Devil's Fire (4 page)

His eyes plumbed mine, as though to ask if the favour his Celestial had done for Sebastian seemed feasible to me. Then he helped me smooth my skirts and guided me to the table. With utmost courtliness, he seated me at a corner and took his place at the head, beside me.

Seconds later we were joined by the couple we’d spied upon, who were acting as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Hyde stood, smiling at the man whose dark beard and hair made such a contrast to his own features. ‘Mary Grace, this is Sebastian Hatch, my sextant and business assistant. Sebastian, you probably remember Miss Michaels from when we —’

‘What man could forget such an angelic face, and such stunning auburn hair?’ Hatch crooned. He bowed over my hand, kissing it slyly. ‘We’re pleased to have you, Mary Grace. Yu Ling seldom meets young ladies her own age, and she was terribly excited about readying your room for the night.’

His beard tickled my skin as he bussed my knuckles, his dark eyes fixed on mine. How could such common, polite words sound as though secret meanings peeked out from behind them? And how could this debonair man, dressed as fashionably as his employer, act like he could devour me while Hyde looked on — even though he, too, had just enjoyed a stunning appetiser?

These mysteries played with me as we ate our delicious stew. Men had never expressed such open admiration for my attributes, and being seated across from one and beside another set me on edge. I was also aware of Yu Ling’s sloe-eyed gaze, as she sat beside Sebastian. Her obvious interest unsettled me, after watching her suck on the sextant.

Our conversation implied subtle double meanings while we all pretended we hadn’t pleasured ourselves before dinner. This charade would’ve excited me more if I hadn’t been the newcomer — unaware of household customs, and wondering if I were to be served up as dessert.

The Celestial brought us a raisin-studded bread pudding, however. I tasted brandy as well, and by the time I finished the dessert and my wine, my entire body tingled. Before today I’d rarely imbibed, so the laughter and attentions of my new friends went to my head. I found out how tipsy I’d become when I tried to stand up, and Hyde had to steady me.

‘You’ve had a tiring day,’ he said kindly, excusing us with a nod to his staff. ‘Thank you both for a wonderful meal. I think Mary Grace is ready to retire.’

‘Shall I run her a bath?’ Yu Ling asked. She cocked her head at a coquettish angle, her eyes alight with Oriental mystique.

‘That would be lovely,’ Hyde replied.

Once again I had the feeling this young woman couldn’t wait to get her hands on me, and that Hyde would indulge her. Yet now, after such good food and drink, the idea didn’t seem as repugnant…perhaps because of the shine in my benefactor’s eyes. I sensed he wouldn’t allow the play to go further than my relative innocence would tolerate. I’d simply have to trust him.

He showed me through the parlour where Sebastian and the serving girl had performed, and the adjoining library. Both rooms featured deep green walls and over-stuffed furnishings of sage and tan, without the ostentatious air of the first floor. His own suite, dominated by a four-poster bed of mahogany, exuded a rich masculinity in its royal blue, red and gold decor.

Hyde smiled at my awestruck gaze until the sound of running water beckoned us. We then entered the largest bathing room I’d ever seen, and were enveloped in rose-scented steam rising from the clawfoot tub. Candles chased the evening shadows into the corners, inviting me to slip into the soothing water.

I turned to my host with a shy smile, which he kissed. Cradling my face in his hands, he opened my lips with his tongue to explore, to ignite my inner fires so effortlessly. As I wondered just how many times we could make love in a day, I realised the water had been shut off. The hands unfastening my dress belonged to a silent someone who’d come in behind me.

When I balked, Hyde’s kiss became more insistent. I understood then that he was distracting me so Yu Ling could perform her duties, as well as to accustom my body to a woman’s touch…a potentially exciting exploration of my sensuality.

The Celestial made quick work of removing my clothes. Her breath teased my skin as my shift fell around my ankles. Her murmurings, a soft Chinese chatter, conveyed an excitement she couldn’t contain as she slipped her fingers beneath my stockings to remove them.

Still kissing me fervently, Hyde kept his body apart from mine — thwarting my inclination to cling to him, while I submitted to his serving girl’s ministrations. Their teamwork sent me into an unexpected frenzy: when his tongue began to duel with mine, Yu Ling ran her hands up the insides of my naked thighs.

