Regency Rogues Omnibus (19 page)

“Damnation,” Harrison hissed turning away from Drummond’s departure. The astute Lord Kittridge, his closest friend and a man with unnerving instincts and above average intelligence, did not believe the woman upstairs was Lia!

Chapter Six

Chloe was afraid not to lay naked on Lord Ravenscar’s bed waiting for him. Too weak and-and to her confused mortification, too excited. Excited in a sexual way. Reclining, waiting for him. What would he do to her this time? What would he command her to do? Her nipples were beaded tight into rosy jutting spikes and her womanhood ached.

“Sacred Buddha, what is happening to me?” she moaned, twisting her head against the soft bed quilt that she lay naked on.

Chloe heard him then, entering the room and she could not lay still because of the fear and excitement edged tight inside her. Heedlessly, she rolled her body and came up onto her knees dragging a corner of the bed quilt with her to cover some of her nudity.

“W-What of
my
b-baby?” she cried with chattering teeth.

Ravenscar continued to undress while advancing toward the bed and his onyx eyes were inky with emotion. Anger? Lust? Chloe scrambled backward as he tossed a small jar onto the bed, then he impatiently tugged his shirt over his head revealing his broad muscular chest and thrusting male organ. His shirt was the last piece of clothing to discard, his pants and boots had gone before.

“I have told you that I would retrieve this baby for you,” he rasped, reaching forward to tear the end of the bed quilt away from her.

Chloe squealed at the abruptness and exposure, then she gasped, “You will?”

Ravenscar came up onto the bed after her, and growled, “Unlike you, my ebony-gilded soullion, I rarely lie.” He was kneeling before her and he bent down to grab the small jar. “Now lay on your back,” he commanded.

What would he do?
Chloe wanted to plead with him, she wanted to beg him not to hurt her. But he had never hurt her before she claimed to be Lia. “Please,” she whispered.

“Now.”

Chloe flinched and quickly lay down before Ravenscar as though she were a slavish offering to him. “What will you do to me?” she asked anxiously.

Ravenscar opened the jar and she saw that it was rouge. Scarlet colored rouge? “You will find, Rosebud, that I will do anything to you that I desire.”

Rosebud? He seemed calmer now ever since she had obeyed him and laid down. His lean cheekbones were planed and his black eyes were deepening with arousal. She shivered beneath her own arousal as Ravenscar dipped his middle finger into the rouge. “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

She obeyed him yet trembled in blind anticipation of what he would do. Then she felt his finger on her lips, and she parted her mouth in surprise. He slowly traced the fullness of her bottom lip, and then the small bow-shaped arch of the top one.

“Rouge is for sexual creatures,” he murmured and she could feel his warm breath just before he took her rouged lips beneath his mouth. He was kissing her! And it was a storm of heat and possession as his tongue aggressively swept deep into her mouth. Uncontrollable sounds of longing escaped her throat and suddenly Ravenscar clasped her nape, holding her to his deeper kiss as his tongue swirled around hers. He stroked the flat of his feverish tongue over hers again . . . and again. When he finally left her lips, her arms were clinging to his shoulders without consciously realizing that she had done so.

“I will rouge your nipples, your cunt, and your tight little ass,” Ravenscar murmured. “Each of the places on your body that I intend to make mine.” One of his scarred fingers with more rouge on its tip came forward again and Chloe stared at him transfixed as he slowly rouged her lips again. “And your mouth,” he finished in a husky whisper.

Her nipples? Her bottom?
Sacred Buddha
, what did he mean, yet she was terribly afraid that she knew. She knew what he would do to her, and he continued to talk of dark erotic imaginings . . .

“I will fuck your mouth next time, Rosebud,” he murmured as he straddled her and the ache in her loins grew hot. “I will hold you down and put my big cock deep inside your mouth.”

