Lesson Two
“Women being of a tender nature want tender beginnings.”
—The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
RALPH SAT UP IN THE leather-upholstered wing chair in his bedroom suite, the single malt blazing a trail down the back of his throat, the light rhythmic rain pattering outside his window sounding like rifle fire inside his head. Three drinks in and he’d still to recover from the ridiculous notion that the whole world, his whole world, lay in rubble.
Beatrice Lindsey was to marry. By the month’s end, she would plight her troth with another man, a man by the name of Billingsby. Even as he strove to absorb the shock, he fought against feeling it. Kate’s baby sister was no baby at all, but a young woman approaching her majority. If he recalled her birthday as precisely as he did every other detail about her, she would turn one-and-twenty upon the first of February, an age by which well-bred young women were expected to marry.
Ralph’s twenty-first year seemed another lifetime. By then he’d already seen several years’ service as a pickpocket for Johnnie Black, a pony racer for Astley’s Amphitheatre and lastly a magician and mimic for myriad London variety saloons. His wasn’t yet a long life, but it had been a full one.
Sheltered though Beatrice was, last winter’s flight from London was but one of several proofs that she more than knew her own mind. If Mr. Billingsby was her choice, and it seemed he was, then the only course a rational man might take was to wish her happy and hope the sot possessed sufficient sense to appreciate his great good fortune.
When it came to Beatrice Lindsey, Ralph was not a rational man.
What he was, at the moment, was an angry man, and the target of his fury, irrational though it might be, was again Beatrice. She’d had him on first in the dining room and then in the hallway with her halting whispers and her contrived touches and her fraught, frequent glances. Those searching, soulful looks had melted him, made him think that, future or not, he must mean something to her.
But now he knew better. And yet something about that blessedly brief, bleak celebration in the library hadn’t smelled quite right.
Mr. Billingsby is a verra fortunate fellow, Rourke had later exclaimed, setting aside his champagne in favor of Scotch.
If Ralph lived a century, he’d never forget how Beatrice’s gaze had gone dead. It is I who am the fortunate one, she’d dutifully answered, but like a wind-up doll, she’d seemed only to be going through the motions.
Billingsby. The very name struck a note so sour that not even Rourke’s finest whiskey could take away the taint. Faceless and formless and innocent of any wrongdoing though Beatrice’s bridegroom was, still Ralph despised the bastard almost beyond the brink of bearing.
He drained his glass of the Scotch and briefly considered pouring more. But getting pissed wouldn’t do anyone any good, least of all him. Instead he set the tumbler aside and took up the book lying in his lap. Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra was the sole companion with which he could tolerate sharing his otherwise solitary evenings. The world of the Hindu sage was an exclusively male domain that modernism had mostly vanquished. Yet pretending it still existed suddenly seemed a most comforting thought.
The knock outside his door was so soft that at first he mistook it for the rain. A second rapping, slightly louder, had him closing the book and eyeing the wall clock. It was almost midnight. If his nocturnal caller was another dim-witted housemaid, by God he’d have Hattie’s head. Still, for prudence sake, he laid the book facedown on the table before rising. Cinching his robe, he made his way over to the door.
He opened it partway, expecting giggles and gin-laced breath and cheeks roasted red from hours of working too near the fire. Instead a caped Beatrice awaited him on the other side. If wishful thought had been a tangible force, he might almost believe he’d conjured her from air.
“May I come in?” she asked softly, not exactly a whisper but near enough.
Ralph nodded. He opened the door the rest of the way and stepped back to admit her.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Biting at her bottom lip, she whisked past him, her cloak hem brushing the tops of his slipper-shod feet.
“No.” Belatedly he realized he still held the door. “I was…reading,” he added. He closed the door and ushered her inside.
His sitting room wasn’t much—a settee covered in moth-eaten red velvet, a small wine table upon which he’d set his glass and book and a pair of armchairs upholstered in a fairly hideous Scottish plaid, all castoffs he’d foraged from the attic. The space suited his needs, but looking with fresh eyes, her eyes, he supposed it must seem impossibly shabby.
He gestured her to the other chair, but she shook her head. “I think better on my feet. But please sit if you wish.”
