Vanquished (27 page)

Hastening to reassure her--political pamphlets aside, how much did she really know about how it was between men and women--he hastened to set her at ease. "You don't have to worry about there being . . . consequences. I have a tin of French letters by my bed."

Tossing the pins on the table, she looked at him askance. "You've slept with a lot of women haven't you?"

Threading his fingers through the silk of her hair, he didn't deny it. "I can bring you to climax any number of ways. I don't have to breach you to make you come. You can have as much or as little as you want. It's your choice."

She took a deep breath and then released it very slowly, her magnificent breasts pulling at the short stays she undoubtedly wore beneath her gown's plunging neckline. "All of you. I want all of you."

His chest felt as though it were swelling, not with pride but with something else. Something deeper--finer--than anything he'd ever felt until now. "I've never been with a virgin before, but I won't hurt you, Callie. I'll go slowly with you, let you get used to me, and once you have, I'll give you as much or as little as you want."

He wasn't prepared for the raw vulnerability washing over her face. "Oh, Hadrian, I feel such a fraud."

He couldn't begin to guess at what she might mean, but he recognized the look of hurt, the bald self-hatred, at once for hadn't he confronted the same demons in his shaving mirror every day since he could remember?

She shook her head, the very picture of misery. "The press calls me the Maid of Mayfair because I'm so pure, but I'm not, I tell you, I'm not." The quaver in her pitched voice told him she was perilously close to crying.

"Callie, love, what are you saying?"

"That I'm no maid, not of Mayfair or anywhere else. I'm not a virgin and haven't been for ten years. Oh Hadrian, I've been pretending all along."

"I'm a hypocrite, Hadrian, the very worst sort."

In the ensuing minute or two since her confession, Hadrian had guided her over to his bed. Sitting side by side on the edge, he felt Callie's misery as a palpable thing, a dull throbbing that might as easily originated inside his own chest.

He stroked a hand down the curve of her bared back-- she really did have the smoothest skin--and said as gently as he might, "I doubt that very much but go on."

Head in her hands, Callie began her story. "I was engaged a long time ago. I was young, just nineteen, and up from the country for my first season. My come-out had been nothing short of a disaster. The other girls that season all seemed to be blond and petite and the eligible men all my height or shorter. I think I came to dread being noticed and ignored in equal part. Every ball was a misery to me and even knowing that going home without an offer would brand me as a failure, I still didn't care. I just wanted to go home."

Gently, very gently, he pulled her hands away and turned her chin so that she was looking at him. "But you did receive an offer, I take it?"

She nodded. "I met Gerald at a
musicale
held at the home of a friend of my aunt's. He was pleasant, ingratiating even. When he confided to me that he too hated to dance, I felt at ease for the first time in months. The next day he called at the townhouse we'd let and asked Father's permission to court me. I have to admit it, I was flattered."

"Did you love him?" It was foolish, he knew, but for whatever reason he had to ask.

She hesitated. "Looking back, I think I was more infatuated than in love. He was young and good-looking and . . . virile in the way of country squires. My parents had started to despair of having a spinster on their hands, and Gerald seemed to satisfy all their requirements for a son-in-law. His family was solid, respectable, and well, it wasn't as though I was any great prize."

"I beg to differ but go on."

"The only person who didn't care for him was Lottie."

"Wise woman, your aunt."

She nodded. "Indeed. We'd courted for several months when he proposed."

"And you said you weren't a marrying woman." He stroked a hand down her cheek and shook his head if only because she looked so adorably earnest sitting there making her "confession."

"Oh, I'd read a few feminist tracts and attended the odd lecture, but I wasn't active in the movement. Gerald assured me that once we wed, I wouldn't have time for such silliness. His patronizing grated, but still I never thought of refusing him, that I might do something with my life other than be someone's wife." Her face darkened. "No sooner did I have his ring on my finger then he began pressing me."

"For sex." It wasn't a question and absurd as it was, he felt jealous.

She looked away. "I put him off for a while, not that I wasn't thinking about it as well. We'd kissed, that was all, but I'd liked it. I have to admit I was . . . curious."

He reached for her hand--touching any other part of her just now would have seemed wrong in some way he couldn't quite define. Lacing his fingers with hers, he said, "You're a passionate woman, Callie. There's no sin in admitting you wanted sex or that you enjoyed it."

That raised a thin laugh. She lifted her eyes to his, and he could imagine how she must have looked all those years before, untried and unsure and so vulnerable in her innocence that he felt his heart turning inward.

"Mostly I was nervous--and terribly shy. The embarrassment of being dragged out onto the dance floor was nothing to what I felt when Gerald unbuttoned my shirtwaist and exclaimed over how . . . how large I am."

The bastard!
He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. "He hurt you, didn't he?"

She bit her lip and looked away to the chipped globe of his bedside lamp. "He wasn't a monster if that's what you're asking, but he'd been drinking. I think it's fair to say he was . . . less than patient with me. When I asked him to please go more slowly, he laughed and said something about pain being the legacy of Eve, and if I liked I could close my eyes and think of something else until he'd finished."

