For Desire Alone (3 page)

But she had never seen him angry.

She drew back. “I—” she began, unable to put any strength in her tone in the face of his unexpected wrath.

He shook his head. “I have been told you are seeking a new protector. Tell me that rumor isn’t true.”

Mariah flinched and her first reaction was to run from that fact, from this thing she did not wish to do. But she couldn’t do that, no matter how much she desired that escape. There was one powerful reason why she couldn’t bury herself in mourning and cloister herself away from leering eyes.

She drew a deep breath and calmed herself. “Why wouldn’t that be true?” she asked when she found her voice again.

John’s eyes widened. “Because Heathcote has only been dead a few weeks!”

Once again, Mariah couldn’t help but turn her face away from those harsh words and the pain they caused. She pursed her lips and forced herself to think about the facts of her situation rather than the fact of Owen’s loss.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Indeed, some might call me cold to search for a new relationship while Owen is hardly in the grave. But it isn’t as straightforward as you seem to think. There are circumstances at play here that you don’t fully understand.”

For a moment John’s face, which was normally so difficult to read, revealed a flash of dismay. A moment of guilt. But no surprise. No question as to what she could be talking about.

And in that moment, Mariah stared in pure horror as the truth became clear.

“Or perhaps you understand them after all,” she whispered. He shifted and his guilty expression intensified.

“I don’t know what you could mean, Mariah,” he said, but his voice revealed the lie in those words.

She blinked and stepped toward him, almost against her will. “Y-You knew?”

He stepped back an equal distance. “You are being foolish. Knew what?” he asked, but the rough rasp that continued in his voice, the way he turned his gaze from her told her more than his questioning denial.

“You
knew
,” she repeated without clarifying.

Her entire body began to shake as she stared at John. Here was a man who had been best friends with her lover for as long as they had been old enough to walk. John had been through thick and thin with Owen. She knew they had shared secrets and even women before Owen took her as a lover.

They had been as close as two men could be.

But Mariah had also thought John counted
her
as a friend. That he cared for her on some level that was separate from his feelings for Owen. She had never believed he would allow her to be harmed if he could prevent that from happening. But that belief was apparently as untrue as Owen’s promises. Both men had played her for a fool. And John was the only one she could confront.

“I really don’t know what you’re going on about, Mariah,” John said in a harsh whisper. “Truly.”

“Bollocks,” she snapped as she charged on him, much as he had charged on her in the ballroom. “You
knew
that Owen was leaving me destitute, didn’t you?”

“Mariah—” he began, and yet still he could not look at her.

“Didn’t you?” she repeated, far louder. “Please do not treat me like an idiot now. Don’t lie to me.”

He hesitated, which was answer enough. Then he nodded. “Yes. Yes, I knew.”

Mariah didn’t think, she only reacted. “You bastard.”

Then she swung her hand for a slap.

Chapter Three

John saw Mariah’s palm rounding toward his face in slow-motioned disbelief. He had never pictured her to be inspired to violence. Especially by him!

He reacted just as he would have in an underground fight. He reached up and caught Mariah’s hand midair, then spun her around, trapping her in the crossing of her own arms. He pulled her back against his chest so that she could no longer use her body as a weapon.

She struggled against him, her backside gyrating over his crotch as she attempted to pull away. Her motions mimicked far more pleasurable acts. Ones best performed naked. He could hardly stifle a groan of pleasure.

Her body was still a weapon. Just not that kind she had attempted to make it a moment before.

“Let me go,” she squealed as she continued to squirm and wriggle in his arms. “You son of a bitch, release me at once!”

He could hear her tears in her voice and the sound cut him as deeply as a knife to the heart. His desire to fuck vanished, replaced by another troubling need to help her. He squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to block out that strange instinct to comfort, but it was stronger than he was, at least in this moment.

He spun her around so he could look at her as they spoke. Also so that her finely curved backside would stop tormenting his rapidly hardening cock.

“Mariah, stop,” he ordered in as firm a tone as he could manage. “Stop.”

She squirmed a little more, but slowly the movements ceased and she simply stared up at him, eyes wide and filled with tears that she blinked to keep from shedding.

“How could you not tell me?” she whispered. “You were supposed to be my friend.”

He jolted. “Is that what you think?” he asked, flattening his palm against her back and molding her against him even closer.

She stared up at him, eyes wide in the firelight, breath short. Everything between them shifted in that moment. She recognized that he wanted her. Better yet, he saw no resistance to that in her trembling body or wide-eyed stare. In fact, he saw a faint flicker of her own desire mirrored in there. Unexpected and glorious.

He couldn’t help it. He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her.

John had dreamed of kissing Mariah for as long as he’d known her. Her mouth was made for the act, with its full lips and pert tilt. That and…
other
activities they had already witnessed in the next room a moment ago. The thought had him groaning against her lips, and to his surprise, she took advantage of his parted mouth. She drove her tongue between his lips and tasted him.

But whatever control she exerted in that moment was lost as he immediately went wild. He dragged his hand into her hair, tilting her head for greater access and lifted her ass with the other, grinding her against his erection so she would know what he wanted. What he was.

She yanked away to stare at him, panting with the same desire and confusion that was painted all over her face.

“We were many things while Owen was alive,” he murmured. “But I was
never
your friend, Mariah. You can feel that now, can’t you?”

He accentuated the statement by circling his hips against hers. She let out a strangled moan as his hard cock moved against her soft thighs.

