Susan Johnson (53 page)

With gentleness and skill, with luscious calculated languor, Trey sucked on each of her breasts while the heat centered in the spiraling core of her stomach radiated outward until a rosy flush adorned her body and desire burned like a wild and violent flame inside her.

“I think,” Trey murmured, lifting his mouth away at last, his husky voice fragrant with exaggerated courtesy, “we’ve remedied the indifference … don’t you agree?”

Her eyes half shut, her breathing small, incoherent sighs, Empress fought the lazy, rankling confidence in his tone. “No,” she obstinately whispered.

He shrugged, touching each nipple with a light brushing finger and murmured negligently, “I suppose we could quibble over our interpretations of indifference, but I won’t be ungallant when you’re being so amenable.” He circled a nipple delicately. “On one thing perhaps we can agree. At least now”—he lightly squeezed each nipple—“you won’t drench my suit.” And like an appraiser might estimate or consider what next to do, he placed his palms over her breasts as she stood, beset by her tumultuous feelings, trying to control her breathing, trying to deny the pulsing need, splayed his long fingers over their ripe fullness and rested his hands on the pale, high-swelling curves like they were his property. Her breasts had always been voluptuous, but they were ostentatious now, jutting out, her fair skin showing a trace of veining on the full outer curvature, as though the pressure of their swollen weight was making the pale flesh translucent.

Like a small, flaunting goddess of fertility, he thought, Empress lured and beckoned.
Touch me and I’ll give you pleasure
, she enticed,
suckle me and I’ll give you sustenance.
His warm palms drifted over the flamboyant curve of her breasts, trailed down her ribs and narrow waist, traced the smooth roundness of her hips, gliding slowly to the splendid juncture of her thighs. Stroking the smooth, heated flesh and her pale silky hair, he felt her rise into the pressure of his hand, and his calm assessment abruptly ceased, his own intemperate passion flaring in response. The goddess offered more than pleasure and sustenance; she offered glory in the heated, sweet center of her body, a glory he wanted so badly, he could feel a pulsing ache creep up his spine. Sliding his long fingers into her dampness, into the luxurious haven that tantalized, he delicately stroked the velvety softness and watched her face, slipped upward slowly until he touched the precious, throbbing focus of her rapture, and heard her blissful sigh of pleasure. Completely detached from every reality but Trey’s exquisite stroking fingers, Empress swayed slightly into each luscious ascent of his hand, purred low in the back of her throat, and damned him for being so good. She should be standing here coldly and indifferently, not craving the delicate pressure of his fingers, not wanting Trey to make love to her, not feeling as though she were going to die from the pleasure.

“Please, Trey … I can’t wait …” she breathed, “please … please …”

She was absolutely ready to dissolve, he noted with an expertise honed to perfection through endless observation. He had found his delightful heaven on earth and, after months of exile, was about to enter Empress’s luscious gates to paradise.

The long, frustrating wait was over.

Withdrawing his fingers, he moved away from Empress to lean against the carved headboard. Despite Empress’s earlier denials, she was aroused, past aroused, and his own passions had been urgent since he first set eyes on her two hours after arriving in Paris. The time for unnatural constraint was over; he intended to consummate his intense craving for the beautiful woman who had left him, who had the attention of every hot-blooded aristocratic male in Paris, who had refused to acknowledge that she wanted him but would please him tonight despite her denial and rancor because she was flame-hot right now, exactly as he remembered. “Come here,” he said in a brusque, raspy tone. “Come and sit on me.”

Passion was clamoring for release in Empress’s mind—in her body; her hot, flushed skin and nerves and stretched-taut pleasure centers—but pride stopped her, and unmoving, she gazed at him with wild, tempestuous eyes.

“If you don’t care to obey
here
,” Trey said very low, “you will in the charming prison I can arrange for you. Good manners are not my strong suit.” And he surveyed with appreciation the magnificent woman before him, proud and defiant, her fragile beauty paradoxically juxtaposed to a riveting, untamed sexuality.

Her eyes, frankly hostile now, met his.

“You decide,” he said softly.

