Lesson Four
“A man should gather from the actions of the woman of what disposition she is, and in what way she likes to be enjoyed.”
—The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana
“YOU NEED TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON, Beatrice,” Ralph told her the next night, standing beside the bed on which she lay. Untying the belt from his robe, he pulled it free from the loops. “You need to learn to submit to pleasure and for this week at least, that means submitting to me.” Slowly, very slowly, he dragged the belt free of its loops.
Bea’s breath hitched, not with fear, but with a strange, edgy excitement.
“Give me your hands.”
She hesitated, and then held them out for him to bind. He looped the belt about her right wrist, and then her left, and then tied the whole to the brass bedpost. Lifting her head from the pillow to watch, she felt both removed from her body and completely one with it. She wondered if she was supposed to struggle, to fight him. Struggling, fighting was part and parcel of her nature. And yet she found she didn’t want to fight with Ralph Sylvester. She wanted to submit to him, obey him and give herself up to him—completely.
He secured her and stood back. “So long as you don’t struggle, there should be no bruising.”
Bruising! A frisson shot through her, sexual excitement flavored with the barest hint of fear.
She wore her corset, garters and stockings, but no bloomers, no other under things at all. Lying near naked, displayed like a whore, was strangely exciting. She could hardly wait for him to climb atop and enter her. Instead he stood looking down at her for what seemed like an ungodly long time.
He grabbed a rose from the vase on the bedside table and, easing a hip onto the side of the mattress, settled in beside her. “You’re beautiful.” He dragged the rose’s pink petals along her cheek and jaw. “Utterly exquisite.” Using the flower, he traced the curve of her lower lip.
She felt sweat break out upon her brow. “Please.”
“Please, what?” He stroked the petals along the swell of her breasts.
Her corseted nipples stiff and aching, she hesitated, wetting her lips. “I want…” Her voice trailed off. What did she want?
“Do you want the device again?” he asked gently.
The dildo they’d earlier used had been strangely stimulating. Made of leather, it was long and thick and fashioned to simulate the member of a well-endowed man. Straddling Ralph’s lap while facing their joined reflections in the full-length dressing mirror, his hardness pressed against her buttocks and his hand moving the dildo in and out and around had been undoubtedly titillating. But mainly, it was Ralph’s watching her, not the novelty that had caused her to climax. A prop was no substitute for a flesh-and-blood lover. Still, once she wed Mr. Billingsby, the device might well be elevated to the level of marriage savior, not because she doubted her fiancé’s aptitude to learn so much as she did her will to teach him. More and more of late, she couldn’t imagine sharing such intimacies with anyone other than Ralph.
She shook her head. “I don’t need a toy. I need you. Please, Ralph, please…” She fought against the restraints not because she wanted to escape, but so she could grab his hands and force them down upon her body.
He swung a leg over her and straddled her. She expected him to reach for the French Letters on the bedside table, but instead he slid down the length of her. Parting her thighs, he bent and kissed her between them.
Stroking gentle fingers through her mons, he smiled up at her. “How many times must I tell you, you’ve only to ask?”
He dipped his head and this time he covered her with his mouth. Unprepared, Bea would have leaped from the bed were she not bound there. The sensation of his lips and tongue on her sex was exquisite, beyond anything she had heretofore imagined.
Her sensitized skin suddenly felt too hot, too moist and altogether too tight to contain such a world of wanting. Hot chills skittered down her spine. Gooseflesh furled her upper arms and forearms and thighs. Like a demon’s heart buried between her legs, her sex was consumed with a great throbbing ache.
Relentless, Ralph licked and laved her, suckled and spread her wide, then wider still. The pressure built, the pleasure peaking toward a pinnacle. Almost there, almost there and not quite…
“Please don’t stop, please don’t, please…” Now that she’d begun begging, she couldn’t seem to stop.
Ralph slid not one but two fingers inside. Rubbing a heretofore undiscovered sensitive spot within her, he circled her clit with his tongue. Once, twice, thrice…
Bea exploded, the fireworks and shooting stars melding into one long blissful scream.
RALPH DREW THE CHAIR NEARER to the bed, the better to watch Beatrice sleep. He shouldn’t have let her fall asleep in his bed. It was careless of him, stupid really. Now that he had, he couldn’t risk falling asleep himself. He would need to wake her in another few hours so she could slip back into her room before the servants stirred.
It was just as well. He was weary without being sleepy, physically sated without being truly satisfied. Not since he was fourteen and caught working Johnnie Black’s flash house had his emotions felt so bloody raw. He forced himself to remember that what she wanted wasn’t him, but a specific part of him, his cock. She didn’t want the complete package that was Ralph Sylvester and he couldn’t find it in him to blame her. Not even his mother had wanted him and the women with whom he’d lain over the years had only needed him for the short-term. He was too upper-crust for a woman of his own class and too sketchy for a woman who was a lady to consider as anything more than a secret lover. Why should this woman, this girl really, be any different?
