Lilac

by Louisa Trent

  “But, sir, Tim said a lady inside is in need of care.”

  “Yes.”

  “What lady might this be?” she asked in a huff, her hands braced on her hips. “I answered the door to no lady. There was a whore who came a-knocking, and that is all, to my recollection, who came to the door this evening. Not that I saw her face, mind you. I had misplaced my spectacles, you see and—”

  He interrupted her small talk. “I let her in.”

  “You, sir? Why would you let her in?”

  “You were otherwise occupied, I was standing idly in the hall, rain was pouring down, a pounding came at the door, and so I let her in. The lady, that is. Is that all right with you?”

  “No need to snap, sir. But this is all very vexing. I should not like you to think I have neglected my duties.”

  “I do not. Not at all. I realize how busy you are. You are an extremely busy and industrious woman. I feel very badly about that, indeed. And so, to lighten your load, and after due consideration, I have decided to take charge of her, the lady, myself.”

  Mrs. Birch clucked her tongue. “But her reputation, sir. Be she a decent girl, her name will be in tatters. She must live nearby, just wandered in to escape the weather.”

  “Exactly! Now, the bathing items, if you please, Mrs. Birch.”

  “Sir, I shall have a message sent round to the neighbors directly. What is her name?”

  “We were never formerly introduced.” That admitted, he closed the door against the housekeeper’s gaze, magnified to an owl’s stare behind the thick glass of her spectacles.

  Chapter Nine

  Sean sat at his post, beside the sickbed, his gaze never wavering very far from the patient still fast asleep beneath the covers. The doctor had come and gone hours earlier, after pronouncing Tegan Ellis sound but suffering from a mild nervous exhaustion.

  One look at Sean, and the good physician had diagnosed him the same.

  Little wonder he looked haggard and worried, Sean conceded in irritation, having passed a fretful and sleepless night. And he had good cause for his concern. Virgins were a foreign land to him.

  Though he could not help but feel that the virginal Miss Ellis had been the exception to every rule. She had been totally guileless in her abandonment to sexuality. Her carnal enthusiasm had filled him with pride.

  And pissed him off soundly.

  He had so many questions about her. Such as, would she have reacted with the same abandoned sexuality with any man or only with him? Why had she given herself to him? Why had she not saved her maidenhead for marriage? Why she had not used her innocence as barter for a wedding band? And, if it was so, that only he could have brought out the sexual nymph in her, was that because she wanted something from him, specifically?

  She did want something from him, specifically. The contents of her reticule told him so. He had rifled through her bag, read every paper and document within, and was aghast to discover he agreed with nearly all her father’s findings.

  Something had to be done about Central Mine. Or rather, he had to do something about Central Mine. Regardless that he never wanted anything to do with mining and knew nothing about it, he owned the damn property, and so the responsibility to make improvements fell to him.

  He had sent off a letter to his new mine supervisor, Willard Owen, informing him of the changes to implement immediately. Sean would mull over a correct course of action for the rest of the changes…

  After speaking to Miss Ellis.

  Despite her youth, she appeared to be an authority on the subject. Of course, if one listened to her, she was an authority on every subject under the sun.

  Sean’s patient stirred, and her soft brown eyes opened. She asked straightaway, “Where am I?”

  “Griffith House.”

  He waited for fury over her thwarted suicide attempt. Surely, she had been of a mind to kill herself. Otherwise, why leave his safe and dry bed to go out into the raging rain? He had taken her virginity, and in her overblown sense of honor, she had decided to end her life. There was no other way to look at her departure, no other explanation.

  But her digestion of the information was surprisingly calm.

  Too calm.

  The calm before the storm.

  “I see.” She nodded. “Griffith House. Well, what day is it, pray, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

  Lack of use had roughened her voice. The new throaty timbre had him shifting on his bedside chair. “You slept two days through.” His discomfort grew when she pushed a stray lock of black hair from her rounded forehead and her pointed breasts lifted, the sharp points lifting to the ceiling.

  Sean made a discreet adjustment to his frock coat, a brush of nonexistent lint from the black wool, then needlessly patted his Windsor tie, already eminently straight over his white shirt and gray checkered waistcoat, both moves done to disguise his very real reaction to her.

  Hell. Just awakened, not even trying, and still she provoked him.

  Intolerable, how damnably close he came to losing her.

  “Who nursed me during my illness?” She avoided meeting his eyes.

  “I tended you.”

  She gasped. “From…from the beginning?”

  He wiggled his brows. “Concerned over your reputation?”

  “Oh. My reputation,” she said listlessly. “I had quite forgotten.”

  “If you are worried about word of your lack of suitable chaperone getting out, have no fear. I pay all my domestics well not to talk. Under penalty of dismissal, the staff guards my privacy. They will guard yours as well.”

  She sighed. “Unnecessary. Mrs. Birch misplaced her spectacles when first we met. She could not have identified me again. And assuming me to be a prostitute, she never asked over my name.”

  “Her glasses have since been found. As to the rest…I apologize. Mrs. Birch misconstrued your visit here.”

