Cry for Passion (11 page)

The dildo underneath Jack’s arm burned through the wool of his coat and the cotton of his shirt.

He had the night before gazed at her naked desire until he could no longer watch, and had escaped in the arms of a woman who was now dead.

“I do see you, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack said quietly.

He saw her pain. He saw her need.

He felt her utter aloneness throughout his entire body.

Gaze dropping, she unfastened the band of her black wool skirt. “I was very naive—like women are—when I married.”

The skirt fell, a rustling slide of wool.

Jack stared at the lashes that fanned Rose Clarring’s cheeks and the shadows that consumed her life, thirty-three, the same age as Lord Falkland.

“I thought love made babies,” she said, gold gilding the tips of her lashes.

A soft thud pierced the hiss of gas, a bustle impacting wood.

“Not literally, of course.” A soft swish—the slippery descent of a silk petticoat—scraped Jack’s testicles. “I wasn’t quite that ignorant.” The pain shadowing her face was momentarily erased by wry self-mockery; a second swish resounded over the pop of embers, another petticoat liberated. “I thought when Jonathon ejaculated inside me, it was a gift, a special way in which a man demonstrated his love for a woman. And I liked it.”

Gaslight flared; gold feathered a delicate eyebrow.

“Jonathon didn’t give me an orgasm, but I enjoyed having him lie between my thighs”—A sharp snap pierced Jack’s cock, the release of a corset spring latch—“and the intimate connection when he joined our bodies. I enjoyed feeling his love spurt deep inside me.”

A second snap reverberated with remembered pleasure.

Rose Clarring taking a man’s ejaculate. Jack giving a woman his ejaculate.

“I asked him, when he lay with me on Christmas Eve, why he no longer loved me.” A third snap shot down Jack’s spine. “He said making love . . . he never used the word fucking, Mr. Lodoun”—a fourth snap pierced Jack’s chest—“he said making love to me was like a form of self-abuse. Children, he said, were a man’s gift to the woman he loved. He no longer had anything to give me, he said. So we held each other while his ejaculate leaked from my body onto the sheet, and we cried.” A fifth snap gripped Jack’s throat. “When I woke up the next morning, he was gone.”

A wave of memory crashed over Jack.

The harsh groan of masculine release. The sharp cry of feminine orgasm.

Jack’s drowsy satiation. Cynthia Whitcox’s kissing laughter.

She had left him after their shared pleasure, and he had never again seen her.

Not alive. Not dead.

White cotton abruptly blocked Rose Clarring’s face.

Jack instinctively glanced downward.

Visually he followed the upward glide of a cotton chemise riding silk drawers . . . whispering across smooth flesh . . . clinging to upthrust breasts—pale hair glinted gold in the dark hollows of underarms—jerking free of a snagging hairpin.

Rose Clarring had small breasts, firm and round like the globe of a brandy snifter. Dusky pink nipples stabbed the air, hard with need as Jack’s cock had been hard the night before.

He took no pleasure in her vulnerability.

Rose Clarring’s closed eyelids slowly opened; her stark gaze pinned Jack. “I felt Lucy’s unborn baby, and I needed to see you.”

“Why?” ricocheted off the bare walls that were dressed only in shadows.

“Because you love another woman,” she said, standing tall in ribbon-laced drawers, stockings and shoes. “And I love another man. But they are both dead to us. Yet we cannot share our loss with anyone.”

Her unspoken words vibrated over hissing gas and popping embers: Save for each other.

He was a politician who had completely betrayed her. She was a woman who totally exposed herself.

Jack should walk out now, before she penetrated the special place she had saved for her husband: He could not.

“Take off the rest of your clothes, Mrs. Clarring.” Jack’s voice hardened; the package underneath his arm throbbed as if it were a part of his cock instead of a lifeless, soulless object designed for the sole purpose of fucking. “Let us discover where a woman’s passion resides.”

Chapter 11

“Do you mind if I sit down to take off my shoes and stockings?”

Rose Clarring asked for the same simple dignity she had granted Jack when he had stood before her clad only in his trousers, smallclothes, socks and shoes, body pulsing with his pending nakedness.

Silently gesturing toward the settee, Jack turned to give her a minute of privacy.

