A Taste of Honey

by Rose Lerner

  He could touch any part of her he’d a mind to, could set her up on the counter and slide right in with nothing in the way.

  Sweat beaded on her forehead. A drop trailed down her neck and between her breasts, tracing a red crease from a seam of her corset. He licked it up, salt and skin on his tongue, breathing in her heat.

  She took a chip of ice from her bowl and ran it across her forehead, down her neck and then—she hesitated ever so slightly—around her left breast. Her lips parted on a sigh.

  Robert heaved her onto the counter and spread her thighs, taking himself in hand. She was visibly slick with arousal. He waited for her nod and drove into her at once.

  The ice clattered to the floor. She was so hot, the hottest thing in summer, her cunny’s grip tight and yielding. He’d ought to pick up the ice before one of them slipped in the puddle, but he felt for it with his foot and kicked it across the kitchen.

  He guided her back until she rested on her elbows and he could watch her breasts bounce lewdly and her arse slide on the counter with every thrust. Her head fell back, loose locks of hair swaying. He had never dreamed what this would be like, to see his effect on a woman in that undeniable movement. Already he could feel his pleasure about to peak.

  “I’m sorry it’s so quick,” he got out. “Let me rest a moment, and I’ll make it up to you.”

  She laid a hand flat on his stomach. He was confused at first, and then it struck him that she could feel his muscles tense with each thrust. Her fingers curled a little, and her eyelids drooped in satisfaction.

  He spent, watching himself pump helplessly into her until the pleasure ebbed, and then a little longer. She made a small noise of disappointment when he stopped.

  Robert shut his eyes. Her hips filled his hands, her cunt held his cock, but he couldn’t see her. He breathed until he felt less wild.

  Opening his eyes, he reached for the bowl of ice.

  * * *

  It was hot in the kitchen, and Betsy was sweating with exertion and lust. When Mr. Moon slid a bit of ice along her collarbone, it was a bright pure shock, balanced on the knife-edge between Please don’t and Please don’t stop.

  The ice slid down her breastbone and made a great swoop over her stomach. She gasped and shivered violently.

  She wanted to watch, but it was even better to close her eyes and follow the progress of that patch of cold, now spiraling ever so deliberately up her right breast. She held her breath, bracing herself as he rubbed the ice directly on her nipple. But instead of stinging, it created undiluted sensation, the slippery ice seamlessly arousing every point on her skin one after the other.

  His cock was slipping out of her. She wanted him back, or his fingers, or—a piece of ice? Could she bear it?

  Suddenly a second piece of ice curled up her right breast. Her nipples were twin points of yearning, stabbing through her, transfixing her. Her hips jerked, and then his hot mouth closed over one icy peak.

  She screamed.

  He drew back. “Did I—is it not comfortable?”

  She squeezed her eyes tighter shut and shook her head, reaching out blindly. He made a pleased noise, and then there was liquid heat on her breast again.

  Mr. Moon’s tongue followed ice across her heated skin—arms and hips and inner thighs—hot and cold, soothing and agitating, until she no longer had the strength to do anything but lay on the counter, wood against her back, gasping for breath.

  Then, finally, he slid a piece of ice straight down her stomach to where he’d put his mouth yesterday.

  That did hurt, the skin there so thin and sensitive that it shrank back desperately. She moaned as icy water dripped down her slit, melted by her heat. Did she want him to stop?

  The ice withdrew. She heard it clinking against his teeth, and his knees settling on the floor. She trembled, legs spread wide, until he licked her, his mouth cool and hot by turns.

  “Put—put your fingers in me,” she begged, tongue clumsy in her mouth.

  He slid one in, tentatively, and then another. His fingertips were ice-cold too.

  This was the best refuge from summer she’d ever dreamed of. She’d never dreamed anything so glorious.

  She remembered suddenly how unsure he always was. She ought to encourage him. But could she really—really talk to him while he was licking at her cunny and his fingers were curling deep inside her?