"Good God." He wrapped an arm about her and pulled her to him as tightly as he could without hurting her--she'd been hurt so much already. "Please tell me you broke it off with him then."

Against his shoulder, she shook her head. "I should have, only I didn't. As I said, I was young and, despite my politics, still rather conventional. I'd as good as handed him my virginity on a silver platter. What choice had I but to see the thing through?"

"He broke it off, then?"

"Not exactly." She grimaced and he sensed then that the truly painful part was yet to come. "We were at our engagement ball. Now that he'd had me, I can only describe his attitude as coolly civil. We danced the obligatory opening dance and then went our separate ways. I imagined a lifetime of such nights with us together yet apart, and I knew I had to get out of that room if only to think. I'd only been in the garden a few minutes when Gerald and one of his cronies stepped out onto the balcony for a smoke. It was coming on dark, and I was about to make myself known and go back inside when I realized the girl they were talking about was me."

"I gather whatever they said wasn't particularly complimentary?"

"Hardly. Oh, I've blocked out a large portion of it but words like "milcher" and "beast" will always hold a place in my memory. Afterward there was nothing Gerald could do or say, nothing my parents could threaten, that could induce me to go through with marrying him. The only person who stood by me was Lottie. She let me come up to London and stay with her until things blew over. That was ten years ago. Rather a long visit, wouldn't you say?"

He raised their joined hands to his lips and brushed a kiss over the top of her knuckles. "Oh, Callie, my sweet, lovely girl, if can't you see how beautiful you are, then let me show you. Let me make you happy if only for tonight." He pinned her gaze with his. "Tell me what you want."

She smiled that small Mona Lisa smile of hers he'd grown to love and shook her head. "Beyond being with you I'm . . . I'm not certain."

He made a tsking sound and slid a hand beneath her fall of silky hair, cradling her nape. "Caledonia Rivers not certain of what it is she wants? I don't believe that for an instant."

She bit her lip. "Very well then, I want you . . . inside of me."

He broadened his smile. She really was adorable and, if not a virgin, certainly a lady to her very core. "Might you be more . . . specific?"

Jade green eyes glared up at him, a striking contrast to her very red face. Responding to his challenge, she lifted her chin and said, "Your . . . cock, I want it inside of me. There, satisfied?"

Hadrian angled his face to hers, their mouths but a hair's breadth apart, their shallow breaths joining. "Not yet but before long we both will be."

Finding the tapes of Callie's all-black gown in the semidarkness was no easy feat but eventually Hadrian got the thing off her. Stepping out of it, she turned away to shed her stays and corset and finally her short shift of soft handkerchief linen. That left only her black stockings and garters.

Hadrian came up behind her. Laying hands on her shoulders, he leaned close and whispered, "Turn around. I want to look at you. All of you."

Callie hesitated and then slowly pivoted to face him. There was something innately erotic, and more than a touch dark, about a lovely woman standing before him stripped down to her garters when he hadn't so much as loosened his neckwear. But in this case the beautiful woman was Callie,
his
Callie, and when he saw her hunch her shoulders and fumble to cover herself, he couldn't help but take her in his arms and hold her close against his chest.

Palm pressed to the curve of his shoulder as if to hold him at bay, she shook her head. "I'm nervous. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be."

Her downcast gaze had him lifting her chin on the edge of his hand. "In that case, help me with my buttons," he said against the silk of her hair.

He'd only offered to distract her from her embarrassment, to return them once more to equal footing. Or, more properly, as equal as they could ever be, for Callie was entirely too fine for the likes of him. But now that he was holding her, he could no more ignore the sexual heat rolling off her than he could the rapid-fire pounding of his own heart.

She managed the three buttons of his waistcoat with relative ease but when she got to the buttons fronting his pleated shirt, her fingers were cold and clumsy against his flushed flesh.

Sliding the shirt off his shoulders, she stepped back. "You're the one who is beautiful," she said, fingers skimming his chest, voice intoned with something akin to reverence.

"I've more buttons, Miss Rivers. You're not quite finished with me yet." Taking hold of her hand, he guided it down to the front of his trousers where the ridge of his erection strained to be free. "Do you feel how hard I am for you, how much I want you?"

Without waiting for her to answer, he bent his head to her beautiful breasts, blessing the high slopes with feather-light kisses, taking the tips in his mouth. He could have gone on suckling and tasting her there for some time but remembering what she'd told him about her fiance, he moved on rather than risk resurrecting hurtful memories.

Shucking off the remainder of his clothes, he pushed her down on the edge of the bed and then knelt before her as he had so many times in his fantasies. Only this time she wasn't a figment of his fevered imagination but flesh-and-blood real, gloriously so. Spreading her thighs wide, he took her with his mouth, tongue flicking over her vulva, pink and glistening and fragrant with musk.