by Hope Tarr
His head disappeared between her thighs. He spread her inner lips and covered her with his mouth, sending pleasure pouring through her. She worked hard fingers through his sandy-brown locks, raking his scalp with her nails and lifting to meet his mouth. He teased her with the tip of his tongue, striking the sensitive spot again and again, raising the steady desire she’d endured all day to a scalding, spiky mad ache.
The orgasm struck—fast, hard and furious. Lost to it, Bea shook, she shivered. She threw back her head and howled. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have screamed. At last she stopped shaking and opened her eyes. Ralph stood over her, a palm braced on either side of the washstand, blood and sweat streaking one side of his face.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“My turn.” He lifted her off the desk, set her on her feet and spun her about. “Bend over.”
Facing away from him, she sprawled over the table, her skirts riding her waist. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, pushed it to the side and lightly bit into the back of her bared neck. “A whore in the bedroom,” he whispered, his breath striking her nape.
Beatrice moaned. Though she’d come mere moments ago, she wanted him again. More than wanted, she needed him. She shifted to look back over her shoulder. His trouser flap hung open and he was rolling a prophylactic onto his darkly engorged, heavily swollen shaft. Watching him, she felt her mouth water and her sex cream. She licked her lips, remembering how good he’d tasted and the edgy thrill of taking all that maleness into her mouth.
Despite his command to stay as she was, she was almost moved to turn about and repeat the experience when “it” struck her. He’d known. Ralph must have known or at least strongly suspected that the Ben-Wa balls would drive her to seek him out. Not even a rogue like Ralph Sylvester went about his workday with prophylactics in his pocket. He’d manipulated—no, tortured her all day, and judging from his smug smile he was abundantly gratified by her predictable response. It was yet another reason to hate him. And she would hate him, deeply and darkly—later.
She felt him rubbing his cock head along her nether lips and pleasure poured through her. Into her ear, he whispered, “You’ll be wasted on that milksop fiancé of yours, you know that, don’t you? You can give him all the lessons you will, assuming he accepts them, and still he’ll not know what to do with you.”
Bea swallowed a moan, her hands flexing atop the table. “You ought not to speak of him so.”
She wished he would not speak of Mr. Billingsby at all. As much as she willed herself to hold on to the notion that their lessons were as much for her fiancé’s future benefit as hers, like a fist striking glass, this current coupling shattered that illusion.
He anchored hard hands to her hips and entered her in a single, blinding thrust. Nothing, absolutely nothing in Bea’s life before now had ever come close to hurting so very good. She moaned and raked her nails over her breasts. Even through the heavy corseting, she could feel her nipples swelling.
He drew back and entered her again. This time the force slammed her hard against the marble. She caught herself on her forearms. She would bear bruises on the morrow, maybe as soon as that night. Bruises she would wear on the train back to London. Bruises she might well find herself having to explain on her wedding night. Bruises that, regardless, she would weep to see fade.
Buried deeply inside her, he reached around the front of her, banding an arm about her breasts. “Will he be able to give you this, Beatrice? Will he?”
He rotated his hips and flexed from side-to-side inside her. Perspiration broke out on her brow. “No, he bloody well won’t. No one will ever again, no one but you!”
He pulled out and thrust again. At the same time, he reached around to her front and found her clit with his fingers.
Bea spasmed so sharply she couldn’t be sure if what she felt was pleasure or pain. Like a crystal vase she’d accidentally dropped as a child, she shattered, myriad glittering, sharp-edged pieces that could never again come together as a whole. Damp and weak-kneed, she sagged against the slab.
Hands, gentle once more, smoothed her skirts back down, picked her up, and sat her gently upon the stand. “Have one of the maids draw you a hot bath.” Ralph finished buttoning his trousers and turned to go.
“Shall I still come to you tonight?” she asked. Her body now sated, she found she hated herself far more than him.
He turned back long enough to nod. “Tonight at nine, I shall expect you.”