Ralph might be the son of a whore and a former pickpocket, but he prided himself on a gentleman’s manners. Remaining standing, he folded his hands behind his back, bracing his right hand about the wrist on his left, mentally manacling himself from doing what he desperately wished to do, which was to sweep her into his arms and kiss her until the Mr. Billingsbys of the world were obliterated from her brain.
Instead, he stood still, stock-still, and studied her, curious as to what, if anything, she wore beneath the cape. “I trust you weren’t seen?”
The likelihood of someone seeing her in this part of the castle at this hour of the night was remote, yet not unthinkable. With so many persons housed beneath one roof, one never knew who might be milling about.
“I shouldn’t think so.” She reached up with one slender hand, drew back the fur-lined hood, and shook out her lovely long hair.
It was obvious she had something to say to him, equally obvious that she was stalling. She wrung her hands. Small and white and slender, beyond her face they were the sole part of her body he could see. “I am keeping you from your rest.” She started toward the door.
Cock hard, he stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “You are keeping me from nothing.” Now that she was here, setting aside his anger and betrayal required no more effort than closing the cover on the contraband book. “Fancy some tea? I have a spirit lamp,” he added, rather foolishly. He had a spirit lamp, but then so did everyone else.
She hesitated and then shook her head. “No, please don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother, but if you’re quite certain—”
“Quite,” she broke in, cutting him off.
Silence fell between them like the heavy velvet theater curtains he recalled from his performing past. For several minutes, the clock’s ticking and the rain’s pattering and Ralph’s blood roaring through his ears were the only sounds to break the heavy silence.
“I know you must think me brash in coming here like this,” she finally managed to get out. “But I assure you I have thought the matter through most carefully, and I see no other course.”
She looked so adorably uncertain, so soberly serious that despite everything, he found himself fending off a smile. “And what matter might that be, Lady Beatrice?”
“I wish for you to tutor me.”
The pronouncement gave him pause. Book read and street smart though he was, he’d had scant schooling. What fractional formal education he possessed he’d picked up from Salvation Army classrooms where the free soup, not the lessons, had been his draw.
“Tutor you in what subject?”
She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled it. “I wish for you to tutor me in…sex.”
BEATRICE REACHED UP, her hand working down the queue of hooks fronting her cape with remarkable speed. Coming to the end, she shrugged her shoulders. The cape slid off. Rich, red velvet pooled about her slender ankles, leaving her naked as a newborn, a newborn goddess.
Like a dragonfly caught in amber, Ralph couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do more than stare. She was beyond beautiful, spellbinding, her blue eyes dark in the dimmed light, her smooth skin opaque. Her hair was a curtain of pale silk, the straight locks bringing to mind not golden sunshine but silvered moonbeam as befitted a creature of the night. The vision put him in mind of an angel he’d seen in a church’s stained-glass window on one of the handful of Sundays he’d gone to worship with his mother. The sight of all that entombed beauty had made him sad. He remembered praying for a way to rescue the beautiful angel and set her free.
Staring at Beatrice, longing filled him, not only physical desire but a soul-deep craving that bordered on aching. He wanted to set Beatrice Lindsey free—from her father, her sister and most of all herself. He wanted to be the one to show her just how good life outside the sanctified temple of society’s rules and expectations could be. He wanted to tear down the barriers of her current constraints and build her a palace large enough to accommodate the wings she would need to soar.
He wanted, he realized, to tutor her not only in sex but in life itself.
She firmed her chin and pulled back her shoulders. Her gaze, both defiant and uncertain, locked on his. “Come now, I’m not so very bad…am I?”
She punctuated the question with a shrug which did intriguing things to her breasts. Small, rounded and tipped in palest pink, they were just as he’d imagined. Her nipples stood out, hard, slightly darker pink points that put him in mind of roses while the buds were still quite closed. It was too early to tell whether she was aroused or simply chilly from the draft. A bit of both, he presumed.
He shook his head. “No, but I am.”
Ralph closed the space between them in a single stride. Beatrice let out a sob and opened her arms. Though he hadn’t laid so much as a finger upon her, he would wager his small pension she was ready to receive him.