The small sigh of a depressing cushion slithered down his spine. The impact of wood—the heel of a shoe dropping onto the floor—clenched his groin.

Jack glanced about the small, bare drawing room, the size and shape typical of the terrace homes daily popping up to house the newly emerging breed of lower middle class.

Another thud of wood pierced his chest.

Jonathon Clarring’s town house, Jack thought—deliberately distancing himself from the undressing that occurred behind him—was located in an older neighborhood, a wealthy community that combined elegance with practicality. But Rose Clarring—living separately from her husband—would no longer be able to afford the luxuries to which she was accustomed.

An almost imperceptible sigh abraded his skin, cushion plumping after being released of weight.

Black leather, oak wood and gilded metal leapt out at Jack.

The trunk from which she had twenty-three hours earlier produced the French postcard was shoved against a far wall. The dark blue velvet armchair in which she had sat while he stood fucking his cock faced the settee.

A slick slide of silk drawers pricked the hair on the nape of his neck.

Jack crossed the floor that was bereft of a rug—footsteps deafening over the pop of embers—and lifted the heavy chair, muscles cording with strain.

A low rustle wormed through his bones, a cushion depressing . . . a cushion shifting.

Jack set the velvet-covered armchair at the end of the settee, a heavy thud of wood impacting wood.

Pale flesh twisting on blue damask snagged his gaze.

Rose Clarring slid back on the settee, naked hips turning, heel digging into a cushion to gain purchase.

Heat licked Jack’s cheeks and gripped his cock.

Slowly she lay back, round breasts plumping, right knee rising, left knee falling over a blue damask cushion.

An inverted arrow of dark gold pubic hair framed swollen, dusky pink lips.

Harsh, solitary breathing—Jack’s breathing—sounded over the distant bong of Big Ben.

Rose Clarring exposed her sex as Jack had exposed his sex. The tiny fissure that was her vagina darkly shone between the folds of her vulva.

Eyes stripped of innocence caught his gaze.

Pearl earrings gleamed in the shadow of her hair.

A gift from her husband. Or perhaps a gift from her father.

Pearls for a virgin bride.

Tearing open brown paper, Jack held the dildo in his left hand while with his right hand he unstoppered the bottle of lubricant. Slowly, carefully, he directed the bulbous leather into the clear, slippery oil.

The crystal lip was far larger than the fissure of her vagina. Only the very tip of the dark leather fit inside the opening.

Jack set the bottle down by the bronze base of a hissing lamp. The sharp click of glass on wood reverberated over the crackle of burning coals. Walking to the middle of the settee—not quite touching her knee that angled off blue damask—he offered the dildo.

She gazed at the leather phallus for long seconds, dark lashes hollowing her cheeks. A glistening thread of lubricant slid down the thick shaft, as if the artificial glans was alive and cried with masculine need.

Slowly Rose Clarring reached up to take the dildo.

Electric heat jumped from her fingers into Jack.

Her gaze snapped upward, wide and vulnerable. Jack did not step back to afford her more privacy.

“I’ve always dreamed it would be Jonathon who would tutor me. That it would be he who introduced me to the delights of my vagina.” Bitter cynicism twisted her lips and scoured Jack’s skin. “But you are quite right, Mr. Lodoun. How can a woman expect a man to please her, when we women do not know what pleases us? When we do not even know if we are capable of taking pleasure in a ‘stiff prick’?”

Wetness streaked Rose Clarring’s cheek.

A matching tear leaked from Jack’s cock.

“Perhaps this is all a woman needs”—her slender fingers tightened around the artificial phallus until they were white-tipped from the pressure—“and passion does not exist save in the minds of love-starved women.”

They would both discover the answer before the night was over.

Brown leather protruding both above and below her fingers, Rose Clarring guided the dildo between the delta of her thighs.

The thick shaft divided dark blond public hair . . . was sandwiched in between the lips of a dusky pink labia . . . blotted out the small fissure of a vagina.

Jack stepped back and sank into the armchair.

The position afforded him a different perspective.

He could see the large artificial crown, the size of his own crown: It was shiny with lubricant. He could feel the collapsed opening of her vagina, unoccupied for eleven years: It glistened with unshed tears.

