Surrender to Love

Her first, instinctive movement to escape was stilled when his hands moved from her breasts to between her thighs, holding her so closely against himself that she was forced to feel everything he meant her to feel and to wonder fearfully how far he meant to go. “And now,” he said softly in her ear, “untie that damned ribbon. You said you wanted a swift conclusion to this? Then show me some of the tricks you have learned from your recent lovers and the bordellos you’re fond of frequenting, and perhaps you’ll have your wish.” Even while he was speaking he had brushed aside her clumsy fingers and had untied the ribbon himself before Alexa, feeling as if she was in a kind of daze, had realized what he was about.

“No!” she cried furiously, and then cried out again when she felt herself propelled forward to be almost flung face down across his bed with her arms caught up and twisted behind her back. His fingers held her wrists together like manacles and tightened mercilessly when she attempted, just once, to move. But this time she fought back her scream and only gasped instead, allowing him, without a struggle, to use his free hand to pull the trousers over her hips with savage force, so that they slid down to her ankles, trapping her and rendering her even more helpless than she was already with the weight of his body leaning over her.

“And now, perhaps, we can talk frankly to each other,” Nicholas said pleasantly before adding: “Hold still, love, before I am forced to dislocate your arm and then force the bone back into its socket again—a very painful process, I’m afraid. So, I suggest that you do as you promised and perhaps even derive some enjoyment from this.”

Even after he had released her, Alexa continued to lie still, with her fingers meshed tightly together above her head. Turn limp, she commanded herself. Or turn into wood. Why wouldn’t her treacherous body obey the sensible, pragmatic orders given by her brain? Her arms ached almost intolerably, although she would not let him know that as. she waited for him to hurt her again and thought fiercely, I hate him! I hate him! And please, let

it be over with soon, and let him get no pleasure from it.

“The maiden sacrifice!” she heard him say sarcastically from somewhere above her before adding: “Will you send me an accounting for another maidenhead after tonight? Or have you already been thoroughly explored? Keep still, querida, while you think about your answer and I make you ready for some exploration of my own.”

Roughly, he shoved a pillow under her hips to elevate them before he allowed his hands the license to rove, stroking gently and almost tenderly at first while Alexa pushed the back of one hand against her mouth and then, driven by pride, between her teeth to stop herself from crying out loud when the “exploration” he had threatened her with became painfully and humiliatingly intimate.

The almost involuntary movements she made to escape his probing fingers might have seemed to him, she thought afterwards, an eager and wanton response to his callous invasion of her body—her privacy— herself. In the end, in spite of herself, she did cry out against it and against the poised, waiting threat of his body lying now alongside hers while he stroked her breasts with one hand and continued to move and to feel and to go even more deeply inside her with the other, in spite of what she did or didn’t want.

Until he left her abruptly Alexa had not realized that her ragged breaths had become loud sobs that made her whole body shudder. Rage and frustration and hate mingled with disgust at herself for showing such contemptible weakness and especially before him. She did not want to weep and could not help herself, and at the same time she felt, childishly, like kicking and screaming aloud to relieve her feelings.

“That’s enough of your damned sniveling! Here, sit up and drink some wine to calm you down. For God’s sake! One would think you were some startled little innocent who had never known a man’s touch before.”

Alexa felt herself caught under the shoulders and dragged upright before she was all but forced up against the ornately carved gilt headboard of the bed, a glass of wine thrust so roughly into her hands that some of it spilled over her, trickling coldly between her breasts and down her belly. She felt sore and debased and used. Mis-used was more like it; and he had done it with cold, cruel detachment in order to teach her a lesson in humility, no doubt. Trying to catch back her sobs, Alexa almost choked, both on the wine and her mortification. How she had begun to hate him and the harsh, caustic tone that usually entered his voice when he addressed her, as he did again now.

“One would imagine you’ve been violated, to judge from your piteous sobs. Don’t tell me your other lovers have been so lacking in imagination as to let any part of such a tempting delectable body go neglected?” He laughed when she almost unconsciously drew her legs up under her, and taunted, “Modesty at this late stage? Or is it more pretense? Can it be, my sweet, shy Alexa, that you’re disappointed that I did not take what was begun to a final conclusion? Should I now?”

Goaded, she turned on him with her cheeks still damp from the angry tears she had shed, wanting above all to hurt him wherever he was most vulnerable with her arrowed words. “If you treated your wife in the same callous fashion in which you’ve treated me, I am hardly surprised that she shrank from you. Perhaps she might even have found her second captivity vastly preferable to the first. Was that why you had to kill her?”

There was a silence that seemed to stretch forever, long enough for her to notice irrelevantly that the gas lamps had been turned down under their blue shades that matched the shades of the old-fashioned lamps on the dressing table. That the fire had burned down to red coals, and that the thin cigar he had been smoking gave off a most peculiar odor which she could not place.

