by Lena Dowling
‘You know, I believe the women are safe enough…’ Samuel said. ‘ A few more minutes and the dying light will force them to return to the farm, and given that they made it here under their own steam in the first place, I am sure there would be little harm in leaving them for a few moments alone to finish their...’ Already turning go before he saw any more, he struggled for an appropriate word.
‘Ablutions.’
By the time Colleen and Thea had ridden back to the farm the breeze had all but dried her hair and the wet shift she carried back and Colleen felt wonderfully refreshed.
When she returned the hut was in darkness, but Mr Biggs had left a couple of ragged towels and a candle burning for her on the porch. She smiled as she pulled off her gown, hugging it to her chest. She had been right to cling to him that day at The Factory. He was a fine man, good and thoughtful and he would make a wonderful father to her child; if only he would leave off with this ‘arrangement nonsense’ and come to her bed.
Pleasant as it was, she wasn’t sure how the meal would alter things between her and Samuel. She had made so many mistakes dropping the ends of words when Thea had told her not to, and mixing up the proper way of saying things, that it couldn’t have helped much in getting Mr Biggs to see her differently, but the swim had calmed her nerves, pushing her worries to the back of mind.
She took up one of the scrappy towels and used it to rub over her damp hair. It wasn’t yet pitch black but in unfamiliar surroundings the extra light to help her find her way through the cabin was welcome.
In the tiny room that was her bedroom, Colleen pulled back the bedclothes, blew out the candle, placed it down beside the pallet then flopped down. She wriggled her toes. The sheets were crisp and clean and smelled of soap. Last night the room had been too small and stuffy, but tonight, refreshed by the water, she felt she might drop off to sleep.
If only Nell were here to tell all about the delicious dinner and all the rest of it, but Nell’s work day would only be halfway through and God only knew what she was doing or being forced to do at that very moment. Snuggling deeper beneath the sheets she tried to block it all out, concentrating on feeling cool and clean and happy, having a full belly, and getting to bed at a reasonable hour without a single customer to trouble her.
She closed her eyes, but it was no good; it was as if the evening had splintered into bits and was whirling in and out of her head. She tossed and turned. She hugged her pillow making out like it was Nellie, but there was only the one, which left her lying uncomfortably flat.
She heaved in a breath, and squeezed the pillow tight against her chest until she thought she would burst.
What man, decent or not, wouldn’t begrudge feeding another man’s brat, wouldn’t take it out on the child, even if he never meant to? The thought slammed into her like the devil punching up out of the tick.
She couldn’t afford to be waiting even a single day longer for Samuel to come to her on his own.
She had to be in his bed.
Samuel was near dozing off as the door creaked open into the cottage. He pretended to be asleep, feigning a snore. Nevertheless he had opened his eyes just enough to watch Colleen glide through the cabin. The candle he had left out for her threw out enough light to see that she was completely naked. The perfect lines, the undulating curves of her body sent him rigid. He fervently prayed she would retire to her own room, then let out a breath of relief as she disappeared out into the scullery.
The next time Samuel woke it was dark and cold. One minute he was drifting off and the next he was aware of someone inching towards him.
Once he woke enough to regain his senses he knew it was her before she even spoke. Her natural perfume overwhelmed him — a mixture of soap, pressed linen and her own sweet feminine scent.
She was naked, laying right up against him.
Dear God.
He tried to sit up but it was as if his body refused to obey his mind’s commands and he lay unable to move, a crushing weight pinning him to the mattress.
‘Colleen. You mustn’t — ’
‘Shush.’
She turned back the sheet and cool wet hair brushed against him trailing down his torso, and over his cock like a teasing feather pulling him rigid. He gasped as her tongue slid over his tip, licking up the moisture that was gathering there a precursor to the desire building up, threatening to burst out of him.
He should put a stop to this.
Not wanting to shock her, or have her think less of him, he had never asked anything like this of his first wife.
He grasped a handful of bedclothes and let out an oath.
‘Colleen.’
She silenced him by taking her deeper into her mouth, the succulent wetness driving him mad as a battle geared up to rage inside him. Half of him wanting to restrain her and send her back to her own pallet, while the other half cried out to submit.
‘Colleen, I can’t.’
She released him and raised her head.
‘No, of course you can’t. It wouldn’t be right.’
She patted his thigh and he exhaled, letting go of the handful of sheeting he had gathered up in his fingers.
Thank God, she understood.
But instead of getting out of the bed as he had expected she shimmied forwards, her soft hair teasing over the tip of him.
‘You can’t. But I can.’
‘Colleen, no.’
But she already had a nipple between her thumb and forefinger flicking it backwards and forwards. Lowering herself down she returned him to her mouth, sending a searing heat directly to his cock, rendering him as incapable of resistance as if he had been bound at the hands and feet.
‘Hush now. It’s me wifely duty.’
A groan shuddered out of his body.
‘I promise it will be different with me, like you’re in a whole other place,’ she whispered as if she understood what had been holding him back.
