The General's Mistress (13 page)

I struggled a little with the folds for form’s sake.

Victor shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m going to give you the satisfaction of making you do anything.”

I stood there trembling and naked, waiting.

He smiled. “Lie down on the bed and pleasure yourself.”

My eyes widened and I didn’t move.

“Did you hear me?” he said softly. “I told you to lie down right there and spread your legs. I shall arrange you like a statue.”

I lay down. My heart was beating like a drum. Carefully, lightly, he fluffed my hair over my shoulders. “That’s better. Now open your legs.”

He caressed the inside of my thigh. “That makes a prettier line.”

Of course everything was completely exposed, and he made a show of stroking my lips softly. “Now put your hand there. Just as if you were alone.”

I did. The jolts of pleasure that went through me were extreme.

“Move your hand just so. I want to watch you.” His face was rapt and I could see the passion rising in him, under the leash of control.

I moved my hand, succumbing to the growing warmth.

“Like that,” he said. “Lovely. I think I will have you sculpted like that. As Aphrodite, perhaps. But everyone who sees it will know it’s you. Do you want the entire world to see your charms?”

“You wouldn’t,” I said.

“Are you sure of that?”

His voice was as much the spur as my fingers. I closed my eyes, losing track of everything else. I heard some small movements, but paid them no heed.

“You are lovely that way, my dear. I believe you’d do nearly anything.”

“Yes,” I whispered. To touch myself this way, to come naked on the bed while clothed he stood watching was . . .

And then there was a cool touch between my legs. The ivory phallus slid inside, oiled and hard. I shrieked and came between his hands and mine.

He laughed.

I sat up unsteadily. It shifted, pressing inside me. He was standing beside the bed. “Don’t take it out,” he said. “Leave it there.”

I could see the strain on his face, and with something like a purr I opened the buttons on his trousers and took him in my mouth, kneeling on my haunches. The phallus inside me slid slick and wet with my movements. It was like being penetrated twice, once there and once in my mouth, where I took him completely.

In the end he had to hold on to the bedpost to keep from falling. He clasped at my hair and called out something I didn’t quite understand. I did not let him fall.

A
fterward we lay together lazily. Usually he would dress and leave before too late, but that night he showed no inclination to go, lounging next to me wearing his ruffled evening shirt and nothing else. Which was also unusual. Victor usually hated being en déshabillé, and he was never naked if he could help it.

“My dear,” he said, “be entirely truthful with me. You hate this house.”

“I do,” I said. “It is too old and sad. And too far from where you live. It takes you too long to get home at night, and you will not stay with me because you must leave so early. And there is no other suitable room if you wanted to stay in your own bed.”

“And you hate it,” he said.

“And I hate it,” I said. “If I were choosing a place, it would be closer to you and would be both simpler and more elegant. And more modern. Not larger. I don’t need more space. Just better arrangement.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, perhaps I can look for something different for you.”

I leaned back against his arm. “I will pay the rent out of the money you give me. I’m not asking for more money.”

He shrugged. “Which is as well. You know I am no spendthrift. Though”—he brushed the damp hair back from my forehead—“I think it’s time I gave an entertainment of my own.”

“A ball?” I asked.

“Nothing as grand as that. Perhaps a smaller, more intimate evening with friends.”

At the word
intimate,
the hairs on the back of my neck rose. “How intimate?”

Victor smiled down at me. “Are you imagining yourself the main dish, trussed and presented to the company? Nothing that intimate, my dear. Though I imagine you’d like it.”

“I would not,” I said, though I wondered if I would. It would
depend on who was there. I could not help thinking of Thérèse Tallien and her secret smile.

“I was thinking,” he said, “of dinner and cards. If you can get your mind out of the gutter, I would like you to plan it. At my house, for the week after next.”

I wrenched my mind back out of the gutter with some difficulty. “To do that, I would have to see your house, Victor.”

“So you would,” he said. “Get dressed and we will go.”

“To see your house in the middle of the night?”

He pulled his arm out from under me, dropping my head on the pillows. “Why not? I am going anyway.”

“Victor, it’s freezing, and I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”

“You are a little hothouse flower, aren’t you?” Victor said, smiling down at my naked form. “Get dressed. Surely with a warm cloak and boots, you can manage to get across town in a carriage without expiring.”

I grumbled, but went to dress. I confess that I was curious. I had never seen his house, though I had been in Paris four months. And in the more than a month he’d been in town, he had never asked me there before.

In the end, I did not see any of it in the dark. A carriage ride through Paris in the moonlight is romantic, regardless of the temperature. Indeed, freezing weather only makes it expedient to huddle more closely together. And then I thought it might warm my hands to put them in his trousers.

So in the end we rushed in rather precipitously. He slammed the door shut in a room of which my only impression was dark and shoved me against the door, his lips on mine urgently while both of us attempted to get winter clothes off without breaking apart.