He dragged on the cigar while she felt herself compelled to keep her eyes on his face; and while he seemed to hold the smoke he inhaled within himself for an interminable time, his eyes glittered at her like jagged shards of green glass until they were veiled at last by smoke. “Did I really bare my soul to you that night? How boring that must have been for you. In fact, I’m surprised that you decided to linger, especially in view of... But why did you stay? And why did you suddenly appear when you did, as my—ah, yes—true dream, I think it was. How is your memory? Can you remember all the bordellos you’ve been in, looking for whatever it is you were looking for?” He was so close to her that their shoulders almost touched, close enough so that Alexa could almost feel the violence that emanated from his body and stretched like taut strings under the surface calmness of his voice. If she moved now or even looked away he would probably put his hands about her neck and snap it. Encountering a leopard or a panther unexpectedly in the jungle when there were only a few feet separating you and no time in which to bring up a gun, you stood there very still and stared the predator down, ignoring the growls and the swishing tail and the narrowed green eyes. This was a different kind of predator that she faced now, one she found more frightening and more dangerous. She should never have let herself forget, Alexa thought, that this man only put on a surface show of being civilized—just as easily as he wore his London clothes and his title and his polite manners. But underneath there was the savage barbarian who carried a knife from force of habit and used it without hesitation, a cruel man raised in a savage, primitive land, with the dark Spanish blood of the ruthless conquistadores running in his veins. Besides his unfortunate wife, how many others had he killed?

“Here, dammit!” Nicholas said in a hard voice, and put his cigar to her lips. “Inhaling this ought to loosen your stubborn tongue, along with some of the prudishness you seem to have acquired quite suddenly.”

“But I...” Alexa knew, even as she began to protest, that it would do her no good.

“If you’re afraid of becoming sick, there’s no need to worry. This is a different kind of ‘cigar,’ my dear innocent, and I’m surprised that you haven’t tried this kind of thing before. Try to inhale it slowly, and hold the smoke in your lungs for as long as you can.”

Alexa coughed and spluttered at first, but he remained inflexible; and at last she managed unwillingly to satisfy him, not daring to do otherwise. Her throat seemed to burn from the harshness of the smoke, and she drained the glass of wine he had given her, wondering the next moment how she happened to be holding another glass in her hand. How? Of course. It was his glass, and he had gone into the next room for more wine to get drunk on. Primitive man. Naked sculpture by Michelangelo come to life as he walked back to her. This time the smoke did not burn her throat and her lungs quite as much, and Alexa felt some of the tenseness in her body relax as she leaned her head back against the headboard and breathed in deeply. “It’s not tobacco, is it?”

“This particular plant grows like a weed, and the medicine men swear it can cure almost every ailment known.”

“I’m sure that claim is highly exaggerated! But I suppose...” Her voice trailed off rather vaguely as Alexa suddenly became aware of the effect of the blue lampshades. Except for the sullen, dark red coals everything was deep, dark blue, like diving deeply into the ocean and being able to live and breathe underwater in that dim blueness.

“And what do you suppose, Alexa?”

“I have forgotten what I supposed at first, so I’m sure it was nothing very important.” Turning her head, Alexa met his shadowed look head on before she said thoughtfully, “But I do suppose, you know, that I would like to know if you really did murder your wife?”

“Are you admitting that you might actually have some doubts!” There was something underlying the sarcastic tone of his voice that almost puzzled her before she heard him say, without any inflection this time, “I did kill her, though. Call it murder, if you will; it’s a word that fits the deed as well as any other. And does that satisfy your curiosity?”

Chapter 40

“Marry her? My dear Nicholas, it’s surely not that vast, vulgar fortune that attracts you, is it? If you are short of money...”

“I’m sure you are already well aware of my financial standing, Belle-Mere,” he had answered her shortly, preparing to take his leave of her as politely and as quickly as possible. But it was then that the Dowager Marchioness of Newbury had taken him by surprise by crossing the room to put an urgent hand on his sleeve.

She had given a short, almost resigned sigh before saying quietly: “Very well, then. I had not meant to let too many family skeletons out of the closet all at once, but in this case... You will at least sit down, instead of continuing to stand there towering over me while I make my speech, I hope? Please, I find it difficult enough as it is.”

Knowing how subtly cunning she could be, he had waited skeptically for the speech she had promised him; and although he had learned long ago to school his face so that it showed no reaction, he had responded to her concisely delivered facts, as she called them, in his gut An explanation for everything, she had promised, and had not even spared herself in admitting baldly that after her husband who was so much older than she was had become bedridden with a stroke, she had taken lovers. And one of them had been Sir John Travers, Bart....

“He was young and handsome. A friend of Gavin’s. I used to feel his eyes on me, following me everywhere. He worshiped me, he said. And was fool enough to go off to India to make a fortune—for me, he said, poor fool. And then he actually came back with his fortune but without his manhood, actually believing I would be content to play Beatrice to his Dante. Pure, unsullied love, he called it. Ah, I’m afraid I’ve never been one to mince words or be less than blunt. So, he took himself off, hating me as passionately as he swore he had once loved me, swearing dramatically that he would be revenged, even if it was from the grave.”