Listen to the Moon (25 page)

Thea vanished into the kitchen and then up the stairs.

Sukey noticed that John was frowsy and wilting a little. And the house smelled odd. “Have you been working?”

He gestured for her to follow him and slipped into the butler’s pantry. “Shut the door quickly behind you.”

Chapter Fifteen

The uncovered brazier was full of hot coals, the room so warm that Sukey was reaching for the buttons of her pelisse before she recognized the smell.

Roses
, fragrant and luxurious in the heart of winter.

She breathed them in, disbelieving. Over a dozen lit candle stubs made the copper bathtub in the center of the room glow brightly and turned the steam rising from it a warm yellow.

Sukey knew that tub. They carted it up the stairs to Mr. Summers’s room once a month, along with dunnamany buckets of hot water, and he took great pleasure in soaking in it.

She drew near to it. At least twenty-five gallons of water steamed inside, smelling like roses. “For me?” She reached out to touch the water, almost nervesome.

He caught her wrist. “It might still be too hot. You were early. Let me.” He dipped a finger quickly in, and when this proved safe, submerged his hand. “Give it another five minutes.”

“I’ve never taken a real bath before.” She used a basin and sponge most days, and on Saturday nights the vicarage servants took turns filling a hip-bath before the kitchen fire. But soaking in a tub? That was for ladies and gentlemen. The labor it took to draw and haul and heat and haul again so much water, only to have to empty it out… “You shouldn’t work on your half-holiday,” she protested.

“I told you. It isn’t work when I do it for you.”

“And I told you it is.”

He stepped up behind her and unbuttoned her dress. “Imagine an artist who paints society portraits all week,” he said in her ear. “On Sunday he comes home and paints his wife. Is there really no difference?”

She let him pull her clothes over her head. He unlaced her stays so nimbly it seemed a professional skill, but he was no ladies’ maid. He’d learned it undressing women, dunnamany of them. But the way he said
his wife
, it sounded special. As if she was the only one.

At the ball, he’d called it
doing something for love
. He’d said it without fanfare, probably meaning only to make use of the expression.
For love or money
, people said that all the time. People said
love
all the time, and then they left. Why was she fussing about a stupid word?

Don’t get in that bath
,
she thought with sudden urgency.
You’ve done without it all these years. You don’t need it.

But when he knelt to untie her garters, she let him do that too. There was a lump in her throat and her chest tingled. At first it was fear, but it turned to happiness and she couldn’t turn it back. She felt like an air balloon trying to take flight, straining at its ropes. Her throat trembled with wanting to laugh. He rolled her stockings down her legs in a manner that had nothing professional about it.

He wavered, eyes on the triangle of hair between her legs, inches from his mouth.

Sukey wavered too, but she pulled off her shift and danced past him towards the rose-scented water. “My bath is getting cold, and so am I.” Actually, the water near scalded her cold toe when she dipped it in. But while she debated whether to pull it out again, the heat dimmed, becoming bearable.

She lowered herself into the tub, hopping with the heat. “I’ll be boiled like a lobster!” But soon the pain faded. “Oh my. I see why the vicar likes it.” The everyday words didn’t measure up to the miracle of liquid heat right up to her breasts. She slid down the back of the tub, nipples dipping beneath the surface. She’d be
warm
soon, warmer than she’d been all winter. She breathed in rosy steam, finally finding the courage to lift her hands from the sides of the tub. She did not, as she half feared, slip helplessly into the water and drown.

She looked at John. He was smiling and—to her surprise—watching her face, not her tits. He knelt beside the tub to remove her cap and draw the pins from her hair. Sukey grimaced. She hated washing her hair.

Because it’s always chilly!
She dipped below the surface, hauling herself up sputtering a moment later, terrified of drowning. John laughed openly at her, brushing drops of water from his waistcoat.

Having wet hair felt nice, actually. She lowered herself slowly into the tub again, this time enjoying the water creeping up over her cheeks and forehead, and the way it poured down her shoulders when she sat up.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked. “Or shall I leave you to soak?”

She could not believe it. That he’d go to so much trouble and not even expect to ogle her?

