Regency Society. Ann Lethbridge

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 wished he might have hidden it, hidden this power she had over his body, but he could not and would not and as the clock struck seven he realised that the morning was being eaten away and that his promise of freedom was close.

      ‘What is your name?’

      Suddenly he wanted some truth. Something more than falseness and business.

      ‘Jeanne.’

      She whispered the sound so that he had to strain to hear it. Jeanne?

      He wrote the letters on her stomach with his tongue and traced the word again with his fingers, lightly. All the hairs on her right arm rose, the colour nowhere near as pale as her tresses. Almost dark. Her nipples budded into knots as he skimmed his touch across them and the heartbeat in her throat beat blue against the last smattering of summer freckles.

      So delicate and breakable and so very fragile; just a girl on the edge of womanhood. His hand wandered downwards to feel the wetness, slick, tight and heated.

      He moved then to the softness of her thighs and to the rounded shape of her hips, skirting the outline, making her know in his exploration how truly beautiful she was. Not just a whore. Not just a night or a coin. No contract in any of it save desire.

      Her lips parted and her breathing quickened as his touch moved back to her centre and then away at the very last moment so that he did not quite fulfil her hidden want. But he felt it. Felt it in the way her skin rose against his hand, swollen with need.

      Sweat beaded her upper lip and her forehead where her fringe had fallen. He knew that heat, too, in the place beneath his cheek as he bent to the juncture of her thighs.

      This time she did shout out, shock resonating as his tongue reached in, tasting the fine wine of woman, and her hands threaded in his hair like an anchor, keeping him caught, as the flame does the moth.

      The fire of youth and sex and passion. The lust of a hundred days of abstinence and many years of caution. The memory of what it was like once to only feel free. He drank like a man newly come from the desert until all that was left was her.

      Her skin. Her smell. The feel of her fingers in his hair, holding him closer.

      ‘Jeanne.’ He moved back as he said her name and when no flicker of recognition passed into her summer-blue eyes he knew even that was a lie.

      Still, he could not care. She was here and he was here and her blood on his sheets more real than any falsehood could ever be.

      He moulded the swell of her breast into the palm of his hand and lifted the softness. Full fat abundance fell across the space between his first finger and his thumb. No little girl here. Her chest rose, fast and then faster.

      Bringing her face to his, he opened her mouth to a kiss, surprising himself by the want, and when her resistance faltered all he knew was bliss. Her tongue, her cheeks, her face in his hands turning to him, the pull of knowledge, the sharp tang of certainty, the urge to own and keep and possess.

      When he unlaced his breeches and lifted her onto his lap she did not fight him, and when she felt the tip of his sex pause for a second before pressing inwards, she welcomed the deep ache of it as her head lolled upon his shoulder. Submitting. Yielding. Nothing essential save the heavy rigidness of his manhood felt in the core of her body.

      ‘Ahh, sweetheart,’ he said, dampness on his forehead as her breasts fell heavy between them. Eleanor revelled in his expertise, in his finesse, in the way he built her hunger along with his own ‘til there was nowhere for either of them to go. Except up and away into the realms of fantasy and delight, and the sheer relief