  “This is better than eating ices,” she said shakily. Her cool breasts basked in the warm air.

  He rubbed her with a cold thumb. “Not better than my ices, I hope.”

  She tried to compare, but imagining eating one of his ices, sweet peaches and cream running down her throat—it overwhelmed her. It was too much, too much of him. There was only one thing she wanted to say right now, three short words, and he wouldn’t like them. They would sound like a responsibility.

  “Nothing’s better than your ices,” she told him unevenly, since he wanted to hear it. “Your ices make angels covetous.”

  His fingers twisted. Betsy moaned, pliable in his hands as a bowl of sugar paste. There was no being in this world or the next that wouldn’t covet this. She floated, grasping for something solid, and pleasure wrapped its bright wings around her.

  Ecstasy drained away, leaving her naked and sweaty on a kitchen counter. She never wanted to move again, but there was work to be done and she must look depraved. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

  Mr. Moon beamed down at her, running a finger proudly along her hip the way he sometimes did with the cakes when they came out especially puffed and golden. He was naked too, lean and long, and it made her so very happy to sit up and lay her hand on his bare skin, pull him towards her and kiss his shoulder. Happy and afraid.

  One week, she’d promised herself. Five days left of it. Could she bear to only have five more days of this?

  He liked her, didn’t he? Surely a man couldn’t make a girl feel this way if he didn’t like her dreadfully. He wouldn’t look at her like that.

  He hesitated, hovering close. Pleasuring her had made him hard again. “May I…? One more time, before we…?”

  Betsy nodded, sliding to the edge of the table to welcome him in.

  A week couldn’t be enough for him either. He’d want forever. He would.

  Chapter 4:

  Friday

  Robert went over his carefully planned schedule again. Today was Friday. If they picked all the berries and made the sugar-of-roses figures for the landscape today, and tomorrow they candied the rose petals…

  Betsy came in with her usual cheery greeting. Robert wanted her at once, blood rushing to his cock.

  Was it her usual cheery greeting? Or was there something self-conscious in her smile? They had been so comfortable together before.

  He smiled back as best he could and bent his head over his list. “We’ve got to find folk to help us Tuesday. You and me can’t possibly churn that many ices ourselves.”

  “How many sabotieres can we get our hands on?” she asked. Robert only owned two of the small ice makers.

  “Five.” Even with five, it would be hard to churn enough ice in time, but he could think of nowhere to beg one that he hadn’t already begged.

  Betsy frowned. He wanted to trace the lovely crease in her forehead with his fingers. “I’ll ask Jemima if she can get the afternoon free,” she said. “And I think my mother and sister can come. If not, I’ll find people.”

  Robert had come to Lively St. Lemeston for professional reasons: because it was the nearest market town, because it was big enough to support the sort of shop he wanted, because his patroness Lady Tassell had a political interest here and agreed to help him if she could count on his vote when he became a freeman of the borough. But he’d thought it would become home.

  Yet after eenamost a year and a half, he had no one here he could ask for help. With the Honey Moon occupying his whole attention, he’d made few friends. No friends. Just Betsy.

  He supposed the Dymonds were friends after a fashio
n. But he couldn’t bring a woman he’d hoped to marry into the kitchen, now he and Betsy were—entangled. Besides, he already owed the couple far more money than he ever expected to repay.

  They didn’t expect it either, which was worse. He’d meant their wedding cake to be a gift, and then he’d taken the coins they pressed into his hands, because his credit was running out again with the milkwoman. Every time he saw them he felt ashamed.

  He could ask his old friends from Runford to come; it was only a drive of an hour or two. But then they’d see how near he was to failing, after he’d told them all his hopes for the shop.

  “Thank you,” Robert said gruffly, pulling pails and flat crates from under his worktable. “Did you bring gloves?”

  She twisted so he could see them tucked into her apron strings. Despite the heat she wore a long-sleeved dress, old and stained, to ward off raspberry thorns.

  He patted his purse nervously. “I’ve rented a cart, and then we can drive to Wheatcroft and buy our pineapples from his lordship’s greenhouse.”

