The Lover (10 page)

"I surely do not intend to—what?" His breath fanned her raw, aching nether lips. "Taste you? Lick you? Tongue you?"

Surely he would not—
not in the light of day
.

Surely he would not—not before she washed.

But she wanted him to.

She wanted him to kiss her in the exact same manner he had the night before.

And he knew it.

"But I do intend to taste you. Lick you. Tongue you." Michel's violet eyes were bottomless pools of unplumbed carnality. "A Frenchman, unlike an Englishman, does not hesitate to lave away a woman's pain. He knows that it is because of him that she bleeds."

Lowering his head, he delicately lapped at her exposed, vulnerable flesh. Her labia first, a quick lick, parting the lips. Slowly, thoroughly, his tongue swirled at the portal of her vagina, plunged inside it, impaling her very heart. He lapped and lapped until the raw tenderness was gone and pleasure, just as sharply invasive, ripped through her and she was straining for more,
more
—

Anne frantically reached out—

Only to grab fistfuls of hair.

It was silky soft and warm with the scorching heat that belonged solely to Michel des Anges.

Michel raised his head, lips shiny with her arousal.

Emotion swelled inside her, a sharp bite of wonder, apprehension, and sexual excitement. "Is there nothing that you will not do?"

"Nothing," he said hoarsely. "Providing that it brings pleasure."

Hands shaking—or perhaps it was the bed that shook—she cupped his head; the imprint of his ears branded the palms of her hands. She did not want him to be her whore, crying out, kissing her, pleasuring her because it was what
she
wanted. "But do you enjoy doing these things?"

"Yes."

The truth
, he had said.

"I enjoy them, too."

Michel pressed a kiss into the springy tuft of her pale brown pubic hair. "I know you do," he murmured softly, hot breath sifting, teasing her swollen flesh, which pulsed and throbbed for attention. "You are a passionate woman. And that is a man's true measure for beauty."

Anne almost believed him.

Staring at the long, lean fingers that curved around her thighs—at the masculine nails that were short and manicured, at the thumb nails that were noticeably longer—it was possible to believe anything.

As no doubt countless others had believed.

"I cannot imagine any woman not wanting you," she whispered.

His dark, ridged skin sank into her soft flesh.

Daring his rejection—damning society's—she braved his gaze. "I want you to be my lover. I want to experience the intimacy you speak of. Living together. Just a man and a woman. For one month. If that is what you wish."

A blast of energy rode the wave of her sexual excitement—it came from Michel.

From his eyes, which blazed with heart-stopping intensity.

From his shoulders, which tensed rock-hard between her thighs.

Lowering his head, he grazed her clitoris in a silky-soft kiss. "
Plus que la mort elle-meme
," he murmured.

Before she could translate his words—she was not even certain she had heard them correctly over the hammering of her heartbeat—he sucked her up into a vortex of pleasure where the past that had held only sickness and death and damning decisions ceased to exist and the future was his mouth. His tongue. And the orgasm that glimmered just over the horizon.

Each bump of the carriage wheels jogged another memory.

Michel's cry, hoarse and strained.

Michel's penis, hard and erect.

Michel's long, scarred finger, stained with her virgin blood.

Over and over Anne heard the words he had murmured before taking her into his mouth.

Plus que la mort elle-meme.

She could not have interpreted his French correctly. Or else she had not heard him clearly.

A man did not want anything
more than death itself
.

The cab pulled up to the curb.

Anne stared through the small, square window; it was smeared with tiny fingerprints—the hands of a child.

The brick town house looked different.

Older. More conservative.

Anne felt different.

Younger. Less confident.

Last night she had thought to buy the pleasure Michel des Anges could give a woman. She had never, ever thought he would give her access to his body.

To his life.

Anne tripped as she stepped out of the cab.

Clumsy, clumsy old maid.

Her hands inside her gloves were clammy.

With fear.

With anticipation.

Last night had changed her body.

Living with Michel would change her life.

She could never again take her place among those of the respectable ton who were her parents' contemporaries.

Anne gave the grim-faced cabby a sixpence.

How much had Michel paid the cabby last night? she wondered inanely. More than what she now paid?

The door to the town house opened just as Anne reached for it.

"Miss Aimes." The butler, an attractive man in his fifties with receding sandy hair, stepped aside for her to enter. His spine was ramrod straight.

Anne tried to envision him doing to a woman what Michel had done to her.

She could not.

In his stiff black coat and tie, the butler was a picture of English moral rectitude.

