Susan Johnson (5 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied quickly, tense beneath him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated softly, blood drumming in his temples and in his fingertips and in the soles of his feet inside the custom-made boots, and most of all in his rigid erection, insistent like a battering ram a hair’s breadth from where he wanted to be so badly, he could taste the blood in his mouth. It doesn’t matter, his conscience repeated. She said it doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t matter, and he drove in again.

Her muffled cry exploded across his lips as his mouth lowered to kiss her.

“Oh, hell.” He exhaled deeply, drawing back, and, poised on his elbows, looked down at her uncertainly, his long dark hair framing his face like black silk.

“I won’t cry out again,” she whispered, her voice more certain than the poignant depths of her shadowy eyes. “Please … I must have the money.”

It was all too odd and too sudden and too out of character for him. Damn … plundering a virgin, making her cry in fear and pain.
Steady, you’ll live if you don’t have her
, he told himself, but quivering need played devil’s advocate to that platitude. She was urging him on. His body was even more fiercely demanding he take her. “Hell and damnation,” he muttered disgruntedly. The problem was terrible, demanding immediate answers, and he wasn’t thinking too clearly, only feeling a delirious excitement quite detached from moral judgment. And adamant. “Bloody hell,” he breathed, and in that moment, rational thought gained a fingertip control on the ragged edges of his lust. “Keep the money. I don’t want to—” He said it quickly, before he’d change his mind, then paused and smiled. “Obviously that’s not entirely true, but I don’t ruin virgins,” he said levelly.

Empress had not survived the death of her parents and the months following, struggling to stay alive in the wilderness, without discovering in herself immense strength. She summoned
it now, shakily but determinedly. “It’s not a moral dilemma. It’s a business matter and my responsibility. I insist.”

He laughed, his smile close and deliciously warm. “Here I’m refusing a woman insisting I take her virginity. I must be crazy.”

“The world’s crazy sometimes, I think,” she replied softly, aware of the complex reasons prompting her conduct.

“Tonight, at least,” he murmured, “it’s more off track than usual.” But even for a wild young man notorious as a womanizer, the offered innocence was too strangely bizarre. And maybe too businesslike for a man who found pleasure and delight in the act. It was not flattering to be a surrogate for a business matter. “Look,” he said with an obvious effort, “thanks but no thanks. I’m not interested. But keep the money. I admire your courage.” And rolling off her, he lay on his back and shouted,
“Flo!”

“No!” Empress cried, and was on top of him before he drew his next breath, terrified he’d change his mind about the money, terrified he’d change his mind in the morning when his head was clear and he woke up in Flo’s arms. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge sum of money to give away on a whim, or to lose to some misplaced moral scruple. She must convince him to stay with her, then at least she could earn the money. Or at least try.

Lying like silken enchantment on his lean, muscled body, she covered his face with kisses. Breathless, rushing kisses, a young girl’s simple closemouthed kisses. Then, in a flush of boldness, driven by necessity, a tentative dancing lick of her small tongue slid down his straight nose, to his waiting mouth. When her tongue lightly caressed the arched curve of his upper lip, his hands came up and closed on her naked shoulders, and he drew the teasing tip into his mouth. He sucked on it gently, slowly, as if he envisioned a lifetime without interruptions, until the small, sun-kissed shoulders beneath his hands trembled in tiny quivers.

Strange, fluttering wing beats sped through her heating blood, and a curious languor caused Empress to twine her arms around Trey’s strong neck. But her heart was beating hard like the Indian drums whose sound carried far up to their hidden valley in summer, for fear outweighed languor still. He mustn’t go to Flo. Slipping her fingers through the black
luster of his long hair, ruffled in loose waves on his neck, she brushed her mouth along his cheek. “Please,” she whispered near his ear, visions of her hope to save her family dashed by his reluctance, “stay with me.” It was a simple plea, simply put. It was perhaps her last chance. Her lips traced the perfect curve of his ears, and his hands tightened their grip in response. “Say it’s all right. Say I can stay.…” She was murmuring rapidly in a flurry of words.

How should he answer the half-shy, quicksilver words? Why was she insisting? Why did the flattery of a woman wanting him matter?

