She could scarcely absorb the sheer sensuality of it, and her legs spread to receive him—the flawless connection of their two bodies, hip to hip, groin to groin, perfect complements. Breathing was an impossibility. Pulling back slightly, he brushed his lips over hers, back and forth until he felt them tremble. He kept his hands on her shoulders, using only his mouth to arouse her. “Give me more,” he said so quietly she thought she misheard. “We must be convincing, unless you want company.” Then he took her lower lip between his teeth.
Julia was dying, the breath robbed from her lungs. She was convinced bursting into flames would be next, as Strathmore’s lips feathered their way to the base of her throat. He directed his attention to the sleek slope of her shoulder, and she thought his evening coat slid to the floor. A loud roar hummed in her ears as heat shot through her veins, and whether Beaumarchais or the devil himself was at her heels, she didn’t care.
“I shall try.” Her voice was husky close to his ear. She felt her fingers curling around his waist in exquisite anguish. Instinctively, she drew his head to her breasts amazed to see that with one flick of his fingers, the clasp on her gown gave way, allowing the silk to fall from her shoulders to linger on the upper swell of her breasts. She couldn’t believe simply one hour earlier she had cowered behind the heaviness of his suit coat and now she was directing her aching nipples toward him.
Strathmore drew back, resisting, playing some ungodly trick to keep her in languorous suspension, his eyes flickering with need as he took in the swelling of her breasts against the silk.
“Oh yes,” she breathed, dissolving when he pressed his lips to the base of her throat. She wrapped her arms around him possessively, and instantly his mouth came down on hers with a violence that spoke of some submerged exasperation. She felt his hands down her back, stroking her buttocks as he maneuvered them against a wainscoted wall on the far end of the room, the weight of his body illogically reassuring and alarming at the same time.
Thoughts no longer mattered. Reason had flown through the high mullioned windows into the dark night air. Everything was mired in sensation, an incandescence that glowed from the depths of her abdomen to her highly sensitized skin.
Coming back down to earth, not gradually but abruptly, she felt another pair of hands—strange hands, not Strathmore’s—grasping her buttocks. She drew back from the arms that held her, turning her head away to see Beaumarchais, his palms sliding insinuatingly over her waist and backside.
“I believe I know what kept you two so long from dinner,” Beaumarchais said unctuously, his grasping fingers slicking over Julia’s silk sheathed hips. The candlelight gleamed on his pomaded hair, brushed back from a narrow forehead. “You have had your fill of each other, surely. Now is the time to share, no?”
Before Julia could register the demand, Strathmore slid his body between her and Beaumarchais. “As a gentleman, perhaps you should ask the lady,” he said smoothly. Other voices, as though coming from a long way away, intruded. All the while Strathmore’s hands grasped her hips in a show of possession as he pulled her tightly to his body. “What would you like, darling?” he asked for the benefit of their audience when he knew exactly what she craved.
A thousand champagne bubbles burst in her head. You, she wanted to answer. The rest of the room dissolved leaving only the two of them in a nimbus of light. Her lips parted but no words came.
Wadsworth and Felicity, her dress pooling around her waist, her torso completely naked, followed in Beaumarchais’s wake. The small, rotund man had his arm around her shoulders, slipping down over a pendulous breast to finger a rouged and swollen nipple. Felicity arched her back against him and ran her hands over his generous waist like the enthusiastic actress that she was.
“Well, my darling, what shall it be?” prompted Strathmore. “Remember,” he murmured in a low growl, placing a hot, lingering kiss on the skin of her neck, “we are not alone.”
It was almost as though he wanted her to declare it, state her need publically to the people crowding around them, the musk of sex scenting the air. How could she ever have believed she could find her way to Faron through that thicket of depravity? Confused, hovering between an incendiary desire she had never experienced before and a pulsing revulsion mixed with dread, she forced herself to form the words.
“I want…” she whispered. What did she want? And did it matter? What had taken her there and why? Faron. She thrust the thought aside. “I like…” she tried again.
“To take your pleasures slowly, isn’t that right my pet?” supplied Strathmore, coolness in his eyes despite the heat surrounding them, despite the heat of his hands on her shoulders, sliding up her arms, smoothing the midnight silk and, with dexterous fingers, covering her bare shoulders.
The small coterie moved closer, a bath of fetid breath and unslaked lust. Julia burrowed further into the warmth of Strathmore’s body and watched as he flicked his gaze over Felicity who returned his glance with sharp appetite.
“Alas, my friends”—the words rumbled from his chest while his eyes lingered deliberately on the sultry blonde—“my sweet Julia has suddenly developed a certain possessiveness. Most unfortunate.”
“She will change her mind soon enough,” said Wadsworth, his arm still resting about Felicity’s shoulders, his eyes bulging like a carp’s, upon Julia.
Strathmore made a low sound in the back of his throat. “You would not wish to see her upset, trust me Wadsworth. Speak with your footman if you’d like to know more. She exhibits a nasty temper when provoked, like a veritable wildcat in a temper.”
Beaumarchais’s lips thinned. “Then why did you bring her as your guest, Strathmore, if she won’t play?” He narrowed his eyes. “She’s a good enough looking piece, young, firm-fleshed from what I can see. And those legs, a man can’t help but wish to see what heaven lies between them.”
Julia’s head swirled. Despite the vastness of the hall, the walls were closing in around her, robbing her of air. She took a deep breath, sagging against the hard chest and arms that held her. It had to be an illusion. She was an actor without a script in a mad piece of theatre. Nothing was real. Except Strathmore.
If only she could follow the thread of his logic, if it indeed did exist. Wildcat, temper, possessive.
“You’ll get your chance, Beaumarchais.” Strathmore’s assurance, and his words, burned through the thin silk of her gown. “She will prove much more biddable if I indulge her for the moment. Take the edge off the lady’s appetite, as it were, prepare her for the main event.”
The image was obscene. Julia turned in Strathmore’s arms, forcing herself not to bolt from the room like a child fleeing from monsters. Desperation washed over, suddenly clearing her mind. Strathmore wanted to be alone with her. Alone. Without Beaumarchais, Wadsworth, and the others.
At that moment, it was like savoring the sweetest salvation. She lowered her lashes and pursed her lower lip, hoping she was the picture of hot-blooded truculence. Sighing long and loudly, she improvised, “I want you, Strathmore. Now.” It was a voice that was not her own. Her heart pounded wildly. “You know how much more tractable I am when I’m given free reign.” The last three words were delivered in what she hoped was a sultry tone.
Strathmore gave a short laugh and dropped a casual, stinging hot kiss to her lips. “We’re not finished here, my darling, that’s true, but you know I cannot deny you when you’re in one of your intriguingly volatile tempers. I still bear the scars of last night’s passion, you’ll recall.”
“We have never even started,” growled Beaumarchais too close for comfort.
Desperation made her brave. She had eyes only for Strathmore, cutting Beaumarchais with a chilly glance. “You know how I get…and you know what I want,” she directed a pout at Strathmore with the imperiousness of an empress. Forcing her movements to slow, she languorously swept her palms down the front of her breasts, past her waist to the apex,