The Lover (32 page)

"In the beginning I tried telling the servants. They didn't believe me. When my uncle found out… I never talked to anyone again. I think I went insane. I think that's how I got the strength one night while I lay in bed, waiting for the man, to climb out of my window and scale the walls and then the stone fence. There were no spikes topping it then. I stowed away on a freight boat to Calais."

Anne sucked in her breath… remembering the stone fence surrounding the earl's estate: it was far too high for a boy to scale, spikes or no spikes. Feeling the rhythmical push and pull of the banana: it prodded every fiber in her body. Absorbing the tug of his emotions: they seethed beneath the mask of his face.

"In Calais all I could think about were the nights I'd spent in the coffin. I couldn't sleep. I had nothing to eat. I was caught stealing a loaf of bread. Gabriel upturned a table of pies to distract the baker. Then he and I traveled to Paris. The madame found us. Trained us.

"Sexual pleasure was the only thing in my life that had not been tainted by my uncle. Sex made it possible for me to live, to forget. Gabriel lost his soul, but I found remnants of mine. I learned everything the madame had to teach me, eager for more. Every woman I have ever been with I have learned from. I've learned from you, Anne."

Anne realized that
this
was what Gabriel had tried to tell her.

Michael loved women and sex—not because of the money, or even because of sexual pleasure—but because they were the only things left in his life for him to love.

"What have you learned from me?" she whispered, afraid to move—afraid to break the spell of his confidence; afraid to orgasm—afraid her control would splinter and there would be nothing left of the spinster that she was.

He looked up at her, violet eyes naked.

"I've learned that it's time to get on with my life. Starting now. I'm going to lick every inch of your body. Outside. Inside. You won't remember the worms, and neither will I. Whenever I see chocolate I will think of you. The flavor of your skin. And the pleasure you've shared with me."

Something hot and wet slithered down her temples.

A man should not endure the kind of pain he had survived.

"How did you—" She bit her lip to stop the question, knowing that it had to be asked. "How did you intend upon gaining revenge by accepting my offer?"

"I knew he would take you. Or me. Either way I would gain admission to his estate."

To kill. Or be killed.

But he had not killed his uncle. She had heard the earl's voice through the door as she walked back down the hallway.

Michael had helped her instead.

She expelled an unsteady breath. "How did you get my cook to warm up chocolate for you?"

His violet eyes were suddenly brilliant in the light of the lamp. "I told her you and I were going to enjoy a snack
alfresco
."

Chocolate. Bananas.

Unexplored boundaries of passion.

Three days ago Anne would have been shocked down to her toes.

"Michael."

He stilled, waiting. The very air seemed to wait.

"How are you going to eat the banana?"

A smile stretched his lips. It slowly widened until his even white teeth flashed, giving her a glimpse of what he must have looked like twenty-nine years earlier, a boy who had yet to learn the guilt that love could cause.

"A nibble at a time, Anne."

Michael started at her toes. He sucked her big toe into his mouth and cleansed it with his tongue.

It was more erotic than a feather. More intimate than a kiss. Electric sensation raced through every nerve inside her body.

He tongued the ultrasensitive skin between her toes.

She gripped the sheet to hold herself down on the bed and not shoot straight up to the ceiling.

Right foot. Left foot.

Just when she thought she was going to do the impossible and orgasm from having her toes suckled, he slid up and nuzzled between her splayed legs, softer-than-silk lips surrounded by sharp bristles. The banana jiggled inside her.

Anne held her breath, her entire world reduced to the fruit that filled her and Michael who tongued her.

He persistently licked and rooted, trying to get to the flesh inside the peel.

Anne's hips surged upward. She could not control the orgasm that ripped through her.

She grabbed for his head, his hair, anything to hold him in place, to pull him closer…

Michael slipped away. He leisurely sampled her right leg.

Anne did not think of coffins.

He licked behind her knee.

She jumped at the bolt of lightning that shot through her.

Immediately he surged forward and kissed her clitoris, his tongue a burning lash.

He licked and licked until she could not restrain her hips; they rose with a will of their own. Michael licked a blazing trail down her labia and nibbled—on her flesh, on the flesh of the banana.

She cried out as another orgasm jolted through her.

He licked her stomach, her breasts, teeth grazing her nipple—"Oh, my God"—ducking down to lave her navel. Abruptly he lifted up to kiss her, tongue filling her mouth as the fruit filled her femininity.

She tasted chocolate. She tasted banana. She tasted herself.

"Say my name," he whispered into her mouth.

