Sensation Read online

  No. He wasn't ready. There were other considerations. And there was that distant memory of another woman, which had been relegated to a place in his heart where he could keep it warm and safe ...

  Don't think about it—

  He pulled a chair close to the bed. Got a spare blanket and pil­low from the armoire. Turned out the light. Folded himself into the chair.

  Now he could take the time to try to make sense of what hap­pened today. Except nothing made sense—not her appearance, not what they had seen at the Bullhead, not the circles and sevens, or the moving walls, not the reappearance of the ghostly driver ...

  None of it—

  SHIT—

  He jumped out of the chair and dove for the parlor window which overlooked the street.

  Shit. Damn. Hell. He should have known; he should have kept watch—it was all of a piece, and he should have known, but it was too late now .. .

  In those few minutes that he'd gotten her settled, when his mind was preoccupied and his back was to the window wall—in those few minutes, just enough time had passed that the fog had lifted slightly, and what was there was what he should have fore­seen: the street was empty, and the coach was gone.

  What the hell.. . ?

  He was too tired to think, too disoriented to make sense of anything, let alone the mysteries of the Bullhead or how a bloody coach, horses, and driver could disappear into thin air.

  But the edible virgin—she was the biggest mystery of all, com­ing out of the fog and into his world in ways that were too intru­sive, distracting, and maybe deliberate.

  What was he going to do with her?

  She was so beautiful and more intriguing than she ought to be. She was limp as a rag doll lying sprawled on his bed, her hair flowing like melted chocolate all over his pillows. His pillows. His place, marking his territory the way he had marked her.

  He felt his gut tighten. Immediately, he wanted her. Instantly, he remembered mounting her, pushing into her, breaching all her barriers, being enveloped by her, held by her, worn by her .. .

  Hell and damn . ..

  She was the personification of Eve, as tempting as sin, as dis­turbing as fire, sent to make him burn, to melt him to ashes.

  Shit. He got up and started pacing. He didn't know quite where to go from here. He was so tired and so galvanized. He wanted to sleep, but he couldn't, because he was certain as stones in the morning he'd find her gone.

  But that's what you want. ..

  No, what he wanted was her.

  NOW.

  What he needed was another day—to think, to plan, to com­prehend what was happening, to make sense of everything, to make sense of her.

  But how could he spare another day, when he was so tired and so gut-bustingly aroused, and he couldn't be sure she wouldn't sneak away when he was asleep?

  What did he have that she wanted, now that he'd taken her virginity and her money, and rejected her plea for his help while blackmailing her into letting him fuck her a second time?

  Hard question. Hard him. He couldn't think straight. The walls, the danger, the robed men, the chocolate virgin who could be his enemy, mysterious coachmen, sevens and circles .. .

  God ... so tired—

  He dropped onto the bed. If he were lying beside her, he'd

  sense her movements; he'd know if she left the bed, left the room, left him.

  That made sense, in that hard rock moment, as much as any­thing else made sense this night. The carriage was gone; there would be no answers about that until later. Later today. He could wait till later.

  And besides, he needed time and he needed sleep. But most of all, for reasons he didn't want to examine, he needed her.

  Angilee was not that deeply asleep that she didn't feel him eas­ing himself into bed beside her. Her heart leapt, her body tensed, and she waited for him to move toward her, for something to happen.

  Nothing happened.

  Why was nothing happening?

  No ... why did she want something to happen? She was adamantly against something happening given that he wouldn't help her and she had devised this whole new plan that didn't in­clude him.

  Because—because—it might be a very good thing if something happened, she thought suddenly. Because she really didn't want to go out hunting for a ready-made husband. The thought of it paralyzed her, scared her, made her body run cold and shivers skitter down her spine.

  To take someone strange and vile as her husband for a while? It made her skin crawl to even imagine it. Not to say she wouldn't do it. She was perfectly prepared to do it.

  What if she didn't have to do it?

  What if something happened here, now, and it turned out that he could be enticed by having sex with her again? It would save her days of frustration trying to find a suitable chaperone and that elusive husband she could even stand to be in the same room with.

  Lord, she wanted the solution to be that simple. Absolutely. She wanted it to be him because he was already a known com­modity, he wasn't strange to her, and maybe because she knew his touch, his sex, and his body, and he knew exactly how to extract that unexpected bone-melting pleasure from her still virginal nakedness.

  Those really were all good reasons to try to seduce him into changing his mind about helping her.

  If only he would move.

  WHY DIDN'T HE MOVE?

  Well, maybe he was tired. She herself was exhausted, and wholly unnerved by his refusal to help her and by their experi­ence at the Bullhead.

  He must be utterly sapped. So there. That was why. It wasn't her.

  And besides, she was here in his bed, where she had least ex­pected to ever be. There was still time. It couldn't be but very early in the morning. It was still dark in the room; there was hardly any light but that shed by the sconces. The fog seemed wispier, what she could see of it out the window, as if the rising sun was trying to burn it off.

  He looked pretty close to rising and burning it off; there was something hot and ferocious about him, at close glance. And she was close as an eyelash now, and she could see, in the flicker of the dim gaslight, every line in his face, the grizzle on his cheeks, and feel the radiating heat of his body.

