My Lady's Pleasure

by Olivia Quincy

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  PLAYING WITH FIRE

  Let the world say what it would. She was sure—absolutely sure—that what she was doing was not wrong.

  Barnes took her face in his two work-hardened hands and kissed her hard. Feeling his cool hands on her cheeks as his warm tongue found her own, it was as though a switch flipped in her. She stopped being the clever, self-possessed daughter of an earl and started being simply a vessel for her own desire.

  She reached her hands behind him and ran them down his ass. She was surprised by its muscular compactness. Although he was large and she was small, she could almost cover each cheek with one of her hands. She squeezed and pulled him closer.

  She felt herself widen to accommodate him, and relished the slowness with which he eased himself into her. He stopped halfway, and she instinctively tried to push herself down so he would be completely inside. But he held her feet, and she couldn’t move.

  Her body, almost of its own accord, wanted to move. She wanted to feel him deeper, deeper. She squirmed, and he held her fast. She knew he was in control, and she gave herself over to it. She was surprised, though, when he reached down and picked something up. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him quizzically. Was he getting dressed?

  “This may seem strange to you, but I think it will add a whole new layer of pleasure,” he said, smiling. . . .

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  First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2010

  Copyright © Olivia Quincy, 2010

  All rights reserved

  SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Quincy, Olivia.

  My lady’s pleasure/Olivia Quincy.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-45611-8

  1. Aristocracy (Social class)—England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6117.U356M9 2010

  823’.92—dc22 2010009815

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  ONE

  “You did that deliberately,” said Jeremy when the other guests had gone, leaving him alone in the drawing room with Lady Georgiana Vernon.

  “I beg your pardon, but I haven’t the slightest idea what you could mean,” said Lady Georgiana archly, but with a knowing half smile that revealed that she did, in truth, know exactly what the tall, sandy-haired young man meant.

  “Ah,” said Jeremy, whose manners were impeccable, as became a viscount’s son. “In that case, I made the statement in haste, and I withdraw it with a sincere apology.” But his half smile mirrored hers exactly. The game he’d been playing with the eldest daughter of the seventh Earl of Eastley had been going on much too long for either of them to confuse dialogue with action. “I had thought, when your dress caught on that low table and revealed a length of ankle—a slender, shapely length of ankle, if I may say so—that you might, out of your kind heart and generous nature, have so managed it for my particular benefit,” Jeremy continued, with an exaggerated half bow.

  “You, sir, should know that my good breeding matches your own,” replied Lady Georgiana with mock stiffness, “and that I take great pains to remain decently covered in decent company.” As she said this she slowly began lifting the skirt of her brocaded frock, revealing the lace-trimmed petticoat beneath. Then this, too, began to rise, showing stockings and then, just below the knee, where the crocheted cuffs of her drawers should have been, bare skin.

  “I take it this means I don’t qualify as ‘decent,’” said Jeremy, crossing the room to sit beside her on the sofa.

  “You most certainly do not.”

  “Am I irredeemably indecent?”

  “Absolutely irredeemably.”

  “Do I understand by this that I am unfettered by the societal conventions that prevent me from, for example, running my hand under your dress and up the length of your thigh?” Jeremy asked, matching the gesture to the words.

  “Completely unfettered,” said Lady Georgiana, lying back on the couch to savor the warm, dry roughness of his hand on her skin.

  Although she had been Jeremy Staunton’s lover for more than a year, Georgiana still thrilled at the first touch of each encounter. Perhaps it was the necessary secrecy that kept their physical meetings so vital. They’d known each other all their lives, and they met frequently in society, their friendship on display in the drawing rooms and country houses of the best families in England. Each was generally thought to be an excellent match for the other, and their eventual marriage was sometimes quietly spoken of.

  The two principals had different ideas. Lady Georgiana, particularly, thought of marriage as something she would undertake later in life, if at all. She didn’t despise the institution, but she considered it a pastime for s
omeone older and duller, rather like cultivating roses, or knitting. She had no interest in entertaining the idea just now, when she was so busy exploring the much more compelling idea that chastity shouldn’t be a young woman’s lot in life. Jeremy, for his part, found flouting chastity far more interesting than affirming marriage, and so the two had embarked on an exciting, adventurous, and mutually satisfying affair.

