Devil at Midnight (8 page)

“Enjoy
might not be the appropriate term.”

Grace looked up at his acerbity. Every thought escaped him. Her eyes were the green of polished peridot, her dark red lashes heightening the color. With an effort, Christian cleared his throat.

“I feared you might be drawn with me,” he said. “When I left the house.”

She blinked as if she, too, had trouble following his words. Then she shook her head. “I don’t seem to be tied to you that way.”

“You could go anywhere you pleased when you went walking? Even outside the walls?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t try. But I saw no sign that I wouldn’t be able to. Do you ...” He watched her slender throat move with her swallow. “Do you want me gone that much?”

He had braced when she did, his shoulders tightening like a spring. Maybe he dreaded his answer as much as she dreaded hearing it. “You have no other acquaintances in this region? No friends you might like to ... see?”

She snorted bitterly through her nose, the sound an eerie twin to one he might have made himself. “I don’t know anyone here but you.”

Sudden moisture glittered on her lower lashes. She turned away and pressed her fist to her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said with that same brief laugh. “This is pretty darn pathetic.” She shook herself, pushing her shoulders back. “When I was alive, I didn’t get a chance to make friends. We were always moving from place to place. I didn’t dare let anyone get close. I couldn’t afford to let them know what my life was like. My father—” She stopped, then shook her head as if determined not to speak of that brute again.

“When the angel showed me what your father had done to you, when he said you and I were friends, I jumped at the chance to come. I didn’t think about what would happen next.”

A chill moved down Christian’s spine. “The angel showed you what my father did?”

“When he had you whipped.” She waved her hand, her voice lowering. “And the dog. I saw what he made you do to Lucy.”

She faced him again, and he was the one who now felt compelled to turn away. “I would not have had an innocent girl see that.”

“I know you didn’t want to hurt her. I know he left you no choice.”

Christian’s arm tingled where she touched it. He felt almost too stiff to move. “You saw me weep for her. That is why you offered me comfort.”

“Yes.” Her hand fell away, leaving an odd cold spot. “I assumed you knew.”

Had he known? Had he simply not wanted it put in words that she had witnessed his weakness?

“Christian.” Her low, throbbing voice shocked through him like a crossbow bolt. “There’s no shame in crying for someone you care about.”

“What about in being too weak to protect the people who rely on you?”

“Whatever you do, there’s always someone stronger.”

“I do not accept that,” he declared. “May the Almighty strike me down if I ever do.”

He had never spoken of these things, not even to Michael. It made him shake to have done so, a fine, tight tremor that vibrated in his marrow. When Grace stepped around to his front, his hands clenched without thinking.

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly, “that God would strike you for anything.”

This was not what he expected her to say. His throat was thicker than he wanted it to be.

“I am damned,” he said. “I have known that since I was seven, when the last of my three younger brothers died. Whatever my mother said, I knew there was a reason heaven wanted them and not me, a reason
I
would be left alone. Considering what I turned out to be, the cause is no mystery.”

She stared at him, not speaking for so long that he thought she would remain silent. He wished she would ... or that he had himself.

“I’ve wished some people damned,” she said at last, “but you aren’t one of them.”

She broke him as easily as if she were a ten-foot ogre with an enchanted sword. Tears spilled down his cheeks in two long, hot streams. He wiped them, but they kept coming. He remembered holding some of those younger brothers, the two who lived long enough. So small, so fretful, like little sacks of beans in his awestruck arms. As a boy, he had let himself love them, to hope each time that one would stay with him. Always he had been wrong. He choked for air as Grace reached up to dry his cheeks, but naturally that did nothing.

The kindness in her eyes did something. Ridiculous though it was, that was his personal aphrodisiac.

“I have gone mad,” he confessed with a shaky laugh. “In the midst of all of this, I would ravish you if I could.”

“I would let you,” she said.

He closed his eyes, tormented by a desire he truly did think would madden him. He looked at her again, at her lifted face with its cheeks blushing like sunset. Her lips were parted, her pupils huge. His breathing shifted, no tears in it anymore. He made a rash decision.

“Let down your kirtle,” he growled.

She flinched, but she did not flee.

“I want to see your breasts,” he explained.

“Are you going to touch yourself like you did before?”

“Yes,” he said, the word a hard rasp of sound.

She wet her full, red lips with her pointed tongue. Her gaze slid down to where his prick pushed thick and aching behind his hose. “Would you let me watch this time?”

“Yes,” he said as harshly as before.

She licked her lips again and took one step back. She was still close enough to touch, had that been possible. Clearly nervous, she shrugged the loose neckline of the kirtle over her shoulders.

The instant her breasts were naked, his hand dug into his braies.

“Is this all right?” she asked shyly.

He couldn’t look away from her. Blindly, he found his throbbing length and fisted it. Incited by her participation, the snug pressure of his fingers was even more welcome than before. He was used to swiving women, to being inside of them, but he had never felt this level of desire with others, or this level of pleasure. Unable to wait, he started working his pike, pulling with the tight, hard force his incredible need required. Her shape was lovely, the tightness of her puckered nipples, her collarbones, the faint golden down glinting on her curves. Her breasts looked like they would be just a bit heavy . . .

“You are beautiful, Grace.” His voice was so rough, so broken by the urgent rhythm of his efforts to ease himself that he had to wonder if she understood. Wanting her to, he pulled in a fuller breath. “I am honored to be the first man to see you.”

