Savage Nights: The Savage Trilogy Read online

  Yet I didn’t. This was not the time to forget my training as an Innocent. I’d learned that the pleasure to be found in the challenges could well outweigh even the rewards and that everything—the trust and the waiting and the obedience—served to make that pleasure even more intense.

  Finally he broke away, still holding my jaw steady so that our faces remained close. He was not nearly as impassive as he was pretending to be: although his eyes were hooded, his pupils were dark with excitement, and the vein at his temple pulsed with it.

  “Your challenge tonight will be a simple one,” he said in a rough whisper. “You must walk through the lobby of the Savoy, address the clerk at the desk for messages, and then proceed to your room. You must do these things alone, as you have done them countless times before.”

  I couldn’t keep the little catch from my breath. Of course I’d done all those things before in many grand hotels, including the Savoy, and done them without a thought. If that were all, then this first challenge would be no challenge at all.

  But I’d never done them at this hour of the night, when no respectable lady would be returning unattended by a husband, friends, or servants. Because of all that Savage and I had done in the motorcar my hair was missing pins and falling down, and without a comb or brush there was no possibility of repairing it myself. I still wore the red silk Poiret gown with the glittering black beads that had been perfectly appropriate for the final dinner at Wrenton, but I wore it without a corset, petticoats, camisole, or drawers. I was completely without the layers of lace-trimmed armor that protected a lady’s decency, and the thin silk clung provocatively to my hips and belly. I might as well have been naked, for that would have been less seductive than this lascivious second skin of scarlet silk.

  As I realized exactly how exposed I would be my glance dropped down to my breasts, barely covered by the dress’s panel of black lace. Pebbled with desire, my nipples thrust lewdly against the lace, with the long strand of pearls he’d given me spilling over it. Instead of feeling shame, my heart quickened at the brazen sight and I felt my breasts become more sensitive still as the lace teased my nipples.

  Savage followed my glance and smiled.

  “Ah, so you understand the challenge, Eve,” he said. “Consider well what you must do. Dressed as you are, you must walk across that long marble floor, past the inquisitive eyes of the doormen, the footmen, the bellmen, and the men at the desk. All those men, all watching you, and seeing your dishevelment at this hour, and realizing how aroused you still must be. They’ll see the flush of your cheeks, how bruised your lips are from my kisses, the languid sway of your walk, and the fullness of your breasts. They’ll see you for what you are, a woman who has been fucked, and fucked well. No matter how high you hold your head, they’ll be unable to look away, and every one of them will be wishing he had been in my place.”

  “I can wear my coat, can’t I?” I asked with an odd mix of desperation and desire. While I could imagine all too easily the leering men he was describing—what attractive woman has not endured a similar scene while walking past a group of men?—the fact that I would appear so wanton, so alluring, was unsettling and yet strangely arousing as well.

  I had always kept my feelings private, even secret. Could strange men, in fact, tell so much from my face alone? Would they see what I’d done—what I’d do again—with Savage? Was I that vulnerable?

  If so, then this challenge that Savage proposed would, in fact, be far more difficult than I’d first thought. Instinctively I reached for my fur, pulling it around me for protection.

  He realized what I was doing and chuckled.

  “I should make you enter wearing only your gown,” he said. “It would give you a more complete notion of the power of your effect upon men. But for this week you belong to me, not to them. As you may recall, I do not like to share.”

  He was smiling, but I remembered all too well how he’d violently beaten another gentleman who’d dared to touch me at Wrenton. To say Savage did not like to share was a laughable understatement. Yet I didn’t feel trapped by his possessiveness. Instead it made me feel cherished, treasured, as if by keeping me safe from other men he’d set me free.

  “You may keep your coat,” he said softly. “Let them guess, and only guess, what is hidden inside it. The challenge is for you, not them.”

  Relieved, I drew the coat more closely around my shoulders. “Thank you, Master.”

  He raised a single brow. “You thank me without knowing the complete challenge?”

