Games of Pleasure by Julia Ross Page B

him again.
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    RYDER woke with the bedclothes wrapped about his legs like a shroud. He fought free of them, only to grip his pounding head in both hands. Daylight flooded the room. Not the pearly light of early dawn. Bright, broad daylight. A clatter of activity floated up from the inn yard.
    Though the light assaulted his eyes, he forced himself to look around the room. Harsh yellow beams bounced around the walls to illuminate the cold grate and the cheap furnishings. The fire had gone out. He sat up.
    She was gone.
    A fly buzzed lazily over the cold food on the table.
    I like everything, from the simple to the exotic—
    She was gone . For a moment he didn’t know if he could bear it.
    He dropped his head back against the pillows and pressed both palms over his eyes. Memories swirled, a whirlpool of colored sensation. His tongue, his legs, his back, his whole body ached sweetly: a deep physical exhaustion, as if he had been drained of his soul. His head ached—not sweetly at all—as if a steam hammer had been set to push his brain from his skull.
    Devil take it, how much wine had it taken? How many bottles to find the courage to make love to a stranger against all of his better judgment?
    She had seduced him. Yet in the end the responsibility had been his. He had mouthed platitudes about honor and duty. Then he hadn’t hesitated to exploit the vulnerability of a woman who had barely escaped drowning only a few hours before, a woman whose husband had beaten her and abandoned her to die.
    In a blind search for comfort she, too, had made love with a stranger and even shared a few painfully deep personal insights. Obviously she regretted it. And so she had left.
    Though she was right, of course. To wake together would have presented them both with the awkwardness of facing what they had done.
    His hands shook as a rush of pain dampened his palms. Not the pain of too much wine. The pain of self-disgust. She had asked him for a loan. She had been desperate to leave. Claiming it was only for her benefit, he had insisted that she spend the night with him.
    Had he known in his heart of hearts that he was trapping her into sharing his bed? If so, then he despised himself for his duplicity. Yet how could he regret the bliss he had experienced?
    He had told her that he wasn’t a virgin. True enough as far as it went. He knew now that he’d had no more knowledge or skill than any callow boy. She had used her mouth to take him to the brink of madness. She had used her hands. Her tongue. Her legs. Her breasts. Her body. She had hesitated at nothing, done things he had never dared imagine, taken him to places he hadn’t known existed—and kindled an insatiable potency.
    That, perhaps, was easy enough to understand: the irresistible demands of the body. Yet they had also talked, like lovers or soul mates, lost in shared dreams of stars and childhood.
    God! Why had he told her about those naive boyhood vigils on the roof of the Fortune Tower? He had not thought about any of that in years. He never went up to the rooftops at Wyldshay any longer. Yet he remembered as if it were yesterday when he had first thought that he heard Mercury’s high singing and the base note of Saturn thrumming in harmony. That had been the very tail end of his boyhood, before he had fully realized that there was no place in his future for fantasy.
    But she had woken to regret everything and so she had fled. Tearing his heart from his chest and carrying it with her?
    Perhaps he had gone mad? For even in the height of his passion, his intellect had coolly recognized the level of his foolhardiness: Lord Ryderbourne, fascination and bane of society, had allowed a chance-met stranger to lay open his soul.
    Was this obsession? Was this what had driven Sir Lancelot to betray his country, his king, his best friend?
    Ryder forced himself from the bed and walked naked to the window. Dried sweat salted his skin. His hair was stuck