Farah clutched the bodice of her dress, even though the buttons were still doing their job, and stared at the large, dark man in the chair.
He met her look with a level one of his own. “Second thoughts already, my dear?” The endearment was not meant as such, and they both knew it. His words were a challenge, an answer to one that she’d issued initially. She’d offered him her body, almost demanded that he take it, and now he’d come to collect.
It would be foolhardy to think that he might make this easy for her.
Farah lifted her chin. “No. I merely thought that you might want to take it off, yourself.”
She was playing a dangerous game, and she saw that danger flash in his eyes. “If that were the case, I’d have ripped it off you immediately. Stop stalling and take. Off. Your. Dress.”
Of course. He’d want to watch. It excited him. Aroused him.
Very well, Mr. Blackwell, Farah thought. Watch this.
Dorian could tell she pretended it wasn’t the trembling of her fingers that stole the dexterity from her movements. She tried to keep his gaze locked on her challenging eyes, flashing with little gray storm clouds, but Dorian couldn’t manage to stop from visually devouring every hint of skin each release of a button revealed. The slim column of her throat. The soft expanse of thin flesh stretched over her chest and collarbones, so rife with nerve endings.
She took her time, damn her.
The light from the candles kissed her silvery hair and her creamy ivory skin with gold as though King Midas had given in to temptation and touched her with his cursed fingers.
Regret tried to lick at him, to stir the humanity buried down deep beneath the layers of greed, self-loathing, violence, hatred, and anger he walled within that impenetrable casing of ice.
This was Farah. His wife. Should he objectify her like this?
Another button worked free, exposing the first hint of the swell of her bosom.
The question was: Could he stop himself if he wanted to?
Dorian already knew the answer.
Not for all the money and power in the empire.
As she exposed the valley of shadow in between her breasts, Dorian felt the intoxicating, almost chemical mixture of thrill and shame he imagined tortured the waifish opiate addicts that haunted the back alleys of the Chinese immigrant shops on the East End.
His body was going to get something it pined after. Burned for. Screamed with the intensity of its need.
And he’d hate himself in the morning.
Hell, she’d probably hate him, too. But she’d progressed in getting the buttons undone to her navel, and Dorian spied one nipple outlined in pink-tipped perfection against the thin white silk of her chemise, presented to him by her tightly laced corset. All coherent thought dissipated like the mist before the sun’s rays, and everything around him receded but for her. His next breath hinged on the next button being set free. The next expanse revealed for him to consume like a starving man.
He wanted to stop her. To demand that she continue. But for all his composure, words had become lost to him, communication beyond his ability. All he could do was sit helplessly and await her next move. Watching.
Farah found it strange that the more she revealed, the bolder she became. Perhaps it had something to do with the way Blackwell’s gloved hands gripped the chair arms when she allowed her dress to slide down her curves and puddle at her feet. Or the flare of his nostrils as she reached up, aware of how the action lifted her breasts even higher beneath her sheer chemise, and took the pins from her hair, one by one.
She unraveled the heavy braid that fell over her shoulder, shaking the curls loose to fall to her elbows.
Farah could tell Blackwell fought it, but desire began to melt the ice in his stare, causing his lids to fall heavy over his eyes, and his lips to part in order to allow for the quickening of his breaths.
She hesitated only a moment before moving to untie her laces.
“Don’t,” he ordered. “Not yet.”
Blackwell was a statue, but for the lift of his jacket in deep, heaving movements. His eyes traveled the expanse of her exposed flesh with all the tangible deftness of a caress, branding their way to the waist of her drawers.
“Get rid of them.” His voice barely recognizable now, he filled his chest as though it would stop the little twitches of muscle she could see by his eye, below his collar, in his fingers.
Heart thudding wildly, Farah tucked her thumbs into the band of her drawers, preparing to draw them down.
“Wait,” he clipped through gritted teeth.
Farah paused.
“Turn around.”
Puzzled by the request, she silently complied, determined to follow his instruction. She somehow understood that if Blackwell felt in control, he’d be more likely to go through with this. Farah was prepared and unprepared. Afraid and yet not afraid. Embarrassed and emboldened. The need lurking beneath the chill in his eyes drove her to abandon her characteristic modesty. She was too old for virginal shyness, had seen too much of the horrors this world thrust upon others.
Men were visually stimulated creatures, and females were lovely. It seemed only natural that Blackwell would feel the desire to look upon what he found difficult to bring himself to touch. She understood that in order to conceive the family she wanted, she needed to entice him to do more than look, and that was her prerogative. To push him to a place where desire overcame fear, where the animal instinct to mate controlled the machinations of the body.
