Gideon's Bargain (2 page)

Her shoulders jerked in a defensive little shrug. "How am I to know the vagaries of your humor? One presumes your amusement fades after a time and you discard old amusements. Else one wonders that you should have only five current mistresses."

"Ah," he smiled. "We are back to my mistresses, a subject you seem to find fascinating."

"Merely relevant. If I am to see you only every sixth day, I shall have to arrange my schedule accordingly."

His eyebrows rose and his head cocked to the side. "Would you wish to see me more often than that?"

"I have wished for many things I will never have."

"You could have this."

She blinked. "Pardon?"

He tugged on her lock of hair and released it, watching it spring back into place. His hand settled instead on her shoulder, left bare by the widely cut neckline of her gown. The heat of his skin against hers seared her and sent a shudder coursing through her.

"If you wish to see me more often than that, you have only to ask." He studied her expression while maintaining his own rakish mask. "But do you wish to see so much of a man who has done all the things your rumors claim?"

She shifted, taking a small step backward. "They are not my rumors. It is not my place to require that you should defend yourself from the accusations of idle tongues."

He smiled and leaned forward until his breath drew hot currents against her cheek. "Ah, but if I do not defend myself, my dear…" His lips brushed like feathers against the curls at her temple. "…how will you know which of the tales are slanderous…" He shifted, his powerful chest ghosting close enough to tease her silk-covered breasts, his mouth pressing intimately close her ear. "…and which are true?"

Her heart pounded into her throat, and she swallowed against rising panic. "Rumors are never to be trusted. I am certain few of them could be true."

His chuckle, low and quiet, shook her like an earthquake. "Oh, and I'm equally sure that most of them are, wife."

He forced her to retreat another step until she felt the edge of the settee press against the backs of her knees. She had nowhere else to go, and he smiled at the panic in her eyes. He leaned closer to her, and she sat, thinking to gain a few inches of distance between them. He followed with his body, leaning over her, bracing his arms on the back of the settee and trapping her between them.

"Would you like to find out which ones?"

She froze. Was that what she wanted? Did those hot curls of tension in her belly mean she wanted to know her husband's dark side?

His hand slipped off the back of the settee to rest warm and strong on her shoulder. The other made the same transition, sliding over the puffed sleeve of her gown and down the long stretch of bare arm to close loosely about her wrist. Moving slow and dark as treacle, he drew her arm up over her head and pressed it against the back of the settee, pinning it in place while he repeated the motion with its mate. When he had her hands pinned above her head and held fast in his large palm, he leaned close again and scraped his teeth delicately over her earlobe. She gasped and tried to squirm out from beneath him.

He ignored her struggles, and his free hand stroked down her arm, this time caressing the sensitive skin on the inner side, and glided over her shoulder, stopping at the upper swell of her breast and pressing firmly. "Your heart is racing," he murmured, that dark smile playing once more around his lips. "What do you think that means, Sarah?"

"That I want you to let me go."

"No, I think not. I think it means something very different." He lowered her mouth to hers, seeming unconcerned when she jerked away, contenting himself with nibbling on her earlobe, her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw. "I think it means you're curious, wife. It means you want to know the truth to those rumors." He pulled back just enough so he could look into her eyes, and Sarah found herself unable to look away. "I think it means you're excited."

Sarah froze, and her husband chuckled.

"Ah-ha," he breathed, pressing against her until she could feel the solid weight of his thighs pinning her to the settee, feel his erection press against her, threat and promise. "Have I discovered my new wife's guilty little secret? Do the rumors she hears of me excite her? Does the thought of those depravities make her hot?" His hot, rough tongue flicked out to tease the corner of her mouth. "Does it make her wet?"

"No!"

He ignored her renewed struggles, easily holding her pinned as his hand reached for the hem of her skirts and snaked beneath. She felt his palm against her leg, barred to him by the most insubstantial silk of her stockings, and she trembled.

"Please," she whispered.

"That is my object, wife. To see what pleases you. I think that since you are so reluctant to discuss these rumors with me, I'll have to discover the truth all on my own." His hand began a stealthy journey up her trembling leg, tracing her delicate ankle, the smooth muscle of her calf.

"Because I've heard all the rumors, Sarah. I know what the ton whispers about me behind their fans and their glasses of port. I can tell you each of them."

His hand slipped into the heated cove behind her knees, the touch making her gasp. She'd never felt any sensation as strong as the desire that rippled through her at his touch.

"And better yet, I can tell you which are true."

The hand slid over her knee, up her thigh to find the tight ribbon of her garter.

"Which depravities I've inflicted on my mistresses."

He untied the garter and let it fall away as his hand continued up, now gliding over the pale, hidden skin of her inner thigh, making it quiver and quake beneath his fingers.

"Which depravities I want to inflict on you."

Her eyes widened. "On me?"

"Of a certainty on you, my dear." His fingers teased higher, until the backs stirred against the curling hair of her mound, inspiring the flesh it concealed to dampen even further. "You are my wife. Who better to subject to my whims than the woman God and man have given to my eternal care?"

She tried to clamp her legs together against his explorations, but he stopped her by the simplemethod of sliding his knees between hers. With the heavy muscle of his thigh behind the move, he levered her legs wider and stroked his fingers another inch higher.

She gasped and shifted away from his touch. "What of your mistresses?"

" At present, I have none." He watched her carefully as his thumb pressed against the top of her mound, where soft skin met the thatch of springy curls. "All I have is you."

