Earls Trip

14 - The Lady’s Delight

14

The Lady’s Delight

Clementine waited for Archie until well past midnight with her window open. She had hoped—assumed—he would pay her a visit. She sat near her door, listening for any sign of his return to his own room. He had been so very quiet next door. She never heard him moving around. The walls must be very thick.

When the clock struck one, she decided to take matters into her own hands. After all, she’d done the difficult part already, making her bold proposition.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps the difficult part was still to come. Her stomach flipped when she thought back to her initial kisses with Theo. Well, no, her stomach flipped when she substituted Archie for Theo in that memory. Even though Archie had assured her there was pleasure to be had in the act, and even though she trusted Archie more than anyone else in the world, she was exceedingly nervous about their planned assignation.

Before she could think overmuch about it, she took up a candle, crept into the corridor, and knocked softly on Archie’s door.

There was no answer. But, she reasoned, that did not necessarily mean he wasn’t in there. He might be asleep.

How could he be asleep, though, given what was meant to happen between them? She had barely made it through dinner, what with the nerves and the anticipation, and she’d spent three hours—three hours!—pacing her room.

With one more, slightly louder warning knock, she pushed open the door.

And found a completely empty room.

The space contained nothing but cobwebs. They hung from the corners and trailed down the walls so thickly as to be visible even by the light of her single flame.

“But where is he?” She sent the fruitless question into the air. Befuddled, she forgot the need for stealth as she went back out into the corridor . . . and encountered Lord Featherfinch on his way out of Olive’s bedchamber.

Judging by his horrified expression, he was more surprised to see her than she him. He didn’t know that she knew he was no threat to Olive. So she decided to disarm him and simply asked, “Lord Featherfinch, would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of Lord Harcourt’s room? I have an urgent matter to discuss with him.” She smiled brightly, as if they were meeting by happenstance mid-promenade in Hyde Park.

His mouth opened and closed a few times. He looked like a fish out of water. A very fine, exotic fish. She giggled. Which she was aware was likely to undercut her prior assertion that she had weighty matters in need of Archie’s attention. Lord Featherfinch’s countenance changed, appearing less fishlike and more as if a realization were dawning, and he did surprise her then by following her giggle with one of his own. “I would be delighted to assist you, Miss Morgan. The room you seek is that way. At the end of the corridor”—he pointed—“make a right. Archie’s door is the second on your right after the turn. It has a great big gouge in it.”

“A gouge?” She smiled, overcome with a fondness for this curious man who was such a good friend to Archie, and, it would seem, to Olive. “Perhaps dating from when the invading MacCallums tried to break it down? Or, better, perhaps it is a mark left by the ghosts of the invading MacCallums!”

“Ah, Miss Morgan!” Lord Featherfinch exclaimed, apparently thrilled by her conjecture. “You will do quite nicely indeed.”

She had no idea what that meant, but she wasn’t inclined to press him. She had an assignation to get to. She bobbed an abbreviated curtsy as if she and Lord Featherfinch were parting ways after that Hyde Park encounter instead of outside Olive’s bedchamber at one o’clock in the morning.

At Archie’s door, she traced the edge of the gouge, thinking about how old it likely was, regardless of whether its origins were spectral. It had no jagged edges, and her fingers encountered no splinters. This castle had stood for centuries. The fact buoyed her. Usually she felt that way about the outdoors. A river, for example, kept flowing no matter what men did or said next to it. If the blood they shed flowed down its banks, the current carried it away with indifference. She had always thought of the natural world and the world of man as opposites. People were unreliable. They misunderstood each other. They caused each other pain. They died. But here was a place that had been home to Sir Lionel for his entire life, and to his ancestors before that. Here was a door that had stood the test of time. Perhaps some things men built lasted. She leaned all her weight on the solid bulwark. It would take more than her meager efforts—more than phantasmal marauders, even—to move such a door. Sometimes, it seemed, you could trust something besides yourself to hold your weight.

Clementine had been remarkably successful in putting the details of the task before her out of her mind. But now that she was here, looking at Archie’s door—touching it, leaning on it—she could no longer save such thinking for later. She was going to have to go in there and—

“Oh!” The door swung open abruptly, and she pitched forward. She was falling. She was going to—

“Clem?”

Archie’s chest interrupted her descent. His chest was not as solid as the door. She knew that with her intellect. Yet it was solid enough to keep her from falling. To bolster her. She knew that with some other part of her, some part that was at once larger and smaller than her intellect, the part that usually only came alive when she was outside.

