by Eden Myles
“I think we’re definitely that.”
“Do you mean that, Daniel?”
I groaned a response. I looked up at him, and I felt my heart flit rapidly in that way it could sometimes when I caught Alexei in an unguarded moment, when he dropped his personal barriers and let himself be vulnerable with me. It didn’t happen often, and, as far as I was aware, I was the only one who ever saw that side of him—that part that loved me, who needed so desperately to be loved in return. “I love you, Alexei. I lust for you,” I confessed. “But mostly…I love you.” I slid my hands over his silken lapels, then down the sides of his body. I pushed my hands up under the hem of his shirt under his tuxedo coat so I could feel the silken warmth of his abs against my hands and the feel of his trembling body pressed flush to mine. His cock stabbed into my belly, and it wasn’t long before he reached between us, to undo our belts and trousers, so we could rub our erections against one another.
“I love and lust for you too, Daniel,” he said in a low, growling voice. He closed his big hand around the back of my neck, his fingers drawing slow, sensual circles there even as he nuzzled the supersensitive skin under my ear. I closed my eyes and gasped as his teeth first nibbled and then bit at my skin and the slick, velvet hardness of him rubbed against the front of my body. He was wet already, almost dripping with arousal, and very soon the front of my body was drenched in his pre-cum so I smelled more like him than like myself.
His powerful hand squeezed my knee, then moved further up. He cupped my cock and balls, wetting his fingers, then traced his way down my perineum and found my quivering opening. He circled me gently, the lightest touch, before saying sweetly in my ear, “Do you like this, angel, do you like me touching you this way?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I love it when you touch me. I love it more when you play with me.”
He kissed my throat. “You may have to take tomorrow off just so I can play with you.”
I thought about that and then immediately said, “Yes, sir.” I might be head of Daniel Collins & Associates, but I was also Daniel Collins, Alexei Karenina’s courtier, and I realized I’d let my duties in that department slack off a bit lately.
“Beg me, Angel moy. Beg me to touch you.”
“Please, sir,” I said, spreading my legs further, and he inserted two of his fingers. I arched my back against his penetration and started moaning and thrusting against him. He pushed me back on the piano so I was pinned beneath his weight, and replaced his fingers with his cock. He gripped me by the shoulders, held me down, and battered his way inside me until I cried out, the heel of my shoe striking a chord on the keys of the piano.
“Shhh…” Alexei said, his soft, hoarse voice purring against my throat, the vibration almost undoing me. “Someone might hear.” He started whispering in my ear in Russian even as he fucked me slowly, bucking his hips and moving in and out of me in a slow, sensual rhythm. I had learned just enough Russian over the last few years to follow what he was saying, more or less, and they weren’t the kinds of things you said to anyone unless you truly loved them, knew them, and knew they trusted you implicitly. I gasped at the blatantly erotic things he said to me, the way he kissed and fondled and fucked me, penetrating me in both places at the same time, slow and fast, gentle and hard. He told me again and again how much he loved me, the different ways he wanted me, all the things he wanted to do to me.
His hand traveled over the flat plain of my stomach, teased over my navel, and then he took my aching erection in his hand. He coiled his fingers around my cock, and as his tongue teased past the seam of my lips, he started to pump me up and down while digging his thumb deep into my slit. My whole body writhed in delight, wanting to come but unable to do anything with the solid grip Alexei had on me. All I could do was buck my hips in rhythm to his sharp, relentless pounding against my ass. All I could do was shiver and writhe for him like a puppet on invisible strings. He nibbled and sucked at my bottom lip, biting me. He turned his head and bit the side of my neck hard. He held me down, with his hands, with his teeth, and fucked me until I cried out at the stimulation surging through my body. Alexei had teased and conjured the music from the piano like some dark magician, and now he was pulling the most carnal and fantastic reactions from my body as well.
