WidowsWickedWish

by Lynne Barron

  “Jack,” she moaned as she slid down his length, as her body yielded to his invasion.

  She flexed her thighs and rose, widened her stance, and lowered herself down his hot, hard length again, and again, taking more of his cock into her body with each pass until she was filled with him, wonderfully, impossibly filled by him.

  “You’re so deep inside me,” she whispered in awe.

  Jack lay beneath her, completely still but for his heaving chest, his eyes intent upon her face. Olivia dragged her gaze from his face, down his neck, his chest and taut stomach. She looked down at the point where their bodies joined. She rose, her fascinated gaze locked on their bodies. She bore down again, watched as she took him into her body once more.

  “Look at us,” she whispered. “We fit perfectly.”

  “Livy,” Jack growled as his hands gripped her hips and he held her while he thrust up into her, hard and deep. Olivia pushed down with each thrust, quickly found the rhythm he needed, the rhythm she needed.

  “Ah, Jack,” she sighed as she felt the first shivers of release dancing through her limbs. “Your cock…my God. It’s wonderful…amazing.”

  Jack bucked beneath her, ground his hips against her and she felt him explode into her. It pushed her right over the edge. Her climax was swift and violent, washing through her, wave after wave of pleasure.

  “Jack!”

  His hand was on the back of her head pulling her forward, pulling her lips down to his. He muffled her cries, her moans, his tongue urgent in her mouth.

  Olivia collapsed on him, her arms and legs limp and trembling. She tucked her head into the crook of his neck, smiled against his skin.

  “Livy, you’re going to kill me,” he whispered into her hair. “The things you say.”

  Chapter Seven

  Jack decided that Purgatory was a small parlor in a gray stone cottage in the north of England. And that time stood still in Purgatory, a fact that Dante had forgotten to mention. His particular Purgatorial parlor was warm and cozy. It was also overflowing with loud, rambunctious children. As the afternoon fell away into evening the children clamored about the room, playing some sort of game involving hidden treasures and shouted clues. He shifted in his chair in an effort to ease the constriction in his breeches.

  All he wanted was to whisk the Countess of Palmerton into some secluded corner of the cottage, an empty chamber, the pantry, even the tiny linen closet in the hall would suffice.

  So long as there was room enough to take Olivia into his arms, to pull her soft curves against him, to bury himself in her heat.

  Dinner was no better but for the fact that the pristine white tablecloth hid the erection that had been his constant companion throughout the interminable afternoon. He attempted, with little success, to keep his eyes and his mind off the lady responsible for his uncomfortable condition. It was impossible.

  Olivia sat directly across the round table, seemingly unaffected by their earlier lovemaking, as if she hadn’t taken his cock into her small hand and nearly brought him to climax with her enthusiastic, if somewhat clumsy, caresses. As if she hadn’t risen above him and willingly, eagerly taken him into her body, ridden him with abandon. What the lady lacked in experience, she more than made up for in curiosity. Her curiosity was an aphrodisiac, one he was only to eager to enjoy once more. And soon.

  “Elbows, Fanny,” Olivia gently admonished and Jack looked to her daughter sitting nearly slumped over the table, her chin propped in one hand, the offending elbow resting perilously close to her plate. With the other hand she plowed her fork through a mountain of mashed potatoes.

  “I can’t eat all these potatoes,” the girl grumbled, stabbing her fork into the peak before withdrawing her hand. The fork waved precariously, a silver flag atop Mount Everest.

  “Perhaps next time you won’t pile quite so much on your plate,” Olivia replied calmly.

  “I know, I know,” Fanny grumbled as the fork listed left. “There are starving children in France.”

  “Fanny’s grumpy,” Charlie piped up across the table.

  “What I want to know is what difference it makes to hungry French children if I eat all my dinner?” Fanny asked of the table at large, her fierce blue gaze raking them all before landing on her mother’s startled face.

  Mary Morgan tilted her head down, no doubt to hide her grin.

  “It seems to me,” Fanny continued, “that I can only feed those Frogs if I don’t eat my dinner, if we all stopped eating, every single English person, this instant, and packed up all of our food and sent it across the sea to France.”

