Zoe Archer - Sinner’s Heart

“My hands would grip the blankets. I’d see you, the tension in your neck as you’d clench your teeth, the flex of your muscles as you’d move.”

“I’d not be able to be gentle. I’d take you, hard, so hard, you’d be pushed further back onto the bed, and the bed itself would shudder and groan.”

The brightness continued to build as she envisioned and felt him. She had always liked her lovemaking to be tempestuous, and Bram promised precisely that.

His touch upon himself was brutal, fascinating. “Release would call to you. It would demand your surrender.”

“I don’t surrender.”

“To this, you would. I’d fuck you so powerfully, you’d have no choice. You’d come. So hard you’d lose your breath, lose your name, lose everything but the pleasure I’d give you. Come, Livia. Come now.”

Sensation tore through her. It was a magnificent devastation, molten and unstoppable. Impossible. She had no body, no way to feel or experience release. And yet she did. Through his words alone, he tore down the barriers between the spirit and the flesh.

Oh, gods, it had been an eternity.

Her climax rolled on in endless waves. As she bowed up with release, she heard his guttural moan. She managed to pry her eyes open enough to watch him spend, his head thrown back, face carved sharp. Beautiful agony.

Had she been flesh, his semen would have coated her belly and run down her thighs. But she had no body, and the droplets passed through her and onto the mattress.

He sprawled onto his back, chest heaving. After a few moments, he tucked himself back into his breeches and fastened them. He lay back, a man wrung dry.

“I never thought . . .” She struggled to find words, to gather her shattered mind. “To comprehend such marvels . . . How was that possible?”

“Because we are meant to be lovers,” he said.

Such a simple explanation, yet it felt exactly right.

He gazed at her, and she could not stop her hand from stroking along his bristled cheek, as if she could truly feel him. His eyes slowly closed. Being mortal, and a man, Bram’s breathing soon deepened and slowed. Livia lay beside him, listening to the sounds of his sleep. The blood on his face had dried. There would be more blood—his, countless others’. That was certain.

Tonight had been revelatory. Her magic drew strength when Bram fought; she was not as powerless as she had believed. And the pleasure he had given her afterward, here, in this derelict home that once housed his father’s mistress, on a bed that was shabby and worn . . . that pleasure had been a wonder. It still was, echoing through her in golden reverberations.

More than physical release. An unexpected connection as intimate as two spirits might know. What was this man? Sinner, soldier. Lover.

Her lover—for now. Each hour that passed meant another hour lost, never to be regained. She could not rely on the future. It was a fragile web, and the impending storm would tear everything to tatters.

From his vantage at the window, Bram watched the street. Christ Church’s bell chimed the nine o’clock hour. The hour of business and industry—or so he’d been told, possessing neither the need to do business nor the impulse to industry. Good people walked the streets of London during the daylight hours. Silk weavers concentrated their shops here in Spitalfields, and, as the price of imported silk was exorbitant, the weavers were never idle. After all, England needed its finery.

But this morning, almost no one was on the street, walking to or from their workshops. A few men hurried past, gazes fixed on the ground, and one woman darted between two buildings, her shawl pulled over her head. Bram couldn’t hear the clicking of looms. A child cried and was quickly stifled.

Bracing his hands on either side of the cracked casement, he stared down at the avenue and felt the frown shaping a pleat between his brows.

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered.

“It often is,” answered Livia behind him.

A corner of his mouth turned up. Her mordant wit remained unchanged—yet he expected no less. A night’s pleasure would not alter the heart of her, no matter how searing that pleasure had been.

If anyone would have told him that his most intense sexual experience would involve a woman he couldn’t touch and who could not touch him, he would have laughed in disbelief and told his informant to keep drinking.

But last night . . . Nothing in the whole of his wicked, wayward life had ever equaled what he and Livia had shared. Even the thought of it now turned him molten. Sex had always been a purely physical action. With Livia, it had transformed into something far beyond himself, beyond the needs of the body, or the temporary cessation of sorrow.

Yet that pleasure couldn’t hold back the evil he could sense growing.

“It’s getting worse,” he said.

“John and the Dark One know you are no longer their ally.” Livia came to hover beside him, her radiance pale in the cold gray morning. “Of a certain, the balance continues to tip.”