As my body arched upward and I began to scream for release, he kissed me, catching the scream in his own mouth, muffling it so Sheri wouldn’t hear, even as he came with a low, satisfied grunt deep inside my ass. He pulled out almost immediately, and his sweet, sticky seed spurted not just inside me, but against me as well. He immediately dropped to his knees before the piano and guided my erection into his mouth, swallowing me down until I hit the back of his throat. He sucked and I clawed at the back of his head and came hard, thrusting wildly against his face. He swallowed, and then he bit me, his teeth raking over my sensitive flesh, while his fingers found their way inside me once more, forcing his seed out of me. I came a second time with a cry of both pleasure and pain and spurted the last of my release down his throat.
After he’d swallowed me, he stood up and settled on the piano beside me, gathering me against the front of his suit. I lay snuggled in his arms, sore but satiated, and he bent his head to kiss me on the top of the head. “So it’s settled, then, my angel,” he told me. “We’ll raise that child first, and then take the world tour later.”
I thought about all that I had—Alexei, my house in the country, the dog, and now a child. A family of my own. And I realized then that I had everything a man could truly want from life.
***
THE DOLLHOUSE SOCIETY: LUCKY
By Eden Myles
***
BOOK 1: LADY LUCK
Smithtown, New York, 1805
My horse Pepper and I lanced through the deep woods surrounding my father’s estate. Up ahead, I could hear the huntsmen cornering the fox near the ravine, their trumpets and the baying of the hounds echoing around the valley. I spurred my horse on and the branches of the old maple and pine began to lash at me as we tore through them. The woods let out to the edge of the ravine, a sheer drop to the sandy edges of the Nissequogue River.
As I came upon the other huntsmen, I saw my cousin Rupert at the head, with a musket rifle drawn. He was sighting down the fox that had eaten dozens of our farmers’ chickens in the village. It was an old, ragged fox, and my heart went out to the creature who was no longer capable of trapping its own prey and had to, instead, feed on hapless chickens. But I also knew that for every chicken that was lost, someone would go that much hungrier this winter. The winters in Smithtown were brutal, and despite being the daughter of one of the bigger landowners, I, too, was facing a meatless winter.
Rupert’s arms shook. “I can’t do it,” he said and gave a nervous, whinnying laugh.
Cousin Rupert had always been a bit of a milksop. Then again, Cousin Rupert was only here because of my father’s funeral. He was going back to the city in just a few days. Then the fox would be no concern of his. I clucked Pepper forward and took the rifle from him. “For heaven’s sake, Rupert!”
“Lucky, have a heart. It’s just an old fox.”
“And old fox that’s making this village go hungry!” I said, my anger brimming over, though what I felt was neither for the fox, nor for poor Cousin Rupert. Instead, it was for my father. He had passed on just the month before, leaving the Van der Meer estate in dire financial peril. I used to think that was a phrase to be used in books of romance—dire peril—but now I knew it intimately. My home, my whole world, was in dire peril because my father couldn’t stay away from the casinos on weekends.
I was now the Lady of the Van der Meer estate—but I was as penniless as the villagers under my charge. I wouldn’t let a fox take more meat from their mouths—or mine. With a longsuffering sigh, I sighted down the fox and shot it squarely in the head. Quick and merciful.
I knew my own demise was certainly not going to be that.
***
Mr. Smit, my father’
s attorney, was waiting for me at my father’s house when I returned from the hunt. I’d hoped I might be able to avoid him, but as I let myself into my father’s once-lavish study (many of the antiques and fine Oriental carpets had been auctioned off in the past few weeks), striking the dirt from my skirts, I found him sitting at my father’s desk, going over his accounts once more. “Mr. Smit, now what are you after?” I cried.
Mr. Smit looked up out of his half moon glasses and said, “Lucky…what have you done to yourself?” He looked appalled by the state of my dress.
“I gave my lady’s maid the day off,” I joked, and he looked at me sadly, knowing I had no lady’s maid anymore. I had let her go two weeks ago, though my nanny, Nellie, had begged to stay on, even though I had no money to pay her for her services. She had been the only mother I had ever known, my own having died in infancy. She was the only remaining servant at our house now, and poor Nellie had resolved herself to attending to household duties that were utterly beneath her station.
