by Rose Lerner
The apprentice didn’t wait to be asked twice, cleaning the ink off the form at double speed. Ordinarily he slept in the kitchen at the shop, but just now he was staying with his sister, as her husband was away and she hated being alone in the house.
After Phoebe and Mr. Dymond had each read the proofs through twice, she dug out the box of pages of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that were to go in this week’s papers.
On yon long, level plain, at distance crown’d
With crags, whereon those Moorish turrets rest,
Wide scatter’d hoof-marks dint the wounded ground;
And, scath’d by fire, the green sward’s darken’d vest
Tells that the foe was Andalusia’s guest…
“Good,” she said. “It’s war stanzas this week. We’ve already got fourteen letters about last week’s.”
“What was wrong with last week’s?” Mr. Dymond asked, immediately indignant.
“It contained the phrase ‘adulterate joy’, apparently.”
“Apparently? You haven’t read it?”
She shook her head. He made a disappointed face. She felt disappointed, in herself. “I used to love reading travels and geographies,” she said. “I wanted to see the mountains and olive trees of Spain so badly it was like a pain in my chest.”
Mr. Dymond turned his face to the window, taking in the boring English street. He looked as if his chest were hurting to see Spain at this very moment. “They’re beautiful.”
“I’m sure they are.” Her chest did hurt—but it hurt for him. It hurt with how much she wanted him to turn towards her again, to touch her. She knew she would never see Spain. “I used to see possibilities for myself. It used to seem as if maybe one day I could visit Spain, or the West Indies, or Giza. As if even if I didn’t, there’d be no room in my life to regret it. I thought…”
His gaze came back to her, blue eyes steady. He waited patiently for her to go on.
“I think I stopped seeing possibilities after I lost my baby. I—I stopped seeing them for the world as well. I lost interest in the Intelligencer. I lost interest in politics. I still believe in progress here”—she tapped her forehead—“but in my heart, I stopped. I hate it. I hate that I’ve become so small. All there is to my life is two rooms. I don’t even read the London newspapers anymore.” She picked up the Times, then dropped it with a thwack. “I don’t recognize half the names in these political articles. What’s happened to me? I used to care about things. I used to want things.”
He chewed his lower lip. “You still want things. You must. You move with so much purpose.”
That stopped her. She flushed. Was that how he saw her? It wasn’t the usual sort of compliment, but she liked the idea.
“I’m sorry, that was both strange and overfamiliar,” he said. “But I mean it. I feel invigorated just being near you.”
There was no one about. No one would ever know what she said next. And he made her want to be the person he saw—a bold, purposeful woman. She grinned at him, heart pounding. “I wasn’t talking about that sort of wanting.”
His eyes darkened. “Neither was I.”
It wasn’t at all the same, that sort of wanting and what she’d been speaking of. Or was it? Since meeting him, she had more energy than she’d had in months, maybe years. He’d woken up her body, and the mind and body were connected.
But it wasn’t just her body that wanted him, was it?
“If you could have anything, right now, what would it be?” His eyes were fixed on her with a curious intensity, as if he were hungry for her answer. Hungry for her desire.
For a moment, she let herself consider the possibilities—and just like that, it was too late to lie. She wanted him desperately, and maybe she could have him. She could ignore that and go back to her small boring life, or she could be bold and take what she wanted. She’d been that woman, once. She wanted herself back.
She should ask for a kiss. It was small, and safe, and the least shameful of all her desires. But it wasn’t what she’d been thinking of all afternoon. Not when she kept catching him sneaking glances at her bosom. Her nipples ached, her breasts feeling heavy and swollen. She wanted to be shameful. She wanted to be shocking and forward and get exactly what she wanted, just this once. “Will you touch my breasts?”
His face went slack, as if he felt too many things to decide on an expression. His throat worked soundlessly, his eyes going to her bosom like a needle to the pole. She sat and waited for him to reach out a hand. She let the silence fill with their mutual understanding of her desire.
There was a man with a static-electricity machine at the Whitsuntide fair; for a penny he had let her stand on a resin cake and electrified her body. When Will had reached out to touch her, miniature lightning had stretched from a point on her skin to his finger, bright and painful like a burn. She felt like that now. She was charged and humming, and if Mr. Dymond put out a hand, the energy within her couldn’t help but leap towards him, making the candles in their tin sconces look dim.
“We’d better go into the kitchen,” he said.
“Oh. Oh, of course.” He was going to do it. He was really going to do it. She was the worst sort of wanton, encouraging a man she had no intention of marrying to fondle her like—like a whore, she made herself think. But she led him into the kitchen and drew the curtains closed. She faced him, trying not to shake, light-headed with shame and eagerness.
Then he did put out his hand, slowly, to cup her left breast, shaping it through her clothes and squeezing gently. He rubbed up and down, his palm hard against her. Pleasure spiked in her nipple and radiated out like heat from a hot stove. He had taken off his gloves for the work they had been doing; his bare hand stood out against the dark fabric of her dress, her neckline shifting under the pressure of his fingers. When she glanced up, he was watching her face. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked.
