Millie had been right when she’d assumed Argent had a lair. Dark, cold, and frightening, it was everything she’d imagined it to have been but for one detail. It happened to be located in one of the grandest ballrooms she’d ever ventured into. Even the windows stood two stories high, heavy drapes drawn, and the ivory ceiling with gold embellishments and handpainted icons vaulted higher still. The two grand chandeliers required to light the immense length of the space dripped with expensive crystal and, tragically, more than a few cobwebs.
Her slippers made a forlorn sound as she glided to one of the flickering gas lamps and turned the intricate knob. The flame gleamed off the strange and terrible tools of his trade. Blades of every conceivable length hung from mounts on the wall. Pistols rested on a misshapen stand covered with black velvet that Millie suspected had once been a pianoforte. Other things, for which she couldn’t even begin to imagine their uses, hung from hooks or rested on stands, just waiting to inflict themselves on someone’s flesh.
Which of these, she wondered, would he have used to end her life? The weapons, already macabre, took on a menacing gleam, and Millie’s first instinct was to cringe away. To flee this place.
Turning from the wall of artillery, she gasped as hulking shadows rose from the glossy, dark wood floor, the effigies of violent practice, human-sized statuary upon which to enact the art of execution.
Why had he wanted her to come here, to meet him in this terrible place?
Upon returning from her apartments, his carriage weighted down with a few days’ worth of clothing and sundries, he’d ordered her to convene with him in the grand ballroom alone within ten minutes.
Apparently, he was fond of that distinction of time. Ten minutes.
Perhaps he felt the most at ease in this room, surrounded by his arsenal. Maybe he didn’t want her to forget who he was, what he was, whilst they formulated a plan on how to rid her of those who would see her dead.
She supposed there were many who would be revolted by this room and its contents, and maybe she ought to be. But somehow, during all of this, Millie had begun to leave her trepidation of Christopher Argent by the wayside. Strange, opaque emotions began to take the place of her apprehension. Some she dare not name, and others she shouldn’t allow herself to explore.
Curiosity chief among them.
Stepping forward, she reached trembling fingers toward the rack of knives, selecting one with a large handle and a wicked-looking blade. It was heavier than she’d expected. The handle cool and unyielding beneath her grip. It felt dangerous to hold it, as though it made her a more treacherous person. And, she supposed, it did.
Lifting the blade up to the light, she caught her reflection within it. Just one wide eye and a pale cheekbone. What must it be like, she wondered, to take a life? To thrust such an innocuous device into someone’s flesh, severing their veins and spilling their life’s blood on the ground.
Her reflection tightened, as the thought made her want to weep. It must be just dreadful. To gaze upon the fear in someone’s eyes, to see their pain, to witness the moment they knew their life was over. To witness their regrets. No wonder Argent was so cold, so passionless. How could he perform his hateful employment otherwise?
He’d been unable to execute his duty the night he’d come for her. What had truly stayed his hand? He’d admitted that his physical desire for her was the impetus for her survival. Deep down, Millie knew she had to believe it was more than that. That somewhere in his broken heart, Christopher Argent didn’t want to be an assassin. That he found no pleasure in the taking of a life, but was merely a victim of circumstance and the product of a society that had failed him, utterly.
Was she being a fool? Was she excusing an evil man because he was going to do an evil thing on her behalf?
What did that say about her own culpability?
Millie’s sad sigh echoed back at her as she pushed the thought from her mind. This room was the most well used in the entire spare mansion, she observed as she turned to inspect it. He lived here. His very essence permeated the warm shades of the walls and turned them into something eerie. If Millie had to conjure a manifestation of his mind, of Argent’s very existence, this grand ballroom would be it. Bones and structure of rare beauty, indeed, of flawless design and composition. A dark and phantasmal interior, unable to fulfill its intended glory because instruments of death, of cold violence and merciless destruction, dominated the entire vast room until it was filled with emptiness and the expectation of pain and blood.
Even the shadows.
It was from one of those shadows that Argent melted like a silent apparition. His cold blue eyes glinted like the steel in her hand from an expression equally as hard.
