Lord Savage (11 page)

“‘That Game foolishness’?” He tipped his head to one side, his frown now one of puzzlement.
“The Game’s hardly foolish, Eve. At least it isn’t to me.”

“That is, it’s not to me, either,” I said quickly. I felt off-balance and uncertain,
and unsure of what sort of answer he was expecting. “If it were, I, ah, I wouldn’t
be here.”

“Very well,” he said. He raised his chin a fraction, to unfasten another stud on his
shirt, his gaze never leaving mine. “Then I’ll forgive your forgetfulness, and permit
you to begin again, as an Innocent. Will you agree to that, Eve?”

I swallowed, nervously smoothing a stray curl of my hair behind my ear. How could
I think, with him undressing like this? As he took the onyx links with the gold snakes
from his cuffs, his shirt fell open nearly to the waist, revealing that he wore no
undershirt beneath, the way most gentlemen would. Instead there was only a tantalizing
glimpse of his bare chest and the whorls of black hair upon it.

I’d never seen a gentleman’s chest like this, not once.

“Eve?” he asked again, working the last of the onyx cuff links free. “If you do not
wish what I can give you, then you are free to—”

“No, Master,” I said breathlessly. “I wish it.”

“You will obey me in all matters?” He tossed the shirt’s studs in his palm like a
gambler’s dice. “You will trust me completely?”

“Yes, Master,” I said quickly, as much to convince myself as him.
“Yes.”

“I am glad.” He turned away and dropped the shirt studs and cuff links with a clatter
into a porcelain dish on the mantel. With his back to me, he poured himself a brandy
from the decanter on the nearby table.

He didn’t offer the wine to me. Not that I wanted any, but I wasn’t accustomed to
not being considered, the way a gentleman always did with a lady.

But then I wasn’t a lady any longer, not to him. I’d just agreed once again to be
an Innocent, and the realization was at once both exciting and daunting. What would
he expect me to do? What desires of his would I be obliged to fulfill?

And what in turn could I expect of him?

“So here we are, my pretty Innocent,” he said, coming slowly toward me with the cut-crystal
tumbler in hand. “We’ll have a week to learn each other’s ways, won’t we?”

Instinctively I took a step back, away from him, bumping against the cool glass of
the window.
Foolish,
foolish, I scolded myself. I needed to be bold and confident with him, not skittish
as a cat. No, I felt more like the mouse, with him as the cat.

“Won’t we, Eve?” he repeated, bemused by my unease.

“Yes, Master,” I said belatedly. I had to remember that he expected an answer to every
question.

“Good,” he said. He dropped into the armchair that I’d been sitting in earlier and
stretched his long legs out before him, making himself comfortable.

I, however, was anything but comfortable. I was standing between his chair and the
window—trapped between them, really—and anytime he wished, he could reach out to touch
me.

Or I could touch him
, I told myself, glancing down to the black-clad leg so close to mine. The fabric
pulled and stretched over his muscular thigh, and I longed to place my hand there
to feel his strength, his power.

That’s what a woman like Lady Carleigh would do,
I thought.
She wouldn’t be shy.
If I wanted this man as much as I claimed, then I should let him know with a seductive
kiss or a caress. Likely he’d welcome it, even expect it.

But then Lady Carleigh would know exactly
how
to please a man, and I … I did not.

“You seem uneasy, Eve,” he said. He didn’t have to be a clairvoyant for that; surely
he could hear the racing of my heart from his chair. “To prove how generous a master
I am, especially compared to others in this house, I shall permit you to ask me three
questions, just like a genie. Anything at all.”

It was a precious opportunity to learn more of him, and an unexpected one, too. But,
in the way of such moments, my thoughts went blank, and I blurted the first thing
that came to my head.

“Why—why do you use candles instead of the gaslight?”

“Because I prefer them,” he said easily. “I have an old soul, Eve, and a romantic
one. I find little to please me in the hasty vulgarity of modern life. If in this
small way I can exist in former days, then so be it.”

“But don’t you own a motorcar?” I asked, in my astonishment unwittingly using my second
question.