  “I don’t want to give my tatoes to a bunch of slimy, green frogs,” Charlie replied with a frown.

  “Frogs are Frenchies,” Fanny replied, her words dripping disdain.

  “Frances Marie,” her mother admonished. “That is a derogatory term for the French people and not one that we use in this family.”

  “If we don’t, then why did I just now use it? Huh, why did I do it? Riddle me that,” Fanny demanded just before her flag lost its efforts to say upright. The fork clattered to her plate, sending a shower of gravy across the tablecloth.

  “That’s more than enough, Frances Marie Gibbons.” Olivia scooted her chair back and rose with dignity. “Make your excuses.”

  Fanny ignored her mother in favor of dipping a finger into the gravy beside her plate and swirling it about. From his seat across the table Jack couldn’t be certain but he thought she spelled out the word “Why” in a sloping, rather elegant slant.

  “Excuse yourself, Frances, it is time for you to find your bed,” her mother said, pulling her daughter’s finger from her gravy inquiry.

  “I know where my bed is,” Fanny muttered before yanking her hand from her mother’s grasp and sticking her finger in her mouth.

  “Now.” Olivia eased Fanny’s chair back from the table.

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” Fanny cried, jumping from her seat to stand glaring up her mother. “I am Lady Frances and I can do what I want.”

  “I am the Countess of Palmerton,” her mother replied without batting an eye. “Thus, I outrank you.”

  “Someday I’ll be a duchess or a princess or even a queen!” Fanny put her hands to her hips and stomped her foot. “Then you’ll be sorry! I’ll make you go find your bed! In the dungeon of my castle!”

  “I wholeheartedly welcome the day,” Olivia replied without an ounce of the aggravation she must have been feeling coloring her words. “I’ll likely need the rest after seeing you raised to such heights. But until that day, you are simply Fanny and I am your mother.”

  Mother and daughter stared at one another, neither blinking, long enough for Jack to turn to his daughter beside him, to see the wonder in which she watched what threatened to become an all-out battle.

  “Oh, all right, but this is all your fault,” Fanny finally muttered with a huff. “If you hadn’t allowed me to skip my nap, I wouldn’t be as grumpy as a bear. What sort of mother lets her six-year-old daughter get away with skipping her nap?”

  Olivia shot a glance across the table as if just remembering that they had guests, guests who’d been gifted with a drama during dinner. A blush rose to her cheeks but she held her head high, her gaze catching Jack’s for a moment before she trained it once more upon her tired, recalcitrant daughter.

  “As usual, you are quite right,” Olivia said as serenely as if she were discussing bonnets and bustles. “It’s terribly annoying, your talent for correctly hitting upon the heart of the matter.”

  “I’m precocious,” Fanny replied by way of explanation.

  “Fanny’s precocious,” Charlie repeated for anyone at the table who might have missed the girl’s statement. “And awfully grumpy.”

  “No, Charlie,” his sister replied around a wide yawn. “I’m quite finished being grumpy.”

  “Thank the Lord,” Mary Morgan murmured.

  “If you will excuse me?” Fanny descended into a wobbly curtsy, her tired eyes
drooping, her legs nearly giving out on the ascent.

  Olivia reached out a steadying hand, held it just over her daughter’s arm, and waited until her daughter regained her footing, before laying it on the top of her dark head. “I will also excuse myself. Good night.”

  As she turned her daughter from the room, Olivia caught Jack’s eyes, her gaze full of promise.

  It was that promise that had Jack pacing the parlor, impatiently waiting as the cottage’s inhabitants made their way to bed, one after another.

  Molly Jenkins was the first to disappear above stairs, calling out a cheerful good night to all before admonishing her husband to keep away from the whiskey and hurry through his chores.

  Twenty minutes later, Mary stifled a yawn behind her hand and put aside the book she’d been reading to Charlie. Jack followed her into the entrance hall and watched her ascend the stairs, her hand wrapped around Charlie’s as he lurched along beside her, his left foot dragging on each step.