Startled, Millie gasped when she saw him, the knife slipping from her fingers and clattering to the floor with an ominous echo. Her mouth opened, though no sound escaped, as she took in the pure awe-inspiring vision before her. Though she’d given her body to the man, she’d never truly had the opportunity to see him.
Not like this.
Naked to the waist, he wore only a pair of exotic-looking blue silk trousers that flowed about his long, thick legs as though to hide their movement. Bare arms bulged at his sides from the golden slopes of his massive shoulders. Millie’s mouth went dry as moisture collected somewhere lower. So many, many scars marked him. His thick torso, ribbed with strength and muscle, was a lesson in violence. Gashes interrupted his ribs and the hard, straining ridges of his stomach. And, dear God, his shoulder and the swell of the bicep below it was a webbed mess of gnarled skin. Like a burn, but perhaps worse.
This was a man who evoked fear in the hearts of all who would see him thus. So why not her? Why did the thrill that washed her spine in shivers have nothing to do with apprehension?
Because she hadn’t known. Hadn’t had a clue that he was this—this beautiful.
“Did I alarm you?” he asked, correctly interpreting the cause of her astonishment.
“A-a little,” she confessed. It was a very different thing, Millie realized, to feel the strength of a body and to gaze upon it. Many times over the handful of days she’d known Christopher Argent, his unequaled size and might had been manifest to her touch. In the way his hands gripped her. In the swells of his arms beneath his coat, or the hard planes of unyielding muscle she pressed her cheek against in order to hear his heart beating.
But to appreciate his raw, brutal masculinity with only the sense of sight was a truly unparalleled experience. He was, in a word, magnificent. Again he evoked the image of a fallen angel, for it seemed to Millie that such obvious physical power could belong to no mortal man. That here in the realm of coarse and inelegant humanity, such precise and chiseled limbs could not exist unless shaped of some other earth than flesh. Marble, perhaps. Or iron.
Hadn’t he mentioned that he’d worked forced labor on the railway? He had been forged in the quarries and iron yards of prison.
“Do I frighten you?” He stalked closer, taking a circular approach instead of a straight line.
Did he have to ask? Couldn’t a man such as him, a predator, sense the fear in his prey? Was she afraid? Yes. She was terrified. Not just of him, but of herself, of the frightening heat spilling through her. Of the urges compelling her toward him. Of the dark and carnal things she wanted to elicit from him. Today, right now, he was the stoic assassin, violent and cynical and ready to be about the business of killing.
This man wouldn’t hurt her, she was almost certain.
He was most dangerous as the man from the night before. Wild and aroused, hungry for a satisfaction only she could bring him, and willing to take it if need be. And what Millie feared the most, was that she wanted him to. She wanted to give it to him again, and this time, take the pleasure that was her due. She wanted to tell him what to do … Which shocked her as she’d never before experienced such an impulse.
For a fee, she could now wield his lethality like that knife in her hand. Thrust him at her enemies until their blood painted the ground and her child was safe. There was a dangerous sort of hypnotic power in that knowledge. That a man like this would attack at her slightest command.
But what if she could take it further? What if he allowed her the same command over his body in a more carnal fashion? What would it be like, to order his hands upon her, and to have him comply? To direct his strength and command his pleasure? To withhold his climax until she’d had her own. To make him beg for her mercy, as others had pleaded for his?
Lord, something was wrong with her. She had to stop this. She had to get control over herself before she did something utterly idiotic. Something they both regretted.
“You startled me, is all,” she lied. “I’ve never seen you … like this.”
“Yes, well.” He glanced down at his own torso. “Welton said you might be appalled by my scars. Would you like me to find a shirt?”
“No!” Millie protested. Then, realizing she’d spoken too fervently, she cleared her throat and tried again, diverting her eyes from the feast of fascination that was his bare chest. “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Argent. If you would just, um, tell me what it is you … needed to discuss with me here, I’ll leave you to your…” She gestured to the room at large, uncertain what exactly it was he did in this room. “Your exercise.”
He prowled toward her, the flow of his pants causing him to look as though he floated over the polished floor rather than walked across it.
