A Lady Awakened

by Cecilia Grant

  “Teaching suits you.” Yes. They could speak freely of this.

  “I’ve been lucky enough to find the work for which God created me.” A mischievous smile blossomed on his countenance. “There is my answer to anyone who disapproves of this step. Rather difficult to dispute, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t dare try. But will you manage?” She inched to the left, to see him better round Mrs. Richard Russell’s marker. “I shall certainly increase your stipend if I can, but until the succession of Seton Park is settled, I haven’t that power.”

  “It won’t be necessary. Mr. Mirkwood has been most generous. If you’ll let me a cottage at the rate the other tenants enjoy, then between the stipends from Seton Park and Pencarragh, and a bit of farming, I shall make do.” With the satisfaction of a man who knew his future, he went on trimming the grass.

  When had Mr. Mirkwood offered a stipend? He must have called without her, or had private correspondence. At all events it was handsome of him. She would tell him so. He was coming to visit this afternoon, on some pretext of dairy business, and she would see to it he knew how he’d pleased her.

  * * *

  NO LUST, it developed, was so gratifying to a man as the lust that blossomed only after esteem had taken root. He might have gone his whole life without finding this out, if he’d never been exiled to Sussex. Now, in stray moments, he allowed himself to imagine enjoying this delicacy for the rest of his days.

  She’d like Lincolnshire. There she would find all the amenities of Seton Park—crops, stock, tenants, a living to bestow—and if she ever felt nostalgic for the Sussex landscape, they need only come for a stay at Pencarragh. She might even like London, with its lectures and libraries and great pockets of poverty just waiting for industrious, noble-minded women to push up their sleeves and set things right.

  Over the top of his pamphlet describing symptoms of cowpox in unfortunately vivid detail, he eyed her. Round the corner of her Communications to the Board of Agriculture, she was just as often eyeing this or that part of him. His call had taken a most agreeable turn, and now he sprawled naked atop the covers of the blue-room bed, his pillow propped against one of the bottom bedposts. She sat up against the headboard, counterpane tucked high under her arms. A smile hovered perpetually at her lips these days, as certainly it ought.

  She hadn’t cared for the sight of him, in the beginning. There was another triumph. She might forgive a bit of gentle gloating. “Do you see something that catches your fancy?” he said, turning a page in an offhanded manner.

  She colored. “Your body is so unlike mine.” Her eyes came to his face. “I thought you strange at first. But now I discern a certain logic to your form.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He lowered the cowpox pamphlet an inch or two. “Did your marriage not acquaint you with the masculine physique?”

  “Indeed it did.” He could see by the pursing of her mouth how she felt about that. “But I find one man might differ in significant ways from another.”

  “One might have a larger appendage, you mean.”

  “That’s not at all what I meant.” The corners of her lips twitched nonetheless. “Though I’m sure you’ll be gratified to know you do best my late husband in that arena.”

  “Darling, I best most men there.”

  “My felicitations.” She put her reading down altogether. “What I mean is more to do with a woman’s response. How a set of limbs may be plain or handsome depending largely on who inhabits them.” Her eyes strayed briefly to the counterpane. “How certain … acts … might seem distasteful with one man, but not wholly unreasonable with another.”

  “Acts.” He cleared his suddenly dry throat. “What acts would those be, exactly?”

  “Ask your appendage.” Impishness sharpened her face. “It seems to have a few ideas.”

  Indeed his blood was racing now, on a mission to converge where it could be of most use. “My appendage always has ideas, and has never met an act it didn’t like.” Carefully he set the cowpox pamphlet aside. “I remain in suspense.”

  Her gaze held every womanly secret the world had ever known. Her lips played at smiling but didn’t quite give in. Without hurry she pushed her shoulders off the headboard and sat up straight. The covers swished beguilingly as her legs swept round to one side and bent under her. She was kneeling. Providence be praised.

  She glanced down and up. “You bathe it sometimes, I hope.” Mrs. Russell to the core.

