by Alysha Ellis
Even before she had recovered, Charles was leaning across the bed to shout in the servant’s face.
“How dare you spew your cum on your lady’s face?”
Lise wiped her face with a corner of her dress.
“I’m sorry, my lord.” Jameson’s words were a breath of sound. He stared wildly between his master and mistress. “I’m sorry for that…and for the other.”
“The other?” Charles asked, his voice cold.
But the valet did not heed the warning.
“For not taking your hand inside my arse, my lord. I-I couldn’t bear the thought.”
Only Lise saw the tremendous frown that marred her husband’s face, although when he spoke next, his voice was light enough.
“Very well, Jameson. You are excused.”
The valet hitched up his clothes to some semblance of order then retreated from the room with a garbled sound.
Lise started to readjust her own clothing but the sight of Charles’ now limp cock, dripping with their combined juices, made her pause. His penis looked…dissatisfied. And somehow, she shared it’s feeling.
For the first time in years, she felt the strong desire to love her husband. She was fond of him, occasionally even proud of him, and she greatly admired his unusual sexual tastes, but she’d never loved him, except as a friend and companion. Now, she felt the first stirrings of love for him as a man.
Was it watching him with the servant that had effected this transformation in her temperament?
She’d always considered herself a content woman. She’d married well and into an old and wealthy family. She lacked only constant sexual activity, but with Charles’ varied appetite, she could understand why he chose different outlets.
But perhaps there was a happy medium, a way for both she and her husband to be satisfied. She’d glimpsed a bit of that just now, with Jameson as an eager participant in their ménage. His ultimate defection lay heavily in her heart.
“Charles,” she said, closing her hand around his dick and giving it a gentle squeeze. Some men did not like to be trifled with after they were spent but her husband was able to tolerate the attention. “I am sorry.”
He looked down at her upturned face then switched his gaze to her hand, now lightly palpitating his loins.
“Whatever are you sorry for, my dear?” The distance was back in his tone.
“That it didn’t work out with Jameson.” She sighed as she lowered her head for a quick lick around his burgeoning head. The fat member grew harder against her palm. What a wonder! And she’d always thought Charles a rather weak-blooded sexual partner, content to watch rather than take part.
She went on musingly, “Perhaps another man—”
“No.” Charles shook his head decisively. “There will be no others. It was a mistake to even attempt this arrangement with a mere servant.”
For some reason, Luke Holden’s face came to Lise’s mind. Holden wasn’t a mere servant. And he was as sexy as hell.
She cast a swift look at her husband. Charles and he had been friends once then enemies. What was the reason?
From all she knew of her husband, he was slow to take umbrage and slower to rise to actual hatred. What could Luke have done to alienate their friendship?
Or had it been more than friendship?
Chapter Four
Even in the gossip-loving village, it took several weeks to find out what became of Luke Holden. According to Sarah Garrick, he’d taken a position some miles distant from Hessell House, earning his living managing the property of the wealthy Lord Mundrey of Pomfort. And earning a good living from it, according to the same source, as well as impressing the baron.
Everyone knew that Lord Mundrey had plenty of money but no good looks or intelligence to commend him, an unfortunate situation which he had passed down to his seven daughters. Three of the unhandsome girls were already hopeless spinsters but Mundrey had lowered his standards for the rest and was willing to accept any manner of minor nobility or even, rumour had it, a superior sort of tradesperson.
It was no surprise, then, to find out a few months later that Luke Holden had become engaged to Elizabeth Mundrey and the wedding preparations were already being heralded as the most expensive and elaborate that part of the country had seen for many a year.
Holden still worked as the manager of Mundrey’s property and would no doubt continue this occupation after his marriage, but the engagement gave a certain glamour to his employment.
When next he visited the village, Lise heard, he was wearing a smart new cape and hat, and looked very fine with Elizabeth Mundrey on his arm. People who would have shunned him less than six months before were now obliged to stop and converse at length with the betrothed couple, although a spiteful few said that no amount of wealth and fine clothes could make a pretty girl of Elizabeth and even her fiancé seemed irritated by her constant prattle.
Lise heard nothing more of Holden or the Mundreys for several months after that visit, and as none of the locals were invited to the nuptials, she had to wait to hear about the wedding that had been so highly anticipated.
During this presumably happy time for the Mundreys, Hessell House was undergoing an upheaval. Jonathan Benedict, who’d been overseeing Charles’ properties for the past several years, suddenly claimed an illness in the family and went off abruptly to London, not to be heard from again. With him went nearly two years’ income from Charles’ holdings.
The financial blow was significant but even worse was the effect on her husband’s demeanour. He became testy and withdrawn. He rarely ever spoke to her without her first addressing him, and all of his spare time was spent in his former overseer’s office, lending his rather dull intellect to the laborious task of reconstructing the past few years’ documents.
Finally, one day over supper, he seemed a tad brighter.
“Have some more beefsteak,” Lise urged him, gesturing for another slice to be put on his plate. He’d lost a little weight in the past month and had eaten hardly any more than she at mealtimes. It was good to see him chewing heartily and ingesting more than his wine. “Did you have a good day today, dear? Did you at last make some headway into the papers?”