Her face flamed. She shouldn’t be doing this—but that only made it better. Having begun with honesty, she found she didn’t want to stop. “More.” He drew his hand back, and she said, “Please,” then flushed with shame at the naked intensity in her voice.
He grinned. “Don’t forget ‘thank you’.” He plucked the kerchief from her dress with a sharp tug. Though she couldn’t feel it with any sharpness through the thick fabric of her corset, even the slight friction and shift in pressure made her gasp. He lifted the kerchief to hold it over her eyes. She gasped in shock.
“May I?” he asked.
He could see her, and she couldn’t see him. She couldn’t know what he would do. “Yes.”
He tied the linen at the back of her head. Phoebe was exposed, uncertain and painfully aroused. She felt a change in the air a moment before he cupped her breasts, lifting them, weighing them with his hands. “So perfect.” He raised them as high as they would go, until it almost hurt—then let go. They fell with a bouncing jolt that did hurt, splendidly and gloriously, her flesh already sensitized beyond belief.
His fingertips pressed into her as he sought her nipples. Would he be able to feel them through the fabric? He rubbed circles in their vicinity—so lightly, and there was so much fabric and stiff linen between his fingers and her skin, that for a moment she wondered if she would feel it herself when he found them.
Twin streaks of pleasure shot through her. She cried out in surprise, her knees threatening to buckle—and his thumbs jammed into her flesh, hard. It hurt for a brief, agonizing second, and then heated, feverish sensation flooded through her, centering between her legs. He did it again. Her nipples throbbed. Oh God. This was wicked. Wicked, and unbearable. She was afraid of his touch, and on the verge of begging for it.
He let go. “Turn around,” he said in a low voice.
She nearly stumbled as she obeyed him, breath stuttering in her throat. As she shifted, she became suddenly aware of how wet she had become. She felt for the edge of the kitchen sink to ground herself. He didn’t steady her; his own balance must be tenuous without his wa
lking stick.
He unbuttoned her dress swiftly. “I thought about this last week, when you asked me to do your buttons up.”
“So did I.” She half-expected her voice to have changed, to be something guttural and rusty. Instead she sounded bizarrely normal.
He left her dress on and put his hands on her waist, pulling her carefully back against him. She could feel, faintly through layers of petticoat, that he was hard. She pressed back instinctively; his hands stopped her before she could overbalance him. “Careful,” he said. “Don’t move.”
She stood, breathing hard, as he slid his hands around to gently cup her breasts again.
“I could have you like this.” He had leaned in without her realizing. His lips brushed the curve of her ear below the blindfold, his voice low and intimate. “If you put your hands flat on the table, I could pull up your skirts and take you.”
She moaned.
“Do you want me to?”
She did. “I think it’s your turn to want something.”
He froze for a long moment. She should have said yes. She should have just said yes, and now he was going to pull away and they would never be able to look each other in the eye again and everything was ruined, everything.
“Not yet,” he said, warm, rich amusement in his voice. “We haven’t finished with what you asked for. Pull down your bodice.”
Chapter Eighteen
She tugged at her cuffs, pulling her sleeves off by feel. Her dress sagged around her waist. He unbuttoned her flannel petticoats, and she pulled her arms out of those, too. She must look ridiculous, improbable amounts of fabric bunched everywhere. “You’ll have to unlace my corset.”
He loosened the laces, creating a small gap between the front of the corset and her shift. Cool air rushed in, but the linen of the shift stuck to her skin. She realized she had been sweating. Her skin would be marked with lines from the seams of her corset; maybe without the stays her bosom would sag more than he had expected. Maybe this would turn the moment’s fairy glamour to cold reality, her breasts nothing special or magical after all but only the same boring flesh she saw every morning and evening. She hesitated.
He bent down and kissed her shoulder. “Do you want me to lace it back up?” His voice’s cultured accents suddenly sounded alien and distant. He was such a gentleman. She liked that about him, but just then she would have been reassured by rough, common lust.
Liar, she told herself. You only want him to make this easier for you. You want him to take the choice away so you don’t have to be brave.
She yanked her corset down, its stiff wooden busk jutting forward awkwardly. She could feel her shift still clinging to her skin, probably transparent with sweat.
He bit off an impressive piece of profanity. “Sorry. Turn around.”
She did, fighting the urge to cover herself or pull off the blindfold. What did he see? Without the firm pressure of her corset and clothes, she felt unanchored. The cool air of the kitchen caressing her skin felt obscene. Her shift pulled free of her skin, chill air rushing in. She started. He gave a husky laugh. “Put your arms up.” She obeyed, and he pulled the shift over her head.
“Show them to me.”
Her breath came shallow, half from arousal and half from nerves. Awkwardly, she put her hands under her breasts and lifted them. Her nipples caught on the buttons of his coat. She hadn’t realized he was so close.
“Christ, yes,” he said. “I knew they would spill over your hands like wine.”
“Touch me.”
She could hear the smile in his voice—the smile and the hunger both. “I’ve been in h—er, the hot place—since I met you, you know. Knowing I couldn’t have this. That I’d never, ever know what your breasts tasted like or what sounds you’d make when I nipped you with my teeth. Now I will. I want a few more moments of torment.”
