The Moonlight Mistress (3 page)

For a few moments, they lay together, panting, her hand circling in the soft hair on his chest. She swore she could feel his cock pulsing against her leg, straining to go higher and burrow deep within her body. Her thighs slid against each other, bathed in her own wetness. She shifted them apart, cradling his narrow hips, needing pressure against her sex more than she needed air to breathe.

Fournier abruptly sat up. “Prophylaxis,” he said, as if it were a swearword. His chest heaved, and he yanked his vest the rest of the way off, throwing it onto the floor. Lucilla’s hand, without her volition, floated toward the line of dark hair that bisected his belly, pointing the way to his cock.

She said, “I have prophylactics,” and stroked the silky-soft hair all the way down to the tangled, coarser hair of his sex.
Fournier froze in place. She grasped his cock in her hand and dreamily stroked it in the ring of her thumb and forefinger. His skin there was the softest and most delicate skin in the world. With some effort, she summoned words to her lips. “I have condoms. In my medical kit. Sometimes they’re useful. As bribes. If you get one, and put it on, we can—”

Panting, Fournier said, “What?” She repeated herself. He said, “Let go. Let go or in moments we will be fucking. Without prophylaxis.”

Clive had never said the word, but that was what they had done. They had fucked. At least this stranger admitted to what they were doing. After Fournier tumbled off the bed and took a moment to finish removing his drawers, Lucilla might have found sanity or decorum. What use, though, were they? She wanted this, and she was old enough to choose for herself. She sat up and decisively stripped her shirt the rest of the way off. The breeze tickled her bare skin, and she shuddered, already needing his hands on her again.

“Fournier, hurry,” she said.

“Pascal,” he growled, then lifted a hand in triumph, holding a paper packet. “What is your name?”

“Lucilla,” she said.

He gave a little bow. “Good. We are introduced,” he said, snorting with laughter. After a moment he noted, “I fear you would enjoy this process too much,” and applied the condom himself before rejoining her on the bed.

She liked the way he’d laughed. Lucilla reached for him as he lay down on his side, butting her forehead into his chest and wrapping one arm firmly around his waist. He was breathing hard; she felt light-headed. “We’re going to do this, aren’t we? We’re really going to do this.”

Pascal said, “It’s my devout hope.” His hands shaped her shoulder blades, her spine, the upper curve of her buttocks as his hips eased against her, flinched away, then shifted toward her again. “It is wondrous. Inexplicable that this mere act can make one forget all else. Not merely a matter of biology. Truly it makes me believe in the physical existence of souls, for they must meet somehow when—you are a scientist. You understand these things, that is why I can say them to you.”

She’d heard Frenchmen were flatterers. She had to confess she liked being flattered—and the incongruity of his theorizing while naked and aroused. Lucilla cupped the head of his cock in her palm. He gasped, and said, “I…am sorry. I fear all the blood has left my brain.”

Lucilla chortled and pressed a kiss to his chest. “A philosopher!” She hesitated, then said, “I think it’s wondrous that our animal bodies can give us such pleasure, which I suppose is a form of transcendence.”

Pascal said, “Do you think the body matters, when it is the soul that is immortal?”

She stroked her free hand over his rib cage. “How can we separate ourselves from our bodies?” she asked. “Would anyone desire that?”

She did not think she had ever met a man who would have had such a conversation, especially with a woman. It made her belly shiver, to think of souls mingling like two chemicals in a beaker. What would be the end product?
Apply heat
, she thought.
Distill.

She said, “I want you inside me. I don’t want to be alone.”

Pascal kissed her, groaning deep in his throat when she squeezed the length of his cock. Lucilla needed his weight on her, enveloping her. She turned onto her back and he
followed, bracing himself above her with his injured arm. “Closer,” she said, spreading her thighs. Air tickled and cooled the hot folds of her sex, and she squirmed.