“Beatrice, oh, Beatrice.”
It required a Herculean effort and one that drained every whit of his will, but he did the difficult, near to impossible right thing.
Planting a hand on either slender upper arm, he held her away from him. “Good God, girl, what the devil are you about?”
Her face crumpled. Blast but she was going to cry.
He wagged a finger in her face. “No crying, do you mind me? Not a single tear or I’ll set you out in the hallway as you are.”
The roughness in his voice seemed to work. She firmed her mouth, sniffed and then nodded. “Right, no crying.”
Backing away, he bent and scooped up the cape from the floor, his gaze aligning with her mound, the musk making his mouth water and his cock further thicken.
Straightening, he shook out the garment and, reaching behind her, settled it on her slender shoulders. “For the love of Christ, cover yourself.”
She obliged. Looking both embarrassed and relieved, she turned her attention to refastening the hooks. Ralph shook his buzzing head. Rourke might love him like a brother, but he’d also skin him like cattle were he to find them out. Shagging little sisters counted as a cardinal breach of the manly code.
Duly covered, she looked up at him, one corner of her beautiful mouth edging upward. “In case you’re wondering, I’m ruined already.”
He stared into her unrepentant eyes, wondering if, as in the gallery earlier, she might be playing some game or worse. “You’re soused, aren’t you?”
He recalled her drinking sparingly of the supper wine and scarcely touching her celebratory champagne, but perhaps she’d imbibed more liberally than he’d thought. It was hard to say. Her breath didn’t smell of alcohol. Far from it; her scent put him in mind of the freshness following a springtime shower.
She shrugged. “Hattie and I drank more champagne in my room, but in truth she had the lion’s share.”
“Mad, then?”
That time she paused. “Overwrought perhaps, but mad, I shouldn’t think so. And I meant what I said, every word. I want you to tutor me in—”
He held up a hand, cutting her off. If he heard “sex” even one time more from those luscious lips, he couldn’t account for the consequences.
“Should you not wait to explore any further intimacies with your bridegroom?”
Biting at her bottom lip, she shook her head. “Sadly, Mr. Billingsby is not as skilled in managing these matters as one might wish.”
Ralph felt his spirits lift. Weighing his words with suitable gravity, he said, “I am sorry to hear it.”
The devil he was. Her admission of her fiancé’s failings was balm to his bruised soul. Beatrice Lindsey might have had her first time with another man, a man with a ridiculous name best befitting a goat, but at least Ralph had the satisfaction of knowing the sex had stunk.
“In fairness, he did make every attempt to be gentle. Barring that most unpleasant moment—” she paused, shivered, and pulled a face “—the encounter wasn’t painful so much as mortifyingly awkward, quite…dispiriting.”
“Dispiriting?” he repeated, wondering if he might have misheard. Harkening back to their last leave taking when she’d boldly laid his hand upon her breast, he wouldn’t have pegged her for frigid.
She paused, and then nodded profusely. “Yes, dispiriting captures the sentiment exactly.”
“Most men of your social station keep mistresses.” He hated to be the one to explain this to her, but really, someone should. “Rourke is by way of a happy exception,” he added both because it was true and because he feared her sister’s fairy-tale union might have given her a false view of the majority of marriages. “Once you give your husband an heir and a spare, he’ll likely let you alone.” Indeed, most of his mother’s clients had worn wedding rings.
“But I do not wish to be left alone, abandoned in my marriage bed,” she exclaimed, the desperate look returning. “My wish, since you force me to put it plainly, is to experience sexual pleasure with my husband,” she added almost, he fancied, as though her fiancé was an afterthought. She bit at her bottom lip, pulling the tender-looking flesh beneath her pretty top teeth in such an unconscious yet totally tantalizing way as to make Ralph grateful, profoundly grateful, that he wore a robe rather than trousers. “Mr. Billingsby afterward admitted to having been a virgin, as well. So you see, ours was a case of the blind leading the blind.”
The blind leading the blind, indeed! Ralph smothered a less than gallant laugh. Virginity couldn’t be helped, he supposed, and yet the picture emerging of Beatrice’s fiancé was that of a milksop who couldn’t begin to manage a woman.