And yet Bea was different, he’d always known it. Their interludes at the paddock feeding carrots to Princess had been some of the loveliest of his otherwise unlovely life.
This girl is getting to you. As always, the heckling inside his head sounded a lot like Johnnie Black.
She was. She had. He’d never wanted a woman beyond her body, beyond the pleasure, beyond the moment. Wanting more than sex with someone was unchartered waters for him. He was not only out of his depth, but sinking fast. The only plane upon which he understood how to approach her was the physical. He only hoped his body would suffice to bridge the gap, the emptiness left by all the words he dared not say. He wanted her to not just want him, but to need him. He wanted to be her food, her opium, her air. He wanted to snare her so that the breadth of her desire made it impossible to fathom ever leaving him. Not now. Not ever.
And even if he failed and she married the milksop, Ralph meant for her to wear the memory of him—his scent, his touch, his taste—like a brand.
BEA CRACKED OPEN AN EYE. The curtained bedchamber was dark and yet morning it must be. Any notion that the previous night’s happenings might have been a dream vanished the moment she lifted her arms to the headrest and stretched. Her body was deliciously tender in any number of wicked places. In particular, the lovely soreness between her legs didn’t lie. Likewise the bruises on her knees and wrists, the strained muscles of her arms and thighs, and the muskiness of the mussed sheets testified that the previous night of vigorous carnal pleasure was no wishful imagining but a physical event between two flesh-and-blood beings. An event she couldn’t wait to repeat. Last night’s lesson had surfaced a heretofore unknown and unsuspected aspect of her personality.
She fancied a bit of burlap with her lace.
Unfortunately Ralph Sylvester was only interested in her body. No doubt he viewed her as little more than a stimulating novelty not unlike the sexual toy he’d produced for her to try. Beyond the next few days, he didn’t want her in his life.
But that depressing thought was best saved for later. She might have begun the night with her wrists lashed to the bedposts, but in the end it was her tutor who had capitulated. He’d let her spend the night. Smiling to herself, she rolled onto her side and reached for Ralph. Instead of her arm met with empty space. Testing it with her palm, she found that space to be quite cold.
A funny, frenzied panic seized her. She pushed herself upright. “Ralph!”
“Good morning.”
Relief flooded her, ridiculous and yet true. She followed his voice over to the window. He reclined in the wing chair by the window, the smoke from the cheroot he held sketching clouds in the air. His hair was mussed, one side sticking up higher than the other, and the light coming in from the parted curtains showed the glint of stubble on his face. Wearing the now familiar dressing gown with brocaded lapels, he epitomized a gentleman at his leisure. The robe was laid open at the waist, unbelted, but then she knew why. The sash still hung from the bedpost behind her, the final proof that last night had been very real, not a dream at all.
“What time is it?”
“Coming on four o’ clock. I was just about to wake you.” His lazy lidded gaze slid over her body, reminding her that by now he knew it as well or better than she did herself. “I trust you slept well?”
“Yes.”
Indeed, she’d slept more soundly than she could ever before remember. Who would have known sin made for such a soft pillow?
She lifted the covers and glanced down at herself. She still wore the corset, but her garters were gone, no doubt lost somewhere in the blankets. “I suppose I should go.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Yes, you should. But first I want to see you.”
She let the sheet drop. Just a few days ago, displaying herself in the bright light of morning would have seemed an unthinkable boldness, but now she didn’t seem to mind at all.
His eyes lit and he stubbed out the smoke. “I want you again.” He said it matter-of-factly. Only those hot eyes raking over her weren’t matter-of-fact at all.
“I want you, too.” She’d awakened mere minutes ago and already the tightly coiled ache throbbed between her thighs.
She came toward him, forcing herself not to rush, but to take slow, steady steps. What she really wanted was to race toward him and launch herself into his lap, but such inelegant exuberance was for true lovers and their relationship wasn’t about lovemaking, but sex. He was her tutor, not her fiancé, her lover and yet not really. Despite the intimate nature of their subject matter, she couldn’t afford to forget that ultimately she was paying for his time.
She halted before him. Past being unnerved by his steady stare, she drew her gaze slowly over him and down. She’d never before thought of a man’s member as being beautiful, but Ralph’s was, very much so. He was long and thick, the rosy cock head already dewy with desire. Fascinated, she reached out and traced the silken slit with the tip of her forefinger.
He shuddered, not just his member, but the whole of him. Looking up, she saw that a fine misting of sweat had broken out on his forehead, chest and belly. His skin felt damp and flushed, almost fevered.
Bea knelt, one of her favorite things or so she was learning. His legs were already open. It was a simple matter to move his robe aside, lay her hands upon his knees, and settle between. She did. Musky maleness greeted her, mingling with the scents of sweat and lemon seed soap and another scent she vaguely recognized as her own. The olfactory onslaught made her mouth water and her sex slicken.
She slid one hand upward to the inside of his thigh, and he started. “Am I doing something wrong?”