  Her chin fell. “As to the reason behind my visit—”

  “No need for any of that now.” He folded his hands around a crossed knee. “How is your breathing? Any congestion?”

  “Psshaw.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Only this—I have some familiarity with lung disease. Unlike the miners in your employ, my respiration is fine.”

  A pointed remark. And one that partially revealed her identity. She was coming clean with him.

  As she no longer dissembled, neither would he. “After your collapse, I am remarkably gladdened to hear of your continued good health, Miss Ellis.”

  While caring for her, he made a habit of propping her head on the mounded pillows to facilitate her breathing. Such things concerned him. A the mention of her name, the one she had never given him, her beautiful jaw tensed and she bolted upright in the bed. Her posture rod-stiff, she yanked the bed linen high to cover the rounded curves of her breasts, the peaked nipples of which the lawn of the nightgown had not managed to obscure.

  For a young girl, she had magnificent breasts, which her graceful carriage emphasized. He knew from tending her that her nipples were rosy and soft when not aroused. Tender young nipples. But with a touch, as when he basin-bathed her each night, the tips of her breasts would awaken, as she refused to do, and elongate. He wanted to suckle their lush contours, bite the pronounced nipples, taste her all over…

  Her brown eyes blazed. “You know my name, sir.”

  Her accusation interrupted his lustful train of thought, and it took him a few seconds to reorient their direction. “Yes. From the beginning.” He had all to do not to shout out her name during his orgasm.

  She had not climaxed. Not during their limited foreplay, not when he moved inside her. She had come close, though. But close was not good enough. He meant to rectify their one-sided joining, to make it right. Pleasure was the way to do that.

  He had a selfish motivation. Satisfying his bed partners reflected on his abilities as a lover. Their release always came first with him. This included the prostitutes who comprised the total
ity of his bedroom companions since Millie. He now paid to fuck, as he paid for every other pastime in which he routinely engaged.

  Miss Ellis’s sexual satiation should not prove too much of a challenge. The little innocent miss had climaxed while masturbating, an event from all appearances that had taken her by surprise.

  There could be no mistake about it. Tegan had never fingered her pussy before, had never before experienced herself as a sexual being.

  Her achieving climax during intercourse became his challenge. He demanded to hear the sounds of her orgasm, her heated cries, her screams, her sobs of fulfillment ringing in his ears when he was inside her.

  He knew she would not disappoint. She had all the makings of a delicious piece of ass. Under his patient tutelage, she would emerge from her cocoon of unawareness as a seductive butterfly. He looked forward to her transformation. It had been a while, years, in fact, since he had looked forward to something so much.

  “How did you discover my name, sir?”

  Her question interrupted his reverie. “Through Willard Owen. He reported your father’s reform work to me. And yours.”

  She plucked at the coverlet. “My, but this is awkward.”

  “Your death would have been more so,” he bellowed as his anger flew out of bounds. He had been worried for her, sick with worry, more afraid than he had ever been in his life, and that fueled his temper, a temper he never lost, not since his checkered youth. He had kept a cool head in the ring and now kept a cool head in business negotiations. But this damn well was not business. Nor had he ever felt this unglued in the ring. No negotiation, no prize money, had ever been worth as much to him as straightening this out with her.

  He pointed a trembling finger at her nose. “You should not have run from me.”

  She wagged a finger right back at him, her breasts bouncing with her vehemence. “Do not turn this back onto me, sir. I am the one with the grievance here.” She literally bounced on the mattress.

  Her inability to hold still was a testament to her passionate nature, a marked contrast to his own reserved tendencies. He could remain quiet for hours without as much as a hair on his head stirring. His prizefighter’s training, he supposed.

  Her arm heaved a wild arc that encompassed the width of the room. “You, sir, just admitted to being in cahoots with your newly appointed mining supervisor. You spied on me.” Her gaze searched the chamber. “Where are my clothes?”

  He pointed to where he had laid them over a chair. “There.”

  “My underthings?”

  “You only had on drawers.”

  “Yes, I realize that,” she said curtly. “Where are they?”

  “I burned them.” He dropped his gaze. “They were speckled with your virgin’s blood. I thought the reminder would upset you. And I could not very well have the laundress wash them. That would have violated your privacy. I will buy you new ones. New everything. Only concentrate on regaining your health.”

  In a great melodramatic huff, she fell back against the pillows. “All is lost,” she said, her voice forlorn.

  Christ but she was young, no more than a baby. He had fucked a petulant child. “I know you must be disappointed by everything that has happened.” She had not come. His fault, she had derived no pleasure from the physical act. At his hands, she had lost her virginity with only pain to show for it.

  “Yes, I am disappointed, sir. More than you will ever know.”

  And there it was—a damning condemnation of his skills as a lover.

  Her eyes slanted away, then came back to him. “Were you disappointed in me, sir? Is that why you ask?”

  “No, not at all.” She had been the most innocent, and at the same time, the hottest piece of tail he had ever had. But at his age and sexual experience, he should have been able to withstand her untutored charms.

