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  The word’s Yojo had used that he’d saved her for God trembled through her again, as fresh tears clouded her glimpsing vision and she forced the thoughts back in her mind. She needed to think, or to act, or to plan as swiftly as she could, because she had no idea of how long she would be left alone. First she had to decide if she really was alone, because she had a seething need to be up, moving around, and feeling more power in the dire situation. And, she needed to look at the lock on the cell as quickly as she could, because her captors did not know her very well. The tricks she’d been taught from her Gypsy heritage might aid her escape now, or save her life, because she knew how to pick locks.

  Moving her head in a slow motion, inches at a time, she cleared the area in front of her and to the left side free of any presences. Her hearing told her clearly all was quiet, yet some inner instinct made her feel that she might not be alone. The knowledge raised the light hair on her flesh as she moved slowly without perceptible movement trying to see as much as she was able.

  It was a dungeon setting, vying with the ancient legends of kings and chateaus castles. Joelle guessed that it was such a place, and from her judgment it was no more than an hour or two from the east side of Paris, where they had first kidnapped her. There were blocked stone walls leaching dampness in what appeared through the half she could see of it as a circular room. She was indeed held in a cell. A large iron box with stout and rusted bars crossed on the top and on all the sides. It was a cage set in the middle of the circular dungeon and when she lifted her head slightly she saw the stone steps leading upward at a high angle to a wooden-hewed and iron-battened door.

  Providence sliced through her at the exact moment she dared to raise her head, when a soft rustling sound that seemed to come out of nowhere, echoed in her hearing. The rustling collided with the abrupt pounding of her heart, more than any loudness claimed by the sound. Rats, she thought with hope, never pausing to wonder at the dichotomy of that. Rats were nasty villains, but better than any human villains she could think of at the moment. Then, with a trembling neck, she turned her head slowly toward where the sound had come from, and it was then that she first saw him.

  Instantly, her breath sucked inward with surprise at him being there, but not surprise of discovery, because his head was bowed forward. Joelle realized immediately that she could have thought him female at first glance, with the fall of long brown hair hanging before him. But it was his bare chest, seen through the long strands of dark hair draping each side of the muscular expanse that proved him male. He was sitting slumped on the floor behind the stretch of her feet, and Joelle noticed abruptly that he was chained. It came to her then, as though she was struck with a sudden flash of lightening. The Marquis.

  Then without forethought Joelle rolled upward to sit, staring at the man as she clutched the cloak tightly around her nakedness. He was a prisoner as she was, with his hands perhaps bound behind his back and a chain across his chest and possibly his neck. Could he be the Marquis that Baco had so crudely stated was set to rape her? Certainly her instincts and the proof of her sight told her that he was. She turned her head and her gaze quickly from the lush river of his chestnut hair and the lean, ridged outline of his lower belly. He had a cloak thrown over him, just as she did, and she had no doubt that beneath where the heavy black cloth lay across his hips and legs, he was as naked as she was. And . . . he was drugged, where she was not.

  Chained meant unwilling. Drugged meant unwilling. How would he rape her? Joelle’s flesh crawled as she tried hard to think and hold back her fear at the same time. A sexual ritual, perhaps to the death, involving her, the Marquis, and her virginity. It was insanity! Hardly believable, yet she would defeat herself by not believing it completely. She had enough of the pieces to make an intelligent conclusion.

  Suddenly, she rushed to stand, and then carelessly on her bare feet she ran to the cell door and she examined the lock. Her grandfather had taught her to pick locks by the time she was seven years old. Her grandmother to pick pockets. Her parents had been more reserved about such things, but they both had knowledge of unusual talents. Joelle reached through the bars lifting the heavy lock, bigger than her hand. It was a turnkey, with a hook and snap lock. If she had anything long, pointed, and sharp, she could open it. But the angle would be difficult to hold the lock, and then hold something straight and backward into the lock.

