Catherine’s Reviews > To Save the Devil > Status Update

Nyahaha! You know we're going to ask for an excerpt!

LOl! +1!

Uh oh..

It's not horrible or anything--because I would definitely snark if it was--it's just...blah.

She stood. "You should have that bath now." Her voice had a quiver in it that shot a bolt of lust straight to his yard.

He didn't move. "Helen, I won't endure another night in that bed beside you and not make love to you."

She looked down at him as if he were a dolt of particularly weak understanding. "You'd best help me with the water. The buckets are heavy."

He put down his drink then and helped her tote the buckets to the tub. He could not read her thoughts. Did she understand him? That he could give pleasure and passion and nothing more? Was she so lost in her imagined life as Helen that she did not recognize the real consequences of their lovemaking?

"All Greece hated Helen, you know," he said.

She had her head down, concentrating on a steaming kettle of water for the bath. "Every woman for all time should thank her for daring to be herself and refusing to accept punishment for it."

They emptied the brimming buckets, and the heavy spill of water made the copper tub ring. He had cundums, didn't he? He glanced at the cabinet next to the cheval glass. In another life he had stocked it for an evening with a professional, the sort of pleasure he had allowed himself on occasion since his return to London.

He put aside the water pail and made short work of his clothes. When she saw the state he was in, she would call a halt to the proceedings. He could lock her in his inner room for the night.

But when he stood naked, it was not fear he saw in her gaze, it was a welcome, as if his deuced cock straining for her was an old and dear friend she was glad to see. Hell.

He stepped into the tub.

Helen liked looking at him naked. It made sense of him, the compressed energy that could be unleashed in sudden moves, the scars, the undaunted pride and glory of him. The room's mirrors gave him to her from all angles. His skin seemed molded to his frame, revealing the bulge of muscle and the lines of sinew and bone. He was a study in dark and light, the white of his shoulders and hips, a sharp contrast to the dark hair of his chest and groin. She had been right that he would still command a room naked.

She understood him better now. She had been wrong that her deception would be less wounding than the world's blows or his family's slights. He needed to believe in goodness, this man who thought himself Satan's own. It was his ability to believe in goodness that she must not wound.

Will sank into the heat and let it enfold him. It had taken a great deal of resolve not to push her back on that luxurious bed and pull the sash from her wrapper. He congratulated himself on his restraint.

She pulled up a stool and slipped her fingers into his hair and began to knead his head around his ears, his temples, his nape, and knotted shoulders.

"How do you know how to do that?"

"An old woman taught me the trick...in Troy, a useful accomplishment for those times when Paris was in a foul mood."

"I thought he was your perpetually charming lover."

"You see, you think you know the story."

"So tell me about the uncharming side of Paris." He needed a distraction from the part of him that already beat with a steady pulse of desire. He had no plan for what to do when the water inevitably cooled. Sit until his privates shrank?

"All that armor polishing? That was Paris pouting. He would sulk and hold himself aloof whenever others questioned his soldiering. He had fifty brothers who seldom respected his work in war."

"How could they?"

"You wrong him like everyone else. He was swift and accurate with a lance, a bit showy in his gear, but all those Trojans liked their gold, you know. They had buckets of it."

"You learned a great deal in Troy." The lazy circling hands on his head seemed to tug invisible strings attached to his groin.

"One could go mad behind walls without some study--people, that was my subject."

"Their virtues or their faults?"

"Their voices, who they truly were."

Will laughed inside at what a mad pair they were, Helen, happily prattling about Troy, while he was thinking of Lord Thrustmore's next move.

When he could endure no more, he simply rose and stepped from the tub, pulled her up off her stool, and walked with her to the great bed. He dropped her in a heap and pulled away the sash holding the silk wrapper closed.

She rolled away from him with a laugh, slipping free of the loose garment to lie gloriously naked on the deep blue coverlet. She was everything he remembered from that first night, everything that had driven him mad for days.

He toweled himself dry and flung back the covers, settling in the bed beside her. She removed the cord around her neck and handed it t him, a solemn ceremony of trust. He put it on the cabinet.

