Red Cloak of Abandon (10 page)

were both gone, and the door shut firmly.

“What
did he say?” Diversity and Affinity asked Brevity at the same

time.

“He ssaid,” Brevity answered, clutching her bosom with her skin

flushing pink.
“Come
to me.”

They all gasped, now they all knew the double entendre of the before

seemingly innocent word “come.”

44

Law stood beneath a droopy elm tree in front of Lady Affinity

Redgrift’s London abode. It was midnight, one week to the hour of their

last encounter. He was angry and it was hard to contain, and he was

intrigued and that was even more impossible to control.
She had touched

his dick.
No lady did such a thing, but Affinity
was
a lady. A pure bred

one. He had not been idle in learning all that he could about Lady Affinity

Redgrift in his week of confusion and simmering anger.

Damnation, she had his journal.
The seductive minx had his life in

her hands. It was disconcerting to have his private sexual thoughts pried

into, but more than that it was devastating that anyone of Affinity’s

station learn his secret . . . that he was the Benefactor. One wrong word

from her petal soft lips, or one wrong excited tittering of gossip and his

mission would be at an end. Then how could he atone, he thought, even

as he knew there was no possible way he could ever right his wrong doing?

Law settled his shoulder against the roughened bark of the elm tree

as he inhaled slowly on a cigarillo. The fog was dense enough that his

darkly clothed figure became a shadow in the shifting mists. The fog

condensed everything around him, holding the smoke from his cigarillo

like a tangible thing, with the scent wafting strongly in his nostrils. The

sudden image of Magdalena laughing as she coughed ridiculously after

trying a puff of one of his cigarillos sprang into his mind. Thoughts of

that time always seemed to haunt him more when he could smell the

smoke the strongest.

He had seemed so young then, yet it had only been three years ago

that he was a first captain in England’s finest military. Then, he had been

a second son and all second sons dutifully joined the military. His joining

found him immediately embroiled in the Spanish War. A hellish action

that no proper English gentleman would have fathomed in their wildest

dreams. There was no way a man could prepare for the horror of war and

the complete foreignness of a country so far away, and he knew that

logically, yet one has to live it to understand the compelling strangeness

of it all.

45

Nonetheless, that was no excuse for his inexperience and for his

devastating naiveté. It had cost Magdalena her life. Magdalena, the

beautiful whore who had saved his life, just as he had ended hers. He had

berated himself a thousand times and in a thousand different hells for not

realizing that an English officer’s presence in a Spanish whore’s adobe

hut could get her killed.

But, she had to know,
Law thought, tilting his head back against the

tree, she had to know how dangerous it was. He had simply thought that

if the Spanish found him, they would capture him as a prisoner. A truly

naive Englishman’s thinking. But, Spain was not England and war was

not civilized, it was ugly and dirty.

He had been only two weeks off the ship, when in a horrible and

bloody fight, in a dark, dank, and nearly impassible jungle, he had been

injured and splintered from his main fighting regiment. He had alter-

nately walked and hid for days without water with a piece of shot in his

arm. By that time, he supposed he was hallucinating, when he stumbled

into a fair sized Spanish town. However by then, if they took him as a

prisoner, he might have counted it a blessing. But this town was far north

of the fighting, and at first glance as he stumbled through what appeared

to be the main dirt street, none of the people looked like the Mexican

military, but like peasants and common folk.

That was where Magdalena found him crumpled against an adobe

wall, nearly unconscious. He hoarsely begged her for water, then he

passed out, and when he woke days later he was laying in her scarce

adobe hut. She was young and kind, but poor beyond description, and the

first thing she asked him for was money. He gave her his father’s gold

watch, and just that simple action brought such joy to her.

He had healed and basked in her youth, and they had become lovers.

Many times she had asked about England, and he knew as one does, that

part of her continued interest and kindness in him was with the hope he

might take her there. Take her away from the squalor she lived in, and

her firm young body, so sexually eager to please him, had thrilled his

masculinity, but also obscured the horrors that he had seen. The ones that

he knew it was his duty to return to.

Then, he made the fatal mistake. He felt so alive and he had seen so

much death, the spirit of life inside him was unreasonable. He had left the

adobe hut and wandered the village. He had been seen. Tragically, he had

even been seen wearing his uniform. How mindless he was not to think

that men from his country had killed brothers, husbands, and the loved

ones of the people from the village.

He was never certain who it was, which man in the village or perhaps

it was someone from the Mexican military. He never knew. He only

knew that a trap must have been set to kill him, not simply capture him

as he would so naively think, if he thought of it at all. And plans set with

no thought to Magdalena’s presence beside him. Magdalena must have

heard about the plan somewhere, because she tried to stop it, and that is

46

when she had been killed in the shots fired on him. She had died in his

arms, broken and bleeding, still begging him to take her to England.

He could still remember the blood, and the joy in Magdalena’s dark

eyes when he had said, “yes” he would take her with him. Then she had

died, as he knew she would in that horrible moment, and nothing had ever

devastated him as much as having a woman die in his arms. To die

because of him. He had barely made it out alive after leaving

Magdalena’s bleeding body behind.