  Somehow, over the course of that year, the affair had retained almost all its heat and air of illicit pleasure and, as Georgiana lay back on the sofa in the drawing room at her father’s home at Eastley, she felt the same electric response she had the first time Jeremy had touched her.

  He ran his hand from the outside of her leg to the inside, and her muscles tightened as she gave a quick, anticipatory quiver. He flipped her dress and petticoats up. She was naked from waist to knees.

  “It was thoughtful of you to dispense with your drawers,” he murmured, as he kissed the inside of her left thigh, just above the knee.

  “It took some doing,” Georgiana replied. “After she dressed me, I had to send Hortense on a sham errand so I could take them off and squirrel them away back in the bureau.” Hortense was her lady’s maid, and Georgiana didn’t get dressed without her.

  “I think perhaps I can make the squirreling worth your while,” said Jeremy.

  “You generally do,” she said as she sat forward and pulled him up so she could look him in the eye. “You generally do,” she repeated softly, and kissed him. She knew well the feel of his lips on hers. The first time he’d kissed her, she’d been surprised by their firmness. Until then, the only lips she’d known well were her own, which were full and soft. His, though, were strong, almost muscular. When they kissed, her lips always yielded to his, as they did now.

  His taste was deeply familiar, but Georgiana couldn’t say exactly what he tasted of. He simply tasted of Jeremy, she thought. His smell, though, was easier to place, and Georgiana breathed in the odor of tobacco, and stables, and the laundry soap his housekeeper made with oil of rosemary.

  She found the scent of him wonderfully arousing, and she ran her hands down his chest. She pulled his shirt out of his trousers and ran her hands back up, under the fabric. She spread her fingers and put her palms flush against him so she could feel the fine, soft hair on his chest slip through her hands as she traced the line of each side of his rib cage, up to where his ribs came together just below his nipples.

  Georgiana loved both his compact, dusky nipples and the full, firm pectoral muscles beneath them. She traced the outline of those muscles, and then circled in, tighter and tighter, to the nipples. She knew they’d be hard and sensitive, and she covered each with a palm and pressed, at first gently and then a little harder. Jeremy’s eyes closed as he took in a quick breath. Georgiana reached around his waist to where his trousers buckled in the back, but he stopped her. He inhaled deeply to get his own sensations under control, and then he gently took her forearms and returned them to her sides. “Not yet,” he said. “Lie back down.”

  She did as she was bidden, not quite knowing what to expect. Jeremy had been her only lover, but she assumed he had had others, given his way of surprising her.

  He stood over her as she lay on the sofa, and put his hands between her slightly open thighs. He eased her legs apart, and she had to put her right foot on the floor. He sat on the edge of the sofa between her legs and ran his fingertips up and down the insides of her thighs. He pressed hard enough not to tickle, but not hard enough to satisfy her craving for his touch. Feeling his fingers on the soft skin that no one but Jeremy ever even saw, let alone touched, always opened her to him. She felt the beginning of wetness deep inside her, and half sat up so she could reach out for him again.

  Again, he didn’t let her. Instead, he put one of the cushions from the sofa behind her. “Lie down,” he told her. “Be comfortable.”

  She did, and was, and he sat back down between her legs. He leaned in close and kissed the inside of first one thigh, and then the other. His firm lips had never felt so soft. And then those lips opened, and she felt his warm, wet tongue on her skin. It worked its way up, up one leg and then the other, closer and closer.

  She knew where he was headed, and she had the fleeting urge to stop him. They had gotten to this point before, and she had stopped him, but had later been ashamed of what she thought of as cowardice. As a young woman, she had gone out into the world determined not to be bound by the constrictions society placed on her sex, and of all those constrictions, chastity bothered her the most. That ladies were required to sit in their drawing rooms painting or reading, playing whist or piano, while men prowled the streets, the clubs, and the theaters in search of thrills and adventure, had enraged her from her adolescence, when the wonder of her body first began to be revealed to her.

  Jeremy had helped her understand that wonder—what her body could give, what it could receive, what it could feel, and the pleasure it could bring others. Why, then, did she balk? Where did it come from, that visceral reaction that prevented her from accepting the ministrations of his tongue? Why did it feel dirty?

  Intellectually, she didn’t believe it was dirty or wrong, and she was determined that her head would triumph over her viscera in this battle. It felt odd for Georgiana to lie practically naked on a sofa, with her lover’s head between her thighs, and will her intellect to assert itself, but that was what she did.

