Chapter 26
It may be necessary, before we proceed, dear reader, to offer a word of caution.
If you are morally delicate, requiring virtue or historical accuracy, or indeed still clinging to the belief that a Tolliver sister left alone with a handsome man will make sensible choices, you may wish to close the book immediately.
Honestly, one wonders how you made it this far, for the author has warned you repeatedly. Proceed at your own peril.
“Still furious?” Jasper had the gall to ask.
“Raging,” Lottie said tightly, though her eyes were already fixed upon the box in his hands.
“Splendid. That shall make this all the more effective.”
“What,” she asked warily, “is in that box?”
“Your forfeit,” he replied, strolling past her as though he were not the most infuriating man in London. “I have made my decision.”
She eyed the box like it might bite her. “That is not a letter-opener, is it?”
“Not unless you wish to open yourself,” he said cheerfully.
“Jasper! What on earth can you mean?”
“I jest,” he added, setting the box down on the desk and flicking the latch. “It is a therapeutic device. Very modern, and most scientifically.”
She folded her arms. “And you, of course, are the appointed physician?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “I will be administering your treatment.”
“Treatment?”
“For a most troubling feminine condition. Common in women of your temperament… volatile, restless, ungovernable.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Hysteria.”
“Precisely,” he said brightly, as though she’d just solved a riddle.
He lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside was a curious little contraption—brass, leather-strapped, with a delicate crank on one side. Jasper turned the gear lightly between two fingers and it began to whir, soft and steady, with a faint purring vibration beneath the sound.
Lottie’s eyes went wide. “Is that—” she choked.
“It has been used in certain medical circles,” he said lightly. “One simply applies it in the appropriate location and—voilà! Peace, calm, and renewed feminine grace.”
Her cheeks flamed. “That cannot possibly be real.”
“It is quite real,” he said. “Hysteria is a well-documented disorder, Charlotte. Symptoms include excessive emotion, defiance of social expectations, impetuous midnight visits to gentlemen’s homes—”
“You are deranged.”
He smiled wider. “Doctors have used vibrating chairs for nervous conditions as early as the last century. Though I confess this model is somewhat newer. Modified by a curious inventor in Bloomsbury. Entirely above board.”
She looked from the device to him and back again. “And you intend to use it on me?”
“Well,” he said, giving the crank another playful turn and sending a deeper hum through the air. “I would hardly trust you to operate it yourself. That would not be responsible of me. Now. If you’d like to proceed with your forfeit…”
Jasper turned the crank slowly, the soft whir of the mechanism filling the room with an entirely new kind of tension.
“You shall need to lie back,” he said, his voice low and absurdly calm, as if he were discussing the weather or a case of mild nerves. “It is most effective in a reclining position. Shall we?”
“You are serious,” she said, eyeing the humming mechanism with absurd poise.
“Deadly,” Jasper replied, as he set the device beside her on the bed and began unbuttoning his cuffs. “And professionally committed. This is a very delicate treatment, Miss Tolliver.”
Her mouth opened and closed before she flung herself back upon his bed. It was his forfeit after all. A wager was a wager, and Charlotte Tolliver was not the sort of coward who shrank from the consequences of her own recklessness.
That, at least, was what she told herself. It was vastly more dignified than admitting she was curious enough to burn and beginning to feel very warm beneath her stays.
“You shall need to remove anything that may obstruct… access to the afflicted area.”
Her cheeks went hot. “That is not how real physicians speak.”
“Perhaps not,” he murmured, reaching for the hem of her skirts, “but then, I am not a real physician.”
When Jasper began to raise the fabric, she lifted her hips.
His mouth curved, but he said nothing as he drew her skirts higher, slowly and with such infuriating care that her heart seemed to beat in every inch of newly bared skin.
Cool air touched the warm hollow behind her knee, then the pale length of her thigh, until she lay before him in a state that was not, by any civilised definition, medical.
He turned the small brass gear with his thumb, and the device answered with a low, steady hum.
Lottie jumped.
“Do not be nervous,” he said, kneeling beside her thighs on the bed. His voice had dropped into something soft and wickedly calm. “It is entirely medicinal. I am merely here to ensure proper application.”
She opened her mouth to deliver a cutting reply, but the words deserted her as he settled in closer.
He paused. “Are you still raging?”
“Yes,” she said, though it emerged rather less convincingly than she had intended.
“Excellent.” His thumb moved lightly over her skin. “Then we have not begun too late.”
He touched her with the gentlest pressure—the faintest brush of vibration against where she was hot and already slick—and her hips jerked violently.
“Oh,” she gasped.
“Responsive to treatment,” he observed, his voice all mock-professional as he held the device steady. “Noted.”
The sensation was not at all what she had expected. Not that she had expected anything. How could one expect such a thing? It was all too much, and not enough at all.
He circled slowly, letting the vibrations build, until her hands fisted in the coverlet and her knees began to tremble. All the while he murmured terrible, wicked things under the guise of medical commentary.
