Flirting With Forever (22 page)

He stepped back, kicked his breeks free and jerked her into his arms.

He could wait no longer.

His chest was hard, and every bone in her body ached. Her legs felt like putty. He carried her to the seducing couch and dropped her roughly. He removed his shoes and stripped off his socks. Then he put one knee on the cushion, took the high-backed frame in his hand and entered her.

With exquisite, hammering blows he fil ed her.

Her mind left. Only her animal instinct remained, and she anchored her foot wantonly on the arm of the couch, jerking her hips to meet him and letting the fire stoke her already scorched loins. Second peaks were rare, apocalyptical occurrences for Cam. Only twice in her life—never with Jacket—and both times she’d shamed herself with her wil ingness to abandon propriety for her need.

Her gown, stil knotted, revealed both breasts openly.

When his eyes came to rest on them, she drew a finger slowly across a nipple, feeling the luscious jolt in her bel y.

His eyes widened, and the pounding quickened.

“More,” he whispered.

She grasped each peak and plucked, and wild desire blossomed on his face.

He reared back, satyrlike, and drew the snowy shirt from his body, stil driving himself into her. His chest was broad and taut, and a thick bronze pelt ran down to his thighs. He was more muscular than Jacket and thicker inside her. A Germanic god. And she had no greater wish for this moment than to have him bring her this second, otherworldly gift.

She felt the wave—enthral ing and suffocating. Her breath caught, waiting for the world to explode. And just as the cataclysm began, he brought his stroking fingers to her.

She launched into nirvana, her limbs searching for purchase. He caught her knees and gave one final, penetrating blow. She could feel him lose himself inside her. Again and again, he shuddered, each movement lengthening her ecstasy.

After a long moment, when the reverberations had slowed, he col apsed beside her, pul ing her hips close and cupping her breasts. She was damp, and the cool November air from the open doors blew the faint perfume of their joining from the room.

Victories al around, yes?

She curled the toes stil tingling from the action. Yes.

Yes?

Yes, dammit.
Yes
. From her tousled hair to the
thump-thump
of her heart to the mind-blowing serenity of her limbs, she had gotten everything she could have possibly wanted out of the exchange.

So why did she feel like crying?

The low table beside them held a drawer. He opened it without looking, pul ed out a blanket and with a flip of his arm covered them both. The cashmere was crimson, like the couch, and the silk edge matched the pil ow under her head.

Tools of the trade.

She’d offered herself shamelessly, and he’d used her just as she’d offered. There would be no more sittings, no portrait, no patient siege. The castle had been breeched with nothing more than a wel -used battering ram. And she herself had hurried to let down the drawbridge.

If she returned, it would not be to be painted or courted. If she came back, they would simply fal into bed, and in a few months the desire, satisfied, would fade. It would be just like the relationship she’d had with every other man in her life.

She was not one to wal ow. She’d had her fun. She’d thought Peter would wait. He hadn’t, but neither had she.

Now it was time to get the information that would help her with her book and get home.

The glow receded, replaced by a familiar emptiness.

Part of Peter wanted to laugh or sing or grab her by the shoulders, rol her in the cashmere and tel her how happy she made him. But the other part of him was terrified. He had used her il . His performance had been loutish at best, brutish at worst. He had taken a gentlewoman, an affianced gentlewoman whose feelings for her husband-to-be had been made clear to him, and lowered her to the level of a courtier or worse. However pleasured she might have been, no woman, in the sober light of day, would thank a man for that.

Unless, of course, her feelings for her husband-to-be were not what he imagined.

He stroked the satin skin of her hip and tried to keep his heart from haring off in three directions at once. Already he was constructing the inducements he might offer the Executive Guild to break a centuries-old ban and let him stay.

But she was so quiet, so stil .

Everything depended on the next words from her mouth.

He settled his face into the edges of her hair, trying to lose himself in the gentle, clean smel without disturbing her.

He wanted to kiss her, to seek reassurance in her touch, but he was afraid to move.

She sighed and heaved herself from the blanket. He saw her shoulder rising above the gown, straight and unforgiving.

She did not turn.

She stood and drew the flaps of the silk tight around her.

He watched, feeling the sudden coolness of the room, as she made her way to the fire. She stooped to pick up her purse and fiddled with it abstractedly.

“It sounded like a most amusing story you were tel ing earlier,” she said. “I’d love to hear the end of it.”

“An amusing story?”

“The one about Gisel e … and Van Dyck.”

