Chapter 42
Forty-Two
Harry tugged Thomas down the steps of the cathedral.
She let go of him only to get in the middle of the street and wave her arms and shout like a Bedlamite.
Thomas had to pull her by her shoulders to get her out of the way of the hackney-coach that was stopping so they could get in.
She shouted at the driver to take them to her house and named the street of the Lovelock house in Mayfair where Thomas had paid all those calls on her stepmother so long ago.
Thomas’ heart sank a bit. Harry still thought of the Lovelock house as her house.
She did not consider Sommerleigh home, even after a year.
Of course, with Mrs. Lovelock marrying James and becoming the Duchess of Middlewich, the Lovelock house would likely be sold.
Or perhaps it would be part of Harry’s new inheritance, the one she would receive when her stepmother married.
She might choose then to live in London, apart from him, since she could create the haven she wanted in a house of her own.
No blundering husband hanging about, making demands on her time.
In the carriage, Harry avoided his eyes.
She sat on her left hand and thrummed loudly and swayed to and fro.
He had not seen her this agitated in a long time.
For a moment, he was frightened because she reminded him so much of his sister Jane on that last morning in Manchester.
But he calmed himself. Harry might have fallen into the habit of neglecting her body in the past, but she would never abuse it.
She merely was excited in some unaccountable way.
She must be trying to capture some fleeting, incandescent, mathematical masterstroke.
She was not Jane. He was not Hugh Drake.
By the time Thomas paid the driver, Harry had pounded her way up the front steps of the house and burst past the butler when he opened the front door.
“Hurry, Tommy!” Halfway up the staircase in the front hall, she turned around, scampered back down, grabbed his hand, and started up again.
Only now did he begin to have some sense of the reason for his wife’s urgency. And why she had wanted him to come with her. He hoped Harry could forgive her husband for how slow and dull-witted he was sometimes.
Thomas tried to nod politely at the maids they passed as they ran up stairs and down corridors.
Eventually, Harry came to an abrupt halt in front of a door and dropped Thomas’ hand.
She pulled the chain off her neck and took one of the keys and used her left hand to open the door.
She pulled him inside and slammed the door shut. She turned the key in the lock.
She hesitated a moment and then shoved the chain and the keys into his hand.
“You can hold these.” Her voice was gruff.
He looked down at his hand, at the two keys and the chain there, and then up to watch his wife walk away from him.
She hadn’t far to go. It was not a bedchamber.
It was a tall and narrow room, made even more narrow by shelves lining the walls, some empty, some containing scraps of paper and empty inkpots.
On the shelf nearest Thomas, he saw a cup with long-dried dregs of coffee in the bottom.
The room smelled of Harry, of course. It must be her room from before he had married her. Her London aerie.
Harry reached the table at the far end of the room and with one sweep of her left arm, knocked all the papers there to the floor. She turned around, and, using her left hand on the table for support, she jumped up so she was seated atop the table, her legs dangling down.
He was still breathing heavily from their rapid traverse of the house.
“Tommy,” she said.
She held his gaze with her eyes and lifted her skirts all the way up to her waist.
“Now, Tommy, now!”
She wanted him. She had to have him. Her husband. She had waited too long, and now she was about to burst. She wanted him close. She was starving, aching, throbbing.
As Tommy came towards her, reaching for her, she felt certain he would kiss her mouth. She would not stop him from doing that if that was what he wanted. Right now, he could do anything he wanted. He could have anything he wanted.
But as he stepped between her legs, he must have remembered.
His face swerved to her neck, and his hot mouth was on her throat, his tongue swirling over her skin.
His stubble scratched her pleasurably. She shuddered.
She wanted to be scratched by his stubble and licked by his searing tongue. All over her body.
He put his hand between her legs where she had lifted up her skirts. Oh, yes. Yes. His left hand was a vast improvement over her own.
“Oh, Tommy.”
His fingers were probing at her wetness, and he had found her member, and he was rubbing it.
She was wild now. Wild and uncontrolled in a totally new way. It felt dangerous. She felt dangerous. She heard a growl issue from her own throat. If he took his hand from her, if he stepped away from her, she would pull this house down around their ears with her fury.
