Chapter 2
Captain Denny wordlessly led Lydia to one of the sleeping rooms on the first floor of the inn.
He’d taken her gloved hand the moment he slapped down some coins in front of Wickham and fairly pulled her out of that dark room, elbowing anyone in his way.
Men extended their hands to touch her as she passed, causing Lydia to turn this way and that to avoid their nasty fingers.
Her life as a respectable woman was over; her husband held legal control while extending her none of the protections and benefits afforded to a wife. How would she hold her head high in Meryton knowing that many of the townsmen had witnessed her humiliation?
She wouldn’t. From this day forward, she’d be bowed by her shame.
A lucky woman in such circumstances would move houses.
Take to the sea. Volunteer to live the rest of her days as a fur trapper on the frontier of civilization.
But there was no money for that. And no money for a maid that would allow Lydia to pull the curtains and avoid the scorn and stares of her neighbors.
There was always water to fetch from the pump now, so much blasted water.
“Well,” said Denny, arranging his long limbs in a chair before her. “It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”
Lydia had taken a seat on the bed. She clutched at the bedclothes and felt how her neck and shoulders slumped under the weight of her cares.
What could she possibly say to this man, one of three who had offered her a chance to escape Wickham and experience untold bliss at their experienced hands?
If she regretted her youthful foibles leading to matrimony, what words could adequately describe the regret she carried now, knowing for certain that Wickham’s depravities would only escalate?
At twenty, she should have chosen better.
“There, now, Lydia,” said Denny, coming to sit beside her on the bed and offering his handkerchief.
She looked at it, her mind so addled that she almost didn’t know what to do next.
And then Denny brought the cloth to her face and gently pressed it into her cheek.
“I’m crying,” she said in wonder, as if commenting on the first snow of the year.
“Don’t tell me you’re incapable of your own distress,” said Denny, giving her a smile. Why he should be so kind to her after she fled their merry party to return to George Wickham, she didn’t know.
She remained quiet, unsure of what she could say to her old friend. Especially after that night at the Forster’s old house, where he’d taken Lydia from behind and helped introduce her to the bliss of a rough coupling.
At last, she spoke. “What are you doing here?”
“Don’t you know I live here in Meryton now!
” he replied jauntily. But when he saw Lydia was serious, he gave her a compassionate look.
“I heard something of what Wickham had planned and decided to see it for myself. Didn’t like the sound of it.
You could divorce him, you know,” continued Denny lowly.
“The courts don’t take kindly to spousal cruelty, not like that. ”
“It would be a scandal,” said Lydia, twisting the handkerchief.
“A man offering his wife for sale. I would be notorious for the rest of my days. His lies, trumpeted in the gazettes. My family…gad, Denny! They would simply die of shame. It might really kill my father. They’d never see me again. I certainly couldn’t go home.”
Denny took her chin in hand. “Perhaps you were meant to be notorious. You always were a girl too spirited to live by rules and propriety.”
Lydia waved him away, too exhausted by the latest turn her life had taken to think she was anything but a menace to her own happiness. How tired she was!
“Aren’t you here to ravish me?” she asked, unable to muster more witty repartee. She tried to move her hands as if this was all a lark, some grand joke, but they simply flopped in her lap.
“Dash it, Lydia,” said Denny, gently bringing her head to his chest. “How I regret introducing Wickham to you all those years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t.”
He wore his scarlet uniform, all bright red wool and polished buttons. Denny had been promoted to captain in the years since she’d flirted with him, and he had been careful to direct her face away from the Waterloo Medal on his left breast.
Lydia’s cheek pressed into the gilded brass buttons on his coat, and she inhaled the scent of the wool cloth, shaving soap, and something that had a hint of rose. Maybe it was an attar of roses salve for his lips; they always seemed ready for a kiss. The tension in her eased minutely.
The smell of shaving soap reminded Lydia of something that had escaped her notice at first. “Your moustache! You shaved it!” she cried, reaching a curious hand to his upper lip.
Denny laughed and let her feel the smoothness of his skin.
“But it was so dashing!”
“You should have said so before I had my valet take a blade to it!” exclaimed Denny, full of mirth and clearly delighted that she’d noticed the change. “Do you miss it so much?”
