Savage Nights (The Savage Trilogy #2) (16 page)

But everything that he’d shown me had been European, from a lush Italian Venus with her Mars to lascivious Greek satyrs and French shepherdesses yielding to shepherds. The figures shown had been mostly classically nude, and if they hadn’t been engaged in pleasuring one another then everything could have been in any museum in London or New York.

The prints in this book were different. Here the couples were almost entirely clothed in swirling patterned robes much like the one I was wearing (or half-wearing, since I hadn’t bothered to cover my bared breast). The swirling robes emphasized their contortions as they twisted and turned each other’s bodies, their faces grimacing and their toes clenching. I knew exactly how they felt, that last frenzied moment when release seemed so close yet so agonizingly far.

But what I’d noticed first was how exaggerated the genitals were on both the men and the women. The men’s cocks were enormous, with bulging, bell-shaped heads, while the women’s quims were shown stretching widely to accommodate the men. The detail was astonishing, and it had been impossible for me to look at the pictures without feeling that now-familiar warmth begin to gather low in my belly.

“I’m surprised to see you blush,” Savage said, looking over my shoulder at the book. “There’s no shame in such a book.”

“I’m not ashamed,” I said defensively. “It’s just that they’re very … very detailed.”

He smiled. “That they are,” he said. “But that’s the point. Books like this are called ‘pillow books.’ They were owned by the highest-ranking courtesans, for their amusement and inspiration.”

I glanced up at him from beneath my lashes. “I do not believe you would ever need such inspiration, Master.”

He made a small grunt of amusement. “You flatter me, Eve,” he said. “But I am always willing to be inspired to take new paths, try new things.”

I turned the page in the book, back to a picture I’d studied earlier, and held it for him to see.

“Does this inspire you then, Master?” I asked. The couple in the picture were on some sort of open-air balcony, with the moon overhead. The man crouched on his knees with the woman’s legs over his shoulders, and he held her by his hips as he thrust his enormous cock into her. My breath quickened merely from looking at it again, and not from modesty, either.

“If it inspires you,” he said, his voice low against my ear, “then it certainly inspires me.”

I laughed softly, running my fingers suggestively over the image as if the printed man and his sizable cock were flesh, not ink and paper.

“True, that fellow is endowed like the village bull,” Savage said, chuckling with me, “but I know you, and I know the true reason why you like this picture.”

He pointed to one corner of the image, where a small figure on another balcony half-hidden by trees was intently watching the couple in the foreground. I’d been so intent on the man and the woman that I hadn’t noticed this detail until Savage pointed it out to me.

“You like to watch, Eve,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten that first night when you watched me in the garden with some other woman.”

“I hadn’t intended to watch you,” I said, flushing at the memory. “I’d gone out onto the gallery to escape the bores in the ballroom, and you happened to be in the bushes with Lady Cynthia Telford.”

“Was that who it was?” he asked, disingenuous. “I’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t,” I said, which was true. Seared forever in my memory was my first glimpse of Savage’s cock, thick and hard and ruddy with lust as it had plunged again and again into her quim. With her bent over a bench her face had been hidden by her tossed-up petticoats, and Savage’s, too, had been obscured by a branch. All I’d seen of him was his delicious cock, jutting forward from the front of his evening trousers, and how purposefully he’d used it.

He cocked a single brow. “I didn’t expect you to be jealous, Eve.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Lady Telford is meaningless to me. What I meant is that I’d never forget seeing your cock for the first time. I knew from that moment that I wanted you.”

“Did you now?” he asked, more surprised than I’d have expected and more pleased than I’d ever dare hope. “I’d no idea that the sight of my cock alone would have had that effect upon you.”

“It did,” I said, feeling bolder. “Granted, I hadn’t seen many others by way of comparison, but I knew from that alone that you must be an extraordinary man. And you
are
.”

“Thus I am extraordinary, and you, dear Eve, are irresistible,” he said, tipping my jaw so I couldn’t look away. “Perhaps I should arrange for us to meet in that same garden. Would you like that?”