Anne swallowed. "Michael."

Michael pushed her thighs more widely apart and settled between them. "Now scream my name."

He alternately licked her clitoris and nibbled on the diminishing banana until she screamed his name, again and again and again, until the banana was gone and he licked the chocolate from her throbbing vagina, not deep enough, not thick enough,
she needed more
…

Suddenly he was kneeling between her legs. Somewhere between the licks and the nibbles he had removed his trousers. Dark chocolate streaked his face, chest and stomach. His manhood jutted out from a black nest of hair, blue veins bulging, purple crown shiny with arousal.

"What are you thinking about now, Anne?" His voice was ragged.

"You." Her voice was equally ragged.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to come inside me. Please."

"Say it in French."

"I don't…" She was not proficient with French at the best of times; she could not think of one single French word at the moment. "I don't know the words."

"I'll give you the words. Tell me…
j'ai envie de toi
."

I want you.

Anne stared up into his beautiful violet eyes. He must know that her French was not that poor.

Her throat tightened. "
J'ai envie de toi
."

Sweat and chocolate glistened on his dark skin. "
J'ai besoin de toi
."

I need you.

Tears burned her eyes.

"
J'ai besoin de toi
," she repeated.

"Je voudrais faire l'amour avec toi."

"What does that mean?"

"I want to make love to you."

Make love.

The ugliness the earl had created when describing their actions disappeared.

A spinster's common sense held her back. "My diaphragm…"

"Trust me."

She
had
trusted him. And he had—

"Je voudrais faire I'amour avec toi."

Michael plunged his fingers inside her vagina.
Deep
. She held still at the abrupt invasion.

He was
.. . fitting a diaphragm over her cervix. And then he was coming inside her,
oh
, far larger than the fruit. Larger than his fingers. Coming into her far more deeply than either the fruit or his fingers. Naked flesh pulsing. Throbbing.

She welcomed the weight of his body; the slippery glide of skin, sweat and chocolate. The flood of his pleasure. The fulfillment of hers.

Michael buried his head into the crook of her neck, his beard a prickly rasp. His flesh inside her ebbed. "I never knew why."

Anne remembered so many things, now that her thoughts were free of drugs and desire and revulsion.

Have you ever been in love, Miss Aimes?

Have you, sir?

Yes, Miss Aimes, I have.

The coffin. The worms.

They all related to the poem he had quoted.

"He loved your mother."

Michael stiffened. "He killed my mother."

Nothing is ever simple
, Michael had once told her.
Not lust. Not life
.

Neither was love.

Anne squeezed her eyes shut and buried her fingers into his hair; it curled around her skin, warm and vital. "Sometimes I wanted my mother to die… so I could sleep. Just one night. Uninterrupted."

"But you didn't kill her."

"No."

Not even when she had begged Anne to do the very thing she could not do.

She waited for the familiar guilt to come; it did not.

Michael lay in her arms for long minutes, his heartbeat slowing against her right breast until it was only a faint tattoo. Finally he stirred; his skin slowly peeled away from hers. "I'll draw us a bath."

Dread twisted inside her stomach.

"What are you going to do after that?"

"I'm going to go kill my uncle."

The gate stood open. There was no sign of the gatekeeper.

Thugs rarely stuck around when police became involved.

The dogs had been kenneled; they howled in the distance, as if they knew what the dawn would yield. The gelding underneath him fought for air, lungs bellowing, sides heaving, breath gusting pale streams of vapor. It tossed its head in protest at entering through the gate.

Like the horse, Michael wanted to turn around and go back home to Anne.

He dug his heels into its flanks.

Pale pink dawn outlined the Earl of Granville's palatial manor. Lights blazed through the windows like malevolent eyes.

He grimly smiled.

The man was waiting for him. He would not be taken unawares again.

There were no signs indicating that the police had come. Or gone.

Michael did not doubt at all that the superintendent would distastefully wipe the truth off his fingers and thank God for his children, grandchildren and expected great-grandchild. What else could he do? The man had detained a woman. Buried a boy.

Hardly the crimes that constituted a threat to society.

What magistrate would convict a seventy-year-old earl whose wealth and properties were Devon's mainstay?

He swung down from the horse he had taken from Anne's stable and tied the reins to budding shrubbery. Vaguely he registered the uneven crunch of gravel underfoot, the ache in his thighs and the dull ring of his soles as he ascended the concrete steps.

The front door was not locked. No tall, gaunt man who posed as a butler waited behind it.

Warning tingles raced up and down his back.

