The sensation was too much, and I sank against Mr. Markham’s chest, and even he moaned as Silas’ ministrations flickered across the place where we were joined. Mr. Markham’s hands circled my waist, large and possessive, and he started to move me back and forth. I held on to Silas’s head for balance, my fingers gripping his hair for dear life as I felt Mr. Markham inside me, pressing against my womb and then rubbing against that impossible spot lower down, the spot that made my toes curl and my hips buck.
“Come for us, wildcat,” Mr. Markham said. “Show us how much you like to be fucked by two adoring men.”
The piano wire was about to snap, about to split and lash and fly, and I threw my head back, surrendering to the impending fracture. I held Silas’s head tight to my clit as I began rocking toward my orgasm, using the lovely organ inside and the lovely mouth on the outside to hurtle myself forward, and I became a creature of nothing but raw need, not remembering Silas’s name or his wealth or his position as a gentleman, not remembering anything about Julian save that he was mine, my own, and we were only need embodied, noise and sweat and heat.
“That’s it,” Julian coaxed. “Show us, pet. Make that beautiful pussy come.”
I came. With Silas’ mouth everywhere and with Julian’s cock filling me, I came. And I came hard.
It started at my clitoris, a fire and flame that moved like a wave, rolling back and then crashing against my cunt and womb, retracting and then crashing through my hips and thighs, and then finally shaking my entire body, tremors and tingles that raced along every nerve to the tips of my fingers and toes. I heard Mr. Markham swearing as the convulsions squeezed him and I felt Silas’s smile against the soft lips of my cunt as he continued to tongue me.
“Julian,” I pleaded, as the waves kept coming and coming.
“I’m here, wildcat,” he rasped in my ear. “And now it’s our turn.”
With my pussy still clenching, he lifted me off him, and I whimpered at the abrupt emptiness. I was put on all fours on the bed, with Mr. Markham kneeling behind me and Silas coming up to join us after removing his pants. He knelt in front of me, his member—no less impressive than Mr. Markham’s—jutting out from his lean hips.
Without warning, Mr. Markham plunged into me, sinking to the hilt on the first thrust, and I cried out, the deeper angle bruisingly delicious, turning my already hard nipples into tight jeweled points as Silas slowly stroked himself.
“Ivy,” growled Mr. Markham. “Don’t you want to thank Silas for making you come?”
I nodded, and then Silas moved closer, the head of his dick only the barest breath away from my lips. He was so polite, hesitant almost, and I got the sudden flash of insight that he wasn’t used to taking the reins in the bedchamber like Mr. Markham was. He was so charming and handsome and laid-back, I imagined that most women were more than happy to crawl over him and do all the work. Women like Molly, who liked to take control anyway. If it had been my Julian in front of me, my mouth would have been taken already. But instead Silas waited patiently, one hand gripping himself, the other resting against his thigh.
Mr. Markham was more than willing to take control on his friend’s behalf, however. His hand fisted in my hair and yanked my head back. “Open up,” he ordered. “Open that pretty mouth and let him slide in. I want you to suck him like he’s me, do you understand? Suck his cock like it’s mine.”
He didn’t let go of my hair, and my eyes were watering, but my pussy was wetter than ever, a second climax knotting itself around Julian’s ruthless thrusts. I parted my lips and moaned as Silas entered my mouth, the almost apologetic look vanishing from his face, replaced with something more primal. And then his hand was in my hair too, his fingers tangling in the tendrils along with Mr. Markham’s, and he began moving his hips to bring himself in and out of me, gasping whenever I flattened my tongue against the underside of his cock.
Behind me, Mr. Markham’s other hand dug into my hip, hard and uncaring; his fucking became raw and rough, savage animal noises tearing from his throat as he rammed into my cunt like a man possessed. Delight and desire flared in my chest; I was the one doing this, I was the one rending the controlled Julian Markham in two. The Julian Markham, who barely blinked or panted as he came on my dress, became ferociously undomesticated whenever he sheathed himself inside me, and in turn, it made me wilder, made me feel just as brutal and uncivilized. I spread my legs wider, wanting him deeper, wanting him everywhere.
