Harsh fingers seized my chin, and my lashes flew wide to see the fraying remains of his control snap taut. “Watch me,” he gritted out from between clenched teeth.
I clenched his wrist in both of my hands, nails digging into his flesh. “Make me forget.”
He groaned tightly and pushed himself within my body. I braced for pain on some level, uncertain exactly what it was I expected, but all I felt was the fullness of it, the tightness as my flesh stretched to accommodate this new intrusion. It burned first, then eased to something wholly different—a heat with no end, a bottomless well of yearning.
A thousand new feelings rippled outward, drenching me in awareness, in blind need. “Yes!” I cried, triumph and encouragement.
Hawke moved within me, and it was as if everything I felt expanded. Heightened. In and out, he thrust himself within me with a rhythm that wound my body tighter, drove me further and further into madness, until I dug my short nails into his back and held his sweat-damp body to mine.
He grunted at the act, threw his head back on an animalistic roar when I dragged one hand down his side. I don’t know if I drew blood; I did not care. I felt. Everything I was lost itself, drunk on impressions I had never imagined I could feel. Not like this. Not like the opium I took or the fog I walked in. This took it all away. Made everything vanish.
For a brief moment in time, I was lust and need and wicked pleasure, and I cared for nothing else.
Hawke pushed himself up on rigid arms, filled me so completely as his gaze crackled. In my wild state of mind, I swore that his eyes had gone blue once more. Then I ceased to care about anything but the fingers he wrapped tightly about my throat, the beautifully harsh set of his features as he held me down and drove me to untold pleasures, my own spiraling hedonism taken far beyond anything I could have imagined.
When my release took me again, it was to the echo of Hawke’s ragged groan, a pulsing ache, and the sensation of something hot and wet sliding over my hip.
Chapter Sixteen
I was at a loss.
What was the propriety of those moments after a tryst? Was I expected to gather my things, thank him graciously and leave?
Would he want more than that? Less?
Fanny’s hours and hours of tutelage had never covered this. Hawke sat at the edge of the bed, his back to me, and fastened the trousers he’d pulled back up his legs. Whether to spare me the sight of his nude body or for some other reason, I did not know. I could not tell.
The man was damned difficult to read on any other day. I expected no different now. He was, in the end, just another man who’d gotten his flesh.
That I had enjoyed it—no, that it had stripped from me everything that held me down, tore from me the constraints of a life I had no control over, was something I could easily accept.
I now understood why there were them what risked all for the act I’d always considered more of a chore, a means to a wage.
The hearth painted the chamber in shades of gold, gilding Hawke’s silhouette. I eased the edges of the rumpled bedclothes around me, feeling a sense of insecurity I’d lost somewhere between the bath and the bed. The remains of his release still clung to my flesh, and I felt awkward beyond all measure.
By heaven, I made no logical sense.
Hawke did not turn. The stark contrast of white ridges against the tawny expanse of his back seemed all the more bleak this close, and the angry welts curved over his side left my cheeks hot with the realization that I’d put them there.
As I’d found myself doing the first I’d seen those lurid scars, I reached out a hand. Traced the edge of one with a gentle fingertip.
The muscle beneath jumped. Hawke stood, a fluid motion that only served to showcase the grace and agility with which he moved. A tiger, Zylphia had called him once. True enough. Black and gold.
And wicked as the Devil himself.
“Those aren’t old,” I said, daring to break the silence grown between us. That parts of me still ached, thrummed with pleasure and other unfamiliar sensations, made my casual observation all the more ludicrous.
I wish there’d been at least a pamphlet to guide a lady after her first encounter. At the very least, something for brides. Was the expectation that she would have more to speak of with the man she married?
Impossible. I could not imagine sharing this moment with my late husband. Of all the things we had shared, I could not think of the earl as a man to become more like...
Hawke.
Oh, what a horrid thing I was to compared the two, and unfairly at that. The very thought turned me cold, stripped the vestiges of a fading heat from me and left me scrambling for a different need altogether.
I sat up, clutching the bedclothes to me.
Hawke strode for the small table beside the hearth, poured himself a glass of something that gleamed like garnets held to flame. Wine, perhaps. Or brandy. “Leave it alone,” was his only reply, before downing much of the liquid.
My eyes narrowed. “You must think me one of your bits of flesh.”
“Aren’t you?”
It took effort to refrain from gasping from the verbal blow. “If you believe that,” I replied, coolly as I was able, “you’re rather more deranged than I credited you.”
At least he turned, one black eyebrow arched high. The glass in his hand winked. “You’ve no measure of it, Miss Black.”
The cool return of that moniker cemented my hatred for it. I stood so quickly that my legs bumped the bed behind me. The noise it made as it shifted seemed overly loud in my suddenly pounding ears.
“Very well,” I snapped, striding to the pile of my discarded clothing—and the opium within the pocket. The yawning void opening in my belly spoke of feelings, of injury, I had no desire to share. “I shall leave you to your prison.”
“As you should have the moment you found it.”
The reminder only served to widen the ache, tear free the wound inside me. I stumbled over the edge of the blanket I’d taken with me, sank to my knees and found myself fumbling with the coat I suddenly could not see. Not through the blur affecting my vision.
Not tears. I would never cry for the bastard. Not for him.
Perhaps for other reasons. Other wounds.
Even perhaps for me.
I muttered wordless frustration as I sought blindly for my coat pocket.
Warm hands covered mine.
I stilled, blinked hard to find Hawke kneeling before me, his features implacable. Yet he tugged the coat from me. “What is it you want?” he asked, each word constrained to terse effort.
“The truth,” I snapped.
Even I did not know what truth I spoke of, but Hawke only looked down to my coat. Long fingers dipped into the pocket. “The scars are the reminder of a punishment that did not take.”
Any other person might have displayed humiliation, or perhaps a self-conscious regard. Hawke spoke matter-of-factly, unbowed by the whip that had taken his flesh. Unbroken by the badge of shame he carried with no shame at all.
“They’re fresh,” I said again. “Enough that the scars are still pale. Was it recent?”
He inclined his head, looking up when he withdrew the bit of opium I’d searched for. His gaze told me nothing, banked and reserved.
Mine widened. “My doing?” Of course it was. It made sudden sense. Zylphia whipped for her temerity to hire her own collector, Hawke whipped for...what? What part? What had I done to cause his punishment?