It struck Millie, not for the first time, how silently he moved for such a large, large man. He slithered close, too close, this king of vipers, and the warmth from his bare skin washed Millie in stomach-clenching awareness.
“You mean to tell me, my body does not disgust you?” he asked, something glimmering from the depths of his eyes that she’d not yet seen.
Millie was loath to call a man like this self-conscious or bashful. And yet, that strange attentiveness he conveyed nudged her for an answer.
“No,” she said again, slower this time. “Indeed, I find it rather more diverting than disgusting.”
She’d the sense she pleased him, though he didn’t smile.
He did have scars, but to her they represented a very intriguing combination of mystery and masculinity. They were a testament to his fortitude and vitality. The only reason she’d erase them, would be to make it as though they’d never been. To spare him the agony of their wounds. She wanted to press her lips against each one and somehow clear the memory of the pain from his mind.
That impulse became so intense, Millie literally found herself blinking away tears. And again, she was thrust into dangerous territory. There needed to be less between them and more in between them. More darkness. More space. More clothing.
He leaned closer, and Millie wondered if he realized what he was doing, bringing that hard mouth toward hers. She put her hand out to stop him. To demand that he tell her what he wanted and let her go.
But the moment her hand touched the fine webbing of scars on his shoulder what escaped was, “How did this happen?” She snatched her hand back and held it to her heart. Not because the burned skin had felt uneven and yet unnaturally smooth beneath her fingertips, but because touching him had felt better than she’d remembered.
His eyes narrowed on the hand she held against her as though she’d bemused him, or perhaps rejected him. He didn’t turn from her, though his gaze dulled and he looked away.
“Years ago, on the railway line, an enemy attempted to drown me in hot tar. I was able to fight him off, but not before some of the tar spilled down my shoulder and part of my arm. I couldn’t get to it before it hardened on my skin.”
Millie couldn’t think of one thing to say, so instead she reached out again, pressing her hand to his taut shoulder as an aching fury threatened to smother her. “D-did you … kill him?” she finally gathered the courage to ask.
He nodded, both of their eyes trained on the smooth, pale hand she held against his scarred flesh. “Caved in his skull with a rock, but the damage to my body had been done.”
A dark pleasure speared through her, that the man who’d caused him such an injury had met such an ignoble end.
“How did you remove the tar?” she asked around a thickening voice, already knowing the terrible answer but feeling that she owed it to him to listen. “Did you have to—tear it away yourself?”
His shoulder flexed beneath her hand, power rolling under remembered pain. “No, actually. In Newgate, two ruthless boys, the Blackheart Brothers, Dorian Blackwell and Dougan Mackenzie, spent all night ripping away bits of my flesh along with the tar. We’d formed an alliance some years before when Dougan had saved my life by pulling us out of the deadly prison ship lines and into the railway gang. Though we worked well together, we were all violent youths, and so avoided each other when possible. But that night of my pain and their patient work solidified loyalties between us all.”
Millie’s eyes misted. She couldn’t even begin to comprehend the torture he’d endured. “Are you—still loyal to them?” she queried.
He remained staring at her hand as though it puzzled him. “Dougan is dead now, for all intents and purposes, but Dorian Blackwell and I have spent a lifetime trading terrible favors. And thus it will ever be, I expect.”
Terrible favors. Millie drew her hand away slowly. How easy it was to forget, to ignore the monster born of nights such as the one that left this terrible brand on his flesh. These scars should serve as a reminder, a reminder of the stains on his soul. They should repel her instead of attract her. They should evoke fear instead of compassion.
But when it came to Christopher Argent, things never seemed to be as they should be.
“Have you ever hurt anyone, Millie?” he murmured.
It took her a moment for the question to register, so distracted was she by the electric tingle in her hand. “I—I’m certain I’ve said things I’m ashamed of, that I’ve done underhanded—”
“No,” he interrupted. “I mean, have you ever physically hurt anyone? Cut them, struck them. Broken them.”
Millie took an involuntary step back. “Never,” she whispered. “Why would you ask me such a thing?”