The devil perched upon his shoulder prompted him to press, “Can you be more specific?”
A pink splotch broke out on either high-boned cheek but to her credit, she didn’t look away. “Once he…spent himself, he collapsed atop me and lay immobile for a good many minutes. I fear his constitution may be less than vigorous.”
“I see,” Ralph said, his humor fading.
His poor, beautiful Beatrice. How dreadfully disappointing her first sexual experience had been. He only hoped the oaf hadn’t hurt her. She looked so sad and lost he could scarcely restrain himself from reaching out to hold her.
Brightening, she sent him a grateful smile, the same blindingly brilliant smile she wore following climax in his fantasies. “Yes, you do, don’t you? I’d hoped you would. One of us must take the reins of conjugal relations in hand, and that responsibility, it seems, will fall to me.” Her smile dimmed. “But I cannot very well teach Mr. Billingsby what I do not know myself. You comprehend my dilemma, do you not?”
“The blind leading the blind, yes, I believe I do.”
“Thank you.” She fretted her bottom lip, and Ralph felt himself swelling thinking of all the ways that very pretty mouth might be put to use. “I wish for you to tutor me in sex, Ralph. And no worries, I am more than willing to meet your price.”
Ralph felt his mouth fly open. “My price!”
She answered with a brisk nod. “Owing to a series of tidy bets I placed at The Downs last season, I have money, gobs of it. Well, not gobs precisely, but two hundred pounds, more than sufficient for one night’s work.”
One night’s work! For the span of a few hammering heart beats, he stared into the pale oval of her perfect face and willed himself to hate her. His mother had been a whore. Former thief though he was, he’d yet to sell himself that way.
He supposed he should be accustomed to indecent proposals by now. Men such as him, who’d lived rough but cleaned up shiny attracted a certain sort of woman—bored, rich and neglected. At least Beatrice seemed to consider him a step up from the gamekeeper or gardener. He did, these days, work indoors.
The irony was he would have done her for free. Hell, he would have paid for the privilege. The money she offered was a pittance, not that she’d know. She was too unschooled in the world beyond her salons and soirees to realize what commodities such as sex cost. Even if she’d offered him a king’s ransom, he’d cut off his hand before taking it.
If he possessed so much as a grain of sound sense, he would show Lady Beatrice the opposite side of his door immediately and find some way to banish her not only from his rooms, but also from his brain.
But Ralph had always been more lucky than wise. And he’d never wanted any woman as he wanted Beatrice. Beneath his desire lay fear. If he didn’t agree, she might well decide to seek tutelage elsewhere. The next man she propositioned might not be careful with her or discreet. Hell, he might not be clean. Blackmail, syphilis, rape—the host of dire possible consequences had his heart thundering and his palms sweating. It also steeled his resolve.
Beatrice Lindsey was looking to get herself seduced and she was even willing to pay for the privilege. Most men in his position would consider the bargain well met. A beautiful, eager almost virgin was his for the having, and all he need do was stay hard and breathe. Staying hard was the easy—inevitable—part. It was the breathing he must make a point to remember.
“I accept but on one condition.”
She met his gaze head on. “Name it.”
“Proper tutelage cannot be accomplished in a single night. It will require the full week at the very least.” If he was to sell his soul, he meant to exact its worth.
She hesitated, sliding her tongue over that very full, very pink bottom lip. God, that mouth alone might drive him mad. “But I only have the two hundred pounds.”
“More than ample,” he answered swiftly, swallowing his distaste.
“In that case, we have a bargain.” Smiling, she extended her trembling hand.
Ralph held back from taking it. “To be clear, once you step foot within this chamber, you will place yourself completely in my hands, subjugate yourself entirely to my will. Missish modesty has no place within these four walls. I will treat you as a woman, not a girl and most certainly not a child. You already know your own mind. I will teach you to know your own body just as fully. No pleasure will be off-limits, no act of lovemaking too shocking, too outrageous or too forbidden to forgo.” He steeled his voice to a schoolmaster’s sternness or rather how he imagined a schoolmaster might behave. “You must forget the so-called rules entirely. Within the boundaries of this room there are no rules. There is, however, a guiding principle and that, my dear, is pleasure. Can you do that, Beatrice? Can you surrender yourself to pleasure, to me, for the next seven nights?”
