by Elsa Holland
“Don’t stop.” The sound was a primeval growl of need, making her feel powerful, making her feel utterly womanly. He leaned back and looked down, saw her hand under her skirt and met her gaze.
Her hand circled his shaft, squeezed. “I can’t concentrate, take control of the rhythm.”
“Edith . . .” He swore.
She licked her lips, made them damp and shiny and moved her knees wider as her other hand still worked her sex, in needful strokes. “Please.”
“You’re killing me Edith.” But his hands held each side of her head as he pressed into her mouth, then withdrew and pressed back in. His hips rocking back and forth.
Edith sucked, licked and moaned as her hand brought her closer to completion. She remembered that woman and what she’d done, the caresses, the way she worshiped her man’s shaft as if it were his spirit, as if it were the only language she knew to tell him all that was in her heart. Edith did the same. She kissed, sucked, licked, all the while listening to his ragged breath, feeling his muscles tense as he moaned her name, holding her head with a touch that said he cared, with a need that said he wanted more.
“Edith.” He warned. She removed her hand from his shaft to under his scrotum, found that small indent between the base of his shaft and his anus, pressed deep into his perineum as she continued to move on him with her mouth. His fingers tightened on her head, and as she felt him begin to come she pressed deeper into that point.
He shouted and she held firm, his hand now tight in her hair, he shouted again, a roar of pleasure and surprise. She felt some of his seed in her mouth, a salty taste she savored as his knees began to bend. She pinched her clitoris and came.
Edith released him from her mouth, from her hold as she called out. He sank onto his knees and pulled her to lean against him as he fought to control his breath. Edith collapsed against him. Vaughn mumbled and kissed her head, nuzzled into her hair. “I may not survive a second experience.”
“So I did alright?” She was confident she had, it had felt wonderful to her, the fullness of him in her mouth, the vulnerability and power was all unbelievably arousing and intoxicating.
“Who taught you that?” She felt him tense.
“I spent a lot of time with an old Japanese man, a great deal of it in pain and needing distraction. He’d tell me all kinds of things. When it was especially difficult to distract me he would explain ancient medical concepts. The saving of male vital energy by diverting the flow of a man’s sexual release came from the dialog between the Dark Maiden and the Yellow Emperor in the Inshinpo, the oldest surviving Japanese text of health.”
“You were in prolonged pain?” He asked.
“It was nothing serious.” The man had been her tattooist.
“He explained that technique saying increased the intensity of the orgasm.”
They stood up and straightened themselves as she spoke.
Vaughn took her hand and drew her out of the room, switched off the theater light and walked her towards the servants’ stairwell. She tugged his hand. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Was your release more intense?”
“That’s hard to say.”
She punched his arm. He laughed and drew her close, wrestled her as she tried to punch him again, then he lifted her chin so their gazes met. “It wiped out coherent thought.”
And for the second time that night, she beamed.
CHAPTER 37
The village’s newest resident walked from the thatched roof cottage across the muddy yard to the outbuilding, frost crunching under his feet. The dogs barked and pulled at their chains, always hungry, always noisy when they heard someone moving about. The house sat on the outskirts of the village, one border shared with another house, not so close as to see into each other’s business, yet he could hear faint sounds as they talked in their yard. The other borders were free of neighbors merging into unused land too close to the village for the local landowner to do much with. There was no one directly across from him out the front, just a paddock he had yet to see any livestock grazing on-literally the last house in the village.
He’d received three invitations to drop by for tea and the rector wanted to meet him after Sunday’s sermon. A taxidermist and philosopher was quite a novelty in a village whose populace were mainly employed in agriculture and construction. It was rumored that a few of the more dubious characters in the village worked in the smuggling trade, but that was not spoken of openly.
Setting up the outbuilding had taken most of the week, cleaning and whitewashing the walls, and arranging workbenches, tool racks and shelves. The village was too remote for gas lighting, so he made do with kerosene lamps which shed sufficient light to skin and stuff the animals and build terrariums and mounts to house them.
He had an order for three large terrariums, twelve feet high and six feet wide to be filled with birds. There would be sixty species across three displays to be placed in a conservatory amongst large palms, orchids and other exotics. It kept up his skills, kept him busy in the hours between his life’s work . . . the harvesting of the girls.
He’d waited for the call, wondered how he would feel when he was finally given permission to take a Painted Sister. The others—the tests, removing small tattoos from people whom no one missed—had been easy.
Harvesting the girl had been a challenge to come to terms with. She was someone of merit. Someone he would have liked to see remain in the world. She’d had books by her bed, books she had taken with her on the run; books she had obviously felt were critical to living a good and meaningful life. Her soft eyes and gentle face made any man, no matter how pure, feel he was a sinner that could be bettered by her, cleansed. Yet none of that mattered, it wasn’t up to him; she was merely his commission.
The girl’s skin was folded up and resting. He’d salted it and already it had released a good amount of moisture, ensuring it would not rot while he waited for the Curator’s instructions. He’d packed her between the salted fox skins with their burnished orange coats and black pointed tails, as if laying her to rest in furs. Something he thought she would have liked.