Archie’s arms came around her, just as she’d regained her balance and might have thought he’d step away.

“Clem,” he repeated, quietly, gruffly, and she felt his cheek against the top of her head.

Her hair was down. She was wearing her shift and a shawl, not having packed a proper night rail or dressing gown. She’d forgotten the state she was in. What a picture she must have made conversing with Lord Featherfinch in her makeshift nightclothes!

And how extraordinary that she could trust Lord Featherfinch to not remark upon it to anyone.

Archie began to pull away from her. She wanted him . . . not to do that. “I–” Oh. He pressed his fingers against her temples, letting the pads of his fingers slide along her scalp as he tangled his fingers in her hair. “Oh,” she breathed. Who knew having someone’s fingers dragging along one’s scalp could feel so good?

He took a step back, and she went too, a cat following the pressure of a human hand with its head. He led her into the room like that, step by step. Only when they’d stopped moving did she realize her eyes had been half closed, so surrendered had she been to the divine sensations starting in her scalp and shimmering down her neck and arms. She opened her eyes fully to find Archie studying her with that same unreadable expression from earlier, from when they’d been describing each other’s eyes.

“I was coming to find you,” he said. He did not take his hands out of her hair.

“I was coming to find you.”

“And so you have.”

“I’d been going to suggest that we make a plan to begin our . . .” She needed to be able to say the words if she was actually going to do this. “I’d been going to suggest we lie together tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”

“Because it is late, and I’d imagined this happening out of doors.”

He cocked his head. “Had you?”

“Yes, isn’t that always where we had our fun?”

“I suppose you are right.”

“Why were you coming to find me?”

“What do you always smell like?” he asked, the abrupt segue confusing her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is it your perfume? Something sweet but also herbal, almost medicinal?”

“Oh, it’s chamomile.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“I make my own eau de toilette.”

He looked at her exceedingly fondly, which was a bit confusing. She repeated her previous question. “Why were you coming to find me?”

“I was going to tell you I could not in good conscience agree to your proposal.”

No! That was not what she expected, or wanted, him to say. “Why not?” she demanded, not liking the way her voice rose and her tone went shrill.

His implacable expression cracked then, made room for something that appeared part fondness, part resignation. “All the usual reasons, I suppose. Your reputation, for one.”

“We discussed this. I’m already ruined.”

“We did discuss this, and no, you are not.” He spoke in anuncharacteristically sharp way. His hands remained in her hair, though, and that was something. She never wanted them to not be there.

“Yes, I am. And if I’m to be judged wanting because I’ve given my virtue to one man, what difference does it make if I give it to another?” When he didn’t answer, she tried a different tack. “What if I told you I would find another man to help me if you won’t?”

“You won’t.”

“I will,” she lied. “So it might as well be you.”

He laughed, the beastly man. Not unkindly, but as if what she said was so absurd it merited only laughter. She lifted her chin—but not too much, as she didn’t want him to take his hands off her head.

“Who else would you ask?” he asked in a way that clearly communicated he was humoring her.

Who else, indeed. He had her there. That had been the point of her proposal: Archie was uniquely suited for the job.

“See?” he pressed when she did not answer. “That was an empty threat, Clem.”

She could feel the beginning of a retreat as his hands started to reverse their way back toward her temples. No. She was losing control of the situation. She tried to muster another argument, but as those fingers slid over her temples, she considered that perhaps now was not the time for more words.

So she kissed him. Well, she kissed what she could reach, which even on her tiptoes, was only his neck, but pressing her lips against the scratchy whiskers there seemed to have a paralytic effect on him. He stood frozen, his hands still bracketing her head and his body stock-still with the exception of his chest, which rose and fell as his breath grew labored. Encouraged, she applied herself more decidedly to the task, dragging her lips across his Adam’s apple. And, look: his chest was positively heaving now, as surely as that of the heroine of a Gothic novel. She almost wanted to laugh in triumph but found, to her consternation, that her own breath was not coming sufficiently reliable to allow for laughter. How curious that a man standing stock-still could have such an effect on her. He needn’t know it, though. She was enjoying having struck him dumb and rendered him immobile. It was a curious kind of power, one she’d never thought to want but also, now that she had it, was loath to surrender.

“See, Arch?” she whispered, moving her lips against his skin as she spoke. Her lips were chapped from too much time out of doors today, and his evening whiskers abraded them in a way that was slightly painful yet altogether agreeable. Two sensations that shouldn’t have coexisted. “What’s a little more ruination?”

