The Tiger's Lady (56 page)

In steely silence Pagan watched her face as the pleasure grew. His claiming was swift and total, infinitely sweet. He missed no detail of her response, no soft sigh, no breathless shudder of need.

“I—I hate you, Pagan. Don’t—ohhhh—think this is anything but lust. Something—
you
taught me!”

Pagan’s lips curved in the ghost of a smile.

The next instant, while Barrett’s blood hammered, lush and honeyed with need, his tongue eased between her lips.

He slid against her lazily, as if he had all the time in the world, teasing a moan from deep in her throat. Hot and wet, he drove inside her, his taste smoky with tea and Mita’s herbal remedies.

And every aching movement he repeated with his fingers, buried deep inside her.

Barrett shifted desperately, driving her tongue against him wildly. With a dark growl he pressed closer, answering with the hot, sliding friction of his impaling fingers. Lip to lip, tongue against tongue, they moved in a raw infinity of heat while Pagan’s hands worked their blinding magic.

“Tight, Cinnamon. Ah, my sweet, so damned tight. Move—yes, that’s it.” He eased even deeper, possessing her with shocking completeness.

Desire rocketed to Barrett’s toes. That was when she had the first inkling that she was playing too deep, that this man was a master with a thousand tricks in his arsenal of arousal.

He was magician, mind-reader, and dark enchanter.

And despite all her determination she was utterly defenseless against his skill.

But the realization came too late, for already he had claimed her, set his mark upon her just as clearly as the golden chain that dangled at her taut, straining belly.

His chain.

His woman.

Barrett gasped at the image, suddenly wanting all that, wanting to be his property, his lover, his and only his. And the throbbing line of rigid muscle told Barrett that he was just as affected as she. She gloried in that knowledge, swept with a blinding need to make him far more urgent still.

To claim him just as he had claimed her, man-root to woman’s heat, while passion flared around them, burning them into white-hot cinders.

In that moment Barrett felt alive, blindly, recklessly alive, in a way she had not felt for months. And this was just the man to take her the rest of the way.

With a growl, Pagan palmed one perfect pink nipple to aching arousal, then soothed her slowly before beginning anew. Deep inside her his fingers matched the same movements, first slow and teasing, then building to a wild crescendo.

“Your skin whispers of hot dreams, Cinnamon. When you tremble I think of fields of spring green and a pleasure that will take us all the way to heaven.” And then instead of his fingers it was Pagan’s mouth that teased the damp cambric, tonguing the dark pink bud that thrust up hungrily for his touch.

He lapped and tugged and gnawed, their contact separated always by the fragile barrier of cloth. With each movement Barrett’s exquisite torment grew.

Suddenly she was wild to be free, with nothing but hot skin between them. With nothing but his lips and this velvet hunger. She arched against him, low, breathless cries wrenched from her lips.

As if in answer the fabric opened, its buttons sheared free. Pink and straining, her breasts tumbled forward, begging for the touch of his teeth and tongue.

But Pagan did none of those things. He simply took his time looking at her, watching her face flare high with color.

Until she wanted him mindlessly and accepted her wanting.

“Pagan—” It was a soft, helpless moan.

“Ah, falcon, so perfect you are,” he said hoarsely. And then his head slanted down.

With a hiss the camisole slid from Barrett’s shoulders. She moaned softly as he teased a trail of jasmine petals from her skin, then captured a straining pink nipple between his teeth.

Shuddering, Barrett drove her heels against the stone, past all logic or modesty now, all barriers gone. His mouth was sleek, searing, and it taught her a wild, drumming pleasure.

He took her gently at first and then harshly, driven by his own laboring need, by the hunger that had gripped him for months, ever since their meeting in London. “Do you want this from me,
Angrezi
? Do you want me to take you now?”

Barrett twisted, her nerves aflame. Her answer was low, breathless, infinitely sultry. “M-more.”

She flushed crimson when she heard her own raw plea, but somehow even that emotion spun away as Pagan laughed and complied, lips and fingers moving in a rich texture of torment, in a hot, blinding friction.

Heat lightning. Fire on a long ago London night
…

Memories.

Instantly the fear struck her. “P-Pagan! No—I can’t—”

“Yes, Cinnamon. Much more. Now, while you burn for me. While I watch the pleasure rip through you.” His fingers drove deep, deft and seeking, his teeth a searing torment at one taut nipple.

When she strained upward, Pagan met her with low, guttural encouragement whispered against her flushed skin. When she moaned, he caught the sound in his open mouth.

“Does this please you, sweet one?”

Her answer came in the restless, wild shifting, in the soft, breathless cries torn from her lips.

And when Pagan’s hand swept away her breeches, she arched against him, restless, madly aflame, desperate for something she could not name, could not remember, perhaps had never known.

His eyes raked her naked skin, missing no inch of love-slick flesh, narrowing upon the golden chain that circled her slender waist.

His mark.

For
his
woman.

But the dim phantoms persisted, holding her back.

Suddenly Barrett saw the chill glint of gaslight. Jeweled eyes reflected from a silver dragon, which leered from the buckle of a heavy leather belt.

The belt rose high and fell hard. Then again, its pain smashing white-hot through her shoulders.

No. Not again! Why couldn’t they let her alone?

She stiffened and would have twisted away except for the weight of Pagan’s hand buried deep in her hair, his hard body anchoring her to the mossy slab.

“Don’t fight me, falcon. Don’t fight this fire between us. Savor it. Glory in it, for it drives the earth, fires the sun, lights the moon and all the stars in their sacred courses. In this primal fire there are no deaths and no shadows, neither forgetting nor remembering.”

