Still glowering, Julian continued to observe Mercy. She was laughing giddily and waltzing with Nicholas Bienville. Curiously, he felt no inclination to act—
Until he watched Bienville tug Mercy out onto the veranda with lust clearly in his eyes.
Julian’s hands curled into fists and blood pounded in his ears. Well, then. If the little tart was determined to grant her favors to anything in pants, it might as well be to him.
***
“One kiss. Please, ma belle.”
Out on the veranda, Mercy was struggling in earnest with a very amorous Nicholas Bienville. She had never expected a second dance with him to end this way—with him dragging her outside and trying to force his favors on her.
“No!” she cried, trying to disentangle herself from the strong arms gripping her, ducking her head to avoid the lips determined to claim her own.
“Don’t play coy, little miss,” he snapped. “You know this is what you want—indeed, what you were begging for inside.”
“No!” Mercy cried, feeling the rising bile of panic as Bienville dragged her closer. “I only wanted to dance—”
“As my tongue will now, between those lush lips—”
Abruptly, Bienville was yanked away from her. Mercy blinked in horror to see Julian gripping Nicholas by the cravat and glaring at him murderously.
“Touch her again, Bienville, and you’re dead,” he drawled in a blood-chilling voice.
Wild-eyed, Nicholas stammered, “Julian, I was only—”
“Spare me the nauseating details of what you were doing, and get the hell out of my sight!” Julian roared.
The instant Julian released him, the much-sobered Bienville tottered on his feet, then made a mad dash for the ballroom.
Mercy wrung her hands. Never had she seen Julian so white-faced, so stiff with outrage. “Julian—thank you,” she stammered. “I had no idea that he would—”
“Nonsense,” he gritted, his eyes blazing with fury. “The only reason Bienville is alive at this moment is that he was right. You did beg for it, Mercy. And now, by damn, you’re going to get it.”
Mortified, she raised her hand to slap him. “Why you—”
But Julian caught her hand and dragged her into the shadows of the courtyard. She struggled, yet she was no match for his steely strength. He tugged her into a corner, then crushed her against a pillar with his unyielding, aroused body.
Mercy was horrified and treacherously stirred as Julian’s muscled chest abraded her breasts and the hard length of his manhood pressed blatantly into her pelvis. His hot breath—heavily laced with brandy—wafted over her. “Let me go!” she cried.
He ignored her protest. “What you did to me in there was perhaps to some degree understandable, Mercy. What you did to my mother was unforgivable.”
He was right, and her eyes suddenly swam with tears. “Julian, I—”
“Shut up,” he hissed, and ground his mouth into hers.
Julian’s kiss was the most punishing, the most ravenous, the most bold assault Mercy’s lips had ever known. And it was heaven. Love, hate, and desire warred within her, and desire immediately won. The thrust of his brandied tongue inside her mouth was filled with out-of-control passion and searing hunger. She trembled and shivered against him. She realized that it was not him she had fought tonight, but her own traitorous response to him—to this. She clung to him, illogically both sobbing and moaning with ecstasy. Tears slid down her cheeks as she opened her lips to his plundering invasion. Irresistibly, her tongue vied with his, hers moving with searching delicacy while his plunged and ravaged with raw eroticism.
At last he tore his mouth from her bruised lips. “Is this what you wanted, Mercy? Is it?”
Reeling, she whimpered, “I wanted you to let me go.”
“You wanted to hike your skirts for every man in the ballroom,” he countered crudely. “If you are feeling so generous, mademoiselle, then you cannot possibly object to me.”
Even as she tossed her head, struggling to escape him, he caught her chin firmly with his hand. This time, he moved with slow deliberation, drowning her with his mouth. She could not protest, for his lips were smothering hers—drinking, seducing, ravishing. She could not escape, pinned against the pillar this way. With brazen impudence, he thrust one hand inside the bodice of her gown, impatiently thrusting aside her stays, roughly caressing a tautened nipple. At his scandalous touch, she was electrified. She would have writhed out of his embrace had he not held her in such a passionate vise.
“You arouse very easily, Mercy,” he murmured. “But you will hunger for me, not for the others.”
