Chapter 25 #2
Thomas went back to the fire, sat down, and took off his boots. “Don’t worry. I’m not leaving. The lesson isn’t over.”
Harriet tilted her head.
“Go on. Get undressed. It’s what you can do for me.”
“I don’t understand that remark.”
Thomas sighed. “Like most men, I am stimulated by the visual.” She waited. He said, “It would give me pleasure to look at your body.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Would you rather undress me?”
For a moment, Thomas considered telling the truth—that he would rather stride to the bed and take her mouth with his own while shredding her dress with one hand and pulling her closer with the other.
“No,” he said and leaned back in the wing chair and put his hands behind his head.
Harry did not seem put out by this in the slightest. She took off her shoes and dress and chemise and petticoat and stockings just as she might if she were alone. She spread the clothing neatly over a hard-backed chair and walked to the fire and faced him.
Here again was the elf queen whom he had spied through the gamekeeper’s cottage window.
The firelight danced over her skin. Long feet rose to slender ankles and then elongated knees and thighs that were beginning to show some muscle.
Muscle but also womanly roundness as the flesh rose into her hips and maidenhair.
Thomas spied a glisten of moisture tracking down Harry’s inner thigh, evidence of her previous arousal.
And then her narrowing torso with acres of beautiful, unmarked, fair skin rising to the widening of her ribcage and her bosom.
And the blasted keys, which she never took off, hanging between two glorious breasts.
Those breasts. Those beautiful handfuls with their pink peaks.
With great difficulty, Thomas tore his eyes from her breasts and looked at Harry’s face to see how she was taking his quite obvious ogling.
Her expression—was it disgust?
No, Thomas decided. It was scientific interest.
“Turn around,” he said.
She did. And he found he had been right. Above each perfect small buttock, there was indeed a dimple. He allowed himself briefly to rest one hand on her lower back and to brush downwards over one of those dimples and one of those buttocks.
Harry bounced up and down on the balls of her feet.
“I’m cold. Should I sit on your lap again?”
Indeed, gooseflesh was beginning to cover her skin. He stood up abruptly and took off his tailcoat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt.
“No, go to the bed and lie down under the covers, Lady Drake.”
She almost scrambled into the bed and under the counterpane. She lay supine, obedient, shivering. Thomas walked to the bed.
“I need to be on this side,” he said. She looked briefly at the bedside table, at her stack of books and the lamp there. Clearly, she had a long-established habit of being on the left side of the bed.
He raised his left hand. He wiggled his fingers.
“I’m left-handed,” he said. Her face was blank for a moment, but then a smile flitted across her lips. Quite like the smile she had given him when he had finally taught her to fly a kite two weeks ago.
She slid over.
Thomas smoothed the counterpane down and got on the bed, on top of the coverings. He lay on his side, facing her, his head resting on his right hand as he leaned on his elbow.
“I’m still cold, Thomas.”
After a moment’s pause, he got off the bed and slid under the counterpane with her. She pressed against him, and he wrapped his arms around her beautifully naked form and prayed he would continue to be a man of his word and not of his cock.
“Your waistcoat buttons are poking me.”
He let her unbutton his waistcoat and pull it from his body and throw it off the bed.
Then he was surprised to feel her arm reach over him and her hand grasping his buttock.
It was fleeting, but it was definitely a grope.
Now she pulled at the waistband of his breeches and at his shirt. “Take these off, too.”
He moved her hands away. “No. These are insurance. So I don’t do something we will both regret.”
Harry pulled away from him and lay back. “How unfair.”
So, in some way, perhaps his body did arouse her.
“Yes, but given our limitations, one of us should be dressed. I would like to be naked, too, but since the lesson is about your body, it makes sense I am dressed and you are not.”
He put a hand flat on her abdomen. Was that almost a pout he saw on her lips?
“Sometimes I wonder how men get anything done when they have so little control over their desires,” she said. “I mean, did Newton have to prevent himself from fornicating so he could invent the calculus?”