They lay on their sides facing each other. He looked into deep brown eyes, darkened with desire. The ends of her butchered hair curled softly around her face from the steamy warmth of the bath. The breasts he had done his best to forget rose round and free with only a faint pink line where the linen binding had cut her flesh.

He reached out a hand that he feared had a slight tremor and cupped one smooth, round breast. Its softness made him dizzy. He spread his fingers and ran his palm down her side to the valley of her waist and up again over the curve of her hip to trail down her thigh behind her knee.

He could hear her breath flutter unevenly though she held herself still under his touch. He turned his palm up and trailed his fingers back along the inside of her thigh to the valley of her sex and up her belly. He pressed his palm against her womb, his fingers splayed above her curls, dark gold against her pale skin.

"It's Lord Thrustmore you've got, Helen, no Paris, willing to die for love. I'll give you pleasure and passion, not love."

Helen knew she should feel shamed, exposed, frightened, but she felt none of those things. She felt as powerful as Aphrodite herself. He needed her. In this moment he needed her like he needed air itself. Every limb rejoiced in its power.

She knew that power would shift from her, that in the end the goddess demanded helplessness before desire. But as Helen had borne it, she would, too. She smiled at him.

Will watched he smile a smile he never expected from a virgin as if she knew something he didn't.

He would show her that reading Lord Thrustmore meant nothing. He reached out and snagged her waist and dragged her body up against his, molding her to him, her breasts crushed against his chest, pulling her leg over his hip so that his cock nudged the folds of her sex. He brought his mouth down on hers.

She opened her lips to receive the fuller joining he demanded and twined her limbs with his.

It took several minutes for him to realize that his strategy wasn't working. Instead of a blushing maiden, offended by the taste and smell and heat of carnal embraces, he was in bed with a willing and attentive partner. He lifted his mouth from hers.

"We can stop now. Technically you remain a virgin, and I don't recommend testing the boundary between maidenhead and experience any further."

He fell on his back next to her, his blood pumping like a steam engine.

Her breathing, like his, was ragged. Her breasts rose and fell with each warm exhalation. Her golden skin was flushed, and her nipples, glistening from his attention, stood up in sweet peaks.

"You've a good bit of knowledge to take back to your other life after tomorrow. Maybe you'll want to add Lord Thrustmore to your storytelling." It was a cold thing to say. It made a romp of heir lovemaking, a lesson.

His coldness drew that smile of hers, but she sat up, her legs folder under her. He couldn't help himself; he reached up to cup one breast, to hold that trembling fullness in his palm.

She knelt above him then and ran her hands over his chest and down his belly and down his thighs. He saw her glance at his pulsing cock, tempted to touch that, too. And he would have laughed at that one maidenly hesitation, but she bent down and kissed his ribs. Her breasts brushed his chest and his groin.

Don't. Don't know me. Don't see my need. Don't give so generously of yourself.

Her kisses changed, and he knew that the real woman, the person behind the mask was kissing him. He understood what the girl behind the mask was about--she was giving up her respectability for him.

He rose up and let Lord Thrustmore take over, pushing her down on her back again, kissing her lips, her breasts, her belly, hooking the little lip of her navel with his finger, and dipping down to take possession of her cleft with his hand, until she arched up into his touch. He stopped, rolled away, and stood on shaking legs beside the bed to open a cabinet drawer and pull out a cundum.

"That's not how it ends, is it?" she asked his back.

"Not at all. I'm just making a preparation for what comes next."

He turned and held up the device and watched the open joyfulness fade in her eyes. And felt how unreasonable he was to regret the passing of that look.

"Just doing my part to support neighborhood industry--there's a cundum warehouse across the street."

Helen lay back across the sheets, her body pulsing with life, her soaring spirit momentarily checked.

On her fifteenth birthday she had stood invincible on a bluff, leaning against a stiff October wind, letting it billow her skirts and cape and hold her up. But the fickle wind had died, and she'd just caught herself back from the lip of the bluff in time.