The memory of her eyes as the light slipped out of them, deep and dark, like the black-water pools some believed went to the center of the earth. ‘I’m cold,’ she’d whispered. He’d wrapped a blanket around her as she hung in the harness though he’d known there was no cure for that particular kind of cold.
The barn door creaked as he pressed it open and he had to fight the blast of wind that rolled up the cliff from the sea and battered against the panel.
The workshop sat as close to the cliff as a sensible person would dare build. He would have liked it to be closer, to be right at the edge, but despite the region having stable geology, chunks of limestone occasionally crumbled down to the bay.
He walked over to the table that sat against a long rectangular window he’d had put in, along with a skylight to bring more natural light into the workshop. The rectangular window looked down over the cliff into the churning bay below. At the far, far end of the long beach, on an outcrop of stone, was House Rochester, the residence of the ‘Painted Man’ as the villages liked to call him, a man allegedly more savage than genteel.
A missive had arrived in the midday mail asking for the salted skin to be brought to the Curator. As with himself, the Curator answered to powers higher up and would not question the nature of the death of the girl, despite it being splashed across papers all over Great Britain. That was not the Curator’s place nor his interest. If men of service could not undertake without question the tasks required for their role, they did not merit the position. And in the world of the Collectors, one would not live past one’s dismissal.
Together they would look at her skin and determine the best way to work it, based on the nature of the skin, its designs, and the Collector’s instructions, if any had been given.
Some Collectors liked to have the skin mounted flat under glass in a frame, some liked a three-dime
nsional form, while others liked to keep the skin like a hide, to have it loose, to be able to feel it. There had been requests for objects to be made, the most unique was a body suit to be buttoned up and worn by an aging Collector who missed his girl.
For the last hundred and fifty years, the skins had been taken after death from natural causes.
As a skinner, he had read the histories and been taught from the ancient books about their practice. He had studied with a select group of people who took on the job of skinning for the Collectors when one of their living art should die. As a rogue Skinner he was also trained to hunt down Painted Sisters and kill them on the request of their disgruntled Collector. It meant that he was no longer welcome in those legitimate circles. It meant he had no one to talk to about the girl’s sad eyes, about the weight that lay in his chest as he had folded her salted skin and tucked it between the fox furs.
CHAPTER 38
Vaughn lifted the collar of his coat, placed his top hat on his head and headed down the street into the icy morning air. After only a few steps, his feet were numb. The grass across the road in the square was covered in white crispy frost. Nannies would hover inside all day for fear of their charges becoming sick from an outing. Above him, blueish-grey clouds, muddled the sky with oncoming sleet. It was glorious.
After he’d seen Edith to her room last night, he’d slept like there may actually be a chance he’d find some peace with what he did and what he saw in the world. This morning, as his eyes opened to the dimly-lit room, he still had the taste of their kisses on his tongue, the phantom feel of her lips clasped around his cock, and her tongue pressed against his shaft.
You didn’t do that to a man and waltz away. Oh no. But with a woman like her, strategy was going to be everything.
It took forty minutes to get to Felix’s townhouse. Those forty minutes were with her. Not how she looked, nor fantasies of her body, not the visual sexual images a man carries with him of a lover. No, those things were shrouded in darkness. Instead it was all tastes, sensations, sounds riding him like a voracious Valkyrie of desire. And that was the problem! He needed objectivity before he blundered into considerable trouble.
The butler let him in and Vaughn ascended the stairs; their long-standing friendship affording him the freedom to move about the house without escort, and he opened the bedroom door with Felix still asleep.
“Wake up!” Vaughn strode to the window and threw back the thick velvet curtains. “Felix!”
“Bugger off.”
“Rise and shine.” He sank into a soft chair near the side of the bed as Felix pulled himself up into a sitting position.
“What time is it? Is it two pm already?” Felix picked up his fob watch and swore when he saw that it was before nine am. “Really, Vaughn, this is not the way we do things. You leave me with two hungry women and then expect to call before midday. Poor form.”
Coffee arrived and filled the room with its strong acrid smell. There was a plate of pastries with the promise of more substantial fare shortly.
“I need to talk, and it can’t wait. I have a full day ahead and better things to do at night.” He shrugged out of his coat.
“Don’t you have a life? You used to be fun. As delightful as last night was, I could have done that any night in the last month. I wanted to spend time with you, like we used to.”
“I didn’t take you for a whiner.”
Felix fluffed his pillows and flopped back. “Well then, out with it.” Felix settled a more astute gaze on him than Vaughn really wanted. “Does this have to do with you leaving before you ploughed the blonde?”
Vaughn grinned like a fool.
Felix raised his brows.
“I started a liaison with Miss Appleby.” Saying the words filled him with an unexpected pleasure. Telling Felix made it more real. In fact, if he allowed more people to know of their affair she may come around on the idea of marriage. A little underhanded, perhaps, but a sound strategy none the less.