She went then to where he reclined, braced against the gilded wood, his splendid erection blatant. Fully clad with only his trousers unbuttoned, his clothing, opposed to her nudity, was a calculated conceit to underscore her servility. Like the afternoon round of the brothels by the Jockey Club members before they went off to the races, where there was no need to disrobe for their brief encounters with the courtesan, or at least only a minimum of uncovering was required. It wasn’t even necessary to get into bed if one’s trouser crease took priority. “I’m sure you’re familiar with this … I
know
you are,” he amended, his pale eyes slowly traveling over her voluptuous body as she kneeled beside him, hesitant. “The feigned reluctance is unnecessary.” And he lounged mere inches away, offering no assistance, only loosening the foulard cravat at his neck, exposing a glimmer of gold chain.

“You sanctimonious hypocrite,” Empress hissed furiously, and her hand lashed out to strike him.

His reflexes were superb. He even allowed her the tenuous satisfaction of almost succeeding, his fingers closing cruelly around her wrist just as her fingertips grazed his cheek. “Let’s not make this difficult,” he said softly, his grip harsh. “I’m not asking you to enjoy it, only do it … or I’ll take you away and you’ll service me in the quiet of the country.” He held her hand upright between them, his grasp relentless, her entire body rigidly aggressive. “You’re not strong enough,” he whispered, her stormy expression pugnacious, as though she’d spring at him in attack if he released his hold. “I hope we understand each other. I wouldn’t,” he said with exquisite delicacy, “want to hurt you.”

“The man who’d force himself on a woman has scruples,” Empress said with a sneer.

“Sweetheart,” Trey murmured smoothly, “the only thing I’d be forcing, from the looks of your primed body, is forcing you to … wait.”

Her free hand hotly came up, and no longer as indulgent, his own anger rising, Trey caught it before it neared his face. “I’m getting tired of this damn melodramatic resistance,” he growled, “so make up your mind … the south of France, North Africa, or this very convenient bed.”

Their eyes were level as she knelt beside him, both her hands held prisoner by Trey, and for a long moment she resisted compliance.

Then her eyes dutifully lowered.

And he slowly released his grip on her wrists.

But for all his flaunted indifference, his hands closed on her hips as she began to lower herself onto him, and when she’d fully absorbed his hard length and he could feel her hot around him, his eyes shut briefly and he groaned deep in his throat, a sound as familiar to Empress as her own shuddering sigh.

Without effort he lifted her, then lowered her with deliberate
slowness, raising her again until she maintained his rhythm herself, rising and descending with measured smoothness, her thighs rubbing against the wool of his trousers, her full breasts grazing the texture of his jacket as she complied to his demands. His loosened cravat felt cool when it slipped between her breasts, in contrast to the warm friction on her thighs and breasts where the wool fabric touched her skin.

Empress had no intention of responding to Trey’s calculated act of tyranny, but her traitorous body, so long in hermitage, discounted grudging intent and shamelessly, within only a few fugitive moments, undutifully dissolved into throbbing, impassioned need.

Trey intended to sit collected and let Empress do what she did as the merry widow of Paris, but she was peaking so fast, his own passions spurred and heightened at her tempestuous, hot-blooded hunger. Holding her with his hands firmly on her hips, he impatiently rose to meet her restless ardor, thrust upward at the same time he pressed her hips fiercely down, and she screamed as intoxicating sensation flooded her body. At her wild cry Trey felt himself swell inside her so it hurt for a moment, the violent intensity clamping his teeth shut until a second later savage, unrestrained pleasure washed over him. Feverishly he drove violently into her again, and in the next flame-hot moment she was plunging over the edge. With an uncurbed, hammering wildness he joined her, his hands rising against his will at the end to twine in the pale silk of her tumbled hair, and he crushed her so tightly, he could feel her melting into him as they climaxed. A convulsive shudder shook him when it was over, and Empress collapsed on his shoulder with a great, gulping sigh.

Burying his face in her cloud-soft hair, he held her close as the delicious sweetness pulsed with diminishing intensity. Making love to her, holding her, felt like a homecoming, he thought with blissful contentment. Empress could hear Trey’s heart beating in a frenzied echo of her own as she lay on his shoulder, and reaching up, she tenderly kissed the curve of his throat in gratitude. She had forgotten the profound, unmitigated intensity that took one away like a tidal wave, and also the winsome, snuggling warmth when he held her like he was doing now. His hands were gently stroking her back, and she suddenly wanted to feel his skin next to hers.

