The Hunter (31 page)

“Swipe at my feet again,” he ordered, needing to divert himself from these destructive thoughts. “Then throw enough force behind your body to bring me down. Should you ever need to use this maneuver, you
run
before your assailant hits the ground. You get to safety.”

“Right.” With a look of determination, her foot shot from beneath her skirts and swept at his legs.

“Other foot,” he corrected her.

“Why? This one’s closest and it’s the one my brain seems to want to use.” She attempted again, truly throwing him off balance. Argent could have merely recovered if he’d wanted to, but instead decided to teach her a lesson.

He went down backward, but not before he seized her and pulled her down with him.

They landed in a heap of her skirts, Christopher on his back, his knees and elbow bent to control his own fall, one arm shackled around her. Her hands were trapped against his chest, her body sprawled on top of his, legs skewed to either side of him.

“That’s why,” he muttered.

She writhed and struggled against him, yanking and pulling with all her strength to escape his grip, but Christopher barely had to exert any pressure to keep her his captive. Her struggles created the most delicious friction against his prone body, and the rasp of silk against his cock, pressed closer by her proximity, exacerbated an ever-present problem. He’d been half hard ever since he’d thought he’d caught a flash of appreciation in her gaze as she’d scrutinized his bare chest. Now, with her body writhing, lithe and wild above his, lust screamed through him with excruciating ferocity.

He knew the moment she realized, as she immediately stilled, her body going slack against his, the only movement between them created by their quickening breath.

Christopher closed his eyes, employing every technique he could conjure to help him ignore the inviting warmth centered where her legs parted over him.

Nothing worked. His flesh had become one large, pulsing conduit of sensation. Her weight a delicious pressure everywhere they touched.

“What do I do now?” she asked, her voice a breathy whisper against his skin.

Were he to do what he wanted, what his body screamed at him to do, she’d be beneath him in a moment, helpless and spread wide. All he’d have to do is rip her undergarments away and …

“You try not to find yourself in this position by listening to my instruction,” he gritted from between clenched teeth.

She paused for a moment, before slowly pulling back to look down at him.

Christopher allowed it, his arm sliding from her back down to her waist and over where the curve of her hip would be were it not covered by so many layers of heavy fabric.

“I wonder…” Her husky voice vibrated through him, sending shivers of yearning down his spine that arced to his turgid sex with agonizing need. “I wonder, Mr. Argent, if you take instruction as deftly as you give it.”

Christopher froze beneath her, his entire being focused on the growing heat between her parted legs, creeping closer to his aching arousal with the graceful arch of her body as she continued to sit back.

“Never,” he breathed. He obeyed no one.

“Not even if I ordered you to claim my lips with yours?”

All the moisture abandoned his mouth and Christopher stared at her in stunned silence, certain that he’d misheard her. “What?” he asked.

Her eyes flashed unnaturally bright in the dimness, pools of pathos and a disquieting reflection of his own desire. Christopher knew it had to be a reflection, for a woman like this could never feel the raw, primal hunger that clawed at him now.

“Kiss me,” she commanded, rolling her hips back until she was pressed intimately against him, her voice containing a growing desperation that might not entirely pertain to the carnal heat building between them. “Kiss me like you did the night we met. Like a man who captured my gaze across a glowing room and seduced me with a waltz. Touch me as though we are back in that dark corner beneath the stairs of the Sapphire Room and you are Bentley Drummle, nothing more than a harmless, charming businessman.”

“Millie,”
Christopher warned, confused by the almost frantic need in her eyes. By the fear and strain that seemed to underscore her passion.

“Kiss me like you never meant to kill me.”

Unable to take any more, Christopher reared up and stopped her lips with his own. His bare arms gathered her close, and held her trembling body against his solid one as the searing heat of their mouths fused them together.

She was shaking. Was she still frightened of him? He’d meant to teach her some techniques to make her feel safer, to empower her, but all he’d succeeded in doing was reminding her that she was in danger. That not too long ago, the biggest threat in her life was Christopher, himself.