  Lord Wheatcroft was young and kindhearted and might have let him buy on tick, but the Wheatcrofts were the Tassells’ political archrivals, and Robert thought it best not to owe the baron a debt.

  This would be the last of his ready money.

  * * *

  “I can’t reach!” Betsy complained, laughing. “Ow!”

  She was just around a bend in the path, hidden from sight by the same trees and tall raspberry bushes that concealed the River Arun, rushing along a few yards away. Shielding his face, Robert followed her voice around the bend and through a narrow gap in the bushes. He emerged in a small clearing.

  The bushes lining the path were picked over, but fat red berries ringed the clearing. Betsy stood on tiptoe, trying to reach a cluster. He plucked them for her, dropping them one by one into her pail.

  Taking off his glove, Robert fed her the last one, and then couldn’t draw away his hand. Tracing her lower lip, he slid his finger into her mouth.

  She closed her lips around it, sucking, and then pulled away with a squeaking little pop. Her tongue was soft.

  He wanted to put his cock in her mouth.

  Could he ask for that? Had she done it before, with somebody else? This was all a revelation to him, but maybe to her it was nothing out of the common way.

  She said bedding you was better than eating ices.

  Ices were near a religion to him, but even Robert knew it would be daft to take that as any kind of declaration. He fed her another berry.

  “Mmm.” Her smile was an invitation. “This is a nice spot for our luncheon, don’t you think?”

  “I—” He flushed. “Yes.”

  Betsy’s eyes sparkled with mischief, as if she knew he’d not been thinking of luncheon. “I’ll fetch it from the cart.”

  She returned with their basket and an ancient bedsheet, which she spread on the ground. “Would you think me very wicked if I took off my bonnet?”

  “Ever so wicked.”

  She laughed, setting the bonnet down with her gloves. Dappled sunlight snuggled up to her like a lover, making bright spots in her yellow hair and a sunny circle the size of a farthing on one striped shoulder. He felt suddenly as if touching her wouldn’t sate his hunger, any more than eating sweets when you craved salty. He wanted something else from her.

  “When we were small I’d take Nan raspberry picking to get her out of Mum’s hair. We’d sell the berries to Mrs. Philpotts for jam.” Betsy chewed at the corner of her mouth, her smile a little sad. “I always saved a handful for Mum. Sometimes they made her smile.”

  Robert’s hunger was for this, he realized. For her to talk to him. “Was she very sad after your father left?”

  She blinked, surprised. “I think he left because she was so sad,” she said after a moment. “He was a bricklayer, and gone dunnamuch for work, but he was home more before my sister was born. After that…I don’t know. I was small. I only know Mum was always crying, and he hated it, and then he was home less. And after a few years of that, he went away for a job and never came back.”

  She huffed a laugh. “D’you know, I used to think maybe he’d come back if I made her happy again?”

  What a cruel, impossible task for a child. “What would you do if he came back now?” Robert asked. He would be tempted to smash the man’s face with a rolling pin.

  She thought it over, plucking at the edge of the sheet. Her mouth twisted wryly. “He won’t.”

  “Can I ask you a silly question?” His heart pounded.

  “Aye, anything,” she said, but she looked wary.

  “Do you ever—do you ever lie awake at night worrying?”

  She laughed. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  He didn’t know. Did they? His face was hotter than the sun or the conversation warranted. “What do you worry over? What are you most afraid of?”

  She frowned, dismayed.

  She didn’t want to tell him. She was glad enough to give him her body, but maybe that was all. There was a lump in Robert’s stomach like he’d eaten raw dough.

  It was absurd, anyway, to say she gave him her body. No more had she taken his. He’d not mind that, belonging to her. But they were still entirely separate, and could go anywhere they liked, away from each other.

  Don’t go, he thought. I’ll do anything you like, if you like to ask me for it.

  “Not being good enough,” she said, very quiet. “Doing my best and falling short.” She laughed. “That and being murdered.”