He revealed neither surprise nor disapproval that Anne returned home after a twelve-hour-long rendezvous, his features set in the expression that all servants wore to mask their emotions lest they displease their employers. "Shall I take your cloak, Miss Aimes?"

Her Dover servants, many of whom had been in her parents' service before her birth, addressed her as "Miss Anne," not the impersonal "Miss Aimes."

Their faces were equally impassive.

A wave of loneliness broke over her. It was followed by a rush of shame.

Never before had she wondered about a servant's sexual practices.

"No, thank you." Anne stiffened her spine. "Please have my abigail come to my bedchamber."

The butler bowed again. "Very well, Miss Aimes."

The smell of age and mildew followed Anne up the worn, wooden stairs.

They were familiar scents, safe scents.

Doubt creaked—a loose board. It sliced through the lethargic glow of sexual satiation.

What if Michel had said all those things—that he needed a woman to want him—because that was what
she
wanted to hear?

What if he wanted her to stay with him merely as a ploy to leach more money from her?

The hallway was paneled in mahogany; Michel's hallway was hung with pale blue silk.

Her doors were dark wood; Michel's doors were painted white.

The life she had chosen was exemplary; the life he had lived was shamelessly immoral.

Yet here they were…

Anne threw her cloak and reticule onto the wooden four-poster bed, then crossed the maroon carpet to stand in front of an old-fashioned cheval mirror.

Her corset pinched her swollen breasts; her wool drawers abraded her tender nether regions—proof that she was not the same woman who had dressed in front of this mirror some twelve hours earlier.

The internal changes did not show in the looking glass.

She had left an aging spinster; she returned an aging spinster.

Why would any man want a woman like her to be his lover? To sleep with her? Wake with her? Breakfast with her?

A soft knock interrupted her reflections.

"Come in."

Anne continued looking in the mirror, searching,
searching
…

Only to find her bedroom door pushing open. A dark, wiry woman in her early fifties stepped into the dank bedchamber.

It dawned on Anne that Michel did not have a mirror in his bedchamber. Or bathroom.

"How may I help you, Miss Aimes?"

Anne peered into the shadows inside the mirror. The maid's black dress blended into the dark mahogany of the closing door.

"I would like a bath, please."

The cavernous holes that were the abigail's eyes bore into her back. "Will that be all, ma'am?"

The woman in the mirror who outwardly resembled Anne was pale and composed; the woman inside her quaked and trembled with the momentousness of her decision. "No. Please pack my trunk. I am going away for a month."

So that a man to whom she paid ten thousand pounds could be her lover instead of her whore.

No, not her whore. She had
never
considered Michel a whore.

The abigail curtsied. "Very well," she said, and turned toward the bathroom.

Anne pivoted in a swirl of wrinkled gray silk. "Jane—"

The rental abigail paused. "Ma'am?"

"Do I look different?"

"No, ma'am," the maid responded blandly, incuriously. "Is there anything else, ma'am?"

"No." Anne suddenly felt ridiculous. The maid had known her less than a week. Even if there were a difference, the abigail would not notice. "Thank you."

She resisted the temptation to turn back around and search anew for the changes that Michel had wrought inside her body.

Because she
was
changed.

She had paid a man to take her virginity.

She had garnered the courage to tell him what she wanted.

She had confronted her desires in the blaring light of day.

The muted creak of rusty pipes eerily interspersed the rheumatic ticking of the French clock on the mahogany mantel of the empty fireplace.

It did not matter why Michel wanted to be her lover
, Anne determined mutinously.

She wanted this month with him—a sharing of sleep. Of waking. Of breakfasting.

Intimacy. Friendship.

Pleasures she would never experience with a husband.

A rustle of cloth alerted Anne that she was no longer alone.

Jane stood in the doorway adjoining the bedchamber and bathroom. When Anne caught her gaze, the abigail's dark eyes shifted.

"Shall you undress now, ma'am?"

"Yes. Please."

The abigail deftly unfastened the tiny buttons lining the back of Anne's silk dress.

Michel, she remembered with a flush of heat, was equally adept—at both dressing and undressing a woman.

Slowly, methodically, Anne was relieved of her dress, bustle, corset, and petticoats. The French marble clock chimed the time.

A quarter of an hour had lapsed. The exact same time that the antiquated geyser required to heat up the bathwater.

An answering clock ticked away inside Anne's body, marking the minutes, counting the dangers.

Jane turned in a swish of black wool and disappeared into the bathroom. The splash of cascading water filled the yawning void.

