Like No Other Lover (24 page)

“Trust me,” he whispered.

She had no choice: she abandoned herself to him. They rocked swiftly together, and then all at once white heat rushed over her skin; the mingled roar of their breathing beat in her ears like waves. She could feel, distantly, her nightdress fused to her shoulder blades with sweat.

“Miles…”

A conflagration ripped through her; his name emerged a soundless scream.

The release arced her like a bowstring, shook her body, rocked her forward and back, and he held onto her as it wracked her with wave after wave of indescribable bliss.

And in that moment, nothing else mattered, not him, not herself.

Pleasure owned her.

And then it was done with her. Leaving her limp, at peace.

She was aware now that Miles’s hands were resting lightly at her hips. His chin resting lightly against the top of her head. Her eyes were level with a wedge of burnished skin showing where his shirt was unbuttoned. He glistened with sweat; he smelled male. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She found she couldn’t yet meet his eyes.

And then she did.

He lifted a hand to stroke her hair from her face; his hand dropped heavily again. She saw some expression fleeing from his face. Something that made her catch her breath. She might have called it pain, but it wasn’t that.

How do you know?
he’d said with exaggerated patience, when she loftily claimed that she would not be slinking through corridors once she was wed. He might as well have laughed at her; she would have deserved it. She’d always understood the power of attraction and the attraction of power; she’d made good use of it, and responded to both.

But now she understood why people would risk a good deal for this kind of pleasure. Behave ridiculously, embarrassingly, dangerously.

She’d thought herself worldly. She’d been outrageously naive.

But she knew she would hold herself to it. She had nothing else in the world but her own particular form of honor. She was tired, tired of games.

If she never knew this kind of pleasure again, she would have this: this moment, this man, this knowledge.

She said nothing. Then she just looked up at him, and he must have read everything in her face—the wonder, the gratitude, the awe, the embarrassment—because the corner of his mouth lifted.

She breathed in to steady herself. And reached for his trouser buttons.

He placed his hand abruptly on hers. “You’d best not.” His voice was low and hoarse, startled. It contained an unmistakable warning.

“But—”

“No.” Firmly.

“Why?” she demanded.

He drew in another long impatient breath, exhaled. And when he spoke, his quiet voice was a whip crack.

“Cynthia, for God’s sake. Do you understand what you’re asking of me? You might think I’m in control of my every action, but I’m a man. And so very, very little stops me from throwing you down right now and plowing you senseless. Not a moment has passed since we’ve met where I haven’t wanted to do precisely that. Don’t be a bloody fool. For the love of God, don’t test me.”

He was furious; this was evident.

But it wasn’t directed precisely at her; it was more directed at the circumstances. It was fury born of fear.

She knew him so well now.

And suddenly she knew why.

He’d seen
her
vulnerable and abandoned and utterly at his mercy. He’d begun and ended every moment of their encounters. He’d always been in control.

She suspected that he was afraid to be vulnerable. He was
afraid
to relinquish control. And perhaps, in particular, he was afraid to be at
her
mercy. Because he’d been to some extent at her mercy from the moment they’d met.

“It’s all right to lose control,” she said softly. “You’re safe with me.”

His eyes flared hotly in surprise. “Cynthia—”

She met his eyes. “Stop me.”

And before he could, she dragged her palm over the hard length of him curving toward his belly. She could feel the smooth round head of his cock even through his trousers; her fingers lingered there.

His head went back hard; he hissed in a breath. “Sweet
holy
…”

He followed these words with a stream of much more shocking, gratifying words.

She did it again, and he shifted beneath her, his chest. Her deft fingers swiftly opened his trouser buttons.

“So show me,” she whispered. “How do you want to be touched?”

“Cynthia,” he whispered hoarsely. “I swear to you, it won’t require much…
dear God
.”

His cock leaped free, bare, from his trousers, and her fingers instantly traced the hot length of him. He was enormous and thick; the sensation of him in her palm was powerful and strange and more than dangerous.

She looked down. It was foreign and frightening, ugly and beautiful, for all of that.

He swallowed hard. His hands gripped the arms of the chair.

“How?” she whispered. “Show me.”

She stroked him again.

He seized her hand in his and held it fast in his for a moment, his eyes burning into hers, his mouth a taut line. His breath gusted hot against her throat. A bead of perspiration traced his temple, traveled his jaw. The tension in him thrummed through her body, and where moments earlier she had been exhausted, the excitement began to build in her again, in tandem with fear.

The suppressed force of the man was palpable. She suddenly had no idea of his intentions. And this, too, was part of the excitement.

Curse
her for being a gambler.

And then he moved. Deliberately, he guided her fingers to wrap around his cock.

He held her hand there for a moment.

And then, his warm hand over hers, he dragged it slowly and hard down around the head of it. Then up again. Hard. His eyes never leaving hers.

He took his hand slowly away.

“And for the love of God don’t stop,” he growled.

Cynthia knew triumph, but fear lingered.

She drew her hand down. Hard. And up again. He struggled for control; his chest rose and fell with swift breaths, his fingers curling whitely into the arms of the chair.

She stroked again. And again. Feeling the enormous swell of him grow thicker, tauter, in her fist.

His hands lifted, slowly, to languidly twist, then tangle in her hair. As if he needed her for balance. His head rocked back, the lids of his eyes lowered to slits. The cords of his neck were taut. Watching him struggle to withstand this pleasure was extraordinary; knowing she was the source of it sent a wash of awe through her.

