Jennifer Horseman (11 page)

The shock of it seized the whole of her body, mobilizing all her strength in a sudden desperate attempt to break free. She twisted maddeningly beneath him. He held her still and she closed her eyes, braced as his lips moved softly back and forth over her nipple. A helpless whimper escaped her as his tongue swept around and around the tightening bud, stroking—it seemed—the very beat and pulse of the secret wellspring of her desire.

He would not stop. She was flushed and breathless, her consciousness fragmented to every sensation erupting through her body. Her skin melted under his caress, a caress that stopped only to draw fiery circles around the other breast, as if to encompass the maddening sensations before sliding over her side, pausing over her abdomen. Heat gathered beneath the tease of his fingertips. As if she knew, she tried to break free, but his fingers slipped over the velvet moistness of a place no one and no thing had ever been before.

A great voluminous burst of warmth overcame her as he slowly fanned those flames. She cried softly as the sensations washed through her, attempting to overcome her fear and shock. Then his mouth returned to hers and he was kissing her again.

Time seemed to stop, stretch, and change with the relentless play of his hand and lips, his very will on her form as he orchestrated the tempo of her heartbeat. She was helpless and weak now, conscious of every warm rush and chill, of every move of his mouth and hand, conscious of his changed breathing, the sheen of perspiration between them, conscious of the unknown threat of his hard body over hers until she could bear no more. She closed her eyes to find herself on the edge of a steep cliff, a single step between living and an endless hurtle into a dark oblivion.

The pleasure of his possession seized the whole of him, he was mad with it, with her, with the taste and scent of her, with every beckoning curve of the small body beneath him. Yet throughout it all she gave him not a moment where he could doubt that this was against her will. Only sheer force and the skillful hand of a most experienced lover could have possibly overcome the valiant resistance of her will, and even then not completely. She fought against each measure, and every tremor of pleasure came with a bewildered kind of agony he simply could not understand.

He neared his end, the miracle being he lasted even this long when every fiber of his being wanted all of her. Yet as he held her arms to the bed and released her mouth to trail his lips slowly over her flush form, he suspected that while he had her body, her mind had retreated a thousand miles away. "Where are you now?"

The question was paired with a hot swirling sensation as he drew softly on the rosy tips of her breasts, his tongue a maddening tease. She heard a soft moan and recognized it as her own cry, bringing her back to feel the insistent boom of her heart and blood, the voluminous warmth between her thighs.

"I want all of you. All of you."

She shook her head weakly, until she felt his mouth return to hers again with a kiss of savage sweetness. Yet her dazed consciousness became riveted upon him with new alarm as he came over her and released her hands to part her thighs. She felt the smooth, hot pressure of him slide back and forth over her sex, and she turned her head from his mouth to bite her lip until she drew blood. Every strained nerve of her body greeted this with confused rapturous expectancy, as if an end to her struggle.

Garrett watched as the pleasure changed her beauty, the final triumph of desire making her somehow more beautiful still, and he cursed her and her beauty, a gift not deserved when it caused men such horror. The illusion of innocence would shield her no more, and he thrust himself deep inside her.

He heard her cry, yet he didn't know it for what it was until his senses recovered enough to feel the slight rip, an unnatural tightness. He looked down to see her small white teeth biting hard into his flesh just beneath his shoulder. In the whole of that one moment he faced squarely the unconscionable idea that he never had had any doubt, but that his grief, rage, and the black thirst for revenge, a desperate need to unleash his own pain where it might hurt the most, had colored his judgment, blinding him to the obvious.

The pain seized her and she welcomed it, a diversion against helplessness, shame, terror. She wished it would never stop, that she would die of it. She did not know she had his flesh in her mouth, drawing blood just above the neat line of a dagger cut, that the small mark of her teeth would remind him of this day the rest of his life.

Yet his enormous size stretched her, forcing the pain to diminish, dissipating into a searing hot warmth just as she felt his lips touch her damp forehead. "Your last surrender, Juliet: I won't move until you look at me."

