Regency Rogues Omnibus (56 page)

The word’s Yojo had used that he’d saved her for God trembled through her again, as fresh tears clouded her glimpsing vision and she forced the thoughts back in her mind. She needed to think, or to act, or to plan as swiftly as she could, because she had no idea of how long she would be left alone. First she had to decide if she really was alone, because she had a seething need to be up, moving around, and feeling more power in the dire situation. And, she needed to look at the lock on the cell as quickly as she could, because her captors did not know her very well. The tricks she’d been taught from her Gypsy heritage might aid her escape now, or save her life, because she knew how to pick locks.

Moving her head in a slow motion, inches at a time, she cleared the area in front of her and to the left side free of any presences. Her hearing told her clearly all was quiet, yet some inner instinct made her feel that she might not be alone. The knowledge raised the light hair on her flesh as she moved slowly without perceptible movement trying to see as much as she was able.

It was a dungeon setting, vying with the ancient legends of kings and chateaus castles. Joelle guessed that it was such a place, and from her judgment it was no more than an hour or two from the east side of Paris, where they had first kidnapped her. There were blocked stone walls leaching dampness in what appeared through the half she could see of it as a circular room. She was indeed held in a cell. A large iron box with stout and rusted bars crossed on the top and on all the sides. It was a cage set in the middle of the circular dungeon and when she lifted her head slightly she saw the stone steps leading upward at a high angle to a wooden-hewed and iron-battened door.

Providence sliced through her at the exact moment she dared to raise her head, when a soft rustling sound that seemed to come out of nowhere, echoed in her hearing. The rustling collided with the abrupt pounding of her heart, more than any loudness claimed by the sound.
Rats,
she thought with hope, never pausing to wonder at the dichotomy of that. Rats were nasty villains, but better than any human villains she could think of at the moment. Then, with a trembling neck, she turned her head slowly toward where the sound had come from, and it was then that she first saw him.

Instantly, her breath sucked inward with surprise at him being there, but not surprise of discovery, because his head was bowed forward. Joelle realized immediately that she could have thought him female at first glance, with the fall of long brown hair hanging before him. But it was his bare chest, seen through the long strands of dark hair draping each side of the muscular expanse that proved him male. He was sitting slumped on the floor behind the stretch of her feet, and Joelle noticed abruptly that he was chained. It came to her then, as though she was struck with a sudden flash of lightening.
The Marquis.

Then without forethought Joelle rolled upward to sit, staring at the man as she clutched the cloak tightly around her nakedness. He was a prisoner as she was, with his hands perhaps bound behind his back and a chain across his chest and possibly his neck. Could he be the Marquis that Baco had so crudely stated was set to rape her? Certainly her instincts and the proof of her sight told her that he was. She turned her head and her gaze quickly from the lush river of his chestnut hair and the lean, ridged outline of his lower belly. He had a cloak thrown over him, just as she did, and she had no doubt that beneath where the heavy black cloth lay across his hips and legs, he was as naked as she was. And . . . he was drugged, where she was not.

Chained meant unwilling. Drugged meant unwilling.
How would he rape her?
Joelle’s flesh crawled as she tried hard to think and hold back her fear at the same time. A sexual ritual, perhaps to the death, involving her, the Marquis, and her virginity. It was insanity! Hardly believable, yet she would defeat herself by not believing it completely. She had enough of the pieces to make an intelligent conclusion.

Suddenly, she rushed to stand, and then carelessly on her bare feet she ran to the cell door and she examined the lock. Her grandfather had taught her to pick locks by the time she was seven years old. Her grandmother to pick pockets. Her parents had been more reserved about such things, but they both had knowledge of unusual talents. Joelle reached through the bars lifting the heavy lock, bigger than her hand. It was a turnkey, with a hook and snap lock. If she had anything long, pointed, and sharp, she could open it. But the angle would be difficult to hold the lock, and then hold something straight and backward into the lock.