The hair on Peter’s neck bristled. A question about Van Dyck. Surely this was a coincidence. He thought of Mertons’s warning.

“It was not amusing at the time,” he said slowly. “As I said, it made things difficult between him and me.”

“A bit of an intrigue, I suppose.” She gave him a sparkling look of encouragement. It was the first time she’d met his eyes since they finished. “It would have to be with a woman named Gisel e.”

But Mertons had said the writer was a man, a man named Campbel Stratford—His stomach dropped like lead.
Campbell
.
Cam
. She’d said her name was Cam. He was the one who’d expanded it to Camil a. Camil a, the mortal who ran so fast she could be in two places at once.

He could not have been so stupid. Surely she was the woman she said she was. But Mertons had only read the book. He hadn’t met the author. It would be the most natural mistake in the world to assume Campbel was a man.

A thousand thoughts raced through his head, but none of them took him anywhere except right here, to this bed, a witness to the destruction of his dreams.

“Gisel e …” He shook his head, hoping, praying he was wrong and she’d al ow the subject to pass.

“Van Dyck must have been such an interesting character. I’d love to hear a story or two.”

He was glad he hadn’t eaten, for he thought he might be il . He rol ed onto his back and closed his eyes. He thought of the plan to trick the writer Mertons had constructed. Peter would never have imagined he’d have to implement it with her.

“Would you?” he said. “I’ve got a few tales that would curl a listener’s hair.”

She pul ed a ringlet from her tousled mass, lifted a brow, and they laughed.

Stephen, who had been sitting at his desk attempting to repair a particularly il -prepared printing plate, cast an automatic glance down the hal and shifted. He had been made privy to a range of sounds this evening, including some that could only be described, if indeed words could ever be put to them, as indelicate, and he would have just as soon been standing at the riverside next to his fel ow revelers with a bottle of ale in his hand, but nothing would have induced him to leave the watching of the stairs to anyone else. Nonetheless, the silence above him seemed ominous, especial y given the most particular set of noises that had preceded it.

His experience, while not broad, was consistent, and silence, such utterly perfect silence, did not fit his notion of proper postcoital relations. Which is why when the sudden sound of laughter rattled through the floorboards above, he released a breath he hadn’t even been aware he was holding.

Saints be praised. Peter has found his savior.

Mertons paced his smal room, furious. He’d been banging and shouting for half an hour, but the room was in the lowest floor of the house, and if anyone heard they remained unmoved.

The cunning fox was probably plying Peter with her wares now. If Peter were not smart enough to see a trap when it was laid for him, surely he would not divulge an iota of information on Van Dyck, not when the sole purpose of their trip here had been to save that idiot’s reputation.

The locked turned and Mertons started. It was an apprentice from Stephen’s troop of apes, though this time, one smal er than a barn, which gave him hope.

“Master wants to see you. Says it’s urgent.”

“I should think so.”

Mertons took the stairs two at a time and pelted down the hal . He listened for the signs that the woman had been subdued but heard nothing. The thought of a gag brought a smal smile to his face.

The office was empty, and Mertons was just about to bolt again when the side door banged open and Peter, wearing a rumpled shirt and a stormy, unrested face, flung a canvas so hard into a box for unwanted jetsam that he knocked the box several feet across the room.

“What on earth … ?”

Peter silenced him with a molten glare, col apsed into his seat and dropped his head in his hands.

“The deed is done. Take me back.”

Cam typed quickly, despite occasional breaks to wait out a spel of Jeanne resettling herself with a sleepy sigh on the long office couch or to wipe the lens of wetness from her eyes. She’d been working hard since arriving back in the twenty-first century a few hours earlier, but she wasn’t going to stop until she was done—especial y because stopping meant she’d have more time to think, and thinking was the last thing she wanted to do after leaving Peter’s bed with her tail between her legs.

At least she had gotten a story angle—a great story angle, she might add. Peter had told her about the affair Van Dyck, the old lech, had had with a young girl named Agnes. Gisel e, it turned, had been a nonstarter. Nothing but a seventeenth-century stalker. Apparently even painters had those.

Agnes, on the other hand, was a girl who had been identified by Van Dyck early in her young life as a potential wife. Van Dyck had supplied the abbess of the orphanage where Agnes lived with enough money to sponsor the girl’s education and to ensure she would never be exposed to anything that might awaken her sexual curiosity. Van Dyck, it seemed, had an unearthly fear of being cuckolded—the hobgoblin of men with smal minds and even smal er penises—and wanted his future wife to be entirely devoted to him.