The sound of her name crashed into consciousness. He called her name. He knew her now. ... Of course, she was a virgin and it was taken as proof.

She wanted desperately to deny him this last, as if somehow she knew what it meant, and she said in a whisper of passionate denial, "No . . . no."

"Look at me ... now."

"No," she shook her head, and enraged, she used every ounce of her last strength to push desperately against his shoulders,twisting beneath him.Yet the movement brought a shocking warmth that set her nails hard into his shoulders. The shock of it opened her eyes to him.

He said nothing as he stared down at her, but then, no words could contain his emotions now. For any and all words would deny the magnitude of what he had done to her and they both knew it. She saw everything, though— her own pain reflected in the mesmerizing dark eyes, magnified tenfold with an unworldly compassion she could only wonder at, the depth of it quite beyond her experience. Yet for all of what he made her see of his heart and mind and soul, there was no regret.

Emotion surged through her, sending her small fists pummeling against his chest again. "I hate you!" she said, "I hate you!"

He caught her fists and held them to the bed. Still he did not move, exercising unnatural control over the demands of his body—and only to meet the emotion in those eyes. "If only you could, love. Yet as I have taken your innocence, I shall destroy your hate. I will have all of you—"

She shook her head frantically, as if she knew what he meant. "No!"

"Yes, love. Yes." And he moved within her, overcoming the maddening pleasure spilling into him. He exercised the most exquisite gentleness, repeating the measure over and over again. She turned her head from side to side in negation as he brought her ever closer to the edge of that steep cliff until the moment the miracle of the flesh seized the whole of her. He released her hands as she dung desperately to his neck, hurled into a joyless abyss of hot swirling pleasure, returning only to feel the last great thrust of his body within hers, the violence of his release washing through him with an unearthly pleasure he had never before felt.

Garrett turned over and gathered her unresisting form back in his arms. His thoughts were many, traveling in a hundred different directions all at once, and he tried to clear his mind, seeking the peace that forever strayed from his reach, as far as that was. He had to help her, he knew, yet everything rested uneasily on the shocking force of his physical demands; he could not escape it. There was no satiation with her. Demands of the flesh were normally the easiest part of his life, satisfied by the laughter and play of a hundred women whose names and faces merged in his mind's eye as an indistinguishable image, one forgotten soon after parting. For the first time in his life, desire was woven with the dark streak, the streak of violence and war and dissatisfaction, so that the whole of this rape felt like but a taste of her, leaving him hard and stiff, with a raging need to claim her again. A need, he had no doubt, that could destroy her.

He was afraid it already had.

Juliet felt nothing, not the great warmth of his body, a warmth surrounding and enclosing her to him, not the gentle caress of his hands through her hair, not the swift steady beat of his heart against which he held her head. Nor were any thoughts to interrupt the profound satiation of her body as her heartbeat spiraled slowly down and his very warmth seemed to absorb the moisture of her love-soaked body. She almost fell asleep in this long stretch of time; she actually would have if her mind had not produced Tomas's face, and with that came the sudden realization it was over.

It was over. . . . Dear God, it was over. ... He was through. . . .

A sick cold dread crept between them; Garrett knew the exact moment it happened. She first tensed, then started to tremble. He took her face to see the tears springing in those dark pools, but then, dear God, he hoped to live long enough to forget her first desperate plea: "May I ; . . oh please, may I move from you now?"

The hardest thing he ever did in the whole of his life was force himself to become passive as she scrabbled to the edge of the bed and held herself in a tight ball against the wall. She Sid not notice Garrett rising and moving to the bell, ringing it thrice in close succession, before coming back to stand near her. She didn't notice the shades of twilight sweeping the room, marking the passage of time that would forever change her life. Her entire consciousness focused on an effort to stop shaking long enough to ask the question about the only thing that mattered to her. She didn't quite understand; she knew. The experience she had just survived was a shadow spreading over the bits and pieces, the fragments of her understanding of men and women, enough to make her afraid.