He put more rouge on his finger and she sucked in a trembling breath hearing his dark carnal words and feeling his hot male penis lying on her stomach. “And you’re going to crave me, Rosebud. You are going to crave my cock thrust deep into your throat. Fucking your mouth.” He touched rouge to the tight swollen circle of her nipple and she gasped with a moan of aching need as he painted the areola with scarlet rouge. He left the thrusting spike in the center its natural pink color. “Put your arms above your head, Rosebud.”

Chloe gazed at Ravenscar gazing down at her. He was so still, waiting for her obedience. He must feel how she shivered. How excited she was. She raised her arms and his inky-black eyes lowered to watch her breasts plump and firm upward. “Raise your breasts to me,” he whispered as he lowered to a crouch over her.

“Raven,” she moaned senseless as she raised her breasts upward to him. His tongue darted outward and he licked the pink tip of her nipple. “Oh,” she cried softly.

He straightened a little and began painting her other areola with scarlet rouge as she poised, arched upward beneath him. “You were made for this, Rosebud. Made for my lust.” Then he nipped her other nipple spike between his teeth, holding it.

“Please, Raven, please,” she mewled, quivering as he held her nipple, then rolled it around the edge of his teeth.

“Do you want me to rouge your cunt, Rosebud? Do you want me to suck on your hot little clit?”

Buddha save her, she would die if he didn’t . . .
“Yes, p-please, Raven . . . yes!”

“Say it,” he commanded, dipping his finger into the rouge again.

Oh Buddha help!
“Rouge my p-pussy, Raven,” she pleaded breathless.

“Show me,” he demanded in a tenor rasp.

And she did, like-like his slut . . . his whore . . . or perhaps his love. She spread her legs before him. Lifting one onto either side of his lean hips. Opening herself to his gaze. Showing him how much she wanted him. Showing him how wet she was for him.

“Please, Raven,” she begged, shamelessly undulating her hips upward toward the hang of his rigid male cock. His gaze seemed to change then as though a blanket had been ripped away and she saw pain in his black irises. Pain and vulnerability. It was his hands and the rasp of his voice, she thought. He believed that no woman would desire him because of his injuries. And he believed that she was the one who had inflected them. Yet she would not let herself think of that now. Not now!

“Christ, you are as beautiful as you are vicious,” Raven rasped with no real rancor, and then unexpectedly one of his fingers thrust upward . . . plunging inside her, and she cried out with pleasure.

“Oh
please
, Raven, do it again,” she begged hoarsely. “Ah!
Ou!”

He thrust the bluntness of his finger inside her again and her heels clipped his lean hips as she cried out and arched toward him. Then his mouth was on her sex with his tongue flicking wetly over her clitoris as his fingers mated her with hard inward thrusts.

“God, your cunt is so hot, Rosebud,” he growled as he used the fingers of his free hand to spread the lips of her sex open while his tongue burned her clitoris with rapid licking motions.

“Oh! Oh, Raven. Ah-ah! “

“That’s it, sweetheart. Come to me . . .
come
to me.”

“Ah-oh! Oh! Ah! Ah!”

Chloe shattered beneath Raven’s tongue, clutching his thick dark hair in her hands as her body quivered in release and her legs lost their muscle control. Tears burned her eyes from the exquisite pleasure, and then she felt Raven pumping his fingers inside her once more, as he rasped, “More, Rosebud.
More.
” Her legs fell open wider to his command as mewls of excitement escaped her throat and Raven ordered, “Put your feet on my shoulders, sweetheart.”

She might have fainted a little after the third time Raven wrung a rapturous climax out of her because when she opened her eyes Raven was painting rouge on the lips of her love-swollen sex. His gaze was nearly tender, but then he saw her watching him and his gaze turned more guarded. All she could think of was that Raven called her sweetheart and always gave her pleasure before he took his. What could that mean?

“I want your sweet little ass now, Rosebud.”

Chloe looked at him, suddenly terribly uncertain.
She couldn’t do that,
she thought, a bit frantically as she covered her rouged nipples with her hands and turned onto her side away from him. “Please no, Raven, n-not that,” she whispered.

