Private places, p.33
Private Places, page 33
He allowed her fingers—so much smaller than his own—to envelop his.
She led him to the bedroom, naked in the light.
The book on the nightstand had been moved.
A curious pang shot through Joseph, realizing she had glanced at the pages he had marked.
“Do you have something I can spread over the carpet?” she asked, naked shoulder rubbing his arm, fingers pulsing around his fingers. Amber eyes dark with knowledge.
Reluctantly freeing his hand, he opened a dresser drawer and shook out a soft wool duvet.
Ardelle leaned over and grabbed the bottle of Rose’s Lubrifiant; momentarily Joseph glimpsed the dark puckered flesh he had penetrated earlier that night and in which his sperm still resided. Immediately she straightened—spine oddly stiff—and turned.
Joseph froze—flexing penis involuntarily feinting the air—and stared at the leather phallus in her hand.
“This is what you dream about, isn’t it, Joseph?” stabbed through him.
Every muscle, every ligament inside his body demanded he deny the truth: He could not.
The dark excitement he had felt—awaiting his turn to be punished—flushed his face and crawled down his throat.
Joseph forced his gaze to meet hers. “Yes.”
Her amber eyes were curiously watchful. “You dream that I introduce it into your body.”
“Yes.”
“Because that is what you wanted the don to do, when he hurt you so badly your bum burned.”
“Yes,” Joseph said flatly, cock uncontrollably flexing.
“Lie down.”
But he could not surrender his control . . . not yet.
Joseph searched her amber eyes. “What did you feel, Ardelle, when you lay across the table, waiting for me to touch you?”
Brief emotion darkened her eyes. “I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That you’d give me pleasure.”
And he had. He had felt her every contraction.
“What are you afraid of now?” he asked, mouth dry, muscles taut, penis throbbing.
“That I won’t give you pleasure.”
Joseph’s fear.
He lay down.
Ardelle straddled his hips, facing his feet.
“You saw the print,” he said, breath rasping inside his throat.
The print of a woman riding a man, her back toward him, glancing over her shoulder with an enigmatic smile.
“I saw,” she agreed. And took his naked cock so deeply into her vagina that he could not breathe.
“You taught me something tonight.” She reached for the bottle of lubricant, pelvis rocking against his groin. “When you suckled me.”
He watched shadow play across her vertebrae, feeling her every motion . . . the shifting of her weight, the clenching of her vagina . . . but unable to see her actions. “What did I teach you?”
“You taught me”—her right elbow extended, a graceful curve; at the same time, her vagina nipped him—“we are entitled to take pleasure in what we are.”
Joseph’s breath quickened.
“You said giving was what separated a man from an animal.”
She set the cap down on the quilt beside her splayed thigh. Moist vulva rocking. Vagina painfully nipping.
“I gave you my pleasure.” Slowly she rose up on her knees, his penis sliding inch by slow inch out of the tight, wet haven that gripped him . . . that held him, there at the entrance to her vagina. “Now I want you to give me yours.
“Spread your legs, Joseph.”
Joseph stiffly spread his legs, forcefully holding emotion at bay.
Cool air tickled his too-tight testicles.
“Lift up your hips.”
His heart leapt inside his chest; the crown of his cock flexed inside the mouth of her vagina.
Unbidden memories flashed through his thoughts.
The pain of punishment. The loneliness of assuagement.
The desire that had prevented five boys from finding happiness in a woman.
Joseph lifted his hips; simultaneously he tunneled upward into the wet fist of her body . . . two short inches . . . not nearly deeply enough.
Ardelle leaned forward, vagina bending his cock backward.
He studied the play of shadows on her spine while she spread him, a kiss of air . . . while she found him, a burning notch . . . while she penetrated him. Watching his flesh stretch to accept the bulbous head of the phallus she fed him while her flesh nipped and squeezed the engorged crown that he fed her.
She throbbed. He throbbed.
One heartbeat . . . two heartbeats . . . three heartbeats . . .
The phallus was too big. Her vagina was too small.
Without warning, he blossomed open.
He had welcomed the fullness in his dreams, but this wasn’t a dream.
His buttocks independently clenched to stop the raw invasion. To end the perverted desire that chained him to the past. But suddenly the phallus was inside him: one inch . . . three inches . . . five inches. And he could not move for the hard leather that crowded his body until there was no room for fear or loneliness. There was only room for Ardelle.
Her bowed back suddenly straightened. Joseph instinctively grasped warm, giving buttocks, needing an anchor, white-knuckled fingers exposing that part of her that matched the flesh she had penetrated.
Slowly she lowered her hips; her weight bore him downward.
Transfixed, Joseph watched as the masculine flesh that protruded from his body was swallowed by the feminine flesh hidden inside her body . . . one inch . . . three inches . . . five inches . . . each tug of her vagina nipping and squeezing his testicles while the leather buried deep between his buttocks burned and throbbed as if alive.