The two hands in my hair and the sensation of two cocks pistoning inside me and the erotic sight of Silas’s hips flexing as he fucked my mouth…the explosion built in me once more, making me moan and whine around Silas.
“Silas is going to come, Ivy,” Julian said, and his voice was so rough, rasping over the sound of our bodies slapping together. “And you are going to take it all. And then you’re going to come on my cock and you are going to milk me. Hard.”
On cue, Silas swelled in my mouth, his motions growing jerky and uneven, and then with a soft moan, he spilled onto my tongue and down my throat, his hands on either side of my head, holding me still as he spurted. His noises and the delicious feeling of his cock pulsing was enough to send me over the edge on its own, but the moment his orgasm ended, he was on the other side of me next to Mr. Markham, reaching down to fondle my clitoris while Mr. Markham kept hold of my hair and my hip for leverage as he pounded into me.
“Oh God!” I cried, this third orgasm sawing through me with a viciousness unlike anything I had ever felt, and I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I was coming to pieces, coming unknit and unmade, and Julian kept fucking and Silas kept rubbing and I was screaming through it all, until, with a loud hiss, Mr. Markham came so hard inside me that I could feel his seed lashing against my walls and feel his cock convulsing. He kept his hand on my hip and kept pounding into me through the duration of his climax, sinking his teeth into my shoulder and growling as he did.
After a few long minutes, his thrusting slowed and his teeth left my skin and my vision finally began to clear. The three of us fell backward on the bed into a tangle of limbs and panting, Mr. Markham still buried inside of me.
“Thank you for sharing yourself with me,” Silas said, all gentlemanly politeness, despite the sweat on his forehead and despite the sleepy cock currently pressed against my thigh.
My eyes seemed to close all on their own, and a happy sigh escaped me when Mr. Markham’s hand reached around me to cup my breast and Silas laid his head against my shoulder.
“It was my pleasure,” I said, and those words had never been truer.
I woke twice that night. The first was to Mr. Markham moving against me, his shaft seeking entrance to my cleft, and I sleepily parted my legs, resting one on his hip as my breasts pressed against his chest. I felt lips on my back—Silas was kissing me there—and for several long minutes, there was nothing but slow dreamy thrusts and the press of Silas’ erection against my ass and the sound of skin rasping on fabric. When my orgasm came, it was gentle and sweet, and I was drifting back into sleep even as Mr. Markham shuddered and released into me.
The second time I woke, the floor-length curtains had parted and the blue-black light of early morning limned the window frame and the balcony outside, along with a tall figure. I knew without looking that the man still in bed with me was my own Mr. Markham, but the warmth of the room made the pre-dawn air look cool and attractive, and so in a moment, I was standing next to Silas, wrapped in Mr. Markham’s dressing robe.
He’d pulled on his trousers but nothing else, leaving his ridged and slender torso exposed to the open air. He leaned against the railing, surveying the street below, seeming amused by the early morning bustle of food delivery wagons and street vendors and sporadic hansom cabs.
“Too warm?” he asked, not looking at me.
I affirmed that I was and leaned against the railing as well. The world was a different place in the early morning, when the debauched had finally gone to bed and the industrious were barely awake.
“He’s in love with you, you know,” Silas remarked, still not looking away from the road.
I flushed, wheeling around to make sure Mr. Markham was well asleep and couldn’t hear us talking about him. Satisfied that our conversation was not being eavesdropped upon, I turned back to Silas. “I know.”
Now he turned and braced his back against the railing, folding his arms across his chest. On any other man, the gesture might have seemed hostile or aggressive, but Silas made it seem friendly. Casual. “Do you really?” he asked.