  “Daily. With precisely this purpose in mind.”

  “Because at any time you might meet a lady who wants to put it in her mouth?”

  “I’m of a hopeful disposition.” He put out a hand to touch her arm. “Have you done it before?”

  She nodded.

  “But not with any relish, I expect?” When she shook her head he flexed his fingers to grasp her arm. “Martha, don’t do this if you think it disagreeable. I don’t need it.”

  Her brows edged together. She stared at him for a moment, the familiar severity in an unaccustomed context. Then she leaned low, the counterpane still pinned under her arms, and pressed her lips to his most susceptible skin.

  Hell. “Martha.” She turned her head, still bent low, looking up at him like some supplicant conjured out of his untidiest dreams. “I won’t want you to stop, if you begin this.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “But you must. If you find it unpleasant you must stop, even if I’m begging you to keep on. Promise you will.”

  “I promise.” All soft-eyed, naked obeisance, his supplicant. Counterpane clutched to her front but the splendid curve of her back laid bare to his view.

  “Well, then.” He sank a little farther into his pillow and closed his eyes, listening with his whole body for the exact instant when she—there. Her lips, halfway along his length, brushing over him and leaving a trail of sparks under the skin. Then a narrower touch that could only be the tip of her tongue. Then nothing at all. Her breath. He could feel her breath, quiet and warm, where her tongue had dampened his skin.

  He waited. “Is it—?” The words came out of him jagged and untidy. “Have you decided you don’t want to?”

  She answered with her tongue. He jerked, under her. Then he slid down the bedpost until he lay flat. Again she stopped, and breathed.

  Good Lord. She’d kill him with this. “Please,” he whispered. Ha. He hadn’t expected to be begging quite so soon.

  Her breath fell on him unevenly. Laughter. “Is that a command?”

  “Woman, it’s whatever will get your mouth back on me the soonest. I had entreaty in mind. But if you prefer command, then yes. Please me without further delay. I command it.”

  He didn’t need to say more. Still as still water he lay and felt the touch of her mouth, here and there, like sparse raindrops on a pond’s smooth surface, the gentle beginning of what would end as a deluge. “It’s best on the end,” he muttered. “Where it’s rounded, there. Especially on the underside. That’s where it feels the best.”

  “Patience.” She spoke against his skin, so he felt the syllables. Idle and unhurried, she worked her way from the base of his cock to the head, exploring him with her lips and her tongue. Patience, indeed. Already his body was beginning to seethe in the middle, arching that scant inch or so to find her mouth again every time she was so cruel as to take it away.

  He wouldn’t last. He’d be undone the second she took him inside her mouth—or—ahh—maybe not. He might stand it a few seconds longer. Bloody hell. Had Mr. Russell taught her this? These quick, wicked patterns her tongue inscribed? The way her lips closed over him and welcomed him in? He’d have to thank that man in the afterlife. Of all things.

  He lifted his hands and wove his fingers into her loose hair, his fingertips playing over her scalp in the way she liked. She’d have more pleasure than this, a few minutes hence. He’d see to that. She couldn’t refuse him now.

  One more second, he could hold out. No, two. And three. And—No. Here was his limit. His hands
slipped down to cup her jaw and push her face away, then settled on her shoulders. She blinked at him, all confusion, as he scrambled to get her on her back; to yank off the counterpane; to fumble his way to the right place. “Seed,” he explained hoarsely, and gave it to her, half a second before he must have given it to the sheets.

  Strange images came and went on the long slide back to consciousness. A child. More than one. Taking after him and her in every possible combination. A boy, tall and fair-haired, but with coffee-colored eyes. A girl of impeccable posture, her stern countenance marred by a mouth shaped for laughter. Child after child, each one more beautiful than the last.

  He pushed off her and sank to the mattress at her side. One hand lifted to stroke her cheek and put a loose lock of hair behind her ear. He had something to say to her. But first, he had something to do.

