Chapter 7
It had taken a week for the Shiny Tenth reunion house party invitation to materialize. While they waited, Edward trained Tabby.
He drew pictures of silverware they didn’t own, and they pantomimed eating from it correctly.
He danced her around the small entrance to their rooms and got her to master a respectable curtsy.
It wasn’t possible to make a lady of an urchin in a few days, but Tabby would do fine, especially since the company wasn’t so exalted.
And when Tabitha inevitably trod on his shoe or playfully dropped her paper salad fork, Edward delivered punishments.
As they rode toward the manor owned by Lord Banastre’s elder brother — in a carriage the man himself had sent for their travels — he regarded his companion on the forward-facing bench.
She was prim and stiff in her new clothes, sitting next to the chaperone provided by this generous brother of Bonnie’s.
Tabby was pretending to read from an improving novel, and he was pretending not to want to fuck her senseless on every surface of that carriage, Mrs. Harfagre, the chaperone, be damned.
When Tabby shifted on her seat, Edward’s eyes darted to her, wondering if she was comfortable. And wondering if she still felt the traces of those pleasurable punishments all over their rooms.
Her old gutter vocabulary had slipped out, so he’d introduced her to cocksucking. Her dress had risen to show an ankle, so he’d pulled the whole of her hems up and taken her from behind.
The reverse was true when she performed well. When they waltzed about the room and she failed to miss a step, Edward had dragged her to bed, stripped her of all clothes, and taught her to ride his face until she shook with pleasure over his mouth.
Just as Edward decided to grab Tabby from the bench, the carriage came to a stop.
“The Fitzwilliam Arms. Stopping to change horses. They do a fine stew for the midday meal,” announced one of the outriders.
Edward helped Mrs. Harfagre and Tabby down from the carriage, navigating them through the muck in the yard and into the snug inn’s dining room.
“Do you have a private dining room available?” asked Edward as if he were accustomed to traveling in the first state of fashion these days.
It was an extra expense, but Mrs. Harfagre was looking rather green around the gills.
Almost as if she’d like the chance to hare off to lose her breakfast behind a hedge.
The innkeeper arranged a room without delay, and soon he and Tabby sat before a merry fire with the promise of a fine mutton stew and the day’s bread.
“Tabby, I’m desperate to touch you,” he whispered, the door to their dining room left open by the innkeeper, who no doubt thought they’d want to observe proprieties.
Edward most certainly did not want to observe proprieties. He wanted his suddenly prim little miss in his lap and, with luck and some maneuvering, riding his cock before the carriage was ready to proceed.
“But what about Mrs. Harfagre?” she asked, demure as any society debutante. It was almost as if…
“Tabby, are you using my training against me?” he asked with a hiss. He’d taught her how to be modest in her speech so she could play a lady convincingly — and liberate ever higher sums from her patrons. That she would use it against him was unthinkable! Unconscionable! And entirely possible.
“I wouldn’t want the family running the inn to think ill of us,” she said, her eyes fixed to the rug on the floor. Why, she was playing with him, the minx!
Edward shot from his chair, ready to spank her little arse most pleasurably and then rut between her thighs until they both erupted, when the innkeeper’s daughter bustled in with their meal.
“I’ve a good stew for you here,” she said, laying everything on the table and pulling out the chairs. “Mind you ring if you need more bread. I’ve an ale for his lordship and some half-beer for the lady.”
“Do you have a good pump?” asked Tabby. “It’s just that I rather prefer water.”
Edward had to hold in a laugh as the girl looked at this ostensibly fashionable lady and struggled to make sense of the request. Tabby maintained perfect composure while requesting what she truly wanted, strange though it was, and he couldn’t help but feel amazed at her.
She’d been born so far below him, but had no problem demanding what was hers.
What else might she want? He had an ache as he realized that the answer might not be him. At least not in a permanent way. She might take up with any number of fine men and get lost in the whirlwind of life in the capital, only to lose sight of him.
Why, she might prove as faithless as Lady Philadelphia De Courcy, now Duchess of Chevaliermont, who had been engaged to Edward — and celebrating their engagement ball when he’d discovered her now-husband balls deep in the chit.
Edward dropped into his chair and grabbed the well-formed spoon the lass had left for his stew.
“We should eat,” he said grumpily, digging into the meal.
Tabby sat like a little lady, only enraging him further.
For whose benefit would she move with such grace in the future?
Certainly not his! He was of half a mind to drag her to some shadowy corner and take her against a wall like one of the Covent Garden girls she’d no doubt seen on her walks about the city.
Remind her she could put on all the airs she wanted, but she was still his girl. Young woman.