Without warning she stopped—his crinkly black pubic hair reached for her moist brown pubic hair; the delicate ring of her vagina stretched thin around the thick purple column of his penis—and glanced over her shoulder.
Emotion flooded Joseph.
There was no disgust on her face.
Ardelle wore the same unfathomable smile that the woman in the print had worn: knowing a man’s desires, acting on a man’s desires—Joseph reached for the bottle of lubrication—sharing a man’s desires.
TEN
“Come live with me.”
Ardelle stared up into the dark eyes that were hidden by the brim of a shadow-blackened bowler hat.
Joseph was shaven, pomaded, and impeccably dressed.
He did not look like a man who had given a woman access to his body. And who had then rinsed his sperm from her body with vinegar that burned just short of pain while he licked her clitoris until her entire body convulsed.
Trust.
“Until you find another position and can afford a flat of your own,” he added, tensing at her lack of response, still vulnerable to rejection. “Or permanently. If you like.”
The trial. Always it came back to the trial.
To accept change. Or reject change.
To deny pleasure. Or accept pain.
“Yes.” Ardelle accepted change. She nodded her head; her body pleasantly burned and throbbed still, curiously clean with the passion they had shared. “I would like that.”
“Shall I go in with you?”
“No.” Ardelle stared out the single square window—beyond the steaming horse rump—at a row of mellow brick town houses. They were larger than the town house from which they had just left. More expensive. Her father—unlike Joseph—was very well off. “I’ll just be a moment.”
She had bathed with Joseph, but she needed fresh clothes.
Silently she threw open the cab door. Gray rain misted her face.
The butler swung open the door just as Ardelle took out her key.
“Miss Ardelle!” he said censoriously. “Your parents have been worried.”
“Thank you, Berrimore,” Ardelle said dismissively. She felt a familiar coldness crawl up her spine, vertebra by vertebra. “That will be all.”
Immediately he stepped back, intimidated as she had meant him to be.
Ardelle briskly climbed the gleaming wooden stairs with the elegant, violet-patterned wool runner.
“Ardelle!” A sharp feminine voice cracked like a whip. “You have gone too far. You will come down and explain yourself immediately, miss!”
Ardelle did not slow down.
Inside her bedroom—where she had learned each note of the Westminster Chimes—a quilted rose velvet comforter was neatly turned down, revealing crisp white sheets. Four bed posts darkly gleamed in the morning light, taller than Ardelle the child; with a start of surprise she realized she was now the taller of the two.
This was the bed of her childhood.
Ardelle remembered how warm and welcoming Joseph’s sleigh bed had been, cuddled safely in his arms while her body throbbed both for and from him. She bypassed the four-poster bed and reached into a massive wardrobe.
Laying out clean clothing, she quickly undressed.
The door yanked open at the same time her arms breached a fresh chemise.
Her mother stepped through the doorway; she was armored in a pink satin morning gown. Ardelle fleetingly thought she would look like her when she grew older. She possessed the same dark brown hair, the same amber eyes, the same slender build.
Deliberately she stood naked—walking shoes tilting her hips forward—so that her mother could clearly see the small marks of passion left over from her night with Joseph.
And see them her mother did. She saw the pale, fingertip-size bruises dotting Ardelle’s hips. Her neck that was reddened from the scrape of beard stubble. The nipples dark and swollen. Her sex lips engorged.
Amber eyes wide, Althea Dennison brought up a manicured hand to her mouth. “You are a whore.”
Ardelle had once thought so.
“Have a maid pack my clothes.” She slid the chemise over her head, cool air rushing, breasts lifting. And remembered the heat of Joseph’s hand that had cupped her left breast while he slept. Head clearing the neckline, she added, “I will leave a forwarding address with Berrimore.”
“I will not have my daughter behave like a . . . a tart.”
Ardelle laughed, a cold, brittle sound. A sharp pang stabbed through her, comparing the reverberating laughter with last night’s cries of passion. Immediately her mirth died.
She pulled on a pair of wool drawers. “Too late, Mother.”
“We have given you everything,” lashed Althea Dennison.
Ardelle stepped into a petticoat. “You bought my silence.”
And Ardelle had retaliated by selling her virginity, convinced a woman’s value could be purchased.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Ardelle gazed at her mother while she laced on a small bustle.
No guilt, no regret, no knowledge of the damage she had inflicted clouded the clear amber eyes.
The older woman believed what she had done was acceptable.
The hurt, angry words of a child welled up inside her throat. Ardelle, the adult, swallowed them.
Deftly she plucked off the rose velvet comforter a dark navy wool jacket. “Then there’s no need to discuss it.”
“This is ridiculous,” Althea Dennison said. “Do you think a lone woman can make it on her own?”
