The Maid #7
He chuckled. “None of that—we cannot waste it.” He took my shoulder and rolled me over onto my back, then caught my ankles in his big hands and lifted them straight up, folding me neatly in half like a letter.
“Hold these. There’s a lass. Stay like this a while, girl—give my seed a chance to soak in. ”
I gripped my own ankles, knees by my ears, arse tilted to the ceiling, entirely undignified and entirely obedient, while His Grace strolled off whistling to the washstand.
I lay there listening to him splash and hum, watching the canopy overhead, feeling his seed settle warm and deep inside me exactly as intended.
Did the Guide have a name for this position? Perhaps I shall write one.
He came back with a warm, damp cloth—and stopped at the foot of the bed.
I was exactly as he’d left me: folded in half, knees beside my ears, arse tipped toward the ceiling, gripping my own ankles like the most obedient girl in England while a duke’s seed soaked into me.
I must have looked absurd. I had accepted this. Dignity, I had decided somewhere around the third breed me, was for girls with smaller ambitions.
He did not look at me as though I were absurd.
He looked at me as if I were a work of art. “An even prettier sight than your arse, Betsy…”
His voice had dropped again, down into that register I was learning to recognize—the one that preceded my clothing coming off, or staying off.
I peered up at him from between my own knees. He stood at the foot of the bed with the cloth hanging forgotten from one hand, and his gaze traveled over what I was holding open for the ceiling’s benefit: my folds glazed with him, everything he’d done to me on display at a most instructive angle.
And his cock, which had been softening against his open falls when he strolled off whistling, stirred.
Thickened.
Rose.
“Your Grace?” I said, from my envelope.
“I believe I made you a promise, lass.” He tossed the cloth over his shoulder dismissively. “Again and again, I said.”
My cunny, still full of him, gave an interested flutter. Traitor—or loyalist. I no longer knew which.
“Have you anything left in you, Betsy?” It was courtesy, that question, but his eyes had already gone hot, and his fist had already closed around himself.
“I’m holding my ankles, Your Grace.” I wiggled my fingers against my own shins by way of demonstration. “My schedule appears to be clear.”
He laughed—a short, dark bark of it—and then his knees hit the counterpane and the whole bed dipped, and both of my ankles were pulled out of my grip and into his hands.
He pressed them down. Toward the mattress, apart, until the fold of my body deepened and my hips tilted up to meet him and I was opened past anything the Guide’s illustrations had dared to print.
The Sealed Missive is what the Guide had called this position, with the man holding the woman’s ankles by her ears.
The stretch pulled up the backs of my thighs. I felt his seed shift inside me, warm, claimed territory awaiting reinforcements.
“Second planting,” he said, “goes in deeper than the first.”
Then, with no fanfare, he notched himself against me and pushed in. There was no slow inch-by-inch mercy about it this time, and I gasped at the invasion.
But he knew what he was about; I was soaked with him, slick with spend and my own wanting, stretched soft from the first taking—and he slid home in one long stroke that punched the air out of me and rang me like the struck bell I had been all summer.
My walls were tender, too over-sensitive. Every ridge of him dragged against flesh that had already surrendered twice, and the sensation lived on the far side of bearable, curling my toes somewhere up by his shoulders.
“Christ.” He held there, seated to the root, his hips pressing my folded body into the mattress. “Hot as a forge in there now. Full of me.”
“Whose fault—” I managed, “—is that?”
“Mine,” he said, with enormous satisfaction, and began to fuck me.
Hard.
The first round had been husbandry, I was coming to realize. A task he’d completed because he had a goal; to fill me with his seed. This time?
This was a man taking his second helping purely because the table looked too fine to leave, and he drove into me with deep, jarring strokes that shoved the whole bed against the wall and knocked my voice loose in pieces—”Your—Grace—your—” each syllable jolted out of me on a thrust, until I gave up on English entirely.
And this time, I could see him.
That was the revelation of the position, better than any entry the Guide could have written.
On my hands and knees I’d had the counterpane to look at.
Now I had him: braced above me on his hands, my ankles pinned under his palms, his silvered beard dripping a bead of sweat onto my bouncing breasts, his blue eyes fixed down at the place where we joined, watching his cock disappear into me over and over with the expression of a proud man surveying his own fields.
He was still entirely dressed. Shirt, trousers, boots on the counterpane.
The only part of the Duke of Maidenhair undressed was the part inside me.
