More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (23 page)

“Yes, Jocelyn.” Her teeth bit into her soft, moist lower lip. “For now I am yours. According to our contract.”

“That damned thing.” He chuckled softly. “I want you to want me, Jane. Tell me it is not just the money or this house or the obligation that wretched piece of paper has put you under. Tell me you want me.
Me
—Jocelyn. Or tell me truthfully that you do not and I will leave you to the enjoyment of your home and salary for the next five years. I will not bed you unless you want me.”

He had never particularly cared before. All conceit aside, he knew he was not the sort of man who repelled women who earned their living in bed. And it had always been a matter of pride with him to give pleasure where he took it. But he had never cared whether a woman wanted
him
or just the wealthy, rakish aristocrat with the dangerous reputation. In fact, if he had thought about it, he probably would have decided that he did not want any woman close enough to desire
him
.

He had never before been Jocelyn to anyone. Not to anyone in his family. Not to any woman. Not even to his closest friends. He would rather turn and leave now and never return than let Jane lie on her back on that bed simply because she felt obliged to. It was a somewhat alarming realization.

“I want you, Jocelyn,” she whispered.

There was no doubt she meant it. Her blue eyes were focused fully on his. She was speaking the simple truth.

And then she leaned forward, letting every part of her body rest lightly against him. She set her lips to the hollow at the base of his throat. It was a gesture of sweet surrender.

All the sweeter because it seemed uncharacteristic of
Jane. He knew her well enough to realize it was something she would never do merely because surrender was expected of her.

He felt strangely gifted.

He felt curiously wanted. In a way he had never felt in his life before.

“Jane,” he said, his face in the silk of her hair. “Jane, I need to be inside your body. Inside
you
. Let me in.”

“Yes.” She tipped back her head and gazed into his eyes. “Yes, I will, Jocelyn. But you must show me how. I am not sure I know.”

Ah. Jane to the end. She spoke in her cool, practical voice—which he suddenly realized was a mask for nervousness.

“It will be my pleasure,” he told her, his mouth against hers as his fingers tackled the buttons down the back of her dress.

HE WAS NOT NERVOUS
.

Oh, yes, she was.

She was nervous in the sense that she did not know quite what to do and was afraid of being gauche.

But she was not afraid. Or in any way horrified at what she was doing. Or ashamed. And she had spoken no lie. She wanted him. She desperately desired him. And he
was
beautiful—all solid, hard muscle with broad shoulders and chest, narrow waist and hips, long legs. He was warm and smelled of some musky cologne.

He was Jocelyn, and only she had ever spoken the intimacy of his name. She knew all about the importance of names. Only her parents had ever called her by her middle name, her
real
name, the one that seemed somehow to encompass her true identity. Her parents and now Jocelyn. She had tried to stop him from calling her Jane, but he had done so regardless.

And so in some inexpressible way they knew each other intimately even before the physical knowing, which was just beginning. He was unclothing her. Her nakedness did not embarrass her. She saw herself through the look in his dark eyes and knew that she was beautiful and desirable.

She gave him back the look.

“Jane.” He set his hands lightly at her waist and drew her against him. She inhaled slowly at the feel of his bare
chest brushing her nipples. “We are ready for bed. Come and lie down.”

For a moment the coldness of the sheet against her back took her breath. She had changed the colors of the room but not the materials. Satin, she had guessed, was an erotic accompaniment to what would happen in this bed.

She watched him finish undressing. He did not turn his back and she did not look away. She was to become as familiar with the look and feel of his body as she was with her own. Why begin with shyness or coyness?

She knew pretty well what happened. She had lived all her life in the country, after all. But even so she was shocked. There surely could not be room.

He was smiling that half-inward smile of his when he climbed onto the bed beside her and propped himself on one elbow to look down at her.

“You will become accustomed to both the sight and feel of it, Jane,” he said. “I have never had a virgin. I suppose there will be pain and blood this first time, but I promise you pleasure too. And I will not put this terror inside you until your body is ready for it. It is my task to see that it is made ready. Do you know anything of foreplay?”

She shook her head. “I have never even heard the word.”

“It means what it says.” His eyes still laughed gently at her. “We will play, Jane, for as long as we need before I mount your body and ride us both to satiety. I daresay you do not know much if anything about the ride either, do you? The pain will be over before it begins. You will enjoy it, believe me.”

She did not doubt it. There was already an ache of
something that was not quite pain along her inner thighs and up into her belly. Her breasts had tightened to a strange, tingling soreness.

“You are doing it already, are you not?” she said. “Playing? With words?”

“We could sit at opposite ends of a room and arouse each other to fever pitch with only words,” he said, grinning suddenly. “And maybe we will do it one of these days. But not today. Today is for touch, Jane. For exploring each other with hands and mouths. For stripping away the otherness that holds us from merging into the oneness we crave. We
do
crave it, do we not? Both of us?”

“Yes.” She lifted a hand and cupped one of his cheeks. “Yes, Jocelyn. I want to be a part of your name, a part of the person who bears that name, a part of the soul inside that person. I want to be one with you.”

“You, me, we, us.” He lowered his head and spoke against her mouth. “Let us invent a new pronoun, Jane. The unity of I and the plurality of we melded into a new numberless word for Jane and Jocelyn.”

She opened her mouth beneath his, suddenly ravenous and shaken by the words they had spoken—and those they had not. This was not the way she had expected it to be. This was not man and mistress. This was lover and beloved.

It had not been a part of the bargain. Either for her or—surely—for him.

But it was what was happening.

