The Maid #4
His gaze was fixed exactly where I wished it, hot and unhurried, those remarkable blue eyes making no pretense whatsoever.
And then, as I set the glass down with a trembling hand, I saw it—the front of his trousers, tented and straining. He shifted in the chair, entirely at his ease, and stroked one broad hand slowly along that hardness through the fabric, as casually as another man might stroke a cat.
The ache between my thighs pulsed like a second heartbeat.
“Thank you, Betsy,” he said. He knew my name? His voice had dropped half an octave, and his hand kept moving, lazy and shameless, his eyes never leaving mine. “That will be all. For tonight.”
I curtseyed—Gran would have been proud of that curtsey, if nothing else—and walked out with my chin up and my knees like syllabub.
For tonight.
It was only a matter of time. And we both knew it.
Three days later, Mrs. Marshton sent me up to clean His Grace’s bathing chamber.
At eleven o’clock in the morning. When the whole house knew the Duke returned from his ride at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Bless that woman.
The bathing chamber was a marvel—a great copper tub big enough for two—I was beginning to suspect that was not an accident—warm light through the tall window, the lingering scent of sandalwood soap and him.
I rolled my sleeves to the elbow and bent myself over the rim of that tub like an offering on an altar.
I heard the door open, and I did not turn around. I scrubbed.
I scrubbed devoutly. I put my whole back into it—which meant my rump rose high in the air with every long stroke of the cloth, my skirts pulled taut across it, my unbound breasts swinging and swaying beneath me like the clappers of two soft bells.
The copper made a fine mirror, all warped and golden. I watched the tall blur of him stop in the doorway. Watched it go very still.
Come and see, Your Grace. Come and see what a hard-working girl I am.
His boots came across the floor without hurry. My breath went shallow and quick, my heart slamming, and still I scrubbed, though I couldn’t have said whether the tub was clean or filthy or on fire.
Then the warmth of him came down over me like a wave.
He molded himself along my backside, knees bracketing mine, one hand braced upon the tub’s rim beside my own…and I felt it, pressed hot and hard against the cleft of my arse through skirts and trousers both. The ridge of his—what had the Guide called it?—his cock.
That thick, scandalous word from page after wicked page, and here was the very article, branding itself against me, and it was nothing like the tidy little illustrations. A whimper escaped me before I could bite it back.
“Careful, lass,” he murmured, deep and amused, right against my ear. “You’ll scrub a hole through my tub.”
His hands slid beneath me and cupped both breasts through the thin gray wool.
We groaned together—his low and reverent, mine embarrassingly close to a sob.
His hands were enormous and warm, and they squeezed, testing the weight and the give of me, and I learned in that instant that my breasts were not merely for show after all.
Every knead of his fingers pulled a thread that ran straight down through my belly to the aching place between my thighs.
I caught him, I thought, giddy and breathless. The fish has taken the hook.
Though bent over a tub with a duke’s cock against my arse, I confess it was rather unclear who had caught whom.
In that moment, interestingly, I wasn’t thinking of thirty pounds a year at all. I was thinking of the pleasure of being bred.
The cloth dropped from my fingers with a wet slap. Slowly—slowly, so as not to lose one inch of contact—I straightened, sliding up the whole hard length of him until my back was flush to his chest and my head fell against his shoulder.
He rumbled his approval into my hair. His fingers found my nipples through the fabric and plucked, rolling them like a man testing ripe fruit at market, and my knees simply resigned their position.
“Oh—” I arched into his hands, shameless, whimpering, and ground my arse back against him in small, desperate circles, dragging along that hot ridge just to hear the breath hiss between his teeth.
“You’re a hot little lass, aren’t you… Betsy?”
He remembered my name. A duke, with twelve children and half the county’s mothers on his ledger, and he remembered my name. I could have wept with triumph.
“Y-yes, Your Grace.” Another slow pluck of my nipples, and I gasped, “Please, Your Grace—”
“Please what?” His mouth was open against my throat now, tasting my skin, his beard scraping deliciously below my ear. He nipped, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world. “Please… stop touching you?”
And there it was.
His hands went still upon my breasts. Not withdrawing—waiting. The door stood five steps away. The word stop sat upon my tongue, fully formed, and I understood with perfect clarity that if I said it, he would step back, straighten his coat, and never trouble me again.