Despite his insufferable arrogance, Mercy yearned to tell him that only he could stir her this way. But she couldn’t, for he was kissing her again, even as his fingertips continued to torture the puckered bud. Mercy was engulfed with pleasure, unable to breathe as his mouth mastered hers, unable to think as showers of light seemed to explode inside her head. Julian’s loins ground into her with a provocative rhythm that sent hot desire piercing deep to her very core. Reality faded in and out with the thundering of her heart and the throbbing of the sensuous night around them. She feared that she would swoon.
At last, she managed to catch a stinging breath as Julian’s lips left hers. Yet her reprieve was brief as he leaned over and took her tautened nipple gently but firmly between his teeth.
Oh, mon Dieu! She had thought he could not possibly arouse her more, but she was so wrong! As he sucked and nipped at the aching bud, she came unstrung, bucking against him ecstatically, uttering a low cry that was half desperation, half an impassioned plea. He continued, unheeding, rolling his tongue relentlessly over the hypersensitive tip; she panted and helplessly thrust her fingers through the thick silk of his hair. She knew that Julian was doing all of this to degrade her, to prove what a wanton she was. But if this was shame, then, by the saints, she wanted him to debase her utterly! She wanted his hot mouth on hers, and the hard, searing length of him deep inside her. She wanted to let out the scream seething inside her, the scream his passion inspired, the scream propriety kept strangled in her throat.
Julian straightened to kiss her again, his bold hands pulling her hips against his turgid manhood. She could not help herself. She reached down to touch and explore that tantalizing, hot shaft. He stiffened in shock and she yanked her hand away. At once he grabbed her fingers and pressed them intimately to him . . .
When at last he pulled back, both were struggling to breathe. Their fervid gazes locked as the velvet night surrounded them. Water splashed in the fountain, a curiously erotic sound; a night bird called from its perch high in a tree. From the distant ballroom, the lyrical strains of Strauss’s “Lorelei” spilled out.
“Why won’t you let me go?” she asked at last, anguish and yearning in her eyes.
He stared at her almost sadly. “I might have, earlier,” he admitted honestly. “In fact, I was thinking of doing so only an hour past. But your actions over the evening have not inspired my kindness, or my forgiveness.”
“Then you won’t—”
“I won’t,” he replied in a tight, clipped voice.
She tossed her head. “Why, Julian? Why do you insist on this madness?”
He glanced baldly down at her still gaping décolletage. “Isn’t it obvious by now?”
Ignoring the hot blush spurred by his insulting words, she cried, “I’ll make you miserable—I vow it! I’ll hate you always and—I’ll see that you regret every day that I’m your wife.”
Julian’s smile remained, but his eyes glittered with a hard, unforgiving light. Reaching out to straighten her bodice, he murmured, “You might do well to remember, ma chère, that you’ll be at my mercy after we are wed.” His gaze flashed up to hers. “I’m planning to take you off on a wedding trip, Mercy. A long wedding trip.”
She gasped. “If you think you’re going to—”
“Not think. I am going to,” he promised. “Actually, I’m planning on our first child by spring. We’ll see how well you flirt on the dance floor, mademoiselle, once your belly is thick with my seed.”
“You devil! You would get me with child just to control me?”
“I will get you with child,” he thundered, his eyes brilliant with rage, “because it will be my pleasure to do so.” As she stared at him with mouth agape, he reached out to straighten the errant curl at one ear and continued in a voice laced with steel. “And now, you will go back inside with me and you will act the proper, devoted fiancée for the rest of the evening.”
“Or?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I have rebuked you in private, Mercy. But, I swear, if you so much as look at another man tonight, I will rebuke you in public. And it will be a remonstrance you will never forget.”
“Then it seems I must bow to your brute force!”
“Indeed.”
“You cad!” She ripped at the clasp to the sapphire necklace and thrust the jewels at him. “I don’t want these.”
“You will keep the necklace,” he ground out. “And you will wear it.” With unflappable confidence that daunted her, he firmly fastened the sapphires back around her neck. Again, the cold weight of the stones made her feel as if she were strangling.