“I … I do not know, Master,” I whispered, though as I stared into his silvery eyes I did know: I would like to do that, like it so much that my heart raced at the very possibility.

He leaned a fraction closer to me, his fingers on my jaw moving in the slightest, coaxing caress.

“Imagine it, Eve,” he said, lowering his voice seductively. “You would be the one with me in the shadows, with the risk that others might be watching from the gallery above. We’d hardly speak. There wouldn’t be time before we were missed by the other guests, and besides, our tryst would be for the sake of passion, not conversation. You would be breathless with desire, and I would be hard for you the moment you found me.”

I could picture it all exactly as he described it: the mysterious shadows that only happen in moonlight, the sounds of laughter and music from inside the house, the scent of the flowers from the garden. We would meet there because we couldn’t meet anywhere else, not the way we wanted, and the moment he touched me I would be ready to melt for him, around him, just as I was now.

“We’d be clawing at one another like wild beasts, wouldn’t we?” he continued, building the scene for us both. “Yet even then we’d have to be mindful of your dress, taking care not to tear it, so you could slip back unnoticed among the others. I’d turn you around and bend your over a garden bench. You were expecting this to happen. When I shove your skirts up over your hips, I discover that you’ve left off your drawers, and your beautiful ass and cunny are bare to the moonlight, and to me. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you, Eve?”

“Yes, Master,” I whispered. “Oh, yes, I would.”

He nodded, approving, yet still continued, for by now he was as caught up in describing the fantasy as I was in hearing it. His pale eyes had darkened, the way they did when he was aroused, and I could sense the growing tension in his body.

“I’d take you quickly, hard, and you’d push back against my thrusts, for you’d want it as much as I did. You’d have to press your hand to your mouth to stifle your cries, one to match each time my cock buried as deep as it could in your quim, smothering it all in the palm of your white kid glove. When at last we both came, I wouldn’t be able to keep silent. I’d roar with it, overcome with how good it was—how good it is to fuck you.”

I made a little purr of excitement, rubbing like a cat against his palm and twisting my thighs together in the chair as I sought relief.

“Would you like that sense of danger, Eve?” he asked, his voice rough. “Would you relish the chance that the proper Mrs. Arthur Hart of New York and Newport might be caught in a most compromising situation with me?”

“You know that I would, Master,” I said, my voice husky with longing. “I would do whatever you asked, wherever you asked it of me.”

He released my jaw and looked down at my bared breast.

“Your nipple is as hard as a ruby,” he said, “and I haven’t so much as breathed upon it.”

“You do that to me, Master,” I said. I closed the pillow book with the
shunga
and set it on the table beside the chair; it had done its work most admirably.

I twisted sinuously in the chair to face him. “Your words, your smile, your eyes,” I said. “Everything about you can seduce me. You must realize that by now.”

He smiled, his eyes heavy lidded. “Then I’d wager a hundred pounds that you’re wet for me now.”

Shamelessly I swept the robe aside and parted my legs for him to see for himself. I
was
wet, exactly as he predicted, and I didn’t have to look to feel the moisture that had already spread from my quim to my inner thighs.

His gaze flicked downward, unable not to, and I remembered how he’d said I was irresistible to him.

“Touch yourself,” he ordered. “Show me how wet you are.”

I didn’t hesitate. I slid two fingers between the swollen lips of my quim and dipped deep into my passage. I shuddered at even that small intrusion, and when I withdrew my fingers they glistened with my honey-sweet juices.

That might have been enough to satisfy him, but I went further. I raised my fingers to his lips, where my scent would be unavoidable to him. He caught my wrist and inhaled deeply. Then he pressed my fingers into his mouth, sucking on them hard to taste my essence as his tongue lapped wetly around the tips.

“We needn’t wait, Master,” I said swiftly, hooking one leg over the padded arm of the chair in even more blatant invitation. “This room can be our garden, and if we leave this window open, there’s a chance someone will see us from the house across the way, and—”

“No,” he said, straightening and standing apart from the chair and from me. His expression changed, too, his eyes shuttering and looking not at my face but slightly to the left of it. “You tempt me, but it’s not possible now.”

