Wedding Favors Read online

  Her legs felt wobbly, leaden, as if any second now she would slide down the wall supporting her, unable to walk.

  “Why?” she asked. The curtains at the French doors that led to a narrow wrought-iron faux balcony were wide-open. She thought about the couples she’d seen earlier, making love in full view of the courtyard below. “Surely, you don’t mean to ...” Oh, God.

  He took a sip of his champagne, leaning back among the pillows like a dissolute sultan surveying a new harem girl. “I haven’t decided yet. Would it bother you?”

  “Yes!” Her heartbeat took off at a gallop. Her gaze cut to the balcony. She couldn’t even imagine being so exposed. It would be ... God help her. She swallowed and looked back at him. She didn’t say a word, but he must have read something dark and forbidden in her eyes.

  “Shall we try it and see?” His voice was smooth as molasses, and tempting as the Devil’s.

  “Let’s not,” she said. But it didn’t sound convincing, even to herself.

  “Don’t forget, you still have your mask on. No one will know it’s you.”

  Again, the balcony drew her gaze. The idea was outrageously wicked ... and sinfully arousing.

  “I want you to walk over and open the doors,” he commanded. When she didn’t move, he said, “Do it, Tessa.”

  She took a deep breath. There was no reason to panic. He was right. No one here could recognize her. Except Laura, and her friend already knew her deepest, darkest secret fantasies. Besides, it wasn’t as if she was nude or anything. She was still wearing her bra and panties. She pushed off the wall, padded to the French doors, and with trembling hands, opened them wide.

  “Turn around and face me.” She did. “Now take off the rest of your things. I want to see you naked.”

  Omigod.

  “I can’t,” she protested, mortified that she’d gotten herself into this position.

  “You can,” he assured, watching her hungrily. “Don’t be shy, cher. Live your fantasy. I know you want to.”

  Illicit excitement purled through her. She felt wicked. And unbearably aroused. Okay, she did want to.

  Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely get the clasp of her bra undone. The panties were easier. She realized they were wet. So was she. Heat streaked through her.

  He smiled and set down his glass. He came to her. Pulled her close and held her tight. His hands slowly glided over her nude body. He still wore his trousers and unbuttoned shirt, and it felt unimaginably erotic to be naked in his arms like that. She wanted to kiss him, but he wouldn’t let her. He just held her and caressed her, his hot breath stirring her hair.

  Without warning, he turned her in his arms, so her front was facing the courtyard. She gasped. Several people below looked up at the sound to watch them. His hands enveloped her breasts, gathering her nipples between his strong fingers. He pinched them. An electric jolt of desire stabbed through her. She writhed in his embrace, pressing herself back into him, wanting more of the same.

  “Do you want me?” he murmured in her ear, as though reading her mind. Or maybe her body.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please, yes.”

  To her shock, she felt him reach for his belt buckle and lower his zipper right there. His knees bent, there was a rustle, and seconds later he thrust into her from behind. She was wet and swollen, and his cock went in deep and sure.

  She swallowed a cry and struggled to get free. She couldn’t do this in front of other people! But he held her fast with both arms banded around her middle, not allowing her to move more than a few inches in any direction. She grabbed the top of the wrought-iron balcony. The metal was smooth and cool.

  “Shhh,” he soothed. “Hold still.”

  She sucked in a breath. “You can’t—”

  “I’ll decide how far to go. Just be still, for God’s sake. I want to make this good for you.”

  Amazingly, she believed him. Trembling with trepidation, she did as he asked. He was holding her firmly, her legs spread wide, her backside pressed hard up against him. His cock was thick and huge inside her, and she could feel its solid girth throbbing to the beat of their thundering hearts.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No!” She was on the verge of ... of ... Oh, God, she didn’t know what.

  “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  “Afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “This is dangerous,” she said, her voice filled with incipient panic.