A stark shake of his head accompanied the choked sound he emitted. “No.”
“Shall I keep touching you?”
He nodded. “Yes, yes…”
He snapped his mouth closed so quickly that she couldn’t be sure, but she could have sworn he’d started to say, “please.”
RALPH REQUIRED ROURKE’S signature on a railway document, only the Scotsman had gone missing from the study and had been absent from his desk for some time. Not that Ralph was worried. As usual these days, his employer could be found in the nursery playing with his baby daughter and spoiling her to the brink of death. Given how roughly they’d both grown up, Ralph could only marvel at such worship of a child.
Rourke stood beside the crib, holding Lucy in his arms, patiently enduring her twisting his broken nose, her tiny fisted grip one that would do a fledgling pugilist proud. Ralph crossed his arms on his chest and leaned against the door frame, his impatience fading in the midst of such a charmingly comical scene.
“Get ’em where it hurts.” Rourke pulled back and planted a smacking kiss on his daughter’s apple cheek. “That’s Papa’s girl.”
Ralph reasoned it was likely time to interrupt. “If the rest of Black’s Boys could but see you now.”
“Fatherhood makes fools of the best of us.” Rourke dragged his gaze away from the baby and lifted it to Ralph. “Mock me if you will, but mind you, Sylvester, your day will come.”
Ralph snorted. “My day will never come.”
Rourke cocked a roan-colored brow. “Never makes for a bold statement—and a bloody long, lonely time of it.”
Ralph shoved off from the door and crossed the room to the crib. He felt cross suddenly though he could hardly say why. “I stand by my ‘never’ and support it with two very sound, very rational reasons. I will never marry nor will I sire a bastard to endure an existence such as we did.”
No need to add that the woman with whom he was rapidly falling in love—very well, with whom he strongly suspected he’d already fallen in love—was set to wed another.
“A confirmed bachelor, are you?” Rourke cocked a brow and snorted. “Well, I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Women, Sylvester, have a way of sneaking beneath a man’s skin.”
Ralph let the subject die, declining to point out that their life circumstances lay worlds apart. He’d never before begrudged his friend his fine fortune nor did he now. Still, he felt an inkling of regret he hadn’t followed suit even in some smaller way, set aside a “nest egg” of his own. Beyond a wardrobe of custom-cut suits, he had little enough to show for all his tricks and cleverness.
Rourke broke in upon his thoughts by saying, “I’ve to go into Edinburgh the day after next for the quarterly shareholders meeting. I canna trust that blasted blackguard chairman of the board, Seamus Craig, not to stage a coup. The devil never ceases to try and thwart me, though the return on investments for the new tunnel has seen profit doubling over the past quarter.”
Blast, but the quarterly stockholders meeting had escaped Ralph’s mind entirely even though he’d been the one to draft the memorandum to the board members the week before. But then since Bea’s arrival, his steel trap of a brain had turned sievelike, at least when it came to any matter not expressly concerned with his lovely pupil. Their latest lesson had launched in the wee hours of that morning, and he caught himself wondering how she might be getting on.
“What time do we leave?” Ralph asked.
Rourke concentrated on rearranging the soft pink blanket about the baby. “I thought you might bide here.”
“You won’t need me at the meeting?” Ralph asked, careful to conceal his elation.
Normally he might take offense at being so easily dismissed, worry even that it was some reflection on his work performance, which admittedly had been less than stellar of late. But under the circumstances, the possibility that he might stay behind and finish out the week with Beatrice was veritable music to his ears.
Rourke shrugged. “I can manage for one day, I suppose. Besides, I don’t like to leave my Katie Girl alone when she’s breeding.”
A week earlier, Ralph would have been hard-pressed not to point out that Kate would hardly find herself alone in a household that now numbered nearly fifty. But given the circumstances, why look a gift horse in the mouth?
“If you’re quite certain…”
“I am, so it’s settled, aye?” Rourke asked though from Ralph’s experience of his friend turned employer, it was more statement than question.
Ralph nodded. “Yes, it’s settled.”
Seemingly satisfied, Rourke leaned over the crib and commenced cooing at the baby.
Turning toward the door, Ralph allowed he’d rarely felt more unsettled in all his days.
“BEA-BEA, YOU SEEM so very fidgety,” Kate remarked that same afternoon, pausing in her otherwise enthusiastic presentation of her latest renovation plans, the last of the series of the Edinburgh architect’s drawings unfurled atop her desk. “I venture to say you’ve not heard a word I’ve said this past hour.” She let out a huff, inadvertently rousing Toby snoozing beneath the desk.
Shifting in her seat, Bea feared her sister wasn’t far from the mark, but she scoured her distracted brain all the same. “You had my full attention up to the point of replacing the hip baths with built-in copper-cast bathing tubs. A dial for hot and cold running water as well as waste sounds very grand, very modern. I’m quite certain the housemaids currently charged with carrying heated water upstairs in those heavy brass cans will forever bless your name. When it comes to the conversion from gas to electricity, though, I’m afraid you’ve quite lost me.”