He moved her keys on their chain away from her breasts and off to the side. “Didn’t he invent the calculus during the plague year? I am sure fear of contagion kept him from fornicating and helped him concentrate his mind.”
Her voice became throaty as he brushed his hand over her nipples, making first one hard and then the other. “Please . . . don’t speak . . . of Newton . . . while you are . . . doing that!”
“Why?” he said with a lazy smile, teasing her right breast by spiraling his fingers around the nipple slowly. “Does it insult Newton?”
He now uncovered the breast closest to him and fell on it with his mouth, first kissing, then sucking, then very lightly biting the nipple.
Her skin tasted of a sweet, heady swirl of the sweat he had smelled on the blanket in the gamekeeper’s cottage with just a trace of soap.
“No. It’s just—” she was panting now, “—Newton was so very ugly, while you,” she grabbed his jaw and swung it off her breast and towards her own face, “like his calculus, are very beautiful, my lord.”
He chuckled and pulled away from her hand and went back to her breast to hide his reddening face. She thought him beautiful. He hadn’t known that.
As he nibbled and suckled, he was pleased to hear her panting turn into mewls of pleasure. He came up for air and murmured, “I am glad I can beat Sir Isaac at one thing, anyway.”
Her voice trembled like her body. “And for the purpose of accurate record keeping, please note that was actually the fifth compliment I have paid you.”
He winked. “Duly noted.” He bent his head again to her nipple.
She sat up suddenly, tearing her breast from his lips with her movement. “Is this flirtation?”
He sighed. “Yes, it is. Or it was.”
She fell back. “My apologies. It is just, having never experienced it, I wasn’t sure I recognized it correctly.”
Then she was silent. But her pelvis began to wiggle on the mattress, arching upwards in search of something. So as Thomas sucked and licked and stroked her breasts, he also slowly slid his hand down her abdomen, towards her maidenhair.
She threw the covers off both of them. “I’m warm enough now, and I need to see.”
Thomas decided to change course and moved her legs apart and knelt on the mattress between them and looked at her.
His cock was tenting his breeches, and he congratulated himself on the wisdom of staying partly dressed because this was very difficult as it was.
Every base instinct in his body was telling him to fall on top of her and thrust himself inside of her.
The breeches just barely reminded him that that was not in the cards. For him. With her.
She stared back at him steadily. Was it just his imagination or could she be looking at him with some affection? After all, he had given her pleasure and seen her at her most vulnerable.
And now he was going to pleasure her again.
He leaned over and kissed her navel. Then, very slowly, he kissed his way over the warm velvet skin of her lower abdomen and down to her maidenhair.
She sat up, leaning on her elbows.
“What is this?” she asked.
He looked up and raised his eyebrows and said, “You’ll see.”
“What does it look like down there?”
“You don’t know?”
“How would I know? I can’t see down there. Everything’s hidden, and the angle’s wrong.”
“Well,” he breathed, “it’s quite beautiful.”
She cocked her head to one side.
“But, Thomas, I can’t do this to myself. You won’t be teaching me anything useful.”
“Maybe this could be just for fun.” And with that, he licked her right on her button.
She fell back with a yelp, startled.
Gentle, Thomas, gentle, he scolded himself. She is so ready that she will pop like a shaken bottle of Champagne wine with the slightest nudge of her cork.
He gently pushed her legs farther apart and hooked his arms under her legs.
She obligingly drew her knees up to accommodate his shoulders.
He pulled her around so she lay crosswise on the bed.
He was now kneeling on the floor by the side of the bed with his chest resting on the mattress, her legs resting on his shoulders, his face towards her flower.
He began to kiss her inner thighs, and as he did, her labia, already swollen and glistening, spread wider, welcoming him in.
He kissed her outer lips, lightly sprinkled with maidenhair.
He let his tongue run over her wet inner lips.