  “It is,” he said. “On so many levels. Possibly the most dangerous moment of your entire life. Non?”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “Enjoy it,” he whispered into her ear. “Life is so dull. So few opportunities to feel truly alive, terrified to lose the comfortable existence you’ve always known, as you are feeling now.”

  His words struck an unwilling chord deep within her. How did he know?

  “Look,” he urged. “Look down at the people watching you, and know they are envious of your daring.”

  She let out a shuddering breath. Daring? Her? “I’m anything but,” she murmured.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. His hand rubbed down the front of her body and slid between her legs. She tensed. “Watch them,” he ordered, and his fingers probed her folds, seeking the aching center of her need.

  At his touch, her body arched and she let out a soft cry. The desperate sound drew even more gazes. One strong finger stroked over her clit. She saw stars. His cock pushed in deeper still. His finger circled. She squeezed her eyes shut in an agony of arousal. “Oh, God, Shay,” she moaned.

  “Shall I stop?” he asked, torturing her. The man was a demon. He knew damn well she didn’t want to stop. All along he had known her better than she knew herself, as though he had secret insight into her soul. That for her, doing this was exciting beyond anything she’d ever experienced before or was likely to in the future. And she loved it.

  “No. Don’t stop,” she begged, giving in. She was so close.

  He pulled out a little, then rammed back into her. His finger pressed harder, circled her clit faster. She felt herself coming fast and gulped down a breath. Just as she was about to climax, he reached up and clamped his other hand over her mouth. “Scream for me,” he told her.

  Her orgasm crashed over her in a drowning wave of intense pleasure. It robbed her of air and sent her whole body into spasm after spasm of earth-shattering sensation.

  She screamed, the sound muffled by the flat of his hand.

  And in a sudden flash of total, blissful despair, she knew in her heart that tonight she would do anything this man asked of her. Anything and everything he wanted, without reservation.

  And that was the most dangerous thing of all.

  Chapter 6

  The woman was a feast for the senses, a banquet of pleasure for Shay’s hungry soul. He made love to Tessa all night, until the rosy fingers of dawn reached into the courtyard, turning the maison chamber’s white diaphanous curtains a pale shade of pink.

  She’d started the evening as a beguiling mix of bashful innocence and willing openness. By dawn she had thrown herself fully into the fantasy of being his objet de plaisir. He’d even coaxed off her mask.

  “Let me see you,” he’d murmured as she rode his lap, their arms wrapped around each other, sitting up on the four-poster bed. “I want to know the face of the woman I’m fucking.”

  She’d hesitated only a heartbeat, then flung the mask aside. Her cheeks were flushed with the glow of multiple climaxes, her skin dewy from long hours of bed play. Her face was framed by auburn hair in glorious dishevelment, mussed by his own fingers in her slow indoctrination as his personal odalisque. “I guess it’s only fair,” she returned breathily, “since I can see you.”

  He’d held her still and studied her until she blushed and pressed her face into the crook of his neck. “Why do you look at me like that?” she whispered.

  He kissed her temple. “Like what?”

  “Like ... like you’re
searching for something in my face.”

  “Maybe I am,” he confessed.

  She lifted her head. “What?”

  Should he tell her? Ask her if she remembered that long-ago day they’d met?

  What the hell. The incident had been haunting him for years. He’d seduced her tonight specifically to purge himself of the absurdly disproportionate lingering effects of that chance meeting with a girl young enough to raise the hairs even on the neck of a sixteen-year-old bad boy.

  “You were at the fountain earlier tonight,” he said. “The Jaillissement de Plaisir.”

  Her lips parted, startled. “How do you know that?”

  “I was watching you.”

  A shadow of wariness flitted through her sex-smudged eyes. “From where? Why?”