“I’ll live,” she said, casting him an alluring smile, her first of the night. “I suppose you’ll do without it.”
“If changes to my whiskers get you smiling like that, my dear, I’ll alter myself all the time.”
“Go on,” said Lydia, pushing him slightly.
And then Denny took her chin in hand again and dropped a quick kiss on her lips.
It was nothing, really, nothing at all compared to the intimacy they’d shared six weeks ago in the Forster’s old house.
But his lips were so soft, just as she suspected, and his touch so gentle that Lydia felt unmoored and floating as if in some blissful pond.
It was such a change from the neglect and indifference of her lawful husband.
“Why’d you do it?” she whispered, not wanting to break the spell.
“Thought you might prefer me clean-shaven,” he murmured back.
“I think you are most handsome no matter what grows — or doesn’t — on your upper lip,” she said, toying with one of his buttons.
“But I was thinking of your pleasure,” he said into her ear. “My moustache might irritate your skin.”
“I’m not so sensitive as all that, Denny,” she giggled. “I used to go out in the winter without a muffler, and my cheeks barely turned red.”
“I wasn’t thinking of sensitive skin on your face, darling.”
Lydia’s eyes met Denny’s, and she gasped upon realizing what he meant.
“You don’t—”
“Oh, that I do,” he said with a smirk. “Have you ever had that service before?”
“A mouth…no. George never…” That service was one of many her husband had never performed for her.
“A shame, really,” said Denny, his arm about her waist most comfortingly. “A shame for him. I bet you have the tastiest little peach, Lydia.”
She shouldn’t feel her eyelids drooping at his heated words. She shouldn’t squeeze her thighs together when she longed for more pressure on that place he spoke about so reverently.
But Lydia was swept under when Denny dropped a soft kiss on her neck.
“Your pulse is fluttering,” he rasped, as if he too were as taken by this innocent moment as she was.
She nodded, struggling to think of something to say. “What’s your given name, Denny? I’ve always called you Mr. Denny or Captain Denny or just Denny, but I—”
He chuckled. “You’ll hate it.”
“Never!” she protested, thinking that Denny might just be the kindest, most handsome officer on earth.
“George,” he said with a huff. “Like so many baby boys in the age of the German kings, I am a George.”
Lydia deflated, suddenly recalling her worthless husband, George Wickham.
“And now I’ve upset you,” he said, running a finger up and down the tense lines of her neck.
“It’s not you,” she said, trying to soften again for him. “I merely recalled the world outside.”
Outside this room, she was a prize to be won on the turn of a card, and the property of one George Wickham.
“Why don’t you lie back and let me help you forget all of that for a moment?”
Lydia studied Captain George Denny, struggling to understand what he suggested. His eyes, always a clear blue to which even the sea at Brighton couldn’t compare, shone with some new light. His passion was infectious, and her will bent most pleasurably to his.
“What do you mean to do?” she asked, lying against the mattress with her feet still on the floor.
Denny trailed a hand over the bodice of the dress he and two other officers had given her, gently feeling the weight of her breasts.
“I plan to lick your pretty little scarlet quim until you scream, Lydia. Are you amenable?”
His forward language shot to the part of her aching for his touch. Fortunately, it seemed he had every intention of relieving her need.
“Oh, I don’t know…” she dissembled, not wanting to seem too eager.
Why she was pretending to be anything other than panting for the man in the wake of the revelatory bliss he and his fellow officers had given her several weeks ago, she didn’t know.
It was a habit aimed at modesty, much like refusing the last teacake even when she wanted another one so badly.
A veneer that wouldn’t hide the rotten core of her disgrace, not now that Wickham was openly selling her.
“I was thinking of putting your cunny right here,” he said, tapping the place he used to sport a moustache.
Lydia let out a playful gasp. His words were lewd…and arousing. Distracting. Her thighs wiggled as she imagined the feel of him there. Those rose-scented, soft lips tasting the part of her that had been neglected so long.
Denny slid to the floor. “What are you about?” she asked.
He popped his head back up. “Thought I might request an audience with your beautiful cunt. Worship her on my knees. Study her intricate design and say prayers for her mercy on a mere sinner.”