Didn’t she know that she’d never been in real danger from him? He wasn’t a man of many words, and so conjuring the comforting phrases she needed was as foreign to him as Punjabi. But how could she not know? How could the care with which he held her now, the way in which he tempered his strength, not prove that he’d never truly posed a threat? Could she not feel his reverent deference, in the yielding of his mouth to her tongue?

Her arms clenched around him, fingers digging into his back as she dragged her lips over his again and again. Her body melted against and around him.

“Touch me,” she demanded once more, her breath hot and sweet against his mouth as her fingers twined into his hair. “This time, do not leave me wanting.” Her nails scored against his scalp until she curled her fingers and pulled.

The pain drew a pleasured groan from him as it seared all the way to his cock. His vision blurred until her skin, her face, was the only thing he could see. His sensitive hearing only caught the rasp of the fabric of her dress against his skin, or the wet sounds of their frantic kisses. Heart pounding, he feared how powerless he felt as his hands trailed down to her knees. He could do little but obey her, desired nothing but her pleasure.

Gathering fistfuls of her skirts, he burrowed beneath them with desperate fingers. They both gasped when his hands found her thighs and began their journey upward. He paused at the tops of her stockings, held in place by the most intriguing contraptions, but a rhythmic clenching that had begun in her lean muscles spurred him onward.

A small ribbon lay against the smoothness of her inner thigh, and he somehow knew to pull it. The blessed thing bared her to his touch.

The curse he uttered was more a vibration than a word when he at last grazed the soft nest of heat between her legs. Her desire coated his fingers in liquid fire as he found the slick flesh he blindly sought.

“Yes.”
The word flew out of her on a hitched breath and he inhaled it, a masculine triumph swelling up from the abyss.

His fingers caressed soft, turgid flesh and slid amongst folds of hot, slippery skin until a delicate sound from her throat gave him pause.

“There.” She sighed, her fingers tightening in his hair.

It had been the most erotic word Christopher had ever heard in his life. He dragged his mouth away from hers long enough to explore the curve of her jaw, as he used her little gasps and soft moans as a guide.

This must be what religious men felt as they fell to their knees at an altar. This unworthy rapture. This unholy desire. This need for redemption.

Christopher became a pilgrim of her pleasure. Watching her expressions as carefully as one would a map of the stars. His thumb circled the soft nub above the entrance to her body and her head fell back, exposing her throat to him. He fell upon the pulse at her throat like a vampire, laving and sucking at it to help appease his own roaring hunger.

Every time she ground against his arousal was pure agony … but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. He could feel her climax building inside of her, and if it was the last thing he did before he died, it would be to watch her come for him.

A searching finger found her opening, and his thumb continued its gentle assault on her flesh as he sank inside of her.

Christopher could sense the moment the stars beckoned her to join them.

Her release drenched his fingers in a warm rush and with it came a surge of wild, primal satisfaction he’d never before known. Her knees clenched around his hips and a strangled sound escaped her. Her hands clawed at him, and she curled forward, her teeth bearing down on the sinew of his shoulder as waves of shudders gripped her.

He stayed with her as she rocked over him, lost within the pulsing of her flesh. She was ready for him, soft and wet and yielding. His cock reached upward toward her, offering to replace his hand, hoping she would allow him inside her goddess’s body.

Somewhere in the house, a high voice rose in an unmistakable call.

“Mama?”

Millie tensed under his touch as Christopher bit out a string of harsh curses she’d likely never heard used in the same sentence. Heaving them both up, he set her on her feet and pulled away when she reached out to steady herself.

“Mama? Where are you?” Jakub called, closer now.

She stood on unstable legs, blinking as though trying to orient herself, placing a trembling hand low against her belly.

“Go,”
he barked.

Her brows drew together, as mystified by his sudden burst of temper as he. “I … I—”

“Go to your son.”

“Mama?” An element of anxiety injected itself into the boy’s call, and that seemed to pull Millie back into herself.

