ROMANCE: His Reluctant Heart (Historical Western Victorian Romance) (Historical Mail Order Bride Romance Fantasy Short Stories) (4 page)
Authors: Jane Prescott
Martha laughed and swatted him playfully. “You should’ve. It would have been a much better start than knocking me over.” Her smile faded, and her eyes grew serious. “But Eddie…are you sure? I’m so happy if you are, but I don’t want you to change your mind in a week. I need you to tell me why you’re sure.”
Eddie nodded, grasping for the right words. “It’s a feeling,” he said after a moment. “It’s like you said before, everything has a solution. You taught me a new way of seeing, and it just changed everything. My heart’s been so black all this time, I thought it was rotten…but it just needed a new coat of paint.”
Martha grinned. “My, that’s beautiful. Are you writing your vows as we speak, Mr. Poet?”
Eddie laughed and kissed her again, but she broke away early.
“Before I forget,” she said breathlessly. “I wanted to say…you taught me something, too. When I got here, I was expecting some mess of a man that I’d need to fix or nurse back to health. But you’re already so strong…” she shook her head, her eyes full of wonder. “You’re adding color to my life, Eddie James. You painted
my
heart, too.”
Eddie’s lips were sore by the time they got to breakfast, and by the end of the day, his cheeks hurt from smiling. He wrote a letter to his uncle, picturing the look of joy and simultaneous disbelief that would overtake him when he read the news. They joined Evan and Cheryl for dinner that evening, and Eddie’s heart melted when he saw how sweetly Martha interacted with the children. Evan was watching him through the night, and before they left, he pulled Eddie aside.
“She’s really something, huh?” Evan asked, nudging Eddie conspiratorially. “You look like a new man! Better color, eyes not as puffy…you even look like you’ve been eating better. You guys gonna have kids?”
Eddie looked at Martha as she said goodbye to the babies, who were already wailing for her return. “Maybe,” he said, smiling broadly as she stood and walked toward him. He thought about what she’d said---
you painted my heart, too.
Eddie thought he would die if it were true; Martha’s beauty was so pure and lovely, he knew he had no part in it. But he liked that she insisted that he did. She was a work of art, and he was just starting to appreciate her masterstrokes. Eddie knew he was lucky to even be in her presence. She grinned at him and took his hand as the left. The colors of the sunset in front of him reminded him of her hair, and he wondered if he could replicate it with a brush. She saw his far-away look and smiled.
“What are you thinking about?” she teased.
Eddie smiled and squeezed her hand as he answered. “My muse.”
THE END
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Chris nodded and smiled. It was when I noticed the little dimple on the side of his mouth that my brain totally and completely froze. I almost missed what he said next. “Glad to hear it. I hope to read some of your work soon. I’m running quality control there, and I hope to get a sample of what everyone here has to offer. Oh, and Andrea?”
“Yes?”
“Call me Chris.”
* * *
Nothing beats a quiet night in with your favorite workspace. My studio apartment has five large windows that go from my midsection up, and in the evenings, the twilight fills my room. My laptop screen glows a faint blue on the heavy oak desk that stands in front of window number two. I set the steaming mug of hot chocolate down on a coaster that says “Bob’s Café” beside it and settle down into the soft cushion of my swivel chair. This is one of my favorite things to do, to take a long, hot shower, settle into my soft pink jammies, and to finish up whatever story has got my interest at the moment at work. They say that work and play don’t mix, but not when you do what I do.
I take a sip of the chocolate; it is the perfect temperature and a deliciously silky texture. I look at my screen and scroll up a few pages to see where the storyline was taking me. I was fresh in, and I was loving this one. It follows a young woman on the search for her father, a captain of the royal guard who was set sail for Spain from England on a mission for the queen. He was not heard from again, and she sets out to find him, except that because she is a young, buxom woman on her own, she cannot do this independently. Throw in a little cross-dressing element and a royal letter of recommendation stolen from her brother’s lockbox and you’ve got an adventure. The problem is, the ship she is on is wrecked, but she is saved. When she comes to, she realizes her saviours are actually pirates and that she is now chained and enslaved aboard it.
Terrified of her fate—for what else can it be but ship whore—she refuses to be amenable to anyone’s care, until she realizes that nobody is touching her. I have just gotten up to the point where she realizes that she’s not going to be passed around the ship’s crew like a tool for use because the ship’s captain is quite taken with her. I set down the cup, rub my hands together, and begin to type.
Standing above her, he cut an imposing figure. Easily over six feet tall, through his breeches, she could tell that his thighs were sturdy and well-muscled despite his leanness. Why that elicited a shiver in her, Meg did not know, and she pushed it down where she could pay it no mind. My, but he was handsome! That cleft in his chin, the color of his eyes dark blue and stormy like the sea that was pitching and tossing the boat as if it were made of little more than kindling.