Joelle grimaced and she set the lock back down quietly. Nonetheless, when she turned away, it was with quick and agitated movements. She held the cloak tight around herself as she paced restlessly. She was avoiding a momentous decision . . . there was little time. She did look, with half-hearted attempts, for a long pointed object as she paced. A stick perhaps. But more, she kept glancing at the Marquis.

“It is useless to open the lock. They would catch you before you could escape and drag you back,” she muttered, “And then, they would know that you can pick locks. When you could have saved it for a better attempt...” She lurched through a turn in her pacing, looking at the Marquis as she did so. He looked young . . . perhaps. Yet, it was hard to tell with his head bowed forward.

Rituals.
She knew of many tales of ungodly and morbid rituals through her Gypsy’s heritage. And all of them were of sacrificial innocents that were put to death in the end. This . . . this seemed more sexual and not a life threatening ritual. “You are
fooling
yourself,” she hissed, slashing her hand through the air. “Whatever unspeakable use they have in mind for me, without a doubt it will eventually end in death, if nothing else, just for knowing
too
much.”

“Indeed.”

Joelle gasped, whirling about at the sudden sound of a masculine voice. Her gaze sweeping immediately to the Marquis. He looked the same however with his head bowed.

“Are you awake?” she whispered in a rush that sounded like a hiss.

“Barely.”

She nearly jumped backward at the quickness and reality of the confirming sound, but not from any action of the Marquis. He was still slumping forward with only his chest rising and falling . . . a bit heavier perhaps.
Spirits take her,
he was English, not French! She could hear it in the two short words he’d spoken. And, she realized that providence really did shine harshly in moments of decision, pressing her forward, guiding her. It did not allow her to waver from the only good plan that she had, no matter how much she despised to do it.

Fate had just burst in on her, because with the Marquis semi-awake, then she really
could
do it. Where before, because he’d been unconscious, she’d been unsure. She knew quite a bit about sexual relations between men and women, and she knew enough about male physiology to understand that it might have been impossible to harden the Marquis’ cock if he had remained unconscious. Nevertheless, now he was regaining consciousness. A perfect time to implement her plan and use the only form of drastic diversion, vengeance, or complete insanity she had.

Virginity, verses
no
virginity. And being semiconscious the Marquis would be an adaptive tool.

Chapter Six

Saxon had the impressions of intelligence, petiteness, and burnt red hair. On one of his moments of clarity, through the dredges of the drug they had given him, he thought she was a ploy in the macabre game that was being played out. However, he also remembered his fury pressing through the murky fog of the drug. His rage at Baco’s rough hands on her helpless nudity, and on her alabaster buttocks, nude white globes with creamy pink-edged curves. He
had
seen the splendor of that soft naked ass.

Then, he heard it again, the sultry frames of an exotic voice. A voice he longed to lose himself in. A voice to hear in a never-ending rhythm of pleasure. A husky vibrato. An accent he could not claim, and therefore it intrigued him all the more.

“I am Joelle.”

Soft hands touched his chest, running curling ribbons of sensation down his sides. Tender fingers heating his bare flesh.

“You are a ploy then,” he muttered, trying to feel disappointed over the smooth caresses from small hands circling his belly.

“I am pleasure in moments of uncertainty. Can you feel that?”

A rumbling sound of acknowledged relish, rolled upward in answer through Saxon’s chest as fingers of golden heat petted, and then they circled the flaccid groin between his thighs. A male organ that until recently, he’d neglected for so many years. So that now the slightest attention sent tendrils of covetous sensitivity thrumming deep inside it. It with envy so acute that it filled and firmed, suffusing with greed, while brought to fullness by the industriously tight pumping of a feminine hand. Then, his mind sparked more fully. Abruptly, energized by the promise. Then, he found the will to lift his chin, smelling a cloud of lilies around him.