“Look at you,” he ground out. “Folded up sweet as a christening gift. Taking a second fucking on a cunny that’s already full of my—” His breath tore.
“Every stroke drives the first load deeper, lass. Do you feel it? I’m packing you full.
By the time I’ve done, my seed will have nowhere left to go but your womb. ”
“Yes—yes—”
My hands, evicted from my ankles, were clutching uselessly at the counterpane. His gaze flicked to them.
“Idle hands, Betsy.” A thrust that pushed me up the bed. “I dislike idleness in my staff.”
“I—what—”
“See to your pearl.” Another thrust, and his grip tightened on my ankles, pinning me wider. “My hands are occupied.”
There it was. The man had stretched me open, fucked me senseless, promised me a baby and thirty pounds a year—and my third climax of the evening was to be my own chore, delegated, because His Grace was busy.
I got my fingers between us and saw to my pearl.
It took embarrassingly little. I was swollen and slick and every circle of my fingertips gathered up the pounding rhythm of him and wound it tighter, and his voice kept working over me—good girl, that’s it, milk me, show me how a bred lass comes—and the coil in my belly cinched, and cinched, and on one deep stroke that struck sparks off a place I did not know I owned, it snapped.
I came wailing, my cunny seizing around him in long greedy pulses, my heels drumming against his restraining hands.
“There she is.” His rhythm broke. His control went with it.
He bent over my folded body, boots scrabbling for purchase on the counterpane, dignity abandoned at last—and hammered into me with quick, brutal strokes, chasing his own finish through the fluttering aftermath of mine, using me with a single-minded greed that thrilled me more than any courtesy could have.
“Take it,” he snarled. “Take every—drop—”
He slammed deep and held, and roared, and for the second time that evening a duke’s seed flooded into me—hotter, it seemed, than before, pumped in hard against the first, his cock jerking through it while his hips ground my folded thighs into my chest, as though depth were a matter of will and he had more will than any man in England.
Then it was his forearms on either side of me, and his forehead against mine, and the two of us breathing like foundered horses.
“Remarkable,” he said eventually, into my mouth, more breath than kiss. “Remarkable girl.”
When he finally withdrew, slow and careful, I whimpered at the drag of him over flesh that had now surrendered twice. He knelt back on his heels and looked at the state he’d left me in—glazed to the thighs, brimming—and I watched him decide, visibly, that he was pleased with his work.
He caught my ankles and pressed them back into my own palms.
“Hold these.”
“Again?” But my fingers were already closing around them.
“Both plantings, lass.” He pressed a kiss to the inside of my ankle, entirely gallant, as though he had not just roared over me like a beast. “Not one drop wasted.”
So there I lay, refolded, like that sealed letter someone intended to read again—and often. Somewhere below, floors were being scrubbed and silver counted. Above stairs, a maid held her ankles by ducal decree, twice-filled and humming with it, watching the canopy swim in and out of focus.
He cleaned himself at the washstand, whistling. Dressed. Buttoned the waistcoat, tied the cravat, restored the Duke over the top of the stallion, one layer at a time. Then he came back and sat on the edge of the bed beside my folded self, and laid one broad palm over my upturned belly.
“And if this planting doesn’t take?” I asked, from between my own knees. It was difficult to sound casual from that position. I did my best.
“I’m here the whole of the summer, lass. And I return from my ride every morning at eleven” His thumb stroked the soft of my belly, back and forth over the exact spot he’d claimed for his babe. “Be here, and be naked. Even once you’re breeding, we’ll have all sorts of fun together.”
The thought made me warmer still.
“Remember, Betsy…” he rose, and swatted the underside of my tipped-up arse, proprietary as a man patting his best hunter, “—eleven o’clock. I’m going to fill your belly and mark you as mine.”
And he sauntered out, whistling, to do whatever it is dukes do in the afternoon.
I stayed as I was told, holding my ankles, letting his seed soak in exactly as intended, doing sums on the canopy overhead. Two plantings. Thirty pounds a year, and a cottage, and Gran’s comfortable old age, and fifty pounds and a parlor of my own in five or six years, if Mrs. Marshton had her way.
That was, after all, why a sensible girl did such things.
But lying there folded in the wreck of a duke’s counterpane, sore in the sweetest places and warm to the very center of myself, I could not summon a single thought of money.
I was only counting the hours until eleven o’clock tomorrow.
Like a good girl.