But there was no need for that. He was here, solid, radiating heat, smelling of cinnamon, leaning into her. One arm around her back. One hand between her legs. He had her.
She reached out with her good hand and felt the front of his trousers.
There. That was what she had expected from sitting on his lap.
Thick. Long. Rigid. She slid her hand up and down and heard him groan into her neck.
She did it harder, quicker and his member grew even more under her hand.
Bernoulli’s principle in fluid dynamics clearly did not apply to a phallus. Or at least not to Tommy’s.
She was having a very difficult time concentrating, but she managed to use the fingertips of her bandaged hand to help her good hand unbutton the fall of his trousers.
And then his fall was undone, and she could put her hand directly on his shaft, which was sticking straight out at her.
Hard. Hot. Silky skin. Ready for her. What she had imagined. What she wanted.
“Please, Tommy.”
She pulled her neck away from his lips and looked at him. Those blue eyes. That saw her. As no one had ever seen her.
She licked her lips. “Please.”
“Lie back, Harry.” His voice was hoarse.
She lay back on the desk, but still she clutched his member. “Please,” she whispered. “I want you, Tommy.”
“Let go, Harry.”
She let go. She didn’t want to, but she did. She had to trust him.
He took himself in his own hand, and she felt the head of his cock in her wetness, rubbing at her.
She nearly came up off the table then with her thrill, but he had one hand on her chest, cupping her breast through her dress, holding her down.
“I’m going to try not to hurt you,” he said, panting.
“I know, but I don’t care. I don’t care.” She wrapped her legs around him and locked her ankles. “Please. Please.” Would he help her? He had helped her before. And he was her husband. He had to help her, surely. “Please.” She could not remember when she had said please so many times.
She felt him breach her. And, yes, it hurt. And, yes, she didn’t care. He was so close to her now. So close. And that hungry, empty place was full. Of him.
He leaned over her, and she put both her hands, the bandaged one and the good one, on his face and held him there so she could look in his eyes. To make sure he understood her.
He did.
She saw he did.
As he moved his sex in and out of her sex like a beautifully undulating sine wave, she felt a sensation deep inside. A sensation besides fullness and pain. It was not the same excitement she had felt when he had put his finger or his tongue on her. It was different. It was deeper.
But she kept her eyes on his eyes. A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead, between his brows. He was breathing very hard.
“Tommy,” she crooned.
He grunted. He was moving faster now, stroking in and out of her, the frequency of the sine wave increasing even as the period shortened.
There was a different look in his eye now. A lost look.
“I’m here, Tommy.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes.”
The sine wave grew erratic.
“I love you, Harry.”
And then there was another look in his eyes, something more than lost, something like the look she imagined Euler might have had when he had refined his number, the base of the natural logarithm, the e.
It was the look of ecstasy.
She had given him that ecstasy.
His body raised up off hers even as he kept his eyes on hers. He spasmed one, two, three, four times, clutching one of her shoulders, one of her breasts. He did not blink until the very end.
His face came very close to hers. And she lost sight of his eyes when he put his mouth on hers. How very soft his lips were. How very warm and sweet his breath was. She had not expected that.
He did not linger too long. When he took his mouth away, she said, “Can we do something else now?”
His lungs were burning, his heart pounding. He was sweating. He had just taken the virginity of his exceptional wife after a year of marriage. He had been so aroused, she had been so eager, the positioning had been so awkward that he had not performed as well as he would have wished.
And his legs were trembling even now. Because he was not so sure what had passed between them had had anything to do with pleasure.
She had held his face and looked in his eyes the entire time he had penetrated her.
There could be no greater intimacy, surely. Not for his Harry.
And when he had told her he loved her just before he had released inside her, she had not flinched, she had not looked away, she had said very simply, “Of course you do, Tommy,” and gazed at him with her enormous hazel eyes.
Yes, of course, he loved her. Of course.
His Harry.
At this moment, he felt she was his. Or he was hers. Yes, he was hers. She owned him. What a terrible power she had. He would do anything for her, his wife.
With that in mind, he pulled her up from the table to a sitting position and found the buttons on the back of her dress.
