A Lady Awakened

by Cecilia Grant

  Devil take her. She enjoyed this. She relished the spectacle of his thwarted desire. With one hand he scrabbled at the knots on the spindle. He’d free himself without her help, and then she’d see—

  “No.” Her fingers closed about his wrist. “This was your idea. You’ve no one to blame but yourself.” She gazed down at him like a governess out of someone’s perverse boyhood fantasies, not to say his. “Perhaps next time you’ll think twice before proposing such sport.”

  Good God. She was enjoying this indeed. She’d had to shift up to grasp his wrist and he could see now, not twelve inches from his mouth, where her nipples swayed, ripe and heavy as fruit ready for tasting. He could—no. Not yet. “Go on, then.” He let the words drift lazily through the air between them. “Do what you will to me.”

  She let go his wrist. Her fingertips skated down the length of his arm to his shoulder, then slipped off to find purchase in the pillow. She knelt at his left side; now her left knee went up and over to straddle him. His breaths were shallow. His heart pummeled his chest like a sparring partner with a twenty-pound advantage. What was the matter with him? Breathless as a virgin bridegroom when he’d possessed this woman how many times?

  Well, zero, to be exact. For all the times he’d spilled seed in her, he’d never yet possessed her. That was the matter.

  Her eyes fixed to his, she felt down his belly with one hand and closed her fingers round the base of his cock. She held it steady and—thanks be to whatever divinity had put her in this mood today—eased herself down onto him, her soft parts yielding magnificently, embracing him with a warmth and wetness he’d once expected from a woman and would never, never take for granted again.

  He breathed in. Breathed out. Held her steady gaze.

  “You want me,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she said.

  SHE COULD still say no. One could go partway down the path and pull up. Almost certainly she would do that, in fact, because without help from his fingers, no other outcome was likely. She took her hand from his appendage—his manhood—and put both palms to the mattress, feeling for the proper balance. This wasn’t … was it like this for him? Surely the fit didn’t feel so precarious when he was on top.

  “Is something the matter?” Her eyes had left his, to watch her hands place themselves, but he apparently had nowhere else to look.

  “It’s only … I don’t see how …” Assurance leaked away like air out of a balloon. A crude ungainly vision was coming clear, her naked body bouncing away atop his and losing the appendage more times than not. “The angles are all wrong.”

  “Not wrong. Just different.” His voice was impossibly gentle, as though to stand in for the reassuring caress he could not deliver. His face, if one could bear to look at it, would probably radiate kind understanding. “Would you like me to close my eyes?”

  Yes. “No.” One did not give in to craven cowardice. And half his enjoyment was in seeing things; she would not take that away.

  “I’d like to, just for a minute or so. For novelty.” Piece by piece, he burned through what was left of her resistance. He closed his eyes indeed, and the strong, patient lines of his face touched her resolve like a candle flame held to so much cheap paper.

  She moved. She would show her gratitude by making a mission of his pleasure. The angle wasn’t so difficult, once one got accustomed. She might not look altogether ungainly. And he helped, thrusting up to meet her, showing her the pace and depth he liked best.

  Use me, he’d said. Her body took what it could from the long strokes of his manhood, and clamored for more. His mouth. His hands. His scalding gaze, at the very least. She took a breath. “Mirkwood. Open your eyes.”

  His eyes opened. He knew just what she wanted, and he gave it. If eyes could devour a person there’d be nothing left of her but a cracked bone or two. She sat up straighter, that he might see right down to the scattering of curls, feral and primitive and private, where her body joined his. She would hide nothing from him.

  “Martha.” Her name was music—dark, voluptuous music—the way he said it. His arms strained, every minute forgetting their bonds. “Martha, put your hands on yourself. Touch your nipples.”

  She set a hand on her shoulder and trailed her fingers down … and no. She wasn’t his puppet. What was the good of a man in one’s bed if one had to see to oneself? “No,” she said aloud. In one surge of motion she leaned down to him, palming up her breast. “Take it in your mouth.”

