The Veils of the Budapest Palace (Darke of Night Book 3) (7 page)

When I could think beyond the pleasure once more, he was kissing my mouth with deep, sensual kisses and settled between my hips again. He slid inside me quite easily this time, and began to move with slow, languorous strokes.

“Again?” I said dizzily.

“We have all night. That was only my opening volley. There’s still the main charge, and I think it’s going to be a long, long battle.”

I hooked my legs wantonly around his hips. “You may have noticed I’m not fighting you.”

“That’s because we’re on the same side.”

“Then who is the enemy?”

“The state of non-pleasure.”

Breathless laughter surged, and he rolled onto his back so that I lay on him. “I think we’ve got him on the run,” he said, holding my hips to move me on his shaft. “Let’s frighten him some more.”

I drew up my knees, kneeling to rise and fall on him with greater force. It felt exquisite. “Is he running faster?”

“Oh yes,” Zsigmund said fervently, raising his palms to my breasts. “Just don’t let him double back and attack your flank.”

“No chance.” Clasping my hands over his, I threw back my head in abandoned bliss.

****

I
woke to early morning sunshine hitting my face. It was a very narrow band slipping through the crack where the shutters didn’t quite meet, but since it struck me right across the eye, it seemed to have all the force of full sun.

I sprawled horizontally across the bed in a tangle of sheets and limbs. I blinked, jerking my head aside to avoid the annoying sun. By then, I had worked out that there were too many limbs in this tangle to be all mine, and memory of last night’s wild love was flooding back.

The cause of it all, Zsigmund Andrassy, had his legs over and between mine. His arm lay heavily across my waist, but as I turned my head, it moved, his hand creeping up and over my naked breast.

This, I thought, was what all the fuss and the poetry was about. The excessive pleasure, the decadence of lying naked in your lover’s arms. All night. Not the dutiful visit of a husband to beget an heir.

For a moment, I felt disloyal to Neil for even thinking such a thing. But then I looked into my lover’s face and recognised that the relationships, like the men involved in them, were far too different to worry about comparisons.

“Good morning,” Zsigmund said huskily, looming over me. “I’ve been lying here wondering whether it’s more enjoyable to watch you sleep or waken.”

“And what did you decide?”

“That I’ll have to witness the events several more times to be sure.”

My heart gave a funny little flutter, because he seemed to want more of me. Somehow, I’d always assumed that when the night was over, that would be it. I hadn’t thought beyond it.

I said, “I should go back to the hotel before anyone notices I’m missing.”

“And be seen returning at this hour in your evening clothes?”

“There is that.” I frowned. “What shall I do?”

He smiled, pulling me back against him so that his shaft nestled between my buttocks. It was bone hard, yet again. “Stay here until the evening and then go out as if nothing untoward had occurred. You’d better send a note round to your maid, though, in case she sets up a hue and cry.”

“I had to send my maid back home when her mother became ill,” I said, wriggling as he teased my nipple with his forefinger and thumb. “I’ve been using the hotel maids.”

“Then you’ve nothing at all to worry about.”

The pleasure he was arousing in my breast made me push back against him, and without warning, he entered my body.

“Oh!” I said in amazement. “I didn’t realise you could do it this way round.”

“I clearly have much to teach you,” he growled softly. “In fact, I woke up with a wonderful idea. And if you only say yes quickly, this will be the best time ever. For me, at least.”

“What idea?” I asked, confused, not least by the novel sensation of making love with him behind me.

His hand swept down over my stomach and between my legs, holding me as he eased into me and pulled back. I closed my eyes in bliss. His breath tickled my ear, arousing me further.

“That you should marry me,” he said.

I would have lost the rhythm if he hadn’t been holding me between his body and his hand. “M-marry you?” I stammered. “Are you joking?”

“No, I’m serious.”

“But...but I don’t know you. We don’t love each other.”

“I’m loving you right now.”

Laughter caught at my already shortened breath. “That’s lust, remember? No basis for a marriage.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’ve already had the marriage with love but no lust. We could try it the other way around and see if love doesn’t grow from it.”