Defensiveness rippled along my skin like invisible chain mail, but I couldn’t refute Silas. It had only been a couple of months, and by any standards, that was too short a time to claim to know someone, however intimately. I barely knew him and I now barely knew myself—I’d always been the girl who had done whatever she wanted, sure, but how could I know that marriage to Mr. Markham wouldn’t cage me instead of free me? I wanted to be next to him always…but what if the institution of marriage, the boundaries that came with it, the expectations…what if they poisoned that love for me? For the first time, the ring on my finger felt more like a shackle than a promise.
Yes, I wanted to say. I knew that he loved me. But there was so much complication surrounding it all that I couldn’t actually find the right words.
Silas and I didn’t speak for a long moment, staying quiet in the breeze.
“He married his first wife in the York Minster,” Silas finally said, nodding his head toward the cathedral towers spiking up above the other buildings. “He loved Arabella, you know. People often think he didn’t, because it was arranged between their parents, but he did. He was wrecked after her death.” He sighed.
I thought of Arabella, of how Mrs. Harold had accused Mr. Markham of intentionally moving her to a climate that would force her death. I wanted to know more about her, about their marriage. “Did he know her before they married?”
Silas nodded. “Her family is well-known in the county—moneyed and connected—and she was the inevitable match for him from her birth. The right breeding and the right dowry. But they had a genuine connection too. They exchanged letters while he was at Oxford and even while he traveled…I think he found something refreshing in her. Something sweet. I would say it was her innocence, but I think it was something slightly different. Rather, I think he felt like she would accept his worldliness, his jadedness, knowingly, and still remain as she was. Much how he feels about you, I suspect.”
I glanced back into the dark room, where the long, languid form of Mr. Markham still stretched across the bed.
“But I’m hardly innocent,” I said, gesturing between me, Silas and the bed. “Certainly not in the unspoiled, untouched way that Arabella must have been.”
Silas shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that your sense of self—your ability to love and experience and live—it can persist, despite proximity to darker things. Women like Molly, they can get hard. Cynical. They stop trusting and eventually they stop opening their hearts. They calcify, slowly, into living stone. Your cousin was much the same,” Silas said, drawing my thoughts away from Molly. “She was also the opposite of Arabella. Passionate and strong, or so she seemed. And in you, I think Julian has finally found everything he was looking for, the synthesis of what he worshipped about Arabella and craved from Violet. The passion and also the ability to remain unsullied by the world.”
I should say thank you, I should feel flattered. My brain fumbled looking for the appropriate response, all as my heart sank under the weight of this expectation.
I could be Mr. Markham’s lover and I could be his wife…but could I be his moral anchor? Could I bear the weight of another’s heart and mind leaning on mine?
And what if I didn’t remain unsullied? What if I grew hard like Molly or Violet? Despite my determination to never see him with Brightmore, I had never deluded myself into thinking Mr. Markham would remain physically loyal to me for our entire marriage—everyone knew that husbands strayed, even those who were less sexually rapacious than my future spouse. But if he did, could I remain unhardened by that? Could I even remain with him? I wasn’t, after all, bred to endure quietly the way most women were. When things grew painful, my instinct was to flee.
And Silas had mentioned Violet, and that brought to the surface the most pain, the most powerful urges to flee.
“What’s wrong?” Silas asked. “You’ve gone pale. I can see it even in this light.”
I knew that this was one of those situations where I should demur, say something polite and reassuring, but there was no girlhood grooming to take over when my mind and tongue failed, and so the truth came out instead. “There are times when I doubt…when I doubt us. Our future. One moment, I think I can stay next to him forever, and the other moment I feel trapped by it. I feel terrified of him sometimes, that he’ll wound my heart or betray me or—” Or kill me. And grooming or no, I absolutely knew I shouldn’t voice that last out loud, not to his closest friend.
But I couldn’t not stay my tongue either—not completely. I had no one to talk to about this, no one to seek advice from. “The night he proposed,” I said, keeping my eyes on the shadowed bedroom, worried that Mr. Markham would overhear, “he made me promise never to ask about the night Violet died. Why would he do that, Silas, if there wasn’t something awful that he’d done? That he had to keep hidden from me?”
