My Lady's Pleasure (5 page)

“I’m sure you’d like a cup of tea,” he said to his wife by way of distracting her from the iniquity that had gone on right under her nose.

“I would at that,” she said, and couldn’t help but think of those crumbly little scones with the raisins that Stevens, the Loughlins’ cook, invariably served with tea.

“Then let us go find some, shall we?” said Mr. Sheffield with a smile.

As the Sheffields went in search of their tea, Lady Georgiana and Bruce Barnes headed to the peacock pavilion. The two walked in silence, each noting the change in the atmosphere now that they were alone. When the Sheffields had been with them, Georgiana had assessed Barnes coolly, from the distance that the company of others always interposed between a man and a woman. The company had gone, and with it the distance, and she felt his presence in a new way.

She saw the pavilion as they crested the hill that hid it from the house. It was a big, square, low-ceilinged building nestled in a little dale. “We have to keep it warm in the winter,” Barnes explained, “so we sheltered it from the wind.”

Her mind hadn’t been on the peacocks for quite some time, and she just nodded rather stupidly. “I see,” she said.

Barnes looked at her a little sharply. The woman who’d sparkled all morning was now answering him in monosyllables. She seemed distracted.

She was distracted. She found this man profoundly alluring, and her mind was attempting to penetrate the fog of her physical attraction to him to try to decide what she wanted to do about it.

Barnes turned toward her and looked her straight in the eye for a long moment. “Would you like to see the inside?” he asked in a low voice.

She nodded again, not sure that she ought to go in, but also not sure that she ought not to. Although Barnes seemed a rough man beneath his gentlemanly veneer, Georgiana didn’t think there was any danger in him. She started down the hill, with Barnes close behind her.

The building had a double door in the center of the wall, and Barnes opened one side of it. Although the doorway itself was wide, when only one of the doors was opened, the space leading into the building was quite narrow. The gardener held the door open for Lady Georgiana to pass, but to walk in she would have to all but brush against him. She paused a moment but, having committed herself this far, she refused to be deterred. She walked past him, leaving as much space between them as she could without obviously avoiding the contact.

She felt her skirts brush his boots. She smelled his raw, earthen smell. She saw the large, calloused hand that held the door, and couldn’t help but imagine how it would feel on her skin, caressing her thigh, cupping her breast.

She walked into the building. She heard the door close behind her and stood for a moment recovering herself, letting her heartbeat slow and her eyes adjust to the relative dimness. As they did, she realized that she must be looking at the least remarkable building in all England. It was a large, empty space with four walls. It had a wooden floor, and a stove in the center. There were bales of straw piled up against one wall. And that was all there was.

The anticlimax brought her back to the here and now. “So this is a peacock pavilion,” she said dubiously as she looked around. “I always thought pavilions were luxurious and well-appointed.”

Barnes laughed. “This is luxurious and well-appointed, if you’re a peacock,” he said. “It’s got warmth, food, protection from predators, and the companionship of other peacocks. Do you think they’d ask for upholstered furniture and electric lights?”

Lady Georgiana laughed in turn, and looked up at him, almost relieved that the tension between them seemed to be dissipating. But with one step, Barnes brought it once more to bear. That step took him so close to her that only inches separated them. He seemed to be forcing his presence on her, but he didn’t touch her. He looked at her, and she heard his breath and smelled his smell again. He stood so very close that she felt his heat, yet he didn’t touch her. It was as though he were waiting for her.

Her eyes were level with his chest, and she saw the red-tinged hair that showed where the first two buttons of his shirt lay open. It was dense, curly hair, with none of the silky smoothness of Jeremy’s. It covered a chest that was tanned and hard. His outline was clear through his thin cotton shirt, and Lady Georgiana could see that it wasn’t quite symmetrical. His right side—shoulder, chest, arm—was perceptibly more developed than his left, the result, she assumed, of the work that he did.

And those hands! Even as they hung relaxed at his sides, she could sense their power. Here was a man whose body was built not by lawn tennis and riding to hounds, but by good, honest work. His was strength that came straight from the land, strength he built establishing his mastery over it. No man had ever seemed more virile, more genuine to her. He made the men she was accustomed to meeting in society look effete and ineffectual, hothouse plants beside the oak that was Bruce Barnes.

He stood so close to her, and she ached to close the gap, to cleave her small body to his large one. She felt as though her desire could be quenched by his merest touch.

But something stopped her, and she didn’t quite know what. Perhaps it was simply the suddenness of it all that prevented her. Two hours ago, she hadn’t known this man. Two days ago, she’d been in the arms of a very different man. She’d come to Penfield resolved on asserting her freedom, but freedom thought of in the comfort of her bedchamber at Eastley seemed different from freedom standing in front of her in firm flesh and hot blood.

When she’d walked down the hill to the pavilion, she’d told herself that there was no danger in this man. And there wasn’t, not in the sense that she’d thought of it then. Now, though, she saw that there was danger, but the danger was in her, not in him. It was the danger of passion, the danger of unbridled animal attraction. The thought of it kept her from closing the gap between them at the same time that it intensified her desire to close it. She looked up at him, willing her gaze to stay steady and her pulse to stay calm.

Almost before she realized she had decided what to do, she took a step back. Barnes didn’t move. His gaze held her eyes, and she knew that she was still in his thrall. To break the spell, she would have to break the silence.

“We should get back before luncheon,” she said a little haltingly. “I don’t want to be missed.” Still, she couldn’t look away from him, and he didn’t answer. What was it about this man? Finally, she looked down at the floor and the spell was broken at last.