“Soon.” Streetlights limned his tousled hair, the prominent bridge of his nose, the long line of his jaw. He traced his hand down her cheek, her neck, her breast, her hip. He ran his fingers through her pubic hair and thumbed apart her folds, slicking his hand and circling with his thumb until he brushed her clitoris. Lucilla had gone rigid with anticipation, and now a cry escaped her. Her awareness spiraled inward, down and in, as his thumb circled and pressed, circled and pressed, until the whole area was so sensitized she thought she could come from a puff of air. She was moaning, she knew that because she had to gasp in a breath. Pascal pressed the heel of his hand into her mound, slow and steady, imprinting her with pleasure. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to breathe and make this stop. It built, and built still more. She cramped with pangs of ecstasy, and then it overflowed, spilling out of her, jerking her helplessly in its wake.

All her strings had been cut. She lay gasping while Pascal kissed her forehead, then her mouth. She could feel him smiling. “In me,” she murmured. “We haven’t finished this experiment.”

She held him close as he guided his cock into her, both of them flinching at first from the intensity of the sensation. She laid her cheek against his chest, liking the slide of his flesh on her face as his cock pressed the walls of her vagina. She flung one arm over her head and he twined his fingers with hers as he thrust and withdrew. After a time, she found the strength to lift her hips to his, working with him toward climax. It all flowed into one sensation of lazy pleasure, an
endless rocking and slapping like floating in the sea. She did not climax again, but she didn’t mind. It was too fascinating to concentrate on Pascal, the feel and sound and musky salt scent of him as he lost himself to physical pleasure.

At last, he growled, his fingers tightening on hers as his hips rapidly jerked. She felt his cock twitching within her and kissed his chest lingeringly until his crisis passed and he sagged onto her, panting. A few moments later, he kissed her, withdrew with a sigh and disposed of the condom. Lucilla snuggled into his arms when he turned back to her, drifting in a lake of well-being. Their skins were slick with sweat in the summer air, but lying still, the breeze began to cool them. Her eyelids drooped. From the limp weight of Pascal’s arm on her, he was already asleep.

After one of the worst days she could remember, and the most surprising evening, Lucilla slept the best sleep of her life, at least until an elbow dug painfully into her breast. She shoved Pascal’s arm away. His eyes opened and he blinked at her, dazed. “
Quelle heure est-il?
” he asked.

“Go back to sleep,” Lucilla mumbled. A loud noise from the street sent her bolt upright, clutching his forearm. “A gun?”

“Backfire, from an auto,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I have had army training. I know the sound of a gun.” He turned to her and smoothed her hair away from her face. “You must not be afraid. It will obscure your thinking.”

“You aren’t afraid?” She thought he must be, given that he had embraced her in the night for comfort before he had done so for sex. She wished, now, that she had been brave enough to draw nearer to him. The mere act of joining together had strengthened her, soothing the near panic that had buzzed along her nerves like bees.

She sensed him smile. “Were I an English gentleman, I would say I wasn’t afraid. It would be a lie, of course.”

“No, it’s a way of pretending until the pretending feels real.” Lucilla grabbed his wrist and turned it to see his wristwatch in the light from the window. Three o’clock. “It will be light soon,” she said. “If there are no trains, I had thought we might find someone with a wagon who would be willing to take us closer to the border. Perhaps one of the men who brought deliveries to the Institute. They will recognize me, and I have some money.”

“If we can reach my colleague at the Institute, perhaps we can borrow his motorcar,” he said. “That is why I came here in the first place, to see him. Perhaps he will feel obligated.”

“You sound doubtful.” Lucilla drew up her knees and rested her chin on them.

Pascal turned to his side, facing her. “I was…dismayed, by Herr Doktor Professor Kauz. We had never met before last week, only corresponded. He requested I come here, insisted he must share a discovery of incalculable importance.”

“Kauz,” Lucilla said, remembering a paper-skinned old man with wild hair and a cane. “A biologist as well as a chemist, with a grant from the kaiser’s special fund. He was rude to me.” In truth, he’d said a woman who worked alongside men was no better than—she’d had to research the German word he’d used, which turned out to mean
whore
. From his vicious tone when he’d said it, and his frequent vituperative glances, she hadn’t been surprised by the meaning.

Pascal hesitated then said in a rush, “I did not like his laboratory. He used animals in ways that were cruel, even for science. He said I was soft, and all Frenchmen doubly so.”

“You study—”

“Everything,” he said, with no trace of arrogance that she could detect. “I have a special fondness for maths and engineering, but my work now, it is to find the new things in biology, on behalf of an agency in the government. Since I am paid for that, and I prefer to eat and provide a home for my cats, I cannot practice engineering as I would like. Though I find biology is something like engineering.”