At the ball, when he offered, she’d refused to allow him to repair her dress alone. She’d thought it too great a gift to accept.

This would put her in his debt, and she didn’t know how to repay him. But maybe that only meant she ought to stretch her brains and think of a way. She’d found she liked giving him things.

Maybe there was no limit to what you could take from your spouse, if it was offered freely. Maybe some gifts were too great to turn down. “I’d like to soak on my own a little. Thank you.”

He nodded. “The water will be cooling in half an hour. If you want me before then, shout.”

It was a marvelous half-hour. Sukey splashed about, humming to herself, exploring the tub, glad no one was looking at her. She liked John looking at her, of course, but sometimes you wanted just to be yourself. She floated, drowsy and dreaming, until she was half afeared she’d fall asleep and drown. Sitting up exposed her breasts and shoulders to the cooler air. It felt nice. She was pink all over, flushed with heat.

She grew almost bored, but she resisted calling for John. This was a pleasure she’d have only once, or at least only once in a very great while. She ought to wring the last drops from it. Washing her hair with soft soap, she marveled at how much cleaner this felt than bending one’s head over a little washtub. Curious, she soaped her breasts, liking the way her hands slipped over them. Behind her, one of the candle-ends guttered out with a hiss and smell of smoke.

John knocked. She laughed and ducked under the water, washing her bosom clean. “Come.” She stood, water dripping down her. John froze for a moment before he remembered to shut the door behind him. He leaned against it, silent and still.

Paralyzed with lust
, she thought. For her.

Then he rushed forward and handed her a towel. “You mustn’t catch a chill.”

“I’ll not be this warm again till June,” she said as she stepped out of the tub, although in that moment she felt she’d be warm forever. There was snow on the ground outside, but she was burning up. Even putting on her shift would smother her. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to do, now I’m naked in the middle of the room?” She dried her hair as well as she could, glad it didn’t fall much past her shoulders. She’d finish it before the kitchen fire later.

He wound a damp tress round his finger. “You smell like roses.” When he let go to spread out their bedroll, her hair retained the curl, remembering him.

All of her remembered him, was homesick for him. The air stroked and petted her when she moved, curling around her shoulders, her belly, the back of her knee. John lay down on the pallet. “Come here.”

He arranged her upright and straddling his thighs, only the insides of her knees brushing his pantaloons. She liked the way she towered over him. “It’s not often I’m taller than you.”

“Are you wet?” His voice was hoarse.

“Of course,” she said innocently. “I just got out of the bath.” She’d never felt so clean, as if she’d emerged from the water new-baptized and he was christening her with his eyes. Marking her as his own.

“Answer the question.”

She slipped her middle finger between her folds, testing. “Yes, a little.”

“Make yourself wet enough to take me.” Unbuttoning his pantaloons, he drew his cock out. Stroked it until it was hard enough to spear her with ease.

She watched him watch her, finger circling her pearl, slow at first, then faster, rougher.

He held his cock upright in his hand. “Now.”

She crawled forward and lowered herself onto him, feeling her cunny stretch. He took his hand away and left them joined just there, between their legs, making no move to touch her. “You like to watch me, don’t you?” she asked.

His mouth curved. “You said it yourself: you won’t be this warm again until June.”

“Do you think you’d like to watch another man fuck me?” she asked, very daring. Too daring, maybe. “You wouldn’t miss a detail then.”

He lay still beneath her, but his cock twitched.

She leaned over him. Drops of rose-scented water fell from the tips of her hair onto his shirt. “Or a woman, maybe?” The idea of John fucking another woman had made her furious at the servants’ ball, but if she was there too… “I’d like that, I think. Suckling at her tits while she cried out from your cock in her.”

Yes, she thought, she
would
like that. To make the other girl mindless, desperate, pushed beyond the bounds of ordinary sensation. She’d like to touch a female body that wasn’t her own and see how it responded to her. She’d like to feel John’s eyes on her while she did it.

John’s hips began to move. Sukey fumbled, but soon they were moving in harmony, grinding against each other. He kept his hands clenched at his sides.

Another candle-end guttered out. It made her feel very fond of him, somehow. She loved the way he wrinkled his nose. “Would you like that?” she murmured, still touching herself.

