by Sophia James
‘Like a goddess sent down from the heavens by Zeus himself. Aphrodite, perhaps, the goddess of love and persuasion.’
‘A tall order,’ she returned, but smiled. ‘For every man who looked upon her saw his own ideal standard of beauty reflected back.’
‘I rest my case,’ he responded and his hand rose to her face, his finger running across her cheekbone and the line of her nose. ‘You have read the ancient Grecian myths, then?’
‘Often. I also liked the book you sent me.’
‘There are others you might enjoy.’ His voice was husky and low. ‘I had a friend who translated an ancient Indian text for me in parts. Within such writing the forbidden was illuminated and the rules of desire were enlightened.’
‘Tell me one.’ She licked her lips as she said this. No artifice or pretence. No chance for him to misunderstand exactly what she was saying. She had arrived at this point with an equality that startled her, the power on both sides revealing. Jasper was not a man given to façade and she was the same.
When he began to speak she was surprised by the content.
‘“Lovers, blinded by passion, in the friction of sexual battle, are caught up in their fierce energy and pay no attention to danger.”’
‘Is it that? Dangerous?’ The very thought made her warmer.
‘It can be.’
‘And you are well versed in such practices?’
Shadow came into his eyes. ‘I am not a saint, Charlotte.’
‘And I do not wish you to be, Jasper.’
His finger came around her lips and opened her mouth. She tasted the salt on him and knew a quick jolt of pleasure.
‘When one makes love there is a preamble, an overture to set the tone of it.’ He withdrew his finger and licked it, the wet of her mouth glistening on his lips. ‘A sharing that is so intimate only lovers can understand the detail.’
She felt her heart beat in her throat, a peculiar vulnerability that she never wanted to end. Lovers. Even the word was daring.
‘Open your mouth for me.’
She did and he came inside, not gently but with a force that caught her out, his tongue now where his finger had been, probing, asking, finding in his insistence a response from her. Her head tipped back and her breath simply stopped as she allowed him all he wanted. Not easy, not quiet, but invasive and stimulating all at the same time.
This was a different kiss from any he had given her before because it stamped another power into the act. When she moved he stilled her and when he broke away finally his hand curved around the column of her neck.
‘Lovemaking is as much in the mind as it is in the body, Charlotte. Can you feel what I am telling you?’
‘You want to own me.’ It wasn’t a question.
He smiled. ‘Just for now. Later there will come a time when you will rule me and I promise you that your control can be as absolute as mine.’
A further troth wrapped in the sensual. She could barely breathe with the thought of it.
‘Open your legs. Let me in.’
No intermediate step between this and a kiss. Shocked, she allowed it and his hand fell to the skin between her thighs and then rose, up into the wet warmth of her, pushing forward gently till the thickness hurt.
‘The last barrier between innocence and the forbidden knowledge,’ he said in triumph.
She was not embarrassed as he felt her, his eyes watching and daring her to look away.
‘The hidden treasure, the final breaching, but not yet, my love.’
His endearment was surprising, but then she thought all men probably whispered such words in the throes of sexual passion and he would be no different.
His hand retreated and came up to her mouth again, the taste of herself offered back.
‘Lick me and know yourself, Charlotte. The elixir of life.’
She did so, the musk of sex arousing, the forbidden-ness of it wondrous and the hard truth of his offering making her groan with the want for more.
Nothing so far was as she thought it would be. He had not thrown her down and mounted her, a few pushes and a finish. It was what the women at the Foundation spoke of when they thought she was not listening, the mundane tediousness of an act that just caused them problems.
Here she could only feel the enchantment, an edge of danger adding to the illusion, pleasure and thrill in equal proportion. Every fibre of her body yearned for more.
It would hurt, she knew it would, but she wanted that pain as much as she wanted the pleasure. He had shown her this so simply that she no longer felt afraid.
But he had not finished, his hands moving to her breasts now and cradling them, weighing them, holding them up so that flesh spilled across his hands.
‘Heaven on earth can be found between a woman’s breasts.’ He tweaked one nipple. ‘Men dream of living here, caught between the swell of life and birth.’
His mouth fastened on one nipple and he sucked, his other fingers kneading the opposite nipple so that she was lost in sensation.
She wanted him fiercely and violently, inside her. She wanted what those books talked of, a sudden and explosive taking, ferocious in its passion, intense and powerful.
When he raised his head she saw the knowledge in his eyes, too.
‘Now you are ready.’
Lifting her, he removed the last of her clothes, the fall of the cambric adding to her desperation and the brown in his eyes was glowing in need.
The bed was soft and the velvet beneath naked skin felt sinful. As far from the Fairclough Foundation as she had ever been and she only wanted to go further.
Unbuttoning the fall of his trousers he fitted a small sheath across the top of his manhood, stretching down the edges.