Ardelle fastened up a navy wool skirt. “Yes.”
For two years she had weekly sat across from two such women.
“You are in for a rude awakening, daughter.”
Perhaps.
Ardelle scooped up her reticule. “Good-bye, Mother.”
“You’re just going to leave?” The amber eyes that were on a level with Ardelle were disbelieving. “Like this?”
Ardelle walked out the door.
Her father stood at the foot of the steps.
She remembered the man with the red, panting face.
He had been jolly in those days, Ardelle recalled. There was no laughter now in his brown eyes. He was a shrunken, shriveled old man at the age of fifty-seven.
Time had been his judge and jury, and they had found him guilty.
“Good-bye, Father.”
The brown eyes stared at the newel post she grasped; they would not look at her.
He stepped back, retreating to the study where it had all begun when she had been . . . But Ardelle could not remember what age she had been when he had started wriggling underneath her small, innocent bottom. Five, perhaps. Or four.
Her past. Not her future.
Ardelle stopped by the small ornamental table that held the outgoing morning post. She scribbled a quick address and handed the paper to the thin-lipped butler who stared at her with disapproval. “Have my things delivered to this address, Berrimore.”
The misting rain warmed her icy skin.
A bill-plastered omnibus cumbersomely rounded the corner of the cobbled street.
Sudden excitement curled in the pit of her stomach.
Lightly jumping up on the creaking platform in front of the waiting cab, Ardelle reached into her reticule and withdrew a florin. Hurriedly she paid the confused cabbie and swung open the cab door.
“Come with me,” she breathlessly urged Joseph. A droplet of water trailed down her cheek, the rain as cleansing as a douche. “Quickly.”
Instantly he stepped out of the hansom cab, knuckles white around the wooden handle of his umbrella.
“What is it?” he sharply asked. No doubt expecting a rampaging mother and father hot at her heels.
“An omnibus,” she said. And grabbed his hand.
The iron step was slippery. Ardelle quickly regained her balance—momentarily she dropped Joseph’s hand; quickly she grabbed it again when he stepped down beside her—and chased after the departing bus.
The painful years spent living in the house that had stolen her innocence raced past her.
Sudden laughter welled up inside her chest.
They had survived the night, and they would ride that omnibus.
Joseph did not question her mad dash; instead he hit the side of the bus with his umbrella, squarely smacking a faded advertisement for Victoria Regina, Queen of Toilet Soaps. The driver stopped.
The interior of the omnibus was only marginally lighter than had been the hansom cab. A woman occupied the front seat. A man read a newspaper on a third row seat.
It was nearly empty.
Feeling as giddy as a girl, Ardelle dropped the prerequisite two pennies into the meter and lurched down the aisle of the suddenly mobile vehicle to the back of the bus.
Joseph dropped down beside her.
Laughter trilling the musty air, she reached for the buttons lining his trousers.
A strong hand immediately grasped hers.
Ardelle glanced up, willing Joseph to share in the celebration of their freedom. “A woman once recommended that I fondle your privates in public.”
Dark comprehension blazed in his eyes: Ardelle referred to the widow against whom they now traveled to stand witness.
His fingers helped her release the buttons, longer, stronger than hers.
“Did your bum burn dreadfully last night?” Ardelle asked.
His penis was as hot and hard—cradled between her hands—as it had been two years earlier. Blue veins pulsed against her fingers.
“Yes.” His voice was strained, even as his flesh strained toward her.
Dual pulses throbbed inside her body. She knew that a matching pulse throbbed inside his body, penetrated where he had penetrated her.
For their pleasure. Not for pain.
Silently she played with the tiny urethra that cried slick tears.
So much would be lost today, but surely not everything.
“They will come back to us, Joseph,” she whispered over the creaking groan of wood and the grinding whine of wheels.
Ardelle glanced up and watched rising pleasure tint Joseph’s cheeks. “Someday the members of the Men and Women’s Club will come home.”
Robin Schone lives in a Chicago suburb with her music aficionado husband. She loves reading, swimming, listening to music (preferably rock and/or classic rock) and is a staunch defender of human rights in general and of women’s sexuality worldwide.
Robin is a USA Today bestselling author whose work is translated in nine languages. All five of her novels—Awaken, My Love; The Lady’s Tutor; The Lover; Gabriel’s Woman; and Scandalous Lovers, which inspired “The Men and Women’s Club”—were Doubleday Book Club Selections.
Robin loves hearing from readers. Visit her website at www.robinschone.com or write her at:Robin Schone
P.O. Box 72725
Roselle, IL 60172
Coming in March 2009!
Don’t miss Robin’s exciting new novel Cry for Passion—Rose Clarring and Jack Lodoun’s story—coming from Berkley in March 2009.
Robin Schone, Private Places
