WidowsWickedWish (31 page)

She undressed before the window, her eyes on the sleeping
man, anticipation humming through her veins.

Olivia loved him, had always loved him. Since she was a girl
of six and he a boy of thirteen, he had been the center of her world. No matter
they’d been apart for much of those years. Always she’d thought of him and
dreamed of him.

When she’d wished to be wicked that long-ago day outside the
stables, she’d truly been wishing she might one day dare to reach for him, to
pull him to her and capture his lips, capture his attention, his love.

And she’d made her wish come true. She, the awkward girl,
the shy debutant, the proper lady, had reached for what she wanted. She’d dared
to invite him into her bed, into her body, into her heart.

Jack twitched and muttered beneath his breath when Olivia
climbed on the bed to kneel beside him. She paused, waiting for him to awaken,
for his eyes to open and a smile to lift his wonderfully full lips. But he only
rolled his head on his pillow before stilling once more.

With a featherlight touch, she ran one finger over his
square jaw to find his whiskers rough and his skin warm. She trailed her finger
through the cleft of his chin to his lips where she paused to press gently
before tracing their contours from one corner to the other.

Jack’s tongue came out to wet his bottom lip. Olivia leaned
over him, carefully bringing her hands to rest on his chest, and glided her
tongue along the same path, chased his when it retreated into his mouth.

She kissed him, slowly circling his tongue with hers,
stroking along the sensitive underside until he joined in the kiss. He angled
his head and delved into her mouth, their tongues tangling, a soft hum
vibrating in his throat. Suspecting he was awake, Olivia sifted her fingers
through the coarse hair on his chest, found his nipples and plucked at them.

His big body jerked beneath her, his hips rising from the
bed before falling again.

Breaking the kiss, she leaned back, expecting to see him
gazing up at her only to find that his eyes were still closed, his lashes
fluttering against his cheeks.

Delighted by his unconscious response, by the desire she
heard in the moan that whispered over his lips, Olivia sat back and eased the
covers from his hips and thighs, tossing them to the foot of the bed.

Jack’s cock jutted over his taut abdomen, hard and thick.

Olivia lightly stroked one finger along the root on the
underside of his shaft and he bucked his hips, a raspy groan reverberating
around the otherwise silent room.

She took him in hand, her fingers wrapping nearly all the
way around his girth, and stroked down the hard length, from tip to base.

“Yes,” he moaned.

Again and again she pumped her hand down his shaft, setting
up a rhythm that had him thrusting in counterpoint to her strokes, low groans
rasping between his parted lips.

Olivia felt the familiar arousal course through her body,
felt her cunny pulsing in anticipation, growing wet for him.

“More,” he begged, his hands grappling for purchase on the
mattress.

Olivia rose above him, straddled his lunging hips, and
guided his cock between her legs. She rubbed the fat head over and around her
clit, teasing herself with the promise of what was to come.

But Jack had other ideas.

He pushed against her, nudging insistently, intent upon
thrusting into her even in his sleep.

Olivia brought his cock to the opening of her body and eased
down until the engorged tip penetrated her, stretching her almost painfully.

“Yes, yes,” he panted.

Bracing her hands on his chest, her fingers clenching over
his hard muscles, Olivia took him into her body in one long, smooth glide.

“Ah, fuck me,” Jack growled, his hips lifting to grind
between her spread thighs, foraging deeper into her cunny.

Pleasure arrowed deep into her womb and trembled along her
thighs and up her spine. Her breasts tingled with it and she raised her hands
to cup them, to pinch her nipples, her eyes upon his face, waiting for the
moment he would awake to discover he wasn’t dreaming.

She rose up slowly only to descend down over him, taking his
cock deep into her quim, again and again, nearly mindless with desire,
desperately chasing an orgasm that shivered just beyond her reach.

Jack met each downward glide, thrusting deep inside her
until she could no longer take the exquisite torture. She dropped down over
him, wrapped her hands around his shoulders and changed the angle of their
joining. She strained over him, bore down with each thrust of his hips,
dragging her clit against his hard flesh, filling her quim with his pulsing
cock.

“Jack!” The cry was torn from her as she climaxed around
him, her entire body shaking with the force of her release. On and on it went,
buffeting her in its intensity, until she lost all awareness of herself. There
was only Jack beneath her and his cock thrusting into her body.

Without warning his arms came around her, clasping her hard
to his chest. With a grunt he twisted beneath her. Olivia wrapped her arms
around his back, tucked her knees tight to his hips and rolled with him, dizzy
with the sudden motion while in the last throes of her crisis.

He reared up to his elbows, pressing her bottom to the bed,
forcing his cock deeper into her still convulsing cunny.

“Did you think you could have your wicked way with me and I
would sleep right through it?” Jack’s teeth flashed as he grinned, withdrawing
from her body until only the blunt tip of his shaft remained.

“Thank you,” she whispered, wrapping her legs around his
waist and locking her ankles over his tight buttocks. “Thank you for this
night.”