Law winced, grating his head against the tree. They said time healed

and the memory did not bleed as badly as it once had. He had fought the

rest of his term of service in a daze, surprised still that he had survived.

It had seemed at times that he willed his death. Then, upon his return to

England, he had found his own brother dead of a simple and foolish horse

racing accident, leaving him now the Duke of St. Martin. Yet, he had

been too fanatic in his grief. It had suffocated him, until in a drunken

motley state he had come across a street walker being attacked. Her

screams had jolted his drunken mind and without a second thought he

had plowed into her attacker. The blackguard had fled, but the prostitute

was injured by a knife wound to her chest.

Rosie was her name and she was as plump and pleasant as a tart

cherry pie. He had saved her, and then suddenly he had found the pain of

his existence eased. Rosie had lived and as she did, he found himself

speaking to her of a different life. Each word he spoke seemed to heal

him and make him more whole, and when she had agreed to finally take

his help . . . he had smiled.

He had felt guilty about that smile immediately afterwards, yet

twenty dozen smiles later in his life, he did not feel guilty any longer. He

wondered now, as anger simmered inside him while looking up at

Affinity Redgrift’s bedchamber, if the time had not nearly come for him

to forgive himself.

Law extinguished his cigarillo, then he turned and climbed the elm

tree and followed the largest branch over to the balcony he knew to be

outside Affinity Redgrift’s bedchamber. What he was doing was com-

pletely out of his nature. He intended to get his journal back, that part was

true, but he also intended to find a way to blackmail Affinity into not

speaking of his hidden work.

Nevertheless, it was the other intentions inside him that he dared not

look at too closely. Like the fact that he had never taken his cock in hand

and relieved his arousal of that night or the fact of his intrigue about

Affinity’s intense curiosity over him and her seemingly unconventional

methods of doing–.
What?

All that he knew for certain was that he could still feel Affinity’s

body pressed to his and her finger sliding over the wet slit of his cock.

47

Affinity squinted at the page she was reading as she lay on top of

her bed covers with her night gown pulled upward and bunched around

her waist. The
godemiché
lay beside her on the bed as she read a passage

in Law’s journal.

. . . Mary, with her dusty blonde hair and her blush petal lips, so thin

as to be emaciated, has revealed to me the greatest gift a man could

possess. It is the art of cunt licking. And I must say here that I am

invigorated. My dreams each night since hearing of this have been

fulsome with images of women’s bared pussy’s that are wet, swollen, and

rosy. Each dream-filled pussy is splayed and begging for my tongues

caresses. The wonder that a man can give a woman such pleasure is

emboldening.

I understood before, have witnessed it in fact, that a woman does

receive pleasure from the thrust of a man’s cock, but never with this

method and to these heights as I now understand. Ah, and the method.

Could the method be more enticing for a man to do? Taking your

woman’s sex into your mouth and tasting the heat of it. Feeling the

pinpoint throbs and the deep inner flesh leaving wetness on your mouth

from the musky lips or deeper.

To take a woman and hold her down so. To have her spread her

thighs and raising her long soft limbs as though an altar for a man to

worship upon. Then, the talent of it that Mary described. She instructed

me to long slow licks of the tongue to start. She named the bud of every

woman’s pleasure as the clit, clitty, or love button. How a man should

stroke this furrowed button with the tip of his tongue. In doing so it fills

with passion and thrusts upward to meet his tongue pleading for more

attention. Then, as the woman’s excited moans quicken, the man’s tongue

should follow them in speed, circling, then licking . . .

I am uncertain if I can continue here, my senses are so heightened

that my fingers tremble and my cock throbs stiffly between my thighs.

48

(Hours later . . . I could not stop myself, nor in my damnation did I

want to. I took my insolent cock to my hand as my mind filled with dreams

of a woman’s pussy beneath my eager mouth. I am sated now, beyond

understanding. My seed is spent. Yet, I promise myself to write again of

this masturbation. I want to explore a man’s masturbation and my deep

feeling toward it . . . )

“Oh hh,”
Affinity moaned, clenching her eyes. Why could she not

climax? What was holding her back? She sighed and tucked Laws’

journal under the pillow beneath her head, then she lay staring at the

canopy overhead. All she had to do was touch the throbbing place

between her thighs, but something held her back. Some unseeable force

made it seem less than fulfilling.

She had wanted to insert the
godemiché
partially inside herself to see

how it felt. Dream more of Law, if she were honest. She needed a plan to

see him again. Another scheme. He would be angry that she had his

journal.
Oh yes
, he would be, and she needed to return it. But how could

she intrigue him and try to seduce him, when she had committed this

crime against him.

It was very complex. She had to come up with a brilliant scheme,

first to override his anger, then to entice him. Perhaps, she could pretend

to be a prostitute? He was so sympathetic toward them. If she just did not

admit being a prostitute outright, but hinted at it, therefore not exactly

lying to him, yet letting him assume.

Hmm,
Affinity yawned, she needed to think on this very carefully. If

her campaign for Law were to work at all, she needed to find ways to

spend time in his company. Perhaps, she could blackmail him with her

knowledge of his Benefactor’s exploits. Surely some type of kindly