  The boy stopped about halfway up and gave an impressive bounce. “Aunt Bea’s step,” he told the elegant woman beside him over the unmistakable creak of a step in need of repair. “Aunt Bea’s your little girl, Aunt Mary.”

  “Yes, she is,” Mary answered as they continued on their way.

  “One time Aunt Bea…she said she would let me hold baby Willie…and you know what?” the boy asked before rushing on without waiting for a reply. “She did let me hold Willie…and I didn’t drop him, not once. And you know what else? He didn’t cry, not even a little bit. When the new baby comes, I’m to hold her, too.”

  Whatever reply his grandfather’s long-time mistress made was lost in a gust of wind that whipped through the foyer. Jack turned to find Tom Jenkins standing in the open doorway.

  “I’m off to see to the horses ’fore I find my bed,” the older man said in his cheerful, Cornish way.

  “I’ll help,” Jack offered, pulling his coat from a blue peg upon the wall.

  “I won’t turn away the offer,” Tom replied. “Two hands lessen the load by half.”

  The air outside was bitterly cold, the wind icy wet.

  “Will we have more snow?” Jack fell into step beside Tom who leaned into the arctic wind with his head bent low.

  “In a day or two, mayhap. Leastwise not tonight.”

  “That’s good,” Jack replied thinking just the opposite. Without more snow, the roads would be clear enough for travel, would in fact be just frozen enough to make the journey a relatively easy one.

  “You’d be wise to go while the going’s good,” Tom told him, pulling the stable doors open and ducking inside. “Rain’s more likely than snow in the coming days and Lord above what a sorry state the roads be then.”

  Inside the stables the air was almost warm, and blessedly wind-free. Jack and Tom fell into a companionable silence as they shuffled hay and poured oats for the dozen horses housed within the warm confines. Jack checked on Pacer, his tall gray gelding, and Posy, Justine’s steady sorrel mare.

  “Always liked the stables of a night,” Tom said. “Beasties be sweet when they’re tuckered out.” As if to prove his point, a big shaggy draft horse nudged the man, his immense head gently bumping his shoulder before he burrowed in to sniff along Tom’s neck.

  “Aw get on with you, Romeo,” Tom told the horse before running one gnarled hand down his neck and along his withers.

  “Romeo?” Jack asked doubtfully.

  “Beatrice named him more than fifteen years ago. She was reading the Bard. Was a time we had critters of all kinds named from ’is plays. Constance, Richard, Mercutio, Viola. We even had a pair of love birds went by Hamlet and Ophelia.”

  “And now her favored mare is Lancelot,” Jack replied.

  “He’s a clown for certain, nothing that gray beastie likes better than acting the buffoon, but he rides like the wind.”

  “Which horse is Lady Palmerton’s?” Jack asked as he looked over the horseflesh.

  “Don’t know what she keeps a mount, leastwise she didn’t bring one with her,” Tom answered, turning toward the doors. “She rides the gold filly, Mirabel, Mary calls her.”

  Jack eyed the pretty little horse. “How old is Mirabel?”

  “Don’t rightly know. Mary bought her off a fellow in London when we first come back from foreign parts. She must be more than a dozen years old. But she’s a lady, she is, and the gentlest mount you’ll find. Fanny’s learning to ride on her. Girl has the makings to be a fine horsewoman. Leastwise if she survives growing up. Never known a child but was so all fired up to grow up quick like. Been that way since she was a wee mite and her mum first brung her to Idyllwild.”

  “She’s quite a handful,” Jack agreed diplomatically.

  “A handful she is, and make no mistake,” Tom agreed with a rumbling laugh. “Her mum has the right of it, I’m thinking. Some says idle hands be the devil’s workshop. Me, I’m thinking it’s an idle mind what leads a body to mischief. And Fanny has a mind can turn to trouble quicker than spit even while she’s working her sums whilst practicing her scales on the pianny. Girl needs to be engaged, her ladyship says, before she tears the house down around us all.”

  “Tears the house down?” Jack repeated in some alarm.

  Tom waved his beefy hand in the air. Unsure whether he was waving away Jack’s concerns or motioning him through the stables doors, Jack walked outside.

  “Now, her ladyship,” Tom said as they bent into the wind once more. “She’s a whole other kettle of worms.”

