Chapter Nine
Martin locked the door.
All three of them: the one to the foyer, the one to the rear corridor, and the one to the side gallery in which residents sometimes sat to read the newspapers.
He locked the doors, and he was alone with Martha, who watched him with dark, expectant eyes. He thought he might die if she didn’t give him another command. His heart was beating wildly, his blood pumping through every artery of his body with a force it hadn’t known for decades.
Rising from her chair, she stretched out her hand.
Martin closed the distance between them to take it.
Her fingers were warm and sure. She tugged him as close as they had been moments before.
“You are going to kiss me now,” she whispered, “and you are not going to feel any guilt about it, because I am asking you to do it and because you want to do it.”
He did want to do it. All he had wanted for these past three days was to consume her—even, at supper, imagining himself licking the mutton sauce from her fingers.
Martin lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her smooth nails.
He glanced up to see if he had earned a reprimand, but her eyes were darker than ever, her lips parted on a breath that never became words.
He moved his way up her knuckles—small, then big—before flipping her hands so he could press his mouth to each wrist, one after the other.
He tasted this soft skin with his tongue. She was a briny cream, a heady rose.
Martin wanted to kiss her lips, and she had asked him to, so he circled his arms around her waist to bring her close and dipped his mouth to hers.
They did not waste time pretending they were polite or demure.
Mrs. Bellamy opened her mouth to his, and their tongues touched like the devils they were.
Martin heard his breath become ragged. He bent down to her, craving every inch of her, and when her mouth wasn’t enough, he bundled her in his hands to lift her against his body.
Except, of course, she was no dainty debutante, nor he a well-formed rake. He lifted her a half-inch from the ground before his back objected painfully. Mrs. Bellamy pushed her feet back to the floor, glaring at him again with hungry impatience. “Take me to the sofa.”
He led her to the deeper, darker part of the study where bookshelves towered instead of sunlit windows. Here, not long ago, he had held her hand in friendship and told himself that it was enough.
Could he ever have believed that lie?
He meant to seat her on the sofa, as she had commanded.
Except her hips were so inviting beneath his palms, and their lips had been separated for too long.
She turned to look up at him the very moment he decided he had no more patience, and that was all it took for him to push her against the bookshelf for another kiss.
She wanted this from him. She would get it: every terrible, carnal desire, including lifting her once more—this time, using the power of his legs instead of his back—to prop her against the hip-level shelf that housed records of the estate.
Martin could press his cock against her thigh now, stealing her soft warmth through their clothes.
He moved his hands to her breasts, seizing them despite the corset that protected their shape, and took her right earlobe with the tips of his teeth.
“Oh yes,” she said on a breath that was far too tense to be a sigh. “Oh, be ruthless with me. Tease me—even when I want you to stop.”
So Martin lingered on that ear, making it wet with his tongue, scraping it with his teeth, blowing on it with soft breaths, until Mrs. Bellamy writhed against his cock so much that he couldn’t concentrate any longer.
He slipped a hand down to her ankle, which had coiled around his thigh. “What should I do next, mistress?”
Her hands gripped around his neck. “Find out if I am wet enough for you yet.”
How he had been hoping that would be her command.
Martin slid his fingers up the inside of her skirts, tracing the skin of her calf, her knee, her thigh, until he found the coarse hair protecting her hot, greedy folds.
They were moist but not so wet that his hand became slick, and so Martin pressed his thumb into her apex and asked, “What do you want now?”
“Your tongue,” she gasped, trembling a little in his grip, and Martin tortured her further by kissing her mouth first.
Then, sinking to his knees, he hooked her legs over his shoulders to share her weight with the bookshelf and positioned his tongue on her quim.
Here, she tasted of salt water, like a tonic for a sore throat, and he partook of her like an ailing man.
Desperately. Lustily. Demandingly. He explored her geography with his tongue and learned her desires as she panted against the bookshelves.
“Stay right there,” she commanded at one point, “and don’t slow down.
No, don’t speed up, either. Just like that.
Stay right there. Fuck me with your tongue. ”
And so he did. He was her pupil, the Socrates to her Aspasia, and from her he would learn why this was neither corrupt nor evil.