“No matter.” Looking marginally mollified, Kate rolled up the plan and replaced it in its hollow tube. “Is anything the matter?
Bea shrugged, and then shivered at the reaction even that slight motion wrought. “It must be wedding jitters,” she said, falling back on the apparently failsafe excuse for all imminent brides.
Poor Mr. Billingsby could not begin to fathom the torrent of sexual craving his ineptitude had released. At this rate, she would be the most sexually knowledgeable bride of her set. The other night, she had been beyond bad. Certainly she had not entertained such scandalous and exotic notions during her doomed attempt with Mr. Billingsby, whose person it was a trial to touch. But with Ralph she found she yearned to do scandalous, exotic things. She wanted to be wicked with him, for him, and not only because the lessons might have some future matrimonial use. She wanted to touch, taste and gaze upon Ralph and be touched, tasted and gazed upon by him for no other reason than because doing so gave her pleasure.
His latest lesson, which had occurred that morning, had involved gifting her with a pair of marble-size metal-weighted balls, which he’d presented in a green baize-lined case. A long, thin gold chain strung the orbs together. Ben-Wa balls he’d called them, a device for eliciting desire that dated back to the ancient Orient. Bea had never heard of such a thing but once she realized their purpose, she’d been curious—very well, eager—to try them.
Bea quickly learned the balls didn’t induce sexual climax but rather a slow-burning state of relentless arousal. Gravity proved to be both friend and foe. The slightest movement of her hips or legs increased the teasing friction. When Kate suggested a brisk walk outside to view the winter garden she’d put in, Bea had nearly choked on a mouthful of morning chocolate. Sitting in the nursery rocking chair had nearly been her undoing. She’d already excused herself to her room to masturbate on three separate occasions and it was not yet teatime. Short of pulling on the chain and removing the blasted balls, which her tutor expressly forbade, she had little choice but to suffer the relentless stirrings in silence and count out the hours until evening.
“Perhaps a walk would help,” Kate said yet again and glanced beneath the desk to where the dog lay snoring on his side. “Toby could use the exercise.”
Bea held back a groan. She pushed back from the table and all but leaped from her seat. “Actually I believe a good book from your finely stocked library may be just the antidote I seek.”
AFTER LEAVING KATE, Bea set her stride toward her brother-in-law’s study, which set adjacent to the library. She needed Ralph. She needed him quite desperately. The desire inside her was building toward implosion. Seeking him out during the day was a direct violation of their agreement. And yet at the moment, Bea didn’t care, not a jot. She was sick to death of rules, even the ones she’d helped to make—especially those.
She came upon her brother-in-law’s study, a familiar destination by now. Blast but the door was closed. Pressing a flushed ear to the paneling, she discerned Ralph’s voice and then Rourke’s in answer. Judging from the timbre of their tones, they sounded to be in the thick of a project. Then again, that shouldn’t surprise her. It was, after all, the middle of the workday.
Bea gathered her courage, raised a trembling fist, and knocked. After a moment’s pause, Rourke called for her to enter.
Weak-kneed, she stepped inside. Rourke sat behind his desk, a leather-bound ledger lying open and his spectacles sliding down his broken bridge of nose. Ralph sat at the second desk, his cravat loosened and his jacket hanging over the chair back. A small, black bound notebook lay open before him, and he had a fountain pen tucked behind one ear.
Both men pulled back their chairs and stood as she entered. Dividing her gaze between them, Bea felt her palms begin to perspire. Until now her hands had been one of the few parts of her body she had maintained some control over.
“I am so sorry to disturb you.” It seemed she did little but apologize these days.
Rourke fixed her with a worried look. “Is ought amiss? Kate, Lucy—”
“Kate is pouring over the latest architect’s drawings and Lucy is napping in her nursery.”
Distracted though she was, it still warmed her to see just how very much Rourke cared for the females in his life. Her sister and niece were everything to him. Then unlike Ralph, her brother-in-law didn’t eat little girls for breakfast or big ones, either. Patrick O’Rourke had begun life as a homeless rogue as had Ralph, but he’d taken to the civilizing pleasures of home and hearth with astonishing ease. Ralph, in contrast, could scarcely bring himself to sit through a family dinner. He didn’t bother to hide that he found Lucy’s crying to be a bother. Even in the throes of her very real, very physical frustration, Bea conceded that her heart’s sudden fisting hadn’t to do with Ben-Wa balls or dildos or the delicious things to be done with silk scarves. It had to do with babies—all the blue-and hazel-eyed, blond-and sandy-haired, beautiful babies she and Ralph would never ever have.
Voice shaking, she said, “I crave a word with Ralph.” For the first time since entering, she dared to look at her tutor head-on.
Ralph returned her gaze, game face on. “Can it wait, milady? I am in the midst of taking down a letter.”
