Storm of Shadows

It was way too late for that.

  He held her off-balance, looked into her shocked eyes, and got right to the heart of his interest. “What are you wearing under that skirt?”

  “What?” She sounded so shocked.

  Was Philippe right? Was she a virgin? If she was, her first time shouldn’t be in the backseat of a limo, not even when Philippe had assured him they were as good as alone.

  On the other hand, lots of girls had their first time in the back of a car, and the world was well-populated, so Aaron assumed they weren’t scarred by the experience.

  Now, if he came too soon, that might scar her—and as horny as he was, coming too soon was a real possibility.

  “Tell me what kind of panties you’re wearing.” He couldn’t wait for the answer. Instead he at once slid his hand up her outer thigh, relished the silk of her stockings, finding the lace at the top and the clasp of a sleek garter. Then the smooth gloss of her skin, the bare globe of her ass, the fragment of lace between her cheeks . . .

  A thong. She was wearing a garter belt and the smallest wisp of a thong ever created.

  “I’m going to kill Philippe.” Somewhere, in the depths of his mind, Aaron knew his voice sounded tortured. He pushed her skirt up around her waist, and said, “Next time I see him, I’m going to kill him.”

  Her fingers combed through the hair at the back of his neck, over and over, driving him mad with the pleasure of her touch. How had she so unerringly found one of his pleasure zones?

  Why, when he inhaled, did he smell the scent of leather warmed from their bodies? The spicy perfume at her throat? Why did each bump of the road make him imagine how it would feel if he put her on his lap and let her ride him like a stallion?

  The skin between her thighs felt like silk, yet his thumb found a small, raised area. “What’s this?” It felt like . . . like a pattern . . .

  “It’s my tattoo.” As he stroked her, her voice grew sultry.

  He had forgotten . . . no, he had tried to forget about her tattoo. “This is the one you got on a South Sea island?”

  “Yes. It’s a ritual. All the girls who pass through puberty there are tattooed with a . . . with a . . . oh, Aaron . . .”

  “Tell me what it is.” He nipped her earlobe to get her attention, then sucked it into his mouth and laved it with his tongue.

  “An orchid.”

  “Of course. What else would it be?” A honeyed orchid, smooth to the touch, and resembling a woman’s—“What color is it?”

  “Pink.”

  “Of course,” he said again. He never doubted it for a minute.

  “Specifically, it’s a moth orchid, phalaenopsis, said to resemble a moth in flight and native to”—she struggled to speak—“Southeast Asia.”

  She seemed to think he required more information, which he did, but not about the flower. “Rosamund.”

  “Hm?”

  “You research everything. Did you research sex?” He hoped to hell she had.

  She grew warm in his arms.

  God. She was blushing.

  “Yes.” She sounded stoutly defiant. “I was curious, and I thought there was a chance that someday I might . . . get to . . . you know . . .”

  Shit. She’d just admitted it. Virgin. Virgin. Virgin.

  “Darling, I promise. Today’s your lucky day.” What a stupid thing to say. He sounded like a guy flubbing his pickup lines in a bar.

  She didn’t seem to care, especially not when he used his hand to spread her legs, and ran his fingers under the lacy elastic, up and down, touching everything that had never been touched before.

  He was exploring untouched territory, and the mere thought made him harder.

  Primitive and brutish? Undoubtedly. Uncivilized? Completely. Politically incorrect? You bet. A big fat disadvantage when it came to having the kind of sex he wanted to have? Oh, yeah. But none of that made any difference to the primitive, brutish, uncivilized, and politically incorrect virile beast that hid in his brain and heart.

  Rosamund was a virgin. She was his, all his, only his. And he was going to keep it that way.

  He placed the heel of his hand at the front over her mound, and pressed it once. She jumped, caught her breath, looked frightened and . . . excited.

  Excited. Thank God.

  He did it again and again, a slow, warm pump of pressure. “Feel that?” he whispered. “That’s what it’ll feel like when I’m between your legs. It’s good, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Then there’s this.” He slid his fingers under the thong, separated her nether lips, found her clit, and stroked it between his thumb and fingers. “I can do this while we’re screwing, and you’ll orgasm. Over and over. You’ll be clawing with need and then limp with relief, and then clawing with need again.”

  She trembled in his arms, digging her fingers into his shoulders, moving her hips in tiny, uncertain circles.

  “I’m not sure, but I think you’ll scream while you come. Do you know? What kind of sounds you make?”

  “No, I . . . Sounds? Like moaning and . . . I can’t imagine I’ll make any sounds.”

  “Really?” If he could have, he would have laughed. “Do you use a vibrator?”

  She tensed. She wet her lips, trying to concentrate on answering the question while below, he stroked her, over and over. “I do. The vibrator. They say . . . um, religions say . . . that you’ll go crazy if you use one, but I think I’ll go crazy if I . . .”

