by Litte, Jane
“Nervous?” He reached for her hands and pulled her closer. She tried not to stare at the erection that reared between them.
“There is something you must know,” she said.
He quirked a dark brow.
“I’m not a virgin.”
There, it was out. But he said nothing, and she could not read his expression.
“I know this must disappoint you, but it was only once and I no longer care for him.”
“Are you pregnant?”
Her face heated. “No.”
“Then I am not . . . entirely displeased.”
“And you don’t wish to know more?”
He looked away. “I know enough. I would prefer to spend our wedding night on other things.”
Hugh must truly love her and trust her, to say that. Relief spiraled through her, heady, almost exciting. She wanted to throw her arms about him. “I shall be the best wife, I promise,” she said.
“You may begin by opening your wedding gifts.”
Two boxes lay on the bedside cupboard, wrapped and beribboned. Eagerly Theodora opened the smaller. It contained a glass bottle.
“Almond oil,” Hugh said, and removed the stopper before setting the bottle back on the cupboard. When she gave him a puzzled look, he added, “Unwrap the other.”
Thea did, and gasped. Inside the second box was a long piece of polished, pink marble shaped like a—a phallus.
“Do you like it?” Hugh’s voice was soft, warm.
What could she say? She stifled a nervous giggle. What did one say to a man who gave his bride a phallus on their wedding night?
“I bought it with you in mind, Thea.”
Her mouth went dry.
“Pick it up.”
The veined stone was heavy and cool against her warm skin. Her heart skittered. Was it meant to go inside her?
“What an innocent you are. There is more than one sort of virginity, you know.”
He withdrew the phallus from her hand. “Time enough for that later,” he said, placing it back in its box and setting it aside.
He took hold of her and kissed her, a long, drugging kiss. When he lifted his head away, she drew it back down. More kissing, and then Hugh lowered his lips to her sensitive neck. She was in need of breath when he said, “Let’s remove your nightdress.”
As he undid each button he kissed and tasted her spine. Theodora felt dizzy by the time she was bare. Hugh licked her ear. “Come, straddle me,” he whispered, and sat back on the bed. She complied.
“Did your lover teach you dirty words?”
She shook her head, feeling her cheeks burn.
“Touch my cock. Yes, that’s it there.”
His blood pulsed beneath the cock’s silky, hot skin. He was rosy with it, ready, so ready to couple with her.
“Now, I’m going to taste your nipple.” She shivered when he took it in his mouth. His hand slipped between her legs. “Ah, you’re already wet here. That’s good. Open your thighs further, love.”
His fingers were hot, long. “This is your pussy,” he said, sliding two inside her. “It’s where my cock goes, or the phallus.” He stroked away her fear of the phallus. “And here is your clitoris.” She gasped as he touched it. Martin had never . . .
“Would you like me to lick your clitoris, Thea?”
The very idea was depraved. He licked her neck, and she went even damper around his fingers. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Well, I won’t. Not today. But thank you for asking.”
The remark might have been meant to tease but it stung. Hugh inserted his fingers within her again and gently sucked a nipple so that the pain of her shame mingled with pleasure. Another finger circled her clitoris. “You’re awfully wet, Thea.” The pleasure built unbearably. “No, not yet,” he said, and his fingers slipped out, leaving behind an empty ache.
“Now,” he said, moving farther back on the bed and drawing her knees alongside him. “A man can fuck a woman this way.” She took his meaning as he guided his cock inside her. It felt exquisite to be stretched and filled. She craved more, but how could he move in this position?
Hugh gave her a pointed look. She was meant to do the moving. Her whole body scalding, she began to raise and lower herself on his cock. It was . . . mortifying . . . and yet . . . so satisfying. She was trembling, on the verge of climax, when he said, “That’s enough,” and lifted her off him.
“But . . .” Her pussy tightened vainly on nothing. “You haven’t spent.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry about me. I think you’re almost ready. But, Thea, you must tell me if at any point you want me to stop.”
Stop? She only wished him to continue!
