She was panting and shivering as the last tremors of joy vibrated through her limbs when a warm hand cupped her cheek and turned her head, the throbbing heat of a male body enveloped her. Soft lips covered hers in a tender, lingering caress.
“You are magnificent, Ariel…” The words were a warm whisper upon her lips and she knew they would echo throughout the halls of her mind for many, many years to come.
Before she knew it, she was wrapped within Charles’ long, strong arms, feeling impossibly feminine and infinitely cherished. Shesighed contentedly, both her mind and her body still contentedly coasting along the rivulets of passion to which Charles had introduced her. They remained just so for several long, comfortable minutes merely listening to the other’s breathing and gradually slowing heartbeats when Ariel’s eyes shot open.
This man was not her husband. They were not in a relationship of any sort. This was a business transaction, and the last thing she wished was for him to feel obligated to coddle her.
“You needn’t linger, you know.” Ariel was surprised to discover that her throat was a tad tender from the repeated cries of ecstasy Charles had coaxed from her.
“I beg pardon?” She could feel him lift his head to look down at her.
“I mean, I am certain you have elsewhere you would desire to be. It was…quite lovely to meet you, but I wouldn’t wish to keep you.”
She felt his broad chest huff in a silent scoff. A handful of heart- beats passed before he asked, “You paid for the entire night, did you not?”
“Well…yes…”
“Then the entire night you shall have.”
Ariel tried to ignore the butterflies in her abdomen at his words. She settled for snuggling back into Charles’ embrace and savoring what little time they had left.
Chapter Three
Charles believed Ariel to be asleep when her voice, leaden with exhaustion, reached up to caress his ears. “If you’re American, why are you here in England?” The question was light, but contemplative, as if she’d mulled it over for quite some time before sleep had lowered her inhibitions enough to pose the query—leave it to her to view a man whom she believed to be a male prostitute enough of a human to want to get to know him.
He thought a moment before he responded, weighing the choices and debating if it would be easier to simply feign sleep. He decided against pretending, though, because she’d been nothing if not entirely open and genuine and vulnerable with him. The least he could do was answer her question with as much truth as possible.
“I was raised in Boston,” he began in a low voice, tracing his thumb along the downy-soft curve of her shoulder. “But my cousin passed and there was some business only I could handle, so here I am.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Not especially.”
“You have no relatives?”
The question evoked a sudden and rather unexpected burst of memories. His mother, a saint and a martyr, an angel with delicate features and soulful eyes, who had died giving birth to a girl when Charles was eleven; his father, a cold man whoviewed displays of emotion and affection as signs of weakness, the reason all the warmth in his life had been smothered as soon as his mother had breathed her last. For decades, Charles had believed his father’s death would release the leaden weight in his chest; however, as he’d learned three years earlier at the old man’s funeral, it had left him numb. His emo- tions had been so deadened from the constant threat of beatings at the sign of tears, hissed threats when laughter came too easily, that he’d merely watched them lower the box into the ground, cast a handful of soil upon it, then turned on his heel and went back to his offices to finish the day.
He took a second too long to reply and she looked up at him, concern coloring her eyes. “My apologies, you needn’t answer that if you do not wish to. I—I realize this is very personal but…so is all of this…” She glanced pointedly down at their naked bodies and then back up to his face. “And it feels so strange to me to know nothing—” Charles placed the pad of his thumb against her lower lip to stall her words. One corner of his mouth raised uncontrollably. He made an educated guess that a typical male prostitute would not reveal this much about himself, but Ariel had no point of reference against which to compare this experience. And, so, he answered.
“No. I’ve no one.” And the response was tragically true. He had no surviving siblings. Acquaintances rather than true friends. Colleagues rather than companions. No woman had ever enticed him enough to contemplate spending his life with her. He had his work as his lover, friend, and family. And now, he had a skewed sense of the self he’d worked so hard to cultivate all because a distant cousin had died without any direct heirs.
Charles traced her plump lip with his thumb, the tip just slipping inside and setting his blood back on the path to boiling.
“And you stayed here all by yourself? That seems so lonely,” she said wistfully, her eyes searching his face with a sincerity that shook him.
He wanted to ask her if that seemed as lonely as a woman who was so disregarded and overlooked by Society that she had to hire a man to give away her virginity, but he didn’t. Those words would have been in his father’s cold, cruel tone…an echo from Charles’ damaged past…and Ariel didn’t deserve that. The man was dead and buried; his words deserved to be, too.
“I manage,” he replied in a low tone. And he did. He’d learned to carve out an existence in the life laid out before him. Inheriting this dukedom had set him off-kilter, but he was determined to follow the path he’d charted and continue onward. He’d return to Boston and try to forget that he’d ever been to this dreary little island…but he somehow knew this woman lying against him would be much, much harder to forget.
∞∞∞
“Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly—”
“You most certainlycan, and you most certainlywill.”
“I couldn’t—”
“You can,Ariel.”
