“If you think for one moment that I’m setting foot in there, you’ve taken leave of your senses.”
Argent glanced from the room where he slept, to Millie’s obstinate jaw and crossed arms, then back. If he wasn’t inside of her soon, he was fair certain he’d lose consciousness for lack of blood to his head. “Our agreement is such that you’re mine tonight,” he reminded her through clenched teeth. “That means however, whenever, and wherever I want you.” He motioned to his bed.
Argent had been watching people for a long time, and he knew with a surety he’d never before encountered the look on her face. It landed somewhere between dumbfounded outrage, and dawning horror. “I should have known.” She took a few steps back. “You are criminally insane. Touched. Out of your mind.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
Her finger jammed toward the door he held open for her. “That! That … dark closet. I wouldn’t keep an animal I liked cooped up in there. It’s barbaric. I won’t do it, I tell you.”
Scratching his head, he took a second glance. It was roughly the size of his cell at Newgate, and they’d slept two to a room. “It’s more than large enough to fit the two of us,” he pointed out. Well, horizontally anyhow. If they were to lie vertically, their feet would stick out of the door.
“I didn’t agree to this.” Her hand pressed against her chest as though to keep her heart inside of it. She glanced over her shoulder, three times, taking further steps backward. “You are not locking me in there.”
“But … it doesn’t even lock from the outside.” He closed the door and jiggled the handle, opening it again, as though demonstrating to a simple child how such a contraption operated. “See?” What was wrong with her? She stared into his chamber as though it contained medieval torture devices. Squinting into the dark room, he frowned. His bed might be nothing more than a thin mattress on the floor and a few blankets, but it certainly wasn’t the rack. Once he’d initially removed the shelves contained within, he thought it had opened up the place exponentially, though not enough for an iron maiden or anything.
He realized, a little belatedly, that he’d chosen this pantry because the rooms in his home were simply too spacious. Once your entire life had been contained in a prison cell, open spaces often seemed too exposed to sleep in.
Of course, Millie wouldn’t have such a view, would she?
“I don’t know what kind of perverted madman would bring me to a palace, and have his way with me in a pantry, but I do not consent. I’ll take my chances on the streets.” She took a few more steps back, and shuddered.
Argent took a step toward her. “Like hell you will—”
“Master Argent.” Welton materialized from the shadows, his face placid and droll, as always.
“Not now, Welton,” Argent snapped.
“But sir,” the butler insisted. “I’ve come to show your guest to the chambers I had made up for her.”
Millie’s wide eyes leaped from Argent to his butler and back with unmasked skepticism. “Are you both toying with me?”
Welton sniffed. “Certainly not, madam.”
“I didn’t instruct you to do that.” Argent studied Welton from narrowed eyes. The man had come with the house, and had proved handy to have nearby, once Argent had made it clear that if he ever said a thing about his comings and goings to the police, Argent would snap his neck.
Slowly.
Five years, and Argent had gotten used to having the old codger around. He never questioned his place, and was a font of information regarding the world of the ton and the circles in which Dorian and Argent now maneuvered.
“I am an English butler, Master Argent. It is my job to provide you and your household with whatever may be required before its lack is noted.” He, too, glanced into the space behind the door to which Argent clung and sniffed through one side of his prominent nose with an air of disdain. “It is not customary for a female, spouse or guest, to share the … chambers of the master, and so she is afforded her own for him to visit at his leisure.”
Millie’s other hand joined the first over her chest. “That is your … where you sleep?”
Argent remained silent, curiously loath to claim it. The way she was looking at him now, her eyes swimming again, thrummed an unpleasant chord deep in his gut. If she would pick one emotion and decide to land upon it for longer than a blink, he’d greatly appreciate it. The speed with which she swung from horror, to disdain, to sympathy had him feeling as unsteady as a toy ship in a typhoon.
He just wanted her. Now. His mouth needed to be on her again. But not like before, not frozen with fear as she’d been in her apartments. Or angry then resigned as he’d had her in the baths. He wanted her as she’d been that first time at the Sapphire Room. Hungry, willing, and bold.
If you don’t kiss me, I’ll die.
He hadn’t truly understood what she’d meant at the moment she’d said it. Though the longer he was denied her mouth, the more the words made sense.
“Right this way, madam, if you please.” Welton gestured down the long hallway with a stiff bow and marched toward a large, arched door at the end.
Blinking away a rather dazed expression, she cast a very different sort of look at the neat pallet on the floor before sweeping past it to follow in his butler’s wake.
Once they’d entered the chamber, Argent made the first personal conclusion about his butler in five years. Welton’s favorite color was green.
Argent didn’t focus on the domed ceiling depicting seraphim and mortals alike engaged in some form of romping. The excess of potted trees, flickering lanterns, and delicate wood furniture that lent the room a forested feel all blurred behind the woman gliding into the midst of all the frippery.
