by Baird Wells
Hannah claimed a brass shovel from the stand beside the fire and scooped in two heaping measures of coal from a matching scuttle. James wondered again that it was the first fire, the first light of any kind that he’d seen, since arriving, and chewed over Hannah’s having to tend it. “Are you alone?” he managed, stepping beyond the threshold and finding his voice.
“Everyone has been dismissed for the night. Winter holiday.” Her words were short, with distinct edges, and he wondered if she was upset. She came from the fire and slipped behind him; he followed her progress, watched her shut the door and twist the key in its lock.
Her headaches; it must be. He reached out a hand and pressed her sleeve. “You don’t need to lock the door for me to examine you, particularly if everyone has gone out.”
“I don’t need you to examine me,” she murmured. She reached for his hand, still on her arm, circling his wrist in imitation of his taking her pulses.
His breath caught at her touch. “I don’t understand.”
“No?” She was looking at him but he could only stare at her hand, held up between them while she stripped each finger from her glove until it was naked. She had beautiful nails, smooth and perfectly manicured ovals. He’d never noticed, but he appreciated them now, when they scraped up beneath his sleeve. Her bare fingers wrapped his wrist again.
His mouth went dry, too dry to swallow and dusty enough that he was afraid to try and clear it. He could only stare at some indistinct point on the wall behind her and ponder that as a doctor he had touched and been touched in return countless times, and that Hannah’s was different than all others.
She trespassed beneath his shirtsleeve to her third knuckle, well beyond the corded scar he’d earned from a careless slip during his residency, and, whether because he didn’t reciprocate or for some other reason, withdrew and turned away, taking up a place before one of the windows.
Sweat beaded at his temple, the bone-deep chill of their walk a distant memory. The room was so hot, from sun and tongues of flame greedily devouring the coal, that it parched his throat to tissue paper.
He understood now, but he didn’t quite believe.
He moved beside her at the window and stared out into a ghostly world beyond the Lyon lace, at shapes muted and unimportant. The curtain’s masque created a sort of amnesia, so that he forgot that there were things beyond Hannah’s room, and thought only of her. Clarity from that limitation pushed pieces into place with the speed of a steam ship: everyone dismissed for the night, the fire made up only in her bedchamber. However demure she had seemed, however uneasy, he had been the prey all along. His heart clenched, veins throbbing head to toe at the idea.
“Hannah,” he whispered, watching shapeless people pass by on the street below. Something struck the toe of his shoe, and he glanced down to find her other glove discarded on the rug in answer.
In the last breath before he fell from the precipice, James answered a question of his own. He looked one final time for any hint of Emily in Hannah’s face, not in hopes of finding, but as reassurance that he would not find any later, when it was too late. He squinted and saw only Hannah, playing the part of herself, and that blotted away just enough guilt that he drew a breath and fell from the edge.
With trembling fingers, he pinched the first blue, silk-covered button at her throat, eyes on her lips while he marveled at how they were firm at their borders but pillowy at their center, and wondered how that contrast would feel against his own. Then he thought better of his chosen starting point, and took her hand, towing her to a wide, cushioned bench at the foot of the bed.
She sat in a rustle of taffeta and underpinnings, a sound that rewarded his decision. Society might insist that a woman dress to eight layers, bound by steel and wire in order to keep her propriety in and his lust out, but he had never been entirely civilized by London’s code. Hannah swathed from head to toe provoked his desire in a way that he was certain polite society had laced and gathered right out of its male half decades before.
She stared up at him with those piercing blue eyes, and their heat when he dropped to his knees was equal to the fire at his back. She smiled.
Lust and curiosity; he was indulging both. He gripped a handful of her damp pleated hem and wondered if Hannah was as plain against her skin as she often was on the outside, with her black crepe over poplin and starched white cotton. He slipped up her skirts and ached from navel to knees at his answer.