  He was as benign as he could be as he slept, and she still felt the knife-edge of danger in him. If he was a seething voluptuary by night, he had it well under control. But he was a man who must need money if these quarters were anything to judge by.

  Or ... maybe this was where he brought his many conquests so they wouldn't think he was a man of means who really had the wherewithal to offer them everything they had ever hoped for.

  But he didn't really seem like either kind of man to her. Yet here was where he brought her, and she must assume this was the level at which he lived his life.

  And if this was the truth about him, then why would he refuse to help her? He must need money, and she had money, and she wasn't asking for more than the time it took for her to present the proof of their marriage to her father so that Wroth would be out of her life forever.

  After that, he'd be free, with a substantial remuneration to fuel all the endless debauchery he could ever want.

  Why would he turn that down?

  A man who lived like this and squandered his income at the Bullhead could have no pride. He must be pretending, and she had misread him totally.

  She had to try again, it was simple as that. She was here, and he was, and had been, her last hope, really. Her nebulous plan of finding a chaperone was as wispy as the fog outside and just as substantial.

  This was still a much better solution, even from the moment she'd first thought of it. He had no right turning her down, really.

  Well, her tenacity was more than a match for his determina­tion. Yet another lesson learned at Zabel's knee. It was merely a matter of figuring out how she could accomplish it.

  She was ever her father's daughter, she thought ruefully; there was no getting away from him, no matter how hard she tried. Everything she'd ever le
arned from him was always in the fore­front of how she acted upon her decisions.

  The answer was simple: all she had to do was put the problem into business terms, as her father would, and the answer became perfectly clear:

  Make the bull a different kind of offer—and make it one he can't refuse ...

  Kyger jolted awake.... What?

  Something was strange, out of place. The pillow was over his head, and he was hanging on to it for dear life; beneath the edges, he could just see dull dreary light suffusing the room. Daylight, still adrift in fog. And concurrently, the sound of hooves and car­riages on the street. Movement in the house. Movement on the bed beside him ...

  What?

  He threw off the pillow and was nearly blinded by the dull sun-glazed light of a fog-shrouded morning. Shit. What?

  Why was he feeling so confused?

  Because . .. there was a naked woman lying on the bed next to him.

  Hellfire—the chocolate virgin, in all her edible glory.

  Shit. Damn. Hell. He jackknifed out of the bed.

  Don't look at her.

  As if he could help it. The virgin was playing havoc with his mission and his life, deliberately and intentionally presenting her most edible self to delay and distract him, and he wasn't immune.

  And he hated it. He despised her for it.

  Goddamn it, he, who thought he was invulnerable, controlled and with every sexual impulse held severely in check, felt about as contained as a rampant bull at this moment, and just about as ready to rut.

  And why the goddamned hell not? She'd undressed herself sometime during the early morning hours while he slept. The message, her intention, was clear, in every curvy line of her body, in just the way she'd positioned herself on the bed: the chocolate virgin was melting hot for him to pour his seed into her.

  He hated that she had stooped to that. It made her just an everyday whore, not a wealthy man's daughter with an evil fi­ance. It was a good story, though, even if it was wholly unbeliev­able. Even with her throwing around the kind of money she had offered him to take her virginity.

  She was so gorgeous, a man might easily believe her. But he just wasn't that gullible. And she was no different from the rest of them at the Bullhead. Just a vessel. A receptacle for a man's lust. Offering him the perfect paradise, because she thought another round in bed with him would bring him to his knees, begging to give her whatever help she really wanted.

  He couldn't help her. He could only help himself to her tight hot cunt as she was so blatantly inviting him to do. Why not? She was here, and he was most definitely there.

  He yanked the curtains to further darken the room, and then he unceremoniously ripped off his clothes. He felt no compunc­tion about it. She'd been clothed to her neck when he brought her back here, and now she was naked. There was no misconstruing her intent—or his, for that matter: one look at her naked body and he had descended into nerve endings, impulses and lust.

  He climbed back into the bed with her, aligning his rampant nakedness next to hers, giving himself a moment to feast on the naked whole of her that still beguiled him, in spite of the reality of what she was, and in spite of all the lies.

  Maybe it was a reverse thing with her, and the way she got

  aroused was to troll for men and pay for them. She certainly had come looking for him tonight.

  Well, she'd gotten him. He was ready, she was primed, and it wanted only to wake her and get the games started.

  He didn't quite want to do that yet, and he didn't know why. For some reason, he felt obsessed by her. He wanted to bite her, to devour her, to cram her so full of his penis and his cream that she would never want another man ever again.

  Why? What was it about her? That thick chocolaty hair? That milky skin? That innocence, real or feigned? Her responsive body? Her neediness?

  Her? Needy? She was as needy as a piece of iron. And just as hard and unbreakable.

  But that was the thing: he knew it, he felt it in his bones, in his craw, in his gut, in his heart, and he still felt protective of her. Was he crazy? He wanted to prong her and protect her? God, she was making him crazy. And he had to touch her. He couldn't wait a minute longer to touch her.

