“Isn’t this what you suggested a moment ago? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

It was, but not like this! Not so that she could seduce his best friend!

“If we had met before I was the emperor’s virgin, if you had come to the door of my house instead of secreting yourself away in my palanquin, then I would have found a way to become your wife. I would have waited if you asked. I would have forced my mother’s hand and accepted your suit somehow.”

“But I did not,” he said in misery.

“You did not.” She twisted her hand from his then quickly thrust it into his pants to pull the tie apart. The fabric loosened immediately, slipping down until it caught on his engorged organ. “If ambition is all that I have left, Bo Tao, then I will hold on to it like the lifeline it is.” She looked up and he saw how fiercely she had thought about this, how determined she was to make the best of her life as it was now.

He reached out and stroked her face. “You are already becoming hard, Ji Yue. Ambition does that.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. “I planned to have myself expelled yesterday,” she said. “The bruises were at their worst then. I could have claimed an illness. I even walked to the examination room in search of the doctor.”

“She must be summoned from her home in Peking,” he said softly.

“The physician was not there, and you had forgotten me.”

“Never!” he cried. “But you had made your choice.”

“No,” she said. “My mother made my choice for me. She will not allow me back home. And you had forgotten me.”

How those words cut him.

“And so my choice was to leave the Forbidden City to walk the streets-”

“I would not have allowed that.”

She arched her brow. “Perhaps, perhaps not. You do not have the money or the political stability to support a discarded virgin.”

True enough. He had to stay in the emperor’s good graces or starve.

“In any event, I did not know what you thought. So I chose.”

“To become a whore?”

She hissed in anger. “To not become a whore. To learn what it means to seduce an emperor.” With a quick jerk, she pulled his pants down to his knees. “I do not even know what a man looks like, and I have less than two days to learn all I can about it.” She reached up and boldly cupped his sack. He nearly cried out at the force of her grip. “Do you teach me then, Bo Tao?”

With his balls in her hand, he had no choice. He reached down and touched her wrist. “Gentler, JiYue, they are not ink stones.”

She softened her grip, then she rolled him slightly in her fingers. “They seem so hard. Underneath.”

His entire body trembled and it was a moment before he could breathe. “There is a point behind the balls that has special sensitivity.”

“Really?” She tilted her head to look.

“Not yet!” he gasped. “Not yet,” he repeated as his breath steadied into shortened pants. “Begin with the stalk then proceed higher,” he instructed.

She did as he bid. He had to shed his tunic or else the sweat would stain it. Then he stepped away from her to remove all his clothing. If she wanted to see a man, then so be it. She would see all of him.

“Oh,” she breathed softly as she looked at him from head to toe. “Is the emperor this muscled?” she asked.

“No,” Bo Tao said with a touch of arrogance. “Though he takes special pride in his legs.”

She nodded, obviously making a mental note. Then she stroked his legs, running her hands through the dusting of hair on his thighs, then up to the thicker part between.

“You are beautiful,” she said. “I have seen coolies, of course. I watched them most closely when Mama wasn’t looking. You are not so thick as them.” She flashed him a smile. “I like your leanness better. Can I touch it now?”

Her words and her touch were like opium smoke; his thoughts floated away into sensation. He instructed her as best he could. She cupped and she caressed. She gripped his stalk and rolled her thumb over the head. And when she extended her tongue to taste, his buttocks thrust of their own accord. He breached the confines of her mouth.

She drew back in alarm, but he had to steady himself on her shoulders. “You are losing control,” she said in awe. “I have made you lose control.”

“Not yet, you haven’t,” he growled.

“Then I shall have to try harder.” And she engulfed him in her mouth.

She won. As she swirled her tongue around him, he began to move. His hands burrowed through her hair and he thrust, thinking she would gag on him. She did not. She took him all and sucked when he pulled back. The fire roared through his blood and ripped through his mind. He erupted with the force of days of hardened frustration. And when he spilled, she drank. She sucked him, caressed him, and made him think he was in the most blessed heavenly realm.

Until he collapsed onto his knees before her. He fell, gasping for breath. And when his vision steadied, he saw her licking her lips. “Thank you,” she said most solemnly. “Do we have time for me to practice again?”

He could not believe it. He did not think that such a woman could exist in the whole world, much less be here looking at him with such an earnest expression. It nearly killed him to think that she could never be his.

“Not yet, Ji Yue,” he murmured. “Remember, you have yet to be punished. I have to make you scream.”

Her brow contracted in thought. “Can it be done at the same time?”

He smiled. “Oh, yes.”

“Then I wish to learn that.”

He nodded, already gathering his strength. He would have one afternoon with this amazing woman. One afternoon that would have to last his entire life, and so he decided to enjoy it to the fullest. “Very well,” he said, “but you must remember to scream. As if in pain.”

She nodded most solemnly. “I will remember.”

“Then I will teach you.”

13

“YOU MUST UNDRESS,” he said.

Ji Yue recoiled in shock, her heart beating triple fast. It was one thing to be the woman caressing him, bringing him to a place where he had no control over his body. It was quite another to remove attire that kept her safe. Except, of course, no cloth could keep her safe. The very idea was ridiculous, but she felt its protection nonetheless.

“If you wish to know how to seduce a man,” he said softly. “It begins with your body.”

“You will see my bruises.”

“Your body will always be beautiful to me,” he said. She saw honesty in his eyes, and her heart broke. How had she come to this?

But if her future was in a harem, many women to one man-or even no man when the emperor died-she would take what memories she could. So she put her hands on her buttons and began to pull off her clothes.

“No. Not like you are at a dressmaker’s,” he said. “Slowly. Shyly. But with a hunger in your eyes.”

As a virgin, she should not know what he meant, but she felt an aching longing and a building excitement in what she did. And in what they risked together. She looked at him and let her thoughts pour into her face. She let him see her desire, her fears, and her desperate wish…

“My heaven…” he murmured. And if she doubted the desire in his voice, all she had to do was look down. His jade stem had stiffened again.

With shaking hands, he pulled the cushions from the couch behind her and laid them on the floor. There was little space in this tiny corner of a lesser palace, but from what she understood of the Forbidden City, he must be valued indeed if he had a room of papers and books all for himself.

She smiled at the thought that one day he might have a whole palace of his own-a home and a library with emissaries from Peking coming and going. And in that wonderful fantasy, she was pulling off her blouse and undershirt for her husband.

“Mama said that men love breasts,” she told him as she looked down at her chest. “Is that true?”