An Experienced Mistress (11 page)

He responded with a low growl. Genevieve moved down his torso again—pausing to land a couple of nipping kisses on his navel—and set to finishing what she started.

Things happened just as the book suggested they would, and Genevieve found this strange business not so strange after all. Her body seemed to know what it was doing. She took more of his length in her mouth now, and brought her hand around to stroke and caress him at the hilt, falling into a primeval rhythm as natural as breathing.

His hand traced the nape of her neck, her spine, and curved around her bottom. When she felt it tease its way between her thighs, she maneuvered herself away from him. She knew what he could do. If he started that again, she’d never get anything accomplished. Her lips ached, and she withdrew for a moment and pleasured him with both hands.

“Gen. Stop,” he rasped after a minute. He tried to grab hold of her wrist. “I can’t—”

Ignoring him, she took him in her mouth again.

In just a few moments, his lean hips rose off the bed, a harsh cry escaping his lips as he spilled his seed. His shaft pulsed, and she drank every salty drop of him, awed by the force of the climax she aroused, and thrilled at her triumph.

“Oh, God. Darling.” He panted, gathering her up in his arms, kissing her cheeks, her breasts, everywhere he could reach.

“Mmm.” She cuddled against his chest. He let his head fall back on the pillow, sighed a deep sigh of complete male satisfaction.

After a few heartbeats, she heard his soft, amazed laugh. “I’ve never had that before.”

“What?” The information startled her. For some reason, she’d assumed... “Truly?”

He nodded, eyes closed, the corners of his mouth turning up. “Lucky me. My first time was with an experienced mistress.”

Genevieve felt a sharp stab of sadness. She wanted to tell him that she’d never done anything like that before, either.

But she couldn’t. If he knew the truth about her, he’d think she was a lunatic. After all, what kind of woman pretended to be more wicked than she actually was?

Her stupid feelings for him had gotten the better of her. She might as well be honest with herself, at least: this second interlude probably wouldn’t have happened, had she not been infatuated with him.

And she might as well be infatuated with Prince Albert, for all her chances of having her regard returned.

Genevieve reminded herself that she wasn’t going to see Will Creighton anymore, not after this. She’d find a way to manage without the money. If she felt this way now, how much more foolish would it be to go on?

She wondered if he might have guessed at her feelings. That would be humiliating. Mistresses didn’t get starry-eyed over their lovers. He’d spoken tenderly to her, but that didn’t mean a thing except good manners.

“I suppose you will need to go soon,” she said.

“What?” Will had been stroking her back, but now he propped himself up on an elbow again and stared at her as if she lost her mind. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I just...”

“Oh, no,” he rumbled, running his hand along the curve of her body. “We’re not finished here.”

****

Will thought she might pull away from him. Throughout most of the evening, she’d been both playfully tender and boldly sensual, an irresistible alchemy.

Mistress or no, he’d not expected her to bring his desire to fulfillment, without a thought of her own. Her generosity stunned him.

But then she suddenly withdrew into herself, and he didn’t know why. Maybe that was the way of these arrangements that were matters of money rather than the heart. But still, he couldn’t leave it like that.

So he breathed a grateful sigh when he felt her body react to his touch, warming and yielding again like softened wax. Her smoky green eyes met his once more, but he couldn’t read the expression there.

“What do you mean? What else do you want?” The tone of her voice revealed nothing.

He loved the way her mouth looked now, so red and swollen and wet from the services she’d rendered him. He dragged one finger across her lower lip. Going lower, he traced a delicate circle on the pellucid flesh of her breast, encircling but not quite touching the shell-pink tip. The nipple tightened anyway into an emphatic point, demanding further attentions.

He obliged, bending low and cupping her breast to his mouth. She cried out and gave a sinuous writhe beneath him.

“That,” he said. “That’s what I want.” Her whole body aroused by him and begging for release.

When he kissed her other breast, she drew up her legs on either side of him, one of her feet brushing against him.

“Good Lord,” he said, glancing up. “Your feet are nearly frozen.”

She opened her eyes, frowning. “They are?”

“We cannot have that,” he teased her. “You’ll catch your death.”

In truth, after the experiences he’d had in Crimea, Will couldn’t stand the idea of her having even an ordinary chill. He sat up to take the foot into his lap. Starting at the toes, he smoothed his thumbs all the way down the sole of her foot.

“Ohh,” she sighed, and sounded surprised at the agreeable sensation. He repeated the stroke a few times. Her head fell back on the pillow again.

“You really are amazingly lovely,” he said as he massaged. “I thought so from the first time I saw that painting of you.”

She lifted her head to stare at him. “What painting?”

“The one where you had golden hair.”

“The
Eve
? But no one ever recognizes me in that. Ruth didn’t even know until I told her.”

He laughed. “It was immediately obvious to me.”

“I always liked that one.” She laid back again. “Despite the name.”

“What, Eve?”

“No...the painting is called
The Temptation of Adam
. The artist was an acquaintance of a painter named Adam Forsythe.”

There seemed more of a story here. But Will supposed he understood the kernel of it well enough, and he didn’t feel like hearing any more of the details at the moment. From the shadow that fell across her face, he suspected she wasn’t eager to share them, either. “Perhaps I’ll buy it, and then I can call it something different.”

“Mmm.” Her voice sounded lazy again, as if lulled by the pleasure of the foot rub. “You know, you ought to sit for me. It would be my first masterpiece.”

Will never considered himself susceptible to flattery, but her words gratified him.

