The lady glanced over her shoulder and beckoned him to follow. Whether it was intrigue, lust or a powerful primal hunger that drew him to her carriage, he did not know. She climbed into the conveyance and closed the door, yet the driver made no move to depart and sat staring off into the distance waiting for a command.
Alexander stumbled up to the window and peered inside to find his beauty sitting back in the seat, her cape open, exposing the upper curve of her breasts. Shaping his mouth in an attempt to form a word, he seemed to have lost the ability of speech.
The temptress smiled and opened the door. “Are you coming in?”
He climbed inside, the carriage lurching forward before he’d had chance to take his seat.
They raced through the cobbled streets at breakneck speed, up along the path curving through the forest. He thought to seduce his vixen with salacious banter, but his tongue felt thick, his lips swollen and numb.
She watched him, her hands resting in her lap, never moving, yet his body reacted to the touch of her wandering gaze. It felt as though her fingers clawed away at him, scrabbling over his chest, tugging at his clothes, freeing him from the confines of his breeches. As the imaginary assault tormented him, he could smell the heady scent of his arousal and he struggled to draw breath.
“You respond to me well, Alexi,” she whispered. “But now you must sleep — sleep.”
Sleep was the last thing on his mind, but his lids grew heavy, his surroundings hazy, black.
Alexander had experienced many vivid dreams in his life. The best ones always involved forbidden carnal pleasures: screwing the rector’s wife, his daughter, both together.
But this dream was like no other.
He recalled climbing a narrow stone staircase curling up to a tower. The sound of teasing feminine laughter pulled him up. As did the potent smell of exotic incense drifting out from the doorway. The seductive mist creeping towards him felt like invisible fingers massaging his shoulders, determined to relax him, to seduce him.
Time skipped forward.
He lay stretched out on the canopy bed: a monstrous structure of wooden pillars and grotesque carvings. Two naked women fondled with his breeches, stripping him bare. Their eager hands and mouths bringing him close to climax. But when his enchantress entered the room they scurried away, the sound of their whimpering dampening his desire.
“I read your thoughts, Alexi,” she said, her cape billowing behind her as she walked towards the bed. “You like power, you like to control. You have had many women, no.”
Alexander nodded.
“After tonight, you will no longer be able to hide behind your chivalrous mask, behind your polished words and fancy clothes.” She crawled onto the bed to straddle him while he watched, helplessly. “Your depravity will be your constant companion now.”
As she bent down to kiss him, he felt a coldness sweep through him followed by a raging fire as her tongue and teeth licked and nipped his neck. Something sharp punctured his skin — then he felt lost, alone.
Then he felt nothing.
Chapter 2
New Forest, England, 1820
Evelyn Bromwell pulled the thick tartan blanket over her legs and sighed. “I’ve never known it be so cold,” she said thrusting her gloved hands under the blanket as the wind rocked the carriage. “Not in April.”
“Well, you know what they say about the weather,” Aunt Beatrice replied, her hands nestled inside a mink muff. “In like a lion, out like a lamb.”
Evelyn frowned. “How can it be in like a lion when the month’s almost over? Besides, I thought the saying referred to March.”
“It applies the other way around, too, and the Welsh often use it for April. If you recall, it was rather mild early on.”
The wind rattled the window just to prove a point, the drawn-out howl like an ominous warning.
“More like in with a whistle, out with a whirlwind,” Evelyn chuckled.
A dull thud on the carriage roof caused them both to gasp and they froze in anticipation, as though a lion really was about to burst in through the door.
“Either the coachman’s been blown off his perch or the forest is tumbling down around us,” Evelyn whispered, not wishing to tempt fate. “I’d pop my head out and take a look. But knowing my luck I’d be slapped in the face by a stray branch. Somehow, I don’t expect Mr. Sutherby will want to propose to a lady when she’s sporting a blackened eye.”
Aunt Beatrice smiled. “I think you could sprout a potato from your nose and still Mr. Sutherby would be smitten.”
Mr. Sutherby might be smitten, but Evelyn wasn’t.