“I will try.” She firmed her chin and her voice. “I will do better than try. I will!”
Her fervor was almost religious in its zeal. One would have thought she’d just volunteered to roll bandages for wounded soldiers or to spoon up soup at one of the East End’s Salvation Army kitchens.
Fighting a smile, he composed his features into a somber face that would have served a barrister or better yet a judge. Unlike schoolmasters, barristers and judges were two occupations with which he could claim considerable firsthand account. “Excellent. Then we are agreed.”
“You’ll take me on, as your pupil?” The tentative hope in her voice would have caught at his heart had he not already closed off that most inconvenient organ.
Resolved to play the part of the perfect scoundrel she seemed to suppose he was, Ralph grinned. “Yes, Beatrice, I believe I will.”
Brightening, she didn’t miss a beat. “Marvelous. I brought these.” She reached into her cloak, brought out a tiny tin box, and held it out for him to take.
Ralph didn’t have to open it to know what lay inside. “You brought your own prophylactics?” he blurted out, horrified she didn’t trust him to take care of her.
She bobbed a brisk nod. “Will you not sheath yourself so that we may…get on with the business?”
“When the occasion presents itself, I shall. I possess a full tin of my own.”
Her face fell. “So you do diddle the housemaids after all?”
Ralph hadn’t “diddled” so much as a single housemaid since he’d entered Rourke’s employ. When his friend first acquired the castle several years ago there had been a widowed pub mistress in Linlithgow who’d been generous with her pints and her favors. But his visits had fallen off for no particular reason beyond not caring to bother. He hadn’t had a woman in more than nine months. But his past paramours were scarcely any of Beatrice’s business. She was, after all, the one of them about to wed.
He shrugged. “Given your chosen subject, a monk would make a very poor tutor, do you not think?”
She nodded. “Yes, of course.” Her high forehead furrowed, making her look momentarily older than her not quite one-and-twenty years. “Shall I take off my cloak and lie down?” She glanced toward the sofa. Stuffed with horsehair and narrow of seat, it was a thoroughly uncomfortable piece.
Her question caught him off guard. Good God, did she expect him to pounce like an animal? Foreplay, he more than suspected, was one of the subtleties her fiancé had seen fit to circumvent.
Ralph was determined to be tender with Beatrice whether she wanted it or not. “Mind that you are the pupil here and leave the lesson in my hands.” He stepped closer and slid his right foot between her two slipper-shod ones. Reaching up, he brushed the curve of her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “You have a beautiful mouth.”
Her gaze slid away. “Th-thank you.”
He pinned her chin between his thumb and forefinger and willed her to look at him. “There is no need to thank me for a simple statement of truth.”
Indeed, hers was a mouth made for kissing, many kinds of kissing. A mouth Ralph resolved to tease and titillate, to sample and savor. A mouth that one day soon he meant to see rimming his cock.
But it was only their first lesson.
He leaned in, angling his face to hers, letting her become accustomed to their closeness. “I mean to teach you well, Beatrice.” He brushed his lips over hers.
She shivered. “Ralph, I—”
“Hush, no more talking, no more thinking at all for the time being,” he ordered, feeling his cock thickening at the prospect of leaving all such cumbersome logic behind.
Sliding his tongue along the seam of her lips, he savored her petal-soft texture and champagne-laced breath, teasing her back and forth, again and again. His waiting was rewarded with her sudden sharp breath, the low little moan sending her sagging against him. Wrapping his arms about her waist, he slowly worked his tongue inside, touching the tip to the ridged roof of her mouth, the bottom row of her perfect white teeth and finally her tongue. He stopped there, gauging her response, constructing a mental catalogue of what she seemed to like best.
Clearly she liked this. She reached up and wound her slender arms about his neck, the cloak opening partway. Her breasts pushed against his chest, making him mindful that beneath the cloak she was as naked as he was beneath his robe.
