She didn’t realize her eyes were closed until she opened them and saw Jeremy standing over her, smiling and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. She’d also forgotten that her hands were tied until Jeremy bent down to release them.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he handed the silk stocking back to her, quite a bit worse for the wear.
“I am,” she said, and looked at the torn, misshapen stocking a little ruefully. “But had I known what was in store for my stockings, I think I would have chosen the cotton ones.”
Jeremy laughed. “I’m terribly sorry about your stocking,” he said. “If you let me have it, I will try to find a replacement of the same color next time I go up to town.”
“That’s very kind,” said Georgiana, “but I think I shall keep it as a memento.”
“My memento will be your scent,” said Jeremy, holding his hand to his nose and inhaling deeply. “I’m not going to wash until you get back from Penfield,” he said. She was planning to leave the next morning, and this would be the last time she and Jeremy would meet until she returned.
“But I can’t leave you like this,” Georgiana said, tracing the clear outline of his erect penis through his trousers.
“Ah, but you can,” he said. “I want what you just felt to be the feeling you take with you. That is,” he added, “if you really must go.”
“It’s not a question of must,” she said. “I want to go. Paulette is a dear friend, and the party is one of the best in the country.” Paulette was Lady Loughlin, and the party was the annual masquerade ball that the Loughlins hosted at Penfield, their country estate in Hampshire.
“Why don’t you come?” she continued. “I know your father frowns on masquerade balls, but really—we’re only five years shy of the twentieth century. Can’t you convince him that what simply wasn’t done when he was a young man is now done by just about everyone?”
“It’s not just masquerades in general, as you very well know,” said Jeremy. “It’s the Penfield masquerade. It has something of a reputation, and not the kind that my father looks kindly on.”
They both smiled, he ruefully and she expectantly. He needed to stay in his father’s good graces in order to keep both his allowance and his expectation of financial independence once his father went to his maker. As the younger of two sons, he was at his father’s mercy. The estate was entailed on his elder brother, John, but the crumbs—substantial enough to support a family in something like high style—were his father’s to distribute as he would. If Jeremy started socializing with the likes of the Loughlins, the Viscount Newbury most certainly wouldn’t distribute them to his younger son.
Lady Georgiana understood all this, and didn’t press her lover.
“I’m sorry you won’t be there,” she said, “but I’ll be back in a fortnight, at the most.”
He kissed her hand with a gallant intimacy. “Enjoy yourself, but come home to me,” he said, and took his leave.
TWO
As she rode to Penfield, Lady Georgiana thought about what Jeremy had said. When they first became lovers, they had agreed that theirs was an intimacy without conditions and without expectations, but Georgiana was beginning to think that Jeremy was repenting of his bargain. Lately, she sensed in him a seriousness, a determination that their relationship be something more than ephemeral pleasure. She had the idea that he wanted to keep her. It was an idea that flattered, but also chafed.
She prided herself on being forward thinking. She was of the twentieth century, although she wouldn’t be in it for five years yet. As fond as she was of Jeremy—and she was very fond indeed—marriage to him would be capitulation to a convention that the nineteenth century, and all centuries previous, had foisted on women: Get married, young, to a gentleman of your class, and bear him an heir as soon as ever you can. She didn’t object to marriage, or gentlemen of her class, or heirs; she objected to their being her only choice.
Strength and independence were, for her, cardinal virtues, inextricably linked. She strove for them herself and looked for them in others, men and women alike. Where men were concerned, the world’s views were aligned with hers. When it came to women, the situation was more complicated. Females were expected to be, if not weak and clinging, at least delicate and submissive. To defy those expectations required not just a degree of boldness, but also societal latitude—latitude much more readily granted to a scion of nobility than a scullery maid.
Lady Georgiana wasn’t a fool, and she understood that her freedom was a function both of her personality and her position. She was, perhaps, inclined to overvalue the first and undervalue the second, but that’s to be expected in a girl of spirit.
Spirited she certainly was. Her wit was sharp and her mind was keen. While her education had been only middling for a girl of her class, she had read widely, and was conversant with matters of politics, and agriculture, and even natural philosophy. What she couldn’t do was draw. Neither could she sing. She couldn’t arrange flowers or embroider handkerchiefs. Her piano playing was so rudimentary as to be embarrassing.
She had steadfastly refused to acquire those accomplishments, partly from a natural disinclination borne of her understanding that she lacked the gifts of ear and eye, and partly from sheer obstinacy. She sought the traditional occupations of men as assiduously as she shunned those of women. She smoked cigars. She read newspapers. She would have opinions, and freedom, and lovers.
It was lovers she was thinking of as she rode the last few miles to Penfield.
An observer would have seen a lithe, pale-skinned girl, deep in thought. He might have taken her for a man, as she dressed and rode like one. When she was seventeen, after she had taken a tumble jumping a hedge, she decided that serious horsemanship required riding astride, and she pilfered a pair of riding breeches from her fourteen-year-old brother, the nascent eighth earl. She told the groom to saddle Senator, the most independent-minded horse in the stable. “And not with the sidesaddle,” she added with a self-conscious imperiousness. “I will be riding astride.”