  A groan tore out of him as his head whipped up from the pillow to obey. Good. She’d pleased him. Now he could please her.

  Oh, and he did. He roughed her nipple with the flat of his tongue, and teased her with the tip, and nothing in the world mattered but that he keep on. Chains of fire ran from where his mouth worked her to where his manhood—his cock—filled her up. She drove down onto him, her hands leaving the mattress to grip the spindles where he was tied, her fingers willfully entangling with his own.

  “Martha,” he gasped. The nipple slipped from his mouth and his head fell back. “Untie me now.”

  Now? She panted, stupidly, struggling to bring him into focus.

  “The seed.” His face contorted. “You need to be on your back.”

  Yes. Yes. She did. With a great effort she wrenched herself off of him—he sucked in a tortured breath through his teeth—and pulled at the first knot.

  “Quickly,” he said. The first wrist came free. Before she could reach the second he was on it himself, fingers laboring with fiery intent. Then that stocking too fell loose, and he used both arms to roll her beneath him, and pushed into her again.

  He kept his strokes shallow, as though holding himself back. His hand, no longer captive, found its way down to where their bodies joined and his fingers made splendid mischief there. His face was all watchful, ravenous, half-unbelieving hope.

  “Yes,” she said, that he might have no more doubt. She tipped back her head, pressed her arms and shoulders into the mattress, and arched her hips, twisting, to chase the touch of his fingers, to urge on his cock. His rhythm was going ragged, his breaths were all gasp and pant; dimly they came to her through the heedless sounds her own mouth made—and she saw him naked above her, and she saw him dressed at his dining table, graceful leader of men. She turned her head then, and bit into a corner of her pillow as the whole world went up in white flames.

  Chapter Fifteen

  HE FELL hard to the mattress beside her, eyes closed against the still-spinning room. He’d emptied himself in her. He had nothing, absolutely nothing left. He was a gimcrack shell of a man, dumb elation rattling about where his lungs and liver ought to be.

  Damnation. Orgasm. What a painfully inadequate word. Like some dull scientific process involving plants, some abstruse topic for a Humphry Davy lecture. Nowhere near to capturing that bone-jangling glory. The way his very soul left his body and went into hers. The savage, transcendent triumph in her pillow-stifled cries.

  Pillow. He opened his eyes. He ought to help her onto the pillow. Though really, what need? She was with child by now, or she wasn’t. She would know soon enough, and then so would he. Then everything would be at an end. But he needn’t spend this moment thinking of that.

  “Mrs. Russell.” Between labored breaths he sent the words up toward the bed’s canopy. “Please don’t tell me it’s been that easy all along. Bind my hands. Put you on top.”

  She rolled to her side, her whole body facing him. Her hand found his and laced their fingers together. “That may have helped. But chiefly I needed to know you, I suppose. To learn what you really were.”

  “Ah. Well.” God help him, he would never get used to her saying things like that. His throat felt as though he’d swallowed a plum-sized rock. “Indeed, if you said I’d always had the means at my disposal, I believe I should have to hurl myself out your window in shame.”

  She laughed, the lovely knowing laugh of a satisfied woman. Her eyes, now he let himself look, were dark and delicious as Turkish
coffee. “Only don’t hurl yourself today.” Her thumb stroked over his palm. “Neither from my window nor any of yours. I want you to come again tonight.”

  “I can come again in fifteen minutes if you like.” With his free hand he took hold of her waist, pivoting her closer. “So can you.”

  “Irredeemable man.” Her voice simmered with indulgent affection. “I knew you’d make that joke.”

  THIRTY-ONE DAYS. Too soon to declare victory. Too soon to give in to hopes that could be crushed with proportionally greater devastation, the more time went by. Though she did imagine, or perceive, a faint nausea midmorning of late.

  Martha sat in the back of the schoolroom, one absent hand at her belly, watching yet another scheme come to fruition. Seven young ladies. The two Farris girls, Jenny Everett and her sister, two girls from two other tenant families, and—what a wonderful surprise this had been—Carrie Weaver, her plaits put up and her eyes bright with eagerness.

