Captured (2 page)

Unable to keep herself from it any longer, she dropped her fingers down between her legs, parting the soft black curls that shielded her sex and finding the hard nub that only revealed itself when she was so aroused. It was now jutting proudly from her nether lips, as if it strained toward her eager fingers, aching for her to touch it, rub it, let her fingertips fly back and forth across it until the walls melted around her.

But she did not satisfy the needy little piece of her body, merely teased it for a moment, imagining again that it was his thick fingers that taunted her before slipping lower. He wanted to see if she was as excited as her eyes, her breath, her tightened nipples told him she was. He groaned again as he felt the liquid evidence of her need even before he reached her cunny. She was so aroused that her slickness trailed down her thighs, pooled between her legs like a warm pot of honey heated for afternoon tea.

“I’ve never seen a virgin so ready,” he muttered against her lips, his large hand cradling one cheek of her buttocks, pulling her closer to the fingers that now parted her

folds. As one digit slid easily, swiftly inside, she cried out, pressing her breasts into the warmth of his chest.

The shutter clicked again, a soft whirring sound that beat against her skin, taking her to an even higher pinnacle of lust.

“I may have never had a man, but I know the ways of pleasure. So be sure that you please me, sir, or I shall have to look elsewhere for another lover,” she teased against the spicy skin of his neck, letting her tongue trace the line of his throat, taste the salty musk of the man who had obsessed her imagination for longer than he could possibly know.

“Is that so?” He laughed and nibbled her ear, thrusting another finger into her even as he let a third knuckle rub against her nub, quickly bringing her close to release.

The shutter snapped closed, capturing just how close she was, just how much she ached for him, for the pleasure he would give her.

“It is so, do not doubt me. I am a lady of my word.”

“I believe you, Lillian, but there is no need for your threats. You’re about to find your pleasure on my hand. Right now.” His voice was thick with need, as well as a smug, masculine authority that usually made her hackles rise. But now, all she could do was arch on her tiptoes and deepen their kisses, twist her fingers in his hair and hang on for dear life as the rhythm of his fingers grew faster and faster.

Her quim tightened in a fierce rush of pleasure, and fresh wetness flowed over her fingers. Her lips flew open in a cry of surrender and her knees nearly buckled, but Lillian managed to reach out and push the button on the camera. In fact, it was almost as if the effort it took to take her pleasure and observe it, document it at the same time, only made the release that much more exquisite.

“That was…I can’t even explain how perfect.” She clung to him, tears at the edge of her eyes, her breath still coming in swift pants against his neck.

“I am not done with you yet, my sweet. Don’t give me such compliments until we have accomplished what we set out to do here this night.” He was still incredibly tense, the hard length of his arousal against her hip reminding her that only one of them had achieved the bliss of release.

“What would you have me do? How would you spill your seed? In my hand? In my mouth? Or in my body?” She asked the questions with deliberate casualness, breathless to see how shocked he would be by her knowledge of the various ways of pleasing a man. She was curious to see if he would call her on her bluff, and how she would manage to bring about his climax with skills that had been practiced only in her incredibly vivid imagination.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, however, it seemed she wasn’t to be given an answer at all. With a dark look in his eyes, he simply ripped open the close of his breeches and freed his manhood, roughly spreading her legs and pushing the hot length inside her.

Lillian’s imagination did its best to hold on to the image of him taking her, to struggle to believe that her fingers thrusting wickedly, forcefully between her legs were actually a thick shaft of male need. It was difficult at first, but slowly, as her body began to climb once again toward the pinnacle of pleasure, she could almost feel the hot skin that covered his hardness, hear him making sounds in the back of his throat as he thrust into her with wild abandon.

“Join me, Lillian, join me now,” she imagined him pleading against her neck. And she did, sweet heavens, she did.

“Alexander, yes!” She called out his name, that sweet, forbidden name, into his mouth as he began to lose himself in her body.

