Loving Julia (26 page)

She groaned, quivering in his arms, and lifted her hands to clutch the shoulders that were bent so ruthlessly over her before sliding her arms around his neck. She couldn’t think, couldn’t reason; she could only feel. His mouth was hot on hers, demanding, devouring, his tongue exploring the sweet wet hollows of her own. Her tongue moved at last, shyly, to touch his. He jerked, and stiffened in her arms. She tightened her hold on him, clinging as he kissed her with greedy passion, kissing him back now without reserve, her hands clutching in the silver-gilt silk of his hair, digging into the tense muscles at the back of his neck, running over the broad expanse of shoulders still clad in the smooth cloth of his coat. It had been so long, so long….

He bent her even further over his arm, kissing her, and then his mouth left hers to slide along her throat. The faint roughness of his cheeks and chin scraped her skin as he pressed his face into her neck. Then his mouth was moving even lower, sliding over the slippery silk to find the tip of her breast. She felt the moist warmth of his mouth through her dress, and cried out. He left his mouth on her for a long moment, while the heat of it seared through to the very core of her and all her feelings concentrated on that one spot. Then abruptly he pulled his head away.

Before she could do more than whimper a protest at this abandonment, she was being lifted off her feet, and for a moment her eyes opened and reality intruded. He was carrying her out of the salon, a dark and hungry expression on his face that matched the way she was feeling inside. As he maneuvered her through the doorway and into the hall, she recovered just enough presence of mind to look swiftly around. Thankfully the hall was deserted.

“Sebastian….” It was a faint protest as some semblance of sanity returned to her.

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to make love to you on the floor again when there’s a perfectly good bed waiting upstairs,” he said roughly. Before she could martial her resources to say anything else he was climbing the stairs with her in his arms, taking them so fast that she felt dizzy and had to cling to him.

“Sebastian….” She tried again to remember why she couldn’t let this happen as he reached the upper hallway. But her mind wouldn’t function properly with his arms all around her carrying her as if she were weightless and her body throbbing where he had touched it and the taste of him still burning on her lips.

“Don’t talk. Just kiss me,” he muttered, his hand already finding the knob to the bedroom door even as his mouth descended.

Her eyes helplessly fixed on that gorgeous mouth, Julia complied. She was hardly aware of being carried into the bedroom, of the click of the door closing behind them, of the softness of the bed as he lowered her into it. All she was conscious of was the loss of his warmth as he straightened away from her to blow out the bedside candle.

“Julia,” he muttered as the room plunged into shadowy darkness, and then he was on the bed beside her, kissing her so deeply that he stole her breath away.

She couldn’t talk, couldn’t think, could only feel. His hands were everywhere, on her breasts and belly, sliding up beneath her skirt to caress her thighs, pulling her undergarments with hands that shook too much to untie knots or to unfasten the tiny buttons that did her gown up the back. Julia felt the tug at her throat, felt the resistance of the silk and then heard the soft ripping sound as the hands that couldn’t manage her buttons tore her gown open from the neck. He knelt above her, pulling the ruined garment from her and then tearing the ties that held her petticoats and pantalets from their moorings. When the garments were free he slid them down her legs, following each baring of her skin with tiny biting kisses that should have hurt but instead sent her into a frenzy of passion. By the time he rolled each silk stocking down her leg, kissing carefully back up over toes and insteps and ankles and calves, trailing his tongue over the insides of her knees and then up the insides of her thighs, she was whimpering with passion, afire from the toes he had just drawn inside his mouth to her head which was writhing against the overblown roses of the still made bed. Only the loosened chemise saved her from being completely naked, and then he was drawing that over her head and pushing her roughly back into the nest of bedclothes, covering her body with his own. The textures of his coat and breeches and even the soft linen of his shirt abraded her tender skin, exciting her unbearably.

He was still fully dressed, even to his boots, while she was naked and quivering with wanting him.