  Her brow quirked when he sat up and sent his arms to gather her, one behind her shoulders and the other under her knees. Her forehead furrowed in earnest when he stood and lifted her, but she made no sound. Only when he set her in the armchair, and dragged it up before the room’s largest mirror, did she speak. “What are you doing?” Yes, that, for the rest of his days, would be the only reasonable response from a woman surprised.

  “Watch and discover. Hook your leg over the chair’s arm. Either leg.”

  A tremor went through her. “I don’t want to. I don’t care to look.”

  Less command. More coaxing. He modulated his voice. “I’ll give you something worth looking at. I promise. But meanwhile let me look at you.” He stood behind the armchair, one arm resting atop its back, and leaned down to speak close to her ear. “How imperious you look, sitting there. Keep your eyes on your face. Or mine.” In the mirror he loomed over her, one hand snaking down the back of the chair, along its arm. He leaned round to the left, reached farther, got hold of her knee. Her mouth tightened. “I wish I had a crown to put on your head. I think you must imagine yourself a queen now.”

  “And are you my king?” Her eyes, in the mirror, stayed trained to his.

  He shook his head. “Stablehand.” She didn’t resist as he brought her knee up; draped her leg over the chair’s arm. “Great strapping stablehand who’s caught the queen’s eye and been summoned to service her in her chambers.”

  “That’s very shocking of me.” Another tremor went through her; a better one this time.

  “You’re a shocking, shocking queen.” He let her see his eyes travel down her reflection, down her naked body to where she was most naked of all. “Every man in the palace, from the prime minister to the rat-catcher, knows your habits and lives in hope of being chosen one day.”

  “I’m not sure I approve. Am I married?”

  Too much thinking. As always. “Nominally.” He pressed his mouth to her shoulder, to the sensitive skin of her neck. “The king minds his own business, as long as you don’t give him any bastards. And we won’t.” Out again to her shoulder, and down her arm he set kisses as his body twisted from behind the chair, advancing with devilish grace toward its purpose.

  “Here comes the bit you’ll want to watch,” he said, and sank to his knees before her. Back and forth her eyes went, from his face to the mirror. She’d gone pale with some emotion only she could name. Paler still were the inner sides of her thighs, where he set his splayed fingers. And between them, of course, the flushed pink of her sweetest flesh.

  He bent his head, and put his mouth on her. She sucked in a startled breath. Good. Then he was the first. “Shame on your negligent husband,” he drew back just far enough to say, and after that there was nothing to do but drive her mad while losing himself in her, in these soft parts, so secret, so exquisite, so clearly made to be a match for his tongue.

  Her body opened to him like a hothouse flower. She set one hand at the back of his head, and eased herself to the edge of the chair to get more of him, to get all he had to give.

  And he had plenty. He pushed her second leg over the chair’s other arm to spread her wide—she was beyond offering even a token resistance—and clamped his hands over her hips to still her when she wanted to move. Likely she’d be outraged at this, but the more he controlled the pace and pressure, the longer he could keep her going.

  She fought his grip, voicing her frustration in guttural animal tones. He drove her harder, and higher, his merciless tongue in three places at once, his merciless hands holding her fast. Every move he thwarted—every twist, every thrust—rippled out to the rest of her body. She kicked and flailed, no longer human or even animal but elemental, pure and raging under his touch. Air, fire, earth, water: his whirlwind, inferno, his avalanche, his own private tropical storm.

  Oh, but he was a selfish man. Selfish to keep her imprisoned in her pleasure, and selfish because it was his own burgeoning need that finally made him loosen his hold, and let her go from that peak where he’d kept her over the edge and on down.

  She fought for breath. She looked, wild-eyed, into the mirror and then down to where he still knelt between her legs. “That was …” Again to the mirror. “That was …” Again to his face. “What was that?”

  “A woman’s greatest trick. I wish to God you could teach me how.” He came to his feet, scooping her up on the way, and made for the bed. “And now, milady, I’m your king. With royal seed to plant and a royal lust that will not be denied.”

