And so, when she stepped out of her dressing room at the inn at Dover in which they were to spend the night before crossing the channel to begin their Italian honeymoon, she wasn’t sure what to expect. Her husband was dressed in a simple cambric nightshirt, lying in the canopied four-poster bed with his head propped against the pillows, reading a book. When she stepped into the room, he looked up, smiled at her, and put the book down on the nightstand.
She sat down on the opposite side of the bed and smiled in return. Robert piled pillows in front of the headboard, and motioned her to sit beside him. He didn’t say a word, then or later.
She’d heard tales—ribald jokes, risqué stories—of men’s wolfish nature, and knew, in the indistinct way affianced girls knew such things, that her husband had been adventurous in those private matters, so she was a little surprised when he simply took her hand. He turned it over and gently ran his fingertips over her palm. He traced its lines softly. He ran his index finger down the inside of her thumb, over the smooth muscle where it met her hand, and down to the underside of her wrist.
Her nightgown was of fine, supple muslin, with Belgian lace at the collar, placket, and cuffs. There was a drawstring where the lace cuffs met the muslin sleeves, and Robert untied it by pulling gently on the pink grosgrain ribbon that her maid had tied so carefully. He pushed her sleeve up her arm and ran his hand over her forearm—always gently, gently.
Paulette was astonished at how intensely her body reacted to such a simple motion. What she’d felt seeing him in public had given her only the merest inkling of what it would be like feeling him in private. Every nerve in her body was focused on the point of contact between her and this man; every thought was for what was happening between them. Never had she known such single-minded concentration, or such inner turmoil. It was as though the tightness were melting her, and the intensity focusing itself between her legs.
Each time Robert’s hand touched a part of her he hadn’t touched before, a wave broke inside her. And, as though he knew it—could he? did he?—he let his hand stay in one place while her urgency subsided. Only then would he move on, reawakening the tightness, the turmoil, the melting.
His expert touch brought her own inexperience home to her, but she despised the idea of the naive little virgin meekly letting her husband take her on their wedding night. She was a full-blooded woman, and she wanted both the giving and the taking to flow both ways. She took both his hands in hers and looked at him for a long moment. She leaned in and let her lips just skim over his, and then worked her way around to his cheek, and then his earlobe. Almost instinctively, she moved to his neck and kissed him, hard. He groaned as he felt her lips, her teeth, her tongue.
Her aggressiveness surprised him, and he looked at her with a fresh curiosity. He reached out and untied the pink ribbon at her neck, not quite so carefully and slowly as he had untied her sleeves. He unbuttoned the six buttons that went from the collar to the end of the lace placket, just above her waist. He traced a line from the hollow between her collarbones down to where her breasts met. He turned his hand over so his palm was up, and cupped her left breast, still under the fabric of her nightgown. She watched as he moved his head to her chest and gently kissed the inch-wide strip of bare skin exposed between the two bands of lace. He widened the gap, moving his lips back and forth, first to one side and then the other, each time pushing her nightgown a little farther open.
And then, almost before she realized it, her nipple, erect and sensitive, was in his mouth. She gasped, the first sound that had passed between them since she sat down on the bed. Her body, moving of its own accord, arched toward him. She knew, as he did, that she was ready for him. He sat up and pulled his nightshirt over his head, and she saw what a man looked like. The outline of the male body, its basic composition, was familiar to her from statues and paintings, but art hadn’t prepared her for his cock, so hard it was almost vertical. He took her hand in his and put her index finger in his mouth. The sensation of his tongue on her finger brought her right to the edge. He took that finger, wet, and guided her to run it up the underside of his penis, and the groan he gave let her know that his urgency was as acute as hers.
The feel of his erection surprised her. It had a core like steel, but it was surrounded by smooth, soft skin. The vein running its length had pulsed under her finger, and she found that his heart was beating as quickly and insistently as her own. She reached her hand around its girth at the base, and found it was as big around as her wrist. She started to move her hand up the shaft, her exploration motivated by both desire and curiosity. As hard as it had been, it became harder still. She continued to move one hand slowly up and down his cock, and took his balls in the other. She felt their slippery looseness as she rolled them over her fingers.
