Sexy As Hell (5 page)

Pleasure he could guarantee; he also owned the map to oblivion after years of searching for mindlessness in countless women’s arms. And he’d known all along she was staying. “Thank you,” he politely said as if he’d only been waiting for her sanction. “I’ll happily give you both.”

“Lucky me, you
splendid
creature.” She smiled, comforted by his understanding, charmed by the random hand of fate that had brought him into her bed tonight. Strangely enticed by the rarified enchantment he offered.

No tyro at love with her casual reply. How very convenient.
Resting easily between her outstretched thighs, instead of anticipating another night of casual amour, he experienced an unaccountable desire to see that she found full measure of the pleasure and oblivion she sought.

He gently brushed his finger over her nipples. “I think it’s time I tasted these—if that’s all right with you?”

She smiled. “Am I allowed to say no?”

He grinned. “You’re not big enough or strong enough.”

“Do women always yield to you?”

He shook his head and lied. “Of course not, but humor me. You won’t regret it,” he added, capturing one nipple between his thumb and forefinger and squeezing it ever so softly.

“Arrogant man,” she whispered, but his arrogance was tantalizing and the pressure of his fingers was beginning to command the attention of her genital nerves, a seemingly direct path from nipple to vagina, encouraging added moisture to flood her tissue. Or was it the compelling presence of his rigid penis crammed against her vulva that incited her body’s response?

“Not without reason, puss.” He’d not wasted his time in the boudoirs of the world. Slipping his hand down between her legs, he slowly measured the length of her slippery cleft with his fingertip. Her small gasp was affirmation and permission he decided, and shifting slightly, he lowered his head, drew one nipple into his mouth, and tenderly sucked.

With a soft moan, she slid her fingers through his dark hair and held him firmly at her breast while her breathing changed to soft little pants, a heated glow melted through her body, and she wondered with frenzied rapture and poetic license where he’d been all her life.

Recognizing her soft whimpers meant he’d been given carte blanche, he slid two fingers into her slick sex and gently explored the sleek interior.
No virgin.
Not that he’d thought she was, but he was gratified not to have miscalculated. Although in his current, highly unusual state of arousal, he would have mounted her, virgin or not. An aberration he deliberately ignored.

It must have been too long since she’d had sex. Surely that was why she wanted him so madly. Why she was so lost to reason. And whether having rationalized away her monstrous desires or simply given into sensation, she surrendered to the piquant incitement of Oz’s mouth and stroking fingers, raising her hips in invitation, signaling her urgency by pressing her throbbing cleft against his palm. “I want
you
,” she whispered, frantic to feel him inside her, reaching for his erection. “I want
this
,” she said, brushing her fingers over the swollen head of his cock.
“Now.”

“Soon,” he answered, his voice in contrast, serene. They had all night; he was in a rare quixotic mood, poised between genuine emotion and wildness. Also, he’d learned long ago in a culture that equated sexual expertise with spiritual enlightenment that speed was a deterrent to carnal pleasure.

And he was a genuinely enlightened man.

She protested, but he ignored her, and Isolde soon relented, Oz’s versatile skills not only sumptuously satisfying but also incredibly arousing. Not that Will, the love of her life, hadn’t been a tender lover, nor that they hadn’t together explored passion and desire, but Lennox touched her differently. With a sybaritic, refined exactitude, he fondled, stroked, massaged, and sucked with such exquisite versatility that he kept her hovering, suspended in a state of bliss just short of orgasm.

By the time he slipped a third finger inside her, she was literally shaking. “Try this,” he whispered, and applied himself to making her heated cunt even more hospitable. Gently exploring the honeyed passage, he examined every overwrought crevice and fold, plumbing her depth with his long, slender fingers, titillating and tantalizing until flushed and breathless, she reached the volatile point of no return.

“Are you ready?” he unnecessarily inquired, his fingers running wet, her body taut with need, her eyes shut tightly against the flame-hot lust scorching her brain.