I found it very hard to marshal arguments when his hand and his shaft were pleasuring me to this extent. I pushed back into him hard, in an effort to still him and let me think. But he only gave an excited groan and thrust harder.

“Wh-what if it doesn’t?” I demanded. “What if we’re stuck with each other and you want to marry someone else?”

“Right now, I can’t imagine it, but if it happens, there are ways to deal with any problem.” His tongue flickered over my ear. Again and again, he stroked the special place inside me that he’d discovered last night. That we’d both discovered last night. “Come on, Caroline, say yes. It will be fun. You can have
this
whenever you like, whenever
I
like, which will certainly be oftener.”

“That’s a silly reason to marry,” I gasped.

“No sillier than many. You could fall in love with me.”

God knew I was most of the way there. “If I bound you,” I said desperately, “you’d grow to resent me, hate me.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’m asking for the bonds. Please. Say yes, quickly.”

“Why are you in such a hurry for me to decide?”

His open mouth dragged along the line of my jaw to my mouth. “Because I really, really want to empty myself inside you, and if you’ll agree to marry me, I will.”

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to slap him. Instead, my twisting pushed me over the edge. My cry of “Yes!” might have been assent or triumph. Even I wasn’t sure.

“I’ll take that as agreement,” Zsigmund said fervently, and shoved me hard into his hand, once, twice more. Lost in my own joy, I felt the heat of his spurting seed inside me and wanted to weep with happiness.

Z
sigmund had promised me fun. And now that I’d thrown caution to the winds, there was plenty. Zsigmund and his Hungarian friends rode off with the intention of more or less kidnapping a travelling bishop of their own country, though they were all faintly surprised when the bishop cooperated and they carried him off to Lescloches in triumph.

We were married in the hotel coffee room before a select number of the Hungarian friends, the hotel manager, and several guests who happened to be there at the time. Béla and the hotel manager acted as witnesses.

And so, in a quiet ceremony, followed by a boisterous celebration, I became Countess Andrassy. There was an instant, as I said the words, “I will,” when a sense of unreality hit me so hard, I felt dizzy.
What am I doing?
I thought in panic.
I’ve just given myself to a stranger three months after the death of my beloved husband...

And then Zsigmund’s fingers curled strongly around mine. His ring—his mother’s wedding ring, a rather beautiful band of gold with tiny diamonds winking all the way round—slid over my finger, and a sense of excitement drove the panic away. I was on a new course I had never imagined. When he kissed me, my happiness was complete.

“Congratulations, Count Andrassy,” the bishop wheezed, and Zsigmund turned back to shake hands with him, almost as if he was some comrade in arms.

“Thank you for coming to our rescue,” he said easily. “You saved my wife from a soulless civil marriage!”

“You can still marry in church here too. But I’m glad to be of service to your family once more. I used to know a cousin of yours in my student days.”

“Yes?” Zsigmund said. His attention was straying to me, and it seemed he couldn’t stop smiling.

“Andrassy Gabor,” the bishop remembered. It is a peculiarity of Hungarian custom that the surname comes before the Christian name.

Zsigmund stopped smiling, apparently with surprise. “You knew Gabor?”

“Very well. We helped each other out more than once.”

“Good Lord,” Zsigmund said faintly. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “I don’t think Gabor was cut out for the Church.”

“No, he wasn’t,” the bishop mourned. “But he was always a spiritual man. Most spiritual.”

“I’ll send your regards when next I write home,” Zsigmund promised.

“Oh no,” the bishop said. “Don’t do that...” And he drifted away.

Zsigmund frowned after him with amusement. “Do you think churchmen are born that way, or cultivate it?”

“What way?” I asked.

“Never mind. I daresay I don’t know enough churchmen. As you probably gathered, my family is more on the disreputable side. Aren’t you glad you married me now, Countess Andrassy?”

I smiled and leaned on his arm. “Oddly enough, I am.”

In that evening, I more than made up for all the dances I’d sat out since coming to Lescloches. I waltzed with everyone. I learned the czardas and danced it with Zsigmund and all his Hungarian friends. It was a wonderful occasion, and by the time Zsigmund and I departed for our new suite in the hotel, I knew I’d never been so happy in my life.