Chloe felt him behind her, and she felt him lean over her shoulder with his warm breath on her cheek. “I am going to take it, baby girl,” he murmured in a gravelly voice as one of his hands slowly sifted through her hair. She felt the fingers of his other hand nudging the crease of her bottom and her buttock cheeks tensed, then his finger was there and she felt the creamy sensation of the rouge he applied, circling the reluctant entrance.

“Please, I can’t, please,” she pleaded, curling tightly into a ball.

Amazingly, Raven’s finger left the edges of her rear entrance and his big hand began to rub over her buttocks and down her thighs. “Soon,” he murmured. “Soon, Rosebud.”

Harrison did not know what stopped him. Christ, that was a lie, of course he knew what stopped him. It was because Rosebud was afraid and he was beginning not to care if it was some grand acting scheme on her part. In fact it was just too hard to believe that her emotions were not genuine. Never once, not in one single instance had Rosebud slipped, and now his own passions were too tightly wound up with need. Needing her. Never in his life had a woman responded to him like she did. He had certainly never been as excited.

He kept thinking of something his fellow Archangels once said. It was before Drummond married and his former spying associates had all claimed that they would prefer to have a well-taught mistress in their bed, as the one they would marry, than a frigid society wife. Drummond had gotten his wish with Gabriella. And she was a woman to be truly jealous over.

Harrison turned his gaze down to his fragile rosebud. She was shaking. He clamped down on his own rigid passions and searched for the bed quilt to cover them. She flinched when he pulled the warm quilt up over both of them. “W-what are you doing?” she stuttered in a whisper.

“Sleeping,” he rasped, and then he grabbed her, pulling her tight against him.

“S-Sleeping,” she whispered faintly.

“Mm,” he murmured, laying on his back stroking her hair from where she was turned into his side. “Go to sleep,” he finished.

He heard her puff a sigh of uncertainty, however it was only a short time before she was asleep curling into him more and nuzzling her cheek on his shoulder. He was not surprised, he had sated her well and kept both of their emotions tightly strung. The release was exhaustion. He stared at the ceiling oddly distorted from the flickering of the candles around the room. Rosebud always used candles as though she did not trust the gas lighting or perhaps had never had it before. What was happening to him, he thought vaguely, perhaps a bit sleepily? It was then he rolled over to embrace Chloe into the circle of his arms. He was determined to sleep.

Chloe?
Ah, Christ.

Chapter Seven

Harrison likened himself to a mangy irritable cat the next morning. A caged panther stalking his den snarling at everything in his path. His small staff avoided him as much as they could and he wisely left his woman locked upstairs in his bedchamber. He was prickly and furious. He could not answer to be in Rosebud’s company now. Thoughts he did not want to consider tangled his mind. Urges deeper than that, gnawed at him. One salient point rose above the rest and it was madness. A crazy, delusory thought that would not leave him alone.

He might lose her.

“My lord, there has been an incident.”

Harrison raised his dark head with his black eyes sharpening as he pushed away from his seat at the breakfast table. “An incident?” he inquired, leaving his food untouched. It had been a useless gesture to try and eat anyway.

“There has been a, um, delivery, my lord. Of a nature we are unsure how to deal with,” his butler stated.

Harrison raised an eyebrow as he stalked toward the man and it was then he heard a wailing sound growing shriller by the moment and coming from the front entryway. “What the devil?” he muttered, passing his butler to come into view of his footman standing in the entrance hall holding a battered basket at arm’s length. It was from this battered basket that the heart-wrenching wails erupted, and while Harrison moved forward to view this menace, he heard his butler gasp, “Baby.”

Harrison abruptly halted, however he had gone too far and now stood over the shivering wicker conveyance. He had no choice beneath the ear splitting squalling but to look down and see the ruddy tear-stained face of what was indeed a baby.

“There is a note, my lord,” his footman informed him handing forth a scrap of twill parchment.