And no sooner had she uttered the words, he was already there in that new place, the cautioning voice that had been holding him receding to the barest whisper.
Leaving only desire and need.
She found his other nipple with her teeth. Pleasure blasting through him, the sensation settled as an inevitability between his thighs. He managed to squeeze out another half-hearted, ‘No Colleen,’ as she shifted position again, but she ignored his plea, lowering herself onto him, writhing up and down, sending pleasure ricocheting out through his body.
He had nothing left in him to resist. It was as if she had him laid out on a fiery forge, molten with white heat. She hammered, millions of miniscule shards burning their way up through him until he yielded to the pleasure pounding through his body, pleasure transforming him from the shapeless and wanting to something entirely new.
When Colleen woke the next morning, Mr Biggs was gone.
Without his weight to counterbalance it, the mattress sank deeply beneath her in the middle, enveloping her in a delicious softness. What was it, she wondered? It certainly wasn’t the straw mattress she was used to.
Feathers. No, wool she thought, scrunching a hand into a spongy material beneath her without any quills.
A straw tick topped with a mattress made of wool, that was it.
She sighed the longest and deepest of sighs.
Heaven.
A whole night, in a proper bed with a man, without any demands.
She’d done it.
She’d gone to him.
He hadn’t chased her off as she was afraid he might, and then she had seen to him.
He’d come quickly and after that he had let her alone to sleep the whole night through.
If he never laid a hand on her again it wouldn’t matter.
The most important thing — the only thing that really mattered was done.
But at the thought of never lying with Mr Biggs again, she came over all cold and empty.
She had pushed her way into his bed because she needed to for the baby’s sake, but when sh
e laid hands on him she had felt something that she had never felt before.
At O’Shane’s she had looked through the customers. She had taught herself to do it to preserve her soul, and then, blind to what was happening, she imagined herself somewhere else far away until whatever the customer wanted was over, but with Samuel it had been different.
She had seen him from the very beginning — from the instant she had stared into those wonderful blue eyes that shimmered and sparkled like a mountain fed lake as the sun came up. Since then she had only seen more of him; his smooth hard body glistening with sweat as he worked at something that needed muscle, his face craggy and rough yet always ready with a smile and his strong arms, broad like iron bands on a manacle. Except this was a manacle she wanted.
She hadn’t just been going through the motions — a stroke here, a lick there, a few pretend moans at the right moment to get the punter to come quick. It was like something took hold of her and made everything urgent, made her desperate to touch him and have him inside her.
It had been the strangest feeling, like being swept away on a wave.
Chapter 11
‘I’m done with sleepin’ out in the scullery,’ Colleen said catching another thread without even looking up from the piece of linen she was hemming, making out like it was nothing, even though she had been bursting to tell Thea ever since she woke up.
She had been in a good mood all morning and not just because of what had happened with Mr Biggs, although that had definitely left her in a good humour — so much so she had even broken into song and kicked up a little jig in the cabin when no one was looking.
But more than that, it was as if her whole life had changed and none of what had happened at O’Shane’s mattered anymore.
It was like turning over a new page of a book to find it all clean and shiny without any writing on or black splotches of ink.
Thea tucked her needle in to the fabric and looked up at her.
‘I just knew last night would do the trick.’
‘What about last night?’
Colleen made out she was concentrating hard on picking another thread out of the warp, so she wasn’t tempted to pull a face. Thea’s dinner had precious little to do with what had happened — that had all been down to her, giving up waiting on Mr Biggs and taking matters into her own hands.
‘The swimming, of course, silly.’
Colleen released the thread she had picked out and raised an eyebrow in Thea’s direction, who smiled cheekily back at her.
‘Weren’t we just tryin’ to make Mr Biggs look at me like proper lady-wife material. What did the swimming after have to do with it?’
‘Well,’ Thea said looking back over her shoulder. ‘James says it puts me in the mood, and he always comes along as well to ‘protect my modesty’ as he calls it and often we don’t even make it home before my modesty gets compromised anyway.’
Colleen clasped her hand to her own lips as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had just heard had come out of a real lady’s mouth and not her own.
‘God, Thea.’
‘That’s what James is usually saying by the end of it.’
Colleen released her hand to allow for the gasp that followed.
‘Thea, you are shocking.’
‘I can be.’ Thea laughed. ‘But it does make life so much more agreeable, don’t you think?’
Colleen and Nellie hated the toffs. After what Lady Mellwood had done to them neither one of them would have thrown so much as a bucket of water to a lady if her house was on fire.
Colleen hadn’t wanted to, but it was impossible not to like Thea, for all her mad ideas.
She was a strange one — not like a real lady at all. When it came down to it her ladyship just wasn’t ladyship material.
The haymaking gang were making expert work of the grass with their scythes, slashing through the grass at pace. Due to his strength Samuel could keep up, but if he had been able to master the right technique he would have outstripped even the fastest convict in the group.
Despite what James had said, he didn’t intend to be the type of farm manager who merely supervised while others toiled. Not at first anyway. If he was going to make a good fist of managing the property, he needed to understand the business of farming from the ground up.
