Whispers of the Flesh (13 page)

“Seeing to the needs of the Follets will be your responsibility soon,” Emmett said, pausing to cough into a handkerchief. “Perhaps you and I can sit down and discuss the transition with
le seigneur
before you head back home. When do you suppose that will be?”

“Oh, um . . . Actually, I don’t have any firm plans.”

“I thought you said you had a deadline looming.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to leave until you’re back at the château, and I’m sure you’re . . . that everything’s . . .”

“You’ll be called if and when there’s any need for your presence,”he said. “In the meantime, I’ve got Grace and Chl—well, I’ve got Grace.”

“See, even you admit Chloe’s a freakin’ waste of DNA.”

“Go home, for heaven’s sake.”

“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”

Giving her
that look,
he said, “You know perfectly well how gratifying it is to have you at my side, but not if it’s a deathwatch, especially given that you’ve responsibilities of your own to tend to. Book a flight home, Isabel. Do it tonight. Promise me.”

“Look, just let me get you settled, and then we’ll talk about it.”

His sigh devolved into a deep cough. “Fine. Meanwhile let’s meet with
le seigneur
sometime soon, get you briefed on what to expect when you take over the helm as
administrateur.
By the way, you do realize you should be advising your clients that you won’t be in the graphic design business for much longer, and you certainly don’t want to be taking on any new jobs.”

“Um . . .”

“Here we go, then,” announced Grace Garvey as she strode briskly into the room pushing a wheelchair. Grace was a slender, toasty-brown beauty whose baby dreads with their bleached tips provided just the right funky counterpoint to her officious white tunic and stethoscope. “I’ve negotiated your ransom, Mr. Archer. Time to flee your captors’ clutches.”

“And not a moment too soon,” Isabel said.

Looking out the front passenger window of Inigo’s hulking Peugeot SUV as he drove up to the front of the château, Isabel spied Adrien standing at an open window of his gate-tower study smoking one of his Sobranie Black Russians. Lili and Elic had been after him to quit, which he’d promised to do “when things settle down and I haven’t got so much on my mind.” Meaning when Emmett was gone and he’d managed to scare up a new
administrateur,
who in turn had managed to scare him up a gifted wife.

Adrien’s brown hair had the kind of unruly waves that made it seem as if a comb had never touched it, whereas his ubiquitous button-down shirts with their tidily rolled-up sleeves always managed to look freshly pressed even at the end of a long day. He met Isabel’s gaze with those big, soulful eyes as the car came to a stop in front of the gatehouse, held it for a moment, then nodded in greeting. He didn’t smile, exactly, but his expression softened a bit. Isabel nodded back, then looked away, taking a deep breath.

Every moment she spent in Adrien’s presence, she had to pretend her heart wasn’t twisting in her chest. She tended to speak to him as little as possible. She even avoided looking at him more than necessary, for fear of what he’d see in her eyes, the raw yearning that felt as if it would be with her until the end of her days.

The two guards on duty—Mike, the American, and Luc, the Frenchman, both uniformed in black polo shirts and black chinos—emerged from the gatehouse and crossed the drawbridge that spanned the dry moat. Mike was wheeling the cushy, way-too-complicated electronic wheelchair that Adrien had insisted on buying after Emmett’s first collapse last October. Until then, her father had managed to keep his illness a secret from everyone but Adrien, who had known, from Emmett’s darkening aura, that something was very wrong.

“Do you need me?” Chloe asked Grace.

“Nah, we’re set,” replied Grace, helping the just-awakened Emmett out of the car as Mike positioned the wheelchair and set its brake. “Why don’t you rest up for your shift tonight?”

Chloe asked Inigo if she could “nap” in his apartment.

“Sure, if I can nap with you.” Inigo tossed his car keys to Luc and set off with her toward the southwest tower.

Grace and Isabel exchanged a baleful look of the type they’d been sharing a lot lately.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Emmett said. “Hit the gas, Michael.”

Mike transported him to his second-floor apartment by means of a nineteenth-century rope-pulley elevator, then returned to the gatehouse. In Emmett’s oak-paneled sitting room, the leather couch had been taken out and replaced with a hospital bed that he refused to get in, saying he would be permanently horizontal soon enough. And, too, he wanted access to his balcony overlooking the castle’s central courtyard, where the cherry trees were abloom in frothy pink blossoms.

