Mistress at Midnight Read Free

thumb ran across the hardness of her nipple, flicking at the covering of bombazine, she simply went to pieces, the control that she had kept so tightly bound dissolving into disorder.
    He held her against the half-light and the silence and the empty landscape, and release left her shaking. No sense in it, save feeling. When he raised her chin she took in the glory as he watched her, waves of passion wrenching gasps without voice. Lost and found, the gold in his eyes the only touchstone to a different reality, the tightened cords of lust entwined into every sinew of her body, her nails running unnoticed down the skin at his neck. A thousand hours or a single moment? She could not know the extent of her loss of governance until the world reformed and they were standing again on the top of Taylor’s Gap.
    Aurelia felt embarrassment and then shame. If he let her go, she would fall, like a boneless thing, all stamina gone. Laying her head against his chest, she listened to his heartbeat, the strong and even rhythm bringing her back.
    ‘Thank you.’ She could not say more andto say less would have been mean spirited. He had to know that, at least, but in the face of her appalling behaviour all she wanted was to be gone.
    Lord. She had come as he watched her, the feel of her body tight against his own and wonder in her eyes. Like quicksilver. Like magic. Like all his dreams wrapped into one, her long red hair curling against his skin, the serpent snakes of Medusa.
    He knew not one single thing about her save that of a connection in flesh.
    But he wanted her. He wanted to lay her down beneath the bushes behind them and remove the black and dowdy robe. He wanted to see her slender pale limbs in the oncoming moonlight as his hands wandered the lines of them before slipping into the wet warmth of her centre. He wanted to take her and know her again and again until there was nothing left of self, melded into the eternal.
    His cock grew at such awareness and he could not stop the swelling.
    She felt it, too. He saw the flicker of the awareness of danger in her eyes as her tongue took the dryness from her lips. He heard herbreath quicken, the line of darker blue around one pale eye pulsating.
    His woman. To take. The smell of her filled his nostrils, dangerous yet tempting, all the rules of gentlemanly conduct crossing over into darkness.
    ‘Go.’ It was all he could say for he did not trust himself enough to deny such want. ‘I shall send you the invitations.’
    The anger beneath his words must have registered because she moved back, shadow falling across her face, her hair lifting in the breeze as she turned, footsteps and then silence, only whorls of dust left in her wake.
    Kneeling at the bottom of the railing, Stephen hung on to the solid wood, wild despondency all that was left. Lord, it was getting worse, this dispiritedness, claiming the early evening hours as well as the midnight ones. The demons of his past were gathering, armies of lost souls and foundered causes hammering at all he had stood for in the pursuit of justice. Could it have been for nothing?
    Crumpling the black hat she had left behind in his fist, he looked for the brandy flask in his jacket pocket and undid the silver chain. Drinking deeply, he knew withouta doubt that the solace of strong liquor was the only thing still keeping him sane.
    The carriage she had rented was waiting in the place she had left it and she scrambled in, ordering the driver on even before she settled.
    Away. Gone. It was all she wanted.
    She should not have come to this place at all, but the memory of her mother here was strong and today, travelling between the mills and London, she had wanted to stop and remember.
    Sylvienne had brought her here often because she said it reminded her of a place in Provence and for just a little while Mama did not stand in England, but in France, the mistral on her face and the little Alpilles at her back.
    Aurelia would wait there with her, fingers