The Red Velvet Horse (Siren Publishing Allure)

The Red Velvet Horse

The discovery of an erotic manuscript, written by a nineteenth century English woman, catapults a very modern heroine into a maelstrom of sexual experimentation and forbidden love.

April Ingram is the proprietor of Village Antiques, which she runs with her business partner and lover Holt Schiller. One day she finds an old manuscript hidden in a secret compartment of an antique cabinet. It is the erotic story of Hannah Wilks, a young English woman who lived more than a century before.

Hannah has been recently widowed. Almost destitute she ends up working in a dockside brothel to support herself. It is here that she is introduced to the joys and perversions of the Red Velvet Horse.

April is entranced by Hannah's story and becomes increasingly drawn into her world. She is fascinated by her sexual exploits and feels compelled to act them out with explosive results.

Sensuality Rating:
SEXTREME
Genre:
Historical/Multiple Partners
Length:
33,400 words
 

Iona Blair

EROTIC ROMANCE

Siren Publishing, Inc.

www.SirenPublishing.com

A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

IMPRINT: Erotic Romance

ABOUT THE E-BOOK VERSION:
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THE RED VELVET HORSE

E-book ISBN: 1-60601-168-5

First E-book Publication: November 2008

Cover design by Jinger Heaston

All cover art and logo copyright © 2008 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

PUBLISHER

Siren Publishing, Inc.

www.SirenPublishing.com

IONA BLAIR

Copyright © 2008

It was a strange contraption that reminded her of the type of thing that acrobats use, yet more luxurious by far than a vaulting horse, with its thick padding of red velvet. She had been told that it was used for birchings, and for couplings, with the gentleman mounting the lady, like a stallion a mare.

* * * *

“You know this could be Regency,” April Ingram said. But the old rosewood cabinet was so caked with dirt and mold it was impossible to tell. “Once it’s cleaned up a bit, I’ll have a better idea.”

April had inherited Village Antiques from a Great Aunt. Pleasantly cluttered with treasures from the past, it sat between a jewelry store and snack bar in a trendy waterfront shopping market called Hermitage Quay. She ran it with her business partner and lover Holt Schiller.

T
he chiffonier turned out to be a later reproduction and therefore, not as valuable, but it contained an interesting secret compartment which lay behind its main drawer. A find, which mitigated the disappointment of discovering it, was a fake.

Secret hiding places were quite commonplace in old cabinets such as secretaries and chiffoniers, also in desks like davenports and bonheurs du jours.

“I think there’s something hidden in there, too.” April reached her arm in as far as it would go. She strained to reach a pile of moldy old papers that were crumbling and yellowed with age. They had the appearance of being stuffed into the cramped hiding place with some degree of haste and urgency by someone in the dim and distant past.

“They’re going to be difficult to read.” She placed the tattered pages on her refinishing table, separating them with care. The hypnotic ticking of several longcase clocks measured out the passage of time.

“I think we’re getting somewhere at last,” Holt said, as he assisted in the delicate operation. “But some of these documents will have to be humidified first or they’ll tear.”

Their mutual concentration was mirrored in the giltwood mirror on the far wall, the tall fair-haired man and the willowy blonde, she, clad as always, in elegant black.

“But don’t let the coolness of her looks fool you.” Holt had once confided to a close friend. “Behind that ice-goddess image is one red-hot mamma.”

“Let’s take a break,” he suggested. He ran his fingers over her breasts. “There’s an oak four-poster that just came in today, shall we try it out?”

“Good idea.” April smiled. She pulled down the window blinds and stretched as erotically as a horny cat.

She could feel the old familiar twitchings begin deep in her nether regions, her cunt muscles flexed in anticipation for the pleasure to come. Holt caressed her from head to toe, as if discovering all her treasures for the first time.

He undressed her with maddening slowness, peeling off the sleek black shift and kissing her breasts through the brassiere before unclasping it.

April felt dizzy with desire. She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, her face flushed with longing. She watched as Holt removed his own clothes before joining her, admiring as always his muscular physique and hairy chest.

She moaned and grasped him to her, moving her feet and legs to accommodate him as he tugged off the black fishnet stockings and garter-belt, leaving her clad only in a pair of thong panties.

“You taste good enough to eat,” he whispered into her hair, his hands traveling over her body appreciatively. Caressing, fondling, and then following the same route with his tongue.