The sound he made was half a laugh, half a moan. “Where would we find this obliging person?”

Sukey shrugged. “I could ask a likely looking woman to help carry my basket home from the market. That turned out well for me last time.”

He shut his eyes. “You wouldn’t really, would you?”

She cuffed him on the arm. “Of course not! I
do
think of my reputation, you know.” She leaned forward so her pearl was pressed between her finger and his belly with each stroke. Shutting her eyes, she teased her nipple with her free hand and imagined that another woman was doing it, that another woman was crouched by them, watching her shake, coaxing her to her peak, eager to see her wracked with pleasure.

“Then yes,” he growled. “I’d like it a great deal, as you very well know. Then I could see what you look like with someone’s tongue between your legs. God knows it always
sounds
terribly impressive.”

She nearly fainted with the force of her pleasure. She awoke leaning over him, arms trembling as they held her up. She was hot and worn out, and her hair was drying at the tips, waving slightly. John was watching her.

She did love him. It was just a stupid word and it didn’t mean
forever
or
sure
or
safe,
but it meant how she felt.

Well, there was no use in crying over spilt milk. She smiled at him—or meant to. Her mouth wobbled a little. Her second try was better. “Did you see everything you wanted to?”

He shook his head. “I never will.” He held himself back from spending with an effort, every muscle tensed and unmoving save his hips, tilting up barely at all with each thrust. “There’ll always be more of you to see.”

“You shouldn’t be so sweet. You’ll encourage me to henpeck you.”

He bent his knees and sat, startling her. She nestled in the cradle of his lap now, his thighs at her back. “Kiss me,” he said.

He was too tall. She had to rise up on her knees to do it, half off his cock. But she kissed him, her tongue against his. He wrapped his arms tight around her naked body and spent like that, only half inside her but all around her anyway.

* * *

Hal!
John almost said to the footman in green-and-gold livery standing on the vicarage steps. But remembering himself, he only said, “Good day,” and held out his hand for Lady Tassell’s calling card. He had handed over hundreds of these in his life. Thousands, probably. Strange to be receiving one, and to say, “Shall I inquire if the vicar is at home?”

“If you would, sir.” As the countess, standing at the foot of the stairs, could see John’s face and not Hal’s, he could only bow in answer to the footman’s friendly smile.

“Lady Tassell is here to see you, sir,” he told the vicar, who was lingering over his luncheon with a new book from London. “Will you receive her?”

“Indeed I will. I have been expecting her. Ask Mrs. Khaleel to make up a tea tray, will you? Is the fire lit in the living room?”

John felt that the vicar might have mentioned this expectation. “Yes, sir.”

“Then I will receive her there.”

So John took his former mistress’s muff, tartan pelisse and furs and showed her into the living room. “The Right Honorable the Countess of Tassell,” he announced her, and depositing the overclothes by the laundry fire to dry, he hurried to the kitchen to inform Mrs. Khaleel about the tray.

Hal accompanied him, removing his wig with relief and swinging it by its queue as he walked. It was a habit in footmen John’s father had always deplored, as powder inevitably got on the hand and leg and from thence, everywhere else. “I heard you got married. We all wish you joy.”

“Thanks,” John said, after which any delicate attempt to inquire into the countess’s business was forestalled by Mrs. Khaleel’s eager questions as to the type of sandwiches and cake her ladyship preferred.

He knew more about her preferences than he did about the vicar’s.

As he carried in the tea tray and laid out the cups and plates, he felt her watching him, as serenely triumphant as if he marched before her in chains through the streets of Rome. He strongly disliked knowing that she must think him come down in the world since leaving her employ, as if his present home and his marriage were a wretchedness she had forced him to.

Larry, settling the urn on the cloth, contrived somehow to press his hand to the hot silver and made a pained hissing noise. John kept his face impassive as he dropped two slices of lemon and a lump of sugar into an empty cup, but he saw the corner of Lady Tassell’s mouth quirk up and felt hot with embarrassment.

“Just how I prefer it, thank you, Mr. Toogood,” she said in a surprisingly friendly way. “I should like to speak to you before I go, if your master will allow it.”