The Bride Wore Pearls (27 page)

But he could scarcely be bothered. Instead, he simply lay, sated and lethargic, listening to the sound of water splashing, and imagined Anisha bathing. But eventually, thinking better of his lethargy, he rose, restored his clothing to some semblance of order, then locked the bedchamber door—as he should have done on his way in. Pushing off his shoes, he pondered what next to do.

He’d dragged Nish up here, all flash and heat, in a mad rush to have her. Afraid to slow down long enough to give himself time to think it all through. He had believed, he supposed, that they would simply scratch the itch between them, and be done with it.

But he was assuredly not done with her—nor she, apparently, with him.

He closed his eyes and listened to a tap wrenching shut, but in the near dark, weighed down by the heavy silence, it was all too easy for the guilt to begin seeping in. He had accused Luc of treating Miss Rutledge like a ha’penny whore, then he’d turned round and made love to Anisha without so much as undressing, spilling himself inside her with nary a thought, nary a precaution.

That was what the flash and heat—the desire too long denied—had cost him.

Had cost
her
. Potentially.

A rope of creamy pearls trailed from a porcelain dish near the bed, and absently he picked them up. Incredibly long, they lay warm and heavy in his palm, oddly soothing to hold. Pondering his predicament, Rance let them run like a waterfall from hand to hand, bitterly acknowledging that nothing, really, had changed.

The world still believed him a cheat, a liar, and a cold-blooded killer. Anisha still moved on the tenuous edge of polite society, still had two impressionable children to raise. He still owed her brother his life.

And he’d just repaid that debt by doing the one thing Ruthveyn had asked him not to do—debauch his sister.

But Rance’s good intentions, if he’d had any, flew from his head when Anisha reappeared, clad in an oddly familiar peignoir made of emerald silk heavily embroidered with gold—
zari,
she’d called it when he’d seen her stitching the shimmering banyan Ruthveyn so often wore.

As she approached through the gloom, however, he realized hers hung open, with no silk trousers—no
anything
—beneath. Her pile of luxurious hair had tumbled even further into disarray, and she still wore her magnificent jewels, as if she belonged in some exotic Mughal harem.

Pausing at the edge of the bed, she let her fingers trail temptingly over the muscles of his thigh. “I find myself,” she said huskily, “in dire, desperate need—”

“Then I should be flogged for my failure,” he whispered, catching her hand and drawing it to his mouth.

“—of a lady’s maid,” she finished, her face warming to a wicked smile, “despite my earlier refusal. Might you now oblige me?”

He sat up, his waistcoat still unbuttoned. “Gratefully,” he said, holding her gaze, “provided you will put these pearls round your neck and come back to bed wearing absolutely nothing else.”

She lifted those elegant, perfectly arched black eyebrows. “I would point out, my dear, that I am already naked, or almost. But you—ah, you still languish in your evening clothes.”

Dropping the pearls onto the night table with a clatter, Rance pulled her between his legs and set his lips between her breasts. “I want to see you,” he rasped, pushing the silk from her shoulders.

The robe slithered down her arms and off her back to pool about her feet on the carpet. On a moan of pleasure, Anisha speared her fingers into his hair, holding him to her. He turned and captured her areola in his mouth, slowly sucking. Then he focused his attention to the other breast, lightly rimming it with his tongue, watching in delight as her nipple peaked and hardened.

After a time, however, she stepped back, her breath already roughening. “Loosen my hair,” she whispered. “Take off my choker. This time, I want to be entirely naked with you. I want to enjoy you, Rance, as you were so obviously meant to be enjoyed.”

“Madam’s wish is my command,” he murmured, and she turned around. When he pulled the last pin from her hair, he crooked his head and set his lips to the long curve of her neck, pushing away another needle of guilt.

Lifting her hair so that he might unclasp the jeweled collar, Anisha crooked her head to look back at him. “This is no one’s business but our own,” she said quietly, as if reading his mind. “The divine—in whatever form one imagines that celestial power—grants us the ability to take pleasure in one another. The means to move beyond ourselves and ascend into heaven here on earth, even if only fleetingly.”

She was entirely serious. He laid the choker aside, and she turned in his arms.

“I wish to show you the divine,
meri jaan,
” she whispered, cupping his face in her hands. “And I wish you to show me. The conflagration is over. Now the slow simmer should begin.”

But Rance was already on simmer and edging near to boil. Still seated, he drew her back to him. “Good God, Anisha, you do know how to tempt a man,” he whispered, setting his ear to her heart. It beat slow and strong, in tempo with his own, it seemed.

He pushed away the worry and savored her. Anisha was so small in his embrace, so perfectly formed, with round, high breasts, slightly flared hips, and a slight, ripe swell of a belly that made him think of lazy afternoons with his head resting just there.

After a moment had passed, however, his impatience got the better of him. Rance set her away and stood, his gaze holding hers as he began to strip off what had been, at the start of the evening, a remarkably elegant cravat.

“A thousand times, Nish,” he whispered, “I have dreamt of this.”

She caught her lip between her teeth and looked away. “I was never sure.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he said too harshly. “No man could look at you and feel anything less. I have burned for you, Anisha, from the moment I bent down to pick that luscious scrap of green silk from the floor of your cabin and felt your scent swirl up like hot, sunlit flowers. And I think that I have burned for you every moment since.”

“You remember it,” she murmured, and this time she did push the waistcoat off. That done, her clever fingers began to tug up the hems of the shirt he had neatened just moments earlier. As if in surrender, he raised his arms and let her strip the garment from his body. It floated up, enveloping them in their mingled scents.

“But this
is
unwise,” he said, looking down at her. “Tell me, Nish, to go away. Do you have the strength? I wish you did, for God knows I don’t.”