“The new things?” Lucilla asked, still wrestling with the image of Pascal with pet cats.

“The things that will be of interest, that will reward further study. I report on these things to a board, and they decide who is to receive funding. I have met many…eccentrics, I suppose you would say, who believe their work is vital. None discomfited me like Herr Kauz.”

“He’s vicious,” she said without thinking.

Pascal stared at her for a moment, in silence, then he touched her leg, petting it idly. “Yes,” he said. “That is there, beneath the surface. Perhaps it is not a good idea to ask a favor of a man who is vicious, and who has a dislike of women and Frenchmen. But the others at the Institute do not know me, nor I them. I know where to find Kauz.”

“We can only try,” Lucilla said. “A motor would be much better than our other choices, and there are not many available in this town. He can only say no.”

“He could do far worse than that, I am sure,” Pascal said.

“It might be worth the risk,” she said. “He need not know I am involved.” She paused. “If I am.”

“You are certainly involved
now
,” Pascal said, sounding affronted. “I did not intend that we should fuck and part.”

“I might swoon, that is so romantic,” Lucilla said.

He glared at her. “I will see Herr Kauz alone. You will wait
nearby. If he refuses us, then your plan will be next. Where will we begin?”

“I’ll speak to Frau Greifen, at the coffeehouse across the road from the Institute. She must know someone who would be willing to help us. I saw enough deliverymen lounging there and smoking, every afternoon. If anyone could tell us how we could obtain a motor, or a wagon, surely they would know.”

“Good,” Pascal said. “We should sleep now.”

Lucilla spoke before she could lose her courage. “I don’t think I can.” She cupped his cheek in her hand and brushed his mustache with the edge of her thumb. “Perhaps you would help me.”

He grinned. “And you, me.” He bore her down into the mattress.

CRISPIN DAGLISH LOOKED UP FROM THE STACK OF counterpoint exercises he was marking and froze. The new diction and deportment master held out a slip of yellow paper, a telegram. “Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Didn’t mean to read it.”

Crispin snatched the paper from his hand and scanned it, then blew out his breath. It was not about his missing sister, Lucilla, at all. His hand shaking with relief, he laid down his pen and stood. “I’ve been called up,” he said. “Could you let Miss Tremblay know, so she can take my classes? I’ve got to talk to the headmistress, then I’m to be on a train tomorrow morning.”

Diction and Deportment was extraordinarily beautiful, and the girls were already swooning over him in battalions, but Crispin had quickly and sadly discerned that he was self-centered and not very bright. “We’re at war? With whom?”

“Not yet,” Crispin assured him. “Perhaps you could glance at a newspaper to learn more about what’s happening in Europe. Your girls might have questions. Particularly the German ones.”

At home, he spun his hat toward his bed, stripped off his suit jacket and tie, and unbuttoned his tweed waistcoat before ascending to the attic. He brought his trunk down and quickly threw together his kit. His uniforms had been laundered recently, and he regularly unpacked his pistol from its box for cleaning and oiling. Quickly, he polished his cap badge, which bore the device of a running wolf. All that was missing was his sister to give him a kiss goodbye.

He thought he would know if anything had happened to her, but confirmation of her safety would have been nice. Perhaps his company captain, Wilks, could put in a word for him with Whitehall or the German ambassadorial offices. Or he could make the journey himself. He’d met some of the other lieutenants in his battalion before, albeit briefly. He particularly remembered the charismatic redhead Noel Ashby. Also the band’s leader, Lieutenant Meyer, a handsome blue-eyed blond whose regimentals were uncommonly finely tailored. He could ask Meyer to go with him to London, he thought, and blushed, then was promptly ashamed of himself for thinking what he’d been thinking while his sister was trapped in Germany.

He ought to be worrying about Lucilla, and of course he was, every minute, it had only been a silly fleeting thought.

Regardless, he would at least send a telegram to the British embassy in Berlin. No doubt they’d be inundated with similar pleas. He’d had a tutor at King’s, though, who might be able to help. Still pondering, he assembled a duffel and pronounced himself ready.

Ready for
what
, he wasn’t sure.