by Rose Lerner
“I cannot thank you all enough for your hard work this week,” she began, once initial greetings and congratulations were exchanged. “Going to a new home can only be a wrench, and you have not merely done it yourselves with grace, but made it a joyful and easy occasion for us—”
“We’re both very grateful,” Mr. Cahill said with a grin. “But it’s been a long morning, and though she’d never admit it, I think Mrs. Cahill needs to rest.”
“Indeed, ma’am, you look worn out,” Wrenn said dryly. Everyone else smirked.
Lydia couldn’t bring herself to care. “Yes, indeed, I think I should benefit very much from a few quiet hours before dinner.” The garden-and-stable boy, a lad of fourteen, fought for composure. “Thank you again, and thank you for your understanding. I look forward very much to our life together.”
“Would you like me to attend you, madam?” Wrenn asked.
Lydia looked to Mr. Cahill, unsure.
“That won’t be necessary, thank you, Wrenn,” he said, offering Lydia his arm. She tried not to rush up the stairs to the two rooms that were to be theirs.
They were comfortable rooms—a little too dark-hued and old-fashioned to be cheerful, but she liked that. Mr. Cahill led her through his, papered in silver and dark green, to her own in burgundy and gold. He put his hands in his pockets and turned a full circle, bouncing happily on the balls of his feet. She realized, abashed, that while she had been thinking the rooms small and simple compared to Wheatcroft, to him two airy rooms for one couple must seem the height of decadence.
Feeling like a cat stalking a mouse, she watched him go across and lower the muslin window-blinds. She’d been patient, and soon she’d pounce. The room’s light turned a white, clean shade, and she took a step towards him.
“May I take down your hair?” he asked.
She hesitated. She had wanted to luxuriate in their privacy, in being allowed to go as slowly as they wanted without fear of interruption. But now they were here—“I don’t think I can wait.”
He grinned at her and sat on the edge of the bed. “Let’s take the edge off, shall we? Come here.” He opened his arms, making space for her between his legs. When she sat between them, he wrapped his arms around her stomach and pulled her in close, pressing a kiss on the side of her neck. She gasped and squirmed. “All right, all right, hold your horses,” he said, laughter in his voice, and tugged her skirts up. He lifted her right leg and hooked it over his thigh, exposing her.
She held very still, half nervous and half not wanting to do anything that might discourage or distract him. Was she really ready for this? She had said she couldn’t wait, though, and he took her at her word. When he put his hand there—
Abandon, this was abandon, but she couldn’t even remember what she was abandoning. She whimpered impatiently as his fingers slid over her, desperate to reach the peak faster, now— “Do it yourself,” he murmured in her ear, and slid his hands up her sides to cup her breasts.
Could she, with him watching?
A drop of sweat ran down her throat into the dark hollow made by the busk of her corset. He licked up the side of her neck, tasting her skin. Christ. Why on earth should that feel so good? She dipped her own finger into her wetness and circled her center of feeling.
“What do you think about when you do this alone?” he asked, carefully freeing one breast from her clothes and experimenting with her nipple in his fidgety way. Now he flicked it with his thumb and index finger, a hard, sharp sensation that felt the way champagne corks sounded. She spread her legs wider. He moaned, and she realized she had pushed her rear up against his manhood.
He put a hand on her hip to anchor her and rubbed against her. “Please,” he said hoarsely. “Just one little imagining. The tamest one you have, if you like.”
Her mind was blank. She didn’t need any imaginings when the reality was so terribly arousing. “I—” She struggled to think. “When I was younger, I used to like to imagine coitus in one of the box pews at church.”
His breathing quickened. “Really? Did you ever imagine that while in church?”
“All the time,” she confessed guiltily. “I knew I shouldn’t, and the more I knew I shouldn’t, the more fun it was to know that no one suspected me.” It was fun to tell him about it, too. It felt wicked and free. There were so many thoughts she had never shared with anyone because she knew they would be shocked. She could say anything to him. She could ask him for anything.
“Did you imagine any particular person in the pew with you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t like to imagine real people. It feels like a liberty.”
“Have you ever imagined me?”
She nodded. “I didn’t think you would mind.”
He groaned and moved them, pushing her down on her back on the bed and climbing atop her. His hard cock pressed against her through his pantaloons, graceless and eager. “Tell me,” he said.
She shifted until the wool scraped against her in just the right way, wrapping a leg around one of his for leverage. She loved the way her single bare breast felt, squashed wantonly against his silk waistcoat. Her head fell back.
“Tell me.”
“I want you inside me. I want you to take what you need.”
“You mean you want me to fuck you hard?” The words were crude; she had always imagined that would make them disrespectful, that a man said such things to a woman to master her. She had never objected to the idea—had even found it arousing. But Mr. Cahill was merely translating her roundaboutation into plain English, repeating it back to her because he liked the sound of it—and maybe teasing her a little.
All her life, honesty had been the most forbidden fruit of all. “Exactly.”
He ground roughly against her, driving her into the bed. “I can do that.”
Lydia spent, clinging to him as pleasure shook her out, ripped her apart at the seams, and pieced her back together with all her brightest, best parts facing out. She didn’t even bother chasing the last tremors. There was more and better to come.