“All right. Now, on your hands and knees. I promise I will not pull out before you come.”
Anger and embarrassment, as much as desire, heated her skin now. But she craved his cock inside her, so she followed his bidding.
From the periphery of her vision, she glimpsed him taking the phallus. Her breath went shallow. On all fours she could not see Hugh without looking back—or worse, down at herself, which she refused to do.
He tongued the cheeks of her bum. “Did I say I wouldn’t lick your clitoris? Pity.” But he fingered it lightly. “Ah, you’re pulsing with life, Thea.”
Life. Even in the midst of passion, the word hurt. All those people dead, at the bottom of the North Atlantic, and she was alive. Yet strangely, the pain of that knowledge made her pleasure more acute. She felt the same need that had led her to Martin’s bed, the need to affirm life.
Something cold, smooth, hard entered her. It was the phallus; it must be. Its girth and weight filled her, but they were not enough. “Hugh,” she said, begging, she didn’t know for what.
Oil dripped on her backside, and she was staggered to feel a finger probing her bum. Slowly he added a second finger, and then a third, while she struggled to comprehend her gladness. Relief or loss: she could not say which was stronger when the warmth of his fingers left her, but neither lasted, for then she felt his cock, not at the entrance of her pussy, but at that of her bum. Stunned, she hissed, but his left hand brushed her nipple, his right thrust the phallus, and she felt her body go supple with pleasure just as he entered that other opening. An imperative gripped her. She was desperate, desperate to be shagged in any way. I will not pull out, he had said, and she clung to that promise as she was doubly penetrated, doubly taken.
The strokes of the phallus gentled, taunting her.
“Do you know why I married you, Thea?”
“No,” she said. That much was suddenly obvious.
His cock went still while he rocked the phallus slowly inside her. The fragrance of almond oil filled the air.
“I married you because Martin Wilkes was determined to do so. He wanted your money and I couldn’t let him have it.”
A finger circled her clitoris. But her distress cleared the haze of pleasure.
“Why?”
“Because my cousin Cyril died for you and Wilkes. He might have survived the Titanic, had he not promised you he’d find Wilkes and bring him to the boat deck.”
Theodora had first met Hugh when she and her father had called on him to tell him how bravely Cyril had convinced her to get in the lifeboat. I will find Martin and see him out alive, Lady Theodora.
She’d been reunited with Martin aboard the Carpathia, but Cyril, who had given Martin his lifebelt, had been lost.
Had Cyril loved her?
“They were friends and business partners.”
“Yes, but Cyril had soured on Wilkes,” Hugh said, gently easing his cock in and out of her bum. “He wrote me of it, and of his feelings for you. ‘Minutes ago, when Titanic arrived in Cherbourg, Lady Theodora’s eyes lit. She robbed me of a heartbeat, I do believe.’ In the end, his feelings for you robbed him of many more.”
Pain stabbed her. She didn’t love Hugh, though she had hoped to, and she had fallen out of love with Martin when she’d realized her father was ri
ght, that it was only her family’s money he’d ever wanted. But to learn that Hugh too had only pretended to care for her, and that poor Cyril Darrow, drowned with over fifteen hundred others, truly had . . .
Hugh began to move faster inside her—inside her bum!—and pumped the phallus with his hand. Despite herself, despite the sorrow, his deception, everything, sensation brought her back to life. And it hurt, how it hurt, to feel the pleasure that encompassed her. “Come, Theodora,” he said, and flicked her clitoris, so that she couldn’t help but follow his command.
I was aware you were not a virgin, he’d said afterward. When he was smashed Wilkes boasted that he’d fucked you, so it’s just as well that you did not pretend.
Throughout the railway journey she made to London the following morning without her husband’s knowledge, those words lingered in her ears. She thought of them as she faced a brandy-soaked Martin, having barged past the servants into his smoking room.
“Lady Theo . . . dora,” Martin said when she’d finally finished heaping invectives. “Are you . . . pleased with Mr. Carter?” He leered at her. “I hear your husband has no regard for the proper way to fuck a gentlewoman. Has he buggered you yet?”