“If this is how you thank your husband for catering to your
every whim, I’ll be sure to come up with one adventure after another for you to
enjoy.”

“Right now the only adventure I want is you.”

Jack sank into her, filling her with his pulsing shaft once
more. “Tell me. Give me the words, Livy.”

“Your cock,” she whispered, swiveling her hips, taking him
deeper into her body. “Your wonderful, amazing cock.”

Jack dipped over her, his lips dragging down her neck to
burrow into the juncture of her shoulder. She felt his breath billowing over
her skin and thought he might be silently laughing. Then she gave up thinking
altogether when he began to move.

With long, steady strokes, he thrust into her, delving deep,
his hips swiveling between her thighs, grinding his pelvis against her clit.
Olivia felt another orgasm looming and clutched his back, rolling her hips up
to meet each thrust of his cock.

With a cry, she gave herself up to the pleasure, her thighs
trembling as she clasped him to her, pulling him deep into her body. She arched
off the bed, clawing at his back, drowning in the release that slammed into
her.

“Jack!” His name left her in a long wail that ricocheted
around the room.

“Livy, love, yes,” Jack groaned against her shoulder.

The tempo of their lovemaking shifted and his movements
became hard and fast, his thrusts frantic and without finesse. Olivia unwound
her legs and he rose above her on his arms, his eyes finding hers, holding her
gaze as he pounded into her, the slap of their meeting flesh and panting
breaths loud in the shadowy room.

“Not want you?”

She barely heard the words, his voice little more than a
guttural groan above her as he bucked between her splayed thighs, his entire
body shuddering.

Jack fell over her with a soft grunt, his head landing
beside hers on the pillow. Olivia wrapped her arms around his heaving back,
welcoming his weight and the rasp of his whiskered jaw on her shoulder.

“Livy,” he gasped, “I cannot get enough of you.”

She turned and rested her lips at his temple. Her eyes
drifted closed and a wonderful lassitude descended over her. In the final
moments before sleep claimed her, Olivia wondered if he’d not been asking for
the naughty words at all.

“Mama, Charlie’s digging up worms.”

Olivia looked up from the pansies she was carefully planting
in the rich, dark soil of her new garden to find her son sitting back on his
haunches dangling a worm before his eyes. He tilted his head this way and that,
studying the wiggling creature from every angle.

“Half the fun of gardening is digging up worms,” she told
her patently disgusted daughter. “Perhaps you’d like to give it a try?”

“I’ve better things to do with my time than toil in the
dirt,” Fanny replied from her perch on the bottom step of the porch. On her
bent knees rested an open book.

“What are you reading?”

“Fanny found a bunch of stinky old books on the top shelf of
the library,” Charlie said, prompting his sister to shoot him a glare.

“Well, they do stink,” the boy insisted before carefully
laying the worm in the hole whence he’d come. “And they don’t have any
pictures.”

“Well that’s something of a relief,” Olivia murmured.

“They are the diaries of a girl named Edith,” Fanny said,
her eyes dropping to the open book once more. “She lived in this house long
ago.”

“Derrieres?” Charlie giggled. “Why do you want to read some
girl’s bottom?”

“Diaries,” Fanny corrected.

“You shouldn’t read another’s diaries,” Olivia admonished,
biting back a smile at her son’s question.

“I don’t see why not. She’s dead. She won’t know the
difference,” Fanny replied airily.

“Even so, they are her private thoughts.” Olivia returned
her attention to her task, her gloved hands patting the soil around the roots
of the pretty pink blooms that would soon line the walkway to the front porch.

“Her private thoughts weren’t very interesting. She writes
of nothing but what to name her new kitten and which pudding she ate with
dinner.”

“How old was she?”

Fanny flipped back through the pages she’d already perused.
“She’d just celebrated her eighth birthday. I hope when I am eight I’ve more to
write about than kittens and pudding.”

“Would you like a diary?” Olivia reached for another small
clump of flowers.

“I’m far too busy living my life to take the time to write
about it,” Fanny answered with such startling insight that Olivia could only
smile.

“When can we move in?” Charlie asked for the dozenth time
that morning.

“In a few weeks. When the interior renovations are
complete,” Fanny replied, having heard her mother’s answer each of those dozen
times.

“What are renovations?”

“Repairs to the structure of the house.”

“What’s structure?”

“The walls and roof and floors. Don’t you know anything?”

“I know how to dig up worms.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“You don’t even know what disgusting means, Charlie.”

“I know that it’s yucky. Just like you, lady
smarty-petticoats.”

“Now you’re only mimicking Justine.”

“Justine’s my pet sister.”

Over the bickering of her children Olivia heard the screech
of the rusty gate opening and looked up to see an elderly man stepping into the
front garden.

He wore a somber black hat pulled low over his head, two
steel-gray spiral curls dangling from beneath the wide brim. A bushy white
beard and mustache hid the lower half of his face and tumbled down over his
chest. His suit was ill-fitting and wrinkled, the shoulder seams sagging down
his thin arms, the trouser cuffs pooling around his shