Darius: Lord of Pleasures (12 page)

With his wet finger, he touched the sides of her neck then drew a line from her throat to her cleavage.

“We’ll see how it takes on you, assuming you like it?”

“I love it. Thank you very much.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her against his side, and for the moment, Vivian was content to lie against his warmth, the lovely scent subtly spreading over them as they drowsed together.

“I’ll miss you.” Vivian’s words came out without any warning, to her or him, and Vivian felt Darius stiffen beside her.

“Vivian…”

“Don’t Vivian me.” She hitched her leg over his thighs, as if he might toss back the covers to escape her. “I’ve been married five years, and never once has William given me a gift this thoughtful. This personal. I’ve known you two weeks, and you give me this… and frocks, gloves, and waltzes, and… I know, it means nothing to you, but to me…”

“To you?” His face was unreadable, but he wasn’t telling her to hush or to finish her tea, nor was he lecturing her about ices on hot days.

“I was a married spinster—you were right. Not so much in my dress and choice of reading material, but inside, where no one sees. Where no one cared to see.”

“It can’t mean anything,” he said sternly, as if he were reminding himself and hoping it was true.

“Too late, Darius.” She closed her eyes and relaxed against him. “What you think you mean, is that the sexual business means nothing. What you really mean, is you want Darius Lindsey to mean nothing to me. The two are not the same, and you won’t convince me they are.”

He kissed her into submission, gently, slowly, entrancingly, and she let him sweep her away again, because he’d at least let her have her say, and she owed him the fair hearing he was demanding with his hands and mouth and body.

But what was wrong with the man, that he’d try to convince them both such tenderness and caring meant nothing at all?

She bided her time and waited until the night before the New Year to counterattack. By tacit agreement, they now slept together in his bed, and on a few occasions, had fallen asleep without having intercourse. On those occasions, Vivian would wake up to find Darius making love to her sometime in the middle of the night. She had cuddled up with him and let sleep overcome her, because he’d exhausted her once again with final fittings, riding around the property, a rousing argument over the Catholic question, and a long chess match, which she’d won.

When she was sure he’d fallen asleep, she got up, built up the fire, and then gently eased the covers back to reveal Darius’s naked form.

Everlasting God, he was beautiful. The whip marks had faded, leaving only smooth, burnished skin over hard muscle and powerful bones. She knew his body now, knew the scents and textures, the sounds and touches. Tonight, she wanted to know the taste of him.

“Vivvie?”

“Here.” She curled down to rest her head on his stomach, and felt his hand stroking over her hair. Heaven help her, when did his touch create in her the desire to purr? Her hair, her hands, her shoulders, anywhere and everywhere on her body, she wanted his touch and missed it on some level when she didn’t have it.

She curled her fingers over his shaft, and his hand went still.

“Vivvie, no…”

“You hush,” she chided as she touched her tongue to the tip of his cock. “For once, Darius Lindsey, you hush, and you let me.”

His fingers laced through her hair, and Vivian was sure he was going to gently deny her this—deny himself this, more significantly—but then his palm cradled the back of her head, and she heard him sigh.

He said nothing, verbal surrender being too much to expect, and Vivian settled in to explore him with her mouth. He was religious about his personal hygiene and typically bathed before retiring. There was a lingering fragrance of lavender about his person, but something beneath that unique to him, and just as distinctive. Cautiously, Vivian used her tongue to wet the length of him, feeling his erection grow as she did.

When she concentrated her attention on the silky-smooth head of his cock, she felt the jump of arousal in his stomach where it lay under her cheek. She suckled gently, and his fingers tightened in her hair.

“Let me,” she whispered again, rubbing him against her cheek and easing off to stroke the wet length of him with her hand while she held the head of his cock in her mouth.

“You don’t owe me this,” Darius whispered, his voice oddly tight.

“Hush.” She emphasized her command by drifting her fingers over his balls, and he sighed and arched toward her. He liked her hands on him. He’d never said as much, but he’d told her nonetheless, and so she explored him with leisurely thoroughness, using her tongue and lips and fingers to map him over and over again.