His eyes turned a liquid blue in the lantern light before he turned from her. “It is the reason I brought you here,” he explained as he moved to the wall and selected a knife with a deeply grooved handle. “I want to teach you how.”
* * *
She couldn’t marry the duke, Christopher Argent decided as he, yet again, fended off a surprisingly strong attack to his throat. A man would need both hands to be able to handle a woman like this. It had taken her some time to overcome her fear of hurting him, but once she had, Millie seemed to find a previously unexplored enthusiasm for violence.
He knew he should feel ashamed again, for listening to the lady’s conversation back at her apartments, but the feminine murmurs had drawn him down the hall, and on the list of his sins, eavesdropping was relatively low.
He’d caught Chief Inspector Carlton Morley’s name, but missed most of what they’d said about the man. He’d most definitely heard about Lord Trenwyth, however. And the crux of that conversation was like a knife to the belly every time he remembered what they’d said.
Millie wanted a hero.
And Argent was anything but that. He was, in effect, the very definition of a villain. A hero-maker, as so-called good men would brag about his demise.
Chief Inspector Morley certainly would.
Argent had encountered Trenwyth only once, at a session in the House of Lords he’d attended with Dorian Blackwell years ago. The duke was one of the only men tall enough to look Argent straight in the eye, and in doing so, they’d recognized each other. Not from a previous introduction, but as one killer distinguishes another. For a moment, Trenwyth, Blackwell, and Argent stood in the midst of maybe the most civilized building in the known world and circled each other like wild predators. It was as though a wolf, a jaguar, and a viper converged upon the edges of their respective territories and had to decide whether to fight or to parlay.
It was Dorian’s wife, Farah, who’d saved them from such a decision by stepping into the circle and dazzling them all with her smile, thus creating neutral ground.
Christopher had forgotten that day until this one. Had thrust the unnaturally handsome duke from his mind, as the man had gone off to India to amass a higher body count, and Christopher had remained in London.
To do the very same.
But Millie couldn’t be a duchess. The impediments of that court would become shackles after so long. She would despise marriage to a military man, barking orders and regimenting her day. Crawling on top of her night after night, pressing her into the bed as he used her perfect body to forget the atrocities he’d committed in the name of the crown.
At that image, a low rumble clawed its way out of his burning chest and escaped between his clenched teeth. Millie’s eyes widened upon his face, and she took a step away from him.
“Don’t get frustrated with me,” she reproved with fire sparking in her dark eyes. “I don’t do this for a living, and I’m trying very hard to learn.” Planting her balled fists on her hips, she studied him for a moment longer, and then blinked as a softer, more apprehensive expression overtook her lovely features. “Did I—hurt you?”
“No,” he said, rubbing again at that sharp ache in the cavern of his chest, not missing the way her gaze followed the movement with an arrested expression. Christopher looked down, and then dropped his hand. Was he … lying to her? Had she caused this pang in his chest? Was she the reason he lately felt like one large open wound?
“Swipe at my feet again,” he ordered, needing to divert himself from these destructive thoughts. “Then throw enough force behind your body to bring me down. Should you ever need to use this maneuver, you run before your assailant hits the ground. You get to safety.”
“Right.” With a look of determination, her foot shot from beneath her skirts and swept at his legs.
“Other foot,” he corrected her.
“Why? This one’s closest and it’s the one my brain seems to want to use.” She attempted again, truly throwing him off balance. Argent could have merely recovered if he’d wanted to, but instead decided to teach her a lesson.
He went down backward, but not before he seized her and pulled her down with him.
They landed in a heap of her skirts, Christopher on his back, his knees and elbow bent to control his own fall, one arm shackled around her. Her hands were trapped against his chest, her body sprawled on top of his, legs skewed to either side of him.
“That’s why,” he muttered.
She writhed and struggled against him, yanking and pulling with all her strength to escape his grip, but Christopher barely had to exert any pressure to keep her his captive. Her struggles created the most delicious friction against his prone body, and the rasp of silk against his cock, pressed closer by her proximity, exacerbated an ever-present problem. He’d been half hard ever since he’d thought he’d caught a flash of appreciation in her gaze as she’d scrutinized his bare chest. Now, with her body writhing, lithe and wild above his, lust screamed through him with excruciating ferocity.