He came to life then, reanimated, a butterfly freed from a net. His arms banded around her, and though Clementine had never liked being confined, she found this particular brand of imprisonment rather thrilling. He pulled her to him and leaned over to speak into her ear. She almost didn’t recognize his voice as he rasped, “Do this because you want to, not because you’re already ruined. You’re not ruined now, and you’re not going to be ruined afterward if we decide to do this.”

She had to concentrate on what he was saying, to not lose herself in a curious warm sensation that seemed to be spreading inside her body. “Because you won’t tell anyone.”

He sighed, and his hands came to her shoulders. He took a large step back so he was holding her at arm’s length. He looked her right in the eyes and said, “Of course I wouldn’t tell anyone, but no, that’s not why. You wouldn’t be ruined because you wouldn’t be ruined. I reject the premise.”

The warmth continued to spread even as she shook her head at him. “You reject the premise. I adore you for saying that, for believing that, but you, my dear Arch, are but one man. You are not the world.”

She wanted him to be, though. She wanted everyone to think like him, or, failing that, she wanted her world to shrink such that he was the only person in it. How could she make that happen?

Perhaps the trick was merely to agree with him? It was worth a try. “All right. I’m not ruined now, and I’m not ruined afterward. I still want to lie with you.”

He was kissing her then, and she could see where she’d gone wrong. She was going to be ruined, but not in the usual sense of the word. She was going to be ruined for any other man—not that she was planning on having any other man. But she could see where she’d gone wrong with Theo, with the idea of settling. Archie, gentle Archie, kissed her as if the world were ending. His lips were strong yet soft. Another pair of words that should mean the opposite of each other yet somehow, with Archie, did not. He was intent on his task, intent on her, and as his mouth moved over hers, and his fingers dug into her scalp anew, heat marshaled between her legs. Different from the slow, spreading warmth of before, it was a sharp, disconcerting sensation that would have alarmed her had she been kissing anyone else. With Archie, she could let it happen, she could follow the unfamiliar like a newly discovered stream that led to parts unknown, and know that she would not lose her way.

She sighed into his mouth, which summoned an answering groan from him. She’d thought he was so in control. He’d been kissing her so firmly, so carefully. But that was another thing she must have gotten wrong, for everything that was happening—the movement and pressure of his mouth, and his fingers—grew more intense, almost frantic.

Until he let loose another groan and left her all at once, taking his fingers and his lips and his whole self away in one giant step back. He was stunned, eyes wild and chest back to heaving. The Gothic part of her earlier description might have been correct, but she could see now that heroine had not been. He was tall and imposing, and though he looked like he might have just come inside from being lost on the moors, she was suddenly so very aware of him as a man.

She tested her voice. “We are agreed, then? You will lie with me?” Enough with his misplaced moral objections.

He sighed and began to look less like an untamed Highlander and more like her old Archie. “Not precisely. But close enough, for your purposes.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means”—a slow smile blossomed—“I will show you the pleasure of which we spoke.”

“The pleasure that Theo did not show me.”

The smile slid off his face. “That is correct.”

“Was he withholding it, do you think? Or did he not know how?”

“I would prefer not to speak of Mr. Bull just now.”

“I take your point. Let us speak in generalities, then. Let us speak of the average gentleman. Does the average gentleman know how to show a lady this pleasure of which you speak?”

“I should think so. It isn’t magic. Nearly every man I can think of is equipped with the necessary tools.”

“And what are those?” she asked, startled by his choice of word: tools.

He let go of her with one hand, lifted it, and wiggled his fingers. She could not imagine what he meant. In her admittedly limited experience, fingers hadn’t been involved at all.

Still, something inside her, that part she’d been thinking of as not-intellect, flared. She had a knowing inside her, a creature who moved by instinct rather than by senses. She looked around the room. Archie’s bed was mussed—very mussed, as if he’d been tossing violently. She went over and sat on it. “I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

“All right.”

His easy agreement was unexpected, and welcome. Instead of coming to her, though, he turned to a table by the door that was littered with his personal effects.

“What are you doing?”

He struck a match and lit a small lantern. “Lighting this place up.” He moved to a bureau where there was a branch of candles.

“Why?”

“Because I want to see you.” He paused. “Because I want you to see me.”

Yes.

While she waited, while the room glowed up, she began loosening the drawstring at the neckline of her shift. When Archie finished, he came to the edge of the bed and watched. It was the same attention he always paid her, so it was in one sense familiar. But the watching turned the sharp heat between her legs higher, just like the flame in the lamp, and that was new.