“Oh, I have the strength to do anything that must be done.” But her gaze was drifting over his chest, her fingers already toying at his trouser buttons. “But send you away? No. If you wish to leave—if you care more for propriety than for
this—
then the door is that way.”

“I don’t give a damn about propriety,” he rasped, catching her chin in his hand, forcing those hot-chocolate eyes to his own. “But I do care more for
you
than . . . well, than bears talking about. I care for Tom and Teddy. And I care for Ruthveyn’s good opinion.”

“I am responsible for myself,” she said for the second time that night, “and for my children. I respect my brother, yes, and love him deeply. But I told you the day I arrived in London that I would not live under his thumb.”

With each word, Anisha went on with her work, slipping free the buttons until his trousers bagged off his hips. He went on saying nothing, half afraid to break the spell. And when she looked up, there was a sultry certainty in her eyes, her face stripped free of impatience, of raw lust. It was a simmering look of promise, and no small amount of warning, as if they edged near an abyss of desire from which he might never extract himself.

With her, that had always been his deepest fear.

He had thought himself hard and jaded; believed that he had tasted all the world’s indulgences until numbed by them. But he was beginning to think himself instead just unenlightened. That he was a man who had known only satiation but no passion. No pleasure. Never this sort of bone-deep yearning he felt for her.

She skimmed her hands low beneath the soft linen of his drawers, making his belly shiver with raw desire. “
Anisha
.” He caught one hand, drew it up, and kissed the pulse of her wrist.

“Come,” she said, stepping back from the vee of his legs and catching his fingers in hers. “Lie with me till dawn. There will be time enough later for your guilt, and for us to decide what must come next.”

He shucked the rest of his clothes in a heap as her eyes widened with what looked like feminine appreciation. Then he drew her into his embrace, bending her head back over his arm to plumb the sweet depths of her mouth in a kiss so decadent he felt her knees shaking.

When he’d finished, however, she turned the tables, leaning into him and brushing her lips down the curve of his throat then over his shoulder. There she lingered, drawing the pink tip of her tongue lightly down the pale, knotted scar that marred his upper arm.

“So beautiful, your many imperfections,” she whispered. “A lover scorned, perhaps?”

He gave a soft laugh. “No, a steel
flissa—
a wicked blade wielded by a half-crazed Berber,” he murmured. “But aye, many is the word, Nish, if it’s imperfections you seek.”

But already she had turned her attention, and her mouth, to the trace of blue-black stippling over the curve of his bicep, the remnants of an old powder burn. His battle-roughed spots seemed only to encourage her, and already he could feel the low stirring of desire in his loins.

She sensed it and let her hand slip between them, taking his length in her small, clever fingers to stroke him back to full erection.

When he gave a low moan, she broke the kiss, urging him toward the bed. “Sit back against the pillows for me,” she whispered. “Tuck up your legs.”

The mattress gave against his weight as he settled his back against the headboard, then folded his legs into one another in the way Ruthveyn did when relaxing in the privacy of his home. Anisha shocked him by climbing into his lap, facing him.

Wrapping one leg around his waist, her breasts wobbling enticingly as she settled in, she pressed the warm folds of her womanhood firmly against his cock, which had gone rock-hard against his belly.

He had barely grasped the raw sensuality of the position when, rising up, she came down on him, impaling herself on his length with a long, deep sigh.

“Good . . .
Lord,
” he managed to grunt.

Rance had never felt so intimately, so deeply, joined to a woman in his life. Buried deep inside Anisha, he touched her in every possible way; heart to heart, belly to belly. The weight of her hips on his thighs was like an exquisite pleasure.

He had somehow imagined himself in command here, but this was a different Anisha. A woman who understood her own sensuality. Rance found it wildly, tantalizingly erotic. She wrapped the other leg above his hip, across the small of his back, then twined one arm about his neck. Kissing him deeply, she let her other hand slip round his waist, leaving a trail of heat.

“This time,” she said when she broke the kiss, “I think we should go slowly,
meri jaan.
Very slowly.”

Then her hand slid to his buttock, right across the black tattoo of his Guardian’s mark, urging him deeper inside her. He let his hand stroke along the turn of her waist, then around and down, scooping her up beneath her right buttock, instinctively lifting her to him as Anisha eased back and forth on his shaft with movements so slight as to be almost imperceptible.

“
Umm,
” she said, but it was the barest of sounds; a mere vibration in her throat. And yet it carried with it exquisite feminine satisfaction. The position left her with much of the control but little room for maneuvering. And yet it hardly seemed to matter. It was the union, the warmth, and the feeling of his skin against hers that he seemed suddenly to ache for.

Rance had heard of such positions, of course. Across the brothels of France and the Maghreb, he’d learned a trick or two himself. But as Anisha stared deep into his eyes, scarcely moving, scarcely breathing, the intimacy of it began to feel like something just a notch beyond his ordinary experiences.

Ruthveyn often spoke in almost spiritual terms about the sex act, believing, apparently, that it was—or could be—a near-mystical thing. Rance had always suspected it had more to do with all the hashish they had smoked than anything nearing the divine.

Still, there was no disputing that intimacy was viewed differently in the Hindustan. One of Gauthier’s lieutenants had often talked of having had a Bengali mistress for a time, and of her skill in what he had termed “the thousand ways of love.” But the lady had died too young, and the lieutenant’s passions had died with her—and the stories he had told afterward had seemed to Rance just a madman’s erotic dreams. But now he was beginning to wonder . . .

Just then, Anisha rocked her hips back, then forward again, deepening the contact ever so slightly, and Rance decided she need know only one of those thousand ways—
this
one—because it was exquisite. His head swam with the rich scent of her, and it was as if his every nerve had come alive. And when she let her head fall back, exposing the creamy length of her throat, Rance bit his way down, then pressed butterfly kisses across her breasts.