  This was all his fault. He must make amends for all that had transpired. She was only a little girl, but a year removed from wearing short dresses, alone in the world, and he had ruined her.

  Marriage was the only way to fix the situation. There was no other honorable alternative for either of them. And another thing, although he had withdrawn, no contraceptive method was without error. She might very well be carrying his child.

  He would have to offer for her. As soon as she was feeling more herself, he would broach the subject.

  About time he wed, anyway. About time he thought about starting a family. This might all work out for the best. He was not opposed at all to settling down.

  With her.

  Bemused at his sudden matrimonial turnaround, he smiled at her. She was a pretty little thing and with a surprisingly adventurous carnal streak, a sexual openness uncommon in a miss from a small and conservative part of the country. The only child of old-school Welsh immigrants, she should have been narrow of mind and parochial in thought; instead, she showed a worldly point of view and a quest for knowledge. Then again, her father had been a keenly intelligent man, fearless in his beliefs. From Sean’s understanding, the mother had been caring and loyal and more than able to keep up with her husband’s intellectualism and moral courage. Tegan was from good, solid stock. Their children would be the same.

  The daughter was much like her parents. Her active brain, her thirst for knowledge, her ability to defend her side in a debate, kept him on his toes. Like a scrappy prizefighter, she left the safety of her corner and went to the center of the ring. Not satisfied with merely maintaining a defensive posturing that would allow her to stay on her feet, she went on the offensive, dancing and jabbing and sparring with her opponent.

  That was his style too. If you aim to fight, then fight, dammit, no holds barred. Just get in there and do what you set out to do, as long as you have a code and stick to it.

  He suspected her formal education was limited and she was primarily self-taught. No looking down his nose there; he was the same. Barely able to read and write as a boy, he had been educating himself ever since leaving the ring. Not only book learning but culture too. And etiquette.

  Polish was everything in business. Never again did he want to hear himself referred to as that “ignorant mick, good for breaking skulls in a fight and dandy at a boudoir fuck and not much else.” He had risen above his humble beginnings and kept his ethics intact.

  Looked to him like maybe Tegan Ellis had done that as well. Mining reform was important to her, and she would see those reforms enacted, without crossing any ethical lines. He admired her tenacity, her grit…her integrity.

  All told, he could do worse in a wife. As a bonus, she made him hard without even trying. She made him hard when he would just as soon she did not.

  Before fucking her again, he would marry her. Make everything legal. He would never love another, not after Millie, but as long as he respected her, he could come to care for Tegan. And she was yet young enough to be trained. Like a pretty puppy, he would manage her, he would discipline her, he would turn her into the kind of wife who would do him proud. And in her gratitude to him for making an honest woman out of her, Tegan would wag her tail in adoration any time he approached.

  She drew herself up against the pillows. “I have in my reticule research that will show without a doubt that Central Mine is in violation of human decency and dignity.”

  This was where he opened his mouth and told her he already knew. When she asked how, he would reveal the damning information that he had violated her privacy by going through her bag while she slept. And while he was at it, he might as well then confess that he had watched her masturbate through a peep in the servant’s room. After that, would she even bother to listen to the changes he intended to make to the mines? Or would she rather get up on her high horse and leave, which was tantamount to trying to commit fucking suicide again?

  Young and willful, she would leave.

  Older and vulnerable to her childish caprice, he would do what he must to ensure she stayed, for he would not countenance having her death on his conscience.

  “G
o on,” he said quietly. He would wait until she showed all her hand before saying anything.

  “I can go to the newspapers with this information…”

  “Do that, and you and I both know that the editor will laugh you out of his office. No newspaper anywhere would write a story about my negligence—”

  “So, you do admit to negligence—”

  “I admit the mines are my responsibility. But I am only one mine owner of many who run their operations in a similar manner. There is no story here, Miss Ellis. Not one worthy of newsprint, anyway. The only story worth printing would be if I closed down the mines after the miners went out on strike.”

  “Why would they strike?”

  “Do not play the naive ingenue here. You have all the makings of a rabble-rouser.”

  “I do not! And even if I had an orator’s gift of persuasion, I am but a powerless woman. No one even notices me, never mind listens to me.”

  “I noticed you well enough. I listened to you when you said you were knowledgeable, when you said you were experienced.”

  “You heard what you wanted to hear, sir.”

  “Exactly my point! Through secondary influence, you have the ability to inspire common folk.”

  “I am common folk.”

  “As am I, and so I know that you could find a man of the people to dupe into doing your work. Dangle your body as a prize and that duped man would back you. From any church pulpit or public hall or town center stoop, that man you manipulated could fire the miners up with indignation until, wholly agitated, they walked off the job. While they took to the streets carrying placards, mining operations would shut down. That would make one hell of a sensational story. One of the many industry strikes this decade has seen. But do you want that to happen? Do you want all those men to lose their wages? How will losing profit help the mines or the miners? If that is what you intend to hold over my head, your trip here was a waste of time. I will not weaken. Giving into threats of provoked agitation will hurt everyone in the end.”