  “You said I am to walk through the lobby to the desk, then to the lift to my rooms,” I said. “Wasn’t that the challenge?”

  “In part,” he said, lowering his voice as he slipped his hand inside my coat. Instinctively he found my breast, shoving aside the pearls to fill his palm with my tender flesh. A slash of light from the streetlamp illuminated his hand cupping my lace-covered breast, my nipple pressing through between his fingers, and I shuddered as much from the erotic picture as from the sensation he was drawing from my body.

  “I want you to do all those things, yes,” he continued, “but at the same time I want you to be thinking of how your breasts ache for my hand and for my mouth.”

  He bent his head and sucked hard on my nipple. The wet pressure of his tongue and mouth through the fine web of the lace made me shudder and clutch at the black silk of his hair. He gave my nipple one final swipe with his tongue, then grazed his cheek against the side of my throat, the stubble of his beard rough on my chin.

  “I want you to think of that,” he whispered into my ear, his hand closing over my breast again. “And I want you to remember the feel of my cock when it’s buried deep inside you. I want you to remember how thick it is, how it fills you, and the heat of passion that burns you from inside. I want you to remember the pleasure of it, how wet you become as you writhe around my cock, and how I fill you with my seed until our juices run together, until you come so hard you cry out with the force of it. That is what I want you to remember as you walk through the halls of the Savoy, and that is what I expect you to describe to me tomorrow.”

  How could I think of anything else after I’d heard that? I was close to coming again now, my breath ragged and my body arching against his. But as I turned to offer my mouth again to him more light spilled through the windows on us and I realized that the motorcar had come to a halt.

  “Ah, we have arrived,” Savage said, easing away from me. He smoothed his dark hair back from his forehead as he composed himself, once again the reserved, slightly bored English lord. “Here is the Savoy now.”

  I hadn’t the same ease (or perhaps it was experience) with restoring myself. I scrambled to pull down my skirts and gather my coat together, my fingers clutching deep into the plush sable just as the doorman unlatched the door and swung it open.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Hart,” the liveried doorman said as he held the door for me, recognizing me as a guest of the hotel.

  I looked down, avoiding his eyes as I thought of everything Savage had said earlier. I was flushing furiously, and I couldn’t help but look back at Savage, sitting in the shadows.

  “Good night, Mrs. Hart,” he said. There was so many notes to his voice, the benign pleasantly underscored with challenge, and command, expectation, and perhaps a hint of amusement as well. “It was my … pleasure to be of service to you this evening.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” I murmured, striving to respond in the same manner. “It was entirely my pleasure, and my honor.”

  I stepped from the motorcar, ignoring the doorman’s offered hand—partly because I wished to be aloof and distant but also because I wanted to use both my hands to keep my coat as tightly closed as I could to hide my revealing gown.

  After I had sat so long in the darkened motorcar, the electric lights illuminating the Savoy’s entrance and lobby were so bright that I had to pause, wincing as my eyes grew accustomed to the brilliance.

  “Do you require assistance, Mrs. Hart?” a
sked the doorman with practiced concern. “Might I summon—”

  “Thank you, no,” I said, drawing myself up. If I was to survive Savage’s challenge, I would need every scrap of the hauteur that my position in New York society had required. The subservient role I’d been playing this last week as Savage’s Innocent would not do now, and with my chin high I collected myself for the long walk across the plush red carpet, up the steps, and into the hotel.

  Behind me I heard the doorman close the door to the motorcar, and I imagined Savage watching me begin his test, waiting for me to falter or not do as he’d bidden. Or perhaps he wasn’t watching at all and had instead already put me from his thoughts. He’d said he’d other business to attend to, the way that men inevitably did. Perhaps he was considering that business now instead of me, resting his head back against the cushions with his eyes closed, and—

  No. In my heart I knew he was watching me. I could sense it, feel it, as surely as if his hands were still upon me. He might pretend otherwise and speak of other obligations, but I knew that we’d become so closely twined this last week that he could not help watching me, even if he wished to.

