Beauty and the Earl (3 page)

But whatever Mal’s motivation, he had dragged Liam here to “take the waters” and take the waters he would.
 

He measured his breaths, trying desperately to empty his head of all thoughts. It was a nearly impossible task, it seemed, for his mind was always filled with memories he didn’t want to consider and guilt he refused to acknowledge.
 

He squeezed his eyes shut, but his thoughts continued to race, bombarding him from all sides.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and then sank beneath the water entirely. Beneath the depths, there was no noise, nothing to see, and his brain began to quiet finally. Cut off from everything, even breath, he could almost pretend that his life above the surface didn’t exist.

Almost.

Unfortunately, his body required air to live and so he rose reluctantly. He wiped his face off and slicked his now-wet hair back with his good hand. He opened his eyes and froze.

There, standing on the edge of the steps that led down into the large, square pool where he reclined alone, was a woman. Not just any woman, but probably one of the most beautiful women he had ever had the pleasure to look upon in his thirty years.
 

She was intensely exotic, with a slightly olive-toned skin and thick, sleek black hair that was drawn back loosely, though strands of it continued to bounce around her oval face. Her dark brown eyes, which were currently focused intently on his face, sparkled in the lamplight and held on him with a confidence he normally didn’t see in women. Especially women wearing a white chemise that left no curve of her body to the imagination.

He licked his lips as a hot slicing shock of desire ricocheted through his body and settled in his loins. Beneath the water, his cock began to throb.

“This is a private room,” he managed to croak out.

Her eyebrows lifted and a slight smiled turned up her lips. “Oh, I certainly hope that is true, considering what I have planned.”

She took a step into the water and immediately that white chemise went sinfully sheer against her calves. Another step and her thighs were revealed as the water sloshed up and down against her movements.
 

He swallowed, his head spinning now, but not with its normally unpleasant thoughts. No, it spun with desire, confusion and a desperate need to have her come deeper into the water.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She smiled. “Violet Milford, my lord,” she said, and he almost expected her to put out a hand as if they were meeting under more normal circumstances.

He sucked in a breath, and her smile broadened.

“You know my name, do you?” she asked.
 

He nodded. “Yes. The courtesan.”

She hesitated on the third step of the pool and nodded. “And I know you, as well, Lord Windbury.”

Liam settled back, resting his good arm on the edge of the pool behind him as she continued into the water. Waves covered her body, but she was waist-deep now.
 

“Did my man arrange for your appearance?” he asked. Sometimes Mal did that, but never without Liam’s request as the impetus.

She shook her head. “That hulking beast outside? No, he has no idea I’m here.”

“Then I almost hate to ask this question, but how did you get past him?”

She smiled, and something in him shifted. When her full lips tilted upward, her already beautifully exotic face became even more intoxicating. He wanted to drag her against him and kiss her until she couldn’t form coherent words. He wanted to put her on his lap and grind his cock into her wet heat until she screamed. It had been a very long time since he felt such strong, animal reactions. Sex had become a necessary bodily function, not a pleasure as of late.

“I brought along a distraction,” she replied, seemingly unaware of the place his wicked thoughts had taken him with just her smile. But then, her gaze dropped under the water swiftly.
 

He doubted she could see he was naked beneath, or hard and ready with just her unexpected appearance here, but given her vocation and knowing eyes, he would wager she had guessed both.

Perhaps she even counted on both.

“I am not looking to become someone’s protector,” he warned her, though he found himself offering a silent prayer that this fact wouldn’t scare her away.
 

She moved into the water, dropping under so that it soaked her shoulders before she stood up again and revealed her chemise, utterly sheer and plastered against full breasts with dark, hard nipples. He couldn’t contain a grunt of ever-increasing need.

“I’m not seeking a protector, my lord,” she whispered as she reached him. She reached out and touched his face, the side without the scar, so he didn’t move away from her fingers. “I’m on holiday. I’m only looking to enjoy myself.”

She was so close, he could smell the light musk of some kind of perfume, and he lost all semblance of reason. He reached for her without thinking and dragged her hard against him. Her arms wound around his neck and she lifted her mouth just as he smashed his down.

The kiss was spectacular. Her lips, which looked so full, were exactly what he wanted. Soft and supple, they parted as his tongue demanded entry into her mouth. She denied him nothing, even as he fisted her wet chemise in his hand and dragged his nails against her back in the process. She merely arched against him, rotating her lips against him with suggestive and wanton response.

“Fuck,” he muttered against her mouth as his blood began to boil with out of control desire.

She drew back, smiling at him. There was laughter in her voice as she nodded. “Oh yes, most definitely, for I have heard such rumors of your prowess. But first…”

She trailed off as she reached beneath the steaming water and captured his cock in her palm. When she found him rock hard, a tiny smile crossed her lips, almost triumphant. She stroked over him, and his head dropped back as a low moan escaped his throat. He hadn’t been with a woman in well over three months, and now that he was being touched, he was in serious danger of humiliating himself before she did anything more.

“Why don’t you sit on the edge?” she urged.

He reached back and leaned his full weight on his good arm, lifting himself up to sit on the edge of the pool. Her eyes went wide at the physical feat he had just achieved one-armed, but he didn’t allow her to say anything. He grabbed her and dragged her between his legs, letting his hard cock rub against her breasts as he leaned down to kiss her again.