When Grace asked him if he wouldn’t be more comfortable in sweats, he told her he didn’t own any.

“Pajamas, then?” she asked.

He scowled at her. “At two o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Don’t know what I was thinking.”

She did manage to talk him out of his suit coat and tie, but the wingtips stayed on, and he kept that big, duct-taped tome—an early Russian edition of
War and Peace
—firmly planted on his lap. Isabel suspected that it was a sort of security blanket, a comforting reminder that although his body had betrayed him, he still had his mind.

Emmett sat back in his chair, eyes closed, his breathing labored. Grace filled a glass and stirred in a spoonful of “Thick-N” powder from a big red can. Within half a minute, the water was the consistency of a milk shake; Emmett would choke on it otherwise. Soon, Grace said, he wouldn’t be able to swallow anything, even his pills.

“Snack time,” Grace told Emmett, tipping three pills from their vials and handing them to him.

Emmett put one of the pills in his mouth and took a careful sip of his thickened water. He squeezed his eyes shut as his throat spasmed, but he got the pill down.

Grace said,“I do wish you’d let me give you these meds by IV.”

“No IV,” he said in a weary, we’ve-been-over-this tone. “No tubes, no wires, no beastly little beeps and blinking lights.” Something out on the open balcony seemed to catch his eye as he raised another pill to his mouth. “Darius! Good to see you, old man. Paying the obligatory sickroom visit, are you?”

Grace and Isabel turned to see a small, bluish bird, a rock thrush, sitting on the little iron café table as if quietly observing the goings-on in Emmett Archer’s sitting room—as he no doubt was, for this was the most reclusive of Grotte Cachée’s permanent residents, the shape-shifting djinni Darius.

Darius cheeped. Isabel smiled at him; he bobbed his head. Of course she wasn’t going to greet him out loud in front of Grace. She was surprised her father had done so, meds or no meds.

A movement in a tower window diagonally across the courtyard caught Isabel’s eye. It was the southwest tower, in which Inigo had his apartment, and in fact, it was Inigo she noticed first, standing with his back to her in the same
Big Lebowski
–style bowling shirt he’d had on earlier, kicking off his jeans. A pair of hands—Chloe’s, of course—reached around to knead his perfect ass with blue-tipped fingers. It wasn’t just perfect, it was a work of art, one of nature’s great masterpieces. Every time Isabel looked at the bathhouse statues, for which he’d posed, she thought,
No man has a butt that perfect,
a tight little package of muscle. But the thing was, whoever sculpted those statues was either an ass man or a damned brilliant sculptor, or both, because the marble representation of Inigo’s ass and the real thing were identical in every respect—except, of course, for the tail, which he had removed as soon as they came out with chloroform in the mid-nineteenth century.

Inigo pushed Chloe to her knees and held the shirt up around his waist while guiding her head with the other hand. The Perfect Ass flexed and released, flexed and released . . .

It took Isabel about a nanosecond to grow wet. She hadn’t slept with a man, hadn’t wanted to, since Adrien last August; she’d even gone off the pill. Between ten months of celibacy and the fact that it was midmonth, she was a veritable tinder box, arousal-wise. Even so, that little doctor-nurse scenario back at the hospital hadn’t done much for her; she’d always found sexual playacting a little too goofy to really get off on. But a magnificent male ass thrusting and churning while one of the world’s most spectacular cocks got sucked . . . That was a different matter entirely.

“Isabel?”

She turned to find her father and Grace, neither of whom were in a position to see what she was looking at, thank God, regarding her quizzically.

“Woolgathering, my dear?” her father asked.

No, I was getting turned on by watching Chloe blow Inigo instead of paying attention to my terminally ill father.
Oh, yeah. She was definitely going to Hell.

“I was telling your father he seems a bit tired. Time to get some high-test into you, Mr. Archer,” Grace said as she uncoiled the tubing from the oxygen concentrator in the corner.

“God, how I loathe this bloody thing,” Emmett grumbled as she looped the cannula over his ears.

Grinning at the vulgar language—he never used to say “bloody,” at least not in front of her—Isabel said, “Dad, must you swear like a cutter?”

There came a chuckle from behind her. She turned to find Adrien Morel standing in the doorway.