She bit her lip, hesitating. “I can’t see you well enough,” she confessed.

She nodded at his jerking hand and prick, which must have been obscured by his barely disarranged clothing. He had thought he was at the limit of lechery, but at her gesture heat lashed through him with renewed force. Cursing this additional flood of desire, he released himself, fumbled his points free from his doublet, and shoved his hose and braies down his hips. His prick thrust from the nest of hair at his loins, nearly on fire with its hard demands.

Grace’s eyes hooked on it.

“Better?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she whispered. Her tongue swept out tormentingly yet again. “Please go on as you were before.”

 

 

G
race loved his laugh, shaky though it was. It was low and male, tugging recesses deep inside her and leaving them warm and wet.

“I could not halt,” he said hoarsely, “not if the world were ending.”

The urgent motions of his right hand emphasized his claim. He was completely bare to her now: cock, balls, the tendons straining in the hollows of his strong inner thighs. His feet were planted wide for balance, kicked free of his discarded clothes. It was impossible to find his half dress silly. He was too virile.

Grace couldn’t help dropping to her knees, and never mind how fast that made her seem.

“Grace,” he moaned, but she couldn’t look up to see what her change in posture had done to him. What he was doing to himself had her complete attention, his white-knuckled grip pushing all the way down his thick, reddened shaft. When he reached its root, he tugged the whole of his cock up and out again. His penis was very hard, but he was still flesh, and his fingers compressed his skin. He tightened them each time he crossed the flare that marked the separation of shaft and head. Then, at the top, his fist engulfed the crest and squeezed, each time, over and over, as if he most liked the pressure there.

Grace’s fingers curled into her palms watching it.

His crown was wet and shiny in the candlelight, not from sweat but from the tiny beads of fluid that were welling steadily from its slit. As that wetness grew, drawn up and down by his working hand, the sound his fist made became a slap.

“Grace,” Christian groaned. “When you lick your lip like that, I go mad.”

“Don’t finish,” she pleaded, moving nearer. “I’m not done watching you.”

She was so enraptured by his intimate performance that she didn’t think twice about bracing her ghostly palms on his thighs.

“Grace!”
he choked out.

This time his voice was so agonized she had to lift her gaze. His expression was every bit as contorted—and ecstatic—as that man Philippe’s in the dining hall.

“Can you feel my hands?” she asked.

“They tingle,” he gasped, beginning to grunt in the helpless, guttural fashion she remembered vividly from before. The muscles of his stomach tightened until she saw every one. “Grace, put your hands on my ballocks.”

She only just understood him. She cupped her spectral hands around his updrawn scrotum. When it had risen, she didn’t know; his testicles had been hanging lower when she last looked. She didn’t have a chance to ask him. His entire body jerked at her touch, shoving her hold slightly
inside
his flesh. Her hands buzzed, her skin pulsing wildly all over. He must have felt the interpenetrating contact as strongly as she did.

He made a sound—not quite her name, not quite a growl—thick with the sort of yearning epics were spun around. Aching for him more than she had for anyone in her life, Grace gathered her nerve to press her ephemeral lips to the tip of him.

His seed exploded from his penis in a shocking rush, shooting through her with an odd tickling sensation. Between her legs, her body clenched, but she couldn’t reach the same culmination, not without more help.

Exhausted, emptied, Christian dropped to his knees on the bare hard plaster in front of her.

“Grace,” he said, trying pointlessly to take her face in his hands. In stark contrast to before, when he had looked strained, his eyes were heavy and relaxed. “Fare you well?”

She nodded, though she was shaking.

He smiled, his slash of a mouth now fuller from his satisfaction. He brushed one tingling fingertip down her cheek. “You have a garden of roses blooming here. You make me wish I had the power to pleasure you.”

“That’s all right,” she said hastily.

He drew his hand down her front, his longest finger trailing directly over her left nipple. Grace jumped at the featherlight but very personal touch. She had her palms pressed anxiously to her diaphragm, one on top of the other. Christian laid his large hand over her smaller ones. When he did, it felt as if a breeze were whispering over them.

“Perhaps you could touch yourself,” he said huskily.

She shrank back from him in alarm, sitting on her heels with her head wagging. Christian’s eyebrows rose.

“You would deny me the delights of watching you?”

“I can’t,” she gasped breathlessly.

His gaze slid down and up her body, lingering on her bare, trembling breasts. Grace had never seen an expression that fiery—not even on a movie screen. Christian was a prince, darkly elegant and dangerous. She tensed when his eyes locked with hers again.

“Do you think heaven would punish you for seeking release?”

His question seemed serious.

“I can’t,” she repeated. “Not with you here.”

He continued to search her face, the insidiously seductive heat clearing only slowly from his features.

“You are shy,” he concluded.

She nodded, teeth sinking into her lower lip.

His smile was deeper this time, the shallowest of dimples appearing magically in one cheek. Her nipples tightened as he leaned closer.

“I see I shall have to devise some other method,” he murmured next to her ghostly ear.

C
hristian wondered what sort of weak-willed mooncalf reveled in the company of a ghost. He must have been demented to do and say what he had last night. Once the cold light of morning dawned, with its promise of sanity, he should have been terrified by Grace’s continued presence, should have feared for his already blackened soul. Instead, when she asked him—eyes downcast and hesitant—if she might stay with him that day, he had said she should please herself.

He had said it gruffly and with apparent bad temper. Inside, though, he had been disconcertingly gratified.