“Ivy,” he started, but I cut him off, pacing.
“I should have said no. I can’t agree to that; I can’t not know. Because what if the rumors are true? What if he did kill her? And what if he kills me?”
Silas stared at me for a long moment, his face creased with deep unhappiness. His characteristic smile was absent when he asked, “Did I ever tell you I was at Markham Hall the night Violet died?”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. When they did, I turned and stared at him. “I didn’t know. Nobody ever mentioned…”
“There were a lot of well-known people there that night, but Julian and the local police very thoughtfully excluded our presence from public knowledge to spare our reputations.”
“I can’t believe Mrs. Harold didn’t tell the entire village,” I said, more to myself than to Silas, thinking of Mrs. Harold’s calculating gossip.
“Mrs. Harold?”
“The rector’s wife?” I prompted. “Young with blonde hair? Slender? Talks incessantly?”
His eyes widened with recollection and something else—something that flashed all too briefly in those blue depths and then vanished. “I remember now,” he said. “You know, she’s grown up in the county too. She always had a thing for Julian, even after he married. Even after she herself got married. She’s always finding excuses to hang around Markham Hall, I suppose hoping that Julian would finally notice her and give her all those things in bed that her feeble pastor cannot.”
“Anyway, what I wanted to tell you,” he said, steering the conversation back to his revelation, “was that night, I saw how deeply unhappy Violet and Julian made each other. He had almost completely reformed himself for her—celibate while he courted her those three months, swearing off any other women. But she didn’t care. She wanted only to be back in London again, to be the belle of the town again.”
“And she was pregnant,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to tell him, hadn’t meant to bring it up at all, but it was such a shadow at the back of my mind, a shadow that changed everything.
Silas didn’t look surprised. “I know,” he said darkly. “I learned it that night.”
“You did?” I knew it couldn’t have been common knowledge, or Mrs. Harold would have told me all about it.
He nodded. “They fought at the dinner loudly, angrily. He wanted a divorce, she threatened to kill herself if he tried to sue for one. It was quite uncomfortable to listen to, so I suggested the other guests and I move into the parlor, farther away from them, and we all did, to give them more privacy. I was the last to leave the room, and so I believe I was the
only one who heard her tell him.”
“About the baby.”
“Yes,” he said, looking troubled. “About the baby.”
“How could she threaten to kill herself when she knew she was pregnant?” I asked. “Even Violet is not that selfish.”
“You know what I think? I think she was desperate. Think about it—both she and Julian knew the child couldn’t be his. If he divorced her and let that be known, the shame would have destroyed her. Her life would have been over, and while I know Julian would have provided for her, she would never be able to show her face in society again. But if she remained married, she’d still have the status of Markham Hall in addition to providing—what the world would believe to be—a firstborn heir. She could still find a way to escape and go back to London through more polite, traditional means.”
“So she had to stay married to him. No matter what.” I chewed on the pad of my thumb as I pictured it all—Violet’s fair face alight with fear and rage, Mr. Markham’s rigid with anger and rejection.
“But she hated him,” Silas reminded me. “Had it simply been a question of accepting his wife’s sin—a sin that happened before their nuptials—then I have no doubt he would have accommodated. Raised the child as his own. But she made him acutely miserable, made it clear that she hated him and hated being married to him. She called him names I’ve never heard—even at school—not to mention she’d been sleeping with his valet, Gerald.”
“Gareth,” I corrected. “Why on earth does Mr. Markham keep him employed? Surely that would be grounds for letting him go?”
Silas gave me another smile, rueful this time. “I suppose there was a sense of brotherly suffering. You never saw Violet in her prime, did you? She was relentless and devastating and the mistress of the estate. No gentleman could have refused her. Certainly no servant in her employ. I think it was apparent from fairly early on that he had been coerced by the nature of his position to capitulating, and Mr. Markham felt sympathetic to that. Given that Violet had seduced and hoodwinked him as well.”
The Education of Ivy Leavold Page 6