“Why not?” I asked, disappointment at his sudden withdrawal crushing my desire.

“Because you’ve no place here this afternoon,” he said absently, turning to look out the window at my side. The late-afternoon sun fell across his face, more shadows than light.

I shoved the robe back over my legs and pulled it to cover my breast and rose from the chair. It wasn’t just that I found his sudden shifts of mood and humor frustrating. They wounded me, wounded me sharply, and left me feeling abandoned and filled with doubts. I told myself that it was his fault, not mine, and that I shouldn’t blame myself, yet still I found it hard to stay beside him after what he’d just said.

I crossed the room to stand before the fireplace. I held the sides of my robe tightly closed together across my chest and stared blankly at the mirror over the mantel. Savage had tucked the picture he’d drawn of me earlier into the mirror’s frame, a haphazard display. I’d admired it there this morning, but now its presence also stung, another reminder of how I’d believed things were between us and now apparently no longer were.

And how much I wanted it to be otherwise.

“I do not wish to trouble you, Savage,” I said curtly. I did not want to let him see the pain he caused me. Fortunately, I was every bit as good at hiding as he was. “If you want me gone, then I’ll go.”

In the mirror before me I saw his head jerk up and turn towards me. “I never said that.”

“I rather think you did,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “If you could please send for one of your maids to help me dress, I shall be gone in half an hour.”

“The hell you will, Evelyn,” he said sharply. “If you want to leave, then that is your affair, but you will not do so and blame it on me.”

I saw him reflected in the mirror before me, growing larger and larger as he came towards me, so I was prepared when he seized me by the shoulders and spun me around.

Or so I thought. I tried to slip away, but he held me fast, his fingers digging into my wrists.

“Let me go, Savage,” I said, fighting to free myself. “You’re hurting me.”

“You’re hurting yourself,” he said with infuriating calm. “Stop fighting against me.”

I didn’t. Instead I twisted and plunged, trying to break away. I hated him for being so much stronger than I was, and I hated him for using that strength to keep me still by force.

“One minute you wish me gone,” I declared hotly, “and the next you want me to stay, and I … I won’t oblige you, Savage. I
won’t
. Now let me
go
.”

“I never wanted you gone,” he said, still holding me tight. “Listen to me. I said you’ve no place here, in this house, this afternoon. That is not the same thing.”

“Then what else could it be?” I demanded, bitterness in my voice. “What other meaning could you possibly have had?”

“I meant that I had kept you here alone with me long enough,” he said, his self-control only serving to make my own unravel further. “I meant that I didn’t want you to think you were my prisoner in this room, in this house.”

“Which is exactly how I feel at this moment!”

“Listen to me, Evelyn,” he said deliberately. “I meant that I wanted to take you out to dine with me tonight, as my guest, so that the rest of London could see your beauty, and my good fortune.”

I stopped struggling and stared at him, incredulous. “Why should I believe that?”

“Because, as I told you before, it is the truth,” he said, watching me closely. “We have a table at Gaspari’s at eight. If you do not find that agreeable, you may choose a different restaurant or hotel to your liking, and I will have it arranged.”

I swallowed hard and didn’t answer. For a man whose temper was usually so notoriously short, he was being restrained, even mild mannered. I was the one who’d lost control, the one who’d given in to my fears and passions. I was the dangerous one, not him. It all made me feel curiously off-balance, as if he truly did know some rare truth, some secret, that I didn’t.

Nor did it help that he’d begun to stroke the insides of my wrists with his thumbs, directly over the pulse where he could feel my heartbeat, and know how distraught I’d become. He did it to calm my unhappiness but also to distract me, teasing me with a tiny light caress like that.

He knew me that well.

Exactly as I thought I’d known him.

“I want only to please you, Eve,” he said, subtly shifting away from our everyday names and lives. “You have pleased me, and now it is my turn to do the same for you. You are not my prisoner, and never have been. Or haven’t you realized by now that it’s the other way around, and I am entirely yours?”

Perhaps he was telling the truth. Perhaps I had misinterpreted. Perhaps he never had intended to hurt me.