“It is reassuring to discover, at least,” he said as he strode toward her and the bed, “that you have not lost your saucy tongue, Jane. I would certainly not enjoy you meek and submissive on your back. Now, what sensual delights can you dream up for me?”
She had learned a number of skills during the past week and a half. She had learned not to be shy of her own sexuality or his. It was clear that he really was going to wait for her to entertain him. He took up a stand beside the bed, his feet apart, his hands clasped at his back, and gazed at her with raised eyebrows. It was more than a little disconcerting and very definitely upsetting in light of what she had hoped their next encounter would be like.
She undressed slowly, teasing him with tantalizing glimpses of naked flesh, a little at a time. She folded each garment and turned to set it down on a chair. When she was naked, she lifted her arms and drew the pins from her hair one at a time until it cascaded about her. She smiled. Perhaps after all she could tease him out of his embarrassment over last evening—if that was what this abrupt change in him was all about.
He was still wearing his cloak, but he had thrown it back over his shoulders. He made no effort to hide the telltale bulge of his arousal pushing at the tight fabric of his evening knee breeches. Yet he did not move. His expression remained impassive.
She undid the buttons at his neck and let his cloak fall to the floor behind him. But in doing so she brushed against him and discovered something she had not known before—that there was something erotic about being naked with someone who was fully clothed.
“Sit down,” she invited him, indicating the bed.
He raised his eyebrows, but he sat on the side of it, bracing his feet apart, setting his hands behind him on the bed, supporting himself on his arms.
“You are learning wicked lessons that I have not taught you, Jane,” he said, watching as she unbuttoned his breeches and freed him of their silken confines. “What do you have in store for me? Mouth play?”
She knew instinctively what he meant. And though with her mind she thought it disgusting, she knew with her body that it would not be so. But she did not believe she could do it, even so. Not yet. Not unless the time should ever arrive when they could come together as lovers rather than as man and mistress.
She took him in her hands, caressed him, stroked him while he watched what she did with narrowed eyes. Then she knelt astride him on the bed, placed him at her entrance, and bore down on him. She stayed upright, her spine slightly arched backward, her fingertips on the satin of his evening coat at his shoulders. She looked into his eyes.
“Good, Jane,” he said. “Entertaining.” But he still did not move. He was long and rigid inside her, but he did not move. She could smell liquor on his breath.
He had taught her to ride. But she had done it before while he lay flat and she had leaned over him. And he had ridden with her, stride for stride. They had both labored toward the ultimate pleasure.
Tonight he sat still and watched her with his dark, dangerous eyes.
She was slick and wet and pulsing with desire. She would have liked nothing better than to feel him respond in more than just simple arousal, to have allowed him to lead the way to completion. But he would not do it. There was a darkness in him that she could not seem to lighten. He was still punishing both himself and her, she thought, for what he must see as the humiliation of his disclosures the evening before.
She kept her weight on her spread knees and calves. And she rode him. Not as she had done before, inner muscles clenching and unclenching to the rhythm of ascent and descent. There was a certain defense in such motions, a certain control over the rising and cresting of passion—at least until the final moments. This time she moved without defenses, her inner muscles relaxed, no barrier against the rigid hardness onto which she impaled herself time and time again as she rode the rhythm of sex. She arched her spine more, tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and braced her hands on his silken knees behind her.
She tried to show him with her body that she cared, that she would withhold nothing from him when he needed her. And despite his strange, bleak mood, she sensed that hedidneed her.
She did not know for how many minutes she continued while he remained hard and motionless. But desire became a raw ache, and ache became indistinguishable from pain before finally—ah, blessedly—his hands came to her hips and clamped there so unexpectedly hard that her rhythm and all her control shattered even as he thrust urgently and repeatedly up into her, pumping past the barrier she had deliberately not erected. She could hear herself sobbing as if she listened to someone else a great distance away. She heard the growl of his climax and felt the hot gush of his seed.
Union. Ah, the blessed union. He would be consoled now. They would lie together, warm and sated, and talk. She would reassure him and he would be Jocelyn again instead of the dark, dangerous Duke of Tresham.
Tomorrow she would be able to confide her own dark secrets to him.
She was panting and damp and chilly with perspiration. She still straddled him on the bed, her legs wide and stiff. He was still embedded in her. She lifted her head and smiled dreamily at him.
“Vastly entertaining, Jane,” he said briskly. “You are becoming skilled indeed at your profession. You are beginning to be worth every penny of your salary.” He lifted her off him, turned her so that she sprawled on the bed, and got to his feet. He began to button himself up again.
He might as well have hurled a pitcher of ice water over her.
“And you, of course,” she said, “have always been a master of the veiled insult. I perfectly well understand that this is what I am paid to do. You do not need to remind me just because you let down your guard last evening and embarrassed yourself by telling me things you deeply regret telling.” She pulled the bedcovers up to cover herself. Suddenly she felt very naked indeed.
“You are insulted, Jane,” he asked her, “to be told that you are remarkably skilled in bed? I do not often pay that compliment, you know.” He was throwing his cloak about his shoulders.
“I aminsulted,” she told him, sitting up and holding the covers to her breasts, “that you would think it necessary to degrade me, your grace, with this talk of skills and salary. I am insulted that you are ashamed of having confided in me merely because I am a woman and your mistress to boot. I thought we had become friends—and friendsdotalk to each other. They do confide in each other and share their deepest secrets and their deepest wounds. I was mistaken. I should not have forgotten that you pay my salary for this.” She indicated the bed with one sweeping arm. “And now I am tired. I have been working hard earning my living. Kindly leave, your grace. Good night.”
“Friendsconfidein each other, Jane?” He was glaring at her quite intently, his eyes very black. For a moment she felt frightened. She thought he was going to lean over and grab her. Instead he made her a sudden, ironically deferential bow and strode from the room.
Jane was left cold and trembling and lonelier and unhappier than she had ever been in her life before.
ASHE MADE HISway home to Grosvenor Square, Jocelyn’s mood was black indeed. He now thoroughly despised himself—a satisfyingly familiar feeling, at least. He felt as if he had raped her—though he had approached her in very much the way he had been accustomed to approaching his mistresses in the past. And he despised her. She ought not to have allowed him within touching distance of her tonight, but in fact she had serviced him like an experienced courtesan.
He hated her for lulling him all week into a belief that he had found a friend, a soul mate, as well as a damned good bed partner. For somehow inducing him to lower all his defenses, to share with her everything that was his most secret self. For somehow keeping him from noticing that she received but gave nothing except her body in return, that there was nothing reciprocal in their relationship.
She had taken his trust but had kept herself well hidden behind the position of mistress and the alias of Jane Ingleby. Yet she had dared just now to lecture him on the nature of true friendship.