His cock was magnificently hard, his hips moving in small, slow undulations when he again attempted to tug her away.

“Darius, no.” She returned to the spot under the tip of his cock and applied a hint of suction. “Let me, please.”

He went still, and she drew on him slowly, feeling arousal coil up more tightly in him, though his hips weren’t moving. She knew his struggle: This wasn’t merely an ice on a hot day, not merely a brisk gallop on a cool morning. There was nothing merely
anything
about letting himself have pleasure like this.

Holding him carefully in her mouth, Vivian reached over and found Darius’s free hand. She slid it up his torso until his fingers rested over his own nipple, and then she retrieved her hand and wrapped her fingers around the thick base of his shaft again.

The sound he made was low, pained, and soft, but when Vivian began to stroke him, he moved slightly in counterpoint. She caught the rhythm and gradually got her mouth, his hips, and her hand synchronized, until it was as if she could feel his arousal building in her own body.

“Vivvie…”

She neither paused nor sped up, but kept at him with the sort of determined patience he’d shown her time after time. His pleasure was the object of this exercise, and she would neither relent nor show him mercy. She’d learned that from him, that to pleasure another person took discipline and self-sacrifice and genuine caring. When she felt the tension in him drawing impossibly tight, she realized he was holding off, purposely, maybe trying to hold off altogether.

She drew on him, strongly, and when he would have pulled her away at the last moment, she held her ground and kept him in her mouth, where she could force pleasure upon him more, longer, deeper, than he’d intended to allow. His body had its revenge for all his discipline, and his release had him groaning as he bowed up, shook, and bucked against Vivian’s mouth and hand.

When he finally lay quiet on the mattress, breathing harshly, his hand loosely tangled in her hair, Vivian was still unwilling to relinquish him.

“God, Vivvie…” He sounded bewildered and spent. “Why?”

She closed her lips around his softening length, so he’d feel himself being drawn gently from her mouth, and got off the bed to fetch the wash cloth. As she tidied him up and offered him first crack at the water glass, she considered his question.

She’d done this because, in some regard, she’d come to love him. She’d wanted him to have something of her that was unique, something she’d never share with another. She had a need to give to him she couldn’t question at that moment, and it had felt right to do this with him.

But that answer would hardly serve, not with him already in full retreat. When she bundled in beside him, he obligingly wrapped an arm around her, but his touch was cautious and… withholding.

“Why?” He reiterated the question, sounding more in possession of himself and not particularly happy.

“I wanted to know I could,” she said, thinking it was a version of the truth. “I wanted to know what it was like.”

“Don’t do it again.” He kissed her temple; his tone was relieved. “Not with me. We’re supposed to be getting you a baby, if you’ll recall.”

She nodded, knowing if she didn’t do it with him, she wasn’t going to do it with anybody else. Not ever. Not because it was vulgar and base, as he no doubt thought, but because with Darius, it was sweet and lovely and unbearably intimate. She’d given this to him, but to demand one iota more would be more than his damaged image of himself could sustain.

***

Darius lay awake, his arms around Vivian, the weight of a thousand regrets on his heart.

Why on earth had he permitted this? None of them, not the laughing barmaids at Oxford, not the good-hearted ladies in Italy, not the scheming bitches he consorted with now—not one of them had been allowed what he’d just permitted with Vivian. Bad enough he was her stud, worse yet that he’d taken a hand in her wardrobe and appearance, worse still, he’d admitted to himself it was going to be hard to send her back to her William, but this…

He told himself he didn’t trust Lucy or Blanche not to harm him, did he allow them to French kiss him. Putting his cock between a woman’s teeth was an act of trust, no matter what else a man might say or boast or brag regarding the experience. With those two, it was unthinkable.

With Vivian, it had been impossible to deny her.

So she’d been curious, and he’d obliged her. That’s all it was. A small erotic experiment, quickly concluded and not to be repeated.

He dropped off into sleep on that thought, but when he woke and Vivian wasn’t with him, he was almost relieved.

