by Maren Smith
Her back arched when he latched onto her nipple. She gasped, once more struggling to find the air, only this time it wasn’t frightening. It became even less so when he delved into the layers of her skirts, working the cloth out from between them until there were only two left: his pants and her drawers. His fingers found the split in hers, and then he found her. There was no breathing after that. There was only the slick glide of his fingertips as he slipped in through her folds. Only the husky moan he breathed between her aching breasts as he cupped her pussy, the tips of two fingers seeking, finding, and setting the whole of her body afire as he rolled the sensitive nub of her clit in her own slippery wetness.
Feet, ass and shoulders braced on different steps, her hips responded of their own accord. She rocked into his touch, alternately grinding and lifting as he whispered, “There’s a good girl. Come for me, dovey. Let me feel you come.”
She moaned, thighs quaking as his thumb replaced his fingers on her clit, applying pressure as a single thick finger sank deep inside her. Florrie shuddered, every sense lost beneath the need to touch him, taste the salty-sweet musk of him filling up her mouth and spilling hot across her tongue.
Except that he wouldn’t let her roll him over or push him back or wriggle and squirm her way down his muscular body to rip open the front of his trousers and put her mouth where her hands were even now desperately stroking, cupping and rubbing.
“Fuck me,” she begged. “Please, please, please!”
But he didn’t. He didn’t hook his finger inside her, or withdraw it only to thrust back inside her, two now instead of one. He didn’t grab her by the hair the way he’d done before, jerk her around, force her to hands and knees with her head all the way down on the step while he took her hard from behind.
He didn’t do any of that. His eyes opened and he looked at her instead. At her, into her. So deeply, piercingly through her that at first her muddled brain could discern no difference between the hunger she still saw so vibrantly alive in the mahogany depths of his eyes and the flickering glimpses she caught of—dear God, was that dismay?
Suddenly letting go, Draven tore first his gaze and then all the rest of him away from her. He shoved backward, pulling out of her staying hands before retreating to the bottom of the landing.
“I’m sorry,” he said huskily.
Sorry? The front of his pants was bulging like a college kid getting his very first lap dance, and he was backing away from her? What had she done? Florrie pulled her legs together, her body shaking, her nerves still firing with lust. More confused than even before, she asked, “Wh-what did I do?”
“Go upstairs.” He turned his back, adjusted his pants.
Shaking her head, she hated how badly her voice trembled and how painfully it came out like begging as she pleaded, “But what did I do?”
He rounded on her, all but shouting, “Get up the damn stairs!”
Florrie did, scrambling to her feet while the increasing dirtiness and shame haunted her fleeing steps. Her eyes flooded, confusion and rejection turning the simple act of opening the flat door into fumbling impossibility. At last the latch clicked back and she butted the door open with her shoulder, more falling than stepping over the threshold. Whipping around, the instinct to slam it was almost more than she could bear. But when she looked down the stairwell and her wounded eyes met his, it wasn’t rejection for her that she read in them. It was hurt and hunger, loss and regret.
Offering no explanation, he looked away first.
She wasn’t about to grovel for one.
The click of the latch as Florrie shut the door between them sounded as lonely as it did permanent.
Chapter 10
What did I do?
Draven sat at the bottom of the steps. His shop was dark, the sun having long since set. He hadn’t moved from this spot, not since he’d closed down his shop and put away his wares. The sun had long ago gone down and he was so disgusted with himself that he hadn’t even bothered to light a lamp.
What had she done? Nothing. Nothing but look up at him with Elise’s face and hold herself to him with a body that felt enough like Elise’s that the few minor differences there had been—slightly smaller breasts, slightly rounder hips, the tiniest dark freckle behind her knee and right at the base of her right buttock—had made no difference at all.
What had she done? She’d moaned in the wrong voice, and he’d still wanted her.
God, how he’d wanted her, and he couldn’t even hold that against her. He was, in fact, finding it harder and harder to want to. He’d been alone too long, that was his problem. He was supposed to have been comforting Florrie, not molesting her on the stairs like a common… well, no point in going there. He wasn’t an angel, either.