Or he would give over his soul to the devil, once and for all, and at last live free of the fear of failure and the chains of guilt.
She came, not in a burst or shudder, but in a light, surprised cry of, “Lord Preston!” Martin only knew she had achieved ecstasy—or he had delivered her to it—because her whole body relaxed, and she sighed, “Oh, well done.”
His own need had abated in the task of worshipping her on his knees, but as he rose back to his feet, his cock flooded with intense desire. As if he were an appendage of it, designed only to get him inside her hot vagina.
Mrs. Bellamy met his gaze with those dark, hungry eyes once more. “Do you think me ready for you?”
“Perhaps some pomade de pimpernel would help,” he admitted. “I have one for my hands, if you would like it.”
It was in a drawer in the table beside the sofa. Mrs. Bellamy sniffed it before she lay back on the cushions and, spreading her legs, massaged it inside her body.
The sunlight barely reached this dark corner of the study, yet Martin couldn’t look away from the display of her quim, like a case of jewels against the backdrop of her widow’s weeds.
She commanded, “Take off your trousers.”
He did—his trousers, his stockings, his boots, and his coat, so that all he wore in the name of modesty was his long white shirt.
His conscience reminded him this was a bad idea. He would not want his children to do this. He would not want another man to take advantage of Mrs. Bellamy in such a way.
She caught his hand in her fingers. “Lord Preston.”
He liked her fingers so very much. “Surely you mustn’t call me that now.”
“What name should I use? Your Christian name?”
Lolly was the last person to have called him Martin.
But she was his wife, not just his lover, and a woman of the same rank, besides.
If he gave Mrs. Bellamy leave to use that name—that was something entirely different from letting lust rule for an afternoon.
“Preston,” he said. “It’s what my friends call me. ”
“Preston.” She kissed his fingertips. “May I touch you?”
Confused—they were already holding hands, after all—he nodded, and she wrapped her palm lightly around his shaft. How heavenly it was—or was it evil because it was such a wonderful temptation?
Martin would already reap the consequences of this afternoon. He might as well give in completely.
“Would you think me very wicked if I kissed it?” she asked, her mouth already close to his cock. He had no breath with which to reply. He shook his head.
She did more than kiss it. She took it in her hot, wet mouth and worshipped it the way he had just done her quim: with long, smooth motions; with fast flicks across its tip; with her hand teasing one part and her tongue another.
But she only plunged him into the pool of ecstasy without giving him a chance to swim: soon, she withdrew her mouth and gazed up at him.
“I want to have you inside me. Do you want that, too?”
Oh, how badly he did. “Yes.”
“Then take me.” Lying back, she spread her legs once more. Her quim was slick from the pomade and her own desire. “We are two old adults. We won’t get confused.”
She didn’t want anything from him but this. And he—Martin didn’t know what he wanted other than to complete this moment. There was no more time for doubts, only time for doing.
He climbed onto the sofa so that his knees balanced on either side of the cushions.
Her ankles wrapped around his torso, bringing him close, and Martin leaned down to kiss her mouth once more.
Compared to everything else they had done, it now felt innocent, this tender exchange of desire.
A reminder that this was not just a woman with a quim, but Mrs. Bellamy—a woman he admired, who he hoped in turn admired him.
And then her hand was on his cock again, guiding it to her entrance.
He slid in slowly, watching her for signs of discomfort.
Halfway in, he lost conscious thought, overwhelmed almost to a swoon by the sensation of being swathed in another body.
His hips acted of their own accord. She met his movement beat for beat.
This was not tender: this was animalistic rutting, their breaths getting shorter, their bodies getting frantic, their thoughts replaced by instinct.
Martin curled over Mrs. Bellamy, his mouth buried in the hair coming loose from her thick braid, and gave himself over to the great blankness of fucking.
“Oh Preston,” she whispered in his ear, “yes, just like that.”
He didn’t like the new name, but he came anyway, in an amazing eruption of bliss that he had entirely forgotten was possible.
Wrapped around her in recovery, he returned to himself to find a man who had fucked the poor widow in his care, and he wondered if he would ever forgive himself.