“You’re right,” said Barnes, “we should.” He said it cheerfully, as though nothing had passed between them, and for a moment Georgiana thought she might have imagined their connection. But then he held the door open for her, and she had to pass in front of him to go out just as she had passed in front of him to come in. Once again, her skirts brushed his boots. And again, his scent of the soil and all that grew from it suffused her senses. As she walked past him the feel of his eyes on her back was as real, as tactile, as the feel of his hands would have been. It had been real, she knew. It
was
real.

They walked up to the house together in silence. Lady Georgiana didn’t even attempt conversation; she was entirely focused on being able, once they reached Penfield, to appear as though this had been an ordinary garden tour.

This she was able to do, and, when they got there, she thanked him prettily for his time.

“It was my pleasure,” he said, and watched her go up the stairs.

As she went up to her room to gather her wits and change her clothes, both of which had been more than a little disordered by her morning’s activities, he went back outside and around to the kitchen garden in the back of the house. He slipped through the back door that led into the scullery. There, a buxom, strapping, red-cheeked girl of about nineteen was ironing and folding freshly laundered sheets.

“Ah, Maureen,” said Barnes. “I thought I might find you here.”

“Ah, Bruce,” said Maureen, echoing his tone with a subtle but discernible Irish brogue, “you can find me here most times, as you well know.”

“I do,” he said, as he walked up behind her. “But I never know if I’ll find you alone.” As he said it, he swept her auburn hair away from the back of her neck and kissed her just under her left ear.

Maureen put her iron down and leaned into his kiss. She was a smart, resourceful girl, and until she met Bruce Barnes she’d managed to keep clear of the men of Penfield and their guests, some of whom thought it was their God-given right to have their way with any scullery maid who struck their fancy. Barnes, though, struck
her
fancy, and when he had first appeared at Penfield the previous year, she had decided that he would be the one she’d let have her. She’d never regretted it.

Maureen closed and bolted both the door to the garden and the inner door to the kitchen, and then walked behind Barnes just as he had walked behind her. She put her hands on his shoulders, and then traced the contours of his back down to the waist of his pants. She slipped her hands under the waistband, and then circled them around to the front so her arms were around him and she gripped his already erect penis.

He had both hands on the table she’d been using to iron the sheets, and he bent over at the waist. He stretched his left leg behind him and she straddled it, rubbing herself against the back of his thigh as she stroked his cock and felt it grow harder in her hand. The suddenness of his appearance, the lack of any preamble to their sex, and the insistent throbbing of his penis in her hand set her on fire. She moved her hands back to his waist and turned him around to face her. They didn’t kiss; they seldom did. Instead, she unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her mouth against his bare chest, hard.

Her mouth moved to his nipple, and she took it in. Her teeth played along the edges of the areola, hard enough almost to bruise. Barnes was breathing deeply, holding her hips hard against his. As she bit, she circled her tongue around his nipple, feeling it firm, yet strangely yielding in her mouth. And then her teeth closed and clamped on, and she worked his nipple slowly back and forth, all the while keeping her tongue on its tip. He let out a cry that was part pain, part pleasure.

She stopped abruptly. “Hush!” she said. “Cook will hear you.”

He could only grunt in reply.

He took her by the waist, lifted her off the floor, and turned to put her on the table. He made short work of her apron, dress, and drawers, and pulled her to the very edge of the table. He took his cock out of his pants, stepped between her legs, and with one motion was inside her—deep inside her. She gasped. It almost hurt.

She moved even closer to the edge of the table until her thighs were completely off it and she could straighten her body at the hips. Only then did she feel the full, explosive power of his contact with her. She wanted him ever deeper, to feel him reaching to her core, and to feel the lips of her pussy pulling him in.

He took her firm young ass in both his hands so he could push deeper, and he squeezed the two muscles of her buttocks, hard enough to leave marks—he’d left them before. The harder he gripped her, the more the pressure intensified her pleasure. She was tight to him, and she felt her clitoris graze the base of him every time he moved into her. Every thrust seemed just a little deeper than the one before, and every thrust brought her closer to climax.

Together they rose to that climax, and together they reached it. Just as she turned liquid, she felt him shudder and pull her to him. The liquid turned to fire as she succumbed to her orgasm, and she held him close as he tightened, tightened, and then slowly relaxed.

She released him, and they smiled at each other conspiratorially as they rearranged their clothes. She watched as he tucked the instrument of her satisfaction back into his trousers, and gloried in the afterglow of her animal excitement.

For his part, Barnes gloried in the idea that an earl’s daughter might be within his grasp.

T
he Loughlins’ dining room, small for the house, sat twenty comfortably. When more than that number were to dine, Lady Loughlin preferred laying the food out in a buffet to converting another, larger room to accommodate the crowd at table. She had always preferred the ad hoc to the formal, and enjoyed letting her guests spread out through the various drawing rooms and parlors, with groups forming as they would.

There was still the best part of a week to go before the masquerade, and the party at the house was still small. It was nevertheless too big to sit in the dining room, and the evening after Georgiana’s excursion to the peacock pavilion, Lady Loughlin watched with interest to see how the guests would divvy themselves up.

Lady Loughlin’s taste in people was more varied than that of most others of her class. She took pleasure in populating her house with men and women who interested her, regardless of rank or background. When she was younger, she tempered this inclination in the interest of her own social mobility, but now that she was secure in her position she felt free to indulge it.