“Mmm,” moaned Tabby in the way she always had while tucking into a meal. And then she had the temerity to lick her spoon most sensually and wink at him!
“Tabitha, I am three seconds from—”
“And here’s your water, your ladyship,” said the innkeeper’s daughter, bustling in with a glass and pitcher.
“Thank you,” said Tabby, her eyes down and a real blush dusted across her cheeks.
Neither Edward nor Tabby moved to correct the lass.
She probably thought they were a married couple, making their way to a country estate to take up genteel farming and begin the production of a good number of children.
Edward’s spoon clattered on the table.
“What is it?” asked Tabby, rushing from her chair to grab him. “Is it an apoplexy? I’ve heard that happens to old men.” She rubbed his arms and placed a hand on his brow.
“Old men.”
“Yes, well, not precisely old, but if a man starts to…”
Something must have shown on his face because Tabby returned to her chair and began studiously eating her stew, this time at a pace reminiscent of Tobias.
“What’s your punishment if you drop silverware?” she eventually asked.
“Pardon me?”
“I recall you taking me over a chair when I dropped a pretend fork,” she said. “What should happen to you now that you’ve dropped a real spoon?”
Edward held in a gasp. This little strumpet was going to send him through the roof with her antics!
First, she had the audacity to play a perfect lady, and now she was deliberately making him remember that afternoon when he’d brought her to the point of paroxysm over and over while denying her release.
His cods were so heavy and pained they might as well be twisted inside his smalls.
“Tabitha…” he started, then realized he was missing an important piece of information. “Tabby, what’s your surname?”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Your family’s name.”
“Brewer,” she said without delay. “Though it might have only become Brewer after the flood what killed me mum.”
“Why would a flood change your surname?” he asked, entirely bewildered.
“Folks said my family swallowed more beer than a brewer, and it stuck. There was a flood of beer. Happened, oh, six or seven years ago? A vat of porter took out a bunch of my family what was gathered for a cousin’s funeral,” she said, her old accent and vocabulary coming back in places as she recalled.
“But not your father, who drowned in a cesspit.” Goodness, her family had a tendency to drown in unlikely things. He’d need to keep her away from moats and the like.
“That’s right,” she said, grabbing another piece of bread. Seeing her eat so heartily warmed his heart; demme the ladylike nibbling he’d taught her.
He didn’t protest when she brought up his treason case, much as it wilted his otherwise interested cock.
“So we’ve tossed the Portuguese cove,” she said, waving a well-buttered slice of bread.
“The ouvidor, yes.”
“And Camville because you didn’t stick your piece in his wife,” she said.
“That’s correct. The major’s mother-in-law prevented what could have been a very enjoyable interlude,” he sniffed.
“So that leaves…”
“The Honourable Colonel Henry Giffard and Lord Blount,” said Edward, wanting to sigh at this bothersome treason nonsense ruining a perfectly pleasant meal by the fire.
“And did you maybe not roger both of their wives? Maybe just one?” she asked hopefully.
“Unlikely,” he said. “I now recall that Lady Blount had a bush the color of her carrot hair and Mrs. Giffard liked to wail so loudly that I had to cover her mouth the whole time or else her children’s ama would come running.”
“So it’s likely to be one of those two men,” she mused.
“Or women,” he replied, ever realistic about the abilities of women.
He’d long admired them for their less bloodthirsty talents, but he wasn’t so silly as to think only a man could concoct a false treason charge.
Why, a lady might orchestrate such a thing quite efficiently because of the tendency of men to overlook her.
“So we’ll need to focus our efforts there,” she said, packing slices of bread into her reticule. Her fine new handkerchiefs were now employed in protecting the remains of the loaf, and he wondered what — if any — monogram Molly the Buckskin Breechess had selected for Tabby’s linens.
Then she stood from her place and whisked the silver flask from his breast pocket, filling it from the pitcher she’d requested. She looked up from her industrious labors and flashed him a smile.
“Don’t forget about this. I stole it for you,” she said. “Keep my cods at the ready, won’t ya?”
He was in love. It was new to him, but there was no mistaking it now that he realized what it meant when the ache in his ribs eased when she was near. He was desperately, ostentatiously gone for Tabitha Brewer.
“Say, Tabby,” he said as they rose to return to the carriage. “Come to my room at the inn tonight after Mrs. Harfagre falls asleep. I’ve been meaning to give you something.”
“What’s that?” she asked, looking back at him.
He brought her hand to his reinvigorated piece, which jumped at the feel of her fingers.
“Oh my, Dick Stone, you certainly are hard,” she whispered while slanting him a sly glance.
The minx!