“I want you naked,” he said.
“Yes,” she said and reached for the buttons of his waistcoat. “Both of us.”
“Let’s get off this table.”
“Yes.”
He fumbled at her buttons, still shaking a bit. She was defter than he, despite her bandaged hand. But, eventually, they were lying on their discarded clothes over dusty floorboards, and he could touch every part of her, every inch of her velvet skin.
Her breasts were heaving, raised up to him. Those beautiful, taut handfuls he had watched develop over the last year. He had helped bring them into being, hadn’t he? Didn’t he deserve to enjoy them now? Especially when he knew his mouth on her exquisite pink areolas would make her mewl.
He fell on them now with his mouth and his hands. And he was rewarded by her beautiful, softly scented flesh, the puckering of her nipples under his tongue, and the sounds of her arousal.
“Tommy,” she moaned. Yes, her mewls had turned to moans. Her good hand was on his chest, his flank, his buttock, his back, his jaw. The bandaged hand stayed on top of his head, resting lightly.
Then, “Tommy.” More forcefully.
He raised his head from one of her breasts. “Yes, Harry?”
“I know,” her breath was ragged, “you like,” she exhaled, “breasts. But can you also,” she raised her pelvis up off the floor, “touch me somewhere else?”
He wanted to tease her. She was bound to him now in a way she hadn’t been before, and he felt he had earned the right to tease her without fear of losing her.
“Where do you want me to touch you, Harry?”
“On my cunt.”
He should have known he could not tease her that way. She would demand what she wanted, his plain-speaking yet complicated wife with her gutter tongue she did not know was a gutter tongue.
And so he put his hand where she wanted and began to touch her wetness, and she sighed and fluttered her lashes and wriggled under his hand.
It was quite the most girlish thing he had ever seen her do, and he could feel his cock begin to throb again.
And as his mouth roamed over her breasts and his finger stroked that button at the top of her cleft, he heard her sound her howl and felt her body shake under his.
“Oh, Tommy,” she said. She was still for a moment before her good hand found his cock and she told him maybe he should be the one to lie flat now.
Hours later, as they gathered their clothing off the floor in the dimming light, Harry explained she had brought him here because her room was the closest place she knew of with a lock and a key.
Thomas had a great deal of respect for Harry’s thinking process, but this was clearly suspect.
He knew there was something deeper at play here—but he was not a deep man.
And, he promised himself, he would never, ever complain that his first bedding of Harry had taken place on a wooden table with uneven legs, in front of an unshuttered and uncurtained window high above a busy Mayfair street, surrounded by dust and scraps of paper and empty inkpots. What care had he for the surroundings?
She had entrusted him with her beloved keys, after all. Even if nothing else had happened in her room, he knew he had her heart.
“Recognize your luck, Thomas Drake,” he said aloud. He peeled off a piece of foolscap from the side of one of Harry’s breasts as she struggled to fasten her petticoat with only one hand. The ink from the paper left some unreadable equation printed there like a sailor’s tattoo.
“Luck.” Harry snorted. The ensuing lecture on odds and probabilities only lasted as long as it took Thomas to pull her petticoat off again and to unbutton his trousers.
Only later did Thomas ask himself—if Harry had still had good use of her right hand, would she have been so motivated to consummate their marriage?
Luck.
Some months later, at the end of a long, warm summer, on a horse blanket and under the stars, his wife’s head pillowed on what she had told him was her favorite thigh, he had a thought.
“What of Fermat’s conjecture?”
“What of it?”
“Have you forsaken it, Harry?”
“No, I’m still working on it. The ideas are coming. Slowly. And no one else has proven it yet. I may still win.”
“Shall we start testing every number?”
She laughed. “That will take a rather long time, Tommy.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me Aristotle said time was meaningless without change?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s never change and then time will cease to exist.”
“A proposition marred by faulty logic. And I am rather interested in change, Tommy, or at least in a certain one that might be coming in about seven months.”
And she took his hand and placed it over that still flat expanse between her navel and her maidenhair.
And then Harry asked if he didn’t consider it good news and if he did, why was he weeping?