“Sebastian …” she muttered into the mouth that was devouring hers, but the taste of his tongue and the feel of his hands on her swelling breasts left her incapable of further talk. Feebly she tugged his coat in an effort to get her message across, but his mouth followed his hands down her body, fastening on her breast with a hot wetness that made her cry out and clutch his head. He bit her nipple with his teeth, hurting her and yet not hurting her, reducing her to a kind of mindless ecstasy that left her gasping as his mouth moved over to torment the other soft peak. His hands were stroking her thighs, and she tried to writhe under his weight, wanting to bring his hands to perform the wonderful magic that they had performed before. But he was too heavy, his body had her pinioned, she could hardly move—or breathe. Then he was lifting himself off of her, as he rolled to the side of the bed and stood up.

“Sebastian!” This time his name was a pitiful plea for him to return, but it died on her lips as she watched him tear the clothes from his body. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and she saw him shrug out of the black superfine coat, letting it drop where it would, then strip the cravat from around his neck and tear at the buttons on his shirt with hands that she knew were trembling. He let the shirt drop, too, then sat down on the edge of the bed to tug off his boots. Julia was fascinated by the planes and angles of that lean powerful back as it curved away from her, muscles working. She wanted to touch it.

She sat up, conscious of her nakedness and her femininity as she had never been conscious of anything before in her life. Crawling toward him, she thrilled to the aching, pulsing need that made her breasts feel heavy and her secret woman-place weep. In the shadowy darkness his hair gleamed silver and his back arched as he pulled off first one boot and dropped it to the floor with a thud before tackling the other.

She touched his spine, a delicate butterfly touch, and he stiffened. He was rigid, unmoving, as she traced a path from the silky curls at the nape of his neck over the ridged indention of his spine to the edge of his breeches. The breeches frustrated her exploration, so she put both hands on his back, palms down, and slid them upwards, testing muscles and sinews, ribs and shoulder blades, then stroked broad muscular shoulders. His skin was hot, smooth, just beginning to dampen with sweat. He was very muscular, with a honed, lean kind of strength that was deceptive when he was dressed. She slid her hands downward again in a sweeping caress. Then, propelled by instincts she hadn’t even known she possessed, she leaned forward to slide her arms around his waist and press her breasts against the warm moist silk of his back.

“Christ!” It was an expletive, muttered as he shot off the bed and stripped off his breeches, giving her just a glimpse of a muscular, fur-sprinkled chest above narrow hips and a flat abdomen, and the enormous jutting male part of him below it.

Then he was pressing her back into the bed, his mouth fierce on hers and his body hard, demanding, overwhelming as it bore her down. This time he was as naked as she, and she gloried in it. She felt the abrasion of his body hair against her breasts and belly and thighs, and squirmed beneath him the better to feel it. She felt the iron hardness of his back muscles under her hands and sank her nails into them, the better to test them. She felt the burning heat of his mouth against her neck, and opened her own against the salt dampness of his shoulder, the better to taste him.

His thigh slid between hers, hair-roughened and hard from years in the saddle. It was joined by its fellow, and then he lay between her legs, throbbing and pulsing and prodding, and he was kissing her deeply on the mouth and his hands were on her breasts and then … and then …

He slid inside her. She gasped as he filled her, arching, trembling and crying out his name. The sensation was exquisite, wonderful, setting her a-quiver from head to toe, stopping her breath and stilling her heart and spinning her away.

She clutched him close, her arms straining him to her, her sharp cry swallowed by his mouth even as her body was consumed by his body. He plunged inside her with a pulsing urgency that drove her over the edge, and then, as he felt her ecstasy, he was himself swept away.

Later, when they had both drifted back to earth and lay limply together, their breathing eased and their sweat drying on their bodies, Julia started thinking all the thoughts that had not managed to squeeze past her passion.

Her body was sated and her mind, while still somnolent, was beginning to function again. This man in her arms, this arrogant infuriating gorgeous male whom she hated to love and loved to hate, had brought her to London for the express purpose of making her his mistress. She, who had been a good girl all her life despite the fact that making money by selling one’s body was as common a thing in her world as changing clothes was in his, had allowed him to do so. Despite her outrage at the suggestion, despite her proud denials and the ringing, richly deserved slap she had dealt him, she was now his mistress. It was funny, really. He had made her a lady only to turn her into the one thing she had vowed she would never be: a whore.