His stomach growled. Smirking, he laid a hand atop his empty stomach. “The doom of the world may hang in the balance, but I need breakfast.”

She rolled her eyes. “Mortals and your appetites.” “You enjoyed those appetites last night.”

“Most assuredly.”

“There will be more.” Moving away from the window, he stepped close to her. If she had been flesh, at this nearness he would have felt the heat of her body, smelled the fragrance of her skin. “I will give you pleasure to rival the gods.”

“An audacious boast,” she said, tipping up her chin. Yet her eyes darkened further and she ran her tongue over her bottom lip.

He’d happily burn down half of London just to kiss her.

“Not a boast, but the truth,” he answered. “Whatever you experienced in your mortal life, any other lovers you may have had—I’ll make you forget them all. You’ll know only me.”

She stared at him for a moment, her lips parted. “I want nothing more.”

He reached for her, yet his hand passed through the curve of her neck. Acrid frustration welled.

Unconcerned with the demands of his heart, his stomach gave another complaining rumble. The last meal he had eaten had been a hastily bolted chop sometime yesterday afternoon.

“Go,” Livia said, smiling. “Attend to your quotidian needs.”

A thorough inspection revealed that nothing edible remained in the pantry. He’d have to go out to obtain something to eat.

“If I step out of doors in this,” he said, plucking at his torn and bloody clothes, “I’ll be dragged to Newgate as a suspected murderer.”

“The law may show leniency if you tell them you only killed demons.”

“Never mind Newgate. I’ll be hauled to Bedlam and be lucky if the visitors pelt me only with rotten vegetables.”

A search revealed a large chest shoved into the corner of a tiny room adjoining the bedchamber. Bram hefted the chest out of this small room. Setting the trunk on the floor of the bedchamber, he rattled the lid, and discovered it was locked tight.

“Could be empty,” he muttered, “or simply hold bedclothes. Though I could wear a sheet as a toga.”

Livia sniffed. “It takes more than a length of linen to wear a toga. However,” she added with an appreciative leer, “if you strip down to your smallclothes, you’d make a fine gladiator.”

He discovered he rather enjoyed being ogled. A thread of shadow worked its way through him, however. Once, he’d been a kind of gladiator, and gained scars both visible and unseen.

“I’ve a way to discover what’s inside,” she continued, kneeling down beside the chest. Seeing her on her knees brought to mind far too many distracting ideas and images—none of which could ever come to pass.

As he watched, Livia stuck her head inside the heavy wooden box, disappearing up to her shoulders. She reemerged a second later. “Clothing,” she announced.

“If I were a housebreaker,” he said, “you would be extremely useful. I’d avoid all the empty coffers and plunder only those replete with treasure.”

She started when he rammed the heel of his boot against the lock. After a few solid kicks, the metal broke apart.

“Magic could have opened the lock more readily,” she said dryly.

“My way is more satisfying.” He lifted the lid of the chest then pulled out its contents. A man’s velvet coat and waistcoat, both musty, the embroidery along the cuffs and lapels frayed. Holding up the coat, he studied it with a frown.

“This was my father’s.”

“You and he were of a size,” Livia noted.

“He always seemed so big to me.” Yet, after Bram slipped off his torn coat and waistcoat and donned his father’s clothing, he discovered they fit. He strode into the other chamber, Livia right behind him. There, in the cracked mirror propped against the wall, he considered his shattered reflection.

“He’d wear this to church,” Bram said, staring at himself.

“Baron Rothwell always made an impressive figure, even when supposedly honoring a higher power. I’d look back and forth between him and my brother as we sat in our pew. Arthur seemed so small next to Father.” Bram shook his head. “That poor sod—I never envied him.”

“But Arthur was the heir, the favored one.”

He snorted. “Even better for me. I didn’t want to have to wear the responsibility and decorum of the title. All I wanted was to pursue my own desires.” He tugged on the sleeve of the coat. “Now I’m Baron Rothwell. Not the heir my father had wanted.”

The coat was of an old-fashioned style, its skirt fuller than the current mode, its cuffs wider, and the waistcoat was longer than modern fashion dictated. Aside from an odor of must and cedar and the unraveling embroidery, the coat remained in decent condition. His father had always demanded the finest quality.