It took a moment for his words to register, overwhelmed as she was with rapacious desire. And another moment for her to try to find the breath to speak. She nodded instead, incapable of more with the steady, pounding ache between her legs obscuring all else.

“Do you know my name?” For some inexplicable reason, he took umbrage at her fevered frenzy, but even as she tried to speak, he mentally stepped back from the iniquitous brink and smiled. “Don’t bother, darling,” he soothed, telling himself to count his blessings. Whether she knew who she was fucking or not, a night of pure excess was not to be disparaged.

Dispensing with further unwanted emotion, he guided his cock into her silken cleft, slowly invaded her, and set about bringing this particular stage of their amorous encounter to an end.

Long past any notion of leisurely sex, Isolde swiftly slid her hands down his back, cupped his firm buttocks, and with surprising strength propelled him forward. “More,” she ordered, as a countess in her own right was wont to do, the single word faint but audible.

Perhaps more familiar with accommodating females or less familiar with demanding ones, or maybe taking issue with her blind carnal need, Oz gruffly said, “You want
more
?”

Her eyes opened briefly at the low, guttural sound.

Not quite sure why he bridled at the lady’s explosive sexuality, nor currently reasonable enough to resolve his peremptory impulses, he instead relinquished further thought, plunged forward, drove into her with barely restrained violence, and gave her what she wanted.

Her scream rocked him back on his heels.

“No, no, no!” she precipitously cried, desperately clutching his hips to drag him back.

Quickly scanning her face—although there was no mistaking her fierce grip—he decided she wasn’t in pain. “Hush—here, I’m back,” he whispered, gliding in again, bottoming out in her intoxicating heat, resting engulfed and motionless in her snug cunt while a raw, spine-tingling ecstasy bombarded his senses.

Her small, blissful sigh brought a smile to his lips, her soft exhalation strangely touching. Although why it struck him so was a mystery. But not enough of a mystery to alter his irrepressible carnal focus. Grasping her hips firmly, he drove in that slight intoxicating distance more—where the world disappeared and only pure feeling held sway.

Her manifestation of pleasure was no high-pitched scream that time but a series of whisper-soft gasps punctuated with little breathy moans that echoed lewd and sibilant in the quiet of the room.

And the reason that explicitly needy, salacious little sound was drifting into his ears, he pleasantly thought, giving himself up to the soul-stirring rapture, was because his cock was buried in her delectable cunt. Because he’d found safe haven in this soft-as-silk enchantress. Because he’d discovered a measure of paradise in room thirteen of Blackwood’s Hotel and suddenly, inexplicably all was right with the world.

He felt curiously
alive
for the first time in ages. There was no explanation, nor was he actually interested in one. A practical man, he was rather more interested in reconstituting the indescribable, all-encompassing, cosmic bliss. Slowly withdrawing in order not to upset the lady, he drove back in again. And then again. And once again—with deftness and ingenuity, with competence and expertise garnered in temples throughout India. The path to ecstasy had been refined over thirty-five centuries, and with conscientious study he’d come to appreciate the concept of the divine body as the source of infinite delight.

The countess feverishly clung to him as he masterfully transported them toward orgasm, meeting his downstrokes with wild eagerness, whimpering softly each time he withdrew, distrait, wanting more.

Then she’d sigh as he filled her again, her little sumptuous exhalation inevitably making him smile. Miss Perceval, he cheerfully decided after her second riotous climax, was a damnable gift from the gods, a unique blend of joyous innocence and shamelessness, sweetly and sometimes not so sweetly asking him for more, always taking what he gave with a voracious appetite.

Gentleman that he was, he saw that she came several more times before he allowed himself fulfillment. Well trained in his youth by the mystics as well as the courtesans in Hyderabad, he was capable of withholding his orgasms. But not forever.

Even in extremis, though, he was practical.

He came on the countess’s stomach.