Bea gritted her teeth. He knew damn well why she’d come, the level of her urgency, the rawness of her need. Her brother-in-law, however, looked to be wholly in the dark, and she meant to keep him that way. Still, she’d never had much talent for lying. Growing up, Kate had always seen through her fibs straightaway. But at the moment she was altogether too hot, too wet and too consumed by desperate desire to back down.
“I’m afraid it is urgent,” she said sharply. Staring into his expressionless hazel eyes, she suddenly saw just how good at lying he could be. “I need you…to telephone in a telegram for me, an urgent telegram to do with the wedding.” Unnerved, she pivoted back to her brother-in-law. “I must tell Aunt Lavinia that Brussels lace will never do. If I do not intercept her before she puts in her order with the dressmaker, it will be too late,” she added, inwardly wincing at what a silly goose she must sound.
She saw Rourke catch Ralph’s eye and mouth the word brides accompanied by a rolling of his eyes. Composing himself, he turned back to Bea. “Seeing as your purpose is so verra urgent, I suppose I can spare him.” He closed the large leather-bound ledger lying open on his desk. “Go on, Sylvester, we can take up this beastly business later.”
Ralph’s gaze brushed over her, and the heat coiled at her core unfurled and shot straight to her toes. “If you’re certain,” he said to Rourke as though she weren’t in the room at all—another blow to her pride.
Rourke stooped over the desk, pushing the scattered papers into piles. “You’re not that indispensable.” He punctuated the pronouncement with a wink.
“As you wish.” Ralph turned away to collect his coat, his expertly tailored trousers stretching tautly over his slim hips and perfect ass. Wondering why he seemed so intent on torturing her, Bea licked her lips and considered that her brother-in-law could not know just how very wrong he was.
At that moment, Ralph Sylvester was as dispensable to her as air.
“Thank you,” she said and headed out into the hallway.
Ralph followed her, still taking his sweet time. Stepping out, he pulled the study door closed behind him. “The telephone is in the front hallway,” he told her, his innocent tone belied by the wicked gleam in his eye.
Bea darted her gaze down the corridor and, finding it to be empty, grabbed his coat by the lapels and pulled him to her. Grinding her aching breasts against his chest, she hissed, “Speak to you? No, I don’t wish to bloody speak to you. I wish to…”
She stopped herself. Dear God, was she truly becoming so coarse that she would behave so badly in broad daylight in her sister’s home?
He sent her an impudent smile. “You’ve only to say the word, one word, and you can have what you want. You know this and yet your stubbornness persists.”
Bea ground her back teeth together and braced herself to let go of what little remained of her pride. “Please.”
His smile broadened. He took firm hold of her elbow and steered her down the corridor. Tripping to keep pace beside him, she asked, “We aren’t… That is to say… Aren’t we going to your room?”
He turned to look at her, his mocking eyes proclaiming her the sorriest of fools. “We can go anywhere you fancy, fornicate on the dining-room table if you wish. It’s not as though I have any particular reputation to protect, but if you value yours I’d warn against sneaking into bedrooms in the middle of the day. In case you haven’t noticed, servants tend to talk.”
They came upon the staircase. Opening a small door beneath it, he all but shoved her inside.
Squinting to accustom her eyes to the darkness, Bea saw that they stood in a storage closet. The space was big enough for two but barely. Dust motes floated in the dark, still air, which smelled of cedar and must. The slanted ceiling almost scraped the tops of their heads.
Ralph pulled the door closed behind them. Turning back around, he braced his back upon the wall and slid his gaze over her. “Tell me, how are you enjoying our latest experiment? By the look of you, you’re liking it far too much.”
Staring into that cocksure smile, she doubted she’d ever hated anyone half so much. Not her father for selling Princess and thereby ending Kate’s girlhood, not Felicity Drummond for playing her for a fool and not even Mr. Billingsby for being so very clumsy and complacent that she’d been driven to…this.
Fueled by fury as much as desire, she launched herself at him. Ralph’s arms wrapped about her, whipping her about.
He pinned her with the length of him, his eyes boring into hers, his hardness thrusting into her thigh. “Tell me what you want.”
The backs of her legs bumped against something solid and seemingly immoveable. A washstand, it seemed. He lifted her atop and set her down none too gently on the marble slab, the chill seeping into her backside.
“I want you to take these bloody…balls out of me.”
He quirked a brow, all cucumber-cool reserve swathed in expert English tailoring—tailoring her hands itched to rip from his body, his perfectly sculpted, sinfully beautiful body. The same perfectly sculpted, sinfully beautiful body that could bring her pleasure and drive her to madness in equal measure, pleasure and madness such as she’d never before imagined might exist.
“Is that all?”
He pulled her to the edge and stepped up so that she was forced to spread her legs to accommodate him. “How many times must I direct you, Beatrice, to ask for what you want?” His finger stroking slow, invisible circles at the side of her knee nearly set her out of her mind. His parted lips but a whisper away, he breathed into her mouth, “Ask, simply ask.”
“I want you to make me feel better. I want you to make me come.”