“Isabel,” he said with a little duck of the head.

“Adrien.”

They shook hands and smiled their carefully opaque smiles.

Showtime.

Adrien filled Emmett in on Inigo’s proposal to turn the chapel withdrawing room into a screening room while Isabel, who had ended up seated with a view of the courtyard, tried to resist the urge to steal glances at the ongoing X-rated shenanigans in the tower across the way. It was a futile effort, though, like trying to turn away from an Internet porn site you’d stumbled across by accident when you were really horny and it was really good porn.

Under normal circumstances, she would have been consumed with shame to be engaging in such frank voyeurism, but nothing at Château de la Grotte Cachée was what you’d call “normal,” especially when it came to sex. And after all, if Inigo and Chloe hadn’t been more than happy to be seen, they would hardly be doing it in front of a window that was so clearly visible. She smiled when she saw that Darius was watching them, too.

When Inigo had enjoyed enough of Chloe’s mouth for the time being, he stood her up and pulled off her nursie dress, beneath which she wore the lace-topped thigh-highs, a sparkly navel ring, and a sheer, flesh-colored push-up bra. She was unusually stacked for such a petite woman, and the bra made her large, economy-size jugs look like a pair of cantaloupes with hard red nipples. No undies, of course. He bent her over with her hands on the window ledge, and then
he
dropped to his knees and performed a little doggie-style cunnilingus—pretty skillfully, judging from her histrionics.

She came three times by Isabel’s count, and then Inigo stood. She held her hands behind her, wrists together, saying something to him over her shoulder, ending with “Please?”; Isabel could read her lips.

With an obliging smile and a little shrug, Inigo stepped away from the window, returning a moment later with a length of wide red ribbon. Positioning her with the windowsill supporting her just under her breasts so that she was looking down into the courtyard, he lashed her hands behind her, then yanked her head back by the hair and leaned over to whisper something in her ear. His snarly expression was a shock to Isabel, who’d never seen him in any mood other than one of mellow good humor. Of course, he was just putting on a show to please Chloe, but it was a good enough act to send shivers down Isabel’s spine, making her think he must have been into it on some level. Of course, if there was any way to make sex even sexier, a satyr would be into it, wouldn’t he?

Chloe nodded, saying “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

Inigo disappeared again and brought back a little plastic bottle, which he flipped open, squeezing a stream of fluid onto his colossal cock. He rubbed it up and down the shaft with firm, masturbatory strokes. Squeezing some of the lube onto his fingers, he pushed them inside Chloe, taking his time as he slid them around, saying things Isabel couldn’t hear, of course, but that made the little redhead squirm and nod. “Yes, sir.”

When he’d judged her to be suitably lubed up, he pressed one hand on the small of her back while he used the other hand to push his gleaming wet cock into her pussy.

Chloe tensed, wincing. This wasn’t the first time they’d fucked, of course, but he was very huge and very hard, and there was no amount of lube that was going to make him an easy fit for the average woman. He gave it another slow push, pausing when she flinched. Another push, and another, and he was still only halfway in.

He gave her ass a hard slap; it looked like she yelped. He spanked her about a dozen more times, saying things between each smack that Isabel couldn’t decipher except for “dirty girl,” which he said several times. That seemed to help. She arched her back like a kitten getting petted, and even started cocking her hips up to take him deeper. Smiling, he sank it home.

Inigo unhooked her bra and tossed it aside, leaving her heavy breasts hanging free. He tugged on her nipples as he fucked her with deep, even strokes. Before long, she was thrashing with such abandon that he had to grab her hips just so he could keep thrusting. Isabel was pretty sure she came at least one more time. Inigo’s movements grew erratic, and then he hunched over Chloe, his face darkening. His eyes closed. His mouth opened.

A phone trilled, making Isabel jump in her chair. She pressed a hand to her skittering heart, whispering “Jesus.”

Adrien dug his cell phone out of the front pocket of his khakis. “
Allô. Oui,
Mike,” he said in that deep, roughly soft voice, a lion’s purr with a French accent.
“Escortez-les à l’appartement de Monsieur Archer.
Hm? That’s right. They’re expected.”

“
Who’s
expected?” Emmett asked. His breathing was still strained despite the meds, hence the steadily increasing dosages.