  “Don’t?”

  “Right. If I don’t. The vibrator. It’s good.” Her lips parted as she tried to catch her breath. “That’s good, too. What you’re doing. Really good.”

  As the needs of her body overcame the cautions of her mind, her hip movements were becoming more insistent.

  He was seeing, bringing about, the blossoming of a warm, sensual, demanding creature.

  That blossoming made him feel like a god.

  As he touched Rosamund, she grew damp, and that was all the permission he needed. With one smooth motion, he thrust his finger inside her.

  His own audacity was almost his undoing.

  She was tight and hot, and his dick suddenly developed an imagination, one that claimed it, not his finger, was inside her. Aaron trembled on the verge of coming in his shorts, something he had not done since his early teens. He strained to hold himself back.

  Then he realized . . . she’d stopped moving and was barely breathing. . . .

  “What’s wrong?” He kissed her ear, her throat. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. No, but this is too . . .”

  She hesitated for so long, he found himself doing what he had sworn he would never do—trying to comprehend a woman’s mind. “It’s too . . . deep? Public? Distasteful?”

  She shook her head after each guess.

  “Intimate?”

  “Yes.” She hid her face in his shirt. “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to stop?” Merely asking the question almost killed him.

  She shook her head.

  No, stupid. She wants you to slow down. To seduce her. Because she is a virgin, and this is the price you have to pay.

  Be careful what you ask for, Aaron Eagle.

  Carefully, slowly, he slid his finger out of her.

  She whimpered in distress.

  Apparently, the intimacy was too soon and too intense, but at the same time, she liked having him fill her.

  He took the tiniest bit of comfort from that. Soon he would fill her with himself, breach her virginity, and she would gasp and hold him in her arms, and he would bring them both to climax.

  Soon. Damn it. Soon.

  He wedged himself in the corner between the door and the leather back, then pulled her into his lap, discarding her panties on the way. He cradled her shoulders with one arm, her bare bottom against his closed fly, a taunt to his control, and let her legs sprawl across the seat.

  He leaned around to reach for the champagne flute.

  She chose that moment t
o squirm in his lap, trying to adjust her skirt over her thighs to some instinctive female predetermined decent level halfway down her thighs.

  Her butt wiggled against the hardest erection he’d ever experienced, an erection so big King Kong could have climbed it holding Fay Wray in his palm. Aaron could almost see an atomic blue glow coming from his balls, and it was a miracle the damned crystal flute didn’t crack in his grip.

  When she finally subsided, he ungritted his teeth long enough to ask, “Satisfied?” Because he sure as hell wasn’t.

  Something of his agony must have sounded in his voice, for she cast him a look of cautious horror. “Am I too heavy?” She tried to spring free.

  “No.” He caught her around the waist. “You are not too heavy. I simply want you to enjoy a sip of champagne. I know Philippe, and I’m sure this is no less than Dom Perignon.” He held the glass to her lips, and watched her profile as she took her first sip.

  She closed her eyes as if the taste was ecstasy, and that worshipful expression made him want to pull her under him and show her another way to ecstasy.

  In a dreamy voice, she said, “Do you know Dom Perignon is famous for tasting champagne and saying, ‘I am drinking the stars’?”

  “I’ve heard that.” Of course, she knew more about it than he did. The woman was a plethora of both useless and useful information.

  “Actually, while the good monk was responsible for increasing the quality of the Benedictine wines, he didn’t make bubbly champagne, and the quote came from late nineteenth-century advertising.” She cupped his hand with hers to bring the glass to her mouth again. “But it really is like drinking stars.”

  “Yes.” He leaned his mouth close to her ear, and suggested, “If you would like, I can show you other ways to taste the stars.”

  Rosamund audibly swallowed her wine. “Really?” Her voice squeaked.

  The clean scent of her hair filled his head, intoxicating him as surely as the champagne intoxicated her. “Finish your glass,” he said, and immersed his fingers into his own champagne flute.

  The champagne bubbled against his skin, and he almost laughed at her expression—amazed and rapt as he slipped his hand under her skirt, shocked by the cool touch of his champagne-dipped fingers in the warmth between her legs. “Darling, open for me. A little more . . .”

  She did. Gradually, with reluctant fascination.

  He dipped his fingers again, and this time when he slid his fingers along her clit, she whimpered. “Do you like that?” he whispered in her ear. “Can you feel the bubbles?”

  “It feels like it tastes. Cool and sort of—”

  He repeated his actions—the dip into the glass, the caress between her legs, over her clit, around the entrance to her body, and back to the glass. “Sort of what?” he asked.

  “Intoxicating. I feel as if the world is spinning away from me. Is it possible to get tipsy from champagne . . . there?”