She made a sound that was part moan, part curse. The sensation was outrageous. It was miraculous. And Jasper Deverell could see every inch of what it did to her. Lottie’s fingers dug into the bedclothes.
He gave the slightest tilt of his wrist, and a sharper pleasure shot through her, sudden and white-hot.
Lottie’s head fell back against the pillow. “Oh—“
“You are terribly inflamed, Miss Tolliver,” he said, with unbearable gravity. “Entirely overstimulated. A grave case of hysteria. I shall have to continue until the pressure is relieved.”
Her response was a strangled sound—half indignation, half something breathless and utterly unrecognisable to her own ears.
The little machine moved with wicked patience, retreating whenever she thought she might bear it, then returning with just enough pressure to steal the next breath from her lungs.
Her thighs trembled. Her back arched. She was burning from the inside out, lit by sensation she could neither predict nor command.
Jasper watched her with an expression of scholarly attention so false it deserved prosecution. “Remarkable,” he murmured. “The patient presents with agitation, flushed skin, irregular breathing—“
“Stop talking,” she gasped, before letting out a choked moan, her hips twitching upward.
He only smiled and circled again, before adjusting the angle by the smallest degree.
Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened, wild now, shining with disbelief and something very close to desperation. “Jasper—“
“Do not,” she managed, though she had no notion what she meant him not to do. Stop? Speak? Smile? Breathe? Exist? She couldn’t manage the rest. Her hands scrambled for purchase: coverlet, bedpost, the rumpled edge of his sleeve. Anything.
Through it all, he stayed maddeningly calm, murmuring terrible things in a warm, velvety voice: “Such tension. Such exquisite receptivity. I daresay the medical community has underestimated the female nervous system entirely…”
“Stop… talking,” she gasped, barely coherent. “Please, stop… talking.”
“I would,” he said, tilting the device just so, “but I am afraid patient feedback is critical for improvement.”
Her hands twisted in the sheets again and her back arched from the bed as pleasure crashed through her in fierce, helpless waves. She heard herself cry out, raw and entirely indecent as she convulsed, and somewhere through the storm of it she heard Jasper curse softly under his breath.
When it passed, she collapsed back against the pillows, breathless and boneless. She could barely remember her own name, let alone why she’d stormed into his house in the middle of the night.
Then, the machine gave another soft whir.
Her eyes snapped open. “What are you doing?”
Jasper’s smile returned slowly. “Ah. No, no. You see, with this particular condition, it is not uncommon for certain symptoms to persist.”
“Persist?” she repeated, sitting up on one elbow with what little dignity remained to her. “I have just been cured within an inch of my life.”
“Temporarily relieved, perhaps.”
“Jasper.”
“Relax,” he murmured, brushing her thigh with the back of his hand. “Lie back down. Let me finish the treatment properly.”
Lottie let out a breathless laugh that caught somewhere in her throat. She ought to refuse. She had already been reckless enough for one evening, perhaps for one lifetime.
The faint hum began again, and this time she did not startle so much as shiver.
Before she could protest—or compose a protest convincing enough to satisfy her pride—Jasper settled between her legs once more. There was less theatre in him now. His smile had faded into concentration, his breath not quite as even as before.
When the device touched her again, Lottie gasped aloud.
He did not tease as he had done the first time. He gave her just enough pressure to make her hips lift from the bedclothes, then held her there, suspended on the edge of sensation while his free hand slid higher along her thigh.
“Still furious?” he asked, voice rougher than before.
“Yes,” she said, though it was nearly a sob.
“Good.”
Just as she opened her mouth to curse him—or perhaps beg—his fingers joined the machine.
He moved slowly, curling one long finger inside her, and then another. When he found the place that made her go utterly still, his eyes darkened. “There,” he whispered. “Yes. I remember.”
“Oh,” she gasped, arching sharply. “Oh—God.”
Each pump of his fingers sent lightning straight up her spine.
Her body was liquid and desperate beneath him.
The machine hummed steadily against her over-sensitised peak while his fingers worked inside her with devastating patience, coaxing from her sounds she did not recognise and could not restrain.
“Oh—Jasper—oh God—I cannot—”
“Yes, you can,” he said softly. “You are already there.”
Her hands clawed at the sheets. Her legs were shaking. Her body was slick with heat and desperation, and then he did something devastating: he kissed her inner thigh, slow and possessive, all whilst curling his fingers just right.
She shattered with a sound that was half sob, half surrender.
The pleasure was brutal this time, shaking her to the very core.
Her head tossed helplessly against the pillow, hair damp with sweat.
Tears spilled freely from her lashes as her body convulsed, her cries muffled only by the trembling of her own arm flung over her mouth.
This second release came like a wave she was not sure she could survive: deeper, fuller, so powerful it made her eyes water as he worked her through it.
It took an age before her body stilled, and she could remember where and who she was. By the time he gently eased his fingers from her and turned the device off, she was utterly wrecked, and flushed from her breasts to her throat.
He sat back on his heels and watched her with something dangerously close to awe.
She blinked at the ceiling. “Is that... typical medical procedure?”
“Textbook,” he murmured with a grin.