Lilac

by Louisa Trent

  In a swirl of faded black skirts, she danced off for the banquet table.

  He swiveled in his chair, never once leaving go of her in his sights.

  She returned with an enormous cluster of grapes and retook her seat. After peeling a plump one in her napkin, she held the perfect berry up for his inspection.

  “Shall we share, sir?”

  The little schemer had something in mind. What?

  What it is you want from me, Tegan Ellis!

  When she popped the very tip of her offering between her teeth and leaned toward him, helpless to resist her, he pitched forward.

  Their lips met midfruit.

  Chapter Six

  Closing her eyes, Tegan melted into Mr. Griffith’s broad chest.

  Since first learning to read, she had lived vicariously through the journeys of fictionalized characters, searching for the book’s revealed truth. And now, after tasting the fruit of forbidden knowledge—a grape in this instance, not an apple, though the same metaphor applied—she hungered to fill in all those other missing passages books never explained.

  In that spirit of discovery, she prodded his tight lips with her tongue until he opened to her and her tongue darted inside.

  Hmm.

  Pressing against him, her mouth slanted to better absorb his mouth, she savored each and every nuance of the kiss.

  Funny, no romance novels ever described a kiss as fruity. Brandy-flavored, yes. Coffee too. She read quite a few with both those descriptions. Never once did a book mention grape. A pity, really, as grape made for an eminently satisfying kiss.

  Increasing the pressure of her lips on his, she entwined his tongue with her tongue and moved in closer.

  More! Give me more. More. More.

  She strained against him, her nearly naked bosom smashed to his chest, her sensitive nipples rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, her thoughts intent on the delicious, almost hurtful sensation.

  He broke them apart. Large hands cupped her face, big thumbs swishing back and forth. An unblinking stare held her eyes. “We must stop.”

  “Of course. Eventually. All good things must end. Bad things too. That is the nature of change. A-a-another peeled grape, perhaps, first? It will take but a trice…”

  He removed the bunch from her clutching fingers and set the smashed fruit on the floor. “No more grapes until after we talk.”

  Perhaps he could conduct a reasonable conversation, but she was beyond reason.

  More! Give me more. More. More.

  Of what precisely?

  Well, kissing, for one.

  She sighed to herself. My first kiss…wondrous!

  A dreamy thought before recalling her commitment.

  Blackmail. Extortion. Making the robber baron pay.

  A worm had just wiggled into her sweet-tasting grape.

  She had thought merely to endure any kisses stolen from her at the orgy. Her cause justified loose behavior, she had thought, and so she would sacrifice herself to her good cause. But a languid heat had stolen over her at that first touch of their lips, and all thoughts of enduring and sacrifice and good causes fell by the wayside. There was so much to know concerning man/woman interactions. Her curiosity was limitless. Her curiosity demanded she learn more. Indeed, everything.

  For no reason at all, her thoughts flew to the mural, to those writhing, sweaty, naked, entangled arms and legs.

  Good heavens! What a complete dolt she was at times. That wall painting was no ode to Olympic wrestling. And regardless of an overabundance of grapes on the banquet table, insufficient participants in the dining room meant this was no orgy. There went her blackmail plan…

  But wait. No need to throw out a perfect grape with a spoiled bunch. She would simply alter her plan as she had altered her gown. From participating in an orgy to…to…

  Her ruination.

  In her most lurid—and favorite—dime novel romances, gentlemen were forever ravishing ladies. Ravishment would provide ample ammunition for extortion. Now to convince him to do it, to ravish her.

  Giving him not a moment to protest, Tegan sealed her open mouth to Mr. Griffith’s open mouth again, curling her tongue against his again, tasting the grape’s succulence again, only with her commitment uppermost in her thoughts this time around.

  He groaned.

  Oh, dear. Had he somehow managed to inflict hurt on himself while having his wicked way with her?

  And if he had, why should she care?