  “Lady Palmerton? She’s as proper as they come,” Jack replied in surprise.

  “All the more reason she needs someone to keep an eye out, I’d say,” Tom argued good-naturedly. “Sometimes it’s the quiet ones ends up making the most mischief, thems the ones who take a man by surprise and slap him upside the head when he’s just traveling through his life, not stopping along the way to read the signs ’cause she’s never given him reason to.”

  Jack followed Tom into the house not a little taken aback by the man’s words.

  “Mary, she were just such a one, never did give her father a lick of trouble,” Tom continued as he divested himself of his coat and tossed it over a brown peg. “Perfect angel was Lady Mary right up ’til the day she sweet-talked a groom into saddling her horse afore the rest the household was even outta their beds.”

  “Mary Morgan?” Jack asked in surprise.

  “Lady Mary she was then, only daughter to the Earl of Dunstan.”

  Jack draped his coat over his assigned peg, his mind spinning. He knew the present Earl of Dunstan, a sanctimonious ass if ever he’d met one. And he was Mary’s brother?

  “That groom knew she weren’t up to no good…” Tom tossed the words over his shoulder as he ambled into the parlor and made straightaway for the whiskey decanter on the sideboard.

  “And still he saddled her horse?”

  “She’d have saddle the beastie herself,” Tom answered a bit defensively.

  “You were that groom,” Jack guessed.

  “Watched her ride off into the rising sun, didn’t I?” Tom poured amber liquid into two glasses before turning to face Jack. “Next I knew she was ’board ship to France and I was let go without a character.”

  “She’d run off with a man?” Jack asked. “With Hastings?”

  “Nah, that was years later, after her family’d cut her off,” Tom replied. “She just up and took off one day. Bored with her life she was. Wanting to put off marrying and do a bit of adventuring. She’d have come around, maybe later rather than sooner, but she’d have come back.”

  “Except her family turned from her,” Jack murmured.

  “Lady alone in the world…”

  “Hasn’t many options,” Jack finished for him.

  “Listen to me, gossiping like an old woman,” Tom replied with a grin.

  “I can promise your tale will go no farther than this room,” Jack hurried to assure him only mildly surprised when the other man waved away his words.


  “I’m only sayin’ it’s the quiet ones, the ones what seem content to do as they’re bid, thems the ladies a man’s got to watch out for.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Jack replied with a laugh, not believing for one moment that there was any chance that the perfectly proper lady needed watching.

  “You do that, you keep an eye out for signs.” Tom tossed back the remainder of his whiskey before turning to leave the parlor. “The lady has the same look in her eyes what Mary had that morning, like she be done thinking about a bit of adventuring and fixing to get on with it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jack made his way slowly up the stairs, shaking his head at Tom Jenkins’ warning.

  “Watch out for her ladyship,” he muttered as his foot landed on the seventh step and that eerie screech echoed through the shadowy halls above and below.

  Imagine Tom Jenkins thinking Olivia was ready to dive into some sort of adventure. The Countess of Palmerton was a lady right down to the marrow of her bones. Jack could no more imagine her courting mischief than he could imagine her riding bare-assed through Hyde Park.

  Jack chuckled at the fanciful image. Hell, she hadn’t even hair to drape over her amazingly full breasts, to hide her feminine curves from curious eyes. Still absorbed in the fantasy Jack dipped into his room long enough to strip and drag a wet cloth over his body before donning a long blue silk robe, belting it lightly around his waist.

  He knocked softly on the door across the hall, his heart racing as he considered the ways he wanted to make love to the lady on the other side of the thick wood.

  “Come in.” Olivia’s welcome was barely audible, little more than a wisp of sound, but Jack didn’t hesitate. He pushed open the door and stole inside, his gaze finding her in the shadowy space.

  Lady Palmerton reclined in a long copper tub, her head and neck resting against the rim, her long arms draped along the sides, and her toes poking over the end. Every inch in-between was submerged beneath soapy water that shimmied and shifted, giving him a quick glimpse of one rose-tipped breast, the shadow of hair between her legs, and the indent of her navel.