One Illicit Night. Sophia James

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СКАЧАТЬ might to make her words sound the same as one of the maids at Bornehaven, the soft Provençal French easy to mimic. The lines of his shoulders relaxed.

      ‘The south is a long way from the streets of Paris, ma petite. If you need money to return there …?’ He switched easily to French.

      She shook her head. Payment could only mean obligation and with nothing to trade save her body, she was careful. He took the words a different way completely.

      ‘Then if you are hell-bent on staying in the city, perhaps you and I could come to some agreement.’ The fire in his eyes was searing sharp.

      Eleanor pressed back against the bed, watching as he came closer. ‘Agreement?’

      ‘Your line of work is somewhat … insecure. I could offer you a less uncertain future.’

      ‘Uncertain?’

      He began to laugh, his teeth white against the dawn, and in that moment Eleanor knew the pull of beauty, fierce and undeniable, his eyes marked with arrogance and temperance and authority. Not a man to be trifled with. But it was the hint of something else that held her still. A sadness, she thought, written beneath a careful detachment.

      He stopped as he reached her and ran his thumb along her cheek. Without force. A bolt of awareness sizzled between them, making her heart beat faster.

      ‘Though if you truly wish me to halt, mademoiselle, then I will.’

      He meant it. Honour came in unexpected places, she thought as she caught the depth of his dark, dark eyes, and the silence between them lengthened.

      She should pull back, should shake her head and put an end to it all, but she was held immobile, her nipples tightening and the want in her belly finding a home in the place between her legs.

      Le Comte de Caviglione! Her grandfather had said he was a good man, a trustworthy man, a man with some tie to the Duke of Carisbrook …

      One time or ten more, what did it matter when the urgency in her being called only for release and already the damage was done, was it not? The pressing insistence of some emotion that was uncontrollable made her turn to him!

      She did not flinch when he rolled down the cover and exposed her breasts, cold tightening desire and adding to the allure of surrender.

      The velvet counterpane was burgundy, and stitched in gaudy golden thread. She felt the ridges of it against her feet when his hand ran across her throat and made them stiffen. Above the bed a net of gauze was anchored by ribbon, the cane hoop that held it painted in an antique peeling silver, so that the colour bled into the fabric. Beyond that, a mirror was fastened to the ceiling, catching the movement of them both through a veil of muslin, the pale outline of her breasts surprisingly wanton.

      The reflection of the man beside her with his night-black eyes and magnetism left her little chance of refusal. The length of his hair fell past his shoulders, pale spun silver as she reached up to touch the colour.

      He smiled, his glance allowing no modesty, and the distant sounds of a waking Paris were a counterpoint against her growing need.

      ‘How old are you?’

      ‘Eighteen.’

      He turned her leg into the light. ‘What happened?’

      The rings of blistering skin on her thigh stung as he touched it. ‘I tried to keep my gown on.’

      ‘Modesty in a whore is unusual.’

      ‘It was cold …’

      He laughed this time and the sound was freeing, no longer caught up in control. Reaching for a drawer beside the bed, he removed a tin of salve, wiping the ointment on carefully, lessening the pain. When he had finished, he did not break contact, but spread her legs. The soft flesh throbbed in anticipation.

      ‘How much were you paid?’ The question was almost a caress.

      She remained silent, the scale of payment for a lady of the night so far from her knowledge.

      ‘I’ll triple it.’

      ‘And if I refuse?’

      ‘You won’t.’

      A loud burst of shouting below made her start.

      ‘The party will not be over for a few hours yet,’ he added as his fingers left her skin. ‘And the minions of Beraud are restless. Make your choice, ma petite.’

      She caught his hand and held it, slender and elegant, the nails trimmed and clean.

      ‘Then I am at your service, monseigneur.’ She had heard the other women downstairs use this phrase in the salons of the Château Giraudon. In the playing of a part came safety and she ran her tongue around her lips in the same way those below had mastered, slowly, and looked straight at him.

      His eyes were a thousand times older than his face, the chocolate melted into harder shards of amber. Danger and distance and steely control, the fickle carelessness of youth constrained by another menace. But she took a chance on those eyes and those hands and on the words of a man who had not excused the actions of one who had hurt her.

      ‘Instead of payment I would ask of you a promise.’

      He was listening, the stillness in him haunting.

      ‘A promise that come daylight proper you will spirit me out of this place in your carriage and let me go wherever I should will it without question!’

      She was relieved when he nodded.

      ‘Is it just Paris you would escape, mademoiselle, or might I hope that the perils of the night have started to sink in?’

      She only smiled as he peeled away the cover, a few feathers of down escaping the velvet, and one fluttering into the air to land on her stomach, white softness caught in a greying morning. He leant across and blew it away, the warmth tickling her skin and making her breath just stop. Her head arched into the pillow as a quick stab of passion lanced through her, the blood beating in her temples like a band, the base of sound blotting out everything save the sensation of want wound tightly through every pore on her skin.

      He laughed. ‘Perhaps, ma petite, I do you a disservice after all, by letting you leave Paris and a profession that seems your milieu.’ He held the hardness in her still with his hands and waited till the shafts of need had passed before discarding the bedcovering altogether.

      He should never have called her bluff, Cristo thought, but her words allowing him everything were a powerful aphrodisiac.

      I am at your service, monseigneur.

      God, he was twenty-three and hardly a saint, and if the Devil were to smite him into Hell for such an act then he was willing to take his chances. One time more or many, her virginity was already lost. The tremor in her hand as she had held it up to demand his promise to let her go free only added to his intemperance, and the way she looked him straight in the eyes saw to the rest. He was primed and ready, rock-hard with desire, the outline of his manhood raising the fabric of his breeches in a way that was … unseemingly desperate.

      He СКАЧАТЬ