Improper Proposals

by Juliana Ross

  “No more so than you setting your mouth on my privates. Will you let me?”

  “Oh, Tom...I’m not certain.”

  “We’ll begin slowly. With my hand alone. And then we’ll see. If you feel uncomfortable, you need only tell me to stop.”

  “Very well. You are certain you wish to do this?”

  “I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything. So, yes, I’m certain.”

  “What shall I do? Am I meant to stand before you?”

  “I think you’ll feel more at ease if we stay abed. Just let me touch you. Relax, now, and lie back against me. Let your legs fall open—yes, just like that. Look, Caroline.”

  His hand was so large, so strong, his palm alone covering all of my pubic hair. I watched as his fingers delved into the creases at the top of my thighs, soothed and tickled them, set me at my ease.

  “Your skin is so soft. Will you let me kiss it? Only your thighs for now.”

  I nodded. He eased away, moving to stand at the side of the bed. He took me by my hips and drew me forward until my bottom was flush with the edge of the mattress. Then he knelt on the floor, set my legs on his shoulders and began to kiss my thighs. His mustache and beard were pleasantly abrasive against the delicate skin that flanked my pussy, a perfect contrast to the soothing heat of his tongue and mouth.

  He paused and looked up. “Have you ever seen your pussy before?”

  “Not really. It’s hard to see what’s there. Without being some sort of contortionist, that is.”

  “So sit up a bit. Rest your weight on your elbows. You’ll see plenty.”

  “Tell me what you see.” I loved it when he talked during sex, not only because he said the filthiest things, things that ordinary Tom would likely never dream of uttering, but also because I suspected most men weren’t nearly as voluble. Certainly John had rarely said anything much beyond my name.

  “The hair between your legs is so soft, a perfect triangle, hiding the treasure beneath.” He blew at it, softly, and the rush of cool air was startling against my overheated flesh. “When I part your folds, like this, I can see what’s underneath.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Your inner labia, flushed and pink, almost red. Like an exotic flower. Here, at the top, your clit, just waiting for my touch.”

  “What else?”

  “I see the entrance to your vagina, just waiting for me to fill it. And I can smell you—no, don’t shy away, not now. You smell like heaven, better than any perfume. I’ll wager you taste every bit as good. Please, Caroline—”

  “You don’t have to ask. Only do it. Now.”

  He dipped his head, a smile tugging at his mouth, and then his tongue touched me, velvety soft, and it was better than I could ever have imagined. His fingers pulled at my labia, easing me open, urging my clitoris from its hiding place. He licked around it, circling it with slowly, dizzying strokes that were merciless in their growing intensity.

  He penetrated me with the forefinger of his other hand, sinking deep, adding another finger, then another, bending them so they might rub against that maddeningly elusive spot inside me. I fell back, my arms no longer able to bear my weight, my hands scrabbling uselessly at the coverlet. Without thinking I reached down and tangled my hands in his hair, pressing his face ever deeper into my pussy.

  The sensations he was provoking were almost too beautiful to endure. I pressed my hips higher, shamelessly begging for more, and he obliged. He drew his lips tight around my clitoris and sucked on it so firmly that it would have hurt had I been any less aroused. Instead, a bloom of consuming bliss wrapped around me, pulled the breath from my lungs and hurled me to the edge of consciousness. I came so hard that I saw stars, and I think I may also have screamed out his name a time or two.

  He climbed back on the bed and held me as I thrashed and squirmed. Finally I settled into the circle of his comforting arms, more tired than I’d ever been. How could it be that I had never known? Never even imagined? How could it be?

  “Tom?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Will you do that to me again? In the morning, if you have time?”

  “As often as you wish.”

  “I must make some notes,” I mumbled, already half asleep. “I must make a study of it, so I may tell my readers. Though I doubt they’ll believe me.”

  “In the morning,” he whispered, and dropped a kiss on my nose. “I promise.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was nearly the end of January before I returned to London again. Not long after Christmas I had caught a cold, becoming so ill that I could scarcely get out of my bed for a day or two, and even after recovering I was quite unable to sit at my desk for more than an hour at a time.

  The nature of my subject had also hampered my progress, for in it I discussed the ways in which the bonds of intimacy might be tested, and how one might seek to rekindle closeness, even love, after a period of détente.

  When experiencing moments of strain in your family life, such as the arrival of a new baby, the illness of a child or the death of a beloved parent, it is only natural to focus your attention on the crisis at hand and, consequently, to neglect the extraneous. It is at such times that your woman’s instinct to nurture, which normally serves you so well in regard to the care of loved ones, can also cause you to be blind to the one person who may need your care and attention most of all: your husband.

  You weather the storm, but when you emerge from your time of trouble you realize that something has changed. Your husband is distant, too careful with you, too preoccupied with other matters. He may be hurting. He very likely is lonely. How, then, do you mend what has been torn? How do you reclaim the intimacy at the core of your marriage?