The bath would be filled in five minutes.

Jane returned on cue. "I will have a footman bring down your trunk, Miss Aimes."

The overwhelming finality of Anne's decision swelled over her. "Very well," she said—and fought to keep from running after the departing maid to rescind her decision.

Muggy moisture filled the cubbyhole-sized bathroom. It stank of gas. The geyser, a water-tube boiler painted to resemble green marble and outfitted with shining brass and royal arms, continued to emanate heat.

Quickly she brushed her teeth, rinsed her mouth with water, and spit it out in the yellowed porcelain sink. The Bramah toilet—outdated as was everything else in the town house—belched and gurgled when she pulled the copper chain hanging from the reservoir box on the ceiling. She kicked aside the wool drawers bunched at her feet—and stared at the fingerprint on her thigh.

It was red.

The muscles in her vagina clenched.

She lightly touched the fingerprint.

Her fingertip was far smaller than Michel's. The aching throb inside her pelvis was testament to just how much larger he was than she—everywhere.

The narrow, wooden seat biting into the backs of her thighs, she leaned over, removed her garters, and unrolled her stockings.

Michel had both rolled them down… and up. The first after he had shown her angels; the second a scant hour and a half earlier.

Standing up, she grabbed the chemise and jerked it over her head.

The bathwater stung—Anne forced herself to sit all the way down into the narrow copper tub until tepid water lapped at her hips.

As Michel had lapped at her nether lips.

But there was nothing tepid about his tongue. It was scalding hot.

She dipped the washcloth into the water, then rubbed a bar of soap onto the wet cotton until lather frothed and foamed.

Creamy. Cleansing.

Like the combined essence of a man and a woman.

No geyser monopolized Michel's bathroom. No gas fixtures lighted his bedchamber.

Had he been burned in one of the many gas explosions that killed and maimed English citizens throughout cities both large and small?

The washcloth abraded her tender nipples. It was slippery rough, smooth yet scratchy. Like his fingers when they had been inundated with her pleasure.

What would it be like to bathe with a man? she wondered.

Michel's bathroom was large, the porcelain tub proportionally sized. It would easily fit two.

She dropped the soapy washcloth and cupped her breasts, imagining that her hands were Michel's; that her nipples prodded his palms instead of her own. Imagining…
him inside her
… larger than his finger… plunging more deeply than his tongue… while water churned around them.

"Ma'am?"

Anne snatched her hands away from her breasts and slapped her arms over her chest; the liquid heat that suffused her body owed nothing to the bath. "Yes?"

Jane stepped toward the copper tub, eyes staring everywhere but at Anne's nakedness. She held out a tin. "I thought you might like to add Epsom salts to the water. It is quite soothing when one is tired. Or sore."

Anne froze.

How did the maid know?…

She forced herself to relax.

How could the maid not know?

Anne had been gone for an entire night and half the morning. The abigail had removed her outer garments. Anne's skin smelled of sweat, both hers and Michel's muskier odor.

She would not be embarrassed because of one servant.

Soon all of London would know.

"Thank you, Jane. But I am almost finished here. Are you through packing?"

"Very nearly, ma'am. What shall you be wearing on your journey?"

What did a woman wear to meet her lover?

"My gray wool walking dress with the black velvet collar. And my black grenadine morning cloak."

"Very well, ma'am." The maid hurriedly scooped up Anne's discarded undergarments and withdrew.

For one crazy second Anne thought about calling the abigail back and asking her if it was "very well" for a spinster to cohabitate with a man whom she was not married to.

The response such a question must surely evoke brought a bubble of laughter to her throat.

The realization that the maid would no doubt curtsy and indifferently reply, "Very well, ma'am," brought tears to her eyes.

Anne vigorously scrubbed herself clean.

What was wrong with her?

She had lost her maidenhead, an event that she had diligently plotted and planned. Nothing more, nothing less.

She would not regret her decision.

There were far too many other circumstances to repent. Choices she had not made. Responsibilities she had not fulfilled.

Misery
fed regret. Not pleasure.

Rising in a splash of water, she briskly dried off before swathing her body in the damp towel. In the bedroom she silently donned her stockings, drawers, and chemise behind the obscurity of a wooden screen. Jane greeted her with corset outstretched; Anne winced—her breasts were still swollen and tender. She stepped into the circle of petticoats held down for her. Quickly, impersonally, the maid tied on the horsehair-stuffed bustle and pulled the gray wool dress over Anne's head.