He hesitated and then reached inside his pocket. Drawing out the handkerchief, he dropped the Ben-Wa balls into her lap.
LYING TOGETHER IN Ralph’s bed later that night, Beatrice traced the black bird tattoo banding his bicep with a single softly stroking finger. “This is nice,” she said, breaking their companionable silence.
Ralph couldn’t say how long they’d lain together like that, the only sounds in the chamber those of the ticking clock and their collective breathing, but he agreed. It was nice. Unlike his past lovers, Beatrice showed no tendency to fill up the void with chatter. In such brief, lovely moments, he need only concentrate on the sunshine clean scent of her, the satiny smoothness of her skin, and the sensation of her breath striking the side of his neck. At such times, it was easy enough to forget they were playing a game, a match in which more and more of late, master and pupil seemed to be pitted against one another. Still, despite what he’d earlier said, hating her was the very farthest thought from his mind.
“Only you’re hot as a baker’s oven,” she added with a laugh, flopping onto her back. Only then was he aware that their bare skin had been sticking.
He turned on his side to look at her. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d ever been within a stone’s throw of an oven of any sort.”
She swept a hand through her tangled hair, the very picture of unstudied beauty. Mussed, he decided, was how he liked her best. “You’d be surprised. Kate and I took on a great many tasks once the servants were let go. The only difference was Kate was actually good at them. I’m afraid I burned as many fingers as I did pies.”
He doubted she’d ever known what it was like to go to bed hungry. Still, her circumstances had been strikingly mean for an earl’s daughter, an aspect of her history he tended to forget.
He lifted her slender hand and carried it to his lips, the white flesh smooth and flawless as a newborn’s. “You seem to have recovered.” Turning it over, he made a show of examining the palm and digits and sprinkling kisses across the tips.
“Fortunately, Aunt Lavinia employs a full kitchen staff, otherwise I’d be going about in white gloves whether I wished to or not.”
He summoned a smile, though the mention of her London life blunted his good humor. Not because he begrudged her a past there—God knew he certainly had one—but because he was both jealous and sad that his birthplace would be the backdrop for her future, a future that didn’t include him.
Stretching like a cat, she kicked one leg free from the covers. Sliding his gaze down her dimpled knee and shapely calf, he focused on her slender foot. The temptation to suck on those perfectly tapered, perfectly pink toes decided it. She would stay for another hour—at the least.
She rolled back his way and returned her attention to his tattoo. “This is a most unique marking.”
He shrugged. “Hardly unique. Rourke has the same. We all do.”
“We?” Her gaze edged upward to his face.
“Black’s Boys, they called us, after our leader, Johnnie Black.”
“You were in a street gang, then?”
“More like a ring for…thieving. Johnnie ran the flash house where we all lived. His ruse wasn’t especially novel, but it was tried-and-true. He’d scour the streets for castoff boys such as Rourke and I who’d nowhere to go and next to nothing to lose and bring us back to his rookery.”
Blue eyes widened. “And you followed him?”
He shrugged. “Johnnie was a smooth talker and his dandified if not exactly clean appearance placed
him above the typical street tough. Once he brought you back, he baited the hook with all manner of fancy fare—roast goose sizzling on its spit, feathery light pasty pies, and sausages as thick as a man’s wrist. To have known hunger, gnawing, belly-bloating hunger, and suddenly be presented with such bounty can be as drugging as opium or gin. A few weeks in, though, life altered considerably. The fine fare fell off to gruel twice daily with the occasional roasted potato tossed in. If you fancied meat, you’d best be prepared to steal it. On top of our board, we each had to steal enough to make our weekly footing.”
“Your…footing?”
Her widened eyes were his wakeup call, reminding him how easily, too easily, he could slip back into the telltale street cant. Slippage meant he was letting down his guard. At one time, that would have been a dangerous—deadly—mistake. It was dangerous still only not to his physical survival so much as his heart.
