My Lady Gambled (12 page)

He brooded over the fact that it was deucedly hard to do romance, of the courting and wooing nature, without tumbling into heated sexual passions. Everything, with a woman that he loved in his mind, alluded to sex. He wondered exactly what two people could do romantically for a full evening while excluding sex? Especially when all he wanted to do was to make love to Joelle for hour upon hour. It was on his mind constantly. 

Saxon was sincerely glad that he had the full elegant trappings of an English nobleman on this evening. He should be taking Joelle out to dine, to dance. It would be much better to stay focused on his goal of treating her like the respected and honored woman he intended to marry, easier if other people surrounded them. He just could not bring himself to share her though, even in simple social gatherings where it would be easier to respectfully court her.

He was a selfish bastard, but determined. He might never be able to wipe away his near rape of Joelle in the lewd sexual ceremony they had been forced to perform by The Order of the Satyr. Nevertheless, he could show the woman he loved that he cherished her, respected her, and wanted to hold her up upon a pedestal of honor in his life. It was the right thing to do for the mother of his future children, however he was beginning to become disillusioned because it was obvious that Joelle was not sailing upon the same boat as he was.

At first he had thought that the stress of trying to bring The Order down could be upsetting Joelle. That was until last night, when the first clue came to him that his Lady Firefly was perturbed at the sexual constraints of noble courting. It seemed that perhaps, while he was allowing her tender time to recover from their ordeal and find a romantic footing in their relationship, Joelle had a whole different outlook.

Still, he denied her.

Denied them actually, and he tried to tell himself that it was because he knew better, that he was thinking more clearly than Joelle. In time she would look back and thank him, saying that she had not been herself in the upheaval of events, and she was glad that he was stronger and wiser. His justification had actually stood him strong, until last night, in the middle of a sleepless night, when he’d finally had to admit the real reasons to himself. After much soul searching, he was just not certain he could tell the real reasons to Joelle that he’d discovered.

Could he be so harsh to her, or was it better to keep to the idea that he wanted to court her, and she deserved it? It was not an untruth, just not the entire truth, and he had himself convinced it was still the best way. At least until after they dealt with The Order, and the outcome showed them both alive and well.

As noble as he wanted to be in demanding that Joelle stay out of bringing The Order down, he could not. He could not take that away from her, even though it would likely put both of them in extreme harms way again. So, the entire point being that he could not say with confidence that either of them would make it out of this alive. He was not the type of man to delude himself. It was going to be dangerous, and while he could attempt to protect Joelle as much as possible, he was not a miracle worker.

Saxon angrily batted the tail end of a linen napkin sticking out over the edge of a table, then grimily he turned toward the fire. “And, I will not take the chance of sending you pregnant into all of this!” 

That was it, the final blow! It was the thing he hesitated to put into words, while even becoming angry at Joelle for not thinking of it. However, he knew that his anger was really masking fear. His terror at the thought that he could lose Joelle, at the same time he did not try to stop her, but let her go along. He suddenly knew what women felt, who for ages watched their men go off to war.

“Put a brave face on it, man,” Saxon muttered, adjusting the waterfall folds of his cravat. So, dressed to the nines, cloaked in evening attire that he considered dress armor against Joelle’s sexual allure, he would put on a courageous face and live in hope for the future.

Then, Saxon heard the door across the room and behind him opening. He turned at the same moment, wondering why he did not hear his butler’s voice announcing Joelle’s arrival. Yet Joelle stood just inside the closed door. He started toward her, however her hand came up with the clear gesture that she wanted him to stop. His feet halted as he opened his mouth to speak. Yet, just as before, Joelle raised a straight finger to her lips, making a shushing sound. He became aware that she still wore a deep red cloak, which was a stunning backdrop for the long waves of her richly toned black-cherry hair. It occurred to him that her hair was hanging free as his gaze traveled down the length of her cloaked body. It was unusual for her hair not to be caught upward in some style that women wore. His encompassing gaze ended its downward trail on her bare feet.

