The Corrupt Comte (11 page)

As soon as his palm curved around his hard cock, he’d gone to his knees, right there in the foyer. It had felt like eons since his bollocks had grown slick, slapping against a round, pert ass. Longer still since he’d been this desperate to come without a woman laying hands on him. Usually Gaspard would wake in the morning and rub out a release, either in his sheets or in the bath. But mere minutes with his face buried in Claudia’s wet cunt had his body reacting as it would after a solid hour of fucking.

God, he could still taste her.

Kneeling on the floor, shoulders hunched, hand flying along the throbbing length of his cock, he had pictured her lush mouth and glorious breasts, and how she’d shuddered through her orgasm. “Oh,
fuck
,” he’d groaned, and came. His body jerked. He couldn’t catch his breath. And when his head had stopped buzzing and he realized what he’d just done, he’d fallen back on his heels and laughed.

She must never, ever know how deeply she affected him, or the power she wielded with the gift of her body. Never, or any scheme he plotted would be over before it began.

Tonight, as he stood in the ballroom of fellow spy Maxence Denney, Gaspard wondered if she had made her decision, and if that decision had her choosing him instead of the dashing lieutenant on whom she’d first set her sights.

He turned at a tap on his shoulder. Speak of the devil. He scowled at Sabien. “What do you want?”

The lieutenant raised one fair brow. “Grumpy this evening, I see. Did the meeting with our employer not go well?”

Gaspard didn’t want to think about Évoque, any more than he wanted to think about Claudia taking Sabien as her husband, because then he would be forced to think about the large love nest in which the duke had placed Claudia, and to what end. He hadn’t managed to ask her about Évoque and what she knew of her parents’ decision to marry her off to the duke, but he certainly intended to do so…as soon as she arrived. As soon as she chose him. “Define ‘well’. I gave him the list. You heard that Faron called a meeting tonight?”

“Why do you think I’m wearing my finest attire?”

That drew an unwilling chuckle from Gaspard even as impatience gripped him. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” If Sabien continued to stand near him, and Gaspard was forced to watch her approach his friend and smile up at him—a shy smile, full of uncertain hope—he couldn’t be held accountable for his actions.

Which would most certainly include using his knife on Sabien’s most vulnerable body parts.

It had to be his worries over the next day’s events making him so needily possessive over a girl he barely knew. Desperation over his situation. Fear that his slapdash plans would fail, leaving him to face the consequences of five years’ worth of blood and secrets, penniless and alone.

Sabien spoke quietly, recognizing too easily what plagued him. “It’ll be fine, Gaspard. We’ll soon be done. Forever.”

“I can’t wait.”

Sabien sucked in a breath. “I haven’t seen you since you had your big laugh with the Pascale girl.”

Fighting for a calm he was nowhere close to feeling, Gaspard shot his friend a dark look. “It wasn’t a laugh.”

“Sure it wasn’t.” Sabien chuckled. “We all know, even if that poor thing doesn’t. What on earth did you do with her in that closet? She hasn’t said a word, or much of anything, since.” Then, under his breath he muttered, “Thank God.”

Gaspard’s bare hands turned to fists at his sides. Sabien’s aversion to Claudia’s stutter hadn’t kept him from kissing her the other night—not that Gaspard could reveal that little tidbit. It would prove he’d seen Claudia, that they’d conversed privately. That she’d confided in him…and more.

And if Sabien knew that, it would open the door for a host of questions Gaspard simply wasn’t prepared to answer. Not tonight, and potentially not ever.

“You’re welcome to her, you know.” Sabien turned his back on the crowd, facing Gaspard but not making eye contact as his voice lowered. “If you really think marrying her is the only chance you’ve got against the Crown seizing your assets, then do what you must. I just wish—” He broke off with a sigh.

“You just wish what?”

“I just wish you could have both the money
and
the happiness. Personally. You know.” Sabien looked uncomfortable, rubbing a rueful hand over the back of his neck and studying the toes of his gleaming boots.