“If you like me,” Meg said through clenched teeth, the iron of the cuffs binding her to the board behind the silken chair chafing at her delicate wrists, “why not just take me?”
Captain Edwin sat down at the ottoman by her feet. He leaned his face against the hand that was propped up on his knee, and the way he looked at her face made Meg blush, a heat spreading all the way down her chemise, unfamiliar but not wholly unpleasant. When he spoke, his voice was a little gravelly, rasping against her auditory senses like rough silk.
“The thing is, Meg, I never take a woman against her will. I know, I know, it seems to be against the life we lead here aboard the ship, but there’s just something that doesn’t set well with me about forcin’ a woman to take a man like that. That’s not what I have planned for us.”
“What do you have planned for us?” she asks, not sure she’s ready to hear the answer, especially when Edwin’s face breaks out into a small smile and he gets up to reach the table behind him. He lifts up a long, dark piece of cotton cloth and when he approaches Meg, she rears back in her seat as if he’s about to scald her. As he ties the cotton cloth over her eyes, she kicks out and tries to bite him, but the deed is soon done.
“You nefarious twit!” she cries, trying to scratch him, but restrained by the cuffs. The space around her suddenly becomes filled with Edwin’s presence and she can barely breathe. Say what you like about the pirating kind, but Edwin smelled of musk and soap, a scent delicious enough to make Meg swallow hard. The beating of her heart intensified as she felt Edwin place a light hand on her ankle, beneath her skirts. “Wh-what are you doing?”
She heard a small chuckle at her ear and realized that Edwin was drawing his lips near her neck, brushing against her with such precision that when he spoke, his breath tickled the fine hairs on that particular part of her anatomy, causing a kind of aching feeling in her belly. “I plan to make you want me, Meg. I plan to tantalize your senses until you not only do not fear me, but beg for my touch, over and over again. And when I give it to you, you’re going to ask me never to stop.”
And with that, he tied the cotton cloth over her eyes, blocking her view entirely from light or the room. Thrown into complete sensory deprivation, Meg felt a sharp shiver of fear climb its way up her spine even as a pair of soft, warm lips settled down on her neck. The ache in her belly intensified as Edwin teased her neck first with his mouth, then nipped with his teeth, so lightly that a tingle began to spread, first to her collarbone, then her breasts. She felt herself being gathered into a pair of strong arms and with a wild adjustment of positions, she was suddenly settled into a warm lap, her wrists restrained by her sides. Suddenly, Meg understood what was happening, and it awakened something primal inside of her, a fear she could not control. It was a good thing she was being restrained, because she began to struggle.
The more she struggled, the tighter the grip on her wrists became. And although she could not control what was happening to her, Meg found herself growing excited. Disgust filled her at this realization, even as Edwin tied her wrists to the arms of the chair with rope. For a moment, there was no movement, and then she felt the laces of her bodice becoming undone, slipping out of the holes one by one. She felt her chest heaving, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, and she could picture the white cream of it rising and falling by the candlelight in the room. She felt Edwin lean over her shoulder, felt the hard rock of his abdomen press against her back, felt herself bend at the waist as he leaned over and slid his hands up her gown, gathering the many skirts of her gown, bunching them in his fists.
She felt her skin become exposed to the sudden brush of air as he slid her skirts higher and higher up her ankles, then past her knees and up her thighs. Never before had she felt so vulnerable, never before had she known herself to be so at the mercy of a man. She felt frozen at her core, terrified to move, terrified to speak, but there was something about the very wrongness of the situation that was causing her to feel alive, perhaps for the first time since her father had gone. The hands reached over her body and spread her legs apart, baring her sex to the world. She heard Edwin’s breath in her ear grow more harried, and she could not believe that it was her that was causing this, she, who had never had any interaction with men at all. She felt like she was losing her mind.
“Do you know what I see?” Edwin spoke in low tones in her ear.
“Somebody helpless?” she spat, horrified that the image in her mind’s eye of him being able to see the very private parts of her by the clear lamplight made her feel so dirty and yet so good at the same time. She felt the palms of his hands smooth over her thighs, grazing them lightly at first, then turning into rougher strokes; he had the callused hands of a man who has spent his life at sea, and those calluses bumping against the smooth cream of her thighs felt incredible. His fingers danced like little spider legs towards her inner thighs, and then, much to her shame, he brushed the hair between her legs, triggering the sensitive nerve endings at the other point of the hairs, eliciting a moan from Meg that she could not help, that she hated herself for allowing to escape.