Immediate stimulation tingled in every fiber of his maleness. Bare feet, red painted toenails, and some type of gold anklet. That Joelle’s feet were bare coupled with her loose flowing hair told him something he had not planned for was “afoot.” That comprehension came one second before the red cloak sailed downward into a pool at Joelle’s feet.

Saxon resisted the urge to jerk his gaze upward to see the rest of what Joelle’s lovely bared feet promised. It was a tribute to his spying career and many intense undercover moments that he managed it all. What he did see were wisps of different colored silks floating around shapely ankles, encircled in gold bangles.

He was in trouble.

Saxon resolutely kept the small silver hook that replaced his missing hand at his side, even though he had the inclination to raise it and tug at his collar like a young man. His gaze stayed lowered as he cleared his throat, and asked in a restrained voice, “Joelle, what are you doing?”

The only answer came in a sound. The jingling of many thin metal objects in unison, then falling silent sharply. The sound so unusual, Saxon lifted his gaze despite his effort not to. Dear Lord, he thought, with sexual awareness striking through his body, leaving instantaneous evidence arousing every nerve ending. It pooled with purpose in the eroticism of his mind, and the lust of his cock, while his gaze devoured Joelle’s attire.

Or lack there of … 

Really, he tried to think logically, it was the mystery of the delectable pieces of feminine shape that he could and could not see that were fermenting him. The bare cleavage of ripe breasts with rounded inner slopes revealed to tantalizing depths, but covered just shy of a nipple on each side. One side was barely veiled, with a single purple-colored gossamer scarf. The other breast was scantily clad in light blue sheerness.

That was the motif of the entire outfit. Skimpy! Whose origins he could barely guess, while his masculinity paid homage to whomever could be so generously creative on behalf of all men. His eyes moved from a naked and satin-smooth belly, to one rounded hip peeking through, and onto shapely shoulders, enticing feminine collarbones topped off with lush lips painted red and the kohl shadowed eyes of pure allure.

How was he going to refuse the quite obvious intention of this? “Joelle, we have to talk!”

Joelle’s left hip rolled upward and stopped abruptly with the bangles adorning her lifting and jangling together, then falling silent with sharply cut stillness. Saxon watched Joelle’s back arching as she reached back and lifted a large quantity of her black-cherry colored hair above her head, while her sable eyes sparkled with seduction.

Saxon raised his hand to her, in a half-hearted halting gesture. “No, really, Joelle. This is serious!”

With each single word that he spoke, Joelle’s hip rolled and the bangles sounded as she moved toward him. It was as though she spoke through her body to the bangles sound. No! No! No! No! To each word he tried. What could he do?

He backed up, and Joelle followed, speaking extraordinary and carnal things with her body until the back of his legs hit the settee by the fire. Transfixed, Saxon realized he had never known a woman’s bare belly and hips could move with such overt and riveting male enslavement. He felt flushed and that almost embarrassed him, the part of him that could still think at all beneath the thralldom of Joelle’s lush and supple female body moving like sex.

Sex was the only way he could describe it. It was the most sexual thing he had ever seen, and being in love with the woman performing it only exacerbated his seething inner reaction. Well, his visible outer reaction too. His cock was quite simply saluting the effort with hardened cheers. The buttons on his evening trousers were about to bust. It did not help matters that he had been sexually denying himself for a long time.

So when Joelle stood two paces from him, shimming her breasts and belly, bangles ringing songs of lust in his ears, he only stood there, ogling her like a lecherous idiot, while she lifted the end of one scarf and placed it in his hand.

He noted that the scarf was crimson, and it had been covering the area between Joelle’s succulent thighs. But, with his gaze so interested, he did not see Joelle’s hand raise to his chest. However, he felt the shove and unguardedly he fell, to end up sitting on the settee with the crimson scarf clutched in his fist, pulled free from Joelle’s scant attire.

His gaze filled with pussy, moving pussy, pussy eliciting erotic rhythms from the rolling and undulation of Joelle’s rounded hips. His heart literally pounded. He had shaved Joelle’s pussy once at the forced behest of The Order. Be that as it may, all the dark luxurious curls had grown back. Now, he wanted to bury his face in her lavish muff. He wanted to find the crease with his tongue. Damnation, he wanted to plunge his fingers deep into her hot sheath, searing them with the juices she was effusing, readying for his cock. Saxon lifted his hook to his cravat and he tugged, pulling at it until the restrictive feeling around his throat eased, and it laid undone with his throat bare.

