Page 8 of What Happens in Hedone

Jay followed the tilt of her head. On the other side of the room the matron from the tableaux stood locked in a passionate embrace with the woman from the audience. They kissed as if starving for the taste of the other.

“They are good friends,” Jay observed.

His lady snorted. “Very good friends.”

Jay nodded. He had a great-aunt who possessed a devoted female companion and he had at some point comprehended that their union was as complete as husband and wife. Lady Lesbos took the matron by the hand and led her up a set of polished stairs beneath an archway decorated with another peacock, its tail in full spread. Clearly, they had arranged a private transaction.

“There are bedchambers above?”

“I am not familiar with them.”

She said this offhand, moving on to a dish of red jellies coated with sugar. She bit at the end of one, and her eyes widened. “Mmm. Pomegranate clear cake.”

So she did not make assignations. Not with him, but perhaps not with anyone. She lifted her eyes to his. “Do you visit often?”

“This is my first.”

She selected another candy, rolling the sugar across her lips. “I come for the food.”

His mind wallowed in a fog. The scents, the music, the low flickering light, the delight that swirled through the room like a magic-born mist, all of it made him feel again as if he had stepped out of time, outside the constraints of the mortal earth, the dull clockwork world he had always known. There were realms he’d never realized, and once again, it was a woman who touched him and made the scales fall from his eyes.

He wished this day would never end. He wished he could take her to one of those rooms and share whispers, and more, all the night.

“If I am here tomorrow night, will I see you?”

She tilted her head to the side. Her neck was lovely, a long, splendid slope of cream-skimmed skin, the lobe of her ear a delicate curve he wanted to bite.

“Tomorrow night is Persia. Lady Iris is organizing.”

“I have a great longing to visit the East.”

She pressed her lips together, rubbing off the sugar, and Jay was quite sure he groaned aloud. “Have you found it?” she asked in a low voice.

“Found what?” He lowered his voice in return, stepping close to hear her.

Her eyes were dark pools, her lashes snares that tangled a man’s soul. Her nose was long and firm but sloped slightly up at the tip, betraying the elegant symmetry of her features with that touch of pertness. He could not tell if the elaborate scrollwork of her mask was a peacock, a butterfly, or meant to mimic the curl and roll of waves on the sea.

She studied him in return. “The pleasure you seek,” she whispered. “Have you found it?”

What gripped him was nothing so delicate as pleasure. The teeth of raw need sank into him. It ripped off the shell he’d built as armor against the world and left his bare, aching organs exposed.

“Not entirely,” he said.

She lifted the clear cake she’d taken a nibble of. “Try again.”

Jay did the next unprecedented, shocking thing of his life. He bent his head and closed his mouth around her fingers. He tugged the candy with his tongue, then her fingers. She tasted of sugar and angelica. Her eyes flared as she held his gaze, and a flush rose in her cheek.

Desire. For him.

He licked each one of her fingertips, curling his tongue around the soft pad. Her breath stuttered, the flush dipping to her collarbones. Jay followed with his eyes and saw the hard points of her breasts puckering the fabric of her gown. The same primal reaction stirred his groin.

“I thought you said pomegranate,” he growled, “but I cannot tell.”

With a hitch of breath she reached for him—she was bold—and her hand on the back of his neck unlocked something in him, the hard discipline he’d cultivated, the rigid reserve. She lifted her mouth and he fell upon her. There was no delicacy, no cautious foray. He crashed into her like a wave breaking on the shore and she rose to meet him.

Heat engulfed him instantly, as if he’d been snapped up by an enormous terrier and shaken, his mind looping away, his senses stunned. She was warm vanilla and the skin beneath his hand was like clay that had dried properly in the sun, smooth and pliable and the texture of silk. The small moan in the back of her throat, of need, or surrender, sent blood roaring through him, plunging from his brain to his cock.

He'd always taken care with his women. He was courteous. Deliberate. Until now. He slid his tongue into her mouth and she met and welcomed him, and he wanted her this instant, wanted to grab her hips and hoist her onto the table, yank up her gown. He need only undo his trousers and he could be inside her, claim her, possess her utterly.