Spats were a garment as utilitarian as boots or gloves, meant to cover from the top of the shoe to the top of the ankle for men and to the calf for women, and to do nothing more remarkable than to keep legs warm and dry. Sensible black and gray fabrics did the job to his satisfaction and to the satisfaction of countless people, but Hannah was not one of them. Rum pink velvet hugged her calves, top and bottom edges and high tongue embroidered in coral silk thread. Pink satin ribbon laced her spats up the front and knotted into bows that hung limp in surrender. He pinched one tail, snapped it, and the top edges fell open with an invitation. He traced them with his finger slowly, a map detailing just how long she’d planned this. He stole a glance at Hannah’s face. Her eyes were pressed shut and her shoulders swelled and fell like the roll of a tide.
He unlaced both spats and pushed them up her calves to reveal deceptively sensible black boots with long heels that hooked at him like beckoning fingers. Their fronts were little more than a series of long velvet tabs which wrapped her leg and created windows to reveal white silk stockings. Her boots might have been put on with a button loop, but they almost removed themselves now under nothing more sophisticated than his thumb’s determination.
Her foot twitched when he tugged the first boot free, and this time when he glanced up she was watching him, the full bow of her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. He had an urge to chuckle at her nervous study, but he was not the conqueror. She had subdued him in the hall, and now he could only do as he was silently bidden.
Her other boot he twisted, slipped off, and discarded with a thud over his shoulder. Her legwear was another matter, particularly when he had her attention. He cradled her ankles, drew his hands and raked the curve of her calves until he found the backs of her knees. She sucked a breath, flinched, and closed her eyes again under a desperate frown that was almost pain. Extending her leg, she pressed toes into the front of his thigh. Her stocking gripped the wool of his pants and her toes curled into his flesh. In the silent house, with only her soft panting, James heard little beyond a roar of blood in his ears. He hooked the spat’s cuff with two fingers and slid them inside, excited by the slip of quilted satin against his callouses. Both leggings crumpled, whispered over her stockings, and were discarded with an ease that Lucifer might have engineered.
“James.” His name left her lips with the resistance of smoke, more a sound than a fully formed word. She leaned away and caught her palms on the bench’s edge, a posture that influenced her breasts and undermined a good measure of his self-control.
Now he managed a chuckle and worked to his feet, shaking his head. “No.” He reached a hand down to her and drew her up with an ease that concealed his eagerness. When she relaxed her hand, he pressed her fingers harder and pulled her close until his lips were at her ear and a stray curl brushed his cheek. “Every layer, Hannah. Every stitch and tie and button. I’m not a man who leaves a thing half done.”
She sighed, and crumpled into his embrace.
It had been so long since he’d touched intimately, for pleasure alone. Touching Hannah now felt good to the point of pain, and started an eager tremor in his hands.
Her eyes hovering on his lips were a sensation, and this time when he claimed the first button on her bodice, his fingers were steady.
“I don’t –” Hannah shook her head and rested a cool palm to the back of his hand but made no move to stop him. Her face was turned away, rare shyness blushing her cheeks.
Understanding, he released her button in exchange for her waist and drew her to a spo
t beside the fire. In blue and gray, she was bold against the wall’s white paint, and he turned her away to face it. He cupped her elbows and lifted until she raised her arms and braced them against its clean face. Then he slipped his arms beneath hers, chest to her shoulders, and was prevented from more illicit contact by the fullness of her bustle. He embraced her and worked her buttons by feel, his temple pressed to the silky hair behind her ear. “This?” he whispered.
Hannah’s nod was one sharp jerk which could have been affirmation or rejection. He had only a breath to wonder and then her head rolled onto her left shoulder and granted him the pale curve of her neck. He rested his forehead against her bare skin and breathed deeply of her perfume as her bodice surrendered its last button. Musky amber and rich vanilla dizzied him, along with the hint of rosewater used to launder her smallclothes and petticoats. Hannah was expensive in the way of ornamental ladies, determined to be looked at and admired but not touched. But he was touching her, stripping her bodice down the willowy lines of her arms and fumbling ties at the back of her skirt. And she was allowing him in the most unladylike way, encouraging him with a gasp or flinch, a soft arch of her shoulders.