He rubbed his face, stabbed his fingers back through his long hair, but there was no banishing the image of her sitting on the edge of his bed, skirts hiked about her knees as he put her socks on, as if completely unaware of what it did to him. She was so… uninhibited. Yeah. That was a good word for the willingness with which she’d responded to him here on the stairs. Uninhibited. Not loose. Not immoral, as if he were saint enough himself to judge such a thing. As if he hadn’t been sitting here for the better part of two hours, fondling what coins he had in his pocket as though they weren’t already slated to be spent in tomorrow’s stockyard auctions and were instead free to be slipped into Florrie’s now torn bodice.
Like a few moments pleasure with her lying sprawled in the stairwell would ever be enough to soothe his increasingly savage need. He tried to shake himself free of that need, but there was no dislodging the lingering sensation of how good it had felt to hold her hot little ass in his hands. The pitch of her mewling cries as she moved in time with him, her frenzy for him echoing and heightening his for her.
He was killing himself here. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, but any more of this and he was going to burst. Already his cock was as hard as that old elm butchers block once more out of the reach of night thieves, positioned just inside his shop door. He couldn’t sit here all night.
Hands on his knees, Draven shoved to his feet. A man not in as firm control of his urges would have taken the stairs two at a time and charged through that heavy oak door. The tension was already filling him as he imagined stalking Florrie from across the room, his eyes locked with her ever-widening ones until once more she was back in his arms, skirts yanked up, her ass cupped in his squeezing hands with his fingertips digging so deep into the heat between her legs that all he could feel was the dribble of her liquid lust bathing his fingers and his cock as he devoured her one conquering kiss at a time.
Yeah, he could feel it all right and that was probably his first reason for why he put his back to that door and walked as far away from it and, ultimately, from her as the backroom of his shop would allow. The outer yard was where he did his slaughtering. This was where he cleaned up after a full day of selling too.
He lit a lamp first and then laid a coal fire in the hearth. He only had a moment’s reservation about slipping outside to fill two buckets at the water pump, but with the lamp lit in this room, he knew no one could creep inside while his back was turned, not without casting a shadow across the whole of the rear yard. This ‘Ripper,’ he was either much too clever to get caught like that or balls-out crazy, in which case Draven was more than happy to put a lasting stop to his malicious hunting. Then he could focus on finding Florrie’s relations without fear of letting her out of his sight. Hopefully, her family hadn’t fully abandoned her to the merciless streets. Hopefully, they would welcome her back among them, giving her a place of warmth and safety once more.
Because heaven help him, he already knew what he was going to do if she had no one. He’d keep her here, with him. Only, he didn’t see himself spending the rest of his days sleeping in a chair when he had someone like Florrie in his bed.
He heated water for a bath, laying the tin tub out in front of the stove to help ward off the chill. It was more t
han dirt and blood that he’d be washing away tonight.
The water didn’t take long to heat. Or perhaps, his thoughts were so distracted that it just didn’t seem like very long. One moment he had set the tin pail on the stove and in the next, he could hear the rattle of the handle as the contents bubbled and boiled. Pulling his shirt off over his head, he used that to protect his hands while he poured the steaming water into the tub and back out to the pump he went. Three pails of hot water, two of cold and all the time it took to haul and heat and dump, his cock remained as hard as iron. When he shucked his trousers, he jutted toward the ceiling as if his cock could feel what Draven could hear: the steady pacing of her footsteps as she wandered while she worried. Back and forth, every bit as restless now as she had been earlier.
Would the lamplight be as perfectly positioned behind her as the sun had been earlier, and how many more levels in Hell would he sink himself for wanting to sneak upstairs and check? This is what happened to a man when he didn’t get his cock wet on a regular basis. Well, he was getting it wet now, just not the way he would have preferred.