I realised that she, too, wore nothing as she made a deliberate sweep of my backside with her lips and breasts. Those taut buds blazing trails up my hips were her nipples, and the thought made my own breasts bead up, sending a shiver through me.

Yu Ling responded by standing against me, spanning my abdomen with her hands and then drawing them lightly up the sensitive skin of my belly until they cupped my breasts. Her moan made my insides coil, right above the slit that was growing slick in spite of my reservations. I almost pulled away, but then Hyde began to suckle the breasts the Celestial offered him with her attentive hands.

I moaned in surprise and surrender. Sandwiched between the man who licked my nipples with his warm, wet tongue and the serving girl whose mound gyrated against my hips, I could only play the victim. A more willing victim than I dared to admit.

And when feminine fingers parted my folds to grant Hyde’s hand access, the pressure of at least three male fingers made me gasp. Merciless, my captors continued to thrust and knead and press me between their undulating bodies until I thought I’d explode. My cries reverberated in the steamy room as I bucked between them, the waves of shimmering delight cresting on and on until my knees buckled.

With a knowing chuckle, Hyde swept me up and carried me to the tub. ‘May I watch Yu Ling bathe you, sweetheart?’ he whispered. ‘What a fetching contrast — your auburn fairness and her blue-black hair and eyes.’

I felt too loose and jointless to refuse him. I lay like a helpless child in his arms, sighing languidly when the warm bath water lapped around my body. When I leaned against the gentle slope of the bathtub, the Oriental joined me rather than remaining alongside the tub, as I’d expected.

I had never seen another woman naked. Yu Ling, with her ebony hair knotted on her head, appeared so at ease as to be displaying herself for my benefit. Her golden grace was accentuated by the flickering candlelight, while her obsidian eyes riveted mine. As she knelt to rub her sponge against a bar of rose-scented soap, her breasts bobbed. They rode high and firm on her chest, with the velvety perfection of pansy petals begging for my caress.

Then she stood up, slight but proud, her gaze daring me to drink in her loveliness as rivulets of bath water trickled from her bush down her parted thighs. The scrape of the soap against her sponge played a suggestive song as she stepped between my legs. Her tongue darted between her lips as she knelt in the water. The steam rising between us intensified our silence.

I gripped the rim of the tub, waiting.

Yu Ling slowly extended the sponge. Still holding my gaze, she squeezed, dropping dollops of foam on to my chest. When a gasp escaped me, she smiled, crouching like an exotic predator, well aware of her power. With my legs and arms following the curves of the tub I was completely open to her advances. I’d never felt so vulnerable in my life.

Her lips parted, inches from mine. ‘You so ready,’ she panted. ‘Yu Ling watch while Mister Hyde couple with Missy Mary, so she been hot and wet between legs all this time. Want you to touch her down there…yes? Please?’

My fingers tingled as the Celestial guided my hand through the water. When my wrist grazed her thigh, her eyelids flickered. Her face, misted with steam and desire, took on a wanton expression as her jaw went slack. Moaning, Yu Ling eased my palm against her coarse curls and skin so slick it felt wetter than the bath water.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ Hyde muttered thickly.

This utterance — because of whom it named, and because it reminded me Hyde was watching — brought me back to reality. I suddenly realised that a woman had my hand trapped between her quivering legs, and that she was about to kiss me.

‘No! I — please!’ I jerked my hand back, twisting my head away from Yu Ling’s glare to beg Hyde’s understanding. ‘I can’t let her — not while you watch us —’

The Celestial threw her sponge in my face, cursing in Chinese. Waves spilled over the tub’s edge and her stiff, angular walk across the room hinted at a wrath she might try to avenge.

Hyde sagged like a deflating balloon.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whimpered, ‘but I just can’t —’

‘I understand, Mary Grace. We’ve pushed you beyond your limits. I can only hope that some of what you’ve experienced has been pleasurable?’

How could I deny that? And how could I not be grateful for the way he helped me up, and then dried me with a soft towel? Moments later he was carrying me into the next room, where a single candle lit the lavender dimness. On the bed’s soft sheets he laid me, smiling as he shucked off his clothes.

‘Shall we rest, and take up tomorrow where we’ve left off?’ he asked with a roguish grin. Then, more seriously, he added, ‘I’ll never expect you to do things you dislike, or place my own pleasure ahead of yours, Mary Grace. Just speak up, like you did tonight.’