And then she let them hang as she used both hands to hold his cock. She wanted to know how to touch it to please him most, and she used her hands in different configurations, with varying pressure, and paid attention to his response. Touching the tip, she found, elicited the most intense reaction, and she slowly ran her finger up and down the small slit that ran up the bottom of the glans. Then she wet her finger and did it some more.
Robert was at the point where he could no longer trust himself in her hands. He pulled himself away from her and then reached under her nightgown, one hand on the outside of each leg. He ran his hands straight up the sides of her body, lifting the nightgown as he went. She moved to free the fabric, and raised her arms so he could lift it off her. Then his hands ran back down her naked body, retracing their path. They stopped when they got to her hips, and he eased his thumbs around to her inner thighs, and then up, straight up, to the source of her pleasure. He separated the lips of her cunt and slowly inserted his thumb. She was so wet that it slid in effortlessly, and she felt its presence as a preview of what was to come.
Robert was kneeling between her legs, and as he pulled his thumb out, he slid his penis in—just the tip, at first. The sensation was breathtaking. She felt him move the tip in and out, and all she wanted was more. She tilted her hips toward him and, in one motion, he sank his full, hard length into her wet, warm center. She cried out at the sudden pain of her lost virginity, but it was over almost instantly, replaced by the most acute arousal she had ever experienced. Robert moved slowly in and out of her, and she had a sense that he was containing himself only by a supreme effort.
Then she knew there would be no more containment for her. Everything in her contracted toward his presence in her, and she came in great, convulsing waves. The first wave unleashed Robert, and together they consummated their marriage.
Now, twenty-two years later, Lady Loughlin thought back on that night with both pleasure and sadness: pleasure for the purity of the experience, sadness for what she and her husband had lost since that night. In the time they’d been married, their lovemaking had become more skilled, more imaginative, more sophisticated, but a distance had also developed between them. They still made love, but less frequently and less wholeheartedly. They had found that creating a home, navigating society, and raising two sons had divided them into their respective roles. They both felt as though they lived two individual lives, rather than life as one.
This week, though, Lady Loughlin had little time for such thoughts. Georgiana’s arrival marked the beginning of the busiest and most exciting week of the Loughlins’ social calendar. The life she led the rest of the year went into a kind of suspended animation as her house began to fill with guests who looked forward for months to visiting Penfield and to attending her masquerade. And she couldn’t say but that she didn’t anticipate it more than any of them.
“And we’re off,” she said to herself as she went up to bed.
THREE
The morning after Lady Georgiana arrived at Penfield, she was late coming down to breakfast. Hortense had arrived with the luggage early enough to see that Georgiana had tea and toast in her room, and so had deprived her mistress of any incentive to get out of b
ed, get dressed, and join the rest of the Penfield guests in the breakfast room.
It was almost ten o’clock when she finally made her way downstairs, and the only people who joined her over the kippers, for which she had a particular fondness, were Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sheffield, who were still chatting about the day’s plans over plates with discarded toast crusts and cups with cold tea leaves.
“Ah!” said Georgiana. “Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield! How glad I am to see you.” She knew the Sheffields slightly, and had enjoyed the company of the husband sufficiently to be willing to overlook a certain shrewish-ness in the wife.
“And how glad we are to see you,” said Hermione Sheffield, with a chilliness that gave the lie to the words. Mrs. Sheffield valued respectability above all else, and she had much too great a veneration for propriety to approve of Lady Georgiana’s conduct at the party the year before, when the earl’s daughter had spoken familiarly with all the servants—made friends with them, almost—and then appeared at the ball in a scandalously abbreviated costume. She had been Diana, goddess of the hunt, if Mrs. Sheffield’s memory served her, and that good lady was certain that no self-respecting goddess would ever have made an appearance in a robe that parted almost to the knee with every step she took.