Charles shook his head. “No. My muddy brain will never comprehend those large sums. But I have arranged for someone else to take a look at them.”
“Who, dear?”
Overseers were generally in demand and honest ones, as they had so recently seen, were difficult to get and keep.
“Pomfort’s old manager,” Charles promptly replied, making Lise blink in surprise. “Been with the old boy nearly a year and did a good job, by all accounts, but the man got into some personal entanglement with one of the daughters, he told me confidentially, so Pomfort’s happy to see the back of him.”
“Is that so?” Lise managed to choke out. “How fortunate.”
And how equally fortuitous that Charles was so removed from the village gossip that he didn’t know the man Lord Mundrey was sending was the selfsame enemy he’d told Lise never to speak to!
For a moment, she was distracted by a dozen silly questions—what had happened to his engagement? How did Elizabeth Mundrey take the apparent defection?
Then she grasped the full meaning of Pomfort’s offer. Luke Holden would be coming back here, to Hessell House.
She wondered if Holden had wrangled for the transfer. When they’d spoken of his childhood at Hessell House, a certain light had entered his quick blue eyes that made her think he might have seen his chance of returning home and taken it.
Oh, wouldn’t Charles be astounded!
* * * *
For two days, while they awaited the arrival of the new overseer, the house was contented, if not happy.
On the day he was expected, Lise kept a close watch on the front drive, but her patience was rewarded only with passing glimpses of Jameson, who was stepping out with the parlour maid and seemed to be hoping to make a match of it.
Not that Lise missed t
heir games. Ever since Charles had joined them that day, she’d wanted something more from her sexual encounters, but sex with Charles continued to be a once monthly event with little variety or excitement, and she was back to being rammed by the occasional sturdy stable hand in between times.
After her midday meal—Charles took a tray in the office, which he was still trying to organise for the new man—she took up her vigil once again.
She almost cried out with pleasure when the carriage drew up to the front of the house and the familiar figure approached the doors. Her insides clenched with her sudden, unexpected, reaction.
Gone was the slight limp, and the light brown hair was burnished almost to fairness in the straggling English sunlight. There was nothing pretty about him, like Jameson, and certainly no overbred delicacy, as with Charles. He was simply a healthy specimen of the male race, built to conquer and command.
That a man such as he should be reduced to servitude…well, such was the nature of the world.
Lise sprang up from her window and out of her bedchamber but before she could descend the main staircase, she heard raised voices coming from below. Or rather, Charles’ raised voice. Luke Holden didn’t bother to lift his.
“I asked you,” Charles shouted, “what are you doing here?”
Lise crept down the stairs so that she could hear better.
“You invited me,” came Holden’s low drawl.
“I never did!”
“Certainly, you did.” Lise saw the man extract a folded paper from his pocket. “Here is the letter from my former employer, Lord Mundrey. He asked me to seek employment here, with you. He told me that it was already arranged between yourselves.”
Lise could see the hot colour flooding Charles’ face as he perused the letter.
“How did you fix it?” he asked angrily of Holden, the letter still clenched in his hand. “How did you manage to find your way here again?”
Holden was calm and unruffled, clearly the master of the situation. “Simply by doing my job and performing it well. Sir. You have the good baron’s recommendation in your hand. I was employed by him for the better part of a year.”
The two men stared at each other. Holden had the advantage of height but Charles was the lord and master of Hessell House. He could easily turn Holden out the door.
Lise held her breath, wondering who would flinch first.
It was Charles who finally turned away, defeat in his very stance. “I need someone good,” he said. “My former overseer robbed me blind. I can’t even find him now, although I’ve made numerous enquiries… But that’s not your problem.”
“No. Sir.”
Again, that slight pause between the words and the title, which Lise knew must be deliberate. How galling it must be for Charles to stand there and take Holden’s concealed mockery. His very look seemed to scorn Charles’ weakness and his lengthy victimisation at the hands of his former servant.
“Get it straight,” Charles spoke harshly. “You are a servant here. This is no longer your home. Once this business that Benedict left behind is cleared out, you will seek another situation elsewhere. If you do a good job, I will even give you a recommendation, forgetting everything else that has gone between us.”
Lise could see the flash in Luke Holden’s Celtic blue eyes.
“Everything else, sir?”
Charles stepped forward, closing the distance between them until they were nose to nose. His lips barely moved as he spoke and Lise strained every muscle to hear him.
“I have a wife now,” her husband said. “If you tamper with that—”
“I have no intention of doing so,” Holden broke in, unforgivably for a servant. “Alexandra was a different state of affairs altogether. She was not for you.”
Charles sputtered. It took him a few seconds to find his voice again.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because she liked creating strife,” Holden answered coolly. “She wasn’t fit for the arrangement we proposed, though she appeared to agree to it at the beginning. In truth, she saw only a further opportunity to sow discord.”