Draven stepped into the tub. Hardly spacious by anyone’s standards, it afforded only enough room for most people to sit down. Big as he was, Draven had to condense himself awkwardly even to do that much. Feet turned in, ankle bones digging into the unyielding metal sides, the water came up to within three inches of the top of the tub once he was all the way down. He was careful not to slosh as he dipped a rag to wet it, lathered up his soap and started scrubbing away the grime of the day. His own work-rough hands were a poor substitute for the smaller, softer, prettier hands that he knew were attached to the woman pacing upstairs.
He had more than enough pennies squirreled away in this place. He could afford to take a few and… and what, he challenged himself, already finding the half-thought repugnant. Treat Florrie like what he expected her to be, an unfortunate? There wasn’t a woman in all of Whitechapel who hadn’t been forced to walk the streets at some point or other to feed herself or her family. And what if he was wrong? What if she was simply a woman in the wrong place, at the wrong time. There were a thousand reputable reasons for why a woman would find herself out and about at that time of morning, the vast majority of which involved getting herself to honest work.
Except Florrie didn’t belong in Whitechapel and everything inside him said she couldn’t have been here long. The hardness hadn’t settled into her yet. There was a naivety to her, an innocence and confusion, a sense of right and wrong that someone who’d seen what the residents of this place did on a daily basis simply would not have.
And she was American. Her accent was a dead giveaway for that. Someone had to know who she was. Someone would surely see her likeness and description in tomorrow’s newssheet and come forward, and then they would know who and what she was. A rich man’s servant, turned out for theft. Or a governess, discharged for being too pretty. A mother unwed, with a bastard child as yet unfound. Maybe a nun, unable to take the restrictions of the Cloth and cast out from her family.
A nun, he scoffed as he washed his face. God help him… nuns couldn’t possibly kiss like that.
Scooping water in his hands, Draven wet his hair. He wished he were flexible enough to just dunk his entire head. At this point, he needed the clarity. Hell, at this point, the only way he’d get it was if he doused his entire body in cold water. Even then he doubted if that would put out the insidious burn currently wending through his veins. He rubbed his face, then leaned back—as far back as the confines of the tiny round tub would allow. One at a time, he unfolded his long legs, hooking his knees over the tin rim and bracing his feet upon the floor to allow himself as much room as possible. He hated being cramped. He hated not being in control of himself, either, and right now that bothered him more than the size of his tiny tub.
The sensual demand for attention throbbed in the base of his high-standing cock. The ache to be touched was unbearable. The slosh of the water set into motion when he’d moved his feet was still rocking, a gentle back and forth wave that felt soft as the female caress he much preferred it to be. It was like an itch that begged for scratching, but the only thing the grip of his own hand accomplished when he grudgingly gave in to that ache was a temporary mollification of lust, coupled with a heightening taint of disappointment. Yes, it was pleasure, but it was only a pale shadow of the pleasure Florrie would bring and he knew it.
There wasn’t one damn thing he could do about it, either. Except walk upstairs and make an inappropriate suggestion to the woman he had sworn to protect. And why, because she looked like his dead wife?
Initially, yes. But there were differences. Oh, there were differences.
His hand on his own cock went from idle stroking to an intense grip close to the base. He squeezed, eyes closed, the slow rock of the water passing across the peak of his glans where it emerged from the soapy water was like the tickling caress of a woman’s tongue. His whole body felt that lick in every erotic nerve he owned, and it was only amplified by the steady tromp-tromp-tromp of his Florrie-luv’s nervous wandering upstairs.
His ears prickled when he suddenly realized the floorboards above him had gone silent. Florrie wasn’t pacing anymore.
He looked up, as if he could see straight through the old wood planks, just as the door to his left swung wide open. In swept Florrie, her jaw set in stubbornness and her glare cross. Her head was bowed, as if she’d braced herself to start the argument that clearly she’d already rehearsed. She didn’t even see him at first, not until the door banged shut behind her and abruptly her gaze fell upon his foot. Startled, it jumped from his foot to the rest of him.
He still had his hand on his cock.
