Robin Schone (4 page)

drawers covering the apex of her thighs.

Back up to her shoulders, her breasts.

He lingered over her nipples.

They
were
hard.

From the cold, she told herself.

And knew that she lied once again.

Victoria wanted to feel a man’s hands on her body.

She wanted to feel
this
man’s hands on her body.

She wanted to end once and for all the virginity that was both a woman’s prized possession and the

instrument of her downfall.

Purposefully, Victoria reached for the waistband of her frayed silk drawers. Then they, too, were gone,

lost inside the circle of her wool dress.

Goose bumps spread over her bare buttocks.

She did not have to follow his gaze to know at what he stared: the hair between her thighs was curly as

the hair on top of her head was not.

Heat followed the track of his gaze.

No man had ever seen Victoria naked.

No doubt this man had seen hundreds of naked women.

Women whose skin was soft and whose hips were full and supple. Women whose ribs did not stick out

like the whalebones sewn inside a corset.

Women who knew what to expect from a man such as he.

Victoria hurriedly leaned over to untie the makeshift garter belt circling her right thigh, back stretching,

breasts dangling—

“Stand up.”

She jerked upright at the harshness of the command.

Pale color suffused the man’s cheeks. It hardened rather than softened the chiseled perfection of his

face.

The air pulsated around him. Or perhaps it was the veins inside Victoria’s eyes that pulsated.

The silver-eyed, silver-haired man was not as removed as he pretended to be.

She
was not as removed as she pretended to be.

“Step out of the circle of your clothes.”

Stomach somersaulting, Victoria awkwardly stepped out of the wool drawers and the collapsed fortress

of her dress. The twin strings holding her stockings in place bit into her flexing skin, right knee, left knee.

Her feet sank into the bog that the plush maroon carpet had become.

“Take down your hair.”

His voice was still harsh; the words were not quite as clipped as before. English with a trace of French.

Victoria’s breasts throbbed in time to the pounding inside her chest. Fleetingly she wondered if he could

see her heartbeat.

Lifting her arms, she searched for a hairpin, senses sharpening, breasts jutting, stomach tightening—

“Turn around.”

Victoria stilled, heart pounding,
pounding.
“I beg your pardon?”

“Turn around and take your hair down with your back facing me.”

With her back toward him, she would not be able to protect herself.

She had not been able to protect herself six months earlier, laced inside a corset hiding behind her virtue.

Victoria turned around.

A pale blue leather divan monopolized the far wall. Above it, a blue sea lapped an orange sunset.

Vaguely Victoria recognized the painting as being from the school of Impressionists, creators of dancing

light and shimmering color.

Carefully, she released the hairpins; behind her, the man’s gaze was a palpable touch.

On her buttocks. On the nape of her neck. Her shoulders. Back to her buttocks.

In the painting a shadowy man leaned over a small boat; he rowed across the canvas of a dying sun and

rippling water.

No one would ever know his name.

Perhaps he had no name. Perhaps he was a figment of the artist’s imagination.

A man who had no life outside of the painting.

Inexplicable emotion welled up inside Victoria: humiliation, excitement; anger, fear.

Her hair plunged down her back, a thick, heavy blanket that hid her nakedness and tickled the valley

between her buttocks.

It did not stop the coming reality.

“Now turn around and face me.”

Hairpins biting into Victoria’s right palm, she slowly turned around.

The warmth of the room was not reflected inside the silver eyes that watched her.

This was it, she thought—this was the moment when she would lose the last vestige of her girlhood.

This
was what the last six months had built up to. That the frenzied bidding below had led to.

The future yawned before her.

She did not know what lay beyond this moment, this night.

She did not know who she would awaken to the next day—to Victoria the woman or Victoria the

prostitute.

The fear Victoria had held at bay during the auction swelled over her in a black wave of pure,

unadulterated panic.

She had lied when she told herself that a woman who sold her body retained control—Victoria was not

in control: the silver-eyed man was.

And he knew it.

“I do not know your name,” she blurted out, hair a heavy anvil that weighted her body.

“Do you not, mademoiselle?” he asked softly, seductively.

Victoria opened her mouth to reply that she could not possibly know his name: women such as she did

not move in the same circles as men such as he.

“Do you find me desirable?” she asked instead.

Tomorrow
she would be horrified, remembering her question. But not now.

No man had ever told her she was desirable.

For eighteen years she had plainly dressed her hair and her body in order to avoid a man’s attentions lest

she lose her position.

Only to lose it anyway,

Her position. Her independence.

Her self-respect.

She was giving this man her virginity, no matter that he was paying for it.

She
needed to hear
that
he found her desirable.

She needed to know that a woman possessed value in her sex as well as her virtue.

The overhead chandelier flickered and flamed inside silver eyes, a mirror to the bleakness inside her own

soul.

Victoria’s heartbeat counted the passing seconds. . . .

If he denigrated her. .
.

“Yes, I find you desirable,” he said finally.

And he lied.

Pain swiftly blossomed into anger. “No, you do not,” Victoria rashly countered.

He wanted what the other man wanted: a piece of flesh instead of a woman.

The silver lights glittering inside his eyes stilled. “How do you know what I feel, mademoiselle?”

Blood drummed inside Victoria’s breasts and thighs, spurring her on. “If you desired me, sir, you would

not sit there and stare at me as if I were infested with vermin. I am as clean as you are.”

As
worthy
as he was.

The stillness surrounding him expanded until it sucked up the very air.

“Why would I bid upon you if I didn’t desire you?” he asked softly.

“You did not see me,” Victoria pointed out, trying to rein in her galloping emotions, failing.
She had not

ask ed for this.
“How can you desire what you cannot see?”