She lay back, sated and happy. Her own impatience gone, she relished the tension that was still in him, his arms braced to either side of her and his breath hot in her ear as he drove himself towards his peak. “Sss—sorry,” he said. “If—uncomfortable—”
Tenderness suffused her. “Take as long as you like,” she said lazily, and tilted up her hips. “Dinner isn’t until four.”
He made a gurgling noise that might have started out as a laugh and pushed himself up on his forearms to look down at where he rutted in a froth of her skirts. The glazed, open-mouthed look on his face should have been comical or distasteful, but it wasn’t. He dragged himself down her until she could feel the head of his cock bump over her pubic bone and push up against her naked slit.
“Soon,” she said, and at the word some of the heat and impatience rushed back. “Oh, God, I’ve been waiting so long…do it. Unbutton your pantaloons and put your cock in me.” She said it as crisply as she could, having noticed how gleeful it made him when she said coarse things in her educated voice.
He liked it now, very obviously. His jaw dropped, and he pushed convulsively up against her. “Do you mean it?”
Why not? She was as wet as she would ever be. That would help, surely. “Pull the counterpane from under me. We shouldn’t get blood on it.”
He had the quilt on the floor in under ten seconds. Her—she would have to ask him what to call it, all the words she knew were so precious—her female parts ached eagerly as he unbuttoned his pantaloons, fingers slipping on the buttons in his haste.
“Taking the care to do something correctly is faster than hurrying and fumbling,” she teased primly.
He laughed and kissed her. “I think this will hurt about the same either way. It is what it is.”
“I want it to hurt,” she said, and meant it. She wan
ted to mark this connection between them with blood and pain, as Adam and Eve had marked it, tasting the apple in one another’s mouth.
He took a harsh, ragged breath. “This is probably the least romantic thing in the world, but it will help.” He spat in his hand and rubbed his expectorate over his member, his breath hissing through his teeth at the sensation.
Lydia tried not to make a face.
He laughed again, high and breathless and exhilarated. “We’ll have a proper wedding night after dinner and strew the bed with rose petals if you like.”
“Roses are out of seas—”
He pressed into her and her breath stalled in her lungs at the pain. He closed his eyes, breathing hard and shallow. “Shhh,” he murmured, gentling her even though he was trembling.
He pushed in farther, which hurt more. But then he pulled out, and somehow when he came back inside it slid easier. He seesawed until he was all the way in, and then it wasn’t bad at all. It felt good. Oh, it still hurt, a stretching, scraping hurt, but she liked it. It made things real. It made this something special, not something she would have wanted to do with just anybody.
“How are you?” he asked.
I love you. She held the thought tightly inside her and smiled up at him instead. “Good. Oh! I forgot.” She reached up to untie his cravat as he made slow, small thrusts inside her. She wondered if he needed to go harder or faster to spend. She should say something, give him permission, but she liked this. She didn’t want it to end. They would never have another first time. She pulled his cravat off and undid the first shirt button.
“You forgot what?” She liked the sound of his voice, distracted and heavy and rough.
“I wanted to do this.” She ducked her head and kissed along his skin at the edge of the linen. He tilted his head up obligingly. Somehow that pushed him more snugly inside her, and they both gasped. Her head was at an awkward angle and her shoulders were hunched, but she could see the pulse pounding in his throat, and his skin was smooth and salty and his hair was rough. She poked her tongue into the hollow of his collarbone.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m close, I promise—it won’t be long now—”
Oh. That broke her heart. She was loving everything about this moment, and he thought she was wishing it was over, that he should have somehow made it better. “Don’t apologize. Please. You don’t have to—” You don’t have to try so hard. That would only make him feel ashamed. She would hate it if he said that to her, when she was doing her best. She was probably trying too hard right now, to find the correct thing to say. “Nothing is perfect,” she said finally. “I don’t want it to be. I want th”—he struck some sensitive spot within her, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe—“this. I like this.”
He made a sound that was almost like a sob. “I think I li—” He pressed his face into the sheet beside her head and made three hard thrusts whose sharp, twisting pain almost made her spend again. He trembled violently, twitching inside her. Oh. Oh, that was—strange and wonderful and unbearably intimate. He groaned and pushed into her a few more times, out of his own control.
They lay together silently until his cock began to soften and slip from her with a wet noise that was a little bit disgusting. He pulled out hastily and, heaving himself off the bed with an effort, wet a handkerchief in the basin. “Stand up carefully.”
His seed dribbled out of her when she did. She made a face at him, tucking her breast back into her clothes, and cleaned up as best she could. It was difficult not to keep rubbing herself with the wet cloth. “What were you going to say?”
He thought back. “Oh,” he said, grinning. “I think I lied when I said nothing was perfect. But maybe you’re the exception that proves the rule.”
It was a well-known fact that men in the heat of passion would say anything, but even so it gave Lydia the courage to say, “Would you—if you wouldn’t mind—how you kissed my—in the greenhouse, how you—”
He blinked. “You mean you really did like what we just did? Well, of course I could tell you did, but enough that you—?”
“I don’t think it will take long.”