April responded by arching her back and flexing her toes, crying out in ecstasy as he tugged down the thong, and fingered her rigid clit. She was oozing wetness from a cunt throbbing in delight, her nipples hard and unyielding.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, snaking her legs around him and rotating her hips in an urgent rhythmic tempo.

“All in good time.” Holt grasped her by the ankles. Then he raised her legs high above her head and probed at her swollen cunt with his fingertips and tongue.

“You devil…” April gasped. “I’ll get even with you for this.” After she had climaxed, with his fingers stroking the inside walls of her cunt and his tongue circling her clit, she smeared her secretions over his face and mouth, but would not allow him to enter her.

“Come on April…” he pleaded, his face contorted with lust.

Someone started to rattle at the shop door and voices were raised in irritation. “They should be still open at this time, it’s not even four o’clock.”

April smothered a giggle and knelt on the old four-poster, which had a hard lumpy mattress. “Okay, what are you waiting for?” She wiggled her upraised bottom in lascivious invitation.

“You’re a scarlet woman. You know that don’t you?” Holt panted. He slipped his cock inside her and cupped her breasts and tummy with his hands. April could feel his balls banging against her ass as he gave her a hard no-nonsense fucking.

“Remind me to give you a spanking for cockteasing when we have more time.” He delivered a couple of light spanks to her bottom and the backs of her thighs as a preview.

The vigorous fucking was making April wild with longing. Holt moved his hand over her clit and strummed at it with his fingertips. It was too much for her, and she could feel herself soaring…soaring above the clouds and then flying high towards the blazing blue heavens beyond.

* * * *

The old documents found in the chiffonier had humidified enough to risk trying to separate them. As April cautiously undertook this delicate task, she became increasingly fascinated by what they revealed.

For it was a journal of sorts, written by a woman named Hannah Wilks who had lived more than a century before. A sort of haphazard account of her life and times that she seemed to jot down on impulse, rather than in any chronological order.

“It looks as if she never really meant to keep a diary at all.” Holt leafed through the yellowing pages with careful fingers. “That’s why she just recorded her thoughts on single sheets of paper, rather than in a journal.”

April nodded and then hastily put aside the tattered pages as a customer entered the store. She would take them home with her and arrange them as best she could.

Hermitage Quay was also a bus loop, and on days when Holt needed the company van for pick-ups or deliveries, April would go home on the 244 Upper Ferndale. It was about a fifteen-minute ride up a steep hill, to the small house she shared with a tortoiseshell cat named Spice.

It was a good night to be indoors. A gloomy November evening punctuated by the bleating of foghorns. April threw another log on the fire and curled up in her favorite armchair. The old documents recovered from the chiffonier on the table at her side.

“As the winter draws in I fear for my survival
,” wrote Hannah Wilks on another bleak November night of more than a century ago. A recent immigrant from England, she had been left virtually penniless in a rundown Vancouver boarding house when her husband had suddenly died of pneumonia. “
No one will hire me in domestic service because I don’t look sturdy enough for the rigors of such a life”,
she lamented unhappily, on an uneven scrap of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a ledger.

Her landlady, Raisa Tarasov, was a hard drinking Russian émigré with a foul-mouth and quick temper.

“I am not running a charity for beggars,” she would remind the unfortunate Hannah who had not paid her rent, in a guttural accent that made even the simplest word sound like a threat.

“My friend Sophie Pitiuk runs a brothel on Water Street,” Raisa suddenly declared one morning, as I hurried past her in the dark hallway. I had a shawl drawn close around me for warmth against the cloying chill. When I gasped in scandalized effrontery, she swept aside my objections with a course retort. “Sophie has many clients who ask especially for innocent young women.” She then had the unmitigated boldness to reach out and grasp my breast.

“I’d rather starve than submit to such an outrage.” I moved swiftly out of reach of her probing hand.

“Well then that’s exactly what you’re gonna do,” she retorted angrily. She started to toss my few pathetic belongings out into the mud and squalor of Dunlevy Street.

A dense and heavy rain pummeled down on me all night as I huddled behind a rough-hewn outhouse for shelter. By morning, I was shivering, starving, and was more than ready to swallow whatever pride I had remaining.

“We’ll soon get you warmed up and fed, while I send a message over to Sophie.” Raisa wore a confident “I told you so” smile. “You’re quite a comely little thing with your big green eyes, and I’m sure she’ll be pleased with you.”