Chapter 7 #3
Simone nodded and didn’t stop her when she left the salon.
The carriage ride home felt quick because her mind couldn’t stop turning about the conversation they’d had.
About Simone’s suggestion that perhaps what she wanted, what she needed, was another woman, not a man.
That those thoughts she’d always had, ones that had been fleeting and controlled until Simone Stanhope had come into her life… could be true and real.
She greeted her servants and shed her gown in exchange for her nightrail.
When she was alone, she stood before her mirror, staring at her own face with her dark hair down around her shoulders.
She had turned thirty-eight a few months before.
Wasn’t she too old to reinvent herself? To find these new things? That was what Society said.
Only she didn’t feel too old. And when she thought of Simone, she didn’t feel uninterested in desire like she’d thought she was her whole life. She watched in the reflection as she slid a hand along the bare skin of her collarbone, catching her fingers in the strap of her night gown.
What if those were Simone’s hands touching her?
A great shiver worked through her at the thought and her knees went a little weak.
Immediately she froze. She’d never had that response to being touched or touching herself.
But seeing her reaction in the mirror felt too…
pointed, even intimate though she was the only one in the room.
She moved to her bed and got under her covers.
For a moment, she stared at her ceiling.
She could stop. She could ignore Simone’s outrageous suggestion she do this, and her own unexpected reaction to beginning and just go to sleep.
“As if you’d sleep now,” she muttered to herself.
She squeezed her eyes shut and touched her nightgown strap again, brushing her fingers back and forth across the skin of her shoulder. There was a tingle when she did it, but nothing so powerful as a moment before.
She let out a ragged breath and this time she imagined it was a woman who touched her. A slightly more intense tingle, but still not enough. Possibly because the imagined woman was faceless and almost formless. She focused harder, trying to put hair and eyes and a nose to make a pretend lover.
Only as she built that face and body, it turned into Simone. Simone’s gray eyes heavy with desire as they had been when they’d kissed. Simone’s elegant hands brushing her skin. Simone’s lips leaning in to follow the same path as the stroke of her fingers.
Caroline let out a gasping moan into the quiet of her room and realized she had arched her back. Damn. It was really going to be Simone who she pictured in this wicked little fantasy.
But it couldn’t hurt anyone, could it? Simone wouldn’t know. Caroline could pretend it away later. It would just be a test, a game to see if she could find desire or pleasure.
With that settled, she relaxed a fraction and allowed herself to be swallowed into the fantasy.
She brushed her hands lower, letting her fingertips tease over one breast. To her surprise, her nipples were hard and she opened her eyes to watch her own fingertips brush there again through the thin fabric of her night rail.
She squeezed her eyes shut again and lowered one strap of her gown, then the other.
She pushed the cotton away, kicking it aside from her legs and focused once more on the touch against her bare skin.
She teased herself, slowing when the tension in her stomach rose, moving on when she couldn’t wait anymore.
There were places she touched that felt like fire, and others that barely registered a reaction.
It was fascinating, actually, to discover herself after nearly four decades on this earth.
And to discover herself with the image of Simone Stanhope as her guide was even more powerful.
Now she pictured Simone kissing her, holding her down on the bed while she slid her fingers between her legs.
Her husband had done this before he took her, though it was all very perfunctory and not very pleasant.
She readied herself for displeasure, but when she let her legs fall open and pressed her fingers to the place where they met, she was surprised to find wet heat and sparkling sensation there to greet her.
She lifted against her fingers without meaning to and hissed out pleasure at the feel of the pressure of her hand.
Simone’s hand. That was the dream, anyway.
Simone’s fingers spreading her wider, tracing her, brushing back and forth and finding a spark of deeper pleasure there.
Caroline ground into that pleasure, digging her heels into the bed as she chased it.
In her mind, Simone kissed her more deeply and whispered sweet nothings into her ear.
About how she was lovely and charming, about how Simone wanted her even if she could have anyone else in the world.
Caroline was lifting harder now, finding some speed and rhythm against her fingers that she never would have imagined possible.
There was pleasure already, swirling through her nerves and spiraling higher and higher at the place where she touched herself.
She felt desperate to find the peak of it and her legs shook as she chased it.
Finally, in her addled mind, Simone brushed her lips to Caroline’s neck and whispered, “Mine.”
The pleasure made Caroline buck against her hand while wave after wave of intense sensation rolled through her sex and then cascaded through her entire body. Tears streamed down her cheeks at that unexpected release and she rode it as long as she could until she went weak against the pillows.
When she finally began to breathe again, she found her fingers were coated in wetness. She shivered as she wiped them on her thigh and looked at the glistening evidence of what she’d done sparkling there in the firelight.
The experiment had been a success, of course. Simone had been right that it had taken picturing a woman to bring her to the heights of sensation. To the edge of what she’d heard others describe as their passion over the long and lonely years when she’d believed that wasn’t for her.
It turned out it might be. Only now she knew that the person she wanted to share it with most was the person who reminded her regularly that they couldn’t be so close. Couldn’t do what she’d just imagined.
A person out of her reach and not only because she had no idea how a woman like her could ever find this passion with another woman. And if she did, how she would keep it beyond a heated night or a wicked fantasy.