“My payment?” he repeated.
“Mad,” she whispered, “man.”
He bent his head and brushed his lips over hers. “Not yet, but you are driving me there.” Her scent of beauty filled him—sweet, rich, wild. “Say it.”
Her eyes closed and her body trembled. “Vitor.”
He stroked her flesh, and as she shuddered he dipped his finger into her shallowly. Perfect. Perfect beauty. Perfect woman.
Her back arched, her hand fumbling for the bedpost. “What—what are you—”
“You did not know of this,” he said, knowing it from her staggered breaths, the surprise in her eyes. He dipped in again.
“I did not,” she whispered, and moved her hips to seek him. He felt her, learning her beauty here with his hand, the hot, soft core of her womanhood. “But I am glad to know of it now.”
“And this?” He penetrated her deeply.
She gasped. “This too.” She bent her head back against the bedpost, shining locks cascading over shoulders and breasts, nipples making hard points beneath the linen. She was exquisite. He wanted to take her naked again, her breasts in his hands and her belly flat against his. He wanted all of her.
She made soft whimpering sounds, her hips in motion as she pleasured herself on his finger. He drew out and she rasped, “Don’t stop,” then moaned when he thrust two fingers together into her. He kissed the swell of her breast, then covered the peak with his mouth and sucked on her through the fabric. Her body shuddered and he felt her convulse around his fingers.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “Come for me.”
She dropped her brow to his shoulder and whispered, “Now, my lord. I beg of you.”
He hitched her knee over his hip. Wrapping her arms about his shoulders, she lifted her other leg and let him take her as he wished. He had her with her back to the post, and she reached up and clung to the carved wood, accepting his thrusts with moans of pleasure. Moisture from his tongue accentuated the dark peak of her breast, her nipples pressing through the thin chemise as her back arched, straining against confinement. She was wild beauty and she was his. He dragged her to him, bone against bone, and she sought him in urgency, the tempest of her need serving him, gripping and stroking his cock. Eyes closed, she cried out as she climaxed.
Taking her down onto her back on the mattress, he spread her thighs and sank into her again, harder and deeper with each thrust, to feel her fully, to know her as completely as she would allow. He would never tire of this, of her body beneath his, of touching her and taking her, of her hands clutching him in need.
“In the name of Zeus,” she said breathlessly, “if this is the result of calling you ‘my lord’ then I will have to make a habit of it.”
A crack of delight shot from his chest. He could not, for a moment, continue.
“No! Don’t stop, I beg of you. My accursed mouth.”
“Your beautiful mouth.” He surrounded her face with his hands. “Your gorgeous mouth which, however, just quoted Sir Henry Feathers while I am inside you.” It was too much for him. He fell into laughter. She kissed him and twined her ankle about his and the sound that came from her lips was of pure joy.
“Now, my lord,” she said, reining in her mirth and smoothing her hands over his shoulders. “You must continue, for I have rendered payment and expect full service.”
He brushed a damp lock of hair from her brow. “Do you?”
“I do indeed.” She drew up her knees and pressed to him. “Lord Vitor Courtenay, stop making me laugh, and instead . . .” With a hand on the back of his neck she drew him down and set her lips softly to his, then fully for a long, decadent moment. “Make me sing.”
HE MADE HER sing. At least, her sighs certainly sounded musical to her.
He made her dance—after all—patiently, in truth generously, teaching her the moves to an intricate pattern that rendered her breathless in his embrace. It was a dance that did not require standing up.
Later, after she dozed then awakened to the heat of his body shielding her from the cold night and the caress of his hands, he made her want him inside her with such wicked intensity that she sobbed and pleaded, which seemed to her at once despicable and divine.
Finally giving her what she needed, he made her cry out his name again. Rather, she cried it voluntarily, helplessly. Quivering, she pressed her mouth to his skin to stifle the sound of her ecstasy. But she heard it and she suspected he did too.
Afterward, she wrapped her arms around him and held him close.
Then he made her laugh. Summoning Gon?alo from the dressing chamber, he offered her a tour of all the objects from his wardrobe and other personal items that the pup had destroyed, beginning with his shaving brush and—after a lengthy list—culminating in two pairs of what had once been very fine boots.
“You cannot give him up now,” she said upon a sleepy smile. She ached all over with glowing warmth. Curling into the bed linens, she sighed quite foolishly but probably predictably for a woman who had been made love to four times in four hours. “He has eaten so many of your belongings that his tastes are trained to you,” she murmured. “He is ruined for anyone else.”
The nobleman sitting on the bed beside her, wearing only a dressing gown of the same midnight blue color of his eyes, gave her a sidelong perusal. “Ruined, you say?”
“Oh, yes,” she mumbled. “Entirely ruined.”
He stroked a lock of hair from before her eyes.
Her eyelids drooped. “I must go.”
“No,” he said quietly.
A yawn shuddered through her. “I must return to my bedchamber before I—”
“You will remain here.”
She felt his hands upon her as though in a dream. But he did not touch her now where he had given her such pleasure already. Softly, he traced the curve of her shoulder and the length of her arm, then each finger in turn. Fighting against thickening shadows, she felt his hands on her waist, his arms around her, his shoulder beneath her cheek, her palm upon the hard, warm plane of his chest.
“Sleep,” she heard. Or felt.
Then sleep claimed her.
Chapter 20
The Good-bye
No beautiful black-eyed woman ornamented his bed when Vitor awoke to the gray light of dawn. Nor was she to be found in the chair by the fire or the dressing room, which was empty. He scratched his fingertips across his jaw that was rough with whiskers and wondered how and when she had returned to her bedchamber in the gown she had worn to dinner, and how she would explain to anyone she now encountered how she happened to be in the company of his dog before the sun had fully risen.
His dog.
His woman.
The next thought stalled his hand upon his jaw: Her man.
He lay very still as his heartbeats stumbled and he considered the implausibility of it.
Upon his fifteenth birthday he had learned the truth of his paternity, and within a fortnight had boarded a frigate bound for Lisbon. Three years later when the Portuguese court fled Lisbon, he took up the project both his fathers approved: serve Portugal and England in Spain or France or wherever else their need took him. Swiftly wearying of the tedium of intelligence gathering broken by days, sometimes weeks, of horrifying peril, he journeyed to England and unwittingly stepped into the disaster that was Wesley’s courtship of Fannie Walsh. Returning to Portugal, again he crossed the Pyrenees into France, where he came into the hands of mercenaries who turned him over to the British for a hefty sum, who in turn used his vengeful brother to torture him.