The camera took one last photo, one last still frame of a woman in the throes of abandon. And then it was silent, all its frames exposed, all of her secrets contained within one deceptively small, simple black box.

I know it isn’t proper, but don’t send me away.

You don’t know how long I’ve waited to see if this— this sweet fantasy, might someday develop between us.

The roll of Kodak film had appeared in his mailbox that very morning, wrapped with the strange, simple note. Heaven help him, but Alexander Darian hadn’t been able to resist doing exactly as it asked. He’d always been lured in all too easily by the strange and unusual, a fact that kept him on the fringes of polite society despite his noble lineage or how his wealth and reputation as a portrait photographer had grown throughout the years.

Curiosity aside, however, he should have sent the damn thing away. The Kodak Company was making a mint off their signature film. It was an inspired bit of business to encourage photo enthusiasts to mail their rolls back to the plant where they were created for developing, keeping the entire process in-house. Still, their profit had not affected his own.

Alexander’s clients would not trust their photographs to any but his hands. Most purchased the rolls he manufactured in order to ensure he would process their film personally. Not that he actively sought such work anymore. The fees for portrait sittings supported him well. The creation of film and the process of developing was more of a passion for him, something he did for love, not money.

He’d never bothered with a Kodak roll, hadn’t had the urge to touch film that he wasn’t familiar with from the moment it had been born. He should have stuck to his principles, should have packaged up the roll to head off with the afternoon post. Then he wouldn’t be standing in the half-light of the studio behind his office tonight, staring at the lustful eyes and sinfully beautiful body of the one woman who had nearly ruined him

completely. And he certainly wouldn’t be wondering how he was going to resist a second plunge into the waters of scandal with his Lillian.

Even looking at the negatives, with their otherworldly inversions of light and color, he had suspected her identity. She was taller, more full of figure, but those long raven curls, and haunting blue eyes were still the same. But who would have dreamed that those sweet cupid lips would be so completely captivating as they parted in pleasure, or that she would dare to explore herself so boldly, let alone capture the act on film? Even knowing Lillian’s nature as it had been eight years ago, he was shocked—and painfully aroused— by what he saw.

He’d never prided himself on being a gentleman, and didn’t even attempt to resist the urge to print the photographs on his best paper.

But as her image swam into eight-inch by ten-inch focus in the first chemical bath, Alexander felt unexpectedly torn by the emotions that swelled in his heart. Memories of Lillian as a younger girl, dressed in her brother’s clothes, tailing him and Curtis as they looked for trouble on some of the less seemly streets in Boston saddened him beyond belief. He and Curtis had been inseparable until the misunderstanding that ended their friendship forever. Though Lillian’s role in that misunderstanding was far from innocent, he had never blamed the girl.

She had lost her mother and her baby sister less than a year before and entered her fourteenth year largely parentless. Her father hadn’t seemed to notice, or care, that she disappeared after the family’s formal dinner every night. Curtis had been nearing his nineteenth year, old enough to make his own mistakes, but not Lillian. She should have had someone looking out for her. On some level, Alexander had realized that and tried to be the protective big brother her own brother had no interest in becoming. Of course, compassion had transformed into more complex feelings, feelings that had lost him a friend, a sponsor, and nearly derailed a very promising young career.

“You should package these up straight away, send them back to her and forget the film was ever developed,” Alexander said aloud, even as he transferred Lillian, with her

hand cupping her full, luscious breast, into the second bath and moved a new print into the first.

Should.
Never a word he’d had much success with. He
should
have stuck to photographing wealthy members of Society and their children, not indulged his passion for documenting the plight of those on the fringes of that society. Pictures of prostitutes, circus performers, orphaned children and the ancestors of freed slaves might have earned him artistic praise on the Continent, but at home, the work kept him from being fully accepted into Boston’s upper crust.

