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  Satisfaction / 205

  Not quite yet. Anticipation was everything. She was utterly boneless in his arms, completely sated in sex; she wasn't going anywhere, and he wanted to prolong this deep desire to intimately explore her cunt.

  Her nipples occupied him nicely for a while. Deliciously hard, pointed nipples, perfect for thumbing, rubbing, and squeezing. And she felt every sensual caress. He wouldn't let her move, wouldn't let her shift her legs to press down where all the sensual feeling crystallized, sharp, bright, fractured.

  Put his hand there instead, slinking his fingers neatly into her labia and into the thick residue of his clotted cream mixed with hers.

  Her body arched and bucked, and he pulled against her hips to keep her legs spread and his questing fingers in her slippery, hot slit.

  He was consumed with voluptuous excitement. His penis hardened to iron. She stopped fighting him as her body responded to his penetrating fingers. Her hips canted upward, inviting more.

  He slipped his free hand between her legs, and pulled gently at one side of her slit. He slipped his invasive fingers out of her heat, and pulled at the other side, so that her cunt lips were spread and she was open to his fingers probing her.

  Her body writhed as his fingers kept incrementally spreading her wider and wider, his fingers stroking, pressing, caressing the lush, wet inner flesh of her cunt—so wet, so pink, so perfect—opening her still farther to expose her pleasure point, and stroking it lightly as he whispered in her ear, "Whenever you're naked, I want you spread open like this."

  She fought him as he caressed her; she couldn't take the unbearable pleasure, the feeling of being wholly exposed and open to him, and they rocked together in a combative sensual dance even as he pushed her legs still farther apart.

  "I want you always to feel my fingers spreading you—when you're dressed, when you're naked, when you sleep—I want you to feel me working you wide open like this, wet and creamy like this, before I take you ... I want ..."

  He exploded. A man could only take so much. Her body could only take so much.

  206 / Thea Devine

  As the pressure of his fingers eased, she scrambled away from him, to the other side of the bed, as she was smeared by his spuming orgasm, as she watched him helpless in the grip of his pleasure.

  Pleasure she had given him, that her body provoked. All those secret pleasures. Pleasure for her, too. Leave all emotions at the door.

  It made things so much easier.

  Just the sex. Just the pleasure.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lujan was right. She felt it, just as he'd said, as he wanted, felt him down between her legs, spreading her wide, even though she was fully dressed and intending to take breakfast in the dining room.

  "Stay with me." He had pulled her close, reached under her skirt for her mound, his fingers seeking her nakedness through the open slit of her undergarments. Finding her. Prodding her.

  Her knees went weak.

  "Reason enough to stay in bed."

  She pulled away. "You stay. I'll have Mrs. Ancrum send breakfast to you."

  "Come here."

  "I have things to do."

  "Nothing more important than taking care of my penis."

  She wavered for a moment. He was at full, hard staff, primed and ready, and her body was shooting off little darts of desire. If she stayed, he would undress her, caress her, spread her again.

  Oh lord—her breathing grew heavy as her body remembered and recreated all the sensations from the night before.

  Last night, in his hands, pressed, caressed, and detonated. And he hadn't even begun to explore how much she was capable of feeling—there.

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  It almost scared her, how much pleasure her body was capable of. Thank God she had decided not to love him. If he ever did this with some other woman, it would have killed her.

  "I think I took very nice care of your penis all night."

  "It's not enough. Come back, Jancie. I shouldn't have let you even get out of bed."

  He held onto her arm, pulled her onto the bed. "I'll have nipples for breakfast, thank you."

  "Lujan .. ."

  "You need to be in bed with me. I need to feed on you. All of you. Now." His voice was thick with lust and desire, and she felt her body respond in a corresponding way.

  "Lujan," she whispered, knowing already she was helpless to resist. She wanted it, too. She felt drugged with power and pleasure. It took nothing at all for a woman's body to acclimate, to want what a man wanted, to give him what he needed to see.

  He had her naked in moments. "Yesss—" nuzzling her ear, her neck, and slowly working his way down to her breasts. Pushing her back so that he was over her, taking one nipple into his mouth while he insinuated his hand between her legs. "Can't get enough ..." A growl of words around his sucking her nipple and rubbing her slit, warming her up for his ringers first, and then for his penis.

  She angled her legs and arched her back. He worked his way down from her breast to her navel and further down between her legs. It was daylight now; she had unwittingly pulled the curtains, and sun flooded the room, the bed, pouring heat over her body in tandem with the heat he generated as he gazed his fill of her mound, as he began working her labia apart to reveal her glistening nub.

  And then he bent and kissed it, and began sucking at it, and the sun spun away, and the dark and the light, and everything she knew, she felt, she thought, was absorbed into him, his body, his tongue, and that one explosive pleasure point at the center of her world.

  ******************

  He had never had sex like this, ever. God, it was all he could do not to let Jancie walk out the door. She could barely walk as it was, he had plumbed her so deeply and thoroughly.

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  But after this morning's round of coupling, she still protested that she had things to do.