Having seen too many illegitimate children in India struggle for identity in the ambiguous no-man’s-land they occupied, he didn’t want to add to that population. There or here.

Once his breathing returned to a semblance of normal and reality reaffirmed itself, he wiped the countess’s stomach with the sheet while she lay, eyes shut and unresisting—other than a soft groan when he rubbed her dry between her legs. To which sound his cock instantly reacted, as if her voice alone was magnet to his lust. Drawing in a breath of restraint, he reminded himself that the night was still young and proceeded to wipe himself off rather than plunge back into her enticing little cunt.

Tossing the soiled sheet on the floor, he dropped into a comfortable sprawl, put his arms behind his head, and gazing up at the tester, basked in an agreeable surfeit of excess. And rare contentment.

So rare he found himself subscribing the feeling to some mystical force that had come into play in this hotel room in London.

“I’m so pleased that actor didn’t arrive,” Isolde whispered, lifting up on one elbow to smile at him as though in answer to his musings. “You’re quite lovely in every imaginable way.”

He wasn’t about to say,
You make me feel strangely content
, so he said, “I consider myself fortunate to have blundered into your room.”

“It must be fate.”

“Indeed.”
And a certain degree of motivation on my part.
“Although, I’m not finished yet,” he said, putting his odd feelings into a more familiar context. “We’ve plenty of time til morning.”

“How nice,” she said, running a light fingertip across his muscled chest. “I didn’t dare ask for fear of appearing too forward.”

His gaze was amused. “Really—after your repeated demands for more?”

“Mock if you wish, but I hardly know you. I didn’t feel I could ask for more now . . . I mean, now that—you’ve finished.”

Her lovers apparently hadn’t had stamina. “I’m just pausing for a moment. So demand away,” he pleasantly declared.

“You’re not annoyed?”

“No. Gratified certainly, annoyed—not likely. You’re a captivating little puss, Miss Perceval. Tell me,” he said, curious when he never was, “do you do this often?”

“I don’t see that it’s any of your concern.”

“Forgive me,” he suavely returned. “Naturally, it’s not.”

“Do you do this often?”

“Too often. You’re a damned refreshing change.”

“Another jaded gentleman. Why am I not surprised?”

“If it’s any consolation, jaded is not a feeling I recommend.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Boredom, ennui, who knows,” he finished with a shrug. “You must live in the country,” he added, preferring less-encumbered subjects.

“Yes.”

“And you don’t wish to disclose where.”

She sighed. “I don’t know why. After the papers come out tomorrow morning, you’ll know anyway.”

“So?”

“I live near Cambridge.”

“That’s not very definitive.”

“Two miles north of town.”

“Better. What do you do there?”

“Take care of my estates.”

His brows lifted faintly. “For your despicable cousin to inherit.”

“Don’t remind me,” she grumbled.

“Why not marry? That would solve your problem.”

“Are you asking?” she playfully inquired.

“Lord no.” For a frightening moment he wondered if his earlier fear of being gulled had been mere prologue to this authentic gulling. “Don’t say you planned this for I tell you straight out, no one can make me marry.”

“Rest easy, Lennox. I don’t wish to shackle you or myself for that matter.”

Reassured, Oz drew her into his arms and set out to please her and himself in the bargain.

They made love that night slowly and gently, fiercely and wildly, like young lovers learning the other’s likes and dislikes for the first time. Neither were innocents, and yet they experienced simple long-forgotten pleasures in each other’s arms. They talked as well with a degree of candor neither had previously offered their lovers. She discovered he was alone in the world, his family gone. He discovered she was living an equally solitary life without close family. Maybe their common singleness put them in sympathy, or maybe it was their declared ambition to remain unmarried that prompted their unusual accord.

They both meant it, too, for possibly similar and unspoken reasons.

Near sunrise, they finally fell asleep in each other’s embrace after what could only be characterized as a night of extraordinary pleasure.

CHAPTER 3