Instead of being embarrassed by this heat, she was emboldened by it, as if it were the sun summoning to life the buds of spring. She lifted her hips enough to get her shift over them and pulled it over her head. Or tried to—she got herself tangled in it. Struck by the absurdity of the whole circumstance, she laughed.

He was there, then, laughing, too. Untangling her.

Wasn’t that what Archie always did? Untangled her? From ill-made matches and poorly thought-out rescue missions, and more crucially, from the barbs and brambles of her own mind.

Together, they got the garment off, and the mood shifted.

“Your skin is glowing,” he whispered, and that was exactly how she felt, as if the light and heat from the lamps were inside her somehow.

Archie, by contrast, was fully dressed. The gentlemen often dispensed with the formality of coats here, but he was still attired in a waistcoat, shirt, and breeches. “Will you undress, too? I want to see you.”

Wordlessly, he stepped back and shrugged out of his blue silk waistcoat. He let it fall to the floor. Archie had never been a dandy, but he was always carefully dressed, and to see him treat such a fine garment with such a lack of care was strangely thrilling.

For his boots, he had to sit, but he held her gaze as he backed onto a chair near the bed. He struggled with the Hessians, breaking her gaze only as necessary to get the job done.

The breeches followed. “I’m afraid watching a gentleman divest himself of boots and breeches, especially without the assistance of a valet, isn’t a very enticing sight,” he said as he lifted his hips and tugged the tightly fitting breeches over them.

On the contrary.She did not verbalize the thought because she didn’t know if she was supposed to be finding Archie enticing. Perhaps that was not the done thing in a situation like this, an assignation out of wedlock.

He came to her with his shirt still on. His legs were magnificently sculped things, the muscles in them so plainly apparent under his skin. There was a kind of leashed power in them, she realized, just as a horse at rest has within its body the potential to gallop away. He pulled the shirt over his head, revealing a chest covered in hair, more than she would have expected, though she had to remind herself that Archie’s was only the second male chest she had ever seen. He stopped just shy of the edge of the bed and let the shirt join the rest of his clothes on the floor—the carpet behind him was dotted with islands of fabric and leather.

His shirt had hung low, and now it was gone, and he was all there was. In her line of sight, in her world. Earlier, she had wished the world would shrink so that it contained only Archie. Clementine was not accustomed to getting what she wanted. It was a heady feeling.

Not as heady, though, as when, before her eyes, his male appendage. . . well, it twitched.

He came closer, close enough for her to touch him, so she did. She raised a shaking hand and touched his chest, but she didn’t—couldn’t—lift her eyes.

He inhaled sharply when she let her hand trail across his chest to a shoulder, and the appendage grew.

She laughed, delighted. “Did I do that?”

He took himself in hand. The sight was utterly thrilling. It made her mouth go completely dry. “You did indeed.”

“What do you call that appendage?” Her mouth was so parched, her voice sounded odd to her own ears.

“I suppose there are many names for it, none of them suitable for polite company.”

“Well, good thing we aren’t in polite company just now.”

He laughed.

“Tell me,” she insisted.

“Prick. Cock. Less commonly, the silent flute. The gaying instrument.” He smiled wryly. “I’ve heard it called the middle leg.” She smiled, too. “Or even the lady’s delight.”

“The lady’s delight!” she echoed. How . . . well, how delightful.

“Yes, but enough talking, I think?” He crawled onto the bed, slowly, calling to mind the way a fox might stalk a fawn. Perhaps this was a sort of hunting she could endorse. She laid back as he advanced over her, trying to keep her wits about her. She wanted to remember every detail.

“Enough talking,” she agreed just before he lowered his mouth over hers. This time, though, he touched her body while he kissed her, let his hands, so rough but so gentle, slide down her neck and trace her collarbones. She hardly knew where to focus her attention as sensations from both fronts assailed her. But then, “Oh!” A finger grazed a nipple, and she jerked involuntarily.

He pulled back, studied her face.

She responded by reaching for his hand. “Come back.”

As he grazed her again—and again and again—she had an almost violent reaction. It was just so . . . much. But also so wonderful. But also so much.

Just when she felt she couldn’t take it anymore, his hand came down more firmly, kneading the flesh of her bosoms. “Clem. I want to put my mouth here. Is that all right?”

“Goodness, yes!” It wasn’t something she would have thought to want; it wasn’t something she would have thought of at all. But as soon as he’d mentioned it as a possibility the nipple in question grew taut, painful almost, and she somehow knew that his mouth would soothe it.