“I do,” he confessed, holding the glass close to his cheek. “Several, in fact. One
cannot completely escape one’s life, no matter how much one wishes otherwise. But
I much prefer a candle’s warm light to the greenish glow of gas, the blood and urgency
of a fast horse to a rumbling motor, and a painter’s mastery to the chemical wizardry
of a photograph.”

No other man I’d known would ever have made such an admission, nor so poetically,
and it intrigued me. “Then you are a true romantic, aren’t you?”

“I am, and proudly so,” he said, and smiled. “Which is why I am so intrigued by you.
And that, Eve, was the last of your allotted questions for me.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed with dismay. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t care what you intended, Eve,” he said, cutting me off. “All that matters
to me is what you do, and what you will do now is what I say.”

Reluctantly I nodded. He hadn’t exactly tricked me, but the distraction of his mere
presence had made me trip myself. If this was part of the Game, then I’d already lost
the first gambit.

“Take your hair down,” he said. “I want to see it loose.”

Years had passed since I’d either dressed or unpinned my hair myself, especially without
a mirror; Hamlin would never have permitted it. I hadn’t been seen in public with
my hair loose since I was fourteen. Likely, Savage was aware of all this, but I didn’t
wish to admit to being so helpless.

Instead, I reached up and began pulling out the dozens of pins that held my elaborately
braided, curled, and puffed hair in place. I neatly tucked each pin between my lips,
the same way as Hamlin did.

“Let the pins fall,” Savage said. “Barry will gather them. I’ve far better uses for
your mouth than that.”

I took the hairpins from my lips and dropped them as he’d ordered. One by one they
fell to the polished floorboards with a little ping, like drops of metallic rain.

He watched me closely, sipping the amber-colored brandy as his gaze drifted from my
hair to my breasts. His gaze was focused and intent and left no doubt of his appreciation.
Of course: I hadn’t considered it, but the act of lifting my hands to undo my hair
also raised my breasts, swaying and shimmying against my filmy Innocent’s gown.

I remembered how he’d watched and admired me this same way when I’d stood on the bench
during the auction. Daringly I once again began to play to his interest, and as my
confidence grew, I turned this way and that as I made a kind of dance of freeing my
hair. I never would have performed like this before Arthur, nor would he have been
anything but scandalized if I had.

But Savage clearly approved, his focused gaze never leaving me.

I was almost disappointed when the last pin fell to the floor. I shook my head from
side to side to make the heavy waves of hair fall and settle over my shoulders and
down my back, and began to rake my fingers through it like a comb.

“Leave your hair as it is, Eve,” he said. “I like it like that, with an air of wildness.”

I smiled, even as I was unable to keep from coquettishly twisting one errant lock
into a curl around my fingers. It was a strange compliment, to be praised for being
tousled and untidy, but because it came from Savage, I liked it more than any of the
well-worn banalities I’d heard in ballrooms both in New York and London.

I gave my hair a little toss, embracing the wildness he’d seen in me.

“So you feel the freedom, my wild little Innocent,” he said, chuckling. “I knew it
was there inside of you, waiting to be released.”

“Yes, Master,” I said breathlessly, feeling happy as well as wild. It pleased me to
please him, a roundabout benefit that I hadn’t expected. “Yes, I do.”

I watched the muscles in his throat work as he finished the brandy, the slight sheen
of the skin under his jaw. He set the empty glass down on the table before he smiled
at me again.

“Very good, Eve,” he said. “I imagine that you’ll now find it easy enough to remove
that wretched garment.”

“My costume?” Startled, I ran my hands lightly over the front of the gown. Earlier
this evening I had despised this costume for being too revealing, and now it had become
my last scrap of—of what?

The gossamer-weight fabric hid nothing. Dressed like this, I was as good—or as bad—as
naked. He’d already seen most of me when I’d stood on the bench for the auction, beneath
the bright gaslights. There were precious few secrets left to be revealed, yet still
I hesitated, my last scruples clinging fiercely to my New York–born modesty.

“Yes, Eve, that tawdry foolishness that Lady Carleigh chose for the Innocents to wear,”
he said, watching me closely. “It’s a damned tease. I cannot believe you are attached
to so wretched a garment.”