Ralph took advantage of her raised arms to unfasten the cloak. He came to the last of the hooks and slid the garment from her shoulders without her seeming to register its loss. He glided his gaze over her, savoring the pretty picture she made—breasts, small, high and rose-tipped; a lovely long waist and slender legs that seemed to go on forever. Women as a rule liked being looked at, and in Beatrice’s case his admiration was in no way feigned. She was quite perfectly beautiful as well as gloriously willing. Based on what she’d shared of her first time with the milksop, he would have expected clenched thighs and a board-stiff body. Nothing could be further from the case. So far he’d scarcely done more than kiss her and already her nipples stood out, taut twin pink peaks.
He slid a hand from her breast down the length of her, stroking her belly and lower. Kneading her crisp curls, he felt his swollen cock leaking. “Did you ever climb trees when you were little?”
Lazy-lidded eyes met his. Had they been on the streets, that distracted look would have been his cue to snatch her purse and run. But he had dearer spoils at stake. And he had no intention of running anywhere.
“Once, I think. Not really. Kate was always the one of us playing out-of-doors. I preferred staying inside with my dolls.”
He slid his other hand down her spine and cupped her ass. Shaping the firm lobe, he brought her flush against his erection, letting her feel him, letting her know. “Bend your leg and brace it upon my waist,” he breathed into her hair. “Yes, that’s the way.” He slid his hand to the crease of her knee, locking it in place.
“Is it really possible to have relations in this position?” she asked, shifting against him so that he was obliged to reach down with his free hand and check to make sure his unsheathed cock remained covered.
Stroking her, he said, “Were I to lay my hands just below your buttocks and lift you and were you to oblige me by cinching your legs tightly about my waist, we could have vigorous congress with but a wall as anchor. Does that intrigue you?” Her widened pupils and moist, parted mouth told him it did, but he wanted to hear her say it.
“Yes,” she admitted in a breathy voice. “Yes, it does.”
Sticky moisture slid down the side of him. Of the two of them, he was likely the least in control.
To cover his discomposure, he summoned his sternest, most professorial tone. “In that case, ask me for it. Ask me for it, Beatrice, and when you do, mind you say ‘please.’”
“You want me to…beg you?” Whetting her dry lips, Beatrice was torn between offense and a strangely dark thrill.
“Sex is a dance of sorts,” Ralph explained, his one hand petting her most intimately, his other fixed firmly upon her bottom, and what might only be his…member pulsing against the inside of her one open thigh. “And in this dance, I am master.”
Meeting that steely-eyed gaze in the semidarkness, Bea sensed he meant to take their arrangement, their lessons, most seriously indeed. And that was precisely what she wanted—wasn’t it?
She opened her mouth to reply she knew not what. Before she could say anything, he bent his head to her breast, his mouth closing over the tip, his tongue laving the nipple, a sweet, sweet antidote to the swollen ache. At the same time, his stroking hand slid lower still, raising a trembling shiver.
“That feels nice,” she whispered, tightening her grip about his neck and cinching her leg more firmly about his waist, the craving coiling at her core. “Better than nice—it feels so very good.”
He lifted his head to look at her. “I’m glad. I want you to feel good.” Gaze locking on hers, he found her with his fingers, sliding the digit in and out. Warm liquid drizzled the inside of one sensitized thigh, sending his taut muscles thrumming. “Oh, Ralph.”
He withdrew his digit. To her shame, she whimpered, even begged, this time without having to be prompted. “Please, oh, please,” she whispered, uncertain for what she asked, trusting him to know, to take care, to satisfy.
His eyes told her he knew what she needed even if she did not. He found some heretofore undiscovered part of her, a tight little nubbin she’d once viewed with her hand mirror, and began circling it with what must be the pad of his thumb.
“You like this, do you not?” His breath was a balmy breeze that stirred the damp hair at her temples, his strumming hand the instrument of her physical salvation and moral doom.
“Oh, yes.” She swallowed hard, wondering at how her throat might feel so parched when the space between her thighs felt so very wet.
Hot chills skittered over her. Perspiration gathered at the back of her bent knee. Her sex throbbed with a building, budding ache.