  He stroked her hip with a feather touch. Her skin was silky, baby soft, so caressable and tactile, he almost came then.

  And then he lusted to come, to pour his cream all over her lus­cious body. He wanted to rub it into her skin, her breasts, her slit; he wanted to taste her and lick her, and burrow his tongue into the chocolate between her legs.

  As he surrendered into the grip of that overpowering desire, she awakened, slowly and sinuously moving and stretching like a cat right into his questing hand.

  She opened her eyes, and closed them again. Perfect. She had him right where she wanted him. His touch was soft, subtle, arousing. She saw in that glance that he was utterly captivated by her body. It couldn't be better—whatever he wanted to do... anything—as long as he said yes at the end.

  She caught her breath as he insinuated his fingers between her legs. There was no more naked feeling than that, being parted and prodded by a man's fingers. Her body responded instantly, canting upward to pull him deeper, undulating to the rhythm of his pumping.

  Everything liquefied inside her. Her nipples tightened, her de-

  sire heightened. She couldn't spread them wide enough to accom­modate his magic fingers pushing and playing with her labia, with her cunt, and deep between her legs.

  He made her wet, made her melt. If he could just—just.what? She couldn't put a name to what she wanted, just more of it, more from him, more of the pleasure and the swamping feeling of losing herself, of drowning in sensation, in lust, in unimaginable pleasure.

  This was what the Bullhead was about. This was what men paid for, the power women wielded. This pleasure, this full unfet­tered access to their bodies. Anything he wanted, anything ...

  She was climbing the mountain again, step by step, soaring up the mountain, up toward the heat, the crackle of the sun. It was so simple, so natural, just go to the sun, and let the rays dance all over your body and slide between your legs and—

  ...and ...

  —explode in your body, a hot shower of crackling sun and stars and the cool moon taking the sensation down down down . . . until his fingers stopped pumping and she could just burrow down on that hardness and rest.

  "Oh ... !" she whispered, she breathed, she thought, she felt—

  Her body felt boneless, suffused with heat and well-being. She felt him kissing her at the hip, the valley of her belly, licking her navel, sucking it, her body shivering at every touch, twitching as he nipped and sucked his way all the way up to her breasts still with his ringers inserted between her legs.

  Her nipples were hard, constricted, flushed an even darker berry color, ripe, succulent. Ready for a man's tongue to swirl and taste and manipulate erotically with hot, wet little flicks back and forth, back and forth.

  She bucked her hips at the first fluttering of his hot wet tongue on her luscious nipple. Hard, raspberry, virgin nipples ... a man could come for days feasting on them, and he intended to eat at them without surcease. They were made for him, these hot tight teats, his tongue, his lips would be the first to lick and suck at them, and after that, no one else could have them.

  No one.

  He felt her body go soft, and she spread her legs wider as he

  pushed yet another finger into her and pulled hard at her one hard, pointed, succulent nipple just with his lips, just the nipple. Just...

  His penis spurted. He sucked harder; he came harder, his cream spurting like a geyser as he rubbed himself against her silken hip, as he fondled her deep in her cunt, and deeper still, as she arched her back, lifted her hips, and begged for more.

  More was not a problem.

  He covered her body as he sought her other breast and took the other ripe virgin nipple into his mouth and lapped at it with his tongue.

  Just that—
that one little movement and her whole body twisted beneath him, writhing and undulating to meet the sensa­tions he created by just flicking his tongue over the hot hard tip of her nipple.

  They were moving together all of a sudden in rhythm and uni­son, his penis against her hip and thigh, his mouth on her nipple, his fingers between her legs, moving with delicious little sounds of pleasure from the back of her throat, moving with intensity and purpose, knowing what the full-blown culmination would be of all that naked sucking, pumping and licking and fucking.

  It hovered, like a balloon, floating tantalizingly above them, swelling and expanding until it was nearly impossible to contain it—and still it hovered, so distended, so stretched and inflated, it had to burst.

  It burst.

  It detonated.

  It sent everything spinning out of control so that the solidity of him, the heat and heft of him, was the only thing in her world.

  And then, as the sensation scaled downward to the rock-hard extension of his fingers, he removed his fingers, he mounted her, and he plowed his penis into her, burrowed forcefully into her heat and wet and the enfolding softness of her, and planted him­self there.

  The moment was transcending. Neither moved, both intent on the rock-hard feeling of him occupying her. She wore him with the familiarity of an old lover, the way her body received him, en­folded him, enabled him to root deep between her legs. It was

  enough, in those lingering eddies of the pleasure, enough for him just to be coupled with her, joined with her, wholly encompassed by her.. .

  Embedded in her. The first, the only, the always. That was her thought. Him. Simple. This was the way it was meant to be. She had offered, he'd taken, and for his part of the bargain, he must, must, must marry her, and then, she was never going to let him go.

  And neither of them had to give up anything. They both would get what they wanted.

  His head was buried in her neck. Her eyes were closed, her whole being concentrated on the feeling of him inside her, mounted on her, rocking against her in that primitive unconscious way, as if he, as if his penis, were seeking, reaching, elongating still more to root deeper, tighter, harder.