A good girl would say it.
Gran raised a good girl.
Maidenhair Hall had raised me better.
I turned my head, found those blue, blue eyes with mine, and heard myself say—in a voice gone thick and strange with wanting —
“Please, Your Grace. I want to touch you too.”
He hummed again, even as a small smile curled his lips. He rolled my nipples between his fingers and lowered his mouth to my neck.
“You know my…proclivities?” he murmured against my skin. “You know what I like?”
“I have read—” I gasped when he plucked once, particularly hard, and the shock shot right to my already dripping, aching core. “I have read, Your Grace, about how a man and a woman might find pleasure.”
“You are a virgin?” He hummed and flexed his hips so his cock ground against me. “I want to fuck you, Betsy. And I’ll admit, the thought of your sweet cunny untouched by another man, being filled by me for the first time…” He broke off with a groan. “I want that.”
“I—” My voice caught. Not in confusion, not in hesitation, but in need. “I want that too, Your Grace.”
His lips moved to my collar, pushing the material out of the way as he continued to knead my breasts. “You’ll enjoy yourself, Betsy, I promise.” One of his hands slid down toward my stomach. “And if my seed catches, as I pray it will, I’ll take care of you.”
He massaged my soft stomach, as if worshiping it through the wool of my skirts, and I moaned again, unable to help myself. Oh, I knew he would take care of me.
“I trust you, Your Grace,” I gasped out.
“Good girl,” he growled as his fingers began to gather my skirts, pulling them upward.
“I’m going to fuck you until you scream with pleasure, then I’m going to fill up your hot little cunny with my seed.
Again and again, until your womb swells with my baby.
” My skirts and petticoats were above my trembling knees now, which could barely support my weight, and I was grateful for his hold.
“And then, when you’re well and truly bred, I’m going to fuck you again and again merely for the pleasure of watching this sweet body of yours grow fat and round, filled with my cock. ”
It was wicked. It was filthy. It was so-very wrong. And I couldn’t wait.
“Yes,” I gasped. “Please, Your Grace! Fuck me hard, fill me up with your cock, breed me!”
And he chuckled darkly, dropping my skirts. “Good girl.”
“Go through to my chamber,” he said, stepping back and straightening his waistcoat as though we’d been discussing the weather. “Take off every stitch. I’ll follow when I’ve a mind to.”
I obeyed.
Of course I obeyed. I walked through the connecting door on unsteady legs, and I stripped in the middle of that grand room with its enormous curtained bed, my fingers fumbling every button and tape.
Bodice, skirts, petticoats, shift, stockings—a gray-and-white puddle on a duke’s carpet.
And then I stood there, bare as my first bath, nipples hard in the cool air, arousal slick on the tops of my thighs, waiting.
He made me wait long enough to feel it.
When he finally came through the door, he’d removed only his coat and waistcoat. He settled into the great armchair by the window, still in shirt and trousers and boots, and unfastened his falls with an unhurried hand…and drew out his cock.
My first sight of one, in the flesh. The Guide’s illustrations had been detailed, but they had not prepared me for the size of it, thick as my wrist and flushed dark, curving up from the open placket of his trousers. He wrapped one big fist around it and stroked, slow, root to crown, watching me.
Just watching him take his pleasure so casually made me breathless.
“Turn about,” he said. “Slowly.”
I turned. Slowly. I felt his eyes travel over my back, my arse, the swing of my breasts as I came back around.
“Stop.” I stopped, facing the window, presented to him in profile. “Hands behind your head.”
I laced my fingers behind my head. The position lifted my breasts and arched my back, and left me nothing whatsoever to hide behind.
“Aye,” he said softly. “Just like that.”
There was no sound but the slow, wet slide of his fist and the fire crackling in the grate, and I stood there being looked at more thoroughly than I had ever been looked at in my life. My skin flushed pink from my hairline to my knees. The ache between my thighs grew teeth.
“Walk to the window,” he said. “And back.”
I walked. My unbound breasts swayed with every step, and I heard his breath deepen behind me, and by the time I turned at the window I had remembered how to sashay.
His eyes were dark as a thunderhead’s underbelly, and his fist had gone still, gripping tight, like a man who no longer trusted his own hand.
“Come here.”
I came to stand between his sprawled boots, hands still obediently behind my head.
And then he rose, and it was his turn to circle me.