There was no gatekeeper, no dogs, no guards, and no servants, but someone waited for him.

He could sense their presence, could feel the empty coffins in the attic.

One had been for Anne, but the second one was for him.

Gilt-framed paintings, their subjects stern and forbidding, stared down from the cavernous walls. Potted ferns bordered the grand mahogany staircase.

They did not conceal an assassin. But one waited.

He thought of Anne in her old-fashioned bed, sleeping.

Or did she sleep?

She had made no sound when he had eased her head off of his shoulder and untangled himself from her damp hair.

His spinster had cried silent tears when he had told her about his childhood. He had mourned in his own way, crying sweat and sperm.

She had called his name:
Michael
.

The taste of chocolate was sweet on his tongue. The taste of Anne was so much sweeter.

He didn't want to die, he realized belatedly.

He wanted his spinster.

He wanted to show her everything he had ever learned.

He wanted her to show him everything she'd ever yearned for.

Cold premonition coursed through his body.

Rarely did men get what they wanted.

The pistol weighted his jacket. His heels echoed in the cavernous hallway, taunting him.

Death. Desire. Death. Desire.

Muscles taut, he walked past the stairs, past the elevator whose caged door was open, down the long, endless corridor to the study. A trail of electric lights guided his footsteps.

There were no shadows to hide in. Yet someone watched him.

Michael could feel eyes trained on him as he journeyed back into the past.

Three people walked down the hallway.

The boy who should have died. The man who had pleasured a spinster. And the person who watched Michael Sturges Bourne.

The boy inside him remembered the fear as if it existed now and not twenty-seven years ago. The man who had pleasured his spinster wondered when electricity had been installed. Before or after the earl had abducted Diane?

Had the thought of burning in a gas-ignited fire frightened the earl?

Did he fear roasting in hell?

Had his uncle loved his mother?

Bright light shone beneath the study door.

Michael paused.

No steps followed his. But the third person was there.

The paneled hallway breathed when the watcher did. The wood throbbed in time with the watcher's heartbeat.

Michael prayed that love was stronger than hate. That shared pleasure surpassed shared pain.

Grasping the doorknob, he gently swung open the mahogany door.

A crystal chandelier blazed overhead. The man waited behind his desk. His hellhound stood behind him, servilely attired in black and white livery, face impassive.

A white marble fireplace framed the two men; blue and yellow flames silhouetted their bodies. Michael's gaze fastened onto the taller of the two men.

The hellhound's sandy hair was receding, but otherwise he looked exactly as Michael remembered him.

Michael had never seen him show any emotion.

He had seen cruelty on the man's face, sadistic satisfaction when Michael tossed up his guts or fought a futile battle. But he had never seen anything on the hellhound's face.

"Hello, Frank," he said softly.

Frank did not respond.

"Michael." The earl showed no signs of displeasure that his fun and games had been interrupted by the superintendent of police. The satin lapels on his burgundy velvet smoking jacket gleamed like black blood. "You took longer than I expected."

How much longer than he had expected?

Twenty-seven years? Five years? Five hours?

Michael dispassionately studied the man's face.

The electric light was not kind.

He had aged beyond recognition. His hair was totally gray. The earl was a seventy-year-old man whose impotence clearly shone in his faded eyes.

"Did you love my mother?" Michael asked, curiously numb now that the moment had arrived.

A delighted smile creased the old man's face.

It had not changed.

Michael had slept with that smile every night the last twenty-nine years. Had awoken to it every morning.

He felt a twinge of regret, that the hatred that had kept him alive had died in the last five hours.

"Miss Aimes." The earl chuckled, a dry wheeze, black satin lapels undulating. "She's a very astute girl. I am surprised she solicited you, Michael. Truly I am. Yes, I loved your mother."

"But you killed her."

The old man's smile widened. He had lost some teeth. "You never listened, Michael. I told you twenty-nine years ago that I did not kill your mother."

The truth.

Michael clearly saw now what he had not been able to see twenty-nine years earlier. He braced himself against the familiar guilt.

It did not matter.

The man would die for Little. Diane. Anne. The child Michael had once been.

But first…

"What boy did you bury?"

"No one you knew, Michael. Just a scruffy black-haired boy who sold his life for the promise of food."

The rage unexpectedly struck him. Another life… What was the count?

Eight? Nine?

"You have a penchant for young boys and women. One could almost believe you're a coward,
uncle
."

The smile on the earl's face disappeared. "I did what I had to do to make sure you wouldn't inherit the title."