She realized too late, as his tongue plundered her mouth and his hands gave her an intimation of the magic and sensual delights ahead, what this was all about. She understood, far too late, why she had taken
this option rather than any of the other more proper and rational ones. She understood why she had accepted his proposition without either outrage or horror.

This was love. Oh, perhaps not
love
exactly. But this was being in love. This was wanting to give and give to the beloved until everything that was oneself had been gifted away. And wanting to receive and receive until the emptiness had been filled again with a mingling of what was herself and him.

He was right. There was no word. No pronoun. There never was a word for the deepest realities.

“Jane.”

His hands, his skilled fingers, his mouth were everywhere. He knew unerringly where and how to touch her, where to brush with feather-light fingertips, where to tickle, where to pulse his fingers, where to massage, where to pinch and scratch. He knew where to kiss, where to lick, to suck, to nip with his teeth.

She had no idea how long it went on. And she had no idea how she knew where to touch him, how to caress him, when to change the nature of each caress. But she did know, as if she had always known, as if there were a deep well of femininity on which to draw for the beloved without the necessity of any lesson.

Perhaps it was that hers was not just any woman’s body and his not just any man’s. Some instinct told her that this was usually done in darkness and with eyes tightly shut, that usually all the pleasure was hugged tightly to oneself, the pleasure-giver shut out. Even in her inexperience she sensed that lovers did not always love with eyes open and focused on each other’s whenever it was feasible to do so.

“Jane.”

He spoke her name over and over, as she did his. She was his beloved, as he was hers.

The ache, the yearning, the need became more persistent and more localized. She needed him
there
.

Here
.

Now
.

His hand, between her thighs, worked light, deft magic in her most secret place and built a frenzy of desire.

“Jocelyn.” She set her hand over his wrist. “Jocelyn.” She did not know what she needed to say. But he understood.

“Slick and warm and ready,” he said, his mouth coming to hers again. “I am going to mount, Jane. Lie still and stay relaxed. When I am deep, we will begin the final pleasure.”

“Come,” she said to him. “Oh, please come.”

His whole weight bore her down into the mattress, holding her immobile while his thighs came between hers and pressed them wide and his hands slid beneath her. By sheer instinct she twined her legs about his. And then he raised his head and looked down into her face, his eyes heavy-lidded with passion. But not blind passion. He looked deep into her own eyes.

And then she felt him hard against the pulsing ache of her entrance. And pressing through it, pushing slowly but firmly, filling her, stretching her, alarming her. There was the sudden premonition of pain, the certainty that he could come no farther. He was too big.

“Jane.” There was something like contrition in his eyes. “If I could only take the pain for you. But it always falls to the woman to do the suffering.” He pushed hard, frowning as he gazed into her eyes.

There was an involuntary tensing, a fear of pain, and—and an awareness that the moment had passed, that he was deep. That he was inside her body. And inside her heart. Inside herself. She smiled at him.

“I am still alive.”

He grinned and rubbed his nose across hers.

“That’s my girl,” he said. “I could not expect tears and vapors from Jane Ingleby, could I?”

She clenched her muscles about the unfamiliar thick hardness inside her and closed her eyes to revel in the wonder of it. But he had promised more. And now that the dreaded moment of her lost virginity was over, all the longing, all the aching came flooding back.

“What is the ride?” she asked, opening her eyes again. “Show me, Jocelyn.”

“Lie still if you wish,” he told her. “Ride with me if you wish. There are no rules here in our bed, Jane, and nothing in that foolish contract either that applies to this. Just you and me and what is mutually pleasurable.”

He lowered his head then to rest in her hair on the pillow. He withdrew slowly to the brink of her—and pressed inward again.

There was no pain this time. Only wetness and heat and soon the rhythmic thrust and withdrawal of a riding motion to which her own body soon adjusted and matched. A carnal, energetic, blissful mating of bodies that was focused
there
, where her woman’s body had opened to him and his man’s body had penetrated deep. And yet the sensation went beyond that localized physical point. This was the mating of man and woman, of Jocelyn and Jane. It was a ride to union, to that wordless moment at which the I and the you of the two of them would lose focus and meaning. The moment
in which the plurality of we would become singular.

Desire, yearning, need—all became pain and reaching, reaching …

“Now, Jane.” He lifted his head again. His lips touched hers. His eyes looked into her own. “
Now
. Come. Come with me. Now, Jane.”

Yes, now. All the way. Now. All the way to nothingness, to everything. To oblivion, to the ultimate knowing. To oneness.

Yes, now.

“Jocelyn!”

Someone cried his name. Someone murmured hers.

She felt a final, blissful gush of heat and knew that the mating was complete.

There was murmuring after that, and lightness and coolness as he moved off her, and more murmuring, and the comfort of his damp chest against hers as he drew her onto her side against him, his arm about her, and the coziness of bedcovers over her shoulders.

“Jane.” She heard her name once more. “I am not sure you are still capable of saying you are alive.”

She smiled sleepily. “Mmm,” she said with a sigh. “Is this heaven, then?”

She was too tired to hear his chuckle. She slid into a delicious slumber.

J
OCELYN DID NOT SLEEP
. He was thoroughly sated but also uneasy. What the devil had he been babbling? He hoped she had not been listening.

Of course she had been listening.

What they had just done had been done together.
They had not been separate entities giving and taking a purely physical pleasure. They had been—damnation, he could not stop thinking the way he had been speaking. He had become her, and she had become him. Not that that was it either. They had both, together, become a new entity that was both of them and neither of them.