  “From a balcony.” He wasn’t about to tell her that it was the private balcony of his own suite of rooms upstairs. She didn’t know his last name nor the fact that he was the owner of the maison Chez Duchesne and heir to the family fortune. He liked the fact that she was ignorant of his wealth and his reputation. It made her honest, a rare commodity in his experience with women. He winked. “I heard four beautiful women laughing in the abandoned courtyard. Who could resist a peek? By the time I looked, the others had left. Then I saw it was you ...” He let his words trail off, coaxing an acknowledgment, a sign that she shared his powerful memory.

  Her brows drew together. “What do you mean, it was me?”

  “You’ve been there before, at the Jaillissement, non?” he prodded.

  She started to shake her head, then all at once she halted, looking astonished. “I’d almost forgotten, but yes, I have! When I was young, visiting the French Quarter with my parents.” She gasped. “My God. It was that fountain? That’s why the old courtyard looked so familiar!” Her wide eyes met his. “How on earth did you know?”

  He tamped down a flare of disappointment. “You really don’t remember me?”

  “You?”

  As she struggled to dredge the memory of him from the murky depths of forgotten experiences, he shifted and drove his cock farther up into her. A reminder to himself that the past didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had her now, here, tonight. “Do you recall anything else that happened that day ... ?” he prompted, despite an overwhelming irritation with himself for giving a foutu damn. What did it matter if she’d forgotten him?

  It was her turn to study his face. But his cock play was distracting her. She closed her eyes when he rammed up into her again. “My God, the boy!” she breathed. “In the courtyard. The one who tried to kiss me. It was you!”

  He rubbed his cheek with a thumb. “Merci Dieu, you did not have the same reaction tonight as you did back then.”

  She made an embarrassed noise. “Oh, damn. I slapped you, didn’t I?”

  “More like sucker-punched. You’ve a wicked right hook, you.” His lips curved as he grasped her jaw in his palm and held her for a thorough, drowning kiss. “I may just have to punish you for that.”

  Her consternation melted to an undulating whole-body purr. “Promise?”

  They’d been fucking like minks since closing the French doors earlier; explosive but fairly conventional stuff. He’d been gradually initiating her into the role of his submissive, and she’d been a quick study, more than willing to please him.

  “Mais, yeah,” he promised.

  Excitement spurted through him. His gaze sought the array of restraints and other equipment hanging next to the headboard, standard equipment in all the maison’s pleasure chambers. Because of her relative inexperience, he’d been holding back from what he really wanted to do to her.

  Time to raise the stakes.

  He lifted her up off his cock and ordered, “Turn around.” They untangled their legs, and she obliged with her back. “Raise your arms.” She did, and he grasped her wrists, bent her forward, and quickly manacled her low to the headboard.

  She gave a little cry and met his eyes in the large mirror hanging behind the bed. “What’s going on?” Her bottom was in the air, enticingly displayed.

  “What do you think?” he drawled.

  “But I don’t ...” She swallowed, pulling at her bonds. “What are you going to do to me?”

  Pleased that she hadn’t stopped his actions, only questioned them, he ran his hands down the sides of her torso and over her backside. Instead of answering, he asked, “Do you know the legend of the Jaillissement de Plaisir?”

  “What does that have to do with tying me up?”

  He drew back his hand and gave her ass a sharp smack.

  “Ow!” She tried to jerk up, but the fur-lined cuffs prevented it. “What the—!”

  He smacked the other side.

  “Ouch!”

  He rubbed over her plump flesh, feeling the heat of the sting and her growing arousal, drawing it into his hands. “When I ask you a question, you must answer me.”

  “That—”

  He raised his hand again, along with a brow.

  “Okay!” she rushed to say. “I’ll answer! Um, what was the question again?”

  “The legend.”

  “Right. Yes. I’ve heard that throwing a coin in it and making a wish is supposed to grant the supplicant endless sexual pleasure. If you do it with your true love, you’ll be forever fulfilled and in love.”

  He watched her reflection carefully in the mirror. “Is that what you were doing there earlier? Hoping for a magic spell?”

  “I suppose.”

  You believe in voodoo, then?”