The groom, well trained, blinked once and did as he was bidden. She mounted and rode out of the stable yard with all the dignity she could muster. Although she’d had a couple of stealthy practice sessions, she wasn’t used to swinging her right leg over the horse’s back, and she managed it gracelessly. But she sat up straight, with her heels down and Senator’s torso firm between her knees, and headed out to Eastley’s grounds.
She never rode sidesaddle again, and now, five years later, she was a skilled and confident rider. On this occasion, though, neither skill nor confidence was required. The path underfoot was well-worn and, even though the sun had been down an hour and more, there was enough moonlight to render the path faintly visible. Lady Georgiana knew that her horse’s excellent vision and sure-footedness would keep them both on track, and her reverie began to take on a more physical quality.
For her, there was always something about being on a horse. She’d discovered this unexpected pleasure of having a moving saddle between her legs the very first time she took Senator around the grounds at Eastley. She’d been too uncertain of herself then to relax and let it overcome her, but it didn’t take many outings before she understood how to stay on the horse while letting the smooth leather of the saddle pitch up and down against her, raising her temperature, quickening her heartbeat, and moistening her core.
Now all she could think about was the rhythm of the ride and the gradually increasing waves of pleasure working their way through her body, almost of their own accord. Alone on the trail, shrouded by darkness, Georgiana abandoned herself to the steady climb toward the explosion she knew would come. She focused on letting it happen, and not making it happen. She kept her sensations under control by tilting her hips a tiny bit backward to minimize contact, and then forward again to bring her right to the brink. She’d been in the saddle for two hours already, and had the luxury—which she never had, or perhaps just never exercised, with Jeremy—of building
up and then pulling back, and then doing it again, at whatever pace pleased her, for as long as she wanted.
And she wanted. The freedom to move as she liked, to have to focus on no one else, to abandon herself to the rhythm, meant that some of her most intense pleasure, her most body-enveloping orgasms, had come on horseback.
The horse continued his steady walk, the saddle moving up and down, with each lift having a slight forward motion that pulsed against her. The pulsing went on and on, out of her control because the animal she was riding made it happen, but within her control because the slightest motion determined the intensity of her feeling.
As she neared the point at which control ceased, she tried to relax every muscle that wasn’t needed to keep her in the saddle. She resisted the deep-seated impulse to grasp, to clench, to hold. When she was with Jeremy, she loved that sensation—of taking him in, of keeping him in, of trying to bury him deeper and deeper inside her. His hardness and his urgency were part of her pleasure. Without that, her pleasure was different. It was soft and slow, almost slack. Even as she knew she was approaching her climax, she was relaxed and passive.
Then came the tingling she recognized as the first note of fulfillment. It started in the backs of her calves, the sensation of being overcome by a gentle warmth; it traveled up her legs and into her chest before it transformed itself from a lapping wave to a perfect storm, involving every muscle and every nerve. Her deliberate relaxation succumbed to the force of her ecstasy. Now she contracted everything to lengthen, to intensify. She felt as if her very body were transformed to some other material. She didn’t just feel pleasure; she was pleasure, a pleasure that was both suffusing and acute. She made no noise, but exhaled sharply.
Her orgasm left as it had come, subsiding back to the lapping wave and then ebbing altogether, leaving her profoundly satisfied. It took several minutes for her breathing to return to normal, and another few for Georgiana to be fully aware of her surroundings. As she became attuned again to the darkness, and the breeze, and her horse’s steady footfall, she saw a line of lights, dim in the distance. It was Penfield.
Penfield was undoubtedly the finest house in Hampshire. Not the biggest, not the oldest, but the most pleasing and complete. It wasn’t just a box on a hill, like so many of the country houses she’d visited. It had long, lean lines, and nestled comfortably in the rolling terrain of its grounds. The house had been built a hundred years ago as the country home of the Earl of Tewksbury, and had seen that family through three generations. The fourth, though, did them in. With family finances brought low by the gambling debts of a dissolute brother, the great-grandson of the original owner was forced to sell. Lord and Lady Loughlin bought. The Loughlins had lived there twenty years already, but decades mean little when real residence is measured in centuries.
As Georgiana rode up the broad drive that looped in front of Penfield, she noticed again how fine it looked, illuminated by the torches set out to welcome late-arriving guests.
Lady Loughlin came running downstairs when she heard a horse’s hooves on the gravel drive and the ring at the front door. She’d expected Georgiana hours earlier and, even though that young lady never came anywhere on time, the lady of the house was relieved to hear her friend’s voice greeting Dodson, the Loughlins’ longtime butler.
“Georgiana!” she cried, racing into the entrance foyer. “We’ve been expecting you all evening.”
“Paulette,” said Georgiana, embracing her hostess. “I’m sorry to be so beastly late. I hope you haven’t worried.”
“If I worried every time you were late,” said Lady Loughlin, chuck-ling, “I’d be able to think of little else.”
The women embraced again, and Lady Loughlin said, “I’ll show you to your chamber, even though I know you can find it perfectly well by yourself.” Then the older woman looked around. “But where are your trunks?”