“No, Meg,” said Edwin, and to her shock, he swept a thumb over the very heart of her, the puckered folds swelling into a plumpness that she was not familiar with, but he was. “No, sweetheart, if you were so very helpless, you would not be wet.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” hissed Meg, but the moisture between her legs gave her some indication of what he was referring to. She felt him shift his attention to her bodice, lowering it until she felt that the tops of her breasts were exposed, her nipples barely inside the square of the bodice. He moved his hands back to between her thighs and there was that nagging voice at her ear again, not allowing her heart to settle down even for a single moment.
“I know you have no knowledge of men, dear girl, gently bred as you are, but let me tell you what I see. I see your creamy thighs, and the gold curl of hair between your legs hiding your sweet little sex from the world; we’ll go back to that in just a moment. I see your pretty little neck, tender, waiting for me to bite and to suck on, to make you squirm with excitement. And oh, what’s this?” Meg heard his tone take on a note of interest and his breath lower down to her collarbone. “Well,” said Edwin, a smile in his voice, “this is just my favorite part of you, so we’ll save a little mystery for a while, won’t we? It’s your tits, Meg, and it’s not that they’re not fantastic. It’s that they’re just hidden inside your dress for a little bit. Now, some men want the whole package at once, but I’m not most men. I know you’ve got a set of fresh little pink nipples inside of there, and I want to see them, but I want it to be when you’re so lost in the throes of passion that they pop out without my even having to touch them. I want you to want me so much that you lose control of your dress, of your body, and your tits come bursting out as you burst all over me, again and again and again.”
At this point, Meg felt her breathing become so shallow she thought she might stop the action altogether. God help her, but pirate Captain Edwin was doing things to her that she had never experienced before, and he had barely begun touching her. She tried to control herself, but the minute Edwin slid his index fingers in a frame around her sex, her brain narrowed to a focus on what he was doing and nothing else mattered; in fact, the blindfold seemed to intensify each sensation, even as he rubbed her on the sides of her sex and used his hands to spread her apart, her most intimate flesh revealed.
“You’re going to discover yourself with your own hands, Meg,” Edwin told her, and before she knew what was happening, he had wrapped her hands in his hands and was directing them to her nether regions with a determination she dared not fight. First, she rubbed three tightly held together fingers over the whole of her sex and felt the blood rush there. Then, Edwin had her probe the outer portions until that funny ache in her belly dropped lower. He then separated each one of her fingers and had her run it over the length of her slit, bottom to top until together, they hit the spot he was searching for the whole time. He ran her finger over it once, and she gasped out loud. He did it twice and the gasp transformed into a groan that was torn from her lips unwillingly. The stroking began in earnest, slow at first to build her up, then increased to a speed somewhere between heaven and hell.
Meg could hear a strange mewling sound fill the room and it took her several seconds to realize the noise was coming from the back of her throat; in just a few strokes, she had been transformed from a daring, yet gently bred girl to a woman bent over at her waist, using her fingers on the parts of herself she had never seen before that very moment. And they moved together, syncing the flexing of their fingertips against her body until the intensity that had been building overwhelmed her and she cried out, doubling over at the waist and moaning incomprehensibly as the sweetness of her first climax washed over her, her breasts indeed spilling out of her dress, the puckered nipples freed at the very moment that Edwin intended. She cried out again and again, scarcely believing that the name on her lips against the darkness that is all she sees is Edwin’s name, as he had predicted.
I lean back and sigh pleasurably at my handiwork. The sky outside has turned the color of pitch, and there is nothing all around me but the chirp of the crickets and the tha-thump of some far-off party’s music. The remaining liquid chocolate in my cup has gone cold because I have forgotten it in the process and the numbers on the upper right corner of my computer screen read 2:30 A.M. It is time for bed; the heaviness on my lids is telling me so, but I am excited by what I have just written. I love that when Edwin takes her for the first time, she is blind and entirely at his mercy. And my model for the sexy pirate captain?
As if you even have to ask.
As I scroll back up through the piece that is the turning point of the entire story, a blatantly naughty desire comes over me. At first, I shake it off, but the temptation is just too great not to give in to; it’s also so entirely innocent that the idea seems to be a good one. I hit CTRL F and highlight Edwin’s name all over the story. And in the section of the little panel that comes up that reads REPLACE WITH, I type in the name Christopher Mellins.
Just for kicks.
And oh, when I read it over again, it is no longer Meg and Captain Edwin, but me and my boss, Christopher. We are the ones who have been transported back in time into a land where we are not bound by the strict rules of professionalism; that last thought makes me sad, so I go back to reading the piece I have just written. I think about the little purple and flowered vibrator I have in the top drawer of my bureau, glance back at the screen in front of me and know that it’s going to be a long, pleasurable night indeed.