Love on the Dark Side

by Love on the Dark Side [Black Lace] (retail) (epub)

  My breasts are smallish but in his giant’s hands and in his hungry mouth they more or less disappeared. Not that I was complaining. I was loving every moment of his attention. If I did have doubts, they were fleeting thoughts about perspiring walls and infestations of little housemaids.

  You can’t imagine how thrilled I felt when Harry swept me clean off my sandals. In one sweet easy scoop, I was in his arms, laughing and lustful, then seconds later, I was sprawled on his bed, the hard lumpy mattress bouncing inadequately beneath me.

  He knelt over me, him still in trousers, me still in camis, and he cupped his hand to my crotch, watching my face with mild fascination as he rubbed me there. He smiled kindly when I moaned, rubbing harder and deeper till he was pushing the pretty fabric into my wet swollen folds. I felt deliciously corrupted.

  ‘You’re not going to say no to me again, are you?’ he murmured, wiggling my camis down my thighs.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I breathed.

  ‘No?’ he echoed with a playful frown. He unbuttoned his braces at the front of his trousers, reached around and unbuttoned them at the back. He held them in his fists, tugging them taut, and the lengths of leather made a small snapping noise. ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘I mean, no, I won’t. I promise I’m not going to say –’

  ‘You keep saying no, Mrs Townsend,’ replied Harry, and he took one of my ankles in his hand, making me squeal. ‘I don’t want you to disappoint me again.’ He looped the braces twice around my ankle, then, quick as a flash, tied the remaining lengths to the bottom of the bedstead.

  I confess, I was a little bemused by this turn of events. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected, and I’d been expecting quite a lot. But I went along with it and, when Harry took another pair of braces from a drawer and began doing likewise with my other ankle, all I said was, ‘Gosh.’

  ‘Don’t want you to go disappearing into thin air again, do we?’ he said with a charmingly roguish smile. ‘Not when I’m ready to fuck you.’

  He tied my leg to the top of the bedstead then stepped back a couple of paces to observe me. There I lay, trussed up sideways along his bed, Ruth Townsend, with my skinny legs akimbo, wide open and ready to be fucked! Fucked by a gigantic beautiful Edwardian butler. Oh, and how ready I was! My knees were frogged apart and my upper body was bent against the wall, meaning it wasn’t the most comfortable or elegant of positions. But I’d been comfortable for too long, and this unfamiliar discomfort was exquisite.

  Then, to my great delight, Harry shoved down his trousers and underclothes, kicked them free and stood there, magnificent and immense, grinning slyly like the dirty rascal he is. And, oh, his thighs! His big handsome cock! And, oh, his torso, his hard slender hips, his muscular buttocks and, oh, Harry, Harry, Harry!

  I’m not good at asking for what I want. I see myself as one whose role is to make others happy. But, spread-eagled on the bed, I discovered a new skill of begging for it. ‘Please!’ I urged. ‘Oh, please, please! I can’t wait any more. Please, Harry … fuck me!’

  The bed bounced dully as his knee pressed on the edge of the mattress. He slipped his hands under my bottom, cupping my cheeks and lifting me to his angle. When the big plum-tip of his erection nudged at my entrance, my senses reeled: this wasn’t Robert! This wasn’t Robert’s penis! This man sliding inside me and filling me up with his enormous veined impudent virility was … was far and away the most exciting thing that had happened to me for years.

  ‘Oh, God, yes,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘Yes, yes!’

  Harry slammed into me, sometimes pummelling fast, sometimes locking eyes as he glided with slow teasing strokes. The leather bonds chafed my ankles, and my neck and head bumped against the wall. When Harry spotted this, he withdrew.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, huffing and panting. He shifted the little table, tugged the bed from the wall and, as I wriggled for greater comfort, he drove into me again. I let my head and shoulders hang over the bed edge, blood slowly filling my brain as my body jerked, thrilling to the impact of Harry’s big cock booming at my centre. A man from another century who moves the furniture while making love! They’d never believe me. They’d call me mad. And, at that point, I was mad – mad with lust and sex, mad for Harry, mad with the delight of groaning and grinding like a shameless tuppeny slut.