  “I don’t know. Let me see.” In one easy motion, he slid out from underneath her, leaving her wedged into the warm place in the leather that he had just vacated. He spread her legs wider, pushed his arm under her bottom, tilted her hips up, and leaned forward to taste her.

  And there it was, on the pale skin of her inner thigh—an orchid, genus phalaenopsis, opening its pink petals just for him.

  “Aaron. No!” She tried to push him away.

  But this time he wouldn’t allow her to escape. “Shh,” he whispered against her skin. “I’m getting tipsy on champagne. And you.” He tasted her, controlling her struggles, then pressed his tongue inside, long, slow, damp thrusts of his tongue that matched the ancient, primitive rhythm of sex. Dimly he heard her moans, small and quiet at first; then as she lost control, they grew deeper, longer, more desperate.

  Taking his glass, he took a sip of champagne; then with the cool liquid still on his tongue, he kissed her nether lips again.

  Never had champagne tasted so much like an aphrodisiac.

  Her legs moved restlessly around him. She put one foot flat on the seat, the other against the floor. With one hand, she held his head in place, while the other dug divots into the leather seat. She lifted herself to his mouth, over and over, demanding, without words, that he give her what he had promised. That he give her satisfaction.

  He took another sip of champagne, held it in his mouth, and lavished the bubbly wine into the most intimate places of her body.

  She hovered on the brink for a long, long minute. Then he took her clit and sucked the champagne, and her clit, and at the same time thrust his finger inside her—

  Just as he had known she would, she screamed, screamed and arched as if he’d branded her with his tongue.

  And maybe he had.

  Her orgasmic spasms went on and on, clutching at his finger, filling his mouth, feeding his need to make her happy and his desperate desire to make her his own.

  And he would. Now. Here. On the seat. He wanted to wrap her in his arms, to feel her buck against him. He wanted to thrust his knee between her legs to prolong her pleasure. He wanted to know how it would be for him when he pressed his cock inside her. And why not? She was ripe, ready, damp and halfway to another climax.

  He pulled her down on the seat and under him. He reached for his fly and—

  That dumb son of a bitch Claude tapped on the window between the seats.

  Chapter 24

  “What the hell?” Aaron lifted his head. The car was slowing.

  “What is it?” Rosamund’s voice sounded blurred, uncertain.

  He lifted himself on one elbow.

  They had turned into the long, lighted driveway that led to the château.

  They were here. At the party. Now.

  “That liar Philippe said it would take an hour.” Aaron looked at his watch and swore viciously. “It’s been an hour and fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh, no.” Rosamund pushed her hair out of her eyes. “We’ve been doing, um, this for over an hour?”

  “Time flies when you’re having fun.” He was ten minutes away from his own satisfaction, and the château was two minutes away. Hell, he could get off in two minutes, but—He looked down at Rosamund.

  She had barely finished the kind of orgasm that made him want to polish his good lover merit badge. If he jumped her and finished in two minutes, he’d deserve to lose that badge forever. She needed more than a quickie and a pat on the butt. She needed a chance to find herself again. And she obviously didn’t have a clue how to do that because virgins didn’t know how to play at sophistication, pretend sex was nothing more than a game, recover from a quick romp and go on to another.

  That’s what he liked about her being a virgin. Right? Right?

  Somehow, his own pep talk wasn’t convincing him at all.

  But the lights along the length of the drive were shining in the windows, the evening was fading into night, and they had a job to do.

  The manuscript. They needed that manuscript.

  Focus, Aaron.

  Somehow, he needed to forget the demands of his libido and concentrate on a prophecy that would save his life, and hers, and maybe every one of the Chosen.

  “Come on, darling, let’s help you up.” With his hands under her arms, he slid Rosamund into the seated position. “That wasn’t the best way to end lovemaking, was it?” He found her tiny excuse for a pair of panties on the floor and slid them up her legs, trying desperately to ignore the garter belt and the scent of champagne and willing woman that wafted to his nose. “Lift up so we can put these on.”

  She pressed herself more firmly into the seat and whispered, “I’m . . . wet.”

  Well, of course she was. He’d been using champagne on her and she’d been coming into his mouth. . . .

  No! Don’t think of that.

  Because if he did, when Claude opened the door, Aaron would be on her and in her, and wouldn’t give a damn who saw his bare butt pumping away. . . .

  “Is there a napkin or something I could use to . . . ?” She lo
oked so humiliated he had to kiss her again. Just a quick, soft kiss to her lips.

  Pulling his handkerchief from his pocket, he pressed it between her legs.

  Her swift intake of breath told him she hadn’t quite finished her climax, and he was torn between regret and triumph. Regret that she would be frustrated; triumph that she would be helpless to resist him when he made his way to her bedroom later.