Chapter 18
Eighteen
Like all great men, her king knew the heights of passion could only be reached if one had pleasure in giving pleasure.
— The Concubine and Her King. Unpublished MS.
Henry brushed his cheek back and forth across her wet hair as she lay on him.
“I want to take you somewhere warm and dry.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were languid and soft as if she had been dreaming. “I’m warm. Aren’t you warm?”
“Dry, then,” he conceded. “Where shall we go? I think Carruthers was going to arrange rooms at The Swan.”
“I can’t go there.”
She got off of him, sat on the ground, and he felt bereft, only wanting to reach for her, to pull her back down to him despite what he had said only a moment ago about going elsewhere.
He had broken the spell with his talk of Carruthers and rooms and The Swan.
The Swan.
He sat up. There was no place for fear, for hiding, for shame in any of his feelings towards her. He wanted her to know that. And he wanted her to feel the same, to know herself as a woman cherished, not scorned.
“You can go anywhere, Susannah. You’ll be on the arm of an earl. No one would dare treat you badly.”
“I know. And I know an earl can go where he likes and do what he likes. But that’s only if he has no care for others.”
She smiled at him, and her enchantment took hold of him once more.
She went on, “And I know Ashthorpe cares, he just doesn’t understand that the attention he’d be paid would take attention from the bride-to-be.”
“And your brother.”
“And my brother.” A laugh. “But Dando would welcome that.”
She stood, and he saw her glorious, sturdy legs before she pulled down her skirts and covered them, the wet cloth clinging to them. She smiled at her torn shift and levered her breasts back into her stays. She pulled up the shoulders of her dress and began to tie the front.
He put off deciding how he was going to manage to rise with a modicum of dignity by doing up the buttons of his breeches instead.
“We could go to that other public house. The one you tried to foist on me the day we met? The Red Dragon.”
“The Red Lion.” She took a moment before shaking her head. “No. You’re coming to the cottage with me.”
He looked up at her. “I’m coming to the cottage.”
It was not a question. It was not intended as a question. He would go anywhere she took him, without question.
But she answered him anyway. “Yes, love.”
It was the answer he had waited his whole life to hear. She was his answer.
She reached, and he took her hand.
The seventh Earl of Ashthorpe was about to see the inside of the Beasley cottage. This morning, she’d left it the same way she’d found it when she’d arrived yesterday evening without warning.
Dando might have tried to do his own housekeeping while she was gone, but his attempts had been feeble. Dirty dishes were piled high. The fireplace was full of ash. His clothes were thrown hither and yon. Celia would not think much of how Susannah had raised her little brother.
“It’s no better than a pigsty right now,” she said to Henry.
He straightened his back and looked every bit an earl in his muddy tailcoat as he made the silliest sound she’d ever heard. Half squeak, half grunt.
“Was that supposed to be a pig?” she asked.
He only raised his eyebrows and caressed her back with his strong hand.
She willed him to look past the mess, for him to see the care she had taken to make this place a home.
But she needn’t have worried. He was only looking at her and touching her hand, her shoulder, her hair as she took him through the cottage. As if he were making sure she was real and the only way to know was to have his hand on her.
That hand made her feel safe and cared for in the place where she had cared for so many others.
She took him to her bedchamber. Small, narrow. There was barely space to turn around.
“Undress,” she said and went to get one of her brother’s shirts. Please let there be a clean one. Miracle of miracles, there were two.
She came back to her bedchamber, and Henry was staring at the floor as if he were measuring it, calculating where she had put her pallet when she had slept here as her mother’s nurse. He hadn’t even started to take off his clothes.
She held up Dando’s voluminous shirt. “It’s patched, but it’s clean. I didn’t dare take his good one. He needs it for the wedding tomorrow.”
Henry took the shirt from her. She saw his fingers run over the edges of the patches, the fine stitches she’d worked so hard to get even and lying flat so there would be no pucker. But they were still patches. Not exactly the same weave, not exactly the same color as the rest of the shirt.
Good enough for Dando when he was working with the horses but not a shirt fit for an earl.
Henry threw the shirt on the bed and enfolded in her arms.
“Oh,” she said. She had been struggling with the ties on the front of her dress, but she got her arms out from between them and hugged him back.
She thought he hadn’t liked the shirt.
“Aren’t we meant to be getting dry?” she said, looking up at him.
“You know how to take something everyone else would consider ruined and make it whole.” His hand cradled her cheek. “You did that for me.”
She almost laughed because she had just thought the same thing in the church, but the other way around. He completed her.
She didn’t laugh because he kissed her, instead. And this was not a kiss to laugh at. This kiss stirred something feral and hot and tight within her. Something she had spent her whole life containing.
She broke the kiss, dropped to her knees, began to unbutton his fall.
“Susannah, you needn’t undress me, I can—oh.”
She pulled his breeches down to his knees, pushed his wet shirt up. He was not aroused, but she didn’t care. She slicked his cock all over with her tongue.
His hand found her hair, touched it tenderly. “Darling Susannah, I can’t.”
“I don’t want you to. I want to suck your cock, that’s all.”
“But—”
“Count to three hundred. Slowly. I’ll stop when you get to three hundred.”
She put her lips around the tip of his cock and looked up at him. He said nothing.