He collapsed back on the bed. “I don’t think I can move,” he said, eyes laughing. He tugged her by her skirts until she indecorously straddled his face, and yanked her down.
It didn’t take long.
She let Ash help her dress for dinner. “Can I take your hair down?” he asked.
She looked doubtful. “You won’t be able to put it up again.”
“Can’t you?”
She considered. “Not well, but I suppose it’s only dinner at home.” Her mouth curved up as she said it.
Home. This was their home now. This was his house, at least for six months. Suddenly he didn’t know if he could spend six months in one house, using one name. He concentrated on taking out her hairpins, unrolling the rolls of hair. Untying the thread that held the end of her narrow braids, he unplaited them carefully. Her hair parted around the comb like water falling through his fingers. Then he brushed it till it crackled and shone, coppery strands rising to meet the bristles. She shut her eyes and smiled. She always watched him. He liked that she trusted him enough not to, every so often.
She opened her eyes and caught him smiling. “Why do you like this so much?”
He thought. “I like the ordinary details of other people’s lives. This is something you do every day, more than once. You don’t even think about it. Yet no one but you and Wrenn has ever seen it.”
She nodded and gathered her hair in her hands, rolling and pinning it quickly into a snail-shell at the crown of her head. Then he unbuttoned her dress and buttoned her into another, this one a deep turquoise blue. It still filled him with delight that one person could have so many clothes, and that she now had another whole set he hadn’t seen. How long would it take him to see everything, if he avoided snooping in her wardrobe? A fortnight, a month? How much longer to run through every hat and jacket and glove?
She fastened a string of fine large pearls around her neck and took up a rich cashmere shawl.
He didn’t belong here. Not when he couldn’t stop cataloging everything she owned. He knew to the penny how much that shawl could get him from a pawnbroker, and how much if he could find an outright buyer. She probably didn’t remember what she’d paid for it.
You don’t have to belong, he told himself. You only have to blend in for six months, and then—if you can even talk her into it—visit now and again when you feel lonely.
But he was realizing how much he did want a home. One place, forever. He couldn’t understand it. He’d been in plenty of people’s lovely homes before—maybe not quite as lovely as this, but better than anything he’d ever had. He’d never cared that they weren’t his, or wanted to belong there. He’d always thought—
It hit him. He’d always thought, Rafe and I will get ourselves a better one, one of these days. Oh, there hadn’t been any urgency to it. He’d loved his life the way it was. But he’d always planned to settle down, hadn’t he? And he’d never noticed.
All at once he remembered how, as a little boy breaking into townhouses, he’d wasted precious seconds lying in a bed or looking at himself in a smooth new mirror and thought, One day.
What did it matter where he belonged? Did he want to be dirt poor again? Did he want to live among thieves and cutthroats and rivals and guard his back every moment from a knife or a constable’s baton? Did he want to choke down sooty London air and breathe in the stagnant, filthy river all summer? That was the only place he belonged that you could point to on a map. He’d belonged with Rafe, but Rafe was gone and wishing wouldn’t bring him back.
Ash didn’t want to be a gentleman and really belong here, he only wanted to have it—and he did. He just had to hold on to it. By the end of six months, softhearted Lydia wouldn’t want him to leave. He could probably even make her thin
k that his staying was her idea.
Lydia might ask him to leave tonight if he couldn’t pull himself together. But as centerpiece after platter after remove after entremets was brought out and lovingly arranged in a symmetrical pattern on the snowy-white tablecloth, Ash’s stomach curdled further. Duck, pheasant, roast chicken, apple compote without cinnamon, potato pudding, stewed red cabbage…every food he’d named as a favorite.
Why had he done this? It was exactly the kind of purposeless lie he’d trained Rafe never to give. Yet somehow in that moment, he’d given her Rafe’s favorite foods instead of his own.
Ash didn’t look at the food. He ate it without letting himself taste it. Instead, he watched Lydia glowing at having done him a kindness—and a little at the enjoyment of playing devoted bride. “Is the duck done to your liking?” she asked now, with a sweet, hopeful glance from under her lashes. “You must tell Mrs. Gower if there is anything you prefer differently.” Her turquoise-blue gown was bright in the clear, fragrant light of beeswax candles and a cherry-wood fire, and her hair gleamed like burnished bronze. The curve of her mouth gave him the same glad feeling as finding a penny in the street.
He smiled back and said, “Everything is to my liking,” and ignored his stomach filling with Rafe’s food. All those times he’d given Rafe his supper…he was being paid back in spades, now.
He managed it until dessert, when out from the kitchen came a glorious, towering tipsy cake, studded with slivers of almond. Ash imagined how Rafe’s face would brighten to see it. His internal organs felt ticklish. “It’s beautiful!” he told the footman. “Tell Mrs. Gower she’s an angel. A very talented angel.” These were going to be his servants. That cake had taken over an hour to make, and it had been made to please him. He couldn’t insult the cook by not eating it. He couldn’t even insult her by not taking a hearty portion and visibly enjoying every bite. So he chewed and swallowed and hummed with approval.
How often would he have to do this, now they thought tipsy cake one of his favorites?