Her needy moan was lost in their joined mouths, swept away by tangling tongues. She pulled closer, lifting herself and sucking on his tongue at the same time. He had never been with a woman so forward, so driving in her demands, and this was just a kiss.

As if to prove that point, she pulled back, flipping strands of dark hair, ends wet from the water, away from her neck. She had a tiny, knowing expression to her face, a bright light in her eyes. It was…intoxicating. Perhaps because it felt so real, that she wanted him.

Of course, he wasn’t that foolish. She was a courtesan and paid well by men to pretend desire. She was here for a reason, even if she claimed to be on holiday and simply wanted his body. But damn if he wasn’t utterly willing to play along.

Slowly, she stripped her wet chemise away and tossed it on the walkway behind him, leaving her naked. He couldn’t see her lower body, but her breasts were above the water, full and round, beckoning to be touched and sucked and toyed with for hours on end.

But that didn’t seem to be part of whatever plan Violet had. Instead, she grabbed his cock again, but this time there was no water to separate them. She looked at it, hard and ready, thrusting against his stomach at it full length and girth, and she licked her lips.

“I want a taste, my lord,” she murmured before she pressed her mouth to his chest.
 

Again, she chose the right side of his body to caress, rather than the left where he was scarred and damaged. But he could barely consider that because she latched her mouth around the flat disk of his nipple and sucked hard. His hips bucked of their own accord, knocking his erection through her hand and against her stomach and eliciting another needy moan from her throat.

She slid lower, tracing the muscles of his stomach with the tip of her tongue, easing herself into position, seducing and pleasing with her touch until she was finally resting directly in front of his cock at the edge of the pool, looking at him with interest and desire that, once again, seemed so genuine.

She glanced up at him, wickedness in her dark eyes, then lowered her mouth around his cock. She was hot as fire as she took him into her throat. She glided back up his shaft, swirling her tongue around and around his width until stars began to explode before his vision.

He’d had this pleasure before, of course, with other lovers, but never had a woman given it with what seemed like real pleasure and zeal. Violet made a moaning sound as she took him, her body lifting against the wall of the pool as if she were trying to find some of her own pleasure while she laved him with her hot, talented tongue.

He felt a cresting desire to shatter so quickly that he bit his tongue hard enough to nearly draw blood in able to control that explosive reaction. This strange, unexpected encounter had not been of his making, but he wasn’t about to have it end so quickly and leave this woman to tell the world how he had been nothing more than pudding in her skillful hands.

No, he had other desires.
 

He caught her beneath her arms and drew her up. He would have lifted her from the water entirely, but his injury wouldn’t allow that, a frustration that seemed especially pointed at the moment.

“Did I not please you?” she asked, not with the wide-eyed innocence of a virgin, but more with the surprise of a woman who knew exactly where her talents lay.

“Oh no, very pleased,” he said, pushing from the ledge to stand back in the water with her. He wrapped his arms around her waist. “But I want more than you were giving.”

In the water, she was so light that even his injured arm could do some of the work in lifting her. She wrapped her legs around his hips and slipped a hand between their bodies to position herself. He thrust, and suddenly his cock was surrounded by the white-hot embrace of her slit. He held tight as they began to move in tandem, her arching against him, him lifting his hips to fully seat himself as deeply as he could.

Her face was even with his, and she kept her gaze on his, never moving, never darting away. It was incredibly intimate, something he would normally shy away from, but he was so taken in by this stranger’s utter acceptance, utter surrender, that he couldn’t manage to break away from the prison of her stare. He was rewarded when her cries increased, and she slammed against him as orgasm hit her.

He cupped her backside and thrust harder, harder. His body was on fire, alive, and the pleasure built with such pressure that when the dam broke, he only had a moment to pull out before his seed was spilled in the warm, swirling waters.

His breath was short, as was hers as they stood that way, her arms around him, the water bobbing around them. It was only then that he broke their gaze and extracted himself from her embrace.

“I apologize, Miss Milford,” he said, turning away to gather some vestige of his composure. “I assure you I do not normally unleash my animal lusts on a woman I’ve never even been properly introduced to.”

She laughed, and he spun to look at her because the light tone of it was almost like music in the echoing room.
 

“Great God, you act as though I’m some virgin daughter of a duke you just tumbled.” She shook her head and dunked herself under the water to backstroke toward the stairs where she had entered the private bath. “I wanted this, my lord. And I am vastly pleased to have had it.”

She didn’t wait for a response, but walked up the marble stairs, giving him a view of her rounded hips and perfectly shaped backside before she took a robe from a chair beside the door and wrapped herself away from his gaze.

She glanced at him with another smile. “Perhaps we’ll do this again…
after
we’re properly introduced, of course. Good afternoon.”

He stared in stunned silence as she padded through the door and out of the bathing area, leaving him staring after her.
 

Before Violet had the chance to touch the knob, Olivia threw open the door to the home Lord Rothcastle had let for them. Her friend’s face was pink and her eyes bright as she ushered Violet inside.

“And?” Olivia asked without preamble.
 

“And?” Violet repeated as she stepped into the parlor to pour herself a cup of tea. Her hair was still wet and she smiled as she pushed a lock away.

Olivia huffed out her breath. “I have been waiting here for you forever. How did it go with Windbury?”

Violet sank into the closest chair and took a long sip of tea, stalling for time to think about that question. Her plan was advancing perfectly…but she wouldn’t say it had gone “well”. Not when she felt such a discomfort about the entire arrangement.

Although none about the physical encounter, which still made her body hum with pleasure.