And so she faced the fire banked low in the hearth, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and bent to push her drawers over her hips.
“Slowly.” He hissed the command.
A hazard lurked in her plan, though, Farah realized as she languidly swept the lacy drawers over the swell of her rump and down the quivering muscles of her thighs. For a man such as Dorian Blackwell to be driven mad enough with lust to break the bonds of the past.
He might be driven to break her, as well.
Dorian had often studied the female form in every modality from paintings to prostitutes. He’d seen them all. Appreciated a few, despite himself. But nothing could have prepared him for the vision of Farah’s body, a dark and flawless silhouette against the backdrop of the flames.
His weak eye blurred detail in the direct contrast with the firelight, and so instinct drew him to lean closer. She flared out in all the places a woman should, dipping to create curves that were the soft answer to a man’s hard angles.
Bent as she was, her ass was so exposed to him, the slight outline of her womanhood a dark secret in the low light.
Dorian’s mouth went dry. His racing heart sped like a stallion on the last sprint toward the finish line. Impossibly faster. Pushed to the limit of its capacity. His breath sawed in and out of his chest in tight, painful bursts, burning like it did when he ran in the winter. Frost and heat. Ice in his blood and fire in his loins.
It had been almost twenty years since anyone had touched him in a way not meant to cause pain. To humiliate, incapacitate, and control. It had been just as long since he’d used his hands for a purpose other than defense, violence, or domination.
Farah’s skin. Her flawless, unmarked skin. Free of scars, branded by no one, and belonging to him.
At last.
How could any man bring himself to desecrate such unblemished skin with his touch?
How did he stop himself from doing just that?
Dorian’s gloves creaked as he physically held himself to the chair. He wasn’t certain which impulse compelled him more, the one to seize her or the one to run.
So he sat. And watched. Savoring the torturously slow movements of her body like she’d enjoyed her dessert the night before. The pleasure not confined to her tongue, but a full-bodied, visceral experience.
Dorian had never in his life felt as much anticipation or found as much pleasure as she had for her cake and cream. Not his wealth, not his luxury, not in the victory over his many enemies. Not until this moment, when the round, tight curve of her hips and ass were presented to him like the spoils of war.
And yet he could not claim it, for the battle was not over. It raged within him. There were blood, casualties, losses of ground and gaining of the upper hand. It was violent. The outcome unsure.
So he sat.
And watched.
Farah did her best to ignore the whisper of chilly air against the moist, warm folds of her body as she stepped out of and discarded her drawers. Lifting her torso, her unsteady fingers plucked at the ties on her garters in order to rid herself of the cream stockings.
“Leave them,” he rasped.
She straightened, clad only in her corset, chemise, and stockings, unsure of what to do next.
“Lie down on the edge of the bed,” he commanded tightly.
Her gaze flew to the bed, a comfortable, finely appointed, fairly innocuous piece of furniture. Unless one knew that the next time she left it, she would be forever changed.
Though, truth be told, Farah was relieved that Dorian informed her what he wanted of her, as she had no skill or practice in the art of seduction, and felt quite lost until he gave his commands.
A strange, ever-shifting balance of power, this. Her feminine instinct told her that she commanded every synapse in his brain, every beat of his heart whilst she carried out his requests, but once she’d finished, the control ebbed back to him, and she held her breath in anticipation of his next demand.
She tiptoed to the bed on unsteady legs and gingerly lowered herself to sit on the counterpane. She sought his gaze for reassurance, but he was fixed on the thin wisps of golden hair at the apex of her thighs as though the answers to the mysteries of the universe could be found between her legs.
Farah froze, real fear blocking her throat for the first time. Even when he sat, Blackwell managed to loom. Even when silent, he threatened. Though candles illuminated his tall, wide frame, he seemed a specter of muscle and darkness and shadow.
She’d been wrong just now. So very wrong. Any control she’d imagined had been an illusion. Dorian Blackwell never allowed anyone else to wield it in his presence.
She faced him, wondering what came next. She understood the culmination, knew where this ended. But he needed to come to her, to come inside her.
“Lie back.” His voice was brimstone raking over the souls of the damned. “Open your legs.”
This was it. Shaking, Farah rolled slowly to her back. Her fingers grasped the fluffy covers at her sides as though she could find bravery in their seams, and squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look at him.