He found his voice and explained, “Our keep, our rent if you will.”
Puzzlement furrowed her brow, and he had to hold back from reaching over and smoothing the tiny folds. “How can there be rent set upon an abandoned building?”
Until now he’d been in danger of forgetting what an innocent she yet was. Despite the drunkard gamester of a father and the want of any mother save her sister, she’d still grown up pampered as a princess. She was a princess still. And he was? If not a pauper, then certainly a rogue, one more refined than reformed. The patina of civilization he’d acquired in no way altered the baseness of his birth, the baseness inherent to the man he was still and always would be: son of a whore, card sharp and thief. Of all the precious things he’d taken in his time, Beatrice Lindsey’s maidenhead would stand as his chief crime, he was sure of it. Breaching her hymen was bad enough of him. At the very least he could leave her with a few intact illusions.
He hesitated, unsure of how much more, if anything, to say. “Johnnie may not have owned the rookery in the sense of possessing a deed writ upon paper, yet that crumbling, stinking sinkhole of buildings belonged to him nonetheless, as did we. We all had specialties. Mine were picking pockets and running street scams.”
“What sort of scams?”
He cast his thoughts back to those bygone days. He’d used to miss them—the danger, the thrills—but he realized he didn’t, not anymore.
“One of my most successful ones was to pretend to be a foreign visitor who’d lost his way and his wallet. I’d distract the mark with my babbling long enough to pinch his purse.”
Thinking back to all the men and women he’d duped over the years, he’d be hard-pressed to name a greater fool than he was. Only a fool would live like a monk for nine months, pining for a woman who would never condescend to take either his ring or his very common name.
“You make it sound like a game.” Her tone suggested disapproval, but fascination, too.
“It was a game, a game with high stakes—life and death, freedom or capture—so I learned to play it sublimely.”
Lying was second nature to him, sex his forte. He was a natural mimic, a born actor. He’d played so many parts, he sometimes forgot who he was.
“Have a listen to this. Je suis enchanté de faire votre connaissance, mademoiselle.”
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, as well,” she said, her expression transformed into one of surprised delight. “Why, Ralph, what a dark horse you are. I didn’t know you spoke French.”
He grinned. “I don’t.” He was showing off for the girl and having too bloody much fun to care that she was only his for another few days. He followed with stock phrases in German, Russian and finally top-drawer English, his heart singing when she giggled and clapped her hands. “Britannia’s plum-in-the-mouth dialect isn’t really different from street cant, you see. It’s only another accent to be studied and mimicked.”
“What of Rourke? What was his specialty?”
“Rourke was The Brawn. Even as a lad, he was a scrapper with fists like hams and a fury like fuel oil on the receiving end of a lit match. That temper of his could ignite whenever you needed it as well as when you didn’t. One little spark was all that was wanted and then he was off. You couldn’t ask to have a better lad at your back. But pity you if you saw those fists flying at your face. If you did, they would be the last you saw for a week at least.” He chuckled at one of his few happy memories.
“And you? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You were The Brains.”
He held up a hand and fluttered his fingers. “I was what our leader called The Touch.” He sent his two right fingers walking atop the covers toward her, taking the opportunity to tease the tips of her sheet-covered breasts.
She giggled and batted his hands away. “That tickles,” she protested though her eyes told him she liked it. Ralph liked it, too.
“A light, knowing touch seasoned with a whit of patience has always served me well.”
All at once, the mood between them shifted, the teasing sense of fun falling away. Ralph swallowed hard, wanting her yet again.
He slid a hand beneath the sheet and found her breast. “Shall it serve me again, Beatrice?”
She covered his hand with her slender one and urged him closer. “Yes, dear Lord, yes.”
5
Lesson Five
“Those things that increase passion should be done first, and those for amusement should be done afterward.”
—The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
“HAVE YOU KEPT UP with the riding?” Ralph asked of Bea the following morning at breakfast, more for something to say than from any great curiosity. He was curious, he supposed, but only mildly so. Queer, really, how once they stepped outside his bedchamber, he lost any presumption to confidence with her.