Joelle circled her hips, listening to the music of the bangles. She could slow it into seductive beckoning or hasten it into urgent tempos. Then she slowed, snaking her hips languidly as she lifted one bare foot to the arm rest of the settee, bending her knee as she surged her hips in slow motion. She had never done a dance this outwardly raw and sexual before, exposing her sex, even lifting her leg to reveal where the puffy lips could be seen.

She watched Saxon’s gaze attach to this display like a hunter. A sexual hunter. A mating stalker, and exactly what she wanted! She could feel the excitement of attracting him thrum deep in her sex—building. After this extravagant overture, if Saxon did not grasp another scarf soon and start unwrapping her, she was going to thwack him. Just like her animated mother use to do to her “full-of-life father” to get his attention going in the prescribed direction.

Saxon appeared ensnared, with an aura of enormous restraint stretching him to the snapping point, but to her vexation, he did not snap. He looked like a proud and virile male predator, with his long mane of maple-colored hair flowing unbound down his back and his brown eyes showing mahogany tinted flames. She could see he lusted— tremendously and it tensed his body and stilled him to chiseled male. Yet, he would not leap, even as she turned her back to him and bent forward slightly shimming her barely concealed buttocks at him.

Spirits! He was so stubborn, nearly as stubborn as she was. “Saxon Hartley if you do not take another scarf off me this instant, I’m going to walk out of here and never return!” she threatened brashly, as she shook her head in emphasis. Her hair came tumbling down in front of her, as she bent forward and looked over her shoulder at him.

Her words leaped the sparking fires in Saxon’s irises up to her gaze. She felt his restraint nearly snap, and it seemed that he barely caught it back. The feeling of that bridled ardor, flushed her arousal with poignant throbs building steadily in her sex.

“I will not take the chance of impregnating you! Not now. We can not!” Saxon expelled through lips she could see were drawn tight. 

At the same moment she exclaimed, “This is why you refuse to make love with me?” Joelle stopped her dance movements, straightening and turning to face Saxon with her hands braced on her hips. She might thwack him yet!

“I do not refuse you!” Saxon said, in the first angry voice she could remember him using on her. That was besides the first time after they were initially kidnapped, and she had basically raped him to destroy her virginity, which The Order coveted. “I deny us, as I think you would do also!”

That struck Joelle a little too close to sounding condescending and as if she was not intelligent enough to have thought about this. Truth was, she had not. However, she adamantly thought the cause was her lusty gypsy blood, not her intelligence. Desire had simply distracted her.

How dare he?! “Oh such a great master spy, and you cannot even figure out that we do not have to have intercourse to make love and fulfill each other!” Joelle cried, with a touch of anger.

Suddenly, Saxon rose. One moment he was seated and the next, he was in front of her. Her hands lifted from her hips as though she would steady herself in the same instant Saxon crushed her within his embrace. His lips descended, just as she lifted hers upward to exclaim at him. Their mouths collided. The kiss Saxon wrought, devastated her senses and magnified her desire. The kiss was not the gentle promise of more courting, but the lusty surety of sex.

Only now, she was angry and overturned, and she pushed on Saxon’s chest, tugging her lips from his. “No! I do not want this. I’m not sure!” Joelle even thought to herself that she sounded like a petulant child.

“Joelle, Joelle.” Saxon wrapped her weak struggles in his embrace as his hands smoothed warmly on the side of her bare waist. “I have no excuse, but that I was trying to do the best for us.”

“Oooh,” Joelle uttered in drawn out vowels of reluctant understanding, while worrying her nose and mouth over the base of Saxon’s throat. He was sincere. She knew he was. “We need to open up more. Talk more.” Joelle pushed back and looked up into Saxon’s rich mahogany eyes.

“Yes we do, Firefly. This time I was just afraid to admit to myself my fears, until I looked closely.”