  It came so near the endless circle of his own fears that it shocked him. Why should she fear? It was plain she was good enough for anything she put her hand to.

  It must be a leftover from her childhood and her sad mother, one of those feelings like cheese gone ampery after too long on the shelf. You knew you’d ought to feed it to the pigs but somehow it lurked in the corner for weeks.

  All at once he remembered the tight way she’d said, You were ready enough to take a wife last autumn.

  Did she…did she think herself not good enough for him? Did she want him to marry her?

  Hasty as ever, he’d have liked to propose on the spot. But his debts grew every day. Debtors’ prison was…was it likely? It felt likely. He didn’t want to be another man like her father, abandoning his wife to support a household on her own.

  Likely she meant something quite different, anyway.

  Betsy lay back and stared blindly at the sky, her face in a patch of sunlight. “Your worst fear is losing the shop, isn’t it?”

  Panic stirred in his throat.

  You’re not going to lose the shop, he told himself firmly. You fret too much, that’s all. This assembly will be a roaring success, and Mrs. Lovejoy’s twenty-five pounds will pay your debts and give you something to go on.

  Looking at Betsy stretched out on the sheet, he vowed to himself he’d propose when he had those twenty-five pounds in his pocket, and hang the consequences. He couldn’t stand not knowing how she felt any longer than that.

  Soothed by this promise of relief, he lay down beside her. The sky was bright, bright blue behind the leaves. “I reckon so. You know I’m my parents’ only living child.”

  She rolled towards him, shading her eyes. “Living? Did you have brothers and sisters?”

  “They wanted a whacking big brood, but she don’t conceive easy, my mother. And then there were two miscarriages and a son and daughter lost to cholera and the influenza, before I was born. They doted on me. I want…I suppose I want to make up for it. To suffice.”

  “Your mother didn’t want you to sell the bakery.”

  That was an understatement. The bakery had been in his family for generations. It was steady, rock solid. But Robert had never cared about bread. He’d cared about pastry, about fragile, flaking, spun-sugar towers.

  “Mum baked us a cake every day for dinner,” he said. “To make us happy. To make me happy, because I loved sweets. And it did. I want to make people happy.”

&nbs
p; “I know.”

  He’d told her this before, but he didn’t think he’d ever made her understand how much he wanted it. “Mrs. Lovejoy told me sometimes she can’t hear herself think, but when she comes into the Honey Moon, she can breathe again. I want the shop to be that, in folks’ lives. A slice of joy, a morsel of calm when they’ve need of it. A place that won’t ever turn them away.”

  Robert could see it so clearly in his mind. He’d staked everything on it, and if he failed, then he’d sold lifetimes of sober hard work for naught. He’d been entrusted with his parents’ hopes, and willfully dashed them.

  “So long as they have extra pennies in their pocket.” Betsy sighed. “I’m sorry, that was mean. I don’t know what’s got into me.”

  The words pierced him. She was right, sugar and cream weren’t cheap. It would have been wiser, and more virtuous, to keep to the honest labor of flour and water and yeast.

  “I thought…” He was almost afraid to say it. “I thought you liked the shop.”

  “Of course I do,” she said at once, warmly. “I’m sorry I’m being so dull.”

  He felt across the sheet until his hand found hers. “I don’t mind.” He brought her hand up—would she think him strange?—and kissed the back of it. “You’re cheerful to everyone. I’m glad you know you can be dull with me.”

  She took in a sharp breath, as if he’d hurt her.

  When he glanced over in surprise, she was blinking furiously. “Thank you,” she said thickly.

  Don’t cry, he wanted to say, and Please don’t be unhappy. But he’d just said she could.

  He rolled towards her, covering her body with his. I’m unhappy too. He kissed her as if his mouth could communicate the thought without words.

  Her fingers curved around his skull. It filled him with such violent yearning he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to swallow the small hungry sound she made, wanted to dissolve into her the way sugar dissolved into water and was neither sugar nor water, but something new.