I know that voice.
My heart beats so fast I can’t catch my breath. The strength of his hands holding me does strange, wonderful things to my libido I don’t want to admit. Can’t. This fantasy has gone too far. I’ve been jostled by a ragpicker, labeled a thief, chased, grabbed and manhandled. And now I’m turned on by a voice I only imagined I’d heard.
Fear tightens my throat as he turns me around and I get a good look at him. I gasp. Loudly. I can’t believe what I’m seeing, even if the man is in my face, the darkness of his eyes glaring at me. Eyes alive. Lips pressed together in an amused manner. Pulse beating rapidly at the side of his neck where his longish dark hair curls around his cape collar.
God help me. It’s him.
Paul Borquet.
No wonder I’m turned on.
“I want another look at you, you little hellion.” He reaches inside my cloak, then pushes aside my dressing gown and cups my breast in his hand. I struggle, but he holds me with a firmness that lets me know resisting him is futile. “Yes, perfect.” He slides his hand under my petticoat and runs his fingers up and down my thigh. His breathing is heavy, guttural, like an animal assessing its prey. “Slim, firm. You’ll do.”
“Do” for what? What am I? A prize pony? Doesn’t he know I’m running this fantasy gig?
“If you touch me again, monsieur, I’ll grab your balls and—” I slur what I think is the slang word for twisting off his testicles. He gets the idea.
“Damn you, mademoiselle. You should be grateful to me for saving you from Monsieur Renard.”
“Who?”
“The beast of Les Halles.”
“You’re the beast, monsieur, for treating me like this.” I squirm in his grasp, turning my head first to one side, then the other. “I’m not for sale. I demand you release me.”
I kick him in the shin. He yells an obscenity.
“I’ll teach you a lesson, ma belle.”
He turns me over his knee, his hand wandering under my cloak until he finds my bare buttocks, then he begins to stroke my skin. I moan, my breath ragged, my senses reeling. I cry out when he slaps my butt. Once, twice. It stings, but it’s a delicious sting, igniting the nerve endings around my perineum. With two fingers he massages the sensitive area between my pussy and my anal hole. I hear him draw in his breath as his fingers push, probe and knead my quivering flesh.
I close my eyes and enjoy the feelings of tingling warmth as he traces his fingertips around the area, gently but with a purpose, knowing exactly how to arouse me. I feel my face flush and my ears turning red. It feels so good, I want more, more. But I’d rather die than admit it.
“Zut alors, if Monsieur Renard finds you, mademoiselle, your pretty young arse will end up on the wheel.”
“Wheel?” I ask, refusing to give up the pleasurable sensation shooting through my groin. Very pleasant. “What are you talking about?”
Paul Borquet smacks my bare butt again. I moan. “If you do as I tell you, mademoiselle, I’ll save you from such unpleasantness.”
“Oh? And what is that?”
“Alors, mademoiselle, I want you to—”
He closes his hand over my cunt and pushes his finger in between my pussy lips. Oooh…his thumb finds my clitoris and rubs it, not too hard, just enough to awaken sensual, warm feelings in me. I sigh with pleasure.
Then he whispers into my ear the naughtiest, most sensuous, succulent act of lust I’ve ever heard.
Goody. Goody.
CHAPTER FOUR
As slippery with his sweat as with her hot juices, Paul sniffed his fingers, reveling in the aroma of her youth filling up his nostrils. Such delights energized him with renewed passion, vigor and sustenance to indulge in his art.
I must be alone with her. Taste her cunt, wet with her jus de miel, her honey juice, a few inches above my mouth.
First he must seduce the redhead to go with him to his studio in Montmartre. He would tell no one about her, not even the other artists he often painted with at L’Atelier Gromain. Who knew how they’d react when seduced by her opulent beauty?
His gaze traveled up and down her body in a long, continuous curve, the delightful journey beginning at the top of her silken red hair and ending at the tip of her button shoes. She could never compare to a mere mortal. Tall and regal looking, she held her head up with pride, like a goddess carved in white Carrara marble. She was perfection in a world of imperfect flesh, driving men mad.
She was safe only in his hands, he thought, inserting his fingers into her again and massaging her clit with an expert touch.
The girl squirmed in his arms, the smell of her female scent assuring him she was real and not an hallucination induced by his indulgence in absinthe. Breasts, round and firm, responded to his probing fingers, her nipples puckered and dark. He was surprised she wasn’t laced up in a whalebone corset, yet she was slender with a natural waist so small he could almost span both his hands around her.
He wanted desperately to seduce her, grab her everywhere, kiss her everywhere. Never had he dared to imagine he’d find her in Les Halles, the rumbling central market of Paris. He had meandered around the market, smelling the unpleasant odor of sea snails on the fish counters while looking for her, before wandering into a small restaurant to partake of a bowl of gratinée to cure his hangover. He had almost given up hope of finding her when the flash of her red velvet cape caught his eye. Racing after her, he’d sobered up quickly.
Now he couldn’t let her go. He suspected she hadn’t savored what he could teach her. He imagined her nipples, hard and pointy, pierced by silver rings. Her pussy framed with a delicate blush of raspberry curls and glistening with the moisture of her juices, waiting for his tongue to lick her essence, savoring the taste of her. She moaned and sighed with so much joy, as if she were discovering sex in its purest form with his fingers probing her. Inexplicably, each thrust of her lower torso into his hand heightened his anxiety.
What if she wouldn’t pose for him?
“Does mademoiselle agree to my proposition to save her from the humiliation of the wheel?” He looked up toward the high, high ceiling at the big, horizontal wheel attached to the flat roof of the hangman’s stone tower. How many times had he seen thieves and unscrupulous merchants imprisoned in the rim of the medieval torture device with only their heads and hands showing, the hangman turning the wheel tighter every quarter hour?
The girl followed his gaze, then shivered. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Word spreads around Les Halles faster than a careless indiscretion of l’amour, mademoiselle. Come with me.”
“And if I don’t play your lascivious game, monsieur?”
“Les Halles is swarming with gendarmes, mademoiselle, eager to wield their sticks. Apprehending a thief is great sport for them.”
She grinned. Or was that a smirk on her pretty pink lips? “But I have you to protect me, monsieur. Lucky girl that I am.”
“You won’t smile so easily, mademoiselle, if they stretch your beautiful naked body out on the wheel, your legs spread so far apart to reveal the delicate inner pleats of your pink pussy lips, your breasts pointing outward, your nipples sucked on at the whim of the hangman, his ugly tongue licking you wherever he wishes.”
A bad taste lingered in his mouth. The wheel was too cruel a punishment when the girl’s only crime was foolishness. He remembered how many years he had suffered pain, stiffening in fear, never knowing how long the blows from his stepfather would last.
In his mind now, his thoughts went back to Giverny, to his childhood