Then she shifted a little so her leg slid between his, a sensual, instinctive movement, and the smooth velvet of his masculinity rose against her thigh. It was warm, it was hot, and like a child might explore a new sensation, she moved her leg lazily up its length.

Trey’s mouth went dry, and he couldn’t convince himself that refusal was important any longer. He groaned, thinking, there are some things in life without answers. His hand was trembling when he drew her mouth back to his.

A moment later, when Flo knocked and called out his name, Empress shouted, “Go away!” And when Flo repeated his name, Trey’s voice carried clearly through the closed door. “I’ll be down later.”

He was rigid but tense and undecided, and Empress counted on the little she knew about masculine desire to accomplish what her logical explanation hadn’t. Being French, she was well aware that
amour
could be heated and fraught with urgent emotion, but she was unsure exactly about the degree of urgency relative to desire.

But she knew what had happened moments before when she’d tasted his mouth and recalled how he’d responded to her yielding softness, so she practiced her limited expertise with a determined persistence. She must be sure she had the money. And if it would assure her family their future, her virginity was paltry stuff in the bargain.

“Now let’s begin again,” she whispered.

“Let’s not,” he said, groaning.

“Tell me if I’m doing things wrong.”

“Empress, darling,” he murmured on an indrawn breath of
monumental restraint as her bottom moved gently beneath his hands, “you’re doing everything exactly right.”

“You have to teach me.”

God in heaven! Carefully Trey said, “I shouldn’t.”

“Better you,” she said very softly, “than Jake Pol—”

“—train,” he finished with a sigh. “You’re serious, then.”

She nodded, and tumbles of sun-streaked hair slid delicately across his chest. His hands glided up the warm satin of her back, and Jake Poltrain’s name helped make the decision. “You can stop me anytime. Up to a point,” he said. He didn’t know how much she knew about men.

“I don’t want you to stop.” Invitation, lush and sweetly scented.

He took a deep breath. “In that case, kitten, I’d better get undressed. The teaching,” he murmured, “will require a little time.”

“Let me do it.” She smiled at him, gratefulness in her eyes.

His dark brows lifted inquiringly. Had he misunderstood something?

“Undress you,” she replied to his searching glance.

He hesitated for a moment, uncertain whether the experience appealed to him. After all, she was a rank tyro, and it could prove awkward.

“I won’t hurt you,” she promised impudently, a mischievous grin on her face.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, hell,” he said a moment later, his smile still wide, “everything else is going to be new tonight … why not.”

But she wasn’t awkward, and she wasn’t timid, and from the first moment her hands touched his belt buckle, he felt a pleasure stronger than he’d ever experienced. He lifted a little to help her pull the belt free and then waited, a curious anticipation tantalizing his nerves. Why did her touch leave him tautly expectant … tense with wanting her? Was it the novelty of her virginity? Was he aroused because of a strange, sweet innocence that had never interested him before?

She reached for the top button of his shirt, and slowly undid it. The buttons were bone, pale, finely polished, an animal of some kind carved in their centers. The design was exquisitely intricate, hours of work lavished on each individual button. Empress gently ran her fingertip over the couchant
animal. A mountain lion? A puma? It was too dark, though, she reflected idly. “A black cougar.”

She hadn’t realized she’d said it aloud until Trey softly replied, “My good-luck charm.”

Her eyes lifted to meet his. “They’re beautiful,” she said, and her mind diffidently included the warm, silvery eyes staring into hers.

“But outclassed tonight, darling,” Trey murmured, his attention on her exquisite face.

Empress blushed at the low, heated compliment, at the desire flaring like fire in his gaze, and in a small nervous flurry she unbuttoned the last button on his shirt. Taking a calming breath, she reminded herself why she was there, the sacrifice to expediency and what was at stake, then forced her girlish tremors aside. The transient flutters displaced, she slid his wool shirt down and, brushing her palms over his powerful shoulders, said, “You’re very strong.”

“And you’re very …” He wanted to say
desirable
, so damned lush and desirable that he wanted to push her down on the bed and take her that instant without preliminaries. “… good at undressing me,” he murmured instead, smiling a lazy seductive smile that lit his pale eyes with flashes of gold.