The hand she lifted to slap him was caught from the side. “He means to insult me, not you.”
Hugh. How long had he stood behind her? He must have entered the room silently. Odd, seeing him clothed, knowing now what lay beneath the worsted and cashmere. Her body heated in all the places where his hands, his mouth, his cock had been.
“I do adore my Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost,” he said outside Martin’s house. “Isn’t she a beauty? She made it easy to catch up to you once I realized you were bound to vent your fury on Wilkes.”
Now it was Hugh’s face she itched to slap.
“It isn’t worth it.” His expression sobered. Had her wordless departure the day after their wedding weighed on his conscience? “Wilkes certainly is not. But if you want a taste of revenge, I can help.”
“KEEP your voice low,” Hugh said. “You can remove your veil now. They can’t see us.”
It was nighttime. Her husband had brought Theodora to a brothel. They stood facing a large window in a dim, furnished passageway.
“How is that possible?”
“It’s a special mirror. So long as our corridor remains dark, and the rooms on the other side brightly lit, we can see them, but they see only their own reflections.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’ve been on the other side, love.”
How easily he called her “love,” when he did not love her. Despite the temptation to keep her veil, Theodora removed it. Better to amuse Hugh with the sight of her heated face than evince shyness.
On the glass’s opposite side, a young man sat on a bed while a woman wearing a gentleman’s lounge suit and bowler hat disrobed before him. She undulated as she unbuttoned her jacket. Waistcoat, bow tie, trousers, she discarded slowly, seductively. She smiled in Hugh and Theodora’s direction as though she knew she’d an audience, and it pleased her. When she was clad only in her bowler, she arched her breasts toward the young man.
From a drawer in a bedside cupboard, she withdrew a phallus. Unlike the veined marble piece Hugh had gifted Thea, this one was fashioned of brown leather. The woman caressed the man’s face with it, so that he flushed. Then, with a languid motion, she pointed the toes of her right foot and placed them between his thighs. Her knee thus lifted, she pushed the phallus into her exposed, pink pussy, and delicately moved it back and forth.
Liquid heat flooded Thea’s own pussy. She was conscious of its emptiness, and she craved her own leather phallus with which to fill it. Dismayed at her longing, she turned to Hugh. His breathing had been audible in her ear, but his face was composed.
“Lovely as she is, she isn’t what I brought you here to see.”
They moved down the dim corridor and approached another window. In the room beyond, two men lay nude in a bed on their sides, each facing the other’s cock. As Thea watched, one put his mouth to his fellow’s organ, and the other, his face twisting, followed suit. It had never occurred to Theodora that such an act was possible, and yet, there was a strange, stark beauty to the men and to the service they performed for each other with such concentration. They seemed to have something she hadn’t until this moment known to long for. The freedom each granted the other, their equality, and their complete acceptance of one another’s passion brought an unexpected ache to her heart.
“Stimulating, but that isn’t what I wanted to show you, either,” Hugh said.
He had to pull her from the sight and guide her before a third window. “Ah, here he is.” And Thea was shocked to see Martin. “I learned he was a customer here,” Hugh whispered in her ear. Martin lay naked, blindfolded, and bound with scarves to the posts of his bed. “Blindness can sensitize one, and helplessness frees one of inhibitions,” Hugh said. “Perhaps I’ll show you.”
Or perhaps, Thea thought, emboldened by all she had seen, I will show you. The notion of binding and blindfolding Hugh curled her toes and stiffened her nipples.
“Watch now,” said Hugh. A woman sat on a chair alongside Martin’s waist. She slipped a wide strip of leather with laces sewn to its ends around the base of Martin’s cock, then laced it tightly, so that the organ appeared to engorge further. Next she applied ointment from a small jar to his cock, and Martin groaned helplessly. Finally she took his cock in her hand, and began to milk it. Martin’s face reddened, and just as Thea thought he would spend his seed, the woman ceased her squeezing and lightly licked his cock.