Her bodice fell discarded between them, and her skirt and petticoats crumpled in a defeated whisper at her feet. He froze.
There was an inherent madness in a society where women dressed underneath in such a fashion with the express purpose of its never being seen. Hannah’s drawers and chemise were ruffled with a quantity of ivory lace equal to her bed canopy. It hugged her shoulders and spilled over her hips to flirt with pink satin garters. But her corset…James bit his lip and struggled with where to put his hands.
He had seen his share of jumps and corsets in the course of his work, stained cotton or rough homemade linen, but nothing to tempt a man’s hand as Hannah’s did. There was an obscene juxtaposition between the luster of ivory silk and gold thread, and the rigid bands of boning that hugged the garment to her figure. A wide yardage of champagne lace shot through with ribbon banded her bust and accentuated its fullness and the width of her back against her narrow waist. Its bottom was edged by an inch of buttery crushed velvet that made him contemplate how it would feel beneath him, pressed against his naked stomach.
There was something fluid in the curves her corset enhanced, that drew his eyes down and back, while inside he caught fire and began to melt. At a loss, he nested his palms in the crisp ruffles at her hips and dragged them over a womanly flare to the hourglass of her waist, wrapping its width by thumbs and fingers. The only sounds were a gold ormolu mantle clock ticking out each breath, the fire popping and hissing in the grate, and Hannah’s eager breaths rushing out against the wall. She rested her forehead on her left hand, fingers pale-on-pale and splayed against the plaster. Her right hand slipped over his where it cradled her waist, twined with it and pressed it in a question.
“It’s only you and me,” he whispered onto the bare skin between her shoulders, meaning it in more ways the one. “We have time.” He slipped his left hand further around her waist and plucked the tie of her bustle, which folded with a mechanical protest and dropped. He kicked it away somewhere beyond the fireplace. With the last obstacle gone, James pressed the length of his body against Hannah’s, against her heat, and braced his arm beside hers on the wall, black wool beside white skin. He ached inside and out, lust and desire, self-denial and a gray tint of misery, which he pushed back to the edges and refused to explore.
He clutched her with his arm and pressed the heel of his hand up the lacy front of her thigh, and considered daring more. Not yet. Instead he found the thin silken rope of her corset and seduced it into untying with a few deft movements. One loop at a time, he tugged slack into the steel lines of her feminine appliance, heart slamming each time he dropped a grommet.
As much as he had enjoyed the bare feel of Hannah’s back, urged up against his front, when the corset hung slack he turned her around at last. She slouched against the wall, her breasts a cotton-and-lace veiled mound which defeated her undergarment a little more with each ragged pant. He skimmed her sides and drew her arms up, her corset behind, freeing it with eager tugs. It was abandoned to the same fate as the rest of her clothes.
He ran hands over the apples of her cheeks, cupping her face until it fit in his palms, a petite embrace that warned of one thing, in his vocabulary. Their bodies molded in warm swells and planes, his eager and hers absent silk-and-bone prohibition. Her head tipped back onto his arm when it laced between her neck and the wall. He wanted to savor a last drop of anticipation, but their chins bumped and jarred their mouths together with an indecent slip.
Her fingers knotted in his shirt, high on the backs of his shoulders. Things moved in the world around them, had life or noise, but James didn’t hear them. It was all pantomime, everything but Hannah’s mouth stealing little breaths of his soul. His life depended on her in that moment as much as it ever had at Meadowcroft. In the exchanges of their lips he admitted everything; guilt, shame, misery that was pale but constant. He admitted longing, absent before a need he had only for her.