“They’ll be along tomorrow, with Hortense. I wanted to ride alone. I brought enough to get me through the night,” Georgiana said, pointing to a small valise.
Lady Loughlin shook her head in some wonder. She was used to her friend’s eccentricities, but surely no young woman, no matter how spirited or self-sufficient, should be riding alone at night. She knew from experience, however, that no good would come of suggesting a more prudent course, so she simply took her friend’s elbow and led her to her room.
As they went up the great stairway that led to the guest wing, Georgiana asked who else was in the house.
“Oh, we’re full up,” said Lady Loughlin. “We have the Graftons, and the Carlisles, and the Sheffields. And of course Robert’s cousins the O’Maras.”
“That is a houseful,” said Georgiana.
“At least the boys aren’t here.” Paulette was referring to her two grown sons. “Robbie’s in Scotland and Freddy’s gone up to Oxford. But we are expecting the Earl of Grantsbury,” she continued, as though as an afterthought.
“An earl!” exclaimed Georgiana, who could take liberties with her friend, “And not just any earl—it’s Peter!” Georgiana had known Lord Peter Halsey, Earl of Grantsbury, for some years. “I’m delighted to hear that you’ve managed such an earl as that.”
Paulette had managed such an earl as that. But earls hadn’t always been within her grasp.
Lady Loughlin was the former Paulette Carston, heiress to the fortune made by her grandfather, who had formulated Carston’s Complexion Cream. The lotion had become a staple on ladies’ dressing tables, and made the family very rich indeed. But the cream’s admission to dressing rooms didn’t guarantee the heiress’s admission to drawing rooms, and Lady Loughlin’s path through English society had been uncertain.
Her marriage to Robert Loughlin had helped. He was a baron, but an Irish baron, and so the status his family connection conferred gave his wife entrée into a larger circle than she’d known before, but doors to some of the very best houses were still closed to her, at least early in her marriage. Lady Loughlin, though, wasn’t one to dwell on her failures. Overall, she thought her living a fine thing, and took some pride in her ability to take whatever came.
She had been a merry and mischievous girl, and had grown into a charming and gregarious woman. She was forty-one or forty-two, or possibly forty-five—no one could pin her down—and she’d borne two sons, but neither the years nor the children showed in her figure. Her waist looked as narrow as it had been at nineteen, her breasts as buoyant. Only her husband and her maid could say how much tighter stays and stiffer corsets contributed to the effect.
Lady Loughlin and Georgiana Vernon were as great friends as two women separated by two decades could be. The older woman admired the younger, and saw something of herself in her friend. Had Lady Loughlin, as a girl, gone out into the world with noble, rather than commercial, antecedents, Miss Carston might have been much like Miss Vernon. As it was, though, Paulette had understood from a very young age that it was incumbent upon her to play by the rules. Coming from a manufacturing family, she knew how precarious her social standing was. The slightest lapse from the proper would brand her boorish and crass. “What do you expect?” the bona fide ladies would ask. “She was born into complexion cream.”
When she met Robert Loughlin, she knew nothing of the private side of men. She knew their public side well; since her first season in London, when she was just sixteen, she’d spent as much time as she could in society. A good match would be crucial to her prospects, and she meant to put herself in the way of making one. Before Lord Loughlin, there had been several other suitors, but none had met her rather exacting standards. Not relishing the idea of having to turn down a request for her hand, she had found ways to make it clear to them before the offer had ever been made that an offer would not be accepted.
Lord Loughlin, though, she would not discourage. Besides being tall, broad, and handsome, he was thoughtful and well-informed. His manners were pleasing, his conversation entertaining, and his style winning. His hair was undeniably a shade too red, but the Mis
s Carston she had been had graciously decided to overlook that flaw. She hadn’t known him more than two or three weeks before she noticed a constriction in her chest, a tightening around her quickening heartbeat, when he entered a room.
He was also noble and, while he certainly didn’t have income to spare, he wasn’t downright destitute. Although she didn’t need a husband to bring money to their union, she didn’t want to give the impression she had been married for hers. She also wasn’t willing to connect herself simply for status. Her family ties would always be considered a liability, she knew, but she appraised her personal charms and her financial wherewithal at their true value, and calculated—rightly—that their combination would merit a husband of substance, one she could love.
She did love Robert Loughlin, and had thrilled at his asking to marry her. The day they were wed, she shut the door on Miss Carston and wholly embraced the newness, the excitement, the stature, and the responsibilities of Lady Loughlin.
One of those responsibilities, though, gave her some trepidation. She had never so much as kissed a man until she agreed to be Lord Loughlin’s wife, and knew little about what went on between a man and a woman behind their closed bedchamber door. Her mother, she knew, would be of no use; that good lady was so prim that she had trouble discussing even the complexion cream that made the family’s fortune; she believed anything that couldn’t happen in a drawing room, for all to see, shouldn’t be part of a lady’s conversation. In the weeks before her wedding, Lady Loughlin-to-be spoke with several of her married friends, but her necessarily oblique approach to the subject occasioned equally oblique responses.
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