  The only thing she had to do was keep his penis busy and satisfied, damn it. Oh, hell, he was satisfied, in a way he hadn't experienced before. He knew why, too—this was his cunt, his woman, his wife, all for him, and no other man would try her out or try her on.

  And he wasn't scared of Kyger's attraction to her, either. There was nothing Kyger could do that could equal what they had experienced together last night and this morning.

  He still hadn't had enough. Just thinking about it. . . he'd never been with a woman who gave him such an incessant hard-on, a woman he wanted so much and so often. He wasn't fit to be in company right now, and he had meant to join her downstairs for breakfast.

  The hell with breakfast. He wanted to eat something else. Something ineffably feminine and only Jancie's.

  He had to get a grip on jack lance. He couldn't walk around primed and poked all the time.

  Well, maybe he could. He had. But this was different.

  How was it different? This wasn't a grand love affair. This was his wife, available to him in all the ways he could conceive of, when he wanted her. He wanted her now. That was the difference. He kept wanting her, and each time they coupled, it still seemed like it wasn't enough.

  Why didn't she feel that? He wondered what she wanted.

  She wanted breakfast. She had things to do. The lure of unremitting sex was not enough to keep her by his side.

  He found that curious suddenly. Why? Was it not enough? Was he not enough? Was it Kyger?

  Shit. He bolted out of bed. Kyger had to go. Kyger had been running things and living off Waybury for far too many years. He couldn't have Kyger around as a temptation, anyway. Waybury was his, and if he had to, he'd take the reins as he should have done years ago.

  He had made a massive mistake leaving everything to his righteous brother. Respectable women loved men like Kyger—so solid, steady, serious, faithful, dependable—

  Son of a bitch—dependable—something he wasn't. Never

  210 / Thea Devine

  wanted to be. Too many willing women in the world just waiting to be fu
cked.

  But they weren't Jancie. Who was willing, but she wasn't waiting. She wasn't dazzled, by him, by his prowess, his stamina, his unending desire for her. Why wasn't that enough for her? Why wasn't she still in bed with him instead of downstairs having breakfast, and probably with Kyger.

  Shit. Kyger. Every time he turned around, there was Kyger.

  Goddamned Kyger. When did everything around Waybury come under Kyger's control?

  He couldn't get dressed fast enough. Kyger was done for. Kyger would be gone from Waybury before the end of this day, he swore it. No more temptations for Jancie. He'd teach Jancie to wait—for him, his need, his lust, his desire.

  His penis. Thick and hard, and deep inside her.

  ******************

  He pounded down the steps and raced into the dining room.

  It was empty. He didn't expect that. He expected to see his so-dependable brother dependably holding Jancie's hand, and feeding her bacon or a biscuit. Sipping hot chocolate from her lips.

  Damn him. Damn her.

  If they had been there, their plates and cutlery had already been removed, and all that remained was the array of covered dishes on the sideboard, the usual morning fare: eggs, sausage, herring, toast, scones, oatmeal, brioche, a fruit compote.

  Enough to feed a small army. Which made him lose his appetite.

  Waste. And who was responsible for such waste?

  Why, his wife. Did she not go over the menus and choose what would be served?

  Damn it, where was she?

  There was no one downstairs except for a maid dusting the parlor, and the boy who cleaned the ashes from the fireplaces.

  Was Waybury always this empty? It seemed to him that it had not been, that Olivia's presence had filled it and made it home, and now that she was gone, it felt emptier than ever.

  Or was it that Jancie was nowhere to be found?

  Oh, he had a good suspicion where Jancie was.

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  Damn damn damn damn—he stamped back into the parlor and yanked the bell pull.

  Bingham appeared as paper-thin and disapproving as ever. "Sir?"

  "Where is my wife?"

  Bingham's eyebrow arched. "Riding with Mr. Kyger, sir."

  "Is she?" Lujan murmured through gritted teeth. "Well, well, well. She had things to do, did she? So she did. Thank you, Bingham. I'll find them."

  "As you will, sir." Bingham withdrew, discreet as a cloud.

  And now what? He put a rein on his temper, on his fury. He couldn't go off half-cocked looking for them because he would kill Kyger. No doubt about that. And he didn't know what he would do to Jancie.

  Did it matter? All he wanted was Jancie, waiting for him. It goddamned wasn't too much to ask, was it? After yesterday? And this morning?

  All right, then. He would just calm down. He didn't need morning sustenance, so he would just calmly walk to the stables, saddle up, and he would take a calm, leisurely ride out because, well, it was a beautiful day. He wouldn't be looking for them, necessarily, but if he happened to find them together, he would kill them.

  As any rational man would.

  Simple as that.

  ******************

  Thank God, Hugo was nowhere around, Lujan was still in bed, and Kyger had left the house. For sure, with her luck, any one of them could come walking through the door just as she was extracting the album from under Olivia's bed, and how would she explain that?

  All right then, that was done. Only the book was now covered with the dust that no one was cleaning from under the bed. Better that they shouldn't, actually. Let them leave this room as Olivia's shrine, for now.

  She settled herself in the chair by the window. She had brought a magnifying glass she'd found in the library, where she'd gone immediately after she came downstairs to straighten out that row of books.