  ‘There! There!’ I cried as my orgasm fluttered close. And, ‘There, yes, yes!’ as he tipped me over the edge, and all the pleasure that for years had been hiding in my thighs poured out of me, pleasure upon pleasure clenching around his shaft.

  He grunted to feel me – Robert is so silent – then he pounded on and on, his dark feathery fringe stuck to his forehead, his neck taut and sinewy, until he climaxed inside me with a terrible yet heavenly noise of release.

  Afterwards, we lay there stroking and glowing, and I was so blissfully relaxed I didn’t even gasp when I spotted Robert in the room. Pint-sized and pacing, hands in his pockets, he strode from door to washstand, back and forth, quite evidently troubled. He looked as substantial as the little housemaid had done, and I could well imagine him clambering on to the bed to join Harry and I in our post-coital canoodling.

  When Harry followed my gaze, he turned my head to face him.

  ‘You need to bring the button back,’ he said. ‘The one from my shirt. It’s causing problems.’

  I frowned.

  Harry nodded in Robert’s direction. ‘You mustn’t take anything from my world to yours. Or leave anything here. The seal starts to degrade. Time gets leaky. It’s imperative you bring that button back.’

  I glanced at my dwarfed husband. ‘I had a little housemaid,’ I said. ‘Crawling around on her hands and knees.’

  Harry nodded, looking grave. ‘Then it’s started,’ he said. ‘Sarah Smith, no doubt, searching for her engagement ring.’

  ‘She was tiny, like a cat. Like … like he is. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry. ‘Something to do with distance and time. I don’t know why people appear smaller.’

  ‘And the walls started sweating,’ I said. ‘Like condensation.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that either, I’m afraid. The leaks, the situations that slip, they tend to be connected to something … emotional. Traumatic times. Happy, sad, scared. Anything extreme. I don’t precisely know, Ruth. You can only see it if you’re sensitised to it. Maybe someone once had an outstandingly good bath. I can’t explain it all. I wish I could.’

  I looked at Robert, still pacing and clearly in another world, oblivious to ours and steeped in his own pain. Had I done that to him? Was that our future?

  ‘Do you know what happens to me?’ I asked. ‘To this house? You knew my name. You must have other women. Ones living here before me, ones after. Have you –’

  ‘None like you,’ he said before pressing a kiss to my lips.

  I kissed him back. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  ‘Only the naked ones,’ he murmured.

  After a while, I asked again, ‘What happens to me?’

  ‘You mustn’t ask,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t think like that. Someone once mentioned you to me. They shouldn’t have done. It’s dangerous to know. You end up wanting to change things. In your world, I’m long dead. You could probably find out when, how, where. But I mustn’t know. And –’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I breathed, because I saw his death at once. He would die in the Great War. Of course he would. They all did. And his strong youthful manly body would be as cold and heavy as the earth it fell on, just one in all the wasted thousands. ‘Oh, Harry …’

  He pressed a finger to my lips. ‘Shhh, tell me nothing. And I’ll tell you nothing. All we’ve got, you and I, all we can share is this little world of here and now. Nothing beyond the window, nothing beyond the door.’ He glanced around the attic, thankfully now clear of shrunken husbands. ‘Here and now. Me and you.’ He kissed the tip of my nose. ‘And, by my reckoning, that�
�s a very beautiful world indeed, Mrs Townsend. I wouldn’t ask for another inch.’

  I gave him my word I would return the button at the first opportunity.

  I was reluctant to do so, knowing it left me with nothing tangible in my world to hold as evidence of his.

  Sometimes, I’ve found this difficult, particularly in the face of Robert’s insistence I make an appointment with Dr Chadwick. (He means Dr Patel.) He still maintains I haven’t seemed right since that bump on the head. But I feel right, deliriously right. It’s all the years before that feel wrong.