She couldn’t see him, but she knew what he looked like, the wicked glint in his blue eyes, the way one eyebrow and the corner of his mouth turned up slightly and those two little things changed his whole face. Maybe he could wait, but she couldn’t. She leaned forward, dragging her nipples up and down over the fine fabric of his coat. It felt unbearably wonderful.
He trembled. His arm brushed against her; she guessed that he gripped the edge of the sink for balance. His other hand settled over hers and his mouth closed around her left nipple.
He was gentle at first, simply surrounding her with wet delicious heat; the feeling was like a dash of cayenne, turning to cool peppermint when he moved away to blow gently, to mouth and lick at her other nipple. Just as she was about to melt into a puddle at his feet, he sucked hard. She made a grotesque sound, hips jerking.
She felt the light touch of his teeth, as he’d promised, tiny needles of pleasure before he flicked gently with his tongue. She made another terrible needy noise and leaned back against the sink to steady herself. Apart from his hand on hers, he touched her with only the very tip of his tongue. She felt as if he’d entered her. Her intimate muscles clenched helplessly around nothing. Was it possible to achieve the height of pleasure only from this?
If she did, though, it would be over. She wasn’t ready for it to be over.
“Wait,” she rasped. “It’s your turn to want something.”
He stopped just long enough to say, “I want this.” She gave in. Her pleasure grew until she was frantic with it. When he finally drew his mouth away and let go of her breast, she was shaking and weak and ready to spread her legs right there on the kitchen table, please, please, please.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just need to sit down, so I can use both hands.”
To his surprise, there was a flicker of disappointment in her face below the blindfold. What did she want instead?
Nick had never really understood men who complained that women were difficult to please. All you had to do was pay attention, follow their lead without being obvious about it—women enjoyed a masterful air—and with a little trial and error you could easily discover what they wanted. They might find it embarrassing to ask in words, but they moved their hands, spread their legs wider or drew them together, made sounds of pleasure or disappointment or demand.
Nick had a reputation as a generous lover, and he was proud of it. And after all, there was no point being selfish. A man who spilled his seed in the presence of a pretty, willing woman was never unsatisfied.
“You don’t want me to use my hands?”
“I—” She broke off, embarrassed, and pulled the kerchief from her eyes. She looked down at herself. He looked, too. She was an erotic, wanton mess, her clothes in disarray, her corset gaping, her heavy dark hair—already disheveled after a long day’s work and her habit of rubbing at the back of her neck while thinking—about to come entirely loose from its moorings. She breathed hard, face flushed and bare breasts heaving. I did that, he thought.
Her nipples gleamed wet with his saliva. She noticed and went to rub them dry with the kerchief. She hadn’t thought it through, and her eyes widened when the rasp of linen gave her unexpected pleasure. Nick’s mouth went dry.
“Do you want me to use my mouth?” he asked her, grateful his voice didn’t crack. “Down there?”
She gasped as if she liked the idea, but she didn’t nod.
“You want me inside you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. “Please.”
His own need had been present all along—but it had been at the back of his mind, sequestered away while he focused on hers, on the smell and taste of her and the sounds she made. Now it rushed back like blood into a frozen limb, fierce and painful. He hesitated. “There’s no place—”
He hated his leg at that moment, hated it with a concentrated disgust that could have corroded steel. He had used to like to take women in odd places, standing. Now he wasn’t sure he could make it all the way through the act without collapsing. His earlier offer to take her from behind had been an empty promise. It had already been foolish pride to stand so long without his
cane; his leg would give him hell tomorrow. None of the chairs looked as though they could take the weight of two, the floor was hard, and the table was completely covered in parcels, newspapers, correspondence, scissors, and a thousand other odds-and-ends.
Reality was rushing back in, and he could tell from the look on Mrs. Sparks’s face that she was deflating like a balloon in the face of his inability.
“We could put a tablecloth on the ground,” she suggested in a small voice. “Unless you don’t want to. I’m sorry, that was terribly forward of me, I—I’m sorry—never mind.”
“Shhh. Of course I want to.” Nick had yet to meet the man who would turn down an opportunity to fuck a beautiful, eager woman.
She pulled a tablecloth from a chest in the corner, and together they spread it on the ground. Moving with a fierce erection only exaggerated his limp, but she didn’t say anything and neither did he. Then he couldn’t help himself. “It’s not going to be very comfortable on this tiled floor.”
She frowned, crossing her arms over her bare chest as if growing really self-conscious for the first time. “Will it hurt your leg?”
It would, but, “That isn’t what I meant.” He had meant that if he were whole, she wouldn’t have to be on the floor.
“You didn’t answer my question.” The excited flush was fading from her cheeks, and her crossed arms were starting to look more annoyed than modest.
“Everything hurts my leg,” he snapped. “If I didn’t do anything that hurt my leg, I would lie in bed all day, and then my leg would hurt from lack of exercise.”
“Well, is there something we could do to make you more comfortable?”
There was, of course. They could use the bed upstairs. She could be on top. He didn’t want to ask for either. “I’m a man, damn it. I don’t need to be babied. I was merely concerned for your comfort.”
“And I’m concerned for yours.”