  She wasn’t the woman to deny a man anything, now. She laid herself out on the bed and took him, all of him, for the third time that afternoon. Damnation, but she did make him feel like a king. She made him feel as though he’d always been one, muddling along just waiting for her to kiss him out of some enchantment into his birthright. He spilled into her, breath arrested in his throat, time suspended all round them, and slid off, pulling her to his chest, settling his chin on the top of her head.

  “Martha,” he said on his first steady breath, “I love you.”

  PULSE TICKED in his throat, not an inch away from her eyes. Carotid artery, was that? Or jugular vein? A girl’s education didn’t include internal anatomy. But she might look it up in a book. At all events the pulse looked hurried.

  She shut her eyes.

  One had known this might come. One had seen certain signs. And he was a naturally affectionate man. A month spent in the exclusive company of any woman should perhaps have produced the same effect. It would pass, undoubtedly, when he was back among the fair distractions of London.

  Her heart, as warm toward him as any sensible heart could be toward a man of only a month’s acquaintance, demanded she speak. She had a delicate confidence of her own to impart.

  Gently she edged away to a distance from which she could properly address him. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  WHAT WERE the chances she would choose those words to preface I love you too? Not great. He nodded, and waited.

  “I expected my courses some five days since. I begin to believe I’ve conceived.” Her face glowed, as it had been wont to do lately. This had been the reason all along.

  “Martha, I love you.” He’d said that already. “I want to marry you.”

  She put a hand, tender and sympathetic, to his cheek. He felt a fearsome urge to knock it away. “You’re fond of me.” As though she were a wise adult correcting an errant boy. “As I am of you. But we’ve both known the limits of this bargain from the beginning. It cannot end in anything like marriage.”

  “I do not refer to anything like marriage.” With effort he kept his voice calm. “There is nothing like marriage. There is only marriage, and I know of nothing in our bargain that rules it out. Only your own heart can do that.”

  “My heart has nothing to say in the matter.” Those words could raise gooseflesh in a feverish man, even as her tone grew warm and earnest. “I’ve pledged to keep Seton Park out of Mr. James Russell’s hands. I cannot marry, and give it up.”

  “Why, for God’s sake? Will he raze it to the ground? What do you fear from him?”

  She hesitated, her lips p
ressing together. Would she not even tell him this? “I have nothing to fear,” she said abruptly. “But I believe the housemaids do. I know he has been guilty of villainy in the past.”

  Ah. Here was what had driven her to undertake something so disagreeable to her sensibilities in the first place. He might have known it would be some such crusade. “You cannot be certain, though, of what he’ll do in the future. And must the burden of the servants’ safety fall entirely on you?”

  “Who will bear that burden, if I don’t?” Every word took her deeper into righteous conviction. “Nobody takes an interest in the welfare of such women. Your own Mrs. Weaver can tell you that. And I will not gamble on the threat’s uncertainty. The stakes are too high.” Every word pushed him farther away. She’d kept from him this central mission. She’d apparently had confidences from Mrs. Weaver to which he was not privy.

  “Martha.” He would not ask after the confidences, and be distracted from his purpose. “I believe I could make my happiness with you.” Best to put it plainly. “I hope I could make yours, too. And you and I and this child are a family. Will you really throw all that away?”

  She swallowed. He could see—he could feel in the pit of his stomach—her slow descent into despair of his ever understanding. “There are more important things than happiness,” she said. Of family she said nothing.

  He rolled onto his back. The canopy filled his vision, blue brocade only slightly less impressible than the woman at his side. He’d foreseen this, hadn’t he? This preposterous outcome. Only he hadn’t known the bottom of the well would be chest-deep in frigid water that made every breath a chore. “Will you not even say you might accept me if you bear a daughter?” The image came back with painful clarity, a girl with her posture and his smile.

  “I cannot.” Something new colored her words. Shame. “If I don’t have a boy baby, I shall procure one by other means.”