She covered her eyes with the back of her arm. Helen never weeps, she reminded herself.

"Finally too much reality for you, Helen?" Will turned away from her, securing the damned thing to his cock, tying the frivolous ribbon with ruthless efficiency. He glanced over his should at her face, hidden for the moment. "I bring no bastards into the world."

He rolled back on top of her, stretching her hands above her head with one of his, kissing her breasts, and reaching with his other hand to tease again the place he had made ready for their joining. "There will still be pleasure, that I promise."

Helen opened to him. This was the helplessness the goddess demanded. He could reason and draw back and think of the world beyond the bed they shared, while she could not, her body clamoring for a completion he must give. She gave into it. Miss Yeeld, indeed.

He slipped his hand under her, lifting her body up to his, and plunged himself deep inside her. He caught her gasp at the pain of it and stilled. Then he began a slow slide inside her, and as it built, Helen discovered the final secret the goddess had to give, the secret of the mysterious power of love itself--in helplessness, one came fully alive.

Pleasure came and filled her body.

He turned away again, to remove the little sheath, the barrier that had kept him from yielding as she had.

"Sleep. I'll wake you when it's time. My word on it." He picked up the cord with the iron key. The key felt cold in his hand, and he saw her shiver when he looped it over her head and let the iron fall against her breast.

Helen curled her fist around the cold iron. Her heart felt bruised, but it was only from beating so hard. The feeling was bound to pass.

He pulled the covers up around her and slipped away to the inner room. If he meant to get her in and out of March's place safely, he would be wise to study Harding's sketches again.

Yikes. You're right. Here's a question that's going to make me look stupid - does the author mean what I think she means when she writes "cundums"?

Don't worry, I kind of squinched my face up when I read that too. It was used as a condom so I guess it's just another spelling for it.

So I'm not the only one who thought that scene was incredibly lame?

Didn't really have the detail that you usually see nowadays, did it? (That's me trying to be nice, lol).

I would have preferred a fade to black rather than that. It didn't sound fun at all.

But ignoring the actual sex, it still left me cold. There was no emotion there. The hero kept talking about how hot he was but it sure didn't feel like it. I guess the emotion and the actions felt mechanical and tedious to me.

Plus, the incessant inner monologuing was tiring. And the heroine's an idiot to be upset that he prevented her from getting pregnant. Oh no--a condom? I guess you aren't as into it as I thought if you're still thinking of how much you don't want diseases or babies. I guess you don't want me as much as I want you. Woe is me.

And can they please stop talking like she really is Helen of Troy??? Please! It's really irritating. :(

ummm....wow. yeah, wow. that's all I got.

By the way, that's how the chapter ends. I didn't just abruptly stop quoting the scene. That was the end of it.

Hmmm. You know, as much as that was very detached for an intimate scene, I think the writing in general seems pretty disconnected.

Thanks for taking the time to do the quote (I think!) :)

I think it is too. The writing is very distant and the characters lack depth and motivation. I can't even get into it enough to care that I dislike it.

Lord Thrustmore? LMAO. Helen of Troy? Please. That was one boring scene, man. I'm glad we stopped to think about jumping off cliffs and Paris.

You are right. He didn't have much inner dialogue. That would have improved things, since their sex was so mechanical and brief! Talk about quickies.

Earlier in the story he tried to interrogate her by reading her porn about Lord Thrustmore and Miss Yeeld. Brilliant plan, no? I know my embarrassment always makes me tell people whatever they want to know...LOL.

The heroine doesn't have a name beyond Helen of Troy right now. (this late in the story!) She refuses to say who she is and likes to talk like she is Helen.

Yes, I spill everything when someone reads me porn. LOL.

She is pretending to be Helen of Troy? That is so cheesy. *groan*

LOL

Haha, I went the same place as n_u - Lord Thrustmore, really? *laugh*

Gads, that was awful. I mean, just awful. So wordy and awkward. It was boring. How do you make a sex scene boring?

I really would have just preferred a fade to black scene. That was just painful to read.