Or so he told himself.

***

“So the smallest one, who could climb higher than any of the other kittens, went way, way,
way
up into the tree, until his brothers could see only his tail twitching among the branches, and from there he could tell them exactly in which direction the castle lay. All four kittens made it home by dark, and every other cat in the castle envied them their great adventure.”

“Did they live happily ever after?” John stifled a yawn, and it was clear he’d kept his eyes open by sheer determination.

“They did,” Vivian said, “although the smallest one grew up to become a great, lazy black tomcat who spent his time protecting his favorite little boy from mice.”

John smiled sleepily and scooted farther down under his covers. “Wags does that. Will you stay until I fall asleep?”

“Of course.” Vivian tucked the covers in more closely around the boy, kissed his forehead, and resumed her seat at the foot of his bed.

“Darius sings to me sometimes, when I’ve had a nightmare,” John said, eyes drifting closed. “I like the one about the lady with the green dress.”

Vivian took a moment to translate, but then she started in on a quiet version of the folk song “Greensleeves,” switching to a soft hum as John fell back to sleep. When she looked up, Darius was standing in the shadows by the door, arms crossed, regarding her from across the room. She rose, and he held out a hand. “Nightmare?”

Vivian tucked herself under his arm. “Gracie came to get you, but I heard her knocking, so I let you sleep. Does he get them often?”

“Yes.” Darius ran a free hand through his hair. “I think he dreams of his mother, of the few months of his life when she was extant, and then wakes up, and she’s not here, not anywhere.”

“But you’re here.” Vivian leaned up and kissed his cheek. “And he goes right back to sleep, the same as any child.”

“You think so?”

“I have two nephews and a niece. The boys are eight and five, and I can assure you they have had their share of nightmares, and their mother has never been farther away than the next hallway.”

He looked relieved, which made her realize how deeply he fretted for the boy.

“You’re doing a good job, Darius. John is a delight, and he loves you.”

Something shadowed crossed his features, but they’d reached Darius’s bedroom, and Vivian let him tug off her nightgown and bathrobe, then wrap himself around her in the middle of the bed.

“You love that child,” she said softly.

“I do.” Vivian couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she knew the admission cost him. “He wouldn’t love me, did he know all the circumstances of his situation here.”

“Yes, he would.” She laced her fingers through his where they splayed over her midriff. “Children can be very forgiving, and you’re doing the best you can for him.”

He gathered her closer and began to make excruciatingly tender love to her without saying a word.

That night marked the turning point in their dealings, with the date of Vivian’s scheduled departure drawing inexorably closer. They teased less, spoke less, and loved with a quiet desperation neither acknowledged. On the final night, Darius left her in peace to take her bath and tuck herself up in bed.

Near midnight, after much useless gazing into the fire in his study, he found her asleep in his bed for the last time and decided not to wake her. She’d become subdued these past few days, but so had he. When he’d found her tucking John in after a nightmare, something inside him had broken. Of all the burdens he carried, the burden of raising that child alone was the heaviest and the lightest. John was goodness, innocence, and all the hope and potential in the world.

John deserved to be loved and protected, and Darius died a thousand deaths every time Blanche tooled out in her coach and the servants hustled John up to the third floor, there to remain until Lady Cowell took herself off hours later, lighter in the pocket and none the wiser about the composition of Darius’s household.

He hated—
hated
—entertaining her under his roof and insisted on using a guest room at the back of the house to see her. Lucy, thank God, wasn’t inclined to stir so far from Town in search of her pleasures, but rather, delighted in demanding that Darius go always to her at the hour of her choosing.

“Darius?”

“Here.” He curled around Vivian’s back, fitting his groin to her derriere and snugging his arm around her waist. “Go back to sleep, love.”

“Where were you?”

“Making sure you’re packed.” He kissed her nape. In truth, he’d been sitting among her things, touching them, lifting them to his nose and wishing. Pathetic, but after tomorrow, the opportunity to be pathetic wouldn’t be within reach, so he allowed it.