“What? Did you just say the name of your theater nurse? Damn it Vaughn, I like her, she’s a darling. She doesn’t deserve to be toyed with.” Felix moved, agitated, then leaned over and grabbed a pastry. “Are you out of your mind? Men do not have liaisons with respectable working women, they find bawdy blondes.” Felix waved the jam croissant in front of him, his face matching the color of his fruit spread. “God, how far did you go? No, no, don’t answer that. I wouldn’t put anything past you. Are you going to marry her?”
As Vaughn knew he would, Felix got right to the heart of the problem. Marriage was the right thing to do if he took their affair to its ultimate stage, which he fully intended to do.
“I asked and she said no.”
Felix choked on a crumb. “Did you mean it?”
“I . . . yes.”
“Yes? You don’t sound sure.”
“Well, it wasn’t planned, it just came out of me.”
“Were you seducing her at the time?”
“No, she had asked to stop.”
“Oh, and that removes all nefarious motivations.” Felix was back to waving pastries at him.
“Well, I wasn’t pleased when she denied me—that means something.”
“For God’s sake, Vaughn, can’t you do anything like the rest of us? Besides, she is lying. You’re rich, well-positioned in society—what woman wouldn’t want to marry you?”
“I think she was being honest. She found the suggestion preposterous and was rather angry.”
“Angry? That sweet thing?”
A small wave of pleasure ran through him. “Yes. She is surprisingly strong-willed.”
Felix threw back the covers and swung his legs out of the bed. “You’ve already fallen for her.” He walked over to the wash basin and splashed water on his face, then disappeared into the bathroom and when he returned put on a brocade dressing gown from his dresser.
Felix poured himself another cup of coffee and sat down on the other chair. “You’re serious about her.”
Vaughn found himself smiling again and nodded.
“Very well, let me think.” Felix held up a hand to silence him.
Vaughn chewed thoughtfully on one of the pastries as Felix mulled over his love life.
“Vaughn, I like her, she’s a good match given your common connection to medicine, but it doesn’t sit right; a respectable, virtuous nurse who doesn’t want marriage yet is willing to enter into sexual intimacies with her boss. Let that scenario sit in your mind, compare it with your life-long experience of women. What is she really after?”
Felix was right—there was something missing, some piece that would explain it all.
“What impression did you get from her referees?”
“They were all uncontactable.”
Felix raised his eyebrows. “And her credentials, you did check them?”
“Lost records, not registered with the British Nurses Association.” Felix looked at him like he was an idiot. “Listen, I had no choice. I have lost seven staff already this year, and she was the only candidate.”
“You’re an ass to your staff.”
“I expect them to keep up and to know what they are doing.”
“And she does keep up, or does she merely keep it up?”
“She’s damn good at her job,” Vaughn growled.
“Is she an innocent under all those clothes?”
Vaughn scowled at Felix. “Yes!”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m a doctor. Believe me, I know.” Vaughn grabbed another pastry and bit it in half. He hated this feeling of not knowing, of feeling so . . . out of control.
Felix looked exasperated. “If you can’t walk away, try to change her mind about marrying you and keep watch for ulterior motives.” Felix got up and climbed back in bed, then noticed Vaughn wasn’t leaving.
“Something else?”
Vaughn ran a hand over his face. He needed the objectivity Felix could give him, even if he wasn’t comfortable disclosing the details of
the relationship.
“Rules. She sets rules, in the dark, clothes on.”
Felix looked at him incredulously. “Honestly, Vaughn? Maybe she suffers from a mental condition.”
“No!” Vaughn got up and started to pace.
“Are you sure she is innocent? I heard about some doctor on the continent who restores hymens.”
“I don’t think that’s possible, and even if it were, a woman would only do that to get a good husband, and she isn’t interested in marriage.”
“Alright, so why in the dark with clothes on? You say she isn’t shy, and we can see she isn’t ugly.” Felix held up his hand to silence Vaughn’s response. “She must be scarred.”
“No.” The words were out in a flash, the skin he had felt under his palms and fingers had been satin soft.
Felix didn’t listen. “Burned.”
Agitated, Vaughn stood up. “No!” But he knew it was possible, he hadn’t touched her everywhere.
“Something is telling me there is more to this.”
“You think so?” The sarcasm was evident.
“You asked my opinion.”
“And you are stating the obvious. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think there was something I’m missing.”
“If she isn’t after your money, she is after something else. I said the same about Henrietta, and I was right, though with her it was more straightforward. Perhaps she will use her de-flowerment to have you do something she needs?”
“Blackmail?” That didn’t sit right. That wasn’t Edith. “No.”
But this is why he had come to see Felix. He had felt it, too; the odd combination of facts which didn’t add up. If she was who she said she was, she would want marriage, or else would be tearing her clothes off with him as a true sensualist. And then there was the fact she didn’t act like a sheltered woman. She had given him the most astounding oral sex he had ever had, yet she appeared completely unschooled.
Vaughn’s throat constricted. “What if she has someone else?” A flash of pity crossed Felix’s face and he cringed at his own vulnerability.