  How indeed? John and I had never gone through such a period, had never grown apart. So what, then, had held us together? The answer, which took days to come to me, was simple: honesty. We had always been truthful with one another, not only in the particulars of our daily lives, but also—and most crucially—in the details of our feelings for one another. We had tried to maintain perfect candor with one another, and that had kept us from growing apart.

  Of course no such agreement existed between myself and Tom, and for good reason. I was not such a fool as to think I shared the same sort of bond with him, now or ever. Such bonds, I had learned to my cost, were wonderful things while they lasted—but when they broke, as they inevitably did, the pain of loss eclipsed any remembered joy.

  Tom had written just after Twelfth Night with the news that Alice had been safely delivered of a girl, a perfectly healthy infant, and that the infant had been christened Charlotte. Both mother and child were thriving, which I found unaccountably comforting. I scarcely knew Lady Alice, so why should I be so relieved that she and the baby were well?

  With one thing and another, it was the third week of January before I finished my pages and sent them off, and another week after that before I was able to make the journey to London, for in the meantime we’d had a storm and the road to Didcot had been impassable for several days.

  Although I had taken an early train to London, it was much delayed, so much so that we pulled into Paddington a full four hours later than expected, right at the end of the working day. Of course there were no hansom cabs to be had at that hour, so I was forced to take the Metropolitan Railway’s underground service across the city to Farringdon Station, an altogether disagreeable and unsettling experience. From there it was but a half-mile walk to Fleet Street.

  By the time I arrived I was very much out of sorts. I was cold and tired and hungry, and I was covered with soot from the infernal underground train. I stomped up the stairs to Tom’s office, marched down the hall and flung open his door.

  He stood at the window, looking down at the street below, Grendel at his heels. He whirled about, a look of
unmistakable relief on his face.

  “Caroline—thank God.”

  “My train was delayed. Then I couldn’t find a cab from the station. So I had to take the underground to Farringdon and walk the rest—”

  “I’ve been beside myself with worry. Why didn’t you telegraph me from Paddington? Or from one of the stations along the way?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “Come here. Just come here.”

  I set down my valise and stepped forward, not sure I liked the look in his eyes. As if he were delighted and enraged and confused, all at once.

  “May I have a cup of tea? And have the use of your washroom?”

  “Of course. Washroom first, then tea.” He steered me into his sitting room, taking a moment to lock the door behind us, and waited by the settee as I visited the adjoining necessary and washed my face and hands. I still looked a fright, but it would have to do until I reached our rooms at the hotel.

  “Are we the only ones here?” I asked as I returned from the washroom. “The clerks’ offices were empty as I passed.”

  “I think one or two of them may still be loitering about. But they know better than to bother me now. Come here.”

  I approached, wondering what he intended to do. Surely he wasn’t angry with me for the delay? “Are you very upset?”

  “Yes. Not with you. Didn’t I ask you to come here?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You’ll see. I promise you’ll like it, though.”

  Very well. I closed the distance between us and wrapped my arms around his waist. How I had missed this, missed him.

  Without a word of warning he spun me around and pushed me close to the back of the settee, which was a little higher than my waist. “Lift your skirts and bend forward.”

  “What is this?”

  “It’s been six weeks. A month and a half of nothing but my hand, alone at night, as I dream of you. All week I’ve been waiting. Since the moment I got up this morning I’ve been waiting. And then to wait four more hours, with no notion of what had happened, whether you were coming, if you’d been hurt or waylaid.”

  He bent me forward and pushed my skirts out of his way, letting them mound around my hips. “Do you want to know how much work I got done today? I’ll tell you—nothing. Not one word read or written. Not. One. Word.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I know you are. And I’m not angry with you, not in the slightest. If you’d rather I fuck you some other way, I’ll do it. But I think you’ll like this.”

  God help me, but I did. It was so very illicit, to begin with. Anyone might pass by, or come to knock at the door, and hear what we were about. Not that he had so much as touched me, not yet.

  “Bend over the settee. Don’t worry if your feet aren’t touching the ground. I’ll hold you steady.”

  Oh, God. He was going to fuck me, here, now, without so much as a kiss or a caress. I was still wearing my bonnet, for goodness’ sake.

  “What of the prophylactic? You mustn’t forget.”

  “I’m putting it on now. Arch your bottom higher. Good girl—that’s it.”

  I wiggled forward, only the tips of my toes still touching the ground, my heart pounding out of my chest.

  His hands were at my drawers, pulling them open, tearing the fine batiste when it proving unobliging. His cock pressed at my entrance, insistent, unyielding, and then it was inside me, so foreign yet so welcome.

  “This is all I could think about. After waiting for six weeks, six goddamn weeks, this is what I’m reduced to. Fucking you like some Whitechapel trollop.”

  “I don’t care. I love it.”

  “Good. I don’t want to take long—I just want to be able to think straight. I’ll make love to you later. I’ll take my time, I swear. But for now—” He pulled his hips back, then thrust into me, hard. “I’ve never...oh, God, never...”

  “This is enough. This is what I want, too.”