Stroking her nether lips, he whispered into her ear, “Tell me what else you want.”
Desperate to reach the release she’d never before known, she reached down between them, encircled Ralph’s wrist, and steered him back to her center.
“Where you touched me before…in small circles, it felt—” She stopped there, the glorious sensations too grand for words.
She didn’t have to explain. Clearly Ralph knew what she needed better than she did. He found the nexus of her need and recommenced the slow, rhythmic rounding. Aching need crested toward crescendo. Random tingles transformed to a steady staccato throbbing. She was close to experiencing her first sexual climax, closer than she’d ever before been, so very close she could catch the scent of it in the musky air and taste it on her tongue.
She covered the top of his strumming hand with her own. “Please, please don’t stop.”
“I won’t stop.” As if to prove it, his plucking finger picked up pace, sending her sex humming.
The climax broke over here like a storm, the contractions striking fast and furious. Like a tree struck by lightning and split in half, she felt the shuddering run through the whole of her—belly, back and buttocks, fingers and feet.
Burying her face in the salt-flavored flesh of Ralph’s neck, she drank in the scent of sweat and lemon seed soap and screamed and screamed and screamed.
BEA LOWERED HER CRAMPED LEG. Her foot touching the floor triggered a painful pins-and-needles pinging. She lurched against him.
“Careful.” He caught her easily, his arm a steadying anchor about her naked waist.
Forced to cling to him, she felt her former embarrassment returning. “My leg is asleep.”
“So I see. Hold on to me.”
With his free hand he covered her with the cloak and then walked her over to a chair. Reaching it, he sat her down and knelt at her feet. He reached for her foot and began kneading the arch.
“Ooh.” Bea winced as the needling spiked.
“Better?” He slid his massaging hands upward to her calf.
Staring down onto the top of his bowed head, the wavy locks still bearing the furrows from her fingers, Bea couldn’t bring herself to answer beyond a nod. The sudden lump lodging in her throat felt as big as a boulder. Despite the most intimate act in which they’d only just taken part, his tending of her seemed infinitely more personal, almost…tender. “Ralph?”
“Hmm?” As if lost in his task, he didn’t bother looking up.
“Do you mean to…that is will you…enter me?”
Still working her leg, he shook his head. “I will not.”
Hugging the cloak about her, Bea felt the sting of his rejection like a backhanded blow. Mr. Billingsby’s reaction had been dispiriting to be sure, but this was humiliation swept to soaring, dizzying heights.
Addressing his crown, she said, “I know I’m not a beauty like my sister.”
The current fashion favored females with curvy tops and bottoms and tiny, cinched-in middles. Kate was blessed with such an hourglass figure. Bea, in contrast, was shaped like a stick.
This time he looked up. Their gazes snagged, and his massaging hands stilled though he yet cradled her foot. “No, you are nothing like your sister,” he agreed.
Bea felt a sob bubble in her throat. Choking it down, she pushed up from her seat. “Well, now that is settled, I should go.”
Only Ralph refused to release her. “What you are is breathtakingly beautiful and utterly exquisite.”
Tears of gratitude dampened her eyes. “Then why do you not desire to—”
“I desire to do everything with you.”
“Everything?”
He nodded, the stark need sketched on his features affirming he wanted her as she did him. “Yes, everything.”
“Then why…”
His gaze swept over her face. “It is late, you have spent the day traveling and the servants will begin stirring in another few hours. We have six more nights.”
“But I still want…” Mortified, she bit her lip and let the sentence trail off.
“Anticipation plays a large part in sexual satisfaction.” He grinned up at her, once more the consummate rake. “In the interim, I want you to go back to your room and practice pleasuring yourself.”
“But I’ve never…” Ashamed, she let the sentence die.
Rubbing her arch, no longer tingling, he lifted a brow. “Pleasured yourself?”
She hesitated. “Not…successfully.”
Before the dispiriting episode with Mr. Billingsby, she’d launched multiple attempts. She’d ended each session frustrated and sore.
He set her foot gently down and stood. “A woman must understand how to satisfy her own desires before she can satisfy those of a partner.”