She hesitated, looking around though they alone occupied the room. Rourke had taken an early train into Edinburgh and Kate, he suspected, was weathering a rough bout of morning sickness in her room. Though she never complained, the last time Ralph had come upon her unexpectedly in the solarium, her face had rivaled the potted palm for green.
“Not really,” Bea said at length, toying with the toast upon her plate.
A stint racing ponies at Astley’s Amphitheatre had transformed Ralph into a formidable equestrian. Years later, he rode as well as any country gentleman. In contrast, Bea’s father’s selling off his stable, including Princess, had left his youngest daughter little opportunity to ride.
“Fancy a lesson?” he found himself asking whether from pity or selfishness or both he could not be sure.
Blue eyes flashed open wide. “Now?”
“Why not?”
Considering what he’d so far taught her these past days behind those proverbial closed doors, a riding lesson, even one sans chaperone which might or might not end in sex, seemed positively wholesome—and yet infinitely more intimate.
Reserved in public as she was, in private she had any number of clever to witty things to say. He fancied or at least he hoped that must mean she felt at ease with him. Beyond what they did together in bed, he genuinely enjoyed being with her.
How did one go about the business of living when living wasn’t a business at all? How was one to act if not running some sort of scam, playing some manner of game? When it came to normal life, Ralph privately admitted he was the one in need of tutoring.
Turning over her spoon, she shook her head. “I shouldn’t wish to shame myself.”
It occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one of them to feel a fish out of water beyond his bedroom. The epiphany restored his confidence and fueled his determination to see her in the saddle again.
“It would be but the two of us.”
“Are you quite certain you have the time?”
For once the truth was his friend. “Ever since Rourke wed your sister, the household runs like a well-oiled machine. What duties I still retain leave me ample time to be at my liberty.”
In the end she capitulated. The day was fine, sunny and warm with a hint of autumn crispness. The sky ab
ove them was near cloudless, an almost perfect cerulean canopy. What few scattered clouds were present appeared outlined by a dramatic golden light. Walking their horses up the heather-covered hillside, Ralph found himself on the brink of believing his own lies—that they were an ordinary couple in love, that there would be no need to say goodbye at the end of the week or indeed ever, that he had the rest of their lives to make her happy outside of bed as well as in it.
Cresting the hilltop, they reined in to look onto the valley below, the ramparts of Rourke’s castle barely visible. Ralph turned to Beatrice, pleased to find her holding the looped reins lightly yet firmly as he’d advised.
Intercepting his gaze, she smiled. “You’re a very good teacher.” Wearing a riding habit of deep emerald-colored velvet borrowed from her sister, she looked very fine, a natural horsewoman as well as a natural beauty.
“You’re a most apt pupil.” Grinning, he added, “I marvel that after yesterday you can sit sidesaddle with such ease.”
She blushed and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean in that way.”
But Ralph had. He liked embarrassing her almost as much as he did pleasuring her. Indeed, the two seemed to go hand-in-hand.
“I trust I didn’t hurt you? If I ever do, you’ve only to say.”
She stared down at the horn of her saddle. “People have treated me with kid gloves all my days. I suspect my future husband will follow suit, not because he is unkind or unfeeling, but because he knows no other way. No matter what wonders I learn this week, he’ll likely visit me nightly until I’m breeding, and then spend the majority of our marriage at his club. But I have to at least try. I don’t want that to be all I know of intercourse. I want to know something more than that, something finer and grander. I want to know what it is to be with a man who wants me and…and I him.”
Despite the sad little scenario she painted, Ralph’s heart soared. Whether she realized it or not, Beatrice Lindsey had just admitted she saw him as something more than a plaything. Beyond whatever tricks he might teach her, she wanted him. The unexpected admission caught him off guard, prompting him to make one of his own.