  He was the robber baron, and she was the innocent victim of his callous disinterest. Because of him, she was losing the only home she had ever known. Let him suffer as his miners suffered, as she was about to suffer. A muscular ruffian like him could take a little discomfort.

  Let him groan.

  Winding her arms about his neck, in a bit of a chokehold, she drove her tongue to the back of his throat. After a time, he began to make guttural sounds. As though breathing had become difficult for him, he gasped for air.

  If living in a coal town had taught her one thing, it was shallow respiration. She could go for minutes, indeed her whole life, without drawing a single deep breath. Evidently, he was not similarly inclined.

  Still and all, so as not to suffocate him—what good would he be to her then?—she generously allowed him to fill his lungs, which was more than his negligent mining practices allowed his workers to do.

  Miners brought caged singing canaries down into the pit with them as a means to gauge air quality. A suddenly ended birdsong signaled a ventilation problem in the shaft. Gasping for air, the men would drop their picks and shovels and race for the surface. Some never made it aboveground.

  Mining towns were unsafe places. Accidents maimed, left fathers and husbands too disabled to provide. A miner’s death tore whole families apart. Surviving relatives went homeless. She would go homeless too, starting next week.

  By all rights, principles and philosophies, she should utterly despise Sean Griffith. And she did. Truly, she did. Deep down inside her, she loathed the robber baron. But owing to a higher purpose, she would put her own personal feelings aside and do what she must do for the common good. Blackmail would achieve that end. But first, since there was to be no orgy, he had to ravish her.

  She lunged for him. Rained kisses on his face. Dear heavens, she licked his face, a flick across his tanned skin, capturing his salty essence on her tongue.

  He was amoral. Despicable. But if convincing him to ravish her called for loose behavior, she would clench her teeth and comply. For the higher good, she let societal restraints fall away. For the first time in her life, she let freedom reign.

  Upon taking a seat, like all gentlemen did, even a quasi-one like Sean Griffith, he had opened his double-breasted frock coat. The cravat, tucked inside his waistcoat, interfered with her reigning freedom.

  The cravat had to go. It was for the common good.

  She flicked at the meticulously tied knot. When it refused to budge, she gave the longest end a swift pull. The diamond stud stickpin loosened, and the knotted cravat came undone in her hands. She looked at the length for quite some time, utterly mesmerized, before wrapping it about her wrist, round and round. So silky there, so cool, so seductive against her naked flesh.

  An idea took root. What if he tied her up?

  Immobilizing her, say to this very chair, while he ravished her would certainly provide her with sufficient ammunition for blackmail.

  At the thought, a hot pulse of something skittered from the ends of her breasts and lodged itself between her thighs, tingling there in her secret place. The tingle started to gnaw, and she went damp, damp enough to moisten her drawers.

  He eyed the cravat encircling her hand and then narrowed his eyes on her, as if he could read her mind. “Have a yen for bondage, do you?”

  Is that what being tied up was called…bondage?

  If so…

  “Certainly, I have a yen for bondage,” she snapped, like a tightly strung rope.

  A lie. One of the many
she had told since her arrival. In truth, she had no yen at all to be tied up. Absolutely, positively, no yen to be bound to this very chair so she could no more move than she could fly and she would be at his full and complete disposal. And he could kiss her till the cows came home. And possibly after. It was only that, for the sake of her just cause, she must allow him to do certain things to her, to take certain liberties, which he would be able to do if she could not resist his advances. And where would the blame be then for her after he rendered her powerless?

  “No bondage,” he rasped. “Not now.”

  Oh—

  Whoosh. The excitement seeped out of her, and disappointment set in. Well, certainly, if bondage was not what he had in mind, so be it.

  But when he grunted out, “Now, we talk,” the tips of her breast went to stabbing points at the terse authority in his voice.

  No one had ever spoken to her in that tone before. She hardly knew what to make of it, or her amazingly intense reaction to it.