He shoved her skirts up to her waist. Bea looked down and gasped. How could she have forgotten? Earlier the crotch of her bloomers had become so drenched that in desperation she’d shucked them off. Her garters and stockings banded skin that was snowy-white for all she felt afire. Her pubis was at half tilt, the curls damp with desire, her nether lips ruby-red and glistening.
Ralph’s stark gaze met hers. He laid a hand on either knee and spread her legs as wide as they would go. As if reading her mind, he dipped his head and plunged not one but two fingers inside her. Fullness flooded her. Bea fell back on her elbows with a sob, arching against his hand. She felt his warm breath strike her belly and then lower. A gentle pull and then a snapping sound announced he’d captured the tail of the chain between his teeth. Bea caught her breath. For the span of several heartbeats, she forgot all save the gnawing need.
He drew back. A triumphant laugh saw him dropping the balls into his handkerchief and then into his pocket. He bent to her again. His tongue stroked, swept and finally struck deeply inside her, raising a nexus of heat at her core and shivery gooseflesh everywhere else. Bea squirmed atop the stand. It was hot and bruising, sticky and sweet and altogether the most primal moment of her life. Beyond shame, she cinched her legs about his waist and clawed at his back, her fingernails sinking into the worsted wool. She wanted to come, but first she wanted to make him bleed.
His mouth glinting with wetness, her wetness, he looked up at her and smiled. “A lady in the parlor and a whore in the bedroom.”
Beyond words, she braced herself on her elbow and let him have his way. He did, torturing her by moving his fingers scissor style inside her, milking her into his hand, teasing her clit and bringing her to the brink of satisfaction again and yet again, always pulling back before the final moment.
Beatrice was sure she would go mad. Mayhap she was mad, for what woman in her right mind would revel in being so degraded? Ralph didn’t want a marriage with her or babies with her or anything that someone such as she viewed as being a future, a life. He was perfectly content for her to carry on with her marriage plans, perfectly content to let their relationship rest as tutor and pupil, all they’d ever be. As bruised as her heart felt, yet she couldn’t seem to stop from lifting her hips to that hard, thrusting hand.
She spread her thighs as wide as they would go and locked her legs about his waist. “God, I hate you. I bloody hate you,” she said, lifting against him, mingling her sweat with his, her desire with his, reveling in the knowledge that for the rest of the day he would wear her scent on his fine clothes.
“I hate you, too.” He slipped his free hand beneath her buttocks and squeezed, his fingers sliding beneath the lobes. “I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed hating a woman so very much.”
He hated her. That was something, she supposed. The desktop bored into her backside, bruising the tip of her spine, punishing the backs of her thighs. The thought of bending over him as he disciplined her with the flat of his hand had her sex quivering.
“Hate me some more,” she moaned, grabbing at his wrist, willing him to work a third and even a fourth finger inside her, longing for him to finish her with his mouth. “Please,” she added. Having finally submitted to the begging, she couldn’t seem to stop.
She punctuated the plea by lifting her bottom off the marble, thrusting upward with her hips, and slamming into his hand, a silent invitation for him to touch and taste and take her in whatever way he wished.
“You’re so wet I could work the whole of my hand inside you for all that you’re still tight as a virgin.”
She opened her eyes and met his stark gaze. Holding it, she reached down and touched the hood of the little nub that, thanks to him, she now knew was called a clitoris. “I want you to stroke and suckle me there, just there.” Beyond shame, she moved her forefinger in the little circles that over the past few days she’d found she especially liked.
His head disappeared between her thighs. He spread her inner lips and covered her with his mouth, sending pleasure pouring through her. She worked hard fingers through his sandy-brown locks, raking his scalp with her nails and lifting to meet his mouth. He teased her with the tip of his tongue, striking the sensitive spot again and again, raising the steady desire she’d endured all day to a scalding, spiky mad ache.
The orgasm struck—fast, hard and furious. Lost to it, Bea shook, she shivered. She threw back her head and howled. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have screamed. At last she stopped shaking and opened her eyes. Ralph stood over her, a palm braced on either side of the washstand, blood and sweat streaking one side of his face.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“My turn.” He lifted her off the desk, set her on her feet and spun her about. “Bend over.”
Facing away from him, she sprawled over the table, her skirts riding her waist. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, pushed it to the side and lightly bit into the back of her bared neck. “A whore in the bedroom,” he whispered, his breath striking her nape.
Beatrice moaned. Though she’d come mere moments ago, she wanted him again. More than wanted, she needed him. She shifted to look back over her shoulder. His trouser flap hung open and he was rolling a prophylactic onto his darkly engorged, heavily swollen shaft. Watching him, she felt her mouth water and her sex cream. She licked her lips, remembering how good he’d tasted and the edgy thrill of taking all that maleness into her mouth.