Gaspard stood in shocked silence. Working side by side with this man for years, he’d thought he understood the boundaries of their friendship. Evidently not.

For Sabien to openly wish him well…it was perhaps the most generous anyone had ever been to him, regardless of his misguided beliefs on what constituted Gaspard’s personal happiness. Homosexuality was whispered about, tiptoed around and altogether ignored—what society refused to acknowledge did not therefore exist. No one of Sabien’s military rank or social status would be caught dead voicing such concern. No one.

Gaspard couldn’t speak, couldn’t thank him—and in that moment he almost wanted to confess the ruse he’d so thoroughly adopted.

Almost.

Lieutenant Sabien Purvis was a good man, a marquis’s son, handsome and educated and well spoken. He didn’t prevaricate, and he had an unyielding sense of honor and duty. He was loyal, nearly to a fault, and he would be an excellent husband to any woman, should he ever choose to marry. Especially to Claudia.

But Sabien didn’t want her, and Gaspard wasn’t like the Sabiens of the world. He was a bad man with a fake title and a dung-heap castle, passably attractive, educated only insofar as his formative years had allowed, and he had never mastered the ingrained politeness those born into the peerage seemed to possess. He lied freely, evaded truthfulness in every situation, and his sense of honor and duty extended no further beyond the constraints of his own person. He supposedly cared for Sabien and Max and Faron, but the moment they became dispensable was the moment he intended to rid himself of the weight of their friendship. He’d never considered marriage or what type of husband he’d be, but he had to believe that, along with his various other faults, marital bliss remained leagues beyond his reach.

Yet he considered Claudia his.
His.
He’d already claimed her maidenhead—an act spurred by financial necessity, of course. But she was his nonetheless.

Guilt coiled like acid in his stomach. “Do you see me proposing?”

Comfortable with the return of their banter, Sabien smiled. “No, but women seem to prefer you go down on bended knee. Keep that in mind. Ten thousand pounds…” He shook his head, then murmured, “See you after midnight,” and disappeared into the sea of guests.

Gaspard stared after the lieutenant. That dowry wouldn’t do what Sabien thought it would. Gaspard wasn’t going to rescue his decrepit castle and whisk his new moneybags bride off to the Lorraine-Mâche estate nestled in the foothills of the French Alps. No, he was going to pay the debt on his lands, keep the title he’d bled to earn, and burrow down in England with a woman he could bed whenever he wanted, in the privacy of a safe, secure home long miles away from this wretched country he hated so very much.

He was such a rotten excuse for a Frenchman.

He should feel more shame for using Claudia so callously. After introducing her to the sort of shocking sensations a proper young woman never expected to experience in or out of the marriage bed, he’d kept her on tenterhooks, wondering what new, sensual encounter he would next offer her. It wasn’t fair to seduce her—she wouldn’t know any better than to start…
feeling
for Gaspard. She wouldn’t know that any halfway decent excuse for a man could give her the releases she now craved.

Instead, he had flung open the doors to her pleasure, her first surrender a foray into submission. The blindfold, the bonds at her wrists, the bruise he’d marked her with. Claudia had melted at the growl in his voice and the firmness of his commands, both in the closet and in her bedchamber, the perfect pawn to desires he’d never fully been able to explore himself.

He swallowed as he watched the ballroom entrance, remembering again her honeyed taste coating his greedy tongue.

His cock pulsed.

He was an idiot to have given her an ultimatum. To present her with Sabien and Gaspard was to force a choice between a prince and a pauper, and every young woman wanted to be a princess, didn’t she? Yet should Claudia suffer a lapse in judgment, Gaspard wouldn’t hesitate another second in pouncing.

But for all that he wanted to pounce upon Claudia, he
hadn’t
fallen on her like an animal last night, even though he was certain she’d have welcomed him with open arms to her bed. It was an exercise in restraint, testing the limits of his control with the depth of his desire for her. The tenuous connection he’d noted from the very first—one that defied common sense and drew instead on gut instinct—had the curious effect of soothing him as it engulfed him. It was easier to affect some sort of…generosity, some gentleness, with Claudia than it ever had been with any of the brothel girls whose services he’d paid for.