  The thought gave me confidence, and I began walking. I did not walk briskly, as was my usual custom, but slowly, even languidly, for his benefit.

  I kept my shoulders relaxed and let my uncorseted hips sway within the cocoon of my fur coat. Even if no one else could see it, I felt the red silk slither over my body, sliding over my skin in a private, sensuous caress. The long strand of pearls that Savage had given me hung heavy over my breasts, each luminous bead already warmed from contact with my body. With each step as my thighs whispered together I felt his seed as a lubricious reminder of how often he’d fucked me tonight.

  It was all enough to make me forget my New York hauteur. Instead, for him, I walked like a goddess, proud and without shame.

  I wanted that to be Savage’s last glimpse of me and his last memory of me before we met again. If the goal of his challenge for me was for me to feel the power of being temptation incarnate, then this was how I must walk—the way I’d learned while I’d been not only Savage’s Innocent but his lover as well.

  I walked up the carpeted steps, my footfalls muffled by the luxuriant plush, and past the two doormen who held open the shining black doors with their polished brasses. I glanced at the tall mahogany clock: a quarter past four in the morning, roughly what I’d guessed.

  At this hour, there were no other guests in the usually crowded lobby. I was the only one. The neat rows of leather-covered armchairs were unoccupied, the palm trees in their huge Chinese pots nodded with no one beneath their fronds, the signboards with the day’s menus for the tearoom, the supper room, and the dining room went unread, and even the white sand in the ashtrays was raked and pristine.

  But while all the other guests might be in their rooms, the lobby wasn’t empty. Far from it. Just as Savage had predicted, the men employed by the hotel were in attendance exactly as if it had been the middle of the day: bellboys, porters, and doormen in livery uniforms, the desk clerks and managers in morning coats, and assorted other men engaged in sweeping and cleaning and polishing.

  Every one of them had stopped what he was doing to watch me.

  I pretended to take no notice, my eyes straight ahead and my chin high, yet I couldn’t keep the blush from my cheeks. It wasn’t there from guilt, but from the sheer force of their combined attention.

  Again, Savage had been right. These men could guess what I’d done with him, and more, I sensed that they admired me for it, wishing they’d been in his place. I couldn’t say exactly how I knew this, but I did, and it was a kind of admiration I’d never felt before.

  Even in my disheveled state—or perhaps because of it—I felt not only beautiful but also desired. It had nothing to do with my name or my family or my costly clothes or jewels. For the first time in my life, I was being noticed not as a lady, distant and remote and meant to be admired but not touched, but as a woman, primal and erotic, and I reveled in it.

  Finally I reached the elaborate main desk, and I stopped as I always did after returning.

  “Good evening,” I said, although it was much closer to morning. “Have there been any messages for me while I was away?”

  “Good evening, Mrs. Hart,” the desk clerk said, clearly struggling to maintain his professional demeanor with me. “Yes, there have been many messages and letters, but your lady’s maid has collected them each morning for you. I expect she’ll have them waiting for you in your rooms.”

  “I am sure she will,” I said. I was still clutching my coat together, but as I stood before him I lessened my grasp and let the front slip open, giving him a glimpse of red silk and black lace and my own pearly skin, and my obviously uncorseted breasts and belly.

  He glanced down, unable not to, and cleared his throat. A mottled flush rose from his stiff starched color through his neatly clipped beard to his cheeks, and all the training in the world could not stop his gaze from devouring the sensual sight that I was offering.

  I smiled and shifted my shoulders so the coat opened further. I realized I was toying with him, tempting him with pleasures he could never possess, and I realized, too, how exciting it was to be so unabashedly brazen.

  He cleared his throat again, struggling to regain his composure. “Shall I, ah, summon a porter to carry your cases to your room for you, Mrs. Hart?”

  Now I was the disconcerted one. In my haste to flee Wrenton with Savage I’d left all the belongings I’d brought there earlier—all my clothes, my jewels, my trunks. I hadn’t given them any thought at all. I assumed that all my things would be sent after me later today by Lady Carleigh, Wrenton’s mistress and our hostess, and the nearest thing I had to a friend in London, or in New York, for that matter.