  212 / Thea Devine

  Even then, tottering on a ladder first thing in the morning had been something sure to raise questions, if anyone had walked in. Kyger could have found her—or Bingham. Oh God, the thought of Bingham finding her had rattled her badly.

  And she still couldn't shake the feeling Bingham was watching her.

  So she was already feeling fairly jittery. Really, she didn't have much time before Lujan came looking for her. And she had no idea what she was looking for.

  Seven pictures. A small boy. A family stiffly posed in studio settings. They'd probably gone up to London for the photographs, or the photographer had come with props. So there was nothing personal there.

  Hugo so stern. Olivia with a loving hand around her long-gone child. The three boys lined up by height. So alike, so different. Lujan could never have been that innocent. Kyger was always that severe, already in charge and responsible at that young age.

  And Gaunt, impossibly young forever, in his smile a hint of the mischievous child he must have been.

  What was she looking for?

  She didn't know.

  How could such a little boy vanish off the face the earth?

  The same way a fortune in diamonds disappeared.

  Somebody took them and made up a story to fit the facts.

  Somebody took the child and made up a story to fit the facts.

  She was fooling herself if she thought that no one, back then, had come up with that solution. Kyger had told her they'd done everything they could think of, but the end result was, the child was gone. And there were no remains, which meant the child could be a grown man living anywhere on earth.

  Maybe even South Africa. Maybe Kaamberoo.

  Maybe she was delusional; maybe she was desperate to find some kind of clue to explain how Hugo survived his captivity at the hands of those putative murderers and thieves, and why they had not killed him.

  Because there he was, in the family portrait, his face as stolid as always, looking much younger than he did now, with the fruit of his homecoming at his feet.

  Oh Father, I'm failing you again. I don't see a thing except a

  Satisfaction / 213

  comfortably circumstanced family with a child who subsequently disappeared.

  Wait—how long after these photographs were taken had Gaunt gone missing?

  The boy looked to be four or five years old. What had Kyger said?

  Maybe not too long after . . .

  Which meant what?

  She didn't know. She just didn't know.

  Did her father know?

  What did her father know, really?

  In all those years, after he regained his memory and set out to discover what had happened to Hugo and the diamonds, what had her father found out about Hugo's family?

  And what more did he know apart from the stories he had always told her about the disaster at Kaamberoo?

  Had he known about Gaunt?

  She needed to piece the story together again and add the missing pieces to what she already knew: Olivia's claim that the money had come from her side of the family; Hugo agreeing to support his erstwhile partner's daughter all those years in boarding school and then making his claim on her for Olivia's sake; her father's motives in even begging this largesse from him; why he hadn't demanded reparation altogether.

  And then, Olivia's death. Her hard-to-conceal feelings for Lujan. The three Galliard men each seeking to marry her. Her accepting Lujan. Her decision never to love him. Her sworn purpose to search for something that would prove Hugo had stolen Edmund's share of the diamond strike all those years ago. The long-missing, and probably deceased, child .. .

  Nothing connected—quite.

  The pictures told her nothing, except that Hugo could afford a photographer, and the young Gaunt had a fey smile, a glint in his baby eyes, and a possible propensity for mischief.

  She closed the album and secreted it under the footboard.

  Nothing.

  And she was spinning flax into dross. It was quite possible that everything was just as it appeared. That there had been no intent to steal from Edmund, tha
t Hugo had really thought he was dead when

  214 / Tbea Devine

  he left Kaamberoo with his fortune, that his child had fallen down a well and that was why no one had ever been able to find him, that the house and the money had come from Olivia's family ...

  That Lujan could come to love her.

  Fairy tales, all.

  She closed the door to Olivia's room, closing the door, for the moment, on all her futile speculations.

  She heard a sound behind her, that rolling, crickly sound of whatever it was that Emily had been playing with.

  But Emily was nowhere in sight, and there was no one around, at least on the bedroom floor. So the sound seemed magnified, ghostly, portentous in the silence, and Jancie froze.

  It had to be Emily. The sound persisted. Somewhere in this hallway, Emily was chasing the object just as she had before.

  Whatever it was. It just sounded so eerie. So strange, coming after all the time she'd spent in Olivia's room. Stranger still, because Emily had been pursuing it when she'd brought the album to hide it there.

  If she were superstitious, if she believed in ghosts, she could almost believe it was Olivia generating the sound somehow, trying to send her some kind of message.

  Nonsense.

  The rolling sound stopped suddenly, and then she heard a faint sound.

  Owww.

  Emily—and she wasn't in Olivia's room, as Jancie would have supposed.

  Mrowww—more emphatic this time.

  From hers and Lujan's room. How .. . ?

  She threw open the door and Emily stalked out, slanting an exasperated look at her.

  Owww.

  It wasn't Emily. Shocked, Jancie looked down the hallway. All was silence. The sound was gone.

  ******************

  Here it was, spread out before him, that which would be his legacy—the rolling fields, the orchards, the gardens, the neat little farms that rimmed the outskirts of his holdings. Everything that

  Satisfaction / 215

  Kyger had been caring for and keeping in good order for the moment when his feckless older brother would come to his senses.