  Joelle grimaced and she set the lock back down quietly. Nonetheless, when she turned away, it was with quick and agitated movements. She held the cloak tight around herself as she paced restlessly. She was avoiding a momentous decision . . . there was little time. She did look, with half-hearted attempts, for a long pointed object as she paced. A stick perhaps. But more, she kept glancing at the Marquis.

  “It is useless to open the lock. They would catch you before you could escape and drag you back,” she muttered, “And then, they would know that you can pick locks. When you could have saved it for a better attempt...” She lurched through a turn in her pacing, looking at the Marquis as she did so. He looked young . . . perhaps. Yet, it was hard to tell with his head bowed forward.

  Rituals. She knew of many tales of ungodly and morbid rituals through her Gypsy’s heritage. And all of them were of sacrificial innocents that were put to death in the end. This . . . this seemed more sexual and not a life threatening ritual. “You are fooling yourself,” she hissed, slashing her hand through the air. “Whatever unspeakable use they have in mind for me, without a doubt it will eventually end in death, if nothing else, just for knowing too much.”

  “Indeed.”

  Joelle gasped, whirling about at the sudden sound of a masculine voice. Her gaze sweeping immediately to the Marquis. He looked the same however with his head bowed.

  “Are you awake?” she whispered in a rush that sounded like a hiss.

  “Barely.”

  She nearly jumped backward at the quickness and reality of the confirming sound, but not from any action of the Marquis. He was still slumping forward with only his chest rising and falling . . . a bit heavier perhaps. Spirits take her, he was English, not French! She could hear it in the two short words he’d spoken. And, she realized that providence really did shine harshly in moments of decision, pressing her forward, guiding her. It did not allow her to waver from the only good plan that she had, no matter how much she despised to do it.

  Fate had just burst in on her, because with the Marquis semi-awake, then she really could do it. Where before, because he’d been unconscious, she’d been unsure. She knew quite a bit about sexual relations between men and women, and she knew enough about male physiology to understand that it might have been impossible to harden the Marquis’ cock if he had remained unconscious. Nevertheless, now he was regaining consciousness. A perfect time to implement her plan and use the only form of drastic diversion, vengeance, or complete insanity she had.

  Virginity, verses no virginity. And being semiconscious the Marquis would be an adaptive tool.

  Chapter Six

  Saxon had the impressions of intelligence, petiteness, and burnt red hair. On one of his moments of clarity, through the dredges of the drug they had given him, he thought she was a ploy in the macabre game that was being played out. However, he also remembered his fury pressing through the murky fog of the drug. His rage at Baco’s rough hands on her helpless nudity, and on her alabaster buttocks, nude white globes with creamy pink-edged curves. He had seen the splendor of that soft naked ass.

  Then, he heard it again, the sultry frames of an exotic voice. A voice he longed to lose himself in. A voice to hear in a never-ending rhythm of pleasure. A husky vibrato. An accent he could not claim, and therefore it intrigued him all the more.

  “I am Joelle.”

  Soft hands touched his chest, running curling ribbons of sensation down his sides. Tender fingers heating his bare flesh.

  “You are a ploy then,” he muttered, trying to feel disappointed over the smooth caresses from small hands circling his belly.<
br />
  “I am pleasure in moments of uncertainty. Can you feel that?”

  A rumbling sound of acknowledged relish, rolled upward in answer through Saxon’s chest as fingers of golden heat petted, and then they circled the flaccid groin between his thighs. A male organ that until recently, he’d neglected for so many years. So that now the slightest attention sent tendrils of covetous sensitivity thrumming deep inside it. It with envy so acute that it filled and firmed, suffusing with greed, while brought to fullness by the industriously tight pumping of a feminine hand. Then, his mind sparked more fully. Abruptly, energized by the promise. Then, he found the will to lift his chin, smelling a cloud of lilies around him.

  His gaze floated into irises the color of black velvet. A trembling feminine gasp filled his ears, dallying from plush lips the color of damask wine. “You are . . . beautiful,” she said with dulcet murmuring.