  “God, no. I told you, all this was my friend’s idea. I didn’t make a wish, anyway.”

  He pursed his lips. “Not this time,” he murmured.

  “Not—” Suddenly her eyes widened in consternation. “Oh, my God. You and I ... back then, we threw coins!” she said on a rush of breath. “I remember. They landed in the fountain!”

  “A complete accident. And we didn’t throw them,” he refuted. “I was running to buy an ice cream for my little sister. When you and I collided, the coins merely flew from my hand.”

  “I was about to make a wish with mine,” she said, her gaze turning dreamy as she dipped into the past again. “I wanted a kitten for my birthday.”

  He moved forward, took her hips between his hands, and spread her knees wide apart with his. “Et voilà. Nothing to do with us. Or love. Or this attraction we feel. The fountain nonsense, it’s just a silly superstition.”

  Her gaze came back into focus. “Of course it’s not real.”

  “There’s no such thing as voodoo. Or endless pleasure,” he stated unequivocally and thrust into her.

  “Or someone loving you forever,” she gasped as he withdrew and thrust in harder.

  “Complètement fou.”

  Craziness.

  That’s what he told himself as he hammered into her over and over, drawing moans and gasps of pleasure from both of them until they exploded in a mind-bending climax. Crazy that he’d been thinking of her all these years.

  Crazy, he told himself as he spent the rest of the night exploring her body, teaching her to touch him in ways that drove him mad with desire. Crazier still, he told himself as he gently introduced her to the many pleasures of submitting to a man’s will, that he’d even think about blaming his troubles with the building permits and his unfulfilling love life on some absurd voodoo magic. Craziest of all, he told himself firmly as he now stared at the dimming shadows creeping across the ceiling as pink sunlight peeked into the room, that he’d thought fucking this woman for a single night would exorcise her from his dreams, along with the winds of discontent that had blown through his life for the past fifteen years.

  Putain de merde. He knew damn well voudoun wasn’t real ... but it sure as hell felt like he’d been caught in some kind of black magic spell that refused to relinquish him. How could he possibly have thought having sex with her would break him free?

  “Shay?” she whispered. She’d been dozing in his arms for the pas
t hour, the two of them sprawled across the pillow-strewn, sheet-tangled bed, emotionally replete and sexually sated. For now...

  “Yeah, cher.”

  “So, about that kiss at the fountain...”

  Dieu. Was she a mind reader as well as an erotic sorceress? “Mm-hmm?”

  “What made you do it?” she asked. “Why would a boy like you”—she turned in his arms and peered up at him—“try to kiss an awkward, gangly girl like me?”

  He avoided the pitfall. “You were far from gangly, cher. And a boy like me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She smiled. “Older. Cute as hell. Probably a bit of a bad boy, too, I wager.”

  He cringed. “Cute? Merde.” He grinned. “But I’ll give you bad. Yeah, definitely bad.”

  “So, why?”

  “Ah, Tessa. You were young and sweet and on the verge of blossoming into a real beauty. Even a clueless boy like me could see that. When I ran smack into you and those coins went flying, you looked so damn upset that I’d spoiled your little wishing ritual ... I couldn’t resist giving you something else to remember instead.”

  Amusement danced in her eyes. “No ego there or anything.”

  He chuckled. “I’ve always wanted to apologize. It was just an impulse. Honestly, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You didn’t. I was just surprised. I’ve always regretted smacking you. After you’d gone, I wanted to kick myself.” She nestled closer to his body, extended her tongue, and licked at his nipple.

  He fought a moan and, amazingly, his body stirred. They’d indulged in nonstop, down-and-dirty fuck-me sex all night, and still he craved more. He couldn’t get enough of the woman or her body. It was insane how much he wanted her.

  In a well-practiced motion, he rolled on top of her, gathered her wrists in his hands, and pinned them above her head again. He’d learned through delightful experience how much she enjoyed being restrained. And he liked nothing more than being in total control. Especially of a beautiful woman.