How could she yearn for what she had not experienced?

But she had.

She had secretly dreamed that a man would love the woman that she was and not the paragon of virtue

that she had modeled herself after. And now that dream was gone.

No man would ever love her: men did not love whores.

The man before her sat statue-still, gaze unblinking. Had he ever loved? Been loved?...

“Why do you think I bid on you if I do not want you?” he asked, voice a beguiling caress.

There was no tenderness in his eyes.

But Victoria wanted tenderness to be there. She wanted him to
care. .
.

She would not be the same after this night, and she needed someone to mourn the old Victoria Childers

and welcome the new.

“Some men believe that the pox can be cured by taking a virgin,” she stated baldly, wanting to provoke

some emotion—some response—out of this man who had never known a day’s hunger in his life.

She succeeded.

His silver eyes narrowed. “I do not have the pox, mademoiselle.”

Victoria did not retreat from the threat inside his voice and eyes.

“Nor do I, sir,” she said stridently.

Danger shimmered in the air.

“What do you want, mademoiselle?” he asked softly.

She wanted what any woman wanted.

“I want a man to want me instead of my virginity,” Victoria said rawly.

“You want me to desire you rather than your virginity?” he reiterated, as if the thought that a woman

would want to be desired for herself rather than her innocence had never, ever occurred to him.

The time for lying had passed. “Yes. I do.”

Light. Shadow.

Silver. Gray.

Victoria refused to look away from his eyes that alternately reflected light and darkness, silver fire and

gray steel.

This
was the woman she was. This was the woman she had always been.. . .

“And how would you have me show my desire?” he asked, gaze holding hers,
swallowing
hers...

Victoria thought of the man who had demonstrated his desire by having her dismissed from her position.

“You paid two thousand pounds for the privilege of touching my person,” she said, heart cramming her

throat.

“You want me to touch you?” he asked in that soft, seductive voice that was neither soft nor seductive

but danger pure and simple.

“I do not want to be taken like a woman on the street.”

The truth rang out harshly over the roar of the fire and the blood thrumming inside Victoria’s ears.

For one disorienting moment the pain she felt shone in his eyes.

Immediately, the pain was gone.

From his eyes, but not from hers.

“Yet you came here, selling your virginity”—there was no emotion in his voice, no life in his eyes—”like

a woman on the street.”

Victoria would not cower from the truth. “Yes.”

“How do you want to be taken, mademoiselle?” he asked abruptly.

With passion. With tenderness.

But they both knew she had sold that right.

Victoria’s breasts shimmered with the force of her heartbeat. A steel pin pierced her palm.

“With respect,” she said tautly. “I want to be taken with respect...
because
I am a woman.”

Not because she was a virgin. She wanted to be respected because she was a woman.
Because
she

was not pure.

The gathering tension squeezed the air out of Victoria’s lungs.

“ ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ “ he recited unexpectedly.

Watching her. Silver gaze sharper than the steel pin pricking her palm. “Are you a devotee of Shakespeare,

mademoiselle?”

Victoria blinked at the sudden change of conversation. It did not slow down the race of her heart.

“I am not particularly fond of that particular play by Mr. Shakespeare, no,” she managed.

“Which play is that?”

“As You Lik e It,
” Victoria said . “The play you just quoted from.”

The air vibrated—a door opening somewhere in the building, perhaps. Or closing.

“Do you enjoy the stage?” he asked in that tantalizingly seductive voice that no man had a right to

possess.

It danced on her skin like St. Elmo’s Fire.

Teasing. Tantalizing.

Taunting her with what she could not have.

She forcibly concentrated on his question and not her need and her nakedness.

Victoria had only once been to a play.

“Yes,” she said. “I enjoy the stage.”

Again there was that subtle vibration—a chord of response.

But to what?

“Come here, mademoiselle.”

The soft command did not lessen the pressure constricting Victoria’s chest.

Now
he would take her. Fully dressed, while she wore sagging stockings and worn half boots.

Leaning against the wall or bent over the desk.

Lik e a whore.

Victoria realized how ridiculous she must look—a former governess who possessed no elegance and

whose sole redeeming value was her hymen. How comical he must have thought her, demanding respect

when her clothes would be sneered at by the lowest of drudges.

“My shoes—“ she stalled.

“Leave them on.”

“That is not . . .” Victoria’s voice trailed off.

“Dignified, mademoiselle?” he offered, mouth twisting cynically.

The knowledge of other nights and other women was indelibly etched on his face.

How many times had he gone through this ritual? she wondered.

How many skittish virgins had he calmed?

“I was going to suggest. .. practical,” Victoria replied, fighting for control.

She did not know this woman who stood unabashedly naked in front of a stranger, who cried out her

pain and her need—she scared Victoria as much as the silver-eyed man.

“I assure you, mademoiselle, your shoes will not get in the way,” he said cryptically.

The thick carpet sucked at Victoria's feet; she waded forward, pelvis jutting.

Her thighs rubbed together; the friction dancing on her swollen nether lips glittered in his eyes.

He knew of the desire his beauty created, those eyes said. He knew of the moisture that leaked from

her vagina and the heat that beaded her nipples.

He knew more about Victoria in the short time they had spent together than any other person she had

ever known.

Victoria's left heel turned.

Hair swinging like a pendulum, face burning with embarrassment, she righted herself.

The silver-eyed man showed neither approbation nor derision, marble made into flesh. He swiveled in his

chair, wood creaking, physically following her progress, expression inscrutable.

Victoria halted, hemmed in by his body and the desk. Behind her, the wooden fire crackled busily,