Mr. Sheffield, for his part, didn’t share his wife’s disapprobation of revealing robes, and liked Georgiana very much.
“What are you planning for the day?” Georgiana asked them, between bites of kipper.
“We were just deciding that very thing,” said Henry Sheffield. “Several couples decided to take advantage of the fine weather to have a picnic at Linwood”—a large house with a lovely park about ten miles distant—“but Hermione and I thought we’d like to see the new pleasure grounds here before we wander farther afield.”
“I am entirely of your mind,” said Lady Georgiana. “Lady Loughlin kept me abreast of the construction, and I simply cannot wait to see them.” The Loughlins had spent the previous year transforming their park, and the results were the talk of horticultural England.
Mr. Sheffield was just about to invite her to join them to walk the grounds, and Mrs. Sheffield, seeing her husband’s intention, was trying to think of a way to head off the invitation, when a deep, gravelly voice came from the door. “I’d be happy to show them to you,” it said.
All eyes moved to the doorway of the breakfast room, which was almost filled by a very large man with dark eyes and a wide smile. He was dressed like a gentleman, but his sleeves were rolled up, his hair was shaggy, and his boots were splattered with mud, so the impression he gave was that of a laborer.
“Forgive me for interrupting your breakfast,” he said to the company as he helped himself to a piece of bread and slathered it with marmalade. “I heard you talking about the grounds and thought I should introduce myself. I’m Bruce Barnes.” He shook hands with Henry Sheffield and bowed to the ladies as the three of them introduced themselves in return.
They all knew his name, and even some of his history. He’d been born the son of the gardener of an extremely wealthy country squire, and had risen to become one of the foremost designers of estate grounds in all England. He’d shaken up his profession by breaking from the graveled walks and formal gardens of the past, and installing artificial ponds and intricate topiary in the parks of his clients. Although some of England’s oldest, most venerable clans would never countenance such modern innovations, Barnes had caught on with a smart set of rich families, and his services were in great demand.
“There are a few areas that aren’t quite finished,” Barnes told them. “We’d hoped to have everything completed for the masquerade, but the weather wasn’t cooperative. But if you’re willing to overlook a few bare spots, I think I can show you almost everything,” he said.
Lady Georgiana and Mr. Sheffield agreed readily, and Mrs. Sheffield couldn’t decline without seeming ungracious. The two women went upstairs for wraps, as there was a hint of a fall chill in the air, and they met Barnes and Mr. Sheffield in the foyer. The foursome set out for the grounds.
Penfield’s lands were extensive, and two hours later the group still hadn’t seen all of what Barnes had done. They’d seen how a field had been transformed into a lake, complete with an island and a flotilla of punts. They’d taken a few steps into a boxwood maze. They’d seen exotic plants from halfway around the world, and the modern greenhouses that made their cultivation possible. They’d seen hedges trained and trimmed into elephants, camels, and lions. And they’d seen peacocks. Hundreds of peacocks.
“Wherever did you get them all?” asked Mrs. Sheffield in frank amazement.
“I know a man in Dorset who breeds them for the purpose,” said Barnes. “There’s quite a bit of demand.”
“Aren’t they tropical birds?” asked Georgiana.
“They are. Over the winter, we’ll keep them indoors. We’ve built a pavilion for them over the hill south of the house.”
“A pavilion?” Georgiana couldn’t suppress a smile. “For peacocks?”
“A pavilion for peacocks,” Barnes said definitively, his smile matching her own. “Should you like to see it?”
“I most certainly should. I’ve never seen a peacock pavilion before.”
Barnes turned to the Sheffields. “Will you join us?” he asked.
Neither Mrs. Sheffield’s boots nor Mr. Sheffield’s constitution could manage the walk around the house and over the hill—it was over a mile—and they excused themselves and headed back to Penfield in search of a cup of tea.
