She bit her lip and stared down at him dizzily. “I love this,” she whispered. “I love the way you feel.”
Putting his hands on her hips, he rocked against her, making a soft, sexy sound. “You’re so beautiful,” he breathed. “I’ll never forget the way you look at this moment, with your hair tumbled across your shoulders and desire in your eyes. You are my every erotic dream come true, Vanessa.”
“And you are mine.” She bent toward him, brushing her lips across his with aching tenderness.
He groaned and buried his hands in her hair, deepening the kiss with wild abandon, holding nothing back as his tongue danced intimately with hers. She drowned in the taste and feel of him, never wanting the kiss to end.
For a long time, it didn’t. One dizzying kiss led to another, and then another. She began to feel light-headed, and she couldn’t help but move against him, struggling to get closer, wanting to be one with him in the most primal way.
At last, he broke away, thrusting her away from him with a muffled curse. She pulled her knees to her chest, staring at him, struggling to catch her breath.
The first thing he did was readjust his mask with trembling hands but not before she noticed the edge of a pretty significant scar on his left cheek. She immediately dropped her gaze, not wanting him to know he’d given anything away, but she filed that little piece of information away in her mind, along with all the rest.
“Ah, Vanessa,” he said at last. “Words cannot convey how much I enjoyed that. How much I’ve enjoyed all of this, just being here with you.”
She hesitantly lifted her eyes to his, loving the intensity of the emotions he stirred within her. “Will you come again?”
He pushed to his feet, and then bent down to press a sweet, chaste kiss to her forehead. “Nothing in the world could keep me away.”
Chapter Six
Adrian entered MadameMamie’s with a heavy heart. Over three weeks had passed since he’d rescued Gabriel, and it was long past time for Prometheus to make another appearance. To do that though, he first had to do a little reconnaissance and find someone in need of rescuing.
His spy inside the current Earl of Winters’s empire of whorehouses and low-rent properties had assured him that Madame Mamie’s was his stepbrother’s newest venture, so Adrian had come to patronize the horrid place. Hopefully, tonight he’d find all the information he needed to shut the place down within the week.
“Mr. Strathmore, I believe?” the woman he assumed was Madame Mamie purred silkily as she opened the door. “We’d hoped you’d find your way to our little establishment.”
Adrian frowned, unnerved by the fact that the woman had called him by name. He supposed his scars were unmistakable, and he’d done his best to establish himself as a pursuer of wide and varied sexual appetites. The denizens of London’s seedy underground sex pits considered him one of their own, yet for some reason, this woman’s fawning welcome gave him a shiver of apprehension.
Uneasily, he wondered if Roger had begun to put the pieces together, if he’d realized that his establishments were targeted far more often than any others. If he had, he might have begun to wonder who had a vendetta against him, and if so, his thoughts would naturally turn to Adrian and his brothers. He cursed his scarred face, which kept him from going anywhere incognito.
Shaking away his fears, Adrian followed Madame Mamie into a lushly decorated parlor, the red velvet and satin eclipsed only by the varied array of young girls who lounged around the fine furniture in revealing lingerie. He winced internally when he saw how young they were. Not one of them had probably seen her sixteenth birthday.
“See anything you like?” Madame Mamie asked as he ran what he hoped was a dispassionate eye over her merchandise.
His gaze caught and held on a tiny, dark-haired girl in the corner, whose fear rolled off her in a tangible wave. “What about that one?” he asked lazily. “Is she new?”