  * * *

  An orgasm later and he was himself again, sweet and solicitous and endearingly funny as he spoke of his new niece and how, at the age of three weeks, she was already able to bend her father to her tiny will. When I was done laughing at his stories of the renowned Elijah Philemon Keating brought low by a wailing infant, he told me, at length, how Clara had dressed Grendel as a princess when he and the dog had last visited Hampstead.

  “If you could have seen the look he gave me. As resigned to his plight as Sydney Carton on his way to the guillotine.”

  “Did he not fuss? Worry at the ribbons and bows?”

  “No. Just stood there and looked mournful. Once he was undressed, though, and Clara had declared him a doggie again, I took him and Elijah’s dogs to the Heath and let them run for hours. By the time we returned to the house I was quite forgiven.”

  “Is the baby very like her sister?”

  “It’s hard to tell when they’re so young. She has quite a lot of dark hair. Not an especially noisy baby. Is either sleeping or latched on to my sister, eating like the greediest piglet you ever saw.”

  “I think you are as smitten as Mr. Keating,” I teased.

  “I suppose I am. Would you like to see them while you’re here? We could go tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no—I shouldn’t like to bother Lady Alice, not just yet. And I’ve only just recovered from a cold. I dare not go near the baby.”

  “Next time, then. Unless it pains you. To see a newborn, I mean.”

  “It doesn’t, I promise.”

  And it didn’t. I’d made my peace with it long ago, for the world was full of babies, and even if I couldn’t have my own, I still loved to hold and cuddle them, the newer the better. But not Alice’s, not if it meant she were deceived into thinking that Tom and I had a future together.

  My guide was all but finished, with only the concluding Chapter left to write. Tom had said nothing to me of what would follow, if indeed anything would follow. Perhaps I would return to Aston Tirrold and that would be that. Perhaps he would suggest another project. Perhaps...

  “I was so overset today, I’m afraid I forgot to order our supper. What would you like?” he asked as we reached our rooms at the hotel.

  “Something simple. Soup of some kind, with roast chicken to follow? I don’t think I could bear to eat anything too rich.”

  “I’ll ring down now. Why don’t you go into the bedroom and change? Do you want a bath? I can call for the water at the same time.” Although Brown’s was a luxury hotel it had, as yet, no plumbed-in bathtubs.

  “Yes, please.” It would be heaven to wash away the dirt of my journey, to come to him scrubbed clean and smelling of expensive soap.

  A parade of footmen delivered a copper tub and the water to fill it within minutes, setting it before the fire in our bedroom. I’d grown used to being naked in front of Tom, so felt no shame as I abandoned my clothes and immersed myself in the water, which was so hot my skin reddened straight away.

  “Are you sure you don’t wish to join me?” I asked, feeling terribly daring.

  “I would rather watch,” he said, dragging a chair across the room so he might sit close by. “I’ll watch as you wash yourself, every inch of your lovely skin, and I’ll be half dead with desire for you by the time you’re finished.”

  “And then?”

  “We will eat our dinner.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll make love to you. We’ll take our time, all night if need be. I owe you that much after this afternoon.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing, Tom. I loved it. As I believe I demonstrated quite clearly.”

  “You did. But we’ve both waited a long time for tonight. I plan to make the most of it.”

  “You never said what you thought of my chapter. We haven’t
talked about it at all.”

  “We will, over dinner. Though I find it difficult to wrap my head around the subject.”

  “I’m certain it happens to many couples, the feeling that they are drifting apart. Any number of things can affect a marriage—children, family pressures, financial concerns. I think it’s very important that women be given some guidance on how to restore intimacy if ever it’s lost.”

  “You’re quite right. It’s only that I cannot imagine how it could ever happen.”

  “That a couple should be pulled apart?”

  “No. That I should ever lose interest in you.”

  It was a lovely thing for him to say, truly it was, yet I resented it. We both knew our affair would end before long, before we could hurt one another past forgiveness, so why freight the moments we had left with such sentiments? Our time together was ending, so why not embrace the sweetness, while it lasted, and save regret for another day?

  * * *

  He watched me in the tub, his erection made unmistakable by his tight-fitting trousers, and when I was done, he dried me carefully, fastened the sash of my wrapper and led me to the sitting room table, which held steaming bowls of leek and potato soup, a perfectly roasted chicken, and a casserole of what turned out to be braised celery.

  When we had eaten our fill and drunk down the last drop of wine, he led me back to the bedroom, where he drew off my wrapper and made love to me, his hands and mouth worshiping me with every caress, his body filling me so tenderly that I all but wept.

  Once or twice he began to speak, bent on sharing some secret with me, but I distracted him with kisses and beguiled him with my body, and he fell asleep without saying anything of consequence.

  In the morning, if I were very lucky, he would have forgotten, and I would be able to put off the inevitable. One more month before I returned to Aston Tirrold for good. Another month, and I would be alone again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was the middle of February, a cold and rainy day, and I had just posted my final Chapter to Tom. With nothing else to occupy me, I turned to my laundry, which I had neglected these past weeks. Mrs. Jones took care of my heavier things, sheets and tablecloths and the like, but I preferred to wash my finer things by hand, for a good boil in the copper wore out fine linens far too quickly.