“Isn’t that blasphemy?” she asked faintly as she felt Denny draw her hems up her calves.
“Probably,” he said, kissing the inside of her knee when the dress traveled higher. “But then, I am a disreputable sort of fellow.”
He was like a magician, transforming Lydia before her own eyes, lifting the weight of wrong choices and making her feel like the young woman she’d lost in the wake of her hasty nuptials.
“May I see it, my dear?” he asked, licking at her thigh, but moving her hem no further.
George Wickham was the villain of her life; of that there was no doubt.
But Lydia felt incandescent rage at George Denny right now.
Why did he need her permission? Why couldn’t he just take what he wanted and absolve her of feelings of shame?
Would begging for pleasure at his hands make her all those things the men in that dark room whispered she was?
But his mouth on her soft skin made her legs tremble.
Lydia pulled her dress higher to show Denny the apex of her thighs.
“So close,” he said, expelling air with each word so the puffs ruffled her hem and traveled underneath to glance over her heated skin.
And this was when she made a mistake. Her hips moved somehow, completely on their own with no involvement from Lydia’s rational mind, and her hand may have lifted her dress the barest inch higher.
Denny groaned. “Let me see it,” he begged, coming closer to where she felt hot and needy for him. “Spread for me, you darling minx, so I might give you the sweetest little kisses.”
“Denny!” she hissed, scandalized by his words…while slowly opening her legs to his gaze.
“Oh, that’s a good girl,” he said, stroking her thigh, staring at the place she’d exposed to him.
“You shouldn’t be that close,” she sniffed. It was lewd, entirely too shameful for a young woman from a good family to be so studied in this way.
“But how else will I kiss it?” he asked, dropping a peck right on her quim.
Lydia gasped. “You’re not supposed to be—”
“I intend to look my fill,” he said, his aristocratic accent slicing through her arguments. “You see, you have these pretty little swollen lips here.” He ran a finger over one, and Lydia emitted a noise that could only be considered primal.
“Both sides, plump and ready to hug my cock,” he said, grunting as he adjusted himself over his breeches. “A fat little button at the top, positively throbbing for want of a touch, no matter what words you say.”
When he brushed the backs of his fingers over that place, all of Lydia seemed to squeeze with some approaching crisis, the sensation so overwhelming she didn’t realize Denny was removing her slippers and placing her stockinged feet on the edge of the bed.
Her knees were high and spread now, and her thighs framed Denny’s head, still appreciatively surveying her cunny.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked, her voice sounding a million miles away as she imbibed pleasure with abandon.
“Wanted to better see that lovely little hole,” he said. He came closer and stuck his tongue exactly there.
Lydia was shocked, grabbing at the bedclothes, one foot sliding from its place as she reflexively kicked out. And all the while, Denny thrust his tongue in that place as if he wielded a cock, tupping her with relentless strength, stretching her channel.
“I didn’t know it could, oh,” she moaned when he moved his tongue up to those cunny lips he’d admired. He was ruthless, somehow moving from one side to the other before she registered what was happening and leaving her quim a wet mess in the wake of his ministrations.
“Like honey, my dear, pour it out for me. I’ll lick every drop.”
She gasped at what he suggested. That…wetness had nothing to do with her! He was responsible; it was wholly him! Why, she should tell him to stop drooling and blaming—
But when he moved to the bump that seemed to beat with a percussive, relentless force, Lydia’s mind went blank and all objections vanished.
“So many nights I wanted to beg you to let me taste this, Miss Bennet,” he moaned between licks. “I’d be outside the barracks beating my cock until it was raw just thinking of being able to suck you like this.”
He applied his tongue and lips, sucking exactly where she needed him. Oh, she had certainly married the wrong George if this was what she’d been missing.
Lydia could think only of her pleasure. How she required just a little more to reach the heights of bliss.
Distantly, Lydia heard a door open and click shut.
“You’ve done a fine job getting her ready for me,” said another voice she knew well.
Lydia’s first instinct was fear, and her legs kicked out as her mind raced through the possibilities of what Wickham could have lobbed at her now.
“Easy, Miss Bennet, we mean to take good care of you,” said Denny, stroking her side as she came to her elbows to see the man who had entered the room.