“I’ve a baby brother to practice on,” she replied frankly, with her own faint smile and a teasing lift of her ragged, dark brows.

The prosaic frankness astonished him for a moment.

It should have curtailed the sensuality she provoked in him—the mention of home and family and baby brothers—but strangely it added erotic mystery to the fragile beauty who knelt naked beside him, undressing him with a languor that he couldn’t decide was deliberate or artless. She was curiously unabashed, and that tinged the whole bizarre circumstance with a rich opulence. As if a precocious nymph had appeared in disguise on a snow-swept winter night in Montana to please him and pleasure him and teach him a new meaning of sensation.

“Do you have brothers?” she quietly asked, tugging his shirttails out of his trousers.

“No.”

“Sisters?”

“No.”

“I’ve both,” she said.

He was about to answer politely, or at least make the attempt with the focus of his mind absorbed so raptly in the pleasure coursing through his body, but her small hand slid down his bare stomach and brushed lightly over his pulsing erection, and he forgot what she’d said.

“You like that, don’t you?” Empress whispered, watching Trey arch his back slightly in reaction, hearing his low groan of pleasure.

He couldn’t tell when he opened his eyes whether she was teasing or candid, but he knew if he wasn’t going to hurt her in this denouement she called a business matter, and which he, in the small pockets of logic remaining in his brain, saw as madness, she was going to have to be readied, and very soon. “I like it,” he agreed in a husky voice, a smile spreading across his face. “Now come here, Empress, and tell me what
you
like.” Reaching out, his palm drifted over the soft curve of her breast, slid upward, and, grasping her lightly behind her neck, he pulled her head down to his and kissed her … a deep, intrusive, heated kiss that ate at her mouth and lips and caused, he noted with satisfaction, her breathing to change.

“Is it always so nice?” she whispered when his mouth lifted from hers, blissful well-being inundating her mind.

“It gets better”—he smiled a little—“guaranteed.”

She looked down at him lying in casual disarray beside her, half dressed. “Could I have that in writing?” A touch of impishness sparkled in the sugary depths of her eyes.

“Of course,” he murmured, laughingly self-confident. “Along with a few other things …” He was accustomed to giving women pleasure. He knew exactly what to do.

“Are you always so confident, Mr. Braddock-Black?”

“Trey,” he whispered. “And … yes.” His hand was fitting itself comfortably over the curve of her hip. He’d have to remember to go slowly so she would remember the pleasure of the first time and not the pain.

“So modest.” Her grin was light and teasing.

“Yes,” he said again with his own disarming smile. “I think we make a perfect pair.
Your
modesty is the same, right?” Being nude caused her no embarrassment, but after all, selling yourself before a jaded group of wealthy men was the antithesis
of modesty or, in any event, thought-provokingly unique.

“Would you like me to be modest?” Empress asked, entirely natural and willing to please. “I’m not sure how to act. I could put that robe on and turn out the light.”

Trey laughed again, amused at the notion that he might prefer his sex in the dark. “Lesson one, pet,” he said pleasantly. “Modesty is misplaced in the bedroom.”

“Oh, good. Then may I kiss you again?”

How young she looked when she said that. His gaze dwelling lazily on her held a disarmingly friendly appeal. “Let me get these boots and trousers off, and you can do whatever you like.”

“I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Sitting up and swinging his long legs over the side of the bed, Trey bent to pull his boots off. He half turned his head back and smiled at her. “By morning,” he said very softly, “you will.”

He began by kissing her, his warm mouth like heaven, she thought, as it caressed the curve of her shoulder, the corner of her mouth, her eyes and lashes and tender earlobes. He kissed her where the swell of her breast met the trim neatness of her ribs, and where the full softness flowed into the small hollow under her arm. He kissed her fingertips and the smooth soles of her feet, and when he moved upward slowly, easing his long body over her slender form, she felt as though she were floating on a pink-tipped cloud, and the heat coiling deep inside her was enough to illuminate the universe.

Trey kissed her on the mouth then, lying gently on top of her, feeling cool on her heated skin. “I’m warm,” Empress whispered.