Master: An Erotic Novel of the Count of Monte Cristo (38 page)

“Mercédès,” he gasped, surging back up to cover her body with his, his mouth musky and wet, sliding over her chin and to her lips, taking and tasting as he fitted his hips against hers, groaning desperately into her mouth as her hands reached down to close around his cock. She stroked him, slipping his head in and around her quim, feeling him tense and shudder against her, his body damp with holding back, strong and heavy and rough against her soft skin.

She would have lifted her hips to slip him in, but he pulled away suddenly, leaving her cool and spread wide, and for a moment, she was confused . . . but then he slung her up into his arms, and she fell against his solid chest as he began to walk toward the little cottage.

Inside, he strode smoothly to the room she slept in, placing her on the little bed so that her hips rested on its edge and her feet on the floor. Standing there in front of her, he drew her legs long and straight behind him, sliding his hands beneath her ass to raise her hips from the bed as he stood against it. He looked magnificent—long and lean, the planes of his chest dusted with dark hair, the smooth curves of shoulder to biceps to forearm shadowed by the late-afternoon light. His hips were narrow beneath the width of his shoulders, and his belly flat. His cock jutted straight from the shock of black hair as he looked down at her, his eyes gleaming hot and his lips full and moist.

Mercédès shifted her hips in his hands, feeling the gentle bite of fingers in her bottom, and suddenly he moved, slipping himself in, her eyes closing with the intensity of the pleasure. He gave a quiet, desperate groan as he eased fully into place and held there . . . just breathing, his hands beneath her, the soft twitch of his cock deep inside.

She opened her eyes then, and saw his face stressed and tight, his mouth drawn flat and his eyes . . .
Dio,
his eyes so deep and dark and haunted. They frightened her.

And then he began to move, slowly at first, as though to take great care, to savor it, and Mercédès closed her own eyes, and felt pleasure release within her as her fingers splayed over the warm, tight skin of his back. Long and easy, he moved away—then hard and strong to fill her up again. She gave a soft cry when he thrust back in, felt his own responding moan rumble through the back of his lungs.

And so it was, easy and slow he rocked against her, and she lifted to meet him. Pleasure brought tears to her eyes, and she let them leak from there, trickling onto the quilt beneath. It was bittersweetly familiar and yet foreign to feel him against her, inside her, filling and releasing her in a smooth, slow rhythm. Their breathing rose, became more ragged . . . her skin flushed warm and his muscles tightened under her hands. . . . It wasn’t enough. . . . She wanted more. . . .

Suddenly, it was as if a string broke and released them— he surged up onto the bed, bringing her with him, lifting her away from the edge and falling over her. Mercédès’ feet slammed onto the soft mattress, and then they were thrashing together, wildly smashing body to body, hip to hip, gripping and scratching and urging and riding until he cried out, and she groaned, and they fell against each other, sated and sagging, sweaty and musky.

Mercédès came back to herself when she felt the gentle kiss on the side of her neck, the feathery stroke along the curve of her back. She realized what she’d done, and allowed . . . how everything had fallen away in favor of nostalgia and memory.

Monte Cristo raised his face, and she saw streaks of moisture running down his cheeks. She didn’t know if they were rivulets of tears or of perspiration, but it didn’t matter.

She wouldn’t let it matter.

Before she could speak, he bent toward her, covering her mouth with a tender kiss that took her breath away, started the curl of pleasure again in her belly, and she closed her eyes against it. Passing a hand over her face, she smelled the remnants of chicory and sex. He withdrew and slid onto the bed next to her with a soft, heartfelt sigh.

Mercédès lay there, listening to him breathing, for a long while, staring at the plaster ceiling above, the light brown spots from the leaks, the cracks from the settling walls, and memorized the moment, taking herself back to twenty-four years ago when she lay next to Edmond Dantès.

Finally, he spoke, breaking what had grown into a charged silence. A waiting, for all of the things that yet needed to be said. “He raped you.”

A shiver ran over the back of her neck at the sound of the blunt, real words, but Mercédès didn’t allow them to sink further into her consciousness. This wasn’t how—or when—she’d imagined this conversation would begin, but it was too late.