There was no going back. John wasn’t certain when he’d realized that, but it was so true now. He was going to do what he’d dreamed of doing for years. He was going to fuck her. And since it was an act unlikely to be repeated, he was going to do it for as long and as hard and as memorably as possible.

He backed her up until they reached the settee and pushed her back so that she sprawled across the cushions. She stared up at him, still wide-eyed.

“Tell me no,” he ordered her as he stripped his jacket from his shoulders and tossed it aside. He went to work on his cravat. “Tell me to stop. That we’re
friends
, Mariah. Tell me that.”

She did no such thing. Instead, she remained silent as she watched him unbutton the first few buttons of his crisp linen shirt and then tug it over his head to reveal his bare chest and stomach.

Mariah sat up straighter to stare as anger was replaced with a far more complicated set of feelings. First, there was the attraction to the concept of relief. Since Owen’s death, her life had been a cacophony of pain and tension. The idea of releasing some of it, here, tonight, with a lover was wildly attractive.

And then there was the second emotion—desire she had been stifling and crushing and denying for as long as she had known John. Oh yes, she could admit she had imagined what he looked like naked. In fact, she had even done so once or twice even while she lay in Owen’s arms, though she banished those traitorous thoughts instantly each time.

Now the reality was far more desirable than any vague fantasy.

John was leanly muscled, with strong shoulders and an equally powerful chest that was peppered with a thin line of hair which dissipated into his trousers. Trousers that now strained with the hard, heavy erection she had felt probing her when they kissed. Even now her mouth watered at the thought of it.

He stared at her. “Speechless?”

She looked up. He was challenging her. But she was no simpering miss. She arched a brow.

“No, I can simply think of better things to do with my mouth,” she purred.

She reached out to unfasten his trousers and within a few seconds, they were around his ankles and his erection was free to curl against his belly.

Despite her chosen life, Mariah had little experience with cocks. She had seen Owen’s, of course. She’d had a lover before him, for a brief few months, who had been far less impressive. And then she caught a glimpse every once in a while of a man at one of these kinds of parties, like the one in the chamber next door, who had probably already spent all over his lover’s ample breasts and was now back inside the party like nothing had happened.

But she had to stare at John’s cock to truly enjoy it. He was thick and long, the length dark with arousal and hard as steel. She couldn’t help it, not when presented with such a treat. She reached out to grasp him and pulled him closer as she shifted to her knees on the settee.

Her mouth came around him and she shivered with the intimacy of taking him into her body. He tasted salty sweet and filled her mouth with satin steel that felt like heaven.

As did his reaction. She had always seen John as a rather reserved person. Yes, he was quick to joke or laugh, but he rarely gave anyone a glimpse into his real character. He held himself away from others, using his effusiveness as a cloak, rather than an open door.

But his reaction in that moment was real. He dipped his head back over his shoulders and let out a long, low moan of pleasure that she would wager was far more emotional than he would have liked it to be. He began to thrust into her mouth, driving himself deeper and deeper into her throat. She gripped the base of his shaft harder and sucked, swirling her tongue, tasting every inch and reveling in the power she now wielded over him.

Power he seemed loathe to give up, no matter how good it felt. He growled out a curse and popped himself away from her mouth. She stared for a moment at the glistening result of her handiwork, but had little time to take satisfaction in herself because he reached behind her legs and pulled her from her knees so that she dropped onto her backside on the couch. He dragged her forward on the settee and shoved her dress up and around her waist to reveal her naked body beneath.

“Trust courtesans to make this easy,” he muttered.

She smiled. “
Any
woman wearing such a form-fitting dress would be naked beneath, trust me.”

He dropped down before her and positioned himself before her sex. “At this point, I don’t care about any other woman, Mariah.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond. Instead, he gently spread her sex open and buried his mouth amongst the folds. Mariah jolted with the sensation, her back arching as he pressed the flat of his tongue along her opening again and again and again.

He was talented with his mouth, and she supposed after so many satisfied lovers, he would be. He found every sensitive fold, nipping and sucking at her flesh like she was a stream and he a thirsty man.

She relaxed back against the settee and shut her eyes, reveling in the pleasure she hadn’t felt for weeks. Pleasure he doubled, tripled, when he sucked her clitoris between his lips and glided two thick fingers into her sheath.

“Oh God,” she gurgled, lifting her hips to meet the strokes of his tongue and the rhythm of his fingers deep within her.

He curled the digits with each thrust, stimulating so much of her body that every heartbeat, every nerve ending, seemed to be focused on her sex. She writhed out of control as pleasure built and built and finally crested in a magnificent explosion that blurred her vision and made her scream out in the quiet room.

Shudders continued to rock her, even as he slipped his fingers from her slick sheath and gave one last lick to her spasming clit. She couldn’t help the moan of displeasure as he parted from her body.

But he didn’t leave her bereft for long. He draped her legs over his shoulders and positioned himself at her sex. She lifted toward the cock that pressed to her entrance.

“This is what you want?” he panted, pressing into her just half an inch.

She squeezed her eyes shut. God help her, but the answer was yes. Just a few weeks after the death of her lover, she wanted nothing more than to be taken, hard and fast, by his best friend. Despite the fact that it made her nothing better than a lightskirt trolling the streets. Despite the fact that John had offered her no future, nor had he offered a future to
any
woman in as long as she’d known him.

But those troubling facts mattered little. She wanted him inside of her. She wanted him to make her come over and over again. She wanted to feel their bodies merge just as she had always imagined they would.