For her part, Mrs. Sheffield was glad to have a reason to excuse herself. She prided herself on having an uncanny sense of the improper, and she had seen the glances that passed between Lady Georgiana and the man Mrs. Sheffield considered a glorified gardener.
“Did you see the way they were looking at each other?” she asked her husband as they made their way back to the house.
“No, my dear,” said Mr. Sheffield, suppressing a sigh, “I didn’t notice.”
Before she had been Mrs. Sheffield, his wife had been Miss Hermione Preston, a moderately pretty girl from a moderately prosperous but eminently respectable family. She had been unremarkable but for two things: a rectitude unusual in a girl so young, and the most astonishing breasts Mr. Sheffield had ever seen. He still remembered the way that even the best-tailored, most modest dress could barely contain them. Always there had been the luscious twin hillocks, with the tantalizing crevice in between, escaping from the confines of her bodice.
The rectitude, had it been fed by confidence and generosity, might have turned, in time, into the flexible backbone of a fine, upstanding woman. Starved by insecurity and petty jealousies, though, it had become a pinched and poor smallness of mind. Mr. Sheffield had often pondered the folly of marrying breasts without duly considering the woman to whom they were attached. Still, he was a cheerful and optimistic man, and was determined to make the best of it.
“I’m sure you’d like a cup of tea,” he said to his wife by way of distracting her from the iniquity that had gone on right under her nose.
“I would at that,” she said, and couldn’t help but think of those crumbly little scones with the raisins that Stevens, the Loughlins’ cook, invariably served with tea.
“Then let us go find some, shall we?” said Mr. Sheffield with a smile.
As the Sheffields went in search of their tea, Lady Georgiana and Bruce Barnes headed to the peacock pavilion. The two walked in silence, each noting the change in the atmosphere now that they were alone. When the Sheffields had been with them, Georgiana had assessed Barnes coolly, from the distance that the company of others always interposed between a man and a woman. The company had gone, and with it the distance, and she felt his presence in a new way.
She saw the pavilion as they crested the hill that hid it from the house. It was a big, square, low-ceilinged building nestled in a little dale. “We have to keep it warm in the winter,” Barnes explained, “so we sheltered it from the wind.”
Her mind hadn’t been on the peacocks for quite some time, and she just nodded rather stupidly. “I see,” she said.
Barnes looked at her a little sharply. The woman who’d sparkled all morning was now answering him in monosyllables. She seemed distracted.
She was distracted. She found this man profoundly alluring, and her mind was attempting to penetrate the fog of her physical attraction to him to try to decide what she wanted to do about it.
Barnes turned toward her and looked her straight in the eye for a long moment. “Would you like to see the inside?” he asked in a low voice.
She nodded again, not sure that she ought to go in, but also not sure that she ought not to. Although Barnes seemed a rough man beneath his gentlemanly veneer, Georgiana didn’t think there was any danger in him. She started down the hill, with Barnes close behind her.
The building had a double door in the center of the wall, and Barnes opened one side of it. Although the doorway itself was wide, when only one of the doors was opened, the space leading into the building was quite narrow. The gardener held the door open for Lady Georgiana to pass, but to walk in she would have to all but brush against him. She paused a moment but, having committed herself this far, she refused to be deterred. She walked past him, leaving as much space between them as she could without obviously avoiding the contact.
She felt her skirts brush his boots. She smelled his raw, earthen smell. She saw the large, calloused hand that held the door, and couldn’t help but imagine how it would feel on her skin, caressing her thigh, cupping her breast.
She walked into the building. She heard the door close behind her and stood for a moment recovering herself, letting her heartbeat slow and her eyes adjust to the relative dimness. As they did, she realized that she must be looking at the least remarkable building in all England. It was a large, empty space with four walls. It had a wooden floor, and a stove in the center. There were bales of straw piled up against one wall. And that was all there was.
My Lady's Pleasure Page 3