“Do you always get what you want?” Her voice was tinged with resentment. She was too tired for real anger, but she suspected that might come later.

“Ummm.” His face was nuzzled against her left cheek and ear while his arm lay heavily across her waist and his sprawled leg trapped both her thighs. “Not always. Just most of the time.”

He sounded sleepy, contented, and more than a little self-satisfied. Julia felt her anger prick a little more sharply.

“Such as tonight?” The sharpness came through in her voice. Against her ear she felt his breath expel in a little sigh.

“Do we have to discuss this now? I can think of more pleasant things to do.”

His husky whisper would have sent a tingle down her spine if she had let it. As the realization of exactly what position he expected her to occupy in his life came home to her, her anger increased by the millisecond until in less than a minute it was full-blown rage. The suggestive nibbling of his lips on her ear did not help; neither did his hand, which slid up from her waist to cup and caress a soft breast. When he shifted, lifting his head to catch her lips with his in a deep soft kiss, she exploded. Her hand whizzed through the air to slap the side of his face with a satisfying crack and a force that made her palm throb. At the same time she jerked away from him and clambered to the opposite end of the bed, where she sat with her arms crossed over her breasts, glaring at him.

“God damn it!” He roared the words, sitting bolt upright, his hand flying to his face and his eyes sparking so furiously that she could see their bright glitter through the gloom. “What the hell ails you now, you little hellcat?”

“What ails me? You have the nerve to ask what ails me? After first you call me a whore, and then you make me one?” She was sputtering in her fury, bouncing off the bed to stand, arms akimbo, eyes flaying him. He moved too, rolling off the bed and leaning over the round table that flanked it, and she saw that he was lighting the candle.

“I apologize for calling you a whore,” he said over his shoulder, the words only slightly gritted. “But I tend to get a little angry when I’m slapped. And as for making you a whore …” His voice trailed off suggestively as the room flickered to life.

Instantly Julia became aware of his nakedness and her own.

She looked down at herself, saw the peaks and valleys of her own femininity and how his possession had branded them, and flushed a painful red. She looked across at him, got her first full-front, well lit look at a naked man, and averted her eyes. He was just as magnificent naked as he was dressed, she observed even in that brief glimpse, but as the thought registered she immediately banished it from her mind. Dragging the coverlet from the bed, she wrapped it around herself, and felt marginally safer. That is, until she saw that he was advancing on her with purposeful strides.

“You stay away from me, you dishonest swine!” she shrieked. When he kept coming she darted to the far side of the room.

“
Me
dishonest!” he growled, stopping to put his balled fists on his hips and glare at her. His total nakedness did not seem to bother him in the least. “What about you, my guttersnipe-turned-lady? Pretending to be so innocent! ‘I don’t like anyone to see me naked,’ ” he mimicked in a mincing falsetto, “while all the time you’d probably been whoring since you could walk. What’s the matter,” he added as she whitened, “didn’t you think I’d notice? I wasn’t that drunk that night, my dear.”

“You think I …” Words failed her as she realized that the insult he had hurled at her in anger was in fact what he thought of her. She had struggled so hard against that fate almost all of her life that the accusation was the mental equivalent of waving a red flag before a bull. And that
he
should make it, who of all men should know better because she had given him incontrovertible proof. “You were blind drunk, you no good rotten filthy dirty
earl
! You were so drunk you passed out afterwards! You were so drunk you stank like a brewery and … and I had never, ever been with a man before, and you were so drunk you didn’t even notice! You didn’t even
care
, you bastard, you …” Words failed her. She was gibbering with fury, bouncing up and down with fury, and to drive her point home she looked wildly around for a weapon. Snatching up a delicately carved hand mirror in a silver frame, she hurled it at him. He yelped, ducking, and as he straightened she threw a brush, then a box of rice powder that sprayed its contents in a twisting arc as it flew.