I told Zsigmund so as we entered the room. He swept me up in his arms and carried me to the bed. “Let me see if we can’t better even that.”

Intimacy with Zsigmund was a revelation to me, not least in the sheer number of times he wanted me. I had been used, even in the beginning of my first marriage, to a stately visit one night a week as a rule, but with Zsigmund, it was
every
night or morning, or both, and sometimes also in the middle of the afternoon. On top of which, as our first night had promised, I learned there were many ways to make love, all of them delicious. My feeling for Zsigmund intensified into something very close to obsession. It was so wildly different from my feeling for Neil that I couldn’t call it love, but I couldn’t deny I loved his big, scarred, beautiful body and what it did to mine.

The morning after our wedding—well, the afternoon after—I sent a notice to the newspapers in England announcing my marriage to Count Zsigmund Andrassy, quietly in Lescloches. It would probably scandalise Neil’s family as well as my own, and I metaphorically girded up my loins for the deluge of outraged letters that would follow. But I refused to be secretive about the event. I had nothing to be ashamed of.

Then, there was one day I didn’t see him from breakfast until dinner when he joined me at our table, brooding. Although I refused to ask, my stomach was twisting with fear that he’d returned already to his old life of drinking and debauchery with other women. Worse, there was a sort of wild discontent in his eyes, in every restless movement, in his very silence. I ate calmly, allowing him the silence until he chose to break it.

Which he did as he finished his main course, impatiently shoving the plate out of his way so that he could lean his elbows on the table.

“Would I make such a dreadful teacher?” he demanded abruptly.

“No,” I replied, covering my amazement. “You would make an unconventional teacher, but an excellent one.”

“That’s what I thought, but the ba...idiots turned me down.”

“What idiots?” I asked, baffled.

“The school on the Paris road,” he said with a hint of uncharacteristic sheepishness. “Béla said they were looking for a classics teacher. He’s decided to take this other position in England he was offered, so I thought I’d have a go.”

I searched his face. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher.”

“Neither did I, but it might have been amusing. And a man must do something.”

My heart went out to him. He’d been brought up to look after land, not teach for his living, and he’d been trained as a soldier. Neither occupation was open to him here. But I knew he felt his financial dependence on me. He wanted to be the one taking care of me.

A rueful smile flickered across his face and vanished, leaving only unreadable, unspecific turbulence. “My reputation follows me, doesn’t it? You were right about consequences. No one would put impressionable children in my charge.”

“Well, someone’s put them in Béla’s!”

He waved that away, Béla’s vices being, apparently, trivial compared to his. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, wrapping his fingers around the stem of his wineglass. “And it seems these are my choices.
Our
choices. I could go to England with you and hope your influence or that of your friends could secure me some kind of position. Or I could be a gentleman of leisure.”

This was the way I had vaguely imagined our life would go, but as he said the words, I could see the inherent dangers I hadn’t actually considered. He had.

He met my gaze. “I’d go to the devil, wouldn’t I? Boredom and I don’t mix. Even with you to come home to, I’d give myself a year before I embarrassed you with ill behaviour.”

“We could spend that year finding a better solution,” I said lightly.

“We could. And it would be a good year. But there might not be any solution in England.”

“Where, then?”

“I was a good soldier,” he said. “A good officer. I could sell my services to some foreign army and earn reasonable money.”

My stomach twisted. “Is that what you would prefer?”

“I wouldn’t go to the devil so fast,” he said, taking a mouthful of wine and lowering the glass again. “The trouble is, I think I’ve seen enough blood in the last two years. I’m not sure I could stomach much more.”

I let myself relax. “Well, it’s another possible temporary solution,” I said calmly.

“There’s a third.”

“There is?” I prompted when he said no more. He was staring into his glass, seeing something else entirely.

He raised his gaze to mine. “I could write to my grandfather to obtain my amnesty. I’ve married a beautiful, respectable woman—if that doesn’t count as proof of settling down, I don’t know what does. In time, we can go home to Orosháza.”