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

He blew out the candle and slipped between the sheets. When he curled his warm body around me from behind, I had never felt so protected. So cherished. So free from the ghosts who’d haunted my dreams, and from the agony my life had become. Despite my excitement at sharing a man’s bed for the first time, I drifted into a deeply contented sleep.

*  *  *

I awoke disoriented, my eyes flying open in the darkness. When Hyde shifted and mumbled in his sleep, I remembered where I was, but remnants of an unsettling dream hung like fog in my head. I recalled an ominous sound, like the pounding of a nail into a coffin.

And there it was again, metal striking metal. The racket came from a distance, somewhere below.

Hyde pushed up on to his elbows, scowling. ‘Someone’s at the door,’ he muttered, ‘and Sebastian sleeps like the dead. I’m sorry it woke you.’

He padded across the room, to be swallowed by the shadows. I lay there wishing for his warmth, or the comfort of the nightgown I’d left at home, for I felt more than the chill of a winter’s night. Voices below reminded me that I slept above a mortuary. I wondered why a corpse couldn’t wait until morning, yet realised that, in the absence of a doctor, an undertaker was often asked to find the signs of life or death. This wasn’t the first time Hyde Fortune had been summoned in the night, and it wouldn’t be his last.

I snuggled deeper into the mattress, trying to still my imagination. I was alone upstairs, in a house of the dead, in those darkest hours before dawn. That shuffling I heard might be Hyde returning…or the tread of something undead that had escaped from the bowels of the house. Enough moonlight lit the room that I saw the curtains fluttering in the draught from the window. Or was it a departed soul making them move?

I squeezed my eyes shut so the shapes in the shadows would go away. It would be just like my father to haunt me, shaking his finger at my shameless fall from grace. My conscience prickled when I reviewed yesterday’s events: I’d succumbed to Hyde Fortune with barely a protest. Something about this house and its inhabitants had transformed Mary Grace Michaels into a wayward woman I barely recognised — a wanton my dear mother wouldn’t want me to associate with, let alone become.

A brittle cough sent gooseflesh up my spine.

I gripped the blankets, willing away this figment of my imagination. Yet the laboured breathing, and the clearing of a very old throat sounded too real to be a product of my overwrought mind. I remembered the heaviness of Mama’s congestion, the way her consumption gurgled in her lungs, and wondered if it were she, rather than my father, who’d come back to chastise me.

I peeked through the slit of one eyelid and my breath caught. A stooped-over crone loomed between the bed and the doorway. Was it the moonlight? Or was her translucent white gown the gossamer of dreams gone awry? The wraith was studying me with a gaze so piercing I wanted to disappear into the weave of the sheets.

I was very naked, and very cold, and very scared. And this visitor knew it.

‘Don’t go,’ she rasped, and the effort made her cough again. The voice wasn’t Mama’s, but this poor soul’s condition sounded painfully familiar.

‘Heaven’s Gate,’ the apparition continued, ‘is not what they…not as it…appears. Those who go…are lost…forever, Mary Grace.’

One of those pale arms rose, and the thought of this zombie touching me made me scream. I burrowed beneath the blankets, into an airless haven that offered no real protection. Was I to become the victim of my own visions? Would I be frightened to death by this shimmering figure and her warning?

I stopped breathing to listen, until I thought my lungs would burst. I pressed my forehead to my knees and prayed to God like I’d never petitioned Him before. Minutes crept by like hours before I dared uncurl myself for a breath of air.

The woman — or whatever she was — had warned against going to Heaven’s Gate, and my thundering heart believed her. Yet when the first glimmer of dawn brought back my safety, my sanity, I knew what I had to do.

Despite my benefactor’s offer of a fresh start, something about Mount Calvary set my teeth on edge. Its shroudlike atmosphere might suck me under, never to emerge as the wife and mother I wished to be. Sebastian Hatch and his Chinese accomplice would hold me hostage with their little tricks, and not even Hyde Fortune’s avowed love — and he had never used that word, I reminded myself — would save me from this humiliation. His cinnamon-eyed smile and promises couldn’t raise me from disgrace or keep that weird, nether-worldly woman from haunting me again.