  Saxon might have murmured the same revelation back to her . . . were his senses not wavering over the gossamer heat of her fingers stroking his roguish penis to attention. Handmaiden? The word floated through his mind on the strands of arousal being pumped deep inside him. He had heard the name somewhere and he wondered if she were of this nimble calling. His own personal handmaiden of sex.

  Then, he gasped in rising bliss at the talent she displayed to her craft. “Are you my lovely handmaiden t-then?” he rasped through a deft stroke and squeeze of his stiffening, lusty penis, and through the thick dryness of his mouth that left him voiceless after one attempt.

  Joelle looked into the face of erotic male seduction and beauty. Yet, she understood he did not realize that his masculine lines were so overcoming. From his shaded tea-colored skin to his sensually full lips. But it was the myriad and melting depths of his mahogany-colored eyes, framed by black-tipped lashes that pulled tremendous and immediate attraction inside her. Making her heartbeat flutter and her desperate task to harden his imposing cock so much more inviting.

  What had been for her, so anxious and daring an action that she would do a moment ago, had changed into craving, just gazing into the depths of his liquid eyes. She had seen few male appendages in her life, the flesh-covered bone of virility between a man’s thighs. And she certainly had never touched one before.

  Nonetheless, as a young girl, she’d visited traveling Gypsies on occasions. Friends of her grandparents and she’d sat by the fires, listening with avid and half understanding interest as the women talked intimate gossip of men, while the men sat in their own circles, perhaps discussing women’s peculiarities. It was a rich, and it was possibly at times, a very volatile knowledge for a young woman moving in grander society circles to know. She also might have put it to good use one day, attracting a nobleman to the marriage bed, had not her family obligations and deaths gotten in her way.

  Now she was grateful for the semblance of knowledge that she had, in theory, but as yet untried to this point. Only, nothing could have prepared her for the reality of actually touching. If she thought about it at all before pressing forward and just doing it, in the urgency of her plan, she would have thought to find it distasteful for its complete foreignness. She would have thought to find it disagreeable besides her need to command boldness, where she felt timid and uncertain. She certainly never expected to hold the heat of a man’s bare cock in her hands and find it pleasurable and awe-inspiring. She’d not prepared for the rushing of emotions conflicting natural tendencies. The heat flushing her skin, the feeling of her breasts compressing while yearning forward, or the spiral of arousal oscillating in her sex and beginning to thrum to the male flesh stiffening in her hand.

  She might have jerked her hands away as though they were stung with the flash of a flame, but she held her determination strong. What woman could understand, before feeling it, the flood of power and desire at holding a beautiful man’s cock in their hands? Feeling the warm flesh stretch and grow long. Handling the throbs of excitement beating in the shaft, while seeing the elongated miracle that it became.

  And the desire was nearly impossible to overcome as she stared into the chasm of the Marquess eyes, while using his cock and pumping it erotically to the rigidness she had to have for the defiance that she’d contrived. The Marquis moaned with his chest rising and falling faster, while his lips pursed with carnal fullness. His face was lean and yearning, while his irises deepened to black with slashing red hints.

  “You are not them,” he rasped hoarsely, even as his face grimaced in uncontrolled pleasure. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Stop! Ah, stop!” His head fell back further with his maple-colored hair cascading against the iron bars bracing his back. “Don’t stop,” he heaved.

  “I am Joelle,” she panted, as he did.

  Then, breathless, as she raised her body, lifting her knees to straddle his thighs, while the cloak she wore fell over them, draping where she stroked him so boldly in between. “I regret, I-I...” she pleaded. But then, she cast her eyes downward against the dawning light in his irises. And the feel . . . she knew he had to feel the head of his cock where she guided it and held it pressed to her woman’s entrance. The touch alone branded her in a circular motion as the Marquis groaned.

  “Regret . . . or rape, demoiselle. Do not take what is not given,” he said hoarsely. Then, his hips tried to shift away between the bareness of their thighs cleaved into position.