He knew the moment she realized, as she immediately stilled, her body going slack against his, the only movement between them created by their quickening breath.
Christopher closed his eyes, employing every technique he could conjure to help him ignore the inviting warmth centered where her legs parted over him.
Nothing worked. His flesh had become one large, pulsing conduit of sensation. Her weight a delicious pressure everywhere they touched.
“What do I do now?” she asked, her voice a breathy whisper against his skin.
Were he to do what he wanted, what his body screamed at him to do, she’d be beneath him in a moment, helpless and spread wide. All he’d have to do is rip her undergarments away and …
“You try not to find yourself in this position by listening to my instruction,” he gritted from between clenched teeth.
She paused for a moment, before slowly pulling back to look down at him.
Christopher allowed it, his arm sliding from her back down to her waist and over where the curve of her hip would be were it not covered by so many layers of heavy fabric.
“I wonder…” Her husky voice vibrated through him, sending shivers of yearning down his spine that arced to his turgid sex with agonizing need. “I wonder, Mr. Argent, if you take instruction as deftly as you give it.”
Christopher froze beneath her, his entire being focused on the growing heat between her parted legs, creeping closer to his aching arousal with the graceful arch of her body as she continued to sit back.
“Never,” he breathed. He obeyed no one.
“Not even if I ordered you to claim my lips with yours?”
All the moisture abandoned his mouth and Christopher stared at her in stunned silence, certain that he’d misheard her. “What?” he asked.
Her eyes flashed unnaturally bright in the dimness, pools of pathos and a disquieting reflection of his own desire. Christopher knew it had to be a reflection, for a woman like this could never feel the raw, primal hunger that clawed at him now.
“Kiss me,” she commanded, rolling her hips back until she was pressed intimately against him, her voice containing a growing desperation that might not entirely pertain to the carnal heat building between them. “Kiss me like you did the night we met. Like a man who captured my gaze across a glowing room and seduced me with a waltz. Touch me as though we are back in that dark corner beneath the stairs of the Sapphire Room and you are Bentley Drummle, nothing more than a harmless, charming businessman.”
“Millie,” Christopher warned, confused by the almost frantic need in her eyes. By the fear and strain that seemed to underscore her passion.
“Kiss me like you never meant to kill me.”
Unable to take any more, Christopher reared up and stopped her lips with his own. His bare arms gathered her close, and held her trembling body against his solid one as the searing heat of their mouths fused them together.
She was shaking. Was she still frightened of him? He’d meant to teach her some techniques to make her feel safer, to empower her, but all he’d succeeded in doing was reminding her that she was in danger. That not too long ago, the biggest threat in her life was Christopher, himself.
Didn’t she know that she’d never been in real danger from him? He wasn’t a man of many words, and so conjuring the comforting phrases she needed was as foreign to him as Punjabi. But how could she not know? How could the care with which he held her now, the way in which he tempered his strength, not prove that he’d never truly posed a threat? Could she not feel his reverent deference, in the yielding of his mouth to her tongue?
Her arms clenched around him, fingers digging into his back as she dragged her lips over his again and again. Her body melted against and around him.
“Touch me,” she demanded once more, her breath hot and sweet against his mouth as her fingers twined into his hair. “This time, do not leave me wanting.” Her nails scored against his scalp until she curled her fingers and pulled.
The pain drew a pleasured groan from him as it seared all the way to his cock. His vision blurred until her skin, her face, was the only thing he could see. His sensitive hearing only caught the rasp of the fabric of her dress against his skin, or the wet sounds of their frantic kisses. Heart pounding, he feared how powerless he felt as his hands trailed down to her knees. He could do little but obey her, desired nothing but her pleasure.
Gathering fistfuls of her skirts, he burrowed beneath them with desperate fingers. They both gasped when his hands found her thighs and began their journey upward. He paused at the tops of her stockings, held in place by the most intriguing contraptions, but a rhythmic clenching that had begun in her lean muscles spurred him onward.