He’d meant to kiss her, feeling the aggressor. All his kisses, from those stolen behind the barn to those stolen in an empty hospital stairwell, all of them, had been a little more on one side, him acting while the subject of his desire reacted. He’d meant to kiss Hannah, but he couldn’t. She reigned over him, forced him away with a pace he couldn’t learn and then led him back with a slow part of her lips that took him deep inside. Hannah took, and took, and he gave until she let go. Reluctantly he withdrew, and drank her in with his eyes.
She reclined before him now in only her stockings and a joined chemise and drawers. Combination drawers, they were called. A puritanical term for what was in his opinion a provocative garment. Lace and ribbon and other feminine confections aside, there was an implication to the underwear that he thought a living, red-blooded man couldn’t ignore. Made into a single piece, there was no removing one half without removing the other. It tied a man’s hands in the best way.
He reached for the first mother-of-pearl button and was swatted away. Hannah shook her head, slowly and steadily, and gripped the lapels of his coat. She peeled it from him in a long draw, her eyes making a pointed open study of its reveal. Her slender fingers hovered at his waistcoat buttons, and then she sighed and slumped back into the wall and dropped her arm.
James exhaled, freed a breath he’d been holding until spots had exploded at the edge of his vision. Hannah had felt it too, a heightened indecency to his being almost fully dressed and her being almost fully nude. By a dangerous furrow of her left brow and a twitch at her lips, he guessed this was not a vulnerable state, in her opinion; just the opposite.
When he reached for the buttons on her drawers this time, he met with no resistance, just a sigh and a closing of her eyes, then a gentle give of her knees until the wall at her back took over.
He could undress her all day and all night, James decided, when he’d slipped free the second to last button. He could strip every article and dress her again just for the pleasure of repeating the process. Sex, even the prolonged and half-mad lovemaking of youth whose wild stretches could punctuate a whole night, was a demanding and exhausting sort of pleasure. Using nothing more than his hands, he’d discovered an aching gratification that went on and on so long as a garment remained to be drawn off, so long as Hannah arched or gasped or sighed.
When he’d undone all her buttons, from collar bone to navel, he put the first real space between them and did nothing but look. An alabaster swell of one full globe peeked out where the front placket hung limp and unfastened, and a frilled cap-sleeve clung in a losing battle to her shoulder.
Hannah braced her palms against the wall at her sides, looking him over with an intensity heated enough to flatter, letting him look in return.
He hooked her strap with a finger and then made himself wait and allowed them both a long glimpse at the beginning of the end. His knees begged to buckle and
he throbbed deep in his gut, a need which was driven back only a fraction by filling his lungs. One narrow sleeve and then the other, he bared her shoulders, and her upper arms. Hannah wasn’t especially tall for a woman, but she was long. Long arms and legs and torso, which made him feel as though undressing her went on forever.
There was no looking at her when he slipped the sleeves below her elbows and parted her bodice, revealing her breasts, and so he kept his eyes at her navel. He admitted a quantity of shyness that was easily mitigated by necessity with a patient. Even then he rarely saw a woman fully unclothed. With Hannah, there was a reserve, and something else. If he were honest and deeply considered himself, which he’d avoided doing for more than a year now, he had more than once indulged visions of Hannah’s figure, her shape, and how it would fit his own. Fantasy meeting reality was creating an uncomfortable, nearly unbearably awkward pleasure.
He went on staring at her soft belly, even when she shifted against the wall and her drawers slipped down her hips and out of view. He gulped and felt weak.
“James,” she entreated in a rough whisper that drew his gaze to those eyes, those blue bores that left nothing in his soul a secret.
“Look at me.” He was, but when she bit her lip and her shoulders rolled back, he grasped her meaning and painted her with his eyes from head to silk-clad toe. Primitive need, consuming and possessive, thrummed inside him, and he snaked her waist and dragged her close, scooping her from the rug. He cradled her and carried her the few easy strides from the fireplace to the bed and laid her out atop its white chenille spread.