His gaze floated into irises the color of black velvet. A trembling feminine gasp filled his ears, dallying from plush lips the color of damask wine. “You are . . . beautiful,” she said with dulcet murmuring.

Saxon might have murmured the same revelation back to her . . . were his senses not wavering over the gossamer heat of her fingers stroking his roguish penis to attention.
Handmaiden?
The word floated through his mind on the strands of arousal being pumped deep inside him. He had heard the name somewhere and he wondered if she were of this nimble calling. His own personal handmaiden of sex.

Then, he gasped in rising bliss at the talent she displayed to her craft. “Are you my lovely handmaiden t-then?” he rasped through a deft stroke and squeeze of his stiffening, lusty penis, and through the thick dryness of his mouth that left him voiceless after one attempt.

Joelle looked into the face of erotic male seduction and beauty. Yet, she understood he did not realize that his masculine lines were so overcoming. From his shaded tea-colored skin to his sensually full lips. But it was the myriad and melting depths of his mahogany-colored eyes, framed by black-tipped lashes that pulled tremendous and immediate attraction inside her. Making her heartbeat flutter and her desperate task to harden his imposing cock so much more inviting.

What had been for her, so anxious and daring an action that she would do a moment ago, had changed into craving, just gazing into the depths of his liquid eyes. She had seen few male appendages in her life, the flesh-covered bone of virility between a man’s thighs. And she certainly had never touched one before.

Nonetheless, as a young girl, she’d visited traveling Gypsies on occasions. Friends of her grandparents and she’d sat by the fires, listening with avid and half understanding interest as the women talked intimate gossip of men, while the men sat in their own circles, perhaps discussing women’s peculiarities. It was a rich, and it was possibly at times, a very volatile knowledge for a young woman moving in grander society circles to know. She also might have put it to good use one day, attracting a nobleman to the marriage bed, had not her family obligations and deaths gotten in her way.

Now she was grateful for the semblance of knowledge that she had, in theory, but as yet untried to this point. Only, nothing could have prepared her for the reality of actually touching. If she thought about it at all before pressing forward and just doing it, in the urgency of her plan, she would have thought to find it distasteful for its complete foreignness. She would have thought to find it disagreeable besides her need to command boldness, where she felt timid and uncertain. She certainly never expected to hold the heat of a man’s bare cock in her hands and find it pleasurable and awe-inspiring. She’d not prepared for the rushing of emotions conflicting natural tendencies. The heat flushing her skin, the feeling of her breasts compressing while yearning forward, or the spiral of arousal oscillating in her sex and beginning to thrum to the male flesh stiffening in her hand.

She might have jerked her hands away as though they were stung with the flash of a flame, but she held her determination strong. What woman could understand, before feeling it, the flood of power and desire at holding a beautiful man’s cock in their hands? Feeling the warm flesh stretch and grow long. Handling the throbs of excitement beating in the shaft, while seeing the elongated miracle that it became.

And the desire was nearly impossible to overcome as she stared into the chasm of the Marquess eyes, while using his cock and pumping it erotically to the rigidness she had to have for the defiance that she’d contrived. The Marquis moaned with his chest rising and falling faster, while his lips pursed with carnal fullness. His face was lean and yearning, while his irises deepened to black with slashing red hints.

“You are
not
them,” he rasped hoarsely, even as his face grimaced in uncontrolled pleasure. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Stop!
Ah,
stop!” His head fell back further with his maple-colored hair cascading against the iron bars bracing his back.
“Don’t
stop,” he heaved.

“I am Joelle,” she panted, as he did.

Then, breathless, as she raised her body, lifting her knees to straddle his thighs, while the cloak she wore fell over them, draping where she stroked him so boldly in between. “I regret, I-I...” she pleaded. But then, she cast her eyes downward against the dawning light in his irises. And the feel . . . she knew he had to feel the head of his cock where she guided it and held it pressed to her woman’s entrance. The touch alone branded her in a circular motion as the Marquis groaned.