"But I had heard-"

"I know what sort of things you have heard, wife," he said, forcing her thighs even wider beneath him. "What we were discussing was the truth behind those rumors. I believe you require proof of my wickedness to dispel your doubts, hmm?"

Sarah heard his husky purr, felt the threat in it, and renewed her attempts to free herself. She no longer wasted her breath with pleas, but saved it to fuel her thrashing struggles. She knew she lacked the strength to break his hold, but she could not cease her attempts. She had struggled too little in her lifetime.

"You think to tell me what I require? That is an uncanny gift, my lord."

"I need not possess any special powers to know, wife. I possess you." His voice purred again, and his fingers shifted another fraction until she could feel the warm roughness of his skin against the lips of her sex.

She pressed back into the firm upholstery, her thoughts a swirl of chaos, drawing her to him while yet warning her away. "You do not want me," she protested. "I am nothing more to you than the seal on a bargain. Any woman of sufficiently good breeding and sufficiently poor finances would have sufficed."

"Ah, but none of those women are my wife now, Sarah." His lips caressed the fine hairs at her ear. "None of those women have promised to honor and obey me. None but you."

Her wriggling stopped. "Is that what you want from me? Obedience?"

"It is what I mean to have, wife." His hand shifted, and she felt his fingers slide slowly and deliberately between the folds of her sex. "Obedience and pleasure."

Pleasure.

The most seductive word in the English language. The one Sarah had spent a lifetime watching and wanting and never having.

She stilled beneath her husband's probing fingers, frozen with her hands pinned above her head and her muscles tensed against him. Tensed against the very thing she most desired.
Why was she struggling? Neither God nor man could condemn her if she should give in to the whispering in the back of her mind. For the first time in her life, no one could condemn her for taking what she needed. What she wanted.

Her lips parted on a deep breath, and she turned her face to his, feeling their breath mingle in the spare inch between their mouths. "It is not for me to deny you what you mean to have, mylord."

She watched, fascinated, as he heard her words. She saw the dawning of understanding in his eyes, the stirring of anticipation, the lazy stretch of hunger. Then she saw nothing but the bottomless well of her own desire as he touched his lips to hers.

"You are right, Sarah," he whispered, kissing her with his breath, his lips, his teeth, his tongue.

"And tonight, I'll have you."

Chapter Three

She regained her senses a thousand times between the library and her bedchamber, lost them again the instant he set her on her feet before the small hearth fire. He had swept her into his arms the moment he finished speaking, carrying her through the dark halls and up the stairs to the marchioness' chamber. Thankfully, no servants had been about to see, but she still gave a soft sigh of relief when he closed the door behind them and set her down.
Then she look up at his face and felt anything but relief.
She stepped away from him.
He followed.
"Did we not dance these steps downstairs, my dear?" His hand darted out and caught hers at the wrist, pulling her to a stop before she had moved more than a few inches. "I hardly think we need waste our time on them again. What happened to the intrepid wife I uncovered in the library?"
Sarah froze in the act of tugging her hand from his grasp. Where had that woman gone? She seemed to flit in and out of Sarah's body like a specter, one moment possessing her, the next deserting her. Sarah wanted that woman back, the one who gave her hope of breaking free from the life she could feel stifling her. She wanted to be the woman who seized opportunity. The one whose husband taught her all the things that made a woman wicked.
Thoughts, though, were not deeds, and action did not necessarily follow resolve. Details like fear and twenty-two years of rigid conduct got in her way.
"I do not know where that woman is gone," she said after a yawning silence. Her voice sounded rough and unsteady in her own ears. "I cannot seem to control her. No matter how determined my efforts."
Her husband lifted her hand, sliding his fingers down to tangle with hers. He stared at their joined hands, seeming fascinated by the contrast of pale skin against dark, strength against yielding. "Do you wish to control her?"
The question sounded almost idle, but the stroke of his thumb over the back of her hand felt anything but.
She ignored the uneasy roll of her stomach and lifted her chin. "A woman should be whole and united in herself. She should be able to guide her own actions and emotions. Yes, I wish to have such control over myself."
His eyes lifted, searching her face, his expression still heated, but no longer amused. "If that is true, wife, then we could strike a bargain."
"A bargain?"
He nodded, slowly. "A bargain. I could teach you to how to become this intrepid woman within you. I could help you bring her to the surface and control her no matter how unfamiliar the situation."
She eyed him with wary curiosity. "And in return?"
He guided their joined hands back, curving their arms behind her so that he pinned her hand against the small of her back and used the pressure to urge her toward him. She stepped forward to stand between his booted feet, her skirts surrounding and clinging to his muscular legs. They seemed as drawn to him as she was.
"In return," he murmured, "you will let me."
"That's all?"
"This is everything." With his free hand, he brushed a stray curl away from her face and traced the line of her cheekbone with the tip of one finger. "There is only one way to learn real control, Sarah, and that is to surrender it completely to another."
She swallowed. "To you."
"Certainly to me. My wife will surrender to no one else."
She tried to steady herself by drawing in a deep breath, but doing so filled her head with his scent. Sandalwood and spice and soft, old leather left her dizzy and over warm. Her weight sagged against his steadying grip, and he pulled her closer, his thighs surrounding hers and her breasts pressed against him. She thought vaguely that if her intrepid self hadn't deserted her yet again, she would already have agreed to this thing she wanted so badly. She would not be wasting precious time with doubts and unease.
The thought seemed to galvanize her into action. Tilting her head back to meet her husband's smoldering black gaze, Sarah stiffened her spine and reached for her prize. "Very well, my lord. I accept your bargain. Teach me."