  But she would not allow it, holding him firmly by the broad-gauged circumference of his cock, while empathy and alarm vied within her. She would not empathize that this was any form of rape of him. He was merely a tool, and the suffering would be all hers. But her alarm at the weight and breath of his cock, the knowledge of plunging it within the heart of her womb, to her was shocking with uncertainty and fear. Nevertheless, she gulped it back quickly and defiantly, with the malevolent face of Incubus searing its image underneath her clenched eyelids.

  Take this, her mind cried to Incubus’ preying illusion as she loosened her body’s tenseness and she fell downward upon the Marquis’ towering cock. Joelle nipped blood from her lip, holding back the cry trying to hurtle from her mouth that expelled instead from the Marquis.

  “No!”

  Shock shattered with violence through Joelle’s body as her downward leap was brought up short with only the head of the Marquis’ cock inserted inside her. Her free fist, braced on the Marquis’ chest, but not the one trying to force his cock into her, pummeled his chest once. “Help me!” she exclaimed in dire frustration. Why would it not go further? What was wrong? Joelle panicked then, heaving with tears burning her cheeks as whimpers etched from her throat.

  “Demoiselle, demoiselle. Please, little firefly. Hold! Hold! Look at me. Look! Look!”

  The tenor words broke through Joelle’s hysteria. The words commands guided her gaze upward, as she gasped, “Virgin. Take it away!” She gulped with hiccupping tears. “I beg you, Marquis. Take it away!”

  His handsome face twisted with regret and churned with ravished arousal and shock. Then, it turned to compassion drenched with comprehension, flickering across his face, while his head slowly shook from side to side denying the reality. “Firefly.” His voice grated with regret, and then somehow he seemed to gather a powerful inner source within him. His eyes gathered and returned maple fire, as he abruptly commanded and pleaded at the same time. “Kiss me. Please. My God, kiss me.”

  Joelle stared at him with tear-stained awe, then compelled by his aura and their intimate connection, she lowered her trembling lips to his sensually firm ones. Instantly, he breathed embers upon her lips, stroking his exquisite mouth over hers. Her mouth sighed into his being, and the jerky shuddering that had been afflicting her limbs began to loosen and still. His lips searched and plucked euphoric rhythms into her yearning soul, until she moaned with returning ardor. Then, with his lips wet and warm; their lips flushed with kissing, he spoke like a mesmerizer against her mouth.

  “Move up and down slowly upon me, Joelle of the light and fire. Slowly, sweet firefly, and let me taste yo
ur lips for eternity.”

  Joelle nodded against the union and the heat of his lush mouth. “I must,” she murmured upon his lips. “Make my own fate...”

  “So brave, so beautiful,” he said. Then, his lips suckled once again over her mouth.

  Joelle’s heart soared at the stunning find of a man so rare and at the field of emotions strongly coursing through her. This should be a tragic and despicable event with the cost so high as to breed madness. Yet, what she felt was heroic desire.

  Saxon thought with his own form of disillusions that had his mind been lucid, besides chalked with avid arousal, the outcome would have certainly been different. He was after all, and always had been, a man of solemn honor. Even, he thought, with the ripe fruit of a woman’s core strangling wet bliss over the head of his prick.

  He could not use his one hand, his arms, or any part of his body. But barely his hips. The chain strafing his bare chest held him fast and reminded him clearly of the dangerous situation. Nonetheless, all that seemed inconsequential to him but the woman trembling above him with lips like gossamer petals. And . . . she moved upon him. She supped his engorged penis deeper inside her fiery wet womb, until his throbbing penis reached the moment of revelation, tightly embedded inside a sheath of virgin femininity, and pressing to the tender tissue of a maidenhead. He was glad that he was bound against rapacious movement, because a fierce maleness rose inside him with the driving need to plunder beyond all reason. The demand of it beaded sweat on his body and tensed his lean muscles as he used the only way open to him, by carnally sucking Joelle’s tongue into the recesses of his mouth.

  Her answer moaned wild and full, as her small hands bracing on his chest, curled inward. Her fingernails scraped his breast muscles as her body quaked with sudden straining tension. Her tongue slid abruptly from his heated suction, as she panted, “Now.”