Tempted Tigress (27 page)

She was a bizarre creature, her mind hopping from one thing to another without any evident logic or reason. A moment before, he had found it charming. Now he found it... He groaned and collapsed half on top of her, half to her left side. He still found it completely intriguing. He could not predict anything about her, and that kept him interested.

She shifted with him, keeping him trapped. Except, he did not feel trapped. Even his hatred was distracted. "Will those wailing women ever stop?" he grumbled with a curse.

She did not answer. "You are angry. I am not who you wanted. I was acceptable for a night and a morning, but you are angry because—"

"Do not lecture me, woman!" he bellowed into the mattress.

She fell silent, obviously startled by his anger. He felt her take a breath, shifting her shoulders even more. "You spoke into the sheets. I couldn't understand you."

He lifted his face off the mattress. "Do not lecture me, woman," he said slowly and clearly. But it did not have the same effect. And it was a stupid comment anyway. She hadn't been lecturing him. Only Jing-Li still tried to do that, and his friend took great care in his timing.

"Is this part of your habit, then?" she mused aloud. Her eyes were dark as they flowed over his face and body. "Do you always wake angry?"

"Yes," he snapped. Then he frowned, hearing the truth in his words. "Yes, I always do."

She nodded, as if she had expected such a thing. "I myself wake every morning thinking of opium. And that makes me angry." She frowned. "What woman do you want?"

A tiny face flashed through his mind: sweet and young, it contorted with fury while tears streaked the dirt on her cheeks. He closed his mind to the image, but apparently he forgot to mind his tongue. Words flowed too easily with this woman, and he was speaking before he even realized.

"A girl. My sister."

She pulled back, horror on her face. "You want to do this with your sister?"

"No!" Then he pressed down on her knees, shoving backward and out of her. She was not strong enough to stop him, and he was too unsettled to be delicate. "No!" he repeated firmly. "You... this..." He rubbed a hand over his morning beard, using the motion to settle his thoughts. "You distract me from my plans. I am trying to find my sister, and this... this distracts me from her."

"And here I thought you meant to distract
me
last night." Her voice was dry.

Her accusation was also true. Last night he had thought with his organ. Today brought a new direction. He was headed for Shanghai.

He stepped away from the bed, the morning air chill on his naked body, and he pushed away his thoughts, performing his morning exercises with quick, fluid motions. He followed his daily regime, which was necessary to keep capable with his knives. The patterns were exact, the motions ingrained after years of practice.

Yet, this too felt new. She was watching him. And that added extra potency to his movements—to the swipe of an arm, the stretch of a leg, even the sudden slash of a pretend blade.

"Where did you learn that?" she asked as he began his second pattern.

"Peking. It is where I learned everything."

"But you were born at that village, weren't you? You stayed there how long?"

He answered easily. Between her questions and his morning exercises, the anger was fading, the moodiness that came after bed games quickly eased. "Until my father could teach me nothing else. I was ten when we left."

"And now you go to Shanghai to find your sister."

"Yes."

"How did you lose her?"

He was spinning on his heel, ducking a shoulder before a complicated twist that he had perfected by the age of fifteen. At her words, his belly tightened, his rhythm shifted, and he lost his footing. It was not a large stumble, and yet it infuriated him. The peace he had gained flew from him, and he found his hands clenching as if he had real blades in his hands.

He rounded on her, raising his hands to slice with his pretend blades. All she saw were fists coming up toward her face. She should have flinched. She should have cried out and run away. She did none of those things. She remained on the bed, calmly watching him. Her eyes barely even blinked as his fists made it to her throat and held a blade's length away.

Her lips quirked in a wry smile. "Last night you saw my darkness," she said. "I told you what I have done, why I want to fly away." She swallowed, her skin impossibly white in the morning sunlight. "Why I eat opium to forget." She reached up and surrounded his fists with her tiny hands. "You have a darkness too, an anger that boils through your moods, staining everything you do. Sometimes you can hide it. When you are thinking, perhaps, or, pursuing a criminal. But mostly, I think, you are as addicted as I—and for the same reason."

"I have no taste for your opium!" he snapped, his fists quivering near her throat. But he did not move, and neither did she.

"Not opium. But you distracted me from it with sex. I believe you distract yourself in the same manner." She sighed and rolled away from him, easily pushing his fists out of the way. He watched her breasts bob as she reached for her skirt. He stood fascinated by the fullness of her bottom as she tried to shake the creases from the silk.

"I do not eat opium!" he repeated, knowing she accused him of something else entirely. Then he stepped forward, rubbing his hand down her behind, feeling the smooth warmth of her skin. Already his organ stretched for her, and without prelude, he slipped himself close to press into her. He was not hard enough to penetrate, but soon he would be.

She did not flee from him, and yet she did not press backward either. "I am not thinking about opium right now," she said softly. "I do not need such distraction." She twisted to look at him over her shoulder. Her dark curls tugged backward with her movement, lifting up over her near breast. He watched the dark strands slide upward, slowly revealing the white globes of her breasts. Unable to stop himself, he reached forward and cupped one, squeezing the nipple with just enough pressure to make her gasp.