And besides, he needed the exercise — something sufficiently brutal and punishing that it would take his mind of what he had gone and done the night before.
He had learned on the ship that the fastest way to forget was to keep busy, preferably heavy burdensome tasks that drained the body and the mind, leaving only exhaustion in their wake and no room for mithering about what was wrong. This morning he was relying on that discovery more than ever.
Not that he had done anything more with Colleen than exercise his God given rights as a husband, but waking up in the harsh light of day it was something he didn’t dare think about.
To begin with the satisfying hiss as the implement sliced through the dry growth combined with the application of brute force had the benefit of dispersing both the nervous energy and more disturbing memories that had built up since he woke with Colleen beside him.
But as he tried hard to concentrate only on the next clump in front of him, he realised it was hopeless.
Colleen was still asleep when he woke, the sheet down around her hips treating him to a broad daylight view of her gorgeous full breasts peeking out from under a luxurious swathe of her locks. It was all he could do not to draw her hair away and take one in his mouth.
Damn it to hell.
He paused to lean against the handle of the scythe with one hand, jamming his free hand into a fist, knocking it against his forehead.
He had been a fool allowing himself to be led by his cock. The kiss was one thing — from that he might have recovered things back to what they were; what they should have been. But now — there was no going back from this. A few seconds of pleasure burying himself between her legs and he had complicated what should have been a straightforward mutual exchange of benefits. What would she want now in return for sexual favours: affection, fondness, God forbid, love even?
Last night he had let Amelia down every bit as badly as if he had pissed on her grave.
Colleen had done things…things he realised now he’d been missing. It was as if Amelia had fallen short somehow, when she had never refused him — sacrificed everything for him.
Utterly disgusted he stepped forward and lunged at a particularly thick stand of grass that was too dense for his rapidly blunting scythe. The brute force he had applied to a seemingly immovable object had the effect of knocking his legs out from beneath him. He landed up on his back, barely avoiding the scythe ricocheting back into him as it became impaled in the thatch of grass that had been his undoing in the first place.
‘Hey up, the overseer’s on his back,’ called one of the convicts.
‘On his back? I thought that was more Mrs Biggs style,’ said another.
Already out of sorts, and humiliated by the spectacular lack of co-ordination that had seen him landing on his backside, Biggs staggered to his feet and lunged for the smugly grinning convict who had made the comment. Grasping him around the throat he tackled the man to the ground, throttling him, wringing out gasping apologies.
As soon as he left the cabin, the thought of what Colleen had been started out as a minor irritation working up to stabbing him like a twisting bayonet to the guts. It hadn’t mattered to him that Colleen was a prostitute before, he hadn’t even thought about it properly. But that was before he had gone and let her perform the services of a whore on him. Now that he had, he couldn’t get the fact of her former occupation out of his mind.
He was vaguely conscious that a familiar voice was yelling at him and then shocked by the pallor of the struggling man, who was taking on a bluish tinge, he gave him one final shove against the windpipe before releasing his grip and rolling off him.
‘Get up.’ Samuel barked.
But the man lay prone, gasping for breath clutching at his throat, unwilling or incapable of standing up. Samuel scrambled back over taking him by the scruff ready to haul him up by the collar when three white socks on the forelocks of James’ stallion trotted into view.
Releasing the man, Samuel staggered to his feet to address his employer.
‘One more word out of that filthy blackguard and I’ll not only have him flogged, I’ll gladly do it myself.’
‘No, I’ll deal with this, Samuel, lest you kill him and end up in chains yourself, but rest assured he’ll be suitably punished. I don’t have to ask to know that you wouldn’t have assaulted a man without just cause or intolerable provocation.’
‘We were only having a joke with him about his wife and he took it all wrong.’ The convict who had started the whole affair by drawing attention to Samuel’s fall said, trying to save the other man’s hide.
‘Ahh,’ James said, the single exclamation communicating that he understood well enough what must have been said. ‘There’ll be no joking about Mrs Biggs if you know what’s good for you. So put your own backs into it, men, or you’ll be joining your friend in the punishment cells,’ James said.
James rode up alongside the convict, jabbing him in the spine with his whip.
‘Start walking towards the road. I’ll take you back to your barracks myself, and unless you want to be mown down don’t even think about running.’
The man put one foot in front of the other and once he was far enough away to be out of hearing Samuel shook his head and said, ‘I’m sorry you had to witness that, James.’
‘Don’t apologise. You were hardly in the wrong. You acted to defend your wife’s virtue. No one could fault a man for that.’
Samuel grimaced at James’ affirmation of his belief in him. The man he had once been would never have agreed that the wretched convict’s jibe justified his actions.
He shook his head. He wasn’t that man anymore — a man who held himself in, bottled everything up. After last night everything had changed.
James incentivised the horse on with a spur and the animal trotted forwards as Samuel sank back down onto the grass watching both James and the convict disappear behind a stand of gum trees.