She cleared the pleasured huskiness from her throat to reply.“I’m coming,
kochanie,
stay where you are.” Sending him one last voluminous look, full of meaning he couldn’t begin to identify, she brushed at her skirts and hurried out. The click of her shoes made a sharp, lonely sound as they carried her away.

Once the door closed behind her, Christopher allowed his legs to give out, using one of the pillars to support his weight. The warmth of her release chilled on his hand as a memory gripped him.

Mum?
He’d called his mother that, rather than
Mama
. But he’d found her in the dark, much like Jakub would have found his mother here had he not warned them. Christine had been grunting beneath a man, spurring him on with foul words he could tell she did not mean.

It was the first time Christopher had ever felt the urge to kill. Hatred had filled his young body with a force he’d not been old enough to understand.

That night they’d filled their bellies with warm food that had tasted like ashes on his tongue.

Because his mother fucked for survival … just as he’d forced Millie to do.

The pillar abraded his back as he slid down to the floor. Fate was indeed full of cruel and heartless irony. He’d murdered every man he could remember touching his mother. It had taken him years, but he’d done it as a sort of tribute to her. As a promise that he’d never take a woman beneath him and trap her there for his pleasure. That, whatever atrocities he committed, he would never be like those men.

And now …

Burying his head in his hands, he emitted a low sound that echoed accusingly back at him in his empty room of terrors. Of all the men he’d learned to hate, he never felt such loathing as he did for himself.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
TWO

Whenever Millie couldn’t sleep, she tiptoed to Jakub’s bed and snuggled with him for a moment. She reveled in the little-boy smell of soap and sweat with the slight chemical tinge of the paint permanently stained to his hands.

Perching her candle on the bedside table, Millie lifted the long, thin wrapper she’d brought from home, and rested her hip on the bed before leaning over him. He slept on his back with his mouth agape, and she pressed a finger to the bottom of his jaw to shut it before kissing his downy cheek and taking a moment to stroke his hair a few times.

A bath had soothed her aches and cleaned away any remnants of the day, and brushing her hair out and braiding it by a crackling fire had made her pleasantly drowsy.

However, the moment she’d crawled into bed, she’d come alive. Her body was tired. Exhausted, really. But her thoughts tumbled over themselves like a litter of unruly puppies. The events of the past few days revisited her. Some intriguing, some troubling. Some repulsive and some titillating.

Lord Thurston, Jakub’s father, and his dour-faced wife, Katherine. Poor Mena St. Vincent and her awful husband. The encompassing fear she’d faced when a white-faced stagehand had told her someone had attacked her son.

The sweet relief of holding him in her arms.

Losing her virginity. The idea of a noble marriage. Her illicit encounter with Argent only hours before …

Argent. Her silent sentinel. Cold and large as a Roman marble statue, and just as ponderously well crafted. Would that he were chiseled out of something more forgiving. Something less forbidding. If only he were earth and ash, flesh and blood like all the rest of God’s creatures. Instead of shadow and ice.

He had to be, didn’t he? Because there was heat when he kissed her, and fire when he touched her.

Agitated by the memory of his caress, she’d risen from the foreign bed and sought her son, hoping to find clarity in the presence of his innocence.

But tonight it did little to calm her turbulent spirit and, not wanting to disturb his slumber, she pressed one last kiss to her hand and brushed it onto his cheek. Standing, she retrieved his candle and padded to the door, reassuring herself with one more glance before slipping into the dark, empty hallway.

A sound echoed off the walls and chilled her blood. A cry of distress. One so full of helpless torment and piteous rage, it tore at her heart.

Millie would have thought a tortured spirit haunted these bleak corridors if she’d not recognized the exact source of the deep, awful sound.

Argent. If that stoic, stone-faced man was making such a noise, then the devil himself must be flaying the assassin alive.

Her breaths may as well have been cannon blasts in the silences between the disquieting noise. Millie’s candle trembled in her hand as she inched along the wall of the corridor toward the closet that separated most of the sleeping quarters from the stairs.