  The slinky silk slid through her fingers and slithered to the floor. It coiled there like a hissing snake. A cobra, perhaps. Or one of the other exotic reptiles of Africa or Asia that she enjoyed reading about in natural history books. Upon coming across a snake in the garden, all her friends would let out the most bloodcurdling screams. Not she. It was not that she liked snakes, either; only that, because she found them interesting, she had no fear of them. In fact, they drew her in some darkly mysterious way.

  Sean Griffith drew her in much the same darkly mysterious way.

  Unable to bear the aching pulse between her thighs, she wrenched open his shirt and waistcoat, buttons popping, and kissed his throat. Next, she tweaked his nipple and discovered his male flesh grew turgid just as her female flesh was wont to do. Interesting.

  She ran her fingertips all over his chest, which was smooth with a sculpted hardness, a look she appreciated, esthetically speaking.

  Hmm.

  Even allowing for his stripping down to his trousers in the summer to catch the warmth of the sun on his skin, he appeared to be tanned all over, even beneath the gaping waistband of his trousers. Which meant, outside, he must go about…

  She would not think about how he must go about outside. Rather, she would reflect on the paleness of her hand juxtaposed against his much darker flesh.

  Oh dear. Another shiver of something scuttled from the sharp tips of her breasts to the secret place ladies never admitted to owning, and gentlemen, of course, knew nothing about.

  The tingling there increased. The gnawing too. Whatever the something was, it clutched at her there. Damp and moist turned slick and wet.

  Quite overwhelmed, she attacked.

  He seemed not at all taken aback. Had he expected the assault?

  Perhaps, the shiver had given her intent away. At any rate, he offered no comment, made no move of self-defense. Taking her groping in stride, he sat perfectly still and let her do as she wished. Only his Adam’s Apple jiggled up and down, only a pulse in his temple beat, as she scraped her teeth across his cleanly shaven jaw, leaving behind a highly gratifying discolored mark, and let him have his wicked way with her.

  While pulling at his earlobe with her teeth, she happened to note the top of his head. His black hair held a blue sheen and a trace of a curl, but none of the slick oiliness she had come to associate with male grooming. Nevertheless, his coiffure—if one could call his short, no-nonsense style a coiffure—was neatly organized. A mad impulse to disorder the tidy style rose to the top of her consciousness.

  Without a thought for his opinion, she gave into the impulse and combed her hands, both of them, through the thickness. No greasy hair oil met her roving fingertips. No pomade offended her nose with its cloying wax and honey fragrance. Inhaling his natural outdoorsy scent, she mussed the bouncy strands and then proceeded to crush them.

  She sucked on her bottom lip as an idea—actually a compulsion—came over her to wrap her legs around his waist.

  Her compulsion was not without impediments. She had taken a seat on one chair, he the other. But after journeying all the way from Pittsburgh to New York, a matter of hundreds of miles, she was not about to let a distance of a few inches stand in her way.

  Hitching up her skirts, she leaped the narrow divide that separated them.

  “Careful,” he said and caught her, both hands lightly holding her around the waist.

  Heavens! If not for his quick thinking, she might have landed in an embarrassing heap on the floor.

  Liar. Liar. Thighs on fire.

  Falling in a heap on the floor would not have embarrassed her. Nothing she did in his presence would embarrass her. Hinder her for a few seconds. Frustrate her beyond measure. But not embarrass her. After all, this ravishment was all for a good cause.

  In proof that she was above such petty concerns as how she might appear, when the bright purple—her favorite color—ribbons of her garters peeked out from beneath the hem of her drawers, she could not force herself to care. Mindless of everything but her worthy cause, she grasped him to her.

  Not close enough. Not nearly close enough.

  She tried to bring him closer and cried out as she tottered a bit. At least, she thought she cried out due to the tottering. The motivation was suspect.

  Before, when she had touched herself between the legs, she had also cried out after a particular sensation had knotted her lower belly. Upon its release, a hoarse cry had ripped from her throat. Was this thing she was feeling now the same thing as then?