“I thought you might like to have an account of your father’s books.”
“Which is to say, you want more money to pay off his debts.” I dropped onto the divan against one wall of the study and just looked at Mr. Smit. “How much this time, Mr. Smit?”
He hmmed and hawed a bit before blurting out, “It looks as though your father may have had financial relations with Mr. Van Tassel.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. Mr. Van Tassel was Father’s direct competitor in the textile business. Father would never have taken money from him. More to the point, Mr. Van Tassel was a salary lender. A disreputable one, at that! “Mr. Van Tassel is a criminal and a gangster. My father would never have stooped that low…”
“Nevertheless…it would seem they had…a relationship.” Mr. Smit sat back in his seat and fiddled with his glasses. Like my poor joke about my missing lady’s maid, Mr. Smit always played with his glasses when he knew he was right but trying to be polite instead.
After I was done ranting, I circled the library where my father had done business for decades, wondering what my mother would say, were she alive. Or maybe she was giving him an earful in Heaven even as we spoke. Finally, I just sighed. “How bad is it, Mr. Smit? How much do you need?”
He glanced down at his ledger and said, “With interest, you owe Mr. Van Tassel approximately sixty thousand dollars.”
I felt the room take a half turn around me. I tottered and Mr. Smit almost sprang to his feet. I help up a hand to stop him. “Mr. Smit… the only thing I own which comes even close to that amount is the Van der Meer house.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I can’t give you my house.”
“I’m aware of that, as well.” He shuffled some papers. “However, I may have a solution.”
“And that is?”
“Have you considered marriage, Miss Van der Meer?”
I guffawed. “Mr. Smit, you know that’s quite beyond me.”
“Miss, we’re in a new century, and there are more and more ladies marrying later in life. Why, I know a lady personally who waited until she was twenty-two before marrying…”
“It’s quite out of the question,” I told him, cutting him off as I stomped in my dirty clothes across the carpetless floor, much to the nose-wrinkling chagrin of Mr. Smit. Only Nellie knew my reasons for avoiding marriage, and I wasn’t about to go into explicit details with Mr. Smit, that was for sure!
“Well, then,” said Mr. Smit, “the only other option I can suggest is that you look toward your father’s partner overseas…Mr. Sloan, I think he’s called? The man from London?”
I shuddered and went to straighten up some books on a shelf. I had sold the crystal that had acted as bookends and now they were in disarray! The last thing I needed was to involve Mr. Tiberius Sloan in anything. He was twice my age, and growing up, he used to frighten me when he visited my father at the house. He was a huge, towering man with a deep, loud voice and a terrible scar he’d received in some rapier duel when he was younger. Ugly and frightening, everyone in the house called him the Ogre when he showed up. I used to have terrible nightmares about him abducting me, and I used to avoid him at all costs when he stayed at the house. Then again, I was living a nightmare now, wasn’t I?
I bit my lip. “Does Mr. Sloan have any controlling interest in my father’s business?”
Mr. Smit looked surprised by my language. He needn’t have been. When it was determined I would become a spinster, naturally my father wanted to know what it was I planned on doing with my life. I had always known in my heart that he’d wanted a son to help him with the family business, because, to put it bluntly, my father was good at making money, but excellent at spending it. Consequently, I had acted as his secretary and conscience for years. Obviously not enough, or I wouldn’t be in this situation now.
When Mr. Smit didn’t immediately answer, I started toward him, but unfortunately, my riding skirts caught on a nail in the shelf, and before I knew it, I’d not only ripped my skirts but shaken the shelf so the books in them started falling down. I held up a hand to forestall Mr. Smit’s aid. Things like this were always happening to me. When I was still a little girl, my father had fired a woman in his employment who was reputed to be a witch. As a result, both he and I had been cursed for life, he with the talent for losing money, I with incessant clumsiness. The only things I could do with any amount of talent were balance my father’s books, ride a horse, and shoot a gun. Unfortunately, none of those skills was likely to take me very far in this world. “I know what controlling interest is, Mr. Smit, so please save your explanations,” I said as I shoveled books back onto the shelf.