"But you enjoyed it, didn't you?" he asked viciously.

"Yes, Michael, I enjoyed it. But never did I enjoy it more than with you. What woman did you most enjoy? Lady Wenterton? Or Miss Aimes? Who do you regret leaving behind the most?"

His spinster.

"What are you afraid of, Uncle William?" Michael asked dispassionately.

"Nothing, Michael. Nothing is worse than what you reduced me to. This is hell, here in this wheelchair." The man cocked his head curiously. "Have you come to kill me, dear boy?"

"Yes, Uncle William, I have come to kill you."

"I rather thought you might have," the man said sympathetically. "Yet I am alive. I never expected you to bring in the constabulary. You had the perfect opportunity to kill me earlier. You didn't, Michael. Why not?"

Michael did not speak. He did not have to.

They both knew his desire for his spinster was stronger than his hatred for the man. Just as they both knew that she would never be safe as long as the man lived.

A smile of understanding bloomed on the earl's face. "You are not a killer, Michael, yet you felt compelled to kill me. It must have been quite frustrating for you all those years, searching for witnesses. Did you hope to see me hang, Michael?"

Michael tried to forgive Michel's ignorance and the wasted years he had spent trying to find evidence that would convict the earl. For the past five years that he had licked his wounds and mourned Diane there was no excuse.

The man was his to kill, not the law, not age.

"Why didn't you kill me twenty-nine years ago, Uncle William?" he asked disinterestedly. "Did you hope that I would someday find a way to end your miserable life?"

"Watching you throughout the years has greatly relieved my misery. I never wanted you to die, dear boy. I wanted you to suffer. I have gone to great lengths to ensure that you do."

Michael pulled out his revolver and aimed it at the man's head.

The man smiled triumphantly.

Cold metal dug into Michael's left temple, the barrel of a pistol.

Michael's aim did not waver. "How much money does it take to satisfy you, Gabriel?"

"I don't kill for money," Gabriel murmured flatly.

Michael felt something shift inside his chest: hope giving way to reality.

The man watched him with malicious curiosity. Frank's face remained impassive.

He knew that Gabriel's face, too, would be impassive. "What is worth twenty-seven years of friendship?"

Hot breath brushed his ear. "Restitution."

"For what?"

"Pleasure. Pain."

Michael's pleasure. Gabriel's pain.

He could feel his blood thrumming against metal—inside his temple, inside his fingers. "You were jealous."

"Yes, Michael, I was jealous. From the first moment I saw you staring inside the baker's shop with hunger in your eyes, I was jealous. If you had asked the baker, he would have given you the bread. But you never asked. You never asked me for help. You never asked the madame. You never asked the women who chose you over me. You never had to ask. Whatever you wanted, we struggled to give it to you."

A fallen angel's pain.

It was time for it to end.

"You promised to look after Anne."

"I promised."

Gabriel had never broken a promise.

"Then have your restitution."

Somewhere deep inside him where he was still capable of feeling, Michael felt satisfaction.

The man's face no longer smiled. He knew he was going to die.

Time ceased to exist. There was regret in death, but there was also freedom.

Slowly he pulled back the hammer. A loud click echoed in his ear, an answering cock.

Death was all around.

The man's lips unexpectedly curled in amusement. "You will not kill me, Michael. Or will you? Will you kill the man who gave you life? Will you kill your father, Michael?"

His mother… and his uncle?

Michael paused.

Life had taught him that anything was possible.

His mother had been blond. Beautiful. Vivacious. Full of laughter.

Much like Diane.

Perhaps she had loved this man.

More than her husband.

More than her children.

Perhaps in hell he would find out.

Michael mentally started the count down.
One
…

"Don't do it, Michael!"

Another voice—Frank had spoken.

The hellhound had brought his hand out from behind the wheelchair. He trained a pistol on Michael.

Michael did not glance at the pistol; it would be much like his own. Much like the one that pressed against his left temple. Both Colt and Adam revolvers were equipped with double-locks—self-cocking, for rapid fire, or manual-cocking, for accurate single fire. At close quarters either action would efficiently kill. He stared instead at Frank's face.

It wasn't expressionless. It was filled with fear.

Sweat glistened on his forehead.

Jesus
. Did a hellhound feel affection for his master?

Grim humor worked its way up inside Michael. "I can only die once, Frank. Let's see whose bullet hits first. Yours. Gabriel's. Or mine."

He refocused on the earl.

Two…

"He didn't kill your family." The man's face did not show surprise at Frank's interruption. "I did!"