Games of Pleasure by Julia Ross Page A

and strong and gentle against her white flesh, the bones gleaming in the faint sheen from the window.
    â€œThere are over a thousand stars,” she said. “Every one of them is a sun and each lies at the center of its own system of planets. I’ve always taken comfort in that.”
    â€œIn the perfection of Creation?”
    â€œNo, not that. In its infinite indifference, perhaps. When I was little I thought the universe must be perfect, but even our sun has dark stains on it. The marks grow and shrink as if cinders were being randomly tossed up from a furnace.”
    His palm stroked up her spine as if he would shape her back in his memory. His fingers began to play idly with her hair. “That doesn’t detract from its perfection.”
    Miracle tipped back her head and closed her eyes. “Did you ever look at the stars when you were a boy?”
    He hesitated for only a moment before he replied. “I used to creep out alone at night sometimes to stand on the roof of the Fortune Tower at Wyldshay. Not only to look, but to listen.”
    â€œListen?”
    â€œMy ears strained for the thin, high music that the planets sing as they revolve in their orbits. Some nights I even thought that I heard it.”
    â€œPerhaps you did.”
    He reached to take the brush from the bedside table. “Or perhaps the wind sang just so in the wires on the flagpole, or the breeze simply echoed its sighs around the gargoyles and battlements.”
    â€œNo. You heard the music of the spheres. It’s a lonely enough melody.”
    â€œI was hardly lonely. I had a brother and sisters and lived in a house full of servants.”
    He began to smooth the tangles from her hair. Long strokes flowed from her scalp to her waist. Little tingles of pleasure danced after them, as if she were melting under his care.
    â€œYet you still strained to hear that forbidden song,” she said. “Your soul reached for the harmony of the cosmos. It’s our best escape from chaos.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but perhaps all children make time for such things, even when life demands otherwise.”
    â€œYou were born the heir to a dukedom,” she said. “They must have demanded a great deal.”
    He brushed her hair in silence for a few minutes. Tingling with pleasure at his touch, Miracle stared at the little rectangle of sky and the remote majesty of the king of the gods.
    â€œWere you lonely as a child?” he asked at last. “When you learned about the stars?”
    â€œAh!” she said. “Never mind about me.”
    He set aside the brush and began to braid her hair in careful fingers, then unfastened the ribbon at her throat to use for a tie. “You’re perfection,” he said.
    â€œDon’t say that!”
    â€œWhy not? The curve of your back glimmers flawlessly in the starlight. Your skin seems almost translucent, as if you were a spirit of beauty sent merely to torment me.”
    She turned to look down at him, at his dark eyes and tumbled hair, the broad chest and lovely male throat. With one fingertip he slowly traced the profile of her breast and nipple, as if he painted her in starlight. The sensitive tip puckered as sensation plummeted down to her groin.
    â€œI torment you?” she asked.
    â€œOnly with the promise of more bliss.”
    Miracle gazed down at him, his splendor blurred by starlight and the wavering haze of sudden tears. She took the ribbon from his fingers and caught his face in both hands to whisper against the loveliness of his mouth.
    â€œI’m no wraith, my lord, just a woman—”
    He stopped her words with his kiss. Miracle met his tongue with her own, then slid her thigh over his as she pinned his hands above his head in both of hers. His arousal reared hard against her belly. Slowly, exquisitely, she retreated from the terrifying chasm that had begun to yawn at her feet, and began to ravish