And then Pagan began the deep, exquisite rhythms that would rip the last shred of reason from her mind. Again and again he moved, each time deeper, each time claiming a little bit more of her soul while Barrett shuddered, lost to everything but his touch, her skin hazed with a fine sheen of perspiration mingled with the mist from the waterfall.

Slowly Pagan taught her a wilder ache, a breathless drumming through blood and muscle. Aflame, she twisted, seeking the reckless beauty he held out before her. And beneath his expert touch Barrett felt beautiful for the first time in her life, felt her body quiver and begin to sing.

How had he learned such forbidden things? What sort of dark power did he possess to make her so wild, so shameless?

But it was too late for questions. Already she felt the rising silver rush of pleasure. “Dear heaven, Pagan, I—” She tensed, moaning as the first velvet tremors coursed through her. “No, n-not like this!”

“Yes, falcon.
Now
. While I watch you. While I bring you your own piece of paradise.”

His face slanted down and he played her reckless body with hand and tongue and expert fingers. White-hot and mindless, the pleasure grew, rising to a fierce crescendo. Over and over Pagan muttered her name, a raw plea, a fierce demand.

Images, dim and dark, swept over Barrett. It was there again, very close. But something held her back still, something made of memory and shadows, digging deep inside her with cold, invisible fingers.

Why couldn’t she find it?

Why did it always recede, like a mirage dancing in the hot, white air?

“Feel it,
Angrezi.
Want it. Accept your wanting. And when you do, think of a winter’s night. Think of snow swept beneath gaslight while horses clip past at the trot. Think of a man … a man who’d been alone too long and was running from his past.”

So close now.

Every word sent new images vibrating through her mind.

“Think of a man who found his own piece of heaven, only to lose it the same night.”

Barrett’s breath caught as she heard Pagan’s raw need and the regret he no longer concealed. For a night she desperately wished she could remember.

Suddenly pleasure broke through her in a blinding wash of silver, and her resistance shattered.

She told herself it was because he had saved her life. She told herself it was because she needed his strength in this world of unknown and immeasurable dangers. She told herself it was because he was careful and gentle and caring with her.

Barrett told herself everything except the truth.

And the truth was that she shivered because she
loved
this man and wanted his claiming more than anything else in the world.

Her body convulsed wildly against him. Over and over the pleasure broke, tossing her into mist and fury, shredding her into a thousand pieces and pitching her like fallen petals into the pounding rush of the waterfall.

In her ecstasy she cried out, and the sound was Pagan’s name, offered in the raw, wanton splendor of a heart given wildly and without restraint.

Given in love, though Barrett did not think of that word yet, nor even think at all.

Pagan curved over her protectively and caught her cries with his mouth, his eyes burning.

And while he watched in awe, Pagan had the odd sense that the air around them filled with the scent of hyacinths, spilling their sweetness into the last, hot seconds of the day.

Slowly he cupped her cheeks and raised her head, sliding the tangled hair from her face. The movement was slow, intimate, and infinitely protective.

Barrett’s eyes blinked open. Color stained her face. Her eyes were dark with a passion only temporarily abated. Passion he had kindled so exquisitely and well. “H—help me, Pagan. I—I don’t want to wake up trembling in the night anymore, wrenched from darkness and lost memories.”

Somehow her hands found his shoulders and she held on for dear life. “Dear heaven, I’m tired—so tired of feeling them inches away, always faceless, always escaping me.” Her eyes rose, haunted. “No matter how hard I try, I can never quite reach them. And if I don’t, I—”

Her voice broke.

Pagan’s hands eased her closer. Sensing her turmoil, he waited for her to finish.

Slowly her head slid forward until her forehead rested against his chest. Her next words were muffled. “Sometimes I think I’ve gone quite, quite mad. That it’s all a dream and I’ll wake up any minute. Only I
never
wake up. And the pain just doesn’t go away.”

In the end, it was her confession that decided him.

He hadn’t meant to touch her, not in the way she expected. Not with the deep, piercing dominion that he, too, yearned for.

No, he had meant only to force her to face her past and accept the answers she found while she strained, exquisite and vulnerable in her passion.

For an oath stood between them. An oath taken long ago, while the blood-lust of Cawnpore raged around him.

And Pagan had repeated that oath just seconds before the tiger’s roar echoed over the hills. Because she was
different.
Because she was not one of his casual flirts, not just another cynical bed partner. Because she had a right to expect more from him than he could give.

But here in this quiet glade, with his life-blood churning in the wake of her escape, Pagan forgot about oaths, forgot about everything but the bleak pain in Barrett’s dazed eyes, where he saw reflected her need and confusion, along with all his own.

His breath hissed free. He would hate himself tomorrow. Perhaps even sooner than that. But somehow he would wrest this moment of pleasure from the bitter hands of fate and carry it with him forever.

“Then let us start with the heat, falcon. Heat and softness.”

Dimly Barrett felt him sweep her arm aside. The next instant her bared breast spilled warm and hungry into his callused palm.

This time the groan was Pagan’s.

Good. No, wonderful…

She must have spoken the thought aloud, for Pagan laughed darkly and slanted his head down to tease the silken arch of her ear.

The rational part of Barrett’s brain told her to push away, to escape while it was still possible. But she had been cold too long, alone too long, and she had come close, so close to dying…

“P-please…” It was a woman’s plea, smoky with need, and it made Pagan’s eyes smoke in turn.

“Oh, I
shall
please you, my heart. Before the sun is gone I’ll teach you pleasures you can’t even imagine, never dreamed of.”

Barrett shivered, knowing it was wrong to speak of such things, much less to carry them out. But how could she push him away when his touch was so raw and elemental, everything that she needed to drive away the fear that harried her still?