She felt his eyes on her as she stretched her body across the bed. Knew he was looking at her in places no other man had seen.
Bracing her heels on the bed frame, she took a deep breath and parted her knees.
As the silent seconds ticked by, Farah opened her eyes and stared up at the canopy. Her husband truly was pitiless. Barbaric. Unforgivably cruel. He left her like this, an artless innocent bared for the first time without comfort or care. Gathering her annoyance like a cloak, she summoned the courage to look down at him.
What she saw froze her and melted her all at once.
Between the valley of her breasts and the V of her thighs, Farah saw Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, quake. Not just a shiver, or even a tremble. But great, shoulder-heaving shudders that affected his breath.
Expressions she hadn’t thought his brutal features capable of producing played in rapid succession across his face, gone before she could even identify them all. Longing. Apprehension. Privation. Frenzy. Control. Despair. Lust.
Worship.
She breathed his name and his head snapped toward her. “Come to me,” she ventured. “Tell me what to do.”
He shook his head, but his eyes remained fixed upon her. “You’re not ready,” he said without moving his clenched jaw.
“I am,” she encouraged. “I want—”
“You need … to be … wet.” Every word of his sounded like a labor, like it caused him pain.
Farah frowned. She couldn’t help that. It was anxious work seducing a husband who didn’t want to be seduced, baring herself to a man for the first time, all without the arousing of his lips or any soothing consolations. “How do I—”
“Pleasure,” he growled. “Touch.”
Farah knew exactly what he meant. She’d felt it in the bath when she’d washed for him, those first wet stirrings of pleasure, the moisture that bloomed from her body. She needed to produce that again.
Prying her fingertips from where she’d dug them into the bedclothes, Farah let the curve of one nail drift across the sensitive skin of her chest.
His eyes flared.
Her body responded.
More fingers joined the first, playing their way down the curve of her breast, flatter now that she was on her back, the nipple still jutting upward, insistent as ever. Then she reached the edge of her corset, also done in cream silk, and toyed with the barrier before dipping beneath it.
Farah couldn’t believe what she was feeling. The thrills of sensation, the moist whisper of pleasure to come. She no longer cared that he could see, that he was watching. Farah wanted him to. She was not only a bashful virgin, but a bold exhibitionist, and in some way that made all of this much more tantalizing.
At the sound that escaped her parted lips, Blackwell completely lost the cold, observant look of a bird of prey and gained the ferocity of a beast. Hot-blooded. Prowling. Stalking. Waiting to leap. Teeth bared in a grimace of pleasure and pain, he strained as though he fought back a monster with the strength of his own will.
He was her black jaguar, and he just might tear her apart.
Dorian knew he trembled more than she did as her hand drifted from the perfection of her breasts and down the unyielding expanse of her corset. Her touch light and fingers gentle as they followed the candlelit path to her hips, and below.
Could he touch her like that? With this need for domination pounding through his veins? Could he learn that softness, that gentility, by watching her perform it on herself?
For surely he could not allow her to touch his flesh in that way.
Surely—she wouldn’t want to. Not if she ever looked upon it.
She would be revolted, and he would be rejected. Of that he had no doubt.
Beautiful. She was so fucking beautiful. Her thighs long creamy cylinders of pale, taut muscle. The blue bows on her garters drove him to the brink of sanity.
Her sex. Pink, pretty flesh nestled between a light dusting of fair curls. His mouth watered. His blood roared. His cock pulsed behind his trousers in a rhythmic and uncontrolled clench and release of muscle.
Her curious fingers paused before dipping below the soft hair. When she encountered the feminine folds, she gasped.
Dorian stopped breathing.
She tested that place lightly, finding a place that quivered and pulsed at the apex of that pliable skin. Awe speared Dorian as her feminine muscles clenched in the exact rhythm his own loins did. He could see them working through the skin unique to her sex. Her hips rolled with instant little movements, her breath catching on sighs of appreciation.
If Dorian was a lesser man, unused to patience, torment, and agony, he would have released his seed then and there. But he grappled his orgasm back down, thinking of her hands on his repulsive flesh, letting the fear throw ice into the flames.
Then she parted the inner cleft, dipped inside, and let out a moan that could have aroused Eros, himself. Her finger came away glistening as she pulled it back toward the nub that seemed to demand more attention than anywhere else. When she swiped the moisture across it, her muscles all tensed, and she threw her head back onto the counterpane, letting loose a sound so visceral Dorian’s will snapped.
And he lunged.