He tasted her, and she tasted salty and clean and .
. . of herself. He felt her entrance with his own lips and had to restrain himself from trying to penetrate it with his tongue.
That would not give her pleasure, and there was a possibility he might frighten her, this woman who did not seem frightened of anything.
He could hear her humming—a low gravelly sound—and sensed her hands snatching at the sheet under her.
Her thighs began to shake. Her buttocks clenched.
Thomas grabbed her hands and held them so they no longer scrabbled along the mattress looking for purchase. She laced her fingers with his. Carefully, he began to apply himself to the button at the top of her flower. Her member, she had called it.
She squeezed his hands. In response to her squeeze, he began to apply his tongue more forcefully, more quickly.
He could tell she was close to her release.
She arched and thrust her pelvis in the air, and the hum became a long, drawn-out, fully voiced howl.
He let go of her hands and used his own to push her hips down into the bed so he could concentrate on licking in exactly the right place with exactly the right force and rhythm.
She sat up and grabbed his upper arms, and the howl stuttered into a vibrato as her flower pulsed and pulsed and pulsed, and her body pushed up against his hands, straining.
Sweet fluid on his lips. And then stillness.
He stopped the movement of his tongue and looked at her face.
There was a quizzical expression there, and she fell backwards onto the bed with an enormous groan.
The fire crackled.
“I must say I like your idea of fun, Tommy,” she said. And yawned.
By the time he stood, noting she had ripped his sleeves almost completely from their armholes, she was asleep, sprawled across the bed, her nipples red from his attentions, her wetness soaking into the sheet under her buttocks.
He rearranged her so her head was on a pillow and her body was on the dry part of the mattress.
He straightened her chain and placed the keys between her breasts.
He pulled the coverings over her and tucked them around her body.
Smythe might be a little shocked by the absence of a nightdress in the morning, but Harry wouldn’t be embarrassed .
. . and they were married, damn it! Besides, he didn’t know where her nightdresses were kept.
He made sure the fire screen was in place and the candles were out. He took his boots, his tailcoat, his crumpled waistcoat from the floor, and he left the room.
He went to his own bedchamber. He undid the front fall of his breeches and took his cock in his hand, ready to give himself some immediate relief.
But then he thought better of it. He went in search of the leather bag he used when he traveled.
His valet Jackson used to keep it with the trunks until Thomas had insisted it be kept in his dressing room.
He liked to know he had a few things in his bag, ready to hand if he should decide to gallop into town on short notice.
He got undressed and took the nightshirt out of his bag.
He didn’t wear a nightshirt at home or in brothels, only in inns when he might have occasion to traipse down a public passage to the privy.
And he hadn’t been at an inn since his wedding night.
This was the nightshirt he had worn in the bed he had shared with Harry. He raised it to his nose.
There was no trace of her scent.
He cursed. Of course not. It had been ten months. The nightshirt had had too long an acquaintance with his leather bag for it to retain any of her odor. And he had not touched her that night.
And now that he thought more about it, Jackson must have arranged for this nightshirt to be laundered since its last use and replaced in the bag.
Or this was an entirely different, clean nightshirt.
Jackson’s blasted scrupulousness. He deserved all the hours of mending he would have tomorrow, fixing the sleeves of Thomas’ shirt.
Thomas flung himself on the bed.
He took his cock in his hand, and, using rough strokes, he tried his best to climax while thinking of his last redheaded whore from months ago.
When release did not come, he tried to think of the Mancunian strumpet who had first taught him to touch and lick a woman to give her pleasure.
But his thoughts kept turning to the elf queen who slept naked, mere yards away.
The elf queen who was his wife. The elf queen who had bewitched him and called him Tommy for the first time tonight.
The elf queen whom he had, stupidly, now made self-sufficient.
He hated himself as he let himself imagine taking Harry just so he could be done with this torment. As he finished, he made a small sound. If he was honest, it was a whimper.