She released his cock from her mouth but took it up in her hand. Was that a twitch there? “There’s nothing wrong with my knees.”
He grimaced. “Yes.”
She turned saucy minx. “Do you need to sit, my lord?”
She could tell she had vexed him. Just a bit.
“I am not infirm,” he said, all Ashthorpe now despite his half-naked state, his wet clothes.
“Start counting,” she said and began to stroke his shaft. His cock was beautiful even when not erect. All of him was beautiful. And, there, he was already growing under her hand.
“Count,” she said, taking in the hair at his groin, blond and threaded lightly with silver, the hang of his ballocks.
“One, two, three—ah—”
She had nuzzled into his sac and started licking him there.
“Four, five, six—”
“Slower,” she said and returned to loving his ballocks with her tongue and lips. There was stiffness already in his cock, but she would not rush the movement of her hand. She had all the time in the world.
Well, not all the time. Five minutes. She had to drive him mad with desire in the next five minutes. And that was an eternity.
“Ten, eleven, twelve—”
“Mmmmm.” He tasted so much like himself here. She released his shirt and cupped his ballocks with that hand and turned her mouth to the base of his shaft.
It was thicker now.
The shirt—which had fallen and draped over her and his phallus—moved. She looked up. He was holding the shirt to his belly, looking down at her and the work of her hand and tongue. And he was counting.
“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine—”
His voice was getting deeper, raspier, but the numbers rolled off his tongue relentlessly.
Her hand was stroking the top of his cock, and her tongue was against the base, but she changed those positions now and—yes. His cock was not fully erect, but it stood out from his body without any support from her. Not an upwards arrow yet, but the beginnings of a very robust cockstand.
“I need this cock in my mouth,” she said, and he groaned before he answered, “Thirty-five—”
She took him as deeply as she could, her lips brushing against his hair. She would not, she realized, be able to do this if he were fully aroused.
She savored completely surrounding him, making a hot, wet compartment for his cock. Now to make it tight and snug. She sucked. She could swear he grew from that alone. His cock surged, pushed at the back of her throat.
She released him, gasping.
His count was faltering. “Forty-uh, forty-eight, forty . . . nine—”
She put the head of his cock back in her mouth and laved it with her tongue and became a bit wilder with her hand. Long, loosely held strokes.
She kept her mouth on him but looked up, and his eyes had gone dark again. But he still counted. “Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven—”
His voice was hoarse with lust.
She paid more attention to the underside of the head, the place that had been so sensitive when she had teased him in the church, and, oh, he was growing.
Tongue and lips and hand. And his voice. “Eighty-four, eighty-five—”
A tighter grip on his even bigger cock. More tongue and lips and stroke, stroke, stroke, lick, lick, rub.
A hand on her head. She daren’t look up just now, she must put everything into giving him pleasure. But the counting had stopped.
Another groan from him. His fingers tightened in her hair. She bobbed faster, faster, faster and he was as big as he had ever been before.
And she was too short now, too short on her knees when his cock was angled upwards.
“Sit,” she said, gasping, strangled. “I need you to sit.”
He shuffled to the bed, his breeches around his boots hampering his steps, and she followed him on her knees, not wanting to get too far from him, not wanting him to move his hand from her hair.
He sat. She got between his legs, intent on his cock. Dark red now, mighty.
“Susannah,” he said.
“Henry,” she said, not looking at his face but only at his cock. She bent her head, took him in her mouth again.
He was close. He was thick and straining. She could feel the blood throbbing, hot and restless, under her tongue.
She stroked, she licked. She sucked.
“Oh, my God. Oh, God. Susannah.”
His knees came up, both his hands grabbed the sides of her head, his body jerked, and he erupted. A pulsing warmth filled her mouth, and she swallowed his seed. Yes. Moonlight and marshmallow root.
She milked his cock gently with her hand and mouth until she was sure his release had completely subsided. Finally, she let go of him and looked at his face.
“It’s not possible,” he said.
She shook her head no but said “Yes, it’s not possible,” as seriously as she could.
“I can’t believe . . .” He stroked her hair with something akin to awe.
“I just wanted another taste of you. And I didn’t want to wait.”
He smiled. It was the smile of a scoundrel, a rogue. Her earl was a naughty man, proud of his cock.
“I think you got more than a taste.”
“Yes.” She waggled her eyebrows and licked her lips.
And he laughed—he laughed—as she rocked back on her heels and put her hands on his thighs to lift herself up. She was still wet, still muddy, but she collapsed onto her stomach on the bed beside him, and he lay back, too.
She barely thought of how she’d have to wash the counterpane. Barely, but she still thought of it. Yes, she was a woman in love with her man, but she would always be Susannah.
He turned his head so their faces were inches apart and they were gazing into each other’s eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“What is, love?”
“It’s all right if it’s not possible twice in a row ever again,” she said. “I have no expectations.”
“You don’t?”
“Yes.” Then, “It’s like the beans you get from a mysterious peddler. Sometimes they’re magic, sometimes they’re not. But you won’t find out until you put them in the ground and sprinkle water over them.”
“Well,” he said. “Well.”
Did he understand her?
“Well,” he said. “You certainly know how to make my beanstalk grow.”
He understood her.