  Anyway, who do I need to prove it to? I know how I feel, and that’s truth enough for me. I’m alive once again, giddy and alive. I want to squeeze the joy out of every moment I have with Harry. And with the button back on his shirt everything is sealed, everything except my heart which is leaking into Harry’s just as his is into mine.

  Stranger to My Shores Sophie Mouette

  He was behind me, hands on my breasts. I was braced against one of the benches as the hot tub bubbled around us and steam rose up to meet cold stars. It was spring on Cape Cod, and the parts of me that ended up out of the water must have been cold, but I wasn’t paying attention to anything except him, his thick cock in me, our bodies rippling together. We’d been making love long enough for the moon to rise, all the time cradled by warm water. Floating as if in free fall while he licked me, drawing orgasm after orgasm from me with his clever tongue. Then floating joined, our bodies one.

  It started slow and gentle, depending more on the contractions of my pussy and our co-ordinated movements than on his thrusting. I’d thought I could never come that way, pleasurable as it was. But his hands helped me over the edge the first time, and after that the dam burst.

  But now we weren’t slow. He was pounding into me towards his own finish and, as we rode the wave together, I felt his ecstasy build along with my own and, as his sinuous tail moved against my bare legs, I cried out.

  Then I wept, and he did too, I think (though a creature of the water does not show tears as we do), both of us thinking, How can I let you go? But how can I keep you?

  My cottage was on the water’s edge. My grandfather built it as a summer rental, but I lived there full time – a perfect place for a marine biologist who cares more about being close to the water than about luxury accommodations. Two rooms, an efficiency kitchen that isn’t, a huge deck and, on it, a hot tub. The unique thing about that was that it was filled with salt water.

  ‘You’re crazy, you know that, Maris?’ Ben, my one and only lover, had said before he left. ‘You’re going to turn into one of your fish someday!’

  I’d thought he understood how much I loved the ocean. He’d thought he could wean me away from working so much. We were both wrong. But, when things still looked promising between us, he helped me jury-rig a system to filter sea water into the hot tub, then return it to the ocean when I was done. The filter had worked better than our relationship, and for a long time I’d been enjoying the hot tub alone.

  Which wasn’t altogether a bad thing. Or so I thought.

  My life changed on a brisk March morning. The sky was a bright flat blue, scoured by a storm the night before. I half-expected to be called into work. I work with stranded marine animals, and the storm combined with the suddenly cool weather after a few weeks of warmth made perfect conditions for a stranding. But it was my day off, so, although I took my cell phone with me, I set out to enjoy my solitary day.

  Although my house has an ocean view, there’s a lot of salt marsh between me and the water. I decided to go to the Cape Cod National Seashore, a ten-minute bike ride away. Teeming with tourists in summer, it was all but deserted now. The light was still young, the water still turbulent from the night’s storm, a clear pale green.

  Then I saw something ahead in the distance, sprawled out on the sand. I hoped it was trash, but my professional instincts kicked in and I took off at a brisk lope towards it. When I got closer, I broke into a run. The shape huddled on the sand looked human.

  I hit my knees on the sand next to the prostrate form from a dead run. I reached out, then froze.

  What I saw was neither human nor dolphin, not quite. But not quite not, either.

  Part of me wanted to scream, but the biologist in me was fascinated. The upper body, to the hips, looked like a man, and a handsome and well-built one, too. That had to be a fifty-inch chest, and it looked muscular, though there was a sleekness to him that suggested he had a thin layer of blubber. Well-formed sensual mouth, Roman nose, thick hair that looked black at first glance, but at second look seemed to be a deep forest green. From the hips down, he was … other. A casual observer might have compared him to a fish, but the closest proper comparison would be to a dolphin. No scales, but mammalian skin, adapted for water. He was dolphin-like in another way too: his genitals were retractable. In his distressed condition, though, they were not completely retracted and what I saw looked more human than cetacean – and, some utterly unscientific part of me noted, quite impressive. For a moment, all I could do was stare.