“Cynthia…” His voice was a choke of near disbelief. “God help me…I want you…”

Throw you down and plow you
, he’d said. In that moment,
she
wanted nothing more.

And this would mean the end of everything for her—of all her hopes. Because virtue was one of the very few things she had to offer anyone who married her.

This, surely, was why he’d warned her.
Do you know what you’re asking of me?

How reckless she’d been to take for granted his control. How foolhardy, how selfish, to impose the need for such control upon him.

Still, she couldn’t find it in herself to regret it. Not yet. She’d never felt more powerful in her life.

Miles pressed his back against the chair; his head tipped back; his throat moved in a swallow as she stroked him. His breath came in harsh bursts now between narrowly parted lips; he thrust his hips sharply up into her fist.
Faster
. She shifted her weight upon his thighs and complied with her fist, and together they found the rhythm he wanted.

“Cynthia…” Her name was a raw gasp. “…so…
good…
”

And moments later his head jerked forward as if he’d been brutally lashed, his body bucking sharply beneath her.

Peace followed. He eased back against the chair and was still, as though some demon in him had at last been exorcised. He was still, that was, apart from the bellows of his breathing.

His eyes were closed. His hands loosened, slipped from her.

Cynthia glanced wonderingly into her palm, warm and damp where he’d spilled into it. Her cheeks burned.

She watched him struggle to even his breath, head pressed back against that generous chair, perspiration gleaming on his temples. The dark brush of his eyelashes lay still against his skin. His jaw was darkening with the beginnings of the beard he or his valet would scrape off with a razor in the morning. She knew an impulse to brush her hand against his skin, to follow with her finger the uncompromisingly defined lines of his face, as if she could learn why he was put together precisely the way he was. To push that silky dark hair away from his eyes.

He looked like a boy, free of the weight of his thoughts for the moment, free of the weight of his life, and suddenly he was new. And a stranger.

She almost wanted to cry like a confused child.

What were they creating here? It had no beginning or end she could trace; there was no possibility she would be able to make sense of it or control it. It had no part in her life.

It could not end well.

It needed to end now.

These thoughts frightened her in the way this physical intimacy had not. She tensed. Her eyes sought the door: escape. His eyes opened then; he looked into her face. Seemed to drink her in, to sense what she was thinking.

Then he looked down at her hands. His expression didn’t change. But he shifted in the chair and found in his trouser pocket a handkerchief.

Wordlessly, gently, he took her hands in his, matter-of-factly rubbed them clean.

She had no precedent for what to say under these circumstances, and the usual tools at her disposal—charm and beauty, insight and wit—were thoroughly unequal to the occasion, sitting on the lap of a man who had just made her scream silently with untold pleasure.

And for whom she’d returned the favor.

She did it almost unconsciously, as though it was a substitute for words: she raised her hand and rested the backs of her fingers to his cheek. She dropped her hand swiftly again along with her gaze, because the enigmatic flare in his eyes unnerved her.

She slid from his lap, suddenly eager to leave him. And just as reluctant to go.

She straightened her nightdress; he assembled himself behind her. She heard the rustle of it.

He turned to her and looked at her for a long time, seemed to consider what to say. When he decided, he looked away to speak.

“Not again,” he said finally, very softly and firmly. “This can’t happen again.”

He’d been measuring, weighing, examining those words in the laboratory of his mind before delivering them. She almost smiled; if she had, it would have been a decidedly bittersweet smile.

Miles Redmond didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

He turned back to her then. He was asking for her complicity, she thought, for he didn’t trust himself. He was asking her not to test him again.

She simply nodded.

She was, in fact, in wholehearted, fervent agreement. Because she had assumed there was nothing she couldn’t understand, and she was afraid now in a way that felt peculiarly like the opposite of fear.

Her impulse, in fact, was to bolt. And she had never before run from any challenge.

She didn’t know the protocol for parting in the aftermath of…what they’d just done. Miles didn’t, either, clearly. He bent toward her awkwardly, then straightened again just as she leaned in. She leaned back again as he leaned in again.

And thus two people known for their social grace spent a few seconds feinting ridiculously at each other.

But then Miles took in a breath and stood before her—planted himself before her—in a way that caused Cynthia to go very still. He’d made another decision. He leaned in very slowly, or so it seemed to her—that time grew thick and elastic—and there was first his warm breath, then the fall of a strand of his dark hair, then the graze of his lips against her cheek. And for a moment his cheek rested against hers.

Her heart kicked once, sharply. She closed her eyes: his skin was still feverishly warm; his whiskers chafed her. She breathed; in came sweat and clean linen, tobacco and soap, the lingering faint musk of his desire.
Their
desire.

Slowly, slowly, as one emerges from torpor, he lifted his head; the warmth of his cheek faded from hers. He stepped back. His fingers reached up to the bridge of his nose; his spectacles weren’t there. He dropped his fingers again.

Later, in her chambers, she couldn’t remember leaving him. She didn’t remember the feel of the cold hall marble against her feet, either; she didn’t notice the candles burnt to nubs in the rows of sconces, or the length of the shadows thrown by moonlight through the long narrow windows. Her senses were given over to reliving the feel of Miles Redmond’s cheek against hers, to the image of him slowly, slowly, stepping back from her, as if it had required every bit of strength he possessed to allow her to go.