‘For safety,’ he said.
His boots were kicked off next and then he was across her, leaning over, nudging her thighs into position and readying himself.
Tipping her chin up, he made her look at him, his gaze promising a truth that was undeniable. He would have her. Now.
She nodded and he came in, not slowly, but with one long hard stroke and stopped as the pain flared around them, the throb of a last resistance, the intake of breath and the coinciding retreat of her own body.
‘No. Stay still. It will pass.’
He did not let her move an inch, but lay there with her, holding in the ache, stifling it with his heat, the thickness of him cradled inside.
And then he moved again, but slightly, so that the flesh was gentled, a new sensation arising from the old.
A question, a beginning, a warmth that grew into a need to move with him, fast and furious, the slick wetness sucking and the friction of his body holding the heat.
‘Come with me,’ he whispered so that the words were quiet. ‘Come with me now, Charlotte. Let go and come. Now.’
And she did, the roiling waves of all he talked about upon her, the pain gone and the pleasure beaching from her toes to her head, the last shake of his ardour and then stillness. Pressed close together, both their hearts beating like drums in a matching rhythm.
She was elated. So this is what the books spoke of in their reverence and disbelief. This act. This totality. The completeness took her from this world to a far-off place where all she wanted was more. Docile. Compliant. Submissive to a master lover who understood her body as no one else ever had.
Different. Changed. No longer an innocent. She smiled at the word.
* * *
Jasper swore under his breath and stayed still. God, the act of copulation had never felt like this, an undone longing and a certainty that had always been missing before.
He had hurt her, he knew it, even with his care.
The small death. The French were right. La petite mort. He took in a shaky breath and tried to gather himself.
Her eyes were closed and her breathin
g was light and shallow.
‘Charlotte?’
A whisky-gold glance sharpened against his own. ‘Yes?’
‘You were magnificent.’
His arm rested across her, hand cupping her breast. It felt as if he was speaking through water, exhaustion snaking through the lateness of the day. And yet...
He took her nipple between his forefinger and his thumb and pressed down. It was not quite over and she had to understand that, too.
Her head turned, a frown across her forehead.
‘I will take away the pain if you let me.’
‘How?’
He came across her and for a second saw fright in her eyes.
‘Not in that way. It is too soon. But in this one.’
One finger sought her swollen redness and then his tongue took over, licking at the nub of desire, finding exactly what he wanted.
She would come again, he knew it, but this time it would be easy and he would happily accommodate her need. He pushed in higher, his finger now moving across her nub.
‘No.’ She groaned this from above, trying to still him, but he took her hand and held it against her thigh while he worked, bent to his job.
He felt her release in the wavering vibrations. Small at first and then stronger so that her body clenched in reply and the breath she held was expired in gasps. His other hand now sat across her stomach, nursing the orgasm. And when it had finished she began to cry, soft sobs at first and then louder.
With worry he raised himself and turned, brushing away the tears on her cheeks.
‘Are you hurt?’ He was trying to understand it.
She shook her head, but would not look at him.
‘Then what is it? Why do you cry?’
‘Because...because... I loved it. Because I want it again. Because I have become a woman I barely recognise and no different from Harriet or the women who ply their trade in Old Pye Street. For coin for them maybe, but for me...for pleasure.’
Jasper fell back against the pillows and laughed in a way he never had in the bed of any woman before, with relief and with gladness and with an all-consuming liberation.
For an hour he had not thought of himself or his injury or his tentative future. No, he had served Charlotte with as much finesse as he could and now she imagined herself a fallen woman. There was no sense in any of it.
‘Pleasure is an underestimated virtue. Personally, I hold it right up there with truth and honesty.’
She smiled, the dimples on her cheeks small shadows of darkness.
‘And any man would be thrilled to have a woman in his bed who thought as you do.’
She had crawled against him now, winding her legs around his. He felt her breath at his throat and the flutter of her eyelashes on the top of his arm where he held her. Outside the wind had risen and the rain was returned, a stinging freezing patter and further abroad the sound of thunder.
‘I used to count the time between the lightning and thunder.’ Her voice was quiet. ‘But when Nanny Beth died I stopped doing it because she said it was wasting life to try to work out things that would change nothing. I think she was referring to my life really and giving me a push to find new pathways, other things.’
‘Things like this?’
She laughed then and he thought he had not heard that sound often enough from her.
‘I doubt this was quite the direction of her thoughts.’
A new bolt of lightning took away the darkness and if she did not count the seconds till the thunder came then he did.
‘Five.’ He said this out loud.
His finger ran across her nose as she nodded. He liked the way it turned up at the end, distinguishing hers from the more patrician noses now in fashion. Her lips turned up, too, at each end, a small indent emphasising them. Everything about her was different and charming. He wanted to keep Charlotte here in his bed for ever, away from the world, just the two of them lost in time and alone.