“Please,” Martin called out, but the woman ignored his supplications.
“Does this satisfy you?” Hugh breathed into her ear.
Only three months before, Martin had broken her heart. He’d taken the virginity she’d foolishly offered him, and then, when she’d tested him at her father’s urging, telling him she would be disinherited if they married, he’d revealed he thought her worthless without her fortune. I wish you luck in finding a man who would take you now, he’d said. And Hugh had come along and offered for her, like a prince from a fairy tale, and her father had insisted she marry him.
Hugh and she had this much in common: both had longed for a pound of Martin’s flesh. She could never get all Martin owed her, but for boasting to Hugh that he’d slept with her, this was a perfect retribution. Martin would be mortified if he knew she watched him bound and tormented by a prostitute; it was as much a violation of his privacy as the one he’d perpetrated on hers.
She turned to Hugh. Martin had hurt her, and Hugh had comprehended her need to balance the scales better than she had herself. But Hugh had also brought her pain, had tormented her with pleasure. How to balance the scales with him?
“No,” she whispered back, “I’m not satisfied.”
One last look at Martin, his cock now being lightly grazed by the woman’s teeth, and she closed the mirrored window’s curtains.
A mahogany settee stood against the corridor’s other wall, and Theodora pushed Hugh’s chest so that he stumbled back toward its plush beige seat. Then she was on him, skirt and petticoat lifted, garters unfastened from corset and corset hem raised, straddling him as she had on their wedding night. She unbuttoned his trousers and pulled his swollen cock from his underlinens. Taking the moist, hot flesh in her right hand, she milked it as she’d seen the prostitute do. With her left hand, she teased the soft spheres that dangled below. Hugh gasped and struggled to keep his groans low, lest someone overhear them, but she would not allow him the dignity of silence. Her milking strokes grew more determined. “God in heaven,” Hugh said, unbuttoned the flap of her knickers, and pulled it forward and up. She nipped his ear, and lifted herself onto his engorged cock. “Christ,” he swore while she rode him. She did not slow till pleasure made his face go slack.
THE Silver Ghost embraced the road. To Thea’s left, trees blazing with autumn’s fire appeared to rush backward, bestowing the occasional
leaf on the occasional passerby. Only a few gray clouds drifted in an uncommonly blue sky. Ahead, the country lane stretched like a ribbon of possibilities.
It was a splendid day for riding in an open motorcar. Still, Thea was conscious of a churning at her center. She watched her husband’s sure hands on the steering wheel.
Last night, after they’d returned from the brothel to his London house, he had not sought her bed. She had lain alone, tossing and turning for want of him, tears of frustration forming in her eyes.
Behind his driving goggles, Hugh’s gray eyes now focused on the road back to his Berkshire manor. Why had he not come to her? She knew her fierceness at the brothel had aroused him. Had he deprived her to regain the upper hand?
“Tell me, Thea,” he said, still looking ahead, “did you miss me last night? Was there an emptiness between your thighs? Did you touch yourself and think of me?”
The bastard. Let him stew while waiting for an answer.
“Lift your skirts,” he added, not once glancing at her. “Unfasten your garters. I’ll touch you now.”
Shawls and rugs protected her from wind and dust; so did her hat and her veil. The road ahead was empty now, straight and flat enough that Hugh’s left palm would not be at the gearbox often. It could handle her heated pussy instead, beneath the rug on her lap.
But she could also refuse. You must tell me if at any point you want me to stop, he’d said on their wedding night, but his hands, his tongue, his cock, and his diabolical phallus had taken her past the point of saying any such thing. Even when he’d struck out with his cruel words, the pain had not been enough to jolt her into crying Stop. She’d been too hot and confused, and she suspected he’d intended that.
“Come, Thea,” he said now. “Let me satisfy you.”
It was the hoarse edge in his voice, as much as the words, that burned her to her toes and sent her trembling hands beneath the rug. She lifted and unclipped and unbuttoned her clothes, until she felt the motorcar’s leather seat kissing her moist flesh.