  Yet to arrive at my hotel without so much as the keys to my own rooms was more awkward. I should be mortified. Doubtless this, too, was part of Savage’s challenge, another lesson I must learn.

  But I would triumph. My smile widened for the clerk. He might blush, but I did not.

  “Thank you, no, but I’ll need no further … assistance,” I said, turning to walk to the lift. Again, I could feel a score of male eyes watching me, but I didn’t care. My coat floated around me now, alternately concealing and revealing my red silk gown and my body beneath it. I wanted them to look, and I wanted them to desire me, exactly as Savage had directed.

  But I belonged exclusively to him. That was my armor. If this was another of Savage’s variations of the Game, then I’d played and I’d won, and I couldn’t wait to tell him what I’d done.

  I rode in silence in the lift to my floor, and I refused the operator’s offer to accompany me to my door. It was just as well. At least he didn’t witness the spectacle of me rapping on the door of my own suite as I tried to wake my servants. Surely one of them must hear me; I’d brought a small staff with me from New York, the ones who’d claimed to be most devoted to my welfare.

  Finally one of my footmen opened the door a crack, his face groggy yet startled to see me. Behind him stood my lady’s maid, Hamlin, in her nightgown and wrapper, her round face surrounded by a halo of curling papers. I pushed the door open and swept inside.

  “Why did you keep me waiting?” Now that the excitement of my return was done, I was suddenly exhausted and drained, and all I wished for was my own bed. “It’s preposterous that I must be kept waiting outside my own door.”

  “How were we to know you’d return at such an hour, ma’am?” Hamlin said indignantly. She had been with me since I was a girl, and she’d earned the right to be more outspoken than most servants ever dared. “You should’ve sent word to expect you, ma’am. What lady travels like a thief in the night, I ask you?”

  “I am no thief, Hamlin,” I said wearily. “You know that. I returned to London by motorcar with another member of the party. Now I am very tired, and wish to go to bed immediately.”

  “Of course you do, ma’am,” Hamlin said,
becoming reassuringly protective. “Poor lamb! Here, let me take that heavy coat from you, and I’ll lay out a fresh nightdress.”

  I gladly let the heavy fur drop from my shoulders into her waiting hands. I rubbed my hands up and down over my bare arms, my skin prickling and overly sensitized. My walk through the lobby had left me uncomfortably aroused, with no way to ease my longing. I already missed Savage more than I’d thought possible, and if I’d known where he lived I think I would have gone after him.

  Behind me, Hamlin was sputtering with alarm.

  “Look at you, ma’am; just look at you!” she exclaimed, shocked. “How could you go about without your corset or petticoats, ma’am? Didn’t you have a proper lady’s maid looking after you?”

  “Of course I did,” I said defensively. “It was my choice to leave off my underthings. I preferred how the dress looked without them.”

  “More like you’ve left your sense, ma’am,” Hamlin said grimly, attacking the hooks on the back of my dress with indignant fervor. “What lady goes about without a corset or petticoats? And look at you! You’ve lost flesh, you have, else you never could’ve worn this dress without lacing. Didn’t that Lady Carleigh feed her guests? Oh, I knew that Wrenton Manor was a wicked place, ma’am, and full of wicked persons, too, I’m sure.”

  “Hush, Hamlin; it wasn’t like that at all.” I shrugged free of the dress, standing in my shoes and nothing else. With Savage I’d grown comfortable with my body and with being naked. “The company was largely charming and well-bred, with a great many titles. You would have approved.”

  Hamlin sniffed, her ultimate sign of contempt. I might be at ease with my nudity, but she was not and quickly slipped a lace-trimmed nightgown over my head. As she began to tie the ribbons in the front she paused and sniffed again, as if she smelled something of a suspicious nature.

  Which, in fact, she had.

  “Them pearls, ma’am,” she said slowly. “Those don’t look to be the ones given you by Mr. Hart.”