She steeled herself against the reality of the statement, for she couldn’t relive those days, those months, at the hands of Villefort; she’d worked too hard to build a wall around the memories and keep them barricaded from her dreams. It had been the only way she could carry on, and, later, to exist in her life in Paris, interacting with the man everyone admired and sought after, when she knew the depths of his ugliness.

But he was not the only man whose ugliness had been revealed to her. Fernand. Villefort. Even Monte Cristo himself.

“He raped you, and yet you returned to him.” There was no accusation in his voice, only disbelief, and pain, and sorrow as he pulled up onto his elbow to look down at her. “Your letter—I thought I understood, after you told me, but . . . your letter.” He drew in a breath, closed his eyes for a moment. “You returned to him again and again . . . and he used you and raped you. You could have stayed away. You could have revealed it, told someone, Mercédès.”

At last, she couldn’t hold it back. She sat up abruptly, pulling away to sit on the edge of the bed, half facing him, half toward the shuttered window that allowed the summer light in. “And then I would have had no chance of word of you, Edmond. I bore it—the pain, the humiliation, the degradation—for more than a year because he made me believe he could help me. That he would have news, that he would find you and bring you back to me. I was nothing but a poor Catalan girl then—ignorant and naive, and he used that against me. But I let him because I still had hope. I thought that even if he didn’t tell me, I might learn something by being in his office . . . by searching through his files and papers when he wasn’t there. When he left me, bruised and aching—and sometimes bloody—there in the storage room behind his office, when he’d go to meet with his colleagues, I took the opportunity to search.”

She realized her hands were shaking, the quilt mangled and crushed in her grip. She sucked in a ragged breath and swallowed, closing her eyes against the tears that threatened. It was a long time ago. The only good thing that had come of it was Albert. Yes, the son of a man she hated, but he was her son. Wholly, wonderfully, beautifully hers. And he’d proven his worth, his character, by rejecting everything Fernand had given him.

“Did Fernand know?”

“He knew that I was with child, that that was the only reason I agreed to marry him. He knew he would likely never father his own—I’m certain your investigations turned up the information that he preferred men. Or at least, very stimulating episodes. And I was afraid . . . afraid that if Villefort knew I’d gotten with his child that he would do something horrible.”

“As he did with the child he fathered on Madam Danglars not so long afterward? He buried it alive in order to keep it a secret, and it was Bertuccio, the man who later became my majordomo, who found the babe and raised him. Later, after the boy grew up and ran away to seek his fortune, I located him and brought him back to Paris so that he would reveal himself.”

Mercédès nodded, for she had heard the news from Maximilen Morrel and his sister, Julie. “And so Villefort’s career was destroyed by the revelation of the son he thought he’d murdered come back to life. And now the death of his beloved daughter, Valentine, and the suicide of his second wife has driven him irrevocably mad. Danglars has become bankrupt and has run off to Italy. And Fernand is dead, by his own hand—yet the weight of your own hand is clear in all of this.”

Now she pulled awkwardly to her feet, her knees weak and trembling as she stood over him where he sat upright on the bed. “And so you have come here now to finish your vengeance on me, then? The last of those who wronged you? Oh, of course . . . and our children too. For they must bear the burden of our sins as well.”

“No, Mercédès, no.” His voice was taut. “No. I’m done . . . done with that. I was wrong. I came to see you. To tell you I love you. Could you not see it? Feel it?”

“Ah, yes . . . you allowed both of us to receive pleasure at last.” Her lips twisted as she reminded herself who he’d become.

“Mercédès, I came to beg your forgiveness.”

“You have it, for what you did to me, for what you believed about me. Yes, I can forgive you that—for how could you have known I whored myself for you? You could not have known, and in light of all that had been done to you by Danglars and Fernand and Villefort, I can at least understand why you should think it.