Brown leather notched pink flesh. Pink flesh swallowed brown leather.

The glans. The crown.

The shaft.

One inch . . .

Two inches . . .

Three inches . . .

The flesh of her vagina stretched to form a fragile ring around the piercing leather.

Four inches . . .

Five inches . . .

Six inches . . .

The brown leather could go no deeper for the grip of her white-tipped fingers.

Jack clasped giving velvet.

He couldn’t see her clitoris or her labia for the column of her wrist. But he could feel the slick, wet embrace of the concealed lips. He could feel the hardness of her clitoris, as hard as his cock.

He could feel the raw invasion of her body, filled with hard, impersonal leather instead of the flesh of her husband, the man she loved. Journeying alone in pursuit of passion. Uncertain of what awaited her.

Jack dug his fingers into the soft velvet armchair, cock thickening and elongating. He hurt for the discomfort she was bound to be experiencing, celibate for so long. He ached for her to penetrate herself more deeply, to take two more inches, the full length of the dildo, the length of his own flesh.

The brown leather shaft slowly reappeared.

One inch . . .

Two inches . . .

Three inches . . .

The taut ring of flesh relaxed, skin less painfully stretched.

Four inches . . .

Five inches . . .

Six inches . . .

Jack saw the leather crown. Jack saw the leather glans.

They were slick with more than artificial lubricant.

Rose Clarring took six inches. Rose Clarring gave up six inches.

She took. She gave.

Giving Beauty her beast. Taking away Beauty’s beast.

Shallow strokes. Deep strokes. Gentle strokes. Hard strokes.

Learning what it was that gave her pleasure.

Her left hand that gripped the edge of the settee curved over her lower abdomen, as if mapping the internal thrusts that cleaved it.

Jack’s hand curved, shaping velvet into a tautly rounded stomach that pulsed beneath his fingers.

Swelling with entry. Collapsing with emptiness.

A ragged soughing of air accompanied the slick suction of flesh, her breathing matching his.

Jack witnessed the changes in her body—the darkening ring of her vagina that clung to the pistoning phallus; the glistening desire that coated hard brown leather—and could not breathe for the clasp of her sex.

Opening. Closing.

Giving. Taking.

A woman’s desire no longer a beast, but a pleasure to be savored.

Pale motion grabbed Jack’s attention.

Rose Clarring’s left hand arched upward and grasped her left breast.

The pressure of her fingers crushed his cock.

A low moan rode the slap of leather.

Jack’s gaze snapped upward.

Her face was taut, caught between the pain and the pleasure of orgasm. Dark red colored her cheeks and spilled down her chin.

Jonathon Clarring had not been with her in the past when she had needed him. Jack hoped, for her sake, that he was with her now. Jack hoped it was Jonathon Clarring her vagina welcomed. Jack hoped it was Jonathon Clarring’s cock that brought Rose Clarring pleasure.

He wanted her to find the orgasm her husband had not given her. He wanted her to cry out to Jonathon Clarring in the passion for which she yearned.

She had said Jack would be with her. But she had no memories of Jack which she could draw upon.

Jack did not want her to be alone, not at that moment when men and women were at their most vulnerable.

An agonized cry broke over the wet suction of flesh and the harsh soughing of breathing and the crackling of burning cinders.

Jack waited, heart beating inside his cock, breath ripping in and out of his testicles.

Rose Clarring opened her eyes. Rose Clarring saw Jack.

Her pupils—the size of pinpricks—swelled until all he could see was blackness.

Pain eviscerated Jack.

He had not gotten what he had hoped for. Neither had Rose Clarring.

Unable to gaze at the stark loneliness inside her eyes, Jack glanced down at the pale fingers that rested against the mound of her vulva.

The thick base of the leather dildo stiffly protruded from the stretched ring of her vagina. A single teardrop of glistening liquid spilled onto the blue damask settee.

Jack stood up and walked to the doorway, heels hollowly clicking.

“Why did you answer me?” stopped him short. Her voice was husky with the tears she did not cry and the need she had not satisfied. “When I asked who you had loved?”

After he had told her he didn’t feel compelled to share his private life with strangers.

“Because I, too,” Jack said, “need someone to understand.”

Chapter 12

Rose shoveled cold cinders into the ash dump.