‘Faced with the proposition of the vastness of the universe we probably know less than nothing. For all we discern the beats between lightning and thunder might be an undiscovered music.’ Jasper’s voice was low.
‘Oh, I like that. A symphony in space that no one listens to.’
‘Except for us.’
She turned and he felt her finger against his nipple and took in a breath. No woman had ever done that to him before, not even the practised courtesans he’d bedded at a place in Covent Garden in the throes of his addiction and ones that catered to each and every fantasy.
When her mouth fastened across him the shock burned its way to his toes.
‘God.’
She looked up. ‘You take the name of the Lord in vain too often, Mr King.’ Then she returned to her work, her teeth now nipping, the pain slicing reality into shards of delight.
‘Anyone who can lecture on the niceties of religious tenets while generating a lust without boundary has to be an original, Miss Fairclough.’ He tried to move, but she kept him there under the pressure of her opened palm.
‘My turn now. You did promise after all.’
Jasper breathed in, his do-gooding soul-saving lover presenting him with yet another example of the diversity of her gifts. He could barely believe the position he was in, lying here and waiting, his heart beating so fast and loud that he knew she must hear it and the sweat on his forehead building.
He never let others take control. He was always the one in the lead and, although he might have promised her this dominion over him earlier, he had not actually thought she would take him up upon the troth.
Swallowing, he made himself be still, counting the seconds of submissiveness beneath his breath in much the same way as he had the gap between lightning and thunder.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Four seconds. Slowly. Deliberately. As if his life depended on such detachment.
And it did because even underneath regulation other capricious whims burst through the carefully constructed limit.
She was making him live again piece by piece, an unpractised virgin of godly persuasion who should in all truth have nothing to do with him.
But she played him like a maestro and when she pushed back the sheet from where it covered his right leg and ran her touch down his scar he nearly leapt from the bed with shock.
‘I wish I had been there for you when this happened.’
He caught her hand to make her stop, his allowance of control strained and the honesty in her voice breaking him down altogether.
‘And I am glad that you were not.’
‘Because it was so terrible?’
He breathed in slowly. ‘Sometimes I still use a stick. A mahogany stick with a silver handle and I hate it.’
‘But it helps?’
‘Yes.’
She watched him now, closely, the gold in her eyes fiery.
‘Secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely of places, Jasper, but when they are shared their power is defused.’
‘You really believe that?’
This time she blushed, a surprising thing in a woman so very candid.
‘Perhaps not,’ she answered at length. ‘After this evening the secrets of the sensual are more powerful than I could have ever believed them to be.’
Her hand ran between his thighs, probing upwards.
‘See,’ she whispered. ‘Not diluted, but magnified.’
His manhood had risen and as it brushed across her arm, he felt the softness of her skin there even as her fingers closed about it. Growing and wanting again.
He should reach for a condom, for he still had a couple in the drawer in the cabinet beside the bed, but a languid contentment had stolen across him and he simply lay there as she sat and took him inside herself, moving up and down, quietly at first and then faster. Then starlight burst within him a
nd she tensed, milking him with her orgasm, clenched around him and riding the delight, a storm of feeling and submission, a maelstrom of power.
As she collapsed he took her in his arms and they lay curled together, the clock in the corner beating out the hour of nine.
* * *
It was late when she woke again, so late that even the shadows held shadows and the thinness of time was palpable. She lay turned towards him, their hands clasped. Big hands. Capable hands. Hands that had shown her things that she never knew existed. Wondrous things.
A glint of light told her that he was awake and watching. Her.
‘I sent a note to the Foundation and said that you were at my sister’s for the night. So that nobody would worry.’
‘When?’ She had not felt him leave the bed.
‘After ten.’
‘What time is it now?’
‘Just turned three. I heard the bells of St James’s a moment ago.’
She realised then that he was now dressed in one of his fine linen shirts, the tail of it tucked around his thighs.
‘You have been up?’
The whiteness of his teeth showed in a smile. It was quieter now and the storm had passed. When she listened there was nothing but silence.
‘I want to give you something.’
She felt the rustle of sheets as he moved and then the small flare of a single candle on a side table banished the blackness.
He had pushed pillows behind him as a resting place and she sat, too, in the generous nest of them.
‘This,’ he said then and opened his hand. A small, long, green-velvet box sat on his palm, a golden catch on one side.
‘I thought you should have had some jewellery the other night at the ball and you didn’t.’
When she opened it, she saw a necklace finely wrought with stones of gold.
‘They are topaz. They match your eyes. The necklace was my mother’s.’
Emotion kept her speechless.
‘I think they would look well upon you, Charlotte.’