“Welton,” she breathed. “It’s like … like an enchanted forest.”
“Thank you, madam.” With brusque movements Welton turned down the dark coverlet on the bed, uncovering butter-beige linens stitched with tiny leaves that matched the drapes tumbling from the canopy. Next he poured water into the basin from the ceramic pitcher and fluffed the few towels on the stand.
“Welton,” Argent growled.
“Yes, sir?” His butler turned to him.
“Get out.”
“Of course, sir.” Never breaking form, the butler bowed again to them both, and left.
Argent turned to Millie, who stood in the center of the room regarding him from under disapproving brows. “You could have thanked him,” she reproached. “He’s really very good.”
“Take it off.” The words left his mouth the moment he thought them.
Her breasts lifted in an audible breath and stayed there. “You … mean … my dress?”
Striding to the washbasin, he retrieved a cream towel and plunged it into the warm water. “I mean your makeup. I want to see you.”
She approached him in an arc instead of a straight line, her hands clutching her skirts and her teeth chewing at her bottom lip. She held her hand out for the towel and he gave it to her, stepping back so she could use the mirror.
Her reflection added magic to the experience that Argent could never have guessed. He could see the tumble of her hair and the curve of her ass from behind, as well as her face in the mirror. A face so beautiful that his chest ached if he looked upon it for too long.
After a tense moment, she picked up the soap, dipped the linen, and ran it across a portion of the fabric before lifting it to her face. She washed the kohl from her eyes first, their shape morphing from long to round.
“Most men prefer me with this on,” she remarked nervously. “It—covers all the imperfections and accentuates the beauty.”
“You have no imperfections,” he said honestly.
Her movements stalled, and she stared at him with a queer sort of surprise on her face.
Argent didn’t give a dusty fuck how other men preferred her to look when they took her. She was his now. Tonight. That was all that mattered.
Except, he had the troubling desire to murder every man who’d ever seen her like this. Who’d ever drunk the ambrosia that was her lips. He knew the impulse was illogical, understood that he was a bleeding hypocrite. Hell, he even knew she was a liar. She’d denied any acquaintance with Lord Thurston, but she’d fucked him. Had had a child by him.
He didn’t care about the lie. Everyone lied to save their own skin, he didn’t expect any different from her.
But to think of that middle-aged twat with his soft, aristocratic hands on her …
A fire ignited beneath his lungs, and suddenly danger shimmered between them. It fed the violence of his need.
It took thirty years of trained self-control to stand an arm’s length away from her and watch clean, pale skin emerge from beneath the powder, and soft, pink lips glow from beneath the slick rouge.
Once she’d scrubbed everywhere with the soap, she bent down and cupped her hands in the basin, splashing her face and drying it.
When she straightened, he was behind her, and her lips parted with a soft gasp as he finally put his hands on her. Her shoulders were warm through the fabric of her gown, and Argent realized his hands were cold and clammy.
“You shouldn’t open your mouth like that,” he warned. “It makes me want to fill it with something of mine.” His hands slid around to the front of her, the chilly pads of his fingers brushing at the exposed skin of her chest, inducing a shudder down the entire frame of her body. “My fingers, my tongue, my cock, I don’t care. I just know that it’s warm and wet inside of you.”
She snapped her mouth closed and stood stock-still beneath his touch. Her breasts rose and fell beneath the low bodice of her dress in rapid bursts. She was tense and wide-eyed in the mirror, small nostrils flaring.
He’d thought he’d just wanted that mouth, those full, soft lips pillowing his. But he’d been wrong.
He wanted to consume her with so much muscle-clenching need that he couldn’t possibly decide where to begin. He felt strong and dominant, like a true hunter. If she’d retreated, if she’d run, he’d have given chase. He’d have pounced on her and bit down on her neck, submitting her to the indignity of his lust.
But she stood. Still and panting. Waiting. Trembling.
“Are you going to fight me?” he asked, and didn’t breathe until she answered.
“No.”
God, but her features were perfection, her skin so flawless, so tantalizingly fine. Her face a perfect oval, her cheekbones high and proud. To look at her was intoxicating …
To touch her was divine.
He remembered how he’d sat in the shadows of the opera box and salivated over the white flesh glowing incandescent in the light of so many lanterns. He’d dreamt, no, fantasized, of all that soft skin beneath his fingertips. And now he had it.
He could barely believe it.
His hands felt large and clumsy as he drew them from her chest, over the thin flesh of her clavicles, and swept at the curve of her dainty neck.
“Just please,” she said, panting. “Don’t—don’t be cruel.”