  She could barely read. “Do you think we ought to tell her parents she must go to the weekday class with the younger children?” Mr. Atkins came to the back of the room to ask. His brow knit with kindly concern. He’d kept up a pleasing habit of consulting with her on questions regarding the girls’ school.

  Opinions presented themselves with their usual dispatch, but she silenced them. “What do you think?” She sat forward, elbows resting ungracefully on the tabletop. “It will be you, after all, who must contend with her in class.”

  “I hate to move her.” He glanced back at the seven heads bent over slates, each girl inscribing her name. “I can only think she’d be shamed by it, and then too her mother may not be willing to spare her more than one day a week.”

  “Then we must find a way to keep her in this class. She must learn to read at the same time she learns English history.”

  “Perhaps if one of the Seton Park girls were willing to tutor her …”

  “Try Jenny. She’s an excellent reader and she might make time while she’s out with her flock.”

  “Very good.” With a quick nod he moved back up the aisle to the schoolroom’s front. “We’ll begin with kings and queens today.” He stood beside his desk, one hand resting on its top. “Working backward from our present King George. Can anyone tell me in what year he came to the throne?”

  The voices, earnest teacher and fledgling pupils, wove themselves into a sort of soothing counterpane that settled over her as she drifted away on her own thoughts.

  She wasn’t a bit sorry for what she’d done yesterday. And again last night. And once more this morning, hurried and direct, that Mr. Mirkwood might go home and have a few hours of sleep before church.

  He’d acknowledged her with a single nod before slipping into his pew. His countenance had betrayed no sign of improper recollections or imaginings; still she’d dropped her eyes immediately and felt her face grow warm. His every shift and fidget distracted her throughout the service, pressing on her attention like a hot hand laid to her cheek. Inconvenient in so many ways, this business. And still she was not sorry.

  NOT SORRY, to be sure. Perhaps a bit melancholy, though, after another night spent in similar fashion, and another day notched on the calendar. One heard of that as a symptom. Tender inexplicable moods. One noted the possibility, and did not dwell.

  The mood persisted, however, and took her that afternoon on a long walk to all corners of the property. Up hills and down, along the farthest hedge, past tenant cottages, and finally to the bank of a stream where she sat, picking up twigs from the ground and dropping them into the current. Some sailed out of sight, allowing her to imagine them borne along to where the stream joined a river, and from there, journeying all the way to the sea. Many caught on rocks, though, or ran aground in the shallows, their voyage brought to an ignominious early close.

  Things ended. Sometimes sooner than one would like. Mr. Russell must have walked about this land countless times in his life, envisioning its transfer down his direct line. Never dreaming of this intrigue in which he must exit the stage too soon, letting his prized estate fall into the hands of a reprehensible brother or a faithless widow.

  I’ve given myself up to a man as I never gave myself up to you, who were my husband. The words shaped themselves and demanded to be spoken aloud, though for whose benefit, one could scarcely say. She was not penitent. If enjoying herself with Mr. Mirkwood was a betrayal of the dead, then she would knowingly make that same betrayal again, as many times as remained to her.

  Still, she threw a last twig into the water and then stood, brushing off her skirts, to wend her way to where the churchyard sat, with its generations of Russells all resting in rows. Mr. Russell lay beside his first wife, a little distance from the iron fence. Short green shoots stubbled the ground above him, like the cheek of a man overdue for a shave. By the time her child was born—if she was so blessed—his grave would look like all the others.

  He’d wanted a son. He’d objected to his brother’s villainy, when so many men only shrugged at such behavior, and he’d hoped to prevent Mr. James Russell’s inheriting Seton Park.

  She knelt before the headstone, tracing the dates that bracketed his life. The child won’t have your blood. Soundlessly she formed the words. Maybe not even mine. But he’ll be raised as a Russell and he’ll honor your line. Singular, when one considered. Even a loveless, forgettable marriage could result in something worthy. Mr. Russell had wed her in pursuit of an heir, and she would see to it he got one.