“I’m not, Master,” I said quickly. “It’s only that—that—”

“That you are shy? Is that it?”

I sighed softly. “Yes, Master, I suppose I am,” I admitted. “Not even my husband saw
me without my clothes.”

“Then I am honored to be the first,” he said, his voice low and coaxing. “Come along
now, Eve. This is only the initial step if you wish to be free. Show me yourself in
all your wild beauty.”

If he truly wished me naked, then he could have torn the fragile costume from my body
in an instant; as my master, I’d granted him every right to do so. But the fact that
he wished me to make the decision to reveal myself—ah, that made it somehow much easier.

Before I changed my mind, I grabbed the costume’s hem and jerked it up and over my
head, then tossed it to the floor with the hairpins. Perhaps it was remembering how
Lady Carleigh had praised my figure that gave me confidence, or simply my own desire
to be as wild as he urged me to be. Whatever the reason, I didn’t shrink away, but
stood straight and proud in my heeled slippers, almost defiant with my hair tumbling
down my back.

Or maybe—no, most likely—it was seeing the flash of desire and hunger in his eyes
as he studied me, infinitely more intense than when he’d watched me during the auction.
He didn’t try to mask it, either, the way some gentlemen would. He wanted me, and
he wanted me to know it.

“You are a rarity, Eve,” he said, his voice lowering to more of a growl. “From the
first time I saw you in the garden, saw the excitement in your eyes as I fucked another
woman, I knew it would come to this for us.”

“I did, too,” I whispered. What was it about such declarations that made them impossible
to speak loudly? And why was it that when he said
fucked
—a word I’d never dared speak myself—I knew I had to have him fuck me as well? “I
did, and I—”

“Hush, Eve, hush,” he said, placing his forefinger across his lips as a more emphatic
warning. “I ask the questions, and you reply. I give the orders, and you obey.”

“Yes, Master.” I was eager in my replies now, ready to follow wherever he led. He’d
been right about shedding the costume. I did feel more free without clothing, and
my body was warm and quivering inside with anticipation for whatever he’d propose.

“You’re a widow,” he said, a statement, not a question.

“You’re a widower, too, aren’t you?” Lady Carleigh had told me that Lady Savage had
died several years before, tragically young.

His expression didn’t change.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “But you are not asking the questions, Eve. I am. No children,
I presume?”

I shook my head. I’d wanted children, lots of children, to make up for my solitary
childhood. But although I’d been a wife, I had not been blessed with motherhood.

“I thought not,” he said. “Your body’s too pristine to have suffered through childbirth.”

I winced at that, the casual dismissal of my greatest disappointment, and because
of it, my question in return was sharper than I’d intended.

“Have
you
any children?” I asked. “Legitimate ones, that is. Have you fathered a precious heir
to your earldom?”

He frowned. “Eve, you forget yourself again. I ask the questions, not you. But yes,
I have a single son, and yes, he is my heir.”

He said it not proudly, the way most fathers would, but with a curious finality that
made it clear that he’d volunteer nothing more about the boy.

“Now tell me, Eve,” he continued. “Did your husband please you when he lived?”

“Arthur?” My husband’s face rose up in my memory like an unpleasant, potbellied ghost,
one I’d done my best to banish.

Savage shifted impatiently in the chair. “If that was your husband’s name, then yes.”

“He provided for me,” I said carefully. “I never wanted as his wife.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Savage tipped his head back in the chair so that most of
his face was shadowed from me. “I want to know if his cock gave you satisfaction,
if he made you desire him day and night, if he could make you come until you screamed
with pleasure.”

I blushed, more with shame for the unhappy marriage I’d endured than for the bluntness
of his query.

And I wondered, too, how the late Lady Savage would have answered that same question.…

“No, Master,” I said softly. “I was very young when I wed, and my husband was older.
Too old.”

“Did you take lovers to compensate for your husband’s inadequacy?”

“No,” I said. “Not until now.”

His smile shone in the shadows.

“You honor me once again, Eve,” he said. “And I give you my word that you will not
be disappointed.”

“Yes, Master,” I whispered, my breath suddenly tight in my chest. Could he really
make me experience what he’d described?