"Tomas ... oh please, Tomas," she began, trying very hard to make sense and only hazily aware of the fragments of her thoughts. "I ... need, do you know? Will he still want me now?"

She did not see the changed shape to his expression upon hearing this. "The boy I found you with?"

She nodded through tears.

"Were you betrothed?"

"Yes, in secret. . . but now ... I need, I need very badly to know if it will matter?"

The silence stretched indefinitely until she heard: "I would be lying if I said it didn't matter to most men."

She looked to where he stood nearby and but briefly met the emotions in his gaze, just long enough to see that the questions were far harder for him to answer than they were for her to ask. "Does it matter to you?"

He shook his head, his voice a gentle echo of his emotions. "Until now it has never mattered to me."

She turned from him to face the wall as she held her sides, as if to contain her trembling. A cold numbness began creeping into her, a desperate means to save herself from feeling anything more. He might have reached to her and forced her into his arms for comfort, but as her hair fell into a pile on the bed, it parted slightly, and offered a shocking view.

Garrett found himself staring at thin red marks laid across scars, scars that covered the whole of her slender back. "Merciful God, what—" He lifted her up. She cried weakly as he brought her to the edge of the bed and into the light. He swept the hair from her back to stare, seeing the marks for what they were: the thin marks of a whip put to her skin, over and over again, raw slashes laid over marks of other beatings, so that a three-inch-thick scar marked the center of her back and lines covered the rest.

Gayle entered to hear a heated string of the most vicious curses as Garrett emerged from the dressing room with a basin of water and a cloth. The young man could not see Juliet as the drapes were drawn at the end of the bed, but he saw the rage still on Garrett's face. Rage that told him it was not over yet.

"Gayle, I need your medicine for the marks of a whip and I need it now." His voice lowered to an ominous whisper as he added, "I also need a potion that will ease the terror of a young girl who just lost her innocence by an act of rape. Yet she must not sleep yet; I need to talk to her."

Gayle's face briefly registered shock, but understanding the urgency, he promptly left to make the medicines. Some of the waxy salve for the crack of the whip sat on the top shelf of his room, left over from the last slaver they had captured and burned. The potion would take more time to create.

She felt too weak to offer anything more than a small cry as he gently positioned her on her stomach with her hands above her head. "No, love, don't fight me now," he whispered when she tried weakly to twist free. "I don't think you knowiiow bad off you are." He then gathered her hair into a stream that fell off the bed. A cool cloth came over the red marks and the wish that he could absorb her pain sang so loudly in his mind that he cursed the fact that Stoddard could die but once.

Gayle set the cream at Garrett's side and left immediately to ready the potion. He stopped at the door, meeting Tona-li's golden gaze outside again, lit, it seemed, with the very colors of the setting sun off starboard. The panther paced in a state of extreme agitation in front of Garrett's door, agitation that was making everyone wonder if he had tasted human blood this day. If so, his father, Leif, vowed to damn Garrett and make his cat into a skin after all. "Move aside, Tonali," he said with Garrett's own reverence for the mystical creature. "I cannot let you in."

Tonali stopped and bared razor-sharp teeth, teeth the young man was keenly aware could tear a man to pieces, hissing angrily at him. Tonali liked no one except Garrett, and even Garrett he seemed only to tolerate for reasons no one understood. A mutual return of affection, for Garrett saw his unusual companion as the manifestation of the dark force woven into his fate. One would have to know Garrett well indeed before one understood his strange love for the wild beast.

Restless with the knowledge she was in there, Tonali moved aside and began pacing again.

Garrett gently laid the cloth to her trembling form. She tried to hold still without flinching and it reminded him of her unnatural courage, a courage he had seen many times this day as she had tried so desperately to fight him. Juliet, Juliet, her name echoed in his mind as if it were Edric's own as he began to feel the magnitude of the transformation she caused in him. The waves of his rage retreated, subsiding bit by bit to reveal the great depths of his grief for his lost brother.