The possibility of being unmasked and named a liar and a spy had never thrilled him the way it did Maxence Denney, who lived to be found out as not simply a baron but a charmingly deviant cog in France’s political machine. Gaspard risked everything, not the least of which was his life, every time he sought to appease his natural desires…which was why his forays across the bank, ventures fraught with paranoia and precautionary measures, were few and far between.

The release he found with the men seduced for Crown and bloody country was a mere bodily function. There was no excitement. There was no longing. There was no immediacy or desperation or all-consuming lust in those machinations. Every time he rutted behind a man, it was work. It was toil. He suffered for it.

There was no suffering with Claudia. Only an elemental, organic need that shook him, born of trial and battle and war. A need that whispered, with tantalizing nearness, that he could be free
if only
. If only.

If only she chose
him
.

The air suddenly crackled with electric life, and he didn’t have to see her to know she entered the room. This was the point of no return, the moment upon which his entire future hinged. He watched from his vantage point on the far side of the ballroom, his back flush against an interior wall, as a petite brunette bundle of raspberry-pink silk paused just inside the doorway and scanned the dancing occupants.

He followed her gaze as it landed on Sabien’s fair head, saw her chest—tantalizingly bared in a low square neckline—rise in a halting breath as her stare lingered on the lieutenant’s tall, lean form, so elegant in his dark blue evening coat. Her lips parted then firmed, and she lifted her chin before stepping into the crowd.

As the top of her head disappeared, Gaspard’s chest tightened until each breath was a flame, scorching his lungs and charring his throat. So. Claudia had made her choice…and he found he couldn’t fault her for it, no matter how much he wanted to. The only reason this stung so absurdly, so painfully, was because it meant the death of his freedom.

Without Claudia’s dowry, he couldn’t possibly pay the debt on his estate before the Crown reclaimed it. If the Crown reclaimed the estate, Gaspard’s title would go along with it, and without the title, Gaspard would be back where he started five years ago: penniless, abused and without the inherent protection and power provided to him as a member of the peerage. The skill set he’d refined over the past decade prepared him only for a life of crime—or prostitution—and it wasn’t as though he’d managed to set aside any funds. His stingy income barely paid for his basic needs and his outdated wardrobe, subsisting mostly on credit and the generosity of others.

He needed the money Évoque owed him, for survival, if nothing else. And if, in fact, debts overwhelmed him and he lost the title, perhaps he could become his father’s son ten years too late.

At least blacksmithing was an honest profession.

There was no relief for the pain in his chest, however, and he fought against an onslaught of unnameable sensations, crushing him, choking him. He refused to believe the tension thrumming through his limbs had anything to do with emotion, or feeling, or Claudia.

It certainly had nothing to do with Claudia.

Mary, Mother of God, this was
unacceptable
.

A gently clearing throat pierced the deafening quiet pounding in his ears. His blood sang as he shook off the haze that had momentarily blinded him to the ballroom’s goings-on, only to see a vision standing before him. A vision of rose and gold and cream and coffee that hadn’t left his mind in three achingly long days, and Gaspard blinked in patent disbelief before it sank in.

Claudia had chosen him.

Him.

“
Chaton,
” he rasped, his throat unbearably parched.

Her solemn little face lifted. “
Bon s-soir
, my lord.” Regardless of the stumble in speech, there was no trace of uncertainty in her husky tone.

Euphoria sprinted along his nerve endings. “Do you have something to tell me?”

She tilted her head to the side but said nothing.

“Oh, kitten, do not test me tonight.”

“And what was t-tonight, if not a t-test?”

How many people had dismissed Claudia as slow because of her stutter? She was quick, quicker than anyone gave her credit for, and a sharp spike of adrenaline slithered down his spine. She was going to fight him, even though she’d already implicitly offered her surrender by seeking out Gaspard in the ballroom and not Sabien.