There was a bed. I ascertained that when I lay back on it at
his order while he found the box of English letters in the nightstand. I put my hand over his and drew the sheepskin letter tight over him, bending my head to kiss the indentation at the join of groin and thigh.

Afterward, I heard him removing it and dropping it into the chamber pot beneath the bed.

“I’m glad you remembered,” I said sleepily. “It is the wrong time to be without.”

“I remembered,” he said. “For all that you test my sanity. I want no bastards, my dear.”

“Of course not,” I said, and settled more closely against him. Surely he would not send me away tonight. It was nearly dawn, and the servants would remark on it if he ordered a guest room made up in the middle of the night. It would not suit his sense of the respectable.

I
f one could call breakfast at nearly noon respectable, this was. Dressed in an impeccable quilted sapphire-blue wrapper, I breakfasted with him in a small dining room looking out over a formal garden. The walls of the room were white trimmed with gold, and all was modern and airy. Only the lavishly plastered ceiling looped with Louis XV ornament showed the house’s age. The carpets were cream-colored and perfectly clean. The furniture was all in the best possible taste.

His own room, where I had spent the previous night, was a model of a gentleman’s room, with dark wooden furniture and subdued colors. The bed was not a four-poster, but the elaborate carving of the headboard offered plenty of places to attach ropes, if any were required. Perhaps they weren’t, here. Victor was more circumspect than that.

There were no other women here, and probably had never
been. There was only one woman’s garment in the wardrobe, the quilted wrapper I wore, and it was exactly my size and sapphire blue.

At breakfast, Victor’s hair was still a little damp from the bath, and he was shaved and neat, wearing buff trousers and a cream shirt with a buff brocade waistcoat. For him, this constituted great unbending in dress. He helped himself to everything at the table and ate with none of his usual restraint.

I watched him butter a third piece of toast. “Are you quite well, Victor?”

“Absolutely, my dear,” he said. “Now, hurry and eat. We have things to do.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“I thought you wanted to look at houses,” he said. “There is a charming place to rent quite close by.”

I shrugged. “That suits me very well.”

And indeed it did. It lacked a few days till Candlemas, but the day was sunny and bright, though still cold.

The house Victor wanted me to see was lovely. It was only a few blocks from his own, a beautiful house of weathered red brick, not very large but with a big English garden that swept down to a small stream. I wandered the garden happily, imagining the vistas that would be revealed when the trees greened and the flowers bloomed, pointing out the buds of things to Victor, who seemed bemused.

“Those are tulips there,” I said. “I think they are pink or red. I wonder which?”

“How can you possibly tell?” Victor asked, looking down at the pointed leaf spikes that rose two or three inches above the earth in a bare bed.

“The color,” I said. “See how dark they are compared to those buds of snowdrop there? The dark pinks and reds show
like that. Whites and yellows are pale green. And it is hard to tell with the very pale pinks.”

“I had no idea you knew anything about gardening.”

I shrugged and took his arm again. “I do have some interests that are not sexual, Victor.”

Moreau looked out over the sleeping garden. “I forget that, my dear. And I should not. You are so sensual that it’s easy to become entirely beguiled by your face and body.”

“You do,” I said. “Beguiled, is it?” There was a teasing note in my voice. “Beguile the master himself?”

He raised one eyebrow, but did not smile. “Men are fools, my dear, fools for a pretty face and lovely arms. And when beauty comes with raw, submissive sensuality that would make Ovid blush, it’s a terrifying combination. I’d like to think that I am immune to those sorts of charms, but I am not.”

I took his arm. “I hardly think I’m a threat to you. It would take an extraordinary woman to beguile you, and I hardly think that I, young and gauche as I am, could do so even if I tried. Which I haven’t. I respect you too much to try to use you. After all, is not our friendship based on a certain degree of honesty?”

“Yes,” he said, and there was something unreadable in his dark eyes. “How do you like the house?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I wonder how much the landlord wants for it? It must be quite expensive.”

Victor took my gloved hand and turned it up in his own. With his other hand, he dropped a set of keys into my palm. “I am the landlord, my dear. And it is yours.”

“Mine?” My incredulous joy must have showed in my face. “This wonderful house?”

“Yours,” he said with a smile, closing my fingers over the keys. “Yours to decorate as you wish. I have no doubt you will have many hours of pleasure arranging things in your own nest.”

I threw my arms around him and hugged him with delight, quite forgetting his reserve and dignity. “Victor, it’s amazing! You have made me so happy!”

“I’m glad that I have,” he said, returning my embrace. “You make me very happy too.”

I seized his hand and led him under a spreading bare tree. “See? In the summer I can put a table here and hang lanterns from the tree, and we could dine under the stars. It would be peaceful and beautiful beyond imagining.”

“In the summer, I will be in the field, my dear,” he said quietly.