Charles turned away angrily. “You know nothing of it! And you know nothing of Lise—”
“She seems a fine woman,” Holden said, a brief smile tilting his mouth. “Well suited to you. And you to her. And perhaps an—”
“Shut up!” Charles was nearly screaming now and even Holden’s bland features showed signs of strain. “I was a fool to ever listen to you, to ever believe that such an arrangement would ever work.”
“With your lady wife, perhaps—”
“Leave Lise alone,” said Charles, “or else you will be out on your arse. Again.”
* * * *
In the following days, Lise had every chance to observe Holden’s arse, as well as the rest of him. She was pleased with what she saw. And though Charles had been harsh on that very first day Holden had arrived, he soon offered tentative words of approval on the work he was doing, though never in Holden’s hearing.
As for Holden himself, although he didn’t take his meals with the family, Lise saw him frequently in the hallway as he went back and forth from his room in the servants’ floor to the office on the main floor. His quick smile greeted her every time, to which he added a polite bow and often a few words on the weather, but what passed unspoken between them left Lise breathless. His hot glance seemed to tear the clothes from her body and every time she encountered him, her nipples hardened a welcome, which his quick eyes didn’t fail to note.
But it wasn’t enough to see him for a few minutes at a time or to think about him at night when she let her fingers ply her aching sex beneath the cold bedcovers. Often now she remembered the sketches she had found and her fantasy placed her face in the place of the woman’s and Charles and Holden’s for the men’s.
What was the arrangement they had had—or failed to have—with this mysterious Alexandra? Lise had never heard of a lady by that name, but she pressed Prudence to delve into her memory and was finally rewarded with a feat of reminiscence one afternoon when her friend came over to take tea.
“Do you mean Lady Lexa Arrington, of Underwood? I believe her name was really Alexandra, although no one I knew ever called her that.”
“It must be she,” Lise said eagerly. “Alexandra is not the most common name.”
Prudence screwed up her plain face as she tried to tax her brain. “Yes, I do seem to remember that Lexa was linked to Charles for a while, although I believe they were simply friends. But then she committed some sin for which she was sent to live in Italy with her spinster aunts. No one knew what the sin was.”
Lise suspected she might know—and it might have something to do with Luke Holden.
She liked creating strife. Those were Holden’s words. But why would that matter to Charles’ stepbrother, if Charles was the one who was going to marry the lady?
“What is it like having him under your roof?”
Lise brought herself back to the conversation with an effort. “What? Who? Charles?”
Prudence laughed immoderately. “No, silly. I meant Holden.” She lowered her voice. “Elizabeth Mundrey was very sad to lose him, I’ve heard.”
“Is that so?”
Lise tried and failed to put herself in Elizabeth Mundrey’s shoes. What a pity it must be to be unattractive like the Mundrey sisters—or dear Prudence. Of course, one had to pretend to be content with good works and village gossip, but how such women must hunger inside for the feeling of a randy man, for the strength and forcefulness of a virile male creature. Or did they not even know what they were missing?
Tossing her fair curls, Lise licked her pouting lips and smiled at her guest.
“Do tell, Pru.”
Prudence’s voice went even lower, until it was a bare whisper. “Elizabeth told every friend she had how wonderful Holden was in bed and they in turn spread it about the entire country. Now every immoral female in the vicinity wants to know him…carnally.
Isn’t it awful? And poor Elizabeth! Now everyone knows what a slut she is. She will never marry now, poor thing.”
But Prudence’s thin face gave a lie to her sympathetic words as she flushed with pleasure all throughout her thick covering of freckles.
“What went wrong, I wonder,” Lise said, almost to herself.
She didn’t expect her friend to give her an answer but Prudence rose to the occasion.
“Elizabeth’s friends—or her supposed friends, I should say—have it that she couldn’t match Holden’s appetites. Perhaps his tastes are…unusual.”
A short silence followed as Lise allowed her imagination to dwell lovingly on the possibilities.
Lise knew that when men were referred to as ‘unusual’, it often meant they practised sodomy to the exclusion of coitus. Many in polite society accepted that one gender may wish to dally with members of their own sex, but to do so exclusively risked giving rise to the taint of homosexuality, which no gentleman dared to practise in the open.
For her, however, the thought of two men together gave her a hearty thrill.
Lise remembered the looks Holden had given her over this self-same table. She knew he was attracted to women. But was he also attracted to men?
Suddenly, the pieces fell together. The childhood distance between Holden and Charles, followed by the sudden friendship that had developed as they’d reached adulthood and sexual maturity, then the ultimate rupture, like one might find between any pair of lovers.
She was certain now. Charles and Luke had been lovers. Did they still love one another? Was there any hope?
Chapter Five
Love for her husband swelled by the day as he grew accustomed to his new servant and Lise also found herself contemplating how admirable the qualities displayed by Luke Holden were, so much so that she felt as if her loyalties were nearly divided. Of course, she owed fealty to Charles but Luke garnered her respect and sympathy. The man was obviously troubled by the distance between he and his master, though he swiftly concealed every frown or worry line with his usual bright smile.