He
should
have abandoned that work and made an advantageous marriage, helping remove the stain from his family name. Hell, when he came right down to it, he
should
have let Lillian be arrested that night so long ago. Most importantly, he should
never
be considering making contact with that family after eight long years in which William Thomas had done everything in his power to hinder Alexander’s success. Even with a noble bloodline, Alex had been hard-pressed those first few years.

Now, of course, half the wealthy young women of Boston would be thrilled to marry him, for the chance at being a duchess if nothing else. If his cousin Frederick, the Duke of Chester, were to fall over dead before he produced a son, the title would fall to Alexander. It was a fate he prayed to be delivered from every night, having about as much interest in English aristocracy as he did courting marriageable young twits.

“Sweet God.” Alexander sucked in a breath as the second image revealed itself and all rational thought fled.

A sharp, brutal desire shot through his body, stiffening his member. He was suddenly consumed by the desire to possess a woman—this woman—with the savage thrusting of his body into hers. If he could have pulled Lillian from the photograph into his darkroom, he would have. He would have pressed her to the floor, claimed her parted lips with his and spread those milky white thighs, ramming his cock into the sweet place between.

Never in his entire, rather colorful, experience had he seen such a blatantly sensual, sexual image. He wouldn’t have believed such pure, abandoned pleasure possible for a woman, especially a supposed innocent. But there she was, Lillian, with her hand

between her legs and her entire body caught in the throes of release. Though the picture was black and white, he could almost see the flush that stained her cheeks and breasts. He could practically hear her cry of passion, smell the hot scent of her arousal in the air, feel the aftershocks that swept through her straining flesh.

The photograph was stunning. No matter that most would consider it nothing more than a scandalous item of titillation, fit only for the erotic rags, Alexander knew the response he was having to the image was more than that of an aroused male. The artist within him was aroused as well, excited by her bravery, her abandon, the sheer nerve it took to expose herself so completely and capture the moment in all its dark beauty.

To capture it for him, and him alone.

The realization made him groan aloud into the empty room as he continued to shift the developing photographs from bath to bath. For him. She had done this for him. She was a member of the social elite, from a bank-owning family as old as Boston itself. She couldn’t mean for these images to be shown to the world or sold to the highest bidder at some London print house specializing in pornographic literature. They had been made for one purpose only, to arouse him, to let him know that she wanted him to…

To what?

The note had said something about fulfilling a fantasy, developing a fantasy between them. It didn’t take much of a leap of logic to determine it was a sexual fantasy, and Alexander’s blood heated to a ridiculous level as he imagined Lillian in his home, his studio, his darkroom, in a million different positions, his cock entering her, filling her, taking her to the same brink of passion she’d experienced with her own hand and beyond. He would gladly fuck her until every fantasy in her obviously fertile and erotically charged mind was satisfied, but was that all she desired?

“Don’t be a fool, Alex.”

Lord, he was talking to himself more than usual tonight. A sure sign of madness, a madness born in his cock and aching balls that was obviously affecting his right mind. She couldn’t want marriage, her father would never allow it even if she did, and Alexander was certainly of no mind to take a wife in the near future. So what did she

want, his Lillian? She was a shrewd thing, had been even at the tender age of fourteen. She was clever, willful and determined to have what she wanted from life.

For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, that now included him. Was it simply because of those nights so long ago, nights when they’d become unlikely friends and been foolish enough to dream of more? Could it possibly be because of that one kiss and the naive promises they’d made on the eve of her fifteenth birthday? She’d still been not much more than a pretty child to him, no matter what evil her father had accused him of perpetrating upon his only living daughter, so surely that couldn’t be…

Damn, the look in her eyes in some of the pictures practically pleaded for satisfaction. Was that all that she wanted? A man—him in particular—to satisfy her body? He’d never taken a virgin, assuming she still was one. Even if she weren’t, they’d still be asking for trouble if they engaged in an affair. If they were discovered, if she were to, God forbid, become pregnant with his child, she would be ruined forever. He didn’t yearn to enter the married state himself, but did he really want to ruin Lillian’s chances of making a suitable match?