Mistress at Midnight(2)

For Queen and for country or for the dubious needs of men left in charge  of a foreign policy decades out of tune. Aye, England had not thanked  him at all and he did not wish it to. But sometimes in a quiet corner of  the world such as this one, and in the company of a woman who was as  beautiful as she was beguiling, he wished for … something else.                       
       
           



       

He could not name it. It was too removed from the roads that he had  followed, at first in wanderlust and excitement and now out of habit and  ennui.

Murder, even in the circumstances of national security, sounded wrong.  His father would have told him that, and his mother, too, had she lived.  But they were long gone and the only family member left to give some  guidance was Alfred; his uncle's scrambled mind still lurked in the  remnants of the second Peninsular Campaign under Wellington, reality  lost in the scarred remains of his left temple.

Stephen would have sworn had he been alone, but the sunset crept over  her upturned face, painting untarnished skin the blush pink of dusk. The  very sight of her took his breath away. Like an angel offering  redemption to a sinner, her fragile stillness warming a heart long since  encased in ice.

'Keep the pendant, madam, for I should wish another payment altogether,  here in the open air and far from any community.' The beat of his rising  want hummed beneath the banter. Part of him knew he should not voice a  request that was as inappropriate as it was banal, but the larger part  of him ignored such a warning. He was a man who had lived for years in  the land of shadows and ill repute and it had rubbed off on him, he  supposed. Aye, he almost welcomed the distance scandal had brought,  though sometimes, like now, a crack appeared, small and fragile, and a  worm of longing for the good life that he might have lived wriggled  through. He should turn and walk away, protecting the little decency  still left inside him.

But he didn't.

Instead he said that which had been building from the first moment of  meeting her. 'All I want as payment is a kiss, given freely and without  anger.'

She waved such a notion away, the diamond clutched awkwardly in her  hand. 'You do not understand, my lord, it is my sister whom I need you  to introduce into polite society. It is not a liaison for myself that I  seek here …  .'

'Then I refuse your terms.'

She was silent and still, long slender fingers worrying the dark folds  of her skirt, and further away the birds gathered for a last chorus  before slumber.

'Only a kiss, you say?' Whispered. Unbelieving.

The deep blush of blood bloomed under paleness.

He would know her name soon enough and then he would despise her as  everybody else did, and too late to change it. But a chance for Leonora  to be in the top echelons of London's Society was not to be dallied  with.

One chance.

Fate had a way of occasionally throwing a lifeline and who was she to  refuse? Even had he asked for more she could not have said no. For  Leonora and for the twins. The stakes had risen as their circumstances  had declined and with Papa … She shook her head. She would not think of  him.

Goodness, why did he not just take the pendant and be done with it? It  was worth so much more than this nonsense he sought. And how was this to  work? Did she face him and wait or did he require some prior  flirtation?

A refusal would egg a man like him on. She knew it. Better to be  sensible and allow him this one small favour, hold her lips up to his  and close her eyes, tightly, until it was over.

His finger against her throat stopped every logical train of thought,  the gentle play of the sensual so very unexpected. If she had been  stronger, she might have stepped back and away. But the sensation of a  man whose very name incited hysteria and frenzy amongst a great portion  of the fairer sex in England caressing her was mesmerising and she could  neither move nor call a stop to it.

The braiding holding the material of her gown together was thick and  stiff, a resilient barrier to any more intimate caress. She was glad of  such armour.

The hat surprised her, though, his free hand simply lifting the  contraption off her head and away, the trailing ties lost in a growing  wind as the piece fell to her feet.

'The colour of fire,' he said of her hair.

Or of shame, she thought, deep amber catching the final burst of sunset.  She could see in his expression just what she had so often seen in  those of others.

Uncertainty.

All the difficulties in her life surfaced, roaming free in her head, and she shut her eyes.

'Nay. I want you to see me.' He waited until she complied.

Closer he came, breath against her skin, the dark green of his pupils  surrounded by gold. She could have fallen into those eyes, like the sky  into a puddle, fathomlessly deep. Disorientated, she felt him draw her  inwards, the muscles in his arms strong. She would remember this  particular moment all the days of her life, she thought, with a heat of  anticipation beating inside. His right temple held a raised crescent  scar beneath the line of hair.

Blood surged through fear, like a river breaking its banks and running  unconfined across a land it did not normally traverse, taking with it  all that was more usually there. A changing landscape. An altered truth.                       
       
           



       

His heat was surprising. Each part of her skin seemed on fire as his  lips took her own, ignoring the small token she thought to give him and  opening her mouth to his tongue instead.

Inside, tasting, hard pressure and thin pain winding upwards from the  depths of her being. Her fingers came to his neck of their own accord,  threading through dark strands, her body splayed along the length of  his, no space to separate them. She felt him turn her into a deeper  embrace, the ache of need blooming over any sense that she might have  tried to keep hold of, and she opened to him further. Her whole body  now, legs jammed against the junction of his thighs, riding lust. His  breathing was as hoarse as hers, no control, the huge yawning space of  nature about them consigned to only this touch.

Hers. She wanted more. She wanted what she read of and dreamed about in  her bed late at night as all the house slumbered and the banked fires  dimmed.

She felt his masculinity through the wool of her skirt as he tipped his head to break the kiss.

'God.' The sound he uttered was neither soft nor gladdened. It was harsh  and angry and uncertain, his mouth nuzzling her throat, biting into  flesh, asking for completion, the knowledge of all he sought unspoken.  When his thumb ran across the hardness of her nipple, flicking at the  covering of bombazine, she simply went to pieces, the control that she  had kept so tightly bound dissolving into disorder.

He held her against the half-light and the silence and the empty  landscape, and release left her shaking. No sense in it, save feeling.  When he raised her chin she took in the glory as he watched her, waves  of passion wrenching gasps without voice. Lost and found, the gold in  his eyes the only touchstone to a different reality, the tightened cords  of lust entwined into every sinew of her body, her nails running  unnoticed down the skin at his neck. A thousand hours or a single  moment? She could not know the extent of her loss of governance until  the world reformed and they were standing again on the top of Taylor's  Gap.

Aurelia felt embarrassment and then shame. If he let her go, she would  fall, like a boneless thing, all stamina gone. Laying her head against  his chest, she listened to his heartbeat, the strong and even rhythm  bringing her back.

'Thank you.' She could not say more and to say less would have been mean  spirited. He had to know that, at least, but in the face of her  appalling behaviour all she wanted was to be gone.

Lord. She had come as he watched her, the feel of her body tight against  his own and wonder in her eyes. Like quicksilver. Like magic. Like all  his dreams wrapped into one, her long red hair curling against his skin,  the serpent snakes of Medusa.

He knew not one single thing about her save that of a connection in flesh.

But he wanted her. He wanted to lay her down beneath the bushes behind  them and remove the black and dowdy robe. He wanted to see her slender  pale limbs in the oncoming moonlight as his hands wandered the lines of  them before slipping into the wet warmth of her centre. He wanted to  take her and know her again and again until there was nothing left of  self, melded into the eternal.

His cock grew at such awareness and he could not stop the swelling.

She felt it, too. He saw the flicker of the awareness of danger in her  eyes as her tongue took the dryness from her lips. He heard her breath  quicken, the line of darker blue around one pale eye pulsating.