Despite his command to stay as she was, she was almost moved to turn about and repeat the experience when “it” struck her. He’d known. Ralph must have known or at least strongly suspected that the Ben-Wa balls would drive her to seek him out. Not even a rogue like Ralph Sylvester went about his workday with prophylactics in his pocket. He’d manipulated—no, tortured her all day, and judging from his smug smile he was abundantly gratified by her predictable response. It was yet another reason to hate him. And she would hate him, deeply and darkly—later.
She felt him rubbing his cock head along her nether lips and pleasure poured through her. Into her ear, he whispered, “You’ll be wasted on that milksop fiancé of yours, you know that, don’t you? You can give him all the lessons you will, assuming he accepts them, and still he’ll not know what to do with you.”
Bea swallowed a moan, her hands flexing atop the table. “You ought not to speak of him so.”
She wished he would not speak of Mr. Billingsby at all. As much as she willed herself to hold on to the notion that their lessons were as much for her fiancé’s future benefit as hers, like a fist striking glass, this current coupling shattered that illusion.
He anchored hard hands to her hips and entered her in a single, blinding thrust. Nothing, absolutely nothing in Bea’s life before now had ever come close to hurting so very good. She moaned and raked her nails over her breasts. Even through the heavy corseting, she could feel her nipples swelling.
He drew back and entered her again. This time the force slammed her hard against the marble. She caught herself on her forearms. She would bear bruises on the morrow, maybe as soon as that night. Bruises she would wear on the train back to London. Bruises she might well find herself having to explain on her wedding night. Bruises that, regardless, she would weep to see fade.
Buried deeply inside her, he reached around the front of her, banding an arm about her breasts. “Will he be able to give you this, Beatrice? Will he?”
He rotated his hips and flexed from side-to-side inside her. Perspiration broke out on her brow. “No, he bloody well won’t. No one will ever again, no one but you!”
He pulled out and thrust again. At the same time, he reached around to her front and found her clit with his fingers.
Bea spasmed so sharply she couldn’t be sure if what she felt was pleasure or pain. Like a crystal vase she’d accidentally dropped as a child, she shattered, myriad glittering, sharp-edged pieces that could never again come together as a whole. Damp and weak-kneed, she sagged against the slab.
Hands, gentle once more, smoothed her skirts back down, picked her up, and sat her gently upon the stand. “Have one of the maids draw you a hot bath.” Ralph finished buttoning his trousers and turned to go.
“Shall I still come to you tonight?” she asked. Her body now sated, she found she hated herself far more than him.
He turned back long enough to nod. “Tonight at nine, I shall expect you.”
He hesitated and then reached inside his pocket. Drawing out the handkerchief, he dropped the Ben-Wa balls into her lap.
LYING TOGETHER IN Ralph’s bed later that night, Beatrice traced the black bird tattoo banding his bicep with a single softly stroking finger. “This is nice,” she said, breaking their companionable silence.
Ralph couldn’t say how long they’d lain together like that, the only sounds in the chamber those of the ticking clock and their collective breathing, but he agreed. It was nice. Unlike his past lovers, Beatrice showed no tendency to fill up the void with chatter. In such brief, lovely moments, he need only concentrate on the sunshine clean scent of her, the satiny smoothness of her skin, and the sensation of her breath striking the side of his neck. At such times, it was easy enough to forget they were playing a game, a match in which more and more of late, master and pupil seemed to be pitted against one another. Still, despite what he’d earlier said, hating her was the very farthest thought from his mind.
“Only you’re hot as a baker’s oven,” she added with a laugh, flopping onto her back. Only then was he aware that their bare skin had been sticking.
He turned on his side to look at her. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d ever been within a stone’s throw of an oven of any sort.”
She swept a hand through her tangled hair, the very picture of unstudied beauty. Mussed, he decided, was how he liked her best. “You’d be surprised. Kate and I took on a great many tasks once the servants were let go. The only difference was Kate was actually good at them. I’m afraid I burned as many fingers as I did pies.”
He doubted she’d ever known what it was like to go to bed hungry. Still, her circumstances had been strikingly mean for an earl’s daughter, an aspect of her history he tended to forget.
He lifted her slender hand and carried it to his lips, the white flesh smooth and flawless as a newborn’s. “You seem to have recovered.” Turning it over, he made a show of examining the palm and digits and sprinkling kisses across the tips.
“Fortunately, Aunt Lavinia employs a full kitchen staff, otherwise I’d be going about in white gloves whether I wished to or not.”
He summoned a smile, though the mention of her London life blunted his good humor. Not because he begrudged her a past there—God knew he certainly had one—but because he was both jealous and sad that his birthplace would be the backdrop for her future, a future that didn’t include him.
Stretching like a cat, she kicked one leg free from the covers. Sliding his gaze down her dimpled knee and shapely calf, he focused on her slender foot. The temptation to suck on those perfectly tapered, perfectly pink toes decided it. She would stay for another hour—at the least.
She rolled back his way and returned her attention to his tattoo. “This is a most unique marking.”
He shrugged. “Hardly unique. Rourke has the same. We all do.”
“We?” Her gaze edged upward to his face.