“I won’t,” he growled, a promise he made to himself as much as to her. His hand reached around to the satin of her cheek, and pulled it until her chin aligned with her shoulder. From behind her his breath teased at the tendrils of hair by the dainty shell of her ear. “But neither will I be kind.”
He took her mouth with his, plunging his tongue inside in a slick parody of what his body was about to do to hers. But first he had to taste her. If he only had one night, one time, then he’d spend it with his mouth on her. Tasting the salt of her skin, the syrup of her lips, the sweetness of her tongue. He didn’t just want to kiss her, he wanted to devour her. To taste everywhere she was white and tender. Everywhere she was pink and lush.
As long as she didn’t tell him no. As long as he never climbed on top of her. Because he couldn’t. He couldn’t split her legs apart and hold her down with the weight of his body. He didn’t do that.
He never did that.
Small, tentative fingers rested over his hand on her cheek as she slightly turned into him. Her pliable mouth opened beneath his, and she began to return his kiss in soft, uncertain strokes. Every one of her movements ignited tiny fires of bliss in his loins.
Her scent filled his nostrils and held him prisoner. Soap, sweat, and something that reminded him of late summer berries. Everything about her enticed him, and the clenching of the muscles beneath his stomach pulled a sound from his throat so desperate, it could have been a plea.
In that moment, he could feel that she lost her fear.
And he lost his mind.
Suddenly, his lust had teeth, and it chewed through him with the hunger of a pack of winter wolves. It ripped through his veins with the violence of the wild, and he plunged his hand into her hair, pulling it back and exposing her neck to the firelight.
The sound she made startled him, because it was one he’d never heard before. An answering hunger. A sibilant whisper of submission.
Fuck. He’d planned to rip her dress to shreds. To fill his hands with the pale breasts that had tormented his memory since he’d seen them in the bath. He wanted to see, touch, and taste all of her. To draw the experience out so that the memory would last him a lifetime.
But with one groan, she’d undone him. Stripped him of whatever humanity he’d possessed and turned him into nothing but a creature of inflamed, violent need.
His hand still twisted in her hair, they stumbled to the bed. Once in front of it, he bent her over and tossed layer after layer of heavy skirts up her waist.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, her voice laced with a new hesitancy. It was too late now, he was too far gone. Blood pounded in his loins so powerfully the pleasant ache had turned into raw pain.
“Fucking you,” he gritted out. Finally his hands found her undergarments and they became a casualty of his frenzy.
“Like … this?” She rose up on her elbows to look back at him and he seized her hair, pressing her cheek into the covers.
“I only fuck like this.” As he pulled his cock from his trousers, even the pressure of his hand threatened to overwhelm him. It had never been like this, though. Not ever. If he had a thought that was his own, a moment to stop and consider, he might fear this power she had over him. The way she siphoned his control until there was none left.
“Don’t look back at me,” he ordered. He couldn’t look her in the eyes. She’d see too much, or he would; either way it would be his undoing.
She took in a deep breath and closed her eyes, as though preparing herself. “I won’t.”
He looked down and nearly came. Her ass was pale and perfect, curving into long, slim legs that disappeared into black stockings.
Christ Almighty. He wasn’t going to last long enough to get inside of her.
He closed his eyes and ran his fingers through the soft hair at the apex of her thighs, relieved to find it moist. She was ready.
Her breath hitched when the throbbing head found her opening, but she didn’t move or struggle. In fact, her hips curled, lifting back and pressing toward him. Coating his already weeping tip with her wetness.
With a groan born half of pleasure and half of exquisite pain, he bucked his hips forward and plowed into her.
He was ripped in separate directions as two phenomena he’d never before experienced tore his consciousness to shreds.
Something like a pop, or a tear, as he drove into her body.
He registered resistance. Even as he thrust again, and yet again.
Her flesh clenched him like a fist as he moved within her. Tight. Too. Fucking. Tight. Her body pulled and strained at him, forcing a release. Even though the darkness behind his eyelids exploded with the pulses of pure rapture pouring from his cock. His teeth ground together as he withdrew, his seed bathing her pale thighs.
The pleasure, it felt like it would never stop. That he would never stop. The burning began at his spine and shot from his body in long, wet throbbing waves. He hadn’t known that for all the depths of pain a man could endure, the spectrum of pleasure was equally excruciating.
But then he saw her eyes squeezed in pain. Noted the trembling of her chin until she pulled her lower lip into her mouth and bit down.
And his pleasure was strangled by a terrible knowledge. Millie LeCour had told him the truth today. And for years, she’d been lying.
When she said Lord Thurston and Lord Benchley had never had her, she’d been honest.
But her lie, her lie was much larger than her truth.
Because when Argent looked down and saw the blood, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jakub LeCour was not her son.
Because up until only a moment ago, Millie had been a virgin.