  I knelt down and looked closely at his face. His eyes flickered under his lids, but didn’t open. He drew a shallow raspy breath. It finally struck me that I was not only looking at a living legend, but one that might not be living much longer if something wasn’t done. Both the humanoid and porpoise-like parts of his body were showing signs of deep shock. I could see no injuries but, with whales and dolphins, the stress of being trapped on land was enough to cause shock. This … this merman might be suffering from the same distress.

  I reached for my cell phone, then thought of the potential circus, of how the crew at the aquarium would react to this. The scientists would be fascinated. The PR department would go insane. This would be the biggest thing to hit the institution ever. And that’s what stopped me.

  I was scared of the press, the glare of attention – I could only imagine how terrifying it would be for him.

  Instead, I started conducting a field exam, as best I could without equipment. I needed a vet, I thought, but realised a vet would be just as lost as I was. I made an educated guess that I could check a pulse at the throat, as I could on a human, and tried.

  A jolt passed from his skin straight to my brain – or was it my clit? – filling me with his presence, and with a raw animal panic that tasted like desire. My first thought was heat, but it wasn’t heat, but pure energy jarring me.

  I’ve swum with porpoises before, and I know how their skin feels: rubbery, but soft, too, not unpleasant. Like wet velvet. Unbidden, I imagined how his wet velvet body would feel pressed against my naked one. His sensual mouth would move against my own, gentle at first, then more insistent, nibbling against my sensitive lower lip until my lips parted to let his tongue inside to flick against mine. His genitals would fully extend, and his penis would grow to press against my bare thigh, until he shifted his weight and nudged my legs apart … with his tail.

  I’d never had fantasies like that, and I didn’t know what made me start now. All I knew was that the reminder this was not a man woke me out of my sexual reverie.

  Help me, I heard, or rather felt. His eyes opened. The pupils were dilated with shock, with no whites. What little I could see of the colour was a pure pale sea green. The meaning was unmistakable, even without words. Help me, healer. Sick. Please help me. And again that rush of energy. He was terrified, but so trusting, or so desperate, that he gave himself over to me, who must have been as alien to him as he was to me.

  He put his hand on mine and tried to clasp it. His grip was weak, but the jolt he gave me shuddered through my entire body. I understood, not in words, that he picked up from my mind the media sensation he would cause, and feared it. Maybe he didn’t have much choice but to trust me, or maybe he could sense my fascination and attraction. I was a sucker for stray critters and men with green eyes.

  I raced back to my house and returned with my pickup. After some ridiculous manoeuvres involving a makeshift stretcher and th
e come-along on the truck – like a seal or dolphin, he was pure muscle, heavier than he looked – I bundled him in damp blankets in the back of the truck and headed home. He was cold to the touch, suffering from hypothermia. Perhaps, like the sea turtles that sometimes came ashore in winter, he was a tropical resident who got caught in the Gulf Stream and swept north. At the aquarium, we had tanks for recovering animals. I only had my hot tub, but it would have to do.

  Getting him out of the truck was another adventure. I didn’t want to drag him up the stairs with the come-along, but could think of no other way to move him.

  At that thought, he put his arms around my neck and somehow made himself lighter. He was still an armful, but I could move him – it was as if he carried some of his own weight. I tried not to dwell on how nice his arms felt around me. That, I told myself firmly, was just twisted.

  Why? he thought. It’s good to hold and be held. Warm sensations of touching, teasing, mating, buoyant in clear water – yes, he was definitely tropical. What’s wrong with that?

  Then his momentary burst of energy gave out. Must get well first, I sensed. I’m not fit for mating. Tail or no tail, he was all male.

  I eased him into the hot tub. He smiled; then, as I had feared, started to sink. It wasn’t deep, and he caught himself on the nearest bench, but I wasn’t sure how long he could hold himself up.

  When a porpoise is stranded, we’d take shifts staying in the pool with it, literally holding it above water until it gained the strength to swim. I didn’t have anyone to take shifts with me. On the other hand, my patient was sentient. Once his body temperature started to adjust, I could probably put a life jacket on him. But, meanwhile, I had no choice. I didn’t even dare leave him long enough to get a bathing suit.