A small ribbon lay against the smoothness of her inner thigh, and he somehow knew to pull it. The blessed thing bared her to his touch.
The curse he uttered was more a vibration than a word when he at last grazed the soft nest of heat between her legs. Her desire coated his fingers in liquid fire as he found the slick flesh he blindly sought.
“Yes.” The word flew out of her on a hitched breath and he inhaled it, a masculine triumph swelling up from the abyss.
His fingers caressed soft, turgid flesh and slid amongst folds of hot, slippery skin until a delicate sound from her throat gave him pause.
“There.” She sighed, her fingers tightening in his hair.
It had been the most erotic word Christopher had ever heard in his life. He dragged his mouth away from hers long enough to explore the curve of her jaw, as he used her little gasps and soft moans as a guide.
This must be what religious men felt as they fell to their knees at an altar. This unworthy rapture. This unholy desire. This need for redemption.
Christopher became a pilgrim of her pleasure. Watching her expressions as carefully as one would a map of the stars. His thumb circled the soft nub above the entrance to her body and her head fell back, exposing her throat to him. He fell upon the pulse at her throat like a vampire, laving and sucking at it to help appease his own roaring hunger.
Every time she ground against his arousal was pure agony … but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. He could feel her climax building inside of her, and if it was the last thing he did before he died, it would be to watch her come for him.
A searching finger found her opening, and his thumb continued its gentle assault on her flesh as he sank inside of her.
Christopher could sense the moment the stars beckoned her to join them.
Her release drenched his fingers in a warm rush and with it came a surge of wild, primal satisfaction he’d never before known. Her knees clenched around his hips and a strangled sound escaped her. Her hands clawed at him, and she curled forward, her teeth bearing down on the sinew of his shoulder as waves of shudders gripped her.
He stayed with her as she rocked over him, lost within the pulsing of her flesh. She was ready for him, soft and wet and yielding. His cock reached upward toward her, offering to replace his hand, hoping she would allow him inside her goddess’s body.
Somewhere in the house, a high voice rose in an unmistakable call.
“Mama?”
Millie tensed under his touch as Christopher bit out a string of harsh curses she’d likely never heard used in the same sentence. Heaving them both up, he set her on her feet and pulled away when she reached out to steady herself.
“Mama? Where are you?” Jakub called, closer now.
She stood on unstable legs, blinking as though trying to orient herself, placing a trembling hand low against her belly.
“Go,” he barked.
Her brows drew together, as mystified by his sudden burst of temper as he. “I … I—”
“Go to your son.”
“Mama?” An element of anxiety injected itself into the boy’s call, and that seemed to pull Millie back into herself.
She cleared the pleasured huskiness from her throat to reply.“I’m coming, kochanie, stay where you are.” Sending him one last voluminous look, full of meaning he couldn’t begin to identify, she brushed at her skirts and hurried out. The click of her shoes made a sharp, lonely sound as they carried her away.
Once the door closed behind her, Christopher allowed his legs to give out, using one of the pillars to support his weight. The warmth of her release chilled on his hand as a memory gripped him.
Mum? He’d called his mother that, rather than Mama. But he’d found her in the dark, much like Jakub would have found his mother here had he not warned them. Christine had been grunting beneath a man, spurring him on with foul words he could tell she did not mean.
It was the first time Christopher had ever felt the urge to kill. Hatred had filled his young body with a force he’d not been old enough to understand.
That night they’d filled their bellies with warm food that had tasted like ashes on his tongue.
Because his mother fucked for survival … just as he’d forced Millie to do.
The pillar abraded his back as he slid down to the floor. Fate was indeed full of cruel and heartless irony. He’d murdered every man he could remember touching his mother. It had taken him years, but he’d done it as a sort of tribute to her. As a promise that he’d never take a woman beneath him and trap her there for his pleasure. That, whatever atrocities he committed, he would never be like those men.
And now …
Burying his head in his hands, he emitted a low sound that echoed accusingly back at him in his empty room of terrors. Of all the men he’d learned to hate, he never felt such loathing as he did for himself.