Again Mr. Smit consulted his notes. “It doesn’t seem so. I believe your father cut all ties with Mr. Sloan years ago. Still, he may take interest in your plight on a personal, more nostalgic, basis.”
“You’re suggesting I beg to Mr. Sloan based on his previous business relationship with my father.” I played with the locket my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday, a kind of consultation prize when he realized I would never have neither a debutante party, nor a husband. But as I did so, the chain broke and the locket slithered to the floor at my feet.
Mr. Smit nodded as he looked at the locket. “Yes, Miss, perhaps…a personal loan to tide you over?”
I bent to pick up the locket and examine it. Of course, the chain was irrevocably broken.
Mr. Smit cleared his throat. “It is that or you must allow me to prepare the house for auction. Is it your choice, of course. But keep in mind that Mr. Van Tassel won’t wait forever for his money.”
***
“So there, dear, is the Ogre,” my childhood friend Charlotte said, fluttering her ostrich fan in front of her face.
I stood in the doorway of the conservatory and looked on the one man I dreaded more than any other.
Mr. Tiberius Sloan stood at the far end of the room, talking to my cousin Rupert and Charlotte’s husband Darcy, a glass of port in his hands. Darcy, as an attorney, was acting most respectable, though Rupert, who had always had a peculiar predilection for fine looking men, was making a fool of himself, as usual.
As a small girl, I’d thought Mr. Sloan was monstrously huge, like Jack’s giant in the fairy tale. He was big, but not quite as large as I remembered. Not the eight-foot giant I had envisioned. I realized now that Mr. Sloan was around six and a half feet tall, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. I wondered if he wore a girdle under his shirt and waistcoat like so many cavalrymen did these days. It was a fashion that was flowing over from England into the Americas, or so I’d read in the ladies’ magazines, a terrible faux pas I could only blame on the invasion of Napoleonic troops down in the Peninsula. He looked grim and somewhat clerical in his dark suit, though his tapestry waistcoat was quite nice.
Wearing my best court gown, the one Nellie had put me in, I huddled with Charlotte in the doorway. “Oh, he’s simply awful, isn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t say awfu
l, exactly,” Charlotte drawled, and I could tell that she, too, was contemplating whether Mr. Sloan was taking advantage of a girdle, or if that was simply his own physique.
I hadn’t wanted this welcoming soiree, as modest as it was, but both Mr. Smit and Nellie had advised me to indulge in an effort to soften the edges of my request, as it were. Charlotte, my lifelong confidante, had lent her full support in the matter, of course. She was here with Darcy, and they, along with Darcy’s parents, Mr. Smit, and my cousin Rupert, made up the whole of the dismal affair, though Mr. Sloan seemed to be enjoying the company of Charlotte’s husband, at least superficially.
“Stockings,” said Charlotte.
“Excuse me?”
“I wonder if he uses stockings to fill out his breeches. Some men do, you know.”
“Charlotte!”
Charlotte grinned and fluttered her fan. Charlotte was very good at being inappropriate. Father had often said she was a bad influence on me. But the truth was, she and I were very much two halves of the same inappropriate lady. Growing up, I had enjoyed riding, shooting and climbing trees, and Charlotte had enjoyed town gossip and teasing boys. Marriage to Darcy, a junior lawyer at Mr. Smit’s office, had done very little to tame her.
“Oh, no,” Charlotte said in mock horror. “The Ogre has you in his sights!”
I turned and realized that Mr. Sloan had spotted me from across the room. He had arrived that morning on the estate, some three days after I had written him—it turned out that he had been doing business in Boston—but we had not formerly met until now. At least, not as two adults. Nellie had insisted I stay upstairs until the evening soiree so that I might present myself properly to him as the lady of the manor. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling very proper or ladylike. I was exhausted from all the auctions that Mr. Smit had arranged this week, and yesterday, while in town to have my locket fixed, the jeweler had taken an interest and offered me ten dollars for it, because of the diamonds. It was so tempting an offer, I’d finally given in, and then spent the rest of the day feeling guilty about it.