The pad of his thumb pressed into the space just under the ball of her foot and massaged there. She groaned. She continued making little noises of appreciation as he switched to her right foot.

“Why does that feel so good?” she mumbled.

“Feet are delicate structures. Do you know there are twenty-six bones in your foot?”

“How do you know that?”

“I started to study as a doctor.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said, and then moaned as his fingertips pushed against her high arch. Her knees, drawn up, now fell apart as her body went limp with enjoyment.

Unwittingly, she offered up a perfect view of her glistening rosy sex beneath the springy russet curls of her mound. Her hips shifted against the bed as she sighed in response to another stroke.

Her scent was like a warm tropical sea off the coast of some nameless Paradise. As he set her foot back down on the bed and picked up the other one, he moved so he had a straight-on view. He drank in the sight of her spread out before him. The sounds of soft pleasure murmured from her lips. His cock twitched to life again, though he did not expect to put it into action soon after such a staggering climax.

“It’s true, you know,” he said after a few minutes of shameless watching. “I know the proper names of everything.”

“Mmmm. Like what?”

“Like the bone here...” He traced the roundness of her ankle. “That’s called the fibula.” She had a charming ankle. He lifted it up and nibbled on it, making her giggle.

“What else?”

One of his hands went back to massaging her foot. She closed her eyes again, and he supposed she didn’t even know that she bit her lower lip. Certainly she couldn’t know how the sight aroused him.

With his free hand, he brushed the baby-soft skin at the back of her leg, just above the heel. “Your Achilles tendon.”

“Oh, no, you have found my Achilles heel,” she teased. “You know my weakness. Now you can conquer me.”

“Back here you have a fibular ligament...” He tickled behind her knee.

“Stop!” She laughed, trying to twist away from him, but he had her by the foot. “I’m very ticklish there.”

Will thought she would be. “Now I have found your weakness.”

His hand glided up higher, along the plump inner curve of her thigh. “And the muscle here,” he said, “is called the gracilis.”

She wriggled on the bed in response to the caress. He still kneaded the sole of her foot, and his casual tone of voice belied the growing, fevered intensity with which he watched her respond to both stimulations at once.

She gasped when his hand went higher, covering the whole of her sex and part of her mound. He felt her tremble under his motionless palm.

“And what is that called?” she asked breathlessly.

“Don’t remember.” His hand pressed a little deeper.

She was soaking wet, and he saw her fine brows knit as her hips rose up from the bed to meet his touch. “Will, please...”

He heard the desperation in her voice and perhaps it was wrong, but he loved it. “Please, what?” he whispered, moving the whole of his hand in the slowest of caresses.

“Oh, Lord...”

He took pity on her then, lowering his mouth to her cleft. She gave a little scream.

In only a minute before she convulsed around him, sobbing out her release, saying his name. God, it sounded good on her lips.

So good that he couldn’t resist bringing her to climax a second time with his mouth and hands.

When he took her in his arms again she grabbed his hand and kissed his wet palm in a primitive sort of gratitude. She was like that—so free, so passionate. He hadn’t known a woman could be so frankly sensual.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she said, voice shaking, after a little bit.

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I mean...more than once.”

He laughed. “You underestimated me.”

“I won’t do that again,” she mumbled and snuggled closer to him.

“How is it you are not married yet?” she asked after a few moments of contented silence. “I suppose if those Society ladies knew you were like this in bed, one of them would have you dragged to the altar.”

He shook his head. “I do not think Society ladies enjoy doing this sort of thing. They are told to just lie back and think of England.”

Genevieve gave a little gasp of laughter.

“I was supposed to marry one of them, you know,” he said.

Her head popped up again. “What do you mean?”

Will didn’t know why he was telling her this, but he couldn’t see the harm in it. “I got engaged to a girl before I went to war. The daughter of a friend of my father’s.”

She stared at him. “What happened? Why did you break it off with her?”

He felt a ridiculous sense of satisfaction in the fact that she assumed he’d broken it off with Violet, rather than the other way around. “It was she who threw me over. I don’t know why exactly. I imagine that she simply grew tired of waiting.”

“Oh.” Genevieve’s face softened. “Did she send you a letter, then? You could get letters when you were in Crimea, could you not?”

“I could. But not always on time, as it happened. She wrote a letter that I never received.”

She pursed her lips in sympathy. “So how did you find out?”

“I visited her as soon as I got back to London, and I met her new husband.”

“Oh, Good Lord. That must have been dreadful!”

“It was disagreeable.”

“I should say! I mean...you must have been in love with her.”

He reached out and played with a strand of her red-gold hair, luminescent in the candlelight. “No. Youthful infatuation. In love with the idea of love, perhaps.”

She gave a sad, knowing smile. “Ah, yes. I know how that is.”

This intrigued him. “Oh? And how do you know that?” Maybe something similar had happened to her.

“Ancient history,” she said in a firm voice. Will sensed that nothing would induce her to say anything more on the subject.

“At any rate, I guess it made me a little disenchanted with Society ladies. It was after that I thought of taking a mistress.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Genevieve declared.

The clock from the hallway downstairs chimed. She stiffened against him. “My goodness. It must be getting late.”

“Babbage,” Will said suddenly. Was the old man still sitting out there in the carriage, on a damp night?

When Will and Genevieve dressed and went downstairs, they found Babbage and Flory sitting by the fire, both with cups of tea. They both stood quickly as their respective employers entered the room.