“But you do
not
have my forgiveness for planning to kill my son. And for letting Valentine Villefort die. They were innocent people—innocent of all of the perfidy of their fathers—and yet you planned to destroy their lives without a second thought. And your friend Maximilien Morrel, who trusted you . . . who came to you for help, and whom you betrayed by letting him believe you would save Valentine. All in the manner of revenge.” She stepped back, away from his devastated face, but she kept her eyes on him. “
I loved Edmond Dantès
. But I do not love the man he’s become—burning with vengeance, ruthless, and destructive. Cold and calculating and unfeeling. You are no better than Fernand or Villefort.”

He scrambled off the bed, tall and dark and hard, reaching for her. “Mercédès, no. I’ve come to the end of it all. It’s done. You . . . and your letter . . . helped me to realize how wrong I was.”

She pulled away before he touched her. “Yes. Yes, it is. It’s done, Your Excellency. It’s done, and now you feel the guilt, the compassion, the regret.” She felt the burn of tears in her eyes, but she held back the emotion. “But it’s too late. Nothing will change the fact that you would have killed my son, merely for being the flesh and blood of a man—and woman—who wronged you. And that you stood by and allowed Valentine Villefort to die in order to add to the destruction of her father’s life.

“But the worst, Your Excellency, is that you betrayed Maximilien. You led him to believe that you could have saved his love, and you did not. He put his trust in you because you’d saved his family once before, and you betrayed him, just as you were betrayed by trusting in Villefort. So, yes, it is done. I am done.”

His face was a mask of stone. “You don’t understand. I had—”

She stood at the door of the room, aware that her last words to him would be said between two naked bodies. “No, Your Excellency, I don’t understand. And I have no wish to. I have loved and lost Edmond Dantès . . . and loved and lost him
again
. I will have no more of it. Edmond Dantès is dead, and the Count of Monte Cristo is abhorrent to me. Now leave. Leave me to pick up the pieces of my life yet again, and to find a simple and worthwhile way to live.”

She closed the door behind her.

Mercédès was sitting on the single chair in the small kitchen area when he came back out, fully dressed. When she heard him draw in his breath to speak, she held up a hand to stop him. “No.”

“Mercédès,” he said, his voice strong and harsh, “I ask you to do one more thing for me—no, not for me. For Edmond Dantès. For the man you once loved.”

He waited, and she did not respond. She was so weary and heartsick!

When she didn’t speak, he continued in that urgent, hard voice. “I have made an agreement with Maximilien Morrel that he should come to me in three weeks, exactly one month after the death of Valentine Villefort. He meant to put a bullet in his head immediately upon hearing the news of her death, but I made him promise to wait until he comes to me for our meeting, after one month . . . and then if he still wished to end things, I would help him to make it painless.

“For there was a time . . . many times . . . when I desired the sleep of death myself. And I can understand the attraction of it.”

“You need not fear that I wish to end my life,” she replied coldly, wishing he would leave. Go, before she softened again and reached for him, curled her body around his strength and begged him never to leave her again . . . Edmond, Sinbad, Monte Cristo. “The Count of Monte Cristo has not that much influence on me.”

“No,” he said harshly, and she felt rather than saw him flinch as if to move toward her—but then he obviously thought better of it. “No, that is not what I meant. But my last request to you is that you accompany Morrel when he comes to meet me. And then . . . and then I vow that I will never darken your door again. Will you do that? Come with him?”

Mercédès lifted her shoulders in a deep sigh. “I will do it, but only for Maximilien. Not for you. Never for you.”

EIGHTEEN

The sight of the craggy rock of an island brought back a wave of memory for Mercédès. She stood on the deck of the yacht
Nemesis
, the same one that had brought her here nine months earlier. The same sailor, Jacopo, captained the small vessel.

Mercédès had made him promise to let her take Maximilien Morrel’s remains back to Marseille with her after their meeting with Monte Cristo. She realized Jacopo was in service to the count, but she believed he would keep his word.

Next to her, on the small deck, his own fingers curled in a death grip around the rail, Maximilien stood. He’d stared out beyond the horizon since the moment they’d boarded the yacht, two days earlier in Marseille, going below only briefly to sleep when his knees could no longer keep him upright. His face, red and beaten by the sun, his hair a matted mass of windblown curls, and the gauntness in his cheeks bespoke his grief and longing.