They both groaned when his lips made contact. The pressure wasn’t soothing, it turned out. It was, in fact, discomposing, but it was providing a focus for her agitation. As if she were walking along a road with many branches but now the road was narrowing into a single pathway as she approached her destination.

And it was a good kind of agitation, though good seemed too anemic a word to describe what was happening. It occurred to her that racking her mind for words with which to characterize this experience was probably detracting from the enjoyment of it. She ought to treat it, she thought, like being in the woods. She ought to just be.

In doing so, she began to feel a kind of heartbeat, but not one that was emanating from her heart itself. It was akin to waves rhythmically hitting the shore, but the waves were inside her.

She let herself ride those waves. After a few minutes, Archie lifted his head from her breast. His hair was disheveled and his face was damp, and he was beautiful. “Clem,” he rasped, his voice having gone as scratchy as his whiskers, “I want to touch you here.” His fingers fluttered gently over the area between her legs. “This”—his fluttering fingers seemed to be searching out a particular spot, and when he found it, she gasped—“is the source of much potential pleasure. May I touch you here?”

“Yes.” As she’d done with her head chasing his touch before, she now felt the most powerful instinct to lift her hips to meet his hand.

“That’s right,” he murmured, so she did it again, and soon they became the waves, she and Archie, his hand and her hips. They were working in unison, undulating together. The waves inside her were getting stronger, and somehow she knew Archie could feel them, too.

“Oh,” she breathed, when, at the top of one wave, something happened. Something caught, snagged inside her so that she lost the rhythm.

“That’s right,” he said soothingly, so perhaps the rhythm was meant to be lost. She wasn’t sure—

“Oh! Oh!”

Oh.

* * *

Archie was going to hell. There was no way around it.

But wasn’t the descent going to be fun?

He lay next to Clem, both of them panting and staring at the ceiling. His prick was hard as a rock, but he didn’t mind. It would calm down. Eventually. Or, Clementine would go back to her room soon and he could take care of matters then. Though he found he would rather suffer if that was the price of keeping her here.

“I had no idea,” Clem said a few moments later when she got her breath back. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”

He chuckled. “You can do it yourself, too, you know.”

“What?” she shrieked.

He took her hand and guided it between her legs. “You’re probably too spent now, but you can do for yourself what I just did.” He fit his fingers atop hers and maneuvered them so the pads of hers were in roughly the correct spot. “It may take a little time to accustom yourself to the finer details of what works most expediently, but I have observed that you enjoy a moderately firm pressure.” He pressed, and she gasped. It made him want to gloat. Not in a prideful way, but he was glad to finally have done something decisively useful. Too bad he couldn’t tell the boys about it. Here was something, something practical, he was good at.

Clem moved her hand experimentally. “I am all astonishment. And I repeat my earlier question: Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”

“That I do not know. I suppose, as we discussed earlier, that a young lady generally learns about these matters from her mother, perhaps in advance of her wedding night?”

“So a motherless girl is out of luck.”

“Mmm. I do get the impression that these sorts of matters may be discreetly discussed among women.” Some women of the ton gave an impression of such worldliness—worldliness bordering on world-weariness—and Archie had even heard of books being circulated among young ladies, manuals of a sort.

“Hmm.” She rolled onto her side and considered him. He considered her back. The light of all the candles made the room look cozy, domestic. Yet Clem looked as wild as ever, her hair as unkempt as he’d ever seen it. That was, he was certain, due in large part to him. He had finally been able to indulge that ever-present desire to tangle his fingers in it. He hadn’t satisfied the urge, though. He wondered if he ever could. “Perhaps in Town,” she said. “Or perhaps even in the country, but for that I suppose one has to go to tea parties and such. There are no discreet discussions of that sort in the forest.”

“Yet you claimed being an observer of nature prepared you,” he teased.

“Clearly I was mistaken. I was not at all prepared for that.”

“Perhaps you gleaned the mechanics of things from your observations in the outdoors but, paradoxically, spending so much time running wild means you also missed the nuance that might have been covertly imparted by women in society.”

“I think you may be right.” She grinned.

He grinned back. He wanted to put his hand back in her hair, or perhaps rest a palm on her cheek, but that might be an overstep. He’d been charged with a task, and he had carried out that task. Clementine was so very dear to him, though, in this moment. In this moment and always.

“I have so many questions.”

“Well, let’s hear them.”

“The most important one is, when are we going to do that again?”