  Big hands moved up and down her spine, a gentle kneading. “Are you all right?”

  “I shall be as soon as I reposition myself.” She rubbed her throbbing loins against his leg. “In ravishment, preliminaries are everything.”

  “Is that what you mean to do—ravish me?”

  Wherever had he gotten that idea? “Certainly not. The shoe is on the other foot here.” She kicked free of her slippers. Shimmying her hips, she tossed her legs, one on either side of his spread knees. “You are about to ravish me. Go on. Do your worst, sir.” She wiggled her bottom.

  Something—a hard bulge—rocked her balance. She had settled directly on top of it. During all her shifting, that hard bulge had grown to enormous proportions. Thinking to examine the curious length, she raised her hips, as if to go into a gallop on a thoroughbred, and reached—

  “Damnation,” he shouted. “No!”

  “No?” she parroted. He was telling her no?

  Something was amiss. In all her books, dog-eared in the parts leading up to the ravishment sections, objections always originated with the heroine, never the hero. She must have done something wrong. “W-w-what?”

  “There is no need to do that.”

  “There is every need,” she cried. “There is my need.” He had to ravish her; he had to!

  He considered her outburst. “Very well,” he said in an understated tone. “But do you understand the ramifications?”

  Of course not. How could she? Ravishment only ever proceeded to a certain point in a story before a new chapter began. No book ever written adequately explained the resultant time lapse. The bedchamber door closed, and that was that.

  Once, quite perturbed by the missing passage, she had asked the married ladies who attended the weekly tea and read at the Pittsburgh Free Library if they would please fill her in on the missing details. The ladies met her question with stony silence, which led her to conclude that ravishment could only be alluded to, both in novels and in book discussion groups.

  But she was not without cunning. Life imitating art, she fell to her knees at his feet, a pose similar to the maiden’s in the stained-glass window. Unlike the knight’s suit of armor, though, Sean Griffith’s cashmere trousers fit him snugly, molding his enviable physique with little room left over for the imagination…

  Oh. Dear. Lord.

  Enlightenment dawned. So that was what the maiden was up to in the stained-glass window! She had been kissing the knight’s male part.


  And why not? Why not indeed kiss him there?

  If it was permissible to bestow a kiss on a man’s lips during ravishment, it must also be permissible to bestow a kiss on him there. No part of the human anatomy was more kissable than other parts.

  Tegan drew a finger down Mr. Griffith’s admirable length. “Would I do this if I did not understand the ramifications?” She gazed up at him.

  He thumbed the side of his neck, where her enthusiastic kissing had left an angry-looking bruise on his flesh. “I believe I had the wrong impression of you.”

  “Indeed you did, sir. Now open the front of your trousers.”

  “Tut-tut. Is that all you have to say?”

  She thought for a moment. “Open the front of your trousers at once!”

  “Are manners to be forgotten here? Not even a please?”

  “Do as I say and I will please you well and good, sir.”

  His mouth curved up at the corners, he did as ordered.

  Splendid how she had inspired such confidence in him. Now if only she knew how to proceed. It did seem to her that in ravishment women did all the work. Then again, why would ravishment be different from anything else?

  When he released his trousers, his…his…his…

  This was ravishment. Surely, in ravishment a certain amount of…well…exactness was permitted.

  Penis.

  When he released his trousers, his penis sprang free.

  There. She said the word, not once, but twice, if only to herself.

  Never would she have guessed his enormity. Huge sprang to her thoughts as he came to life.

  What to do next?

  She had anticipated more cooperation from him, but evidently, ravishment was not a straightforward proposition. Neither was blackmail. How would she ever make this happen?

  Guided by instinct, she touched him gingerly. Delicately. Inquisitively. From silky-smooth crown to wiry nest. In her exploration, she attempted to encircle his girth with two digits, her fingertips barely meeting across the tremendous pulsing width.