  “I wondered when I might see you here.” There was Mr. Atkins, just come through the gate with a set of shears in his hand. The afternoon sun fell sharply on him, lighting his frame and features with peculiar radiance. As though he were some earthbound angel consigned to work among the dead.

  Martha sat back on her heels. “I’ve been remiss.” She brushed her gloved hands together.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that. Forgive my choice of words.” His footfall advanced to within a row of where she squatted. She heard him hesitate before he veered off to the grave of a Rodney Russell, where he knelt to snip some weeds.

  Partly obscuring her view of him was the nearest headstone, engraved—as hers one day would be—with the name of Mrs. Richard Russell. Beloved wife, it also said. Those words might be omitted from her own. “Was his first marriage happy?” The question spoke itself, with no regard for circumspection.

  Mr. Atkins twisted to glance at her before returning to his work. “I believe it was. Certainly her death came as a terrible blow to him.” His shears sang on in the ensuing pause. “That juncture marked … a distinct worsening in his habits.” He too spoke almost unwillingly, the thought stealing out, pirating his tongue, and stirring what had been the placid churchyard air.

  “I wasn’t aware you knew.” She knelt again, her legs suddenly craving as much steady ground as she could get beneath her.

  “I learned, quite young, to recognize those symptoms.” He stilled the shears and just sat, looking down at them, for a second or five. “If I may ask something very intrusive …” His eyes lifted and came round to hers, his brows like those accents with which the French marked their letter E. “I never supposed him violent. I was not mistaken, I hope?”

  “He wasn’t violent.” Her body felt frozen, immobile as the gravestones and those who lay beneath them.

  “Good.” He dropped his eyes again to the tool in his hand, and moved it idly to his other hand. “No woman should be made to bear that.” She could all but see the memories back of those words, hovering like a malevolent cloud round his shoulders. So busily had she kept secrets from him, over the months, and never once had she paused to wonder what secrets he might keep in his turn. “I ought to have been a better friend to you, understanding your circumstances as I did.”

  “You were an excellent friend.”

  He twisted his mouth and shook his head once. “I shrank from broaching the subject on which you could surely have used some sympathy.”

  “We both did. We both chos
e propriety over an unseemly intimacy. You’ve nothing to regret.” And propriety had gentler claims now. They could converse with more openness hereafter. “I’m sorry for what you must have suffered. Have you ever spoken of it to anyone?” So had Mr. Mirkwood asked her, to little avail.

  “My brother and I speak of it when we see one another.” He brought up a hand and pushed back the hair that always would fall forward. He’d left off his hat. “From the distance of years we can even laugh at some things, truth be told.” With his other hand he wielded the shears again, bending to trim the grass at the gravestone’s edges. “Our mother had ways of managing. My brother wished for an Oxford education, though every Atkins man had been to Cambridge. On his own he should never have brought Father round. In fact he didn’t.” He told the story with the same meticulous care he employed to clip the grass. “One day Mother simply told Father he’d agreed to Oxford. And his memory was such that he never knew he hadn’t.”

  Her gloves might split along the seams, she was clenching her fists so hard. Her heart might crack her ribs. She would be candid now. They would build a better friendship, a real one, with truth and forthrightness where deceit and evasion had been. “Mr. Atkins.” Her voice vibrated with hope.

  “Mrs. Russell.” His hand came up, palm toward her. His face didn’t turn her way. “I cannot know. You understand, do you not? I cannot know.” Gradually, in response to her silence, his hand slid back down to the grass as the shears snipped on.

  But he did know, obviously. Perhaps she’d never deceived him at all. And the message was plain: openness between them could go only this far.

  Disappointment swirled round her insides like the muddy bed of a stream stirred up. For no good reason. Reticence was proper. One couldn’t go about like Mr. Mirkwood, saying every forward thing that came into one’s head.

  Her fists uncurled and she laced her fingers, letting the shears and the distant converse of sheep fill the pause until he spoke again.

  “You ought to know I think of leaving the Church. As a profession, I mean,” he added hastily in response to what must have been her astonished look. “I find I want to give more time to the school.”