  She found, though, that circumstances had compromised her intellect, and she couldn’t stop herself from sitting up once more, taking Jeremy by the shoulders, and pushing him away. When he looked up at her, she didn’t say a word, but her conflicting emotions were written clearly on her face.

  “It won’t do, you know,” he said to her with a small, sympathetic smile. “You’re going to have to learn to let me do this.”

  “I want to,” she said, hesitating. “I do. But it’s as though my body tightens automatically, all on its own, against my express wishes.”

  “Then we shall have to find a way to make your body submit,” he said simply. He pressed her to lie down once more, and again ran his hands over her legs. This time, though, he headed toward her feet. He unlaced her delicate little boots and took them off. He held her feet in his hands for a moment, pressing his thumbs into their fine, high arches. Georgiana closed her eyes and savored the sensation that was part sensual, part sexual.

  Then Jeremy put her left leg down on the couch and held her right in one of his hands as he ran the other up the length of her ankle and calf, which were covered by a sky blue stocking of the sheerest silk. He released the stocking from its elastic garter, and expertly rolled it down her leg, leaving Georgiana wondering just how a viscount’s son learned to remove a lady’s stocking. The thought had barely entered her mind when it was displaced by curiosity. What was he up to?

  Jeremy had taken both her slender wrists in one of his hands, and lifted them above her head. He put one of her hands under the arm of the sofa, and one over. He brought her wrists together again, and wrapped the stocking around them so that Georgiana was tethered to the sofa’s arm.

  “What are you doing?” she asked with a curiosity just tinged with alarm.

  “I’m making sure your body will obey your express wishes,” said Jeremy. “We are ensuring that it does what you want, and not the other way around.” He paused. “Does it hurt at all?”

  Lady Georgiana considered. “No,” she said. She was about to add that she wasn’t sure she was quite comfortable, but Jeremy didn’t let her.

  “Good,” he said as he stood up and took his position between her legs again. “If it begins to hurt, tell me.”

  It took a moment for Georgiana to reconcile herself to the situation. Yes, she was helpless to stop him, but wasn’t this what she wanted?

  It was, and she trusted him. He had earned her trust over the course of a year of generous and considerate lovemaking. As she gave herself permission to let this happen, she was awakened to a very new sensation—the c
onfluence of extreme arousal and enforced passivity. The idea that she was powerless to participate, powerless to manipulate, powerless to do anything but focus on her own sensations was a new one for Lady Georgiana, and it didn’t at first sit comfortably with her. She was determined, in all things, to control her own destiny; the very act of taking a lover had been an exercise of control. And yet here she lay, all her control, all her power, wrested from her.

  But then she realized that it hadn’t been wrested from her. She had given it. With that realization, she began to truly relax. She began to see that her mind, freed from worry about what she should do next, could focus completely on what was happening to her.

  And oh! What was happening to her!

  She didn’t feel just his lips as they danced up her inner thighs; she felt the smallest movement, the subtlest change in texture, in temperature. She was more aware of her own response than she ever had been. In all their lovemaking, there had never been even a moment when some part of Georgiana’s mind wasn’t occupied with Jeremy—what he was feeling, what she’d like him to feel, and how she could make him feel it. Now, though, there was only her own self. Her skin, and how he felt against it. Her desire, and the way it turned her insides to honey. Her need, and how it was growing.

  When Jeremy reached the velvet junction where her legs met and her sex flowed, the first touch of his tongue was revelatory. She had imagined it many times, and she had imagined that it felt good, but this was beyond good. The warmth and the wetness were just the beginning. The way his tongue moved over her, following her contours, now skimming, now diving, sent impulses of pure pleasure the length of her body. He pressed the very tip to the button of her clitoris, and moved it almost imperceptibly back and forth. Just as a tremendous, insistent orgasm started to build deep inside her, Jeremy pulled back. She gasped, and fought to contain the sensations his mouth had unleashed.

  When those sensations had subsided, she felt his tongue return, going around and around her pussy in ever-tightening circles. By the time he came back to that magical button, she knew, as he did, that there would be no more containment. He slowly, deliberately, moved his tongue back and forth, and she felt as though he were touching her very essence. Her orgasm consumed her. It rose up and took up all the space not just in her body, but in her mind and her spirit. She had never, never felt its like, and as it ebbed she marveled at its power.