“Oh Jesus!” She whipped around, running smack into the door which then refused to open. If it weren’t for this electrifying jolt of pure wantonness that swept through him, he might have laughed. As it was, all Draven could do was sit where he was, legs splayed, barely covered by a few drifting soapsuds while she fumbled for the knob.
“Don’t pull,” he tried to warn, but she’d already wrenched and jerked, and when the latch did not respond, rattled the stuck-fast door in its frame in the hopes of making it open. She stopped when they both heard the heavy thunk and clatter of the knob falling off on the other side.
“That door can be a right bugger to open,” Draven said belatedly. It was a fight not to laugh when her shoulders sagged.
She covered her eyes with both hands and buried her face to the door. “I’m sorry. I-I don’t… I don’t know what I was…”
Turn around and look at me. But she didn’t, much to the aggravation of every sinuous desire now accosting him. The heady thumping of his heartbeat could be felt all the way down in the base of his stiffly-jutting cock. His belly was a series of ribbons, alternately pulling and tightening in the conjunction with the need coiling in his hips and ass to find that delicious, age-old rhythm of lovemaking.
The gentle wash of the water still lapped at the head of his cock. Tiny soap bubbles popped all over his sensitive skin. He could hear each whisper-soft burst. He could hear her own quickened breaths, too. It was soft and fast, and his own sounded so much deeper. So much stronger. If only she would look at him, she might see how strong and hard he was.
And naked. Naked sometimes helped.
Refusing to turn around, Florrie kept her hands pressed to her burning face, which was in turn, pressed to the door. Even from here he could see how fiercely she was blushing. In that moment, two things became unequivocally clear.
First, try as he might, Draven was having a hard time seeing Elise give this kind of reaction. Elise had been a good girl. Good when he married her, good all the years they were together, in need of a swift spanking every once and a while, but any time Draven took his kecks off, she was right there, reaching for him with a ready hand and a playful grin. Lord knew, they’d put in their share of tumble time as newlyweds. That first pregnancy had been well-earned.
And sec
ond, this was not the reaction of an unfortunate. He didn’t care how new she might be to the job. No prostitute ever in the history of the profession blushed at glimpsing a naked man’s cock. Florrie was a mystery. She was in trouble, her very life in danger. But now he knew beyond all shred of a single doubt, whatever else his Florrie was, she was no whore.
Too bad, really. It would have made things so much simpler.
***
Oh God, oh God, oh God… It was all Florrie could think. Well, that and… Was he naked? He was sitting in a bucket barely big enough to accommodate his lean hips and naughty bits. His chest glinted wet in the pale glow of the lamplight. He must be bathing and people generally did that without their clothes on. So yeah, he was probably naked.
“Has the other side fallen out yet?” Draven asked, sounding thoroughly amused.
She’d never wanted so badly to steal a look in all her life. She covered her eyes, almost cracking her forehead with the half of the brass knob, which she still clutched. On the other side of this now—for all intents and purposes—locked door, the second half of the handle lay on the floor. She’d heard it fall. Her heart had made a similar sound when it too hit the floor. It felt like it was still there, trembling in fibrillating spasms that echoed in the pit of her twisting belly, the watery weakness of her knees, and her badly shaking hands.
By way of an answer, she held up her half of the door knob.
“It does that,” he acknowledged. “Here, let me help you.”
Every thought in Florrie’s head scattered like pigeons from the rafters when she heard him stand up. Had she been facing anything but the door, she would have looked, but she froze instead. Her eyes fixed wide with barely suppressed panic upon the plank door as she heard a rainfall of waterdrops sluicing off him. Teasing droplets cascaded from all the hard lines of him, finding angles from which to drip back down into the tub while he stood there so bold and unashamed. Saying nothing, just dripping while that piercing dark stare of his burrowed in between her shoulder blades, all but daring her to turn around. It was probably a trick of her imagination that made the scent of soap in the closeness of this backroom smell so much stronger. It was an equally devilish trick that made every prickling nerve in her body believe to its very core that he was creeping close enough to touch her, though she hadn’t heard him move.