“Black’s Boys, they called us, after our leader, Johnnie Black.”
“You were in a street gang, then?”
“More like a ring for…thieving. Johnnie ran the flash house where we all lived. His ruse wasn’t especially novel, but it was tried-and-true. He’d scour the streets for castoff boys such as Rourke and I who’d nowhere to go and next to nothing to lose and bring us back to his rookery.”
Blue eyes widened. “And you followed him?”
He shrugged. “Johnnie was a smooth talker and his dandified if not exactly clean appearance placed him above the typical street tough. Once he brought you back, he baited the hook with all manner of fancy fare—roast goose sizzling on its spit, feathery light pasty pies, and sausages as thick as a man’s wrist. To have known hunger, gnawing, belly-bloating hunger, and suddenly be presented with such bounty can be as drugging as opium or gin. A few weeks in, though, life altered considerably. The fine fare fell off to gruel twice daily with the occasional roasted potato tossed in. If you fancied meat, you’d best be prepared to steal it. On top of our board, we each had to steal enough to make our weekly footing.”
“Your…footing?”
Her widened eyes were his wakeup call, reminding him how easily, too easily, he could slip back into the telltale street cant. Slippage meant he was letting down his guard. At one time, that would have been a dangerous—deadly—mistake. It was dangerous still only not to his physical survival so much as his heart.
He found his voice and explained, “Our keep, our rent if you will.”
Puzzlement furrowed her brow, and he had to hold back from reaching over and smoothing the tiny folds. “How can there be rent set upon an abandoned building?”
Until now he’d been in danger of forgetting what an innocent she yet was. Despite the drunkard gamester of a father and the want of any mother save her sister, she’d still grown up pampered as a princess. She was a princess still. And he was? If not a pauper, then certainly a rogue, one more refined than reformed. The patina of civilization he’d acquired in no way altered the baseness of his birth, the baseness inherent to the man he was still and always would be: son of a whore, card sharp and thief. Of all the precious things he’d taken in his time, Beatrice Lindsey’s maidenhead would stand as his chief crime, he was sure of it. Breaching her hymen was bad enough of him. At the very least he could leave her with a few intact illusions.
He hesitated, unsure of how much more, if anything, to say. “Johnnie may not have owned the rookery in the sense of possessing a deed writ upon paper, yet that crumbling, stinking sinkhole of buildings belonged to him nonetheless, as did we. We all had specialties. Mine were picking pockets and running street scams.”
“What sort of scams?”
He cast his thoughts back to those bygone days. He’d used to miss them—the danger, the thrills—but he realized he didn’t, not anymore.
“One of my most successful ones was to pretend to be a foreign visitor who’d lost his way and his wallet. I’d distract the mark with my babbling long enough to pinch his purse.”
Thinking back to all the men and women he’d duped over the years, he’d be hard-pressed to name a greater fool than he was. Only a fool would live like a monk for nine months, pining for a woman who would never condescend to take either his ring or his very common name.
“You make it sound like a game.” Her tone suggested disapproval, but fascination, too.
“It was a game, a game with high stakes—life and death, freedom or capture—so I learned to play it sublimely.”
Lying was second nature to him, sex his forte. He was a natural mimic, a born actor. He’d played so many parts, he sometimes forgot who he was.
“Have a listen to this. Je suis enchanté de faire votre connaissance, mademoiselle.”
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, as well,” she said, her expression transformed into one of surprised delight. “Why, Ralph, what a dark horse you are. I didn’t know you spoke French.”
He grinned. “I don’t.” He was showing off for the girl and having too bloody much fun to care that she was only his for another few days. He followed with stock phrases in German, Russian and finally top-drawer English, his heart singing when she giggled and clapped her hands. “Britannia’s plum-in-the-mouth dialect isn’t really different from street cant, you see. It’s only another accent to be studied and mimicked.”
“What of Rourke? What was his specialty?”
“Rourke was The Brawn. Even as a lad, he was a scrapper with fists like hams and a fury like fuel oil on the receiving end of a lit match. That temper of his could ignite whenever you needed it as well as when you didn’t. One little spark was all that was wanted and then he was off. You couldn’t ask to have a better lad at your back. But pity you if you saw those fists flying at your face. If you did, they would be the last you saw for a week at least.” He chuckled at one of his few happy memories.
“And you? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. You were The Brains.”
He held up a hand and fluttered his fingers. “I was what our leader called The Touch.” He sent his two right fingers walking atop the covers toward her, taking the opportunity to tease the tips of her sheet-covered breasts.
She giggled and batted his hands away. “That tickles,” she protested though her eyes told him she liked it. Ralph liked it, too.
“A light, knowing touch seasoned with a whit of patience has always served me well.”
All at once, the mood between them shifted, the teasing sense of fun falling away. Ralph swallowed hard, wanting her yet again.
He slid a hand beneath the sheet and found her breast. “Shall it serve me again, Beatrice?”
She covered his hand with her slender one and urged him closer. “Yes, dear Lord, yes.”