He offered her an arm up, his gaping robe revealing perspiration-damp curls, perfectly sculpted pectorals and the brownish pink disc rimming one nipple. Relief at knowing he still wanted her brought a swift return of desire. Suddenly, she wanted to rip off that robe and lap his salt-slick skin, draw his nipples into her mouth and see just how hard her suckling might make them, drag her nails and lips and teeth across his leanly muscled chest and torso and…
“I will try.” She reached out a shaking hand and wrapped her fingers about his wrist.
He brought her to her feet and swung her toward him, so close that she could taste the smoky peat of the Scotch he’d drunk on the breath blowing across her lips, feel the heat of his gaze like fire on her flesh. “Think of self-pleasure as your first homework assignment. There may well be a test when you return tomorrow night.” He winked.
Bea relaxed, as well. “So you mean to have me back, then?”
“Come at nine o’ clock and make sure you’re punctual.” He looked down to his wrist, which she still gripped, and then back up at her, gaze gleaming. “I have a most intriguing lesson in mind.”
DAWN LIGHTS STREAKED THE SKY by the time Bea crept over the threshold of her bedchamber and pulled the door quietly closed. The flagstone floor felt like an ice block beneath her thinly soled slippers, the chamber’s chill beckoning her to bed. On her way, she couldn’t resist stopping before the dressing glass. Turning up the globe lamp, she regarded her reflection.
The eyes meeting hers in the mirror were wide and clear and shining despite her having been up since dawn the previous day. But it was her swollen lips and flushed body that betrayed the change in her as she trusted Ralph would not.
Her first climax. What a mad, marvelous miracle it was! And to think Ralph had used no more than his hand whereas Mr. Billingsby’s entire person had not begun to bring about such a torrent of sweet, savage release.
But then Mr. Billingsby had never once stroked or kissed her breasts. Nor had he parted her thighs ever so gently and used the pad of his thumb to catapult her to mad, over-the-moon ecstasy. Likewise, she very much doubted it would occur to him to drop to his knees and rub her cramping feet.
Charming rogues like Ralph eat little girls like you for breakfast.
What a pity Ralph wasn’t a marrying man, an even greater pity that she should, even after tonight’s impromptu lesson, still fantasize that he might turn into one. But then confounding fantasy with reality had always been her flaw. Growing up, she’d pretended that her mother wasn’t dead after all but a fairy princess living in a castle in the sky. Her father wasn’t her real father, but a wicked troll who’d captured her and Kate. All they need do was bide their time until their respective handsome princes turned up to rescue them. Simple.
But grown-up life didn’t work like make-believe. Ralph might resemble the handsome prince of her girlish daydreams, but along with being her friend, he was also a former thief, a charming womanizer, a rogue. She wasn’t really in love with him. She couldn’t be. Loving Ralph would be blatantly stupid and after all the stupid mistakes she’d so far made, she couldn’t afford another.
In the spirit of prudence, she hung her cape back inside the wardrobe lest Hattie remark upon why, in the middle of the night, she had taken it out. Shivering, she walked over to the turned down bed and slipped beneath the chilly sheets. Pulling them up to her chin, she settled in, her recently sated body throbbing to full, awakened life.
Beneath the covers, she found herself with her fingers. Only for the first time in memory she felt no guilt, only a tremulous excitement she now recognized as arousal. Retracing the motions of Ralph’s finger—even thinking of those small, slow circles had her throbbing—she concentrated on conjuring her tutor’s handsome face, his eyes especially. No longer cast adrift in a sea of bottomless wanting, she felt the pleasure building as she’d always supposed it should, cresting toward some invisible crescendo, a golden moment she’d yet to fully comprehend but craved again all the same. In her fantasy, her slender finger became Ralph’s blunter digit, the blankets atop her the weight of his leanly muscled body lying atop hers. She could almost feel the warmth of his breath striking the side of her throat, the soft press of his lips as he trailed heated kisses over her body, a body he’d blessed with the word exquisite. And all the while, his gaze never left her.
Watching eyes. Hazel eyes.
Ralph’s eyes.
She squeezed closed her eyes and came and came and came.