He felt her fingers on the hot, damp skin of his neck, and in the next moment his cravat slid free with a single swift tug. When her hands moved to the buttons of his suit coat, they were excitable and urgent, no languid female gentleness or timid awkwardness, and every sensitized cell in his body responded to her restless, demanding haste, his passions rekindling as though he had never climaxed. “I want you,” she whispered, and touched his lips with the tip of her tongue.

“You have me,” he breathed, moving in slow suggestion inside her so she felt a sumptuous, undulating surge of excitement.

She had his shirt undone, and her hands slid inside to caress his muscled chest. “Take your clothes off.” Her voice was liquid enticement, and the slow, gliding rotation of her hips so provocative and rich with invitation that all the previous women in his life were relegated to novices.

And when he said no to her command on principle, his dislike of women giving orders in bed intrinsic, Empress whispered, “Yes,” and bending low, ran her tongue over the velvety lobe of his ear, murmuring an impelling reason for changing his mind. He helped her tug his clothes off in a feverish rush, and there was no courting, both deprived too long, both resentful beneath the tumultuous passion that overwhelmed all impulses like a wall of flame roaring across parched grasslands. The third time was as selfish as before. He couldn’t get enough of her, nor she of him, and when it began the fourth time, it was as though a desperate force overcame them both. He rolled her beneath him in one frenzied movement, and she clung to him as though she thought he might leave her. He realized she wouldn’t have let him go—he couldn’t have released her this side of death, in any case, and with a mad, dizzying urgency he took them both with an insistent, only partially contained, violence to a high pinnacle, keeping them there with practiced timing for long, extended moments of agonizing pleasure. He bit her at the very peak of conspicuous, glittering sensation, a small nipping bite on the scented skin of her shoulder, lush and tingling.

And she reached up in scorching response, sinking her teeth into the dark bronzed skin just below his ear, brushing his hair aside with an abrupt sweep of her hand when it slid through her teeth. She bit urgently, sharply, her teeth closing
with a savage ferocity. And he felt his next orgasm begin. The resulting explosion left them both gasping for breath, and they lay in stunned oblivion, feeling as though their bodies had melted.

When Empress looked up finally, Trey’s eyes were shut, his breathing still labored as he lay above her, propped lightly on his elbows, protecting her from his full weight. Holding him gently, her small hands resting on his powerful shoulders, she felt a contentment so rich, it vibrated in palpable ripples over her skin and deep into her soul. How had she ever thought she could live without him?

How, he was thinking, can she sustain this pace with so many men? Then a slurred male voice demanded from the vicinity of the stairway, “I tell you, dammit, I want to see her!”

The butler’s voice could be heard in rebuff, although his lowered tones didn’t carry with the clarity of the inebriated caller.

Trey went rigid, his breathing in abeyance as the sounds of a scuffle punctuated the quiet of the evening. With diminishing volume the insistent man was shown back downstairs and the voices died away. Wordlessly Trey detached Empress’s clinging arms and rolled away. As he silently withdrew, Empress whispered, “Don’t go,” in a small, artless voice that reminded him of the first night at Lily’s when she’d coaxed him to stay. The words sounded wanton in his suddenly grim, black mood, and her eyes when he glanced at her lying only inches away, warm and softly available, were … accommodating.

Her courtesanlike ways disgusted him, his own jealousy an unrecognized emotion. No wonder, he thought, she was so in demand. Few women were so explosively receptive, so spontaneously,
immediately
receptive—as orgasmic as a nymphomaniac. “You may have a caller waiting downstairs,” he said, his voice remote, “and I have another engagement.” Leaving the bed, he walked to the small sink in the corner, wet a towel, and wiped the sweat and residue of lovemaking from his body.

“I don’t know who that was,” Empress said quietly, Trey’s resentment visible in his eyes, the severe set of his mouth, in the very stiffness of his posture, “but he’s gone now. Please
stay.” She was without pride, she sadly thought as she uttered the words, without pride or shame in her passion for this man.

Trey was retrieving his clothes from the floor, and he glanced up sharply at Empress’s words. With the taste of her still in his mouth, his wanting her as pungent as the sweet flavor lingering like savory memory, it took significant self-denial to say finally, “I can’t.”