"Where is your sister, Zhi-Gang? Why does talking about her make you want to run to the nearest woman?"

He would have discarded her then, perhaps pushed her away with an angry curse, maybe even hurt the breast that he cupped so gently. But again, she covered his hand with her own, holding him still. And below, she arched her pelvis backward, stroking his organ enough that it thickened most delightfully.

"Answer my questions and get a reward," she said lightly, an echo of what he had said to her last night. "What happened to your sister?"

He closed his eyes and leaned into her. He smelled their musky scent, well mixed now, and still heady. He was fully hard, and he wanted to be inside her. To reach for the forgetfulness of release. To be wiped clean once again.

But she pressed him to speak, and he could not refuse her. He had no understanding of why. Perhaps she was the first woman to ask in such a way as to tempt him to answer. It did not matter. He pressed her forward so that she bent over the bed. She did not resist, but she did not help either. And so he began to speak.

"My sister was sold into prostitution when I was ten." He thrust himself fully inside her. She was wet from before, so he went in easily. But she was also tight enough to grip him wonderfully, and excited enough to gasp at his motion.

"There is more," she prompted.

"Oh yes," he agreed, and reached around to cup both her breasts.

She stilled. He felt her inner muscles relax completely. "You are tracking a child sold... how long ago?"

"Nearly two decades."

She arched the tiniest bit more, and he was able to move again: sliding out, pressing in.

"So, let me get this straight. You are on a dual mission—the first, as the Emperor's Enforcer, to destroy the opium routes into China. But the second, you also track your lost sister to Shanghai."

"Yes." He continued to slide back and forth into her. In and out, in a steady tempo that held the anger at bay, that erased the guilt and would soon wipe his mind clean.

"But the Emperor has been imprisoned. His mother rules in his name, and she has begun killing all who were in his inner circle."

He was so close. His release was at the very edge, but he froze at her statement. "How would you know about these things?"

Her laughter rippled through her body into his. "I live in this country. Why wouldn't I know about these things?"

Because she was a woman. Because she was white. Because a thousand different things filtered through the sensations that distracted his mind. He stilled his body to think more clearly. "You should not know these things."

"You should not use women to distract yourself."

"You should not eat opium or sell it to my countrymen."

She fell silent, and he knew she was as unsettled as he. So he reached for the one thing that would calm them both. He slipped a hand down off her breast, across her belly, and into the junction between her thighs. She welcomed this change. Her responses were no longer words but soft gasps that fired his blood.

He began to time his movements, rubbing her yin pearl with his fingers as he pushed his sex deep inside her. His tempo increased, their breaths shortened. And soon she cried out in joy, her body convulsing around him.

He thrust one last time, deep inside, and poured himself into her. Again, he felt his mind wiped clean, his body trembling with release and relief.

They trembled there at the end of the bed, holding themselves in their ecstasy. And then as one they toppled forward. He slipped away as she dropped boneless onto the mattress. He fell beside her, finding barely enough energy to wrap his arm around her and tug her backward against him.

He spooned her and buried his face in her hair. He held her tight, wondering if she would pull away, but she did not. In time, she exhaled a shuddering breath and relaxed completely back against him.

They would have slept then. He felt her breath steady into a slower and deeper rhythm. His own eyes drifted shut, his breath synched to hers. Sweet oblivion awaited, and he rushed headlong toward it. But then the wailing stopped.

The widows' sobs had been a constant noise, heard, felt, and mostly ignored. Until silence thundered into the room. Anna heard it too, for she stiffened and lifted her head. Zhi-Gang frowned. Something important had happened. Something had stopped the women's wailing.

Then he heard it; distant pounding of feet as someone ran down the hallway. Zhi-Gang raised his head to hear better. Was that Jing-Li? Bellowing something? Finally, the word filtered through the walls enough to be clear. "...guns!"

From Anna Marie Thompson's journal

February 19, 1886

I'm almost sixteen now, and it is time I looked to my future. Most of the orphan girls become nuns, remaining here or in other missions for the rest of their lives. They think it the most holy of vocations and embrace it completely. This, of course, means that they are too ugly or too mean to embrace any man.

Thankfully, I have another choice. Father has shown me another world, another possibility. He says that I have to choose between living for God or living for myself. Living for God is glorious and honorable, but it's not a very fun life. Living for myself doesn't mean I'm bad. It just means that I'm not holy. Most people chose to live in the world and not bank on Heaven later.

It wasn't a hard decision. Some of the nuns are nice, but they're also the meanest people in the world. Just because I don't want to live for God, they say it makes me ungrateful or bad. But that's not true. Samuel isn't bad, and neither are his friends. They're just people who don't always believe in what the nuns do. That's not wrong. It's just not living for God.

So... I choose the world. I want to live in the world. And that means I need money. Most women get that through their husbands, but I don't want to marry anyone. Father says I don't have to. That many women live without a man. They just need money. And he has a way for me to earn lots. He said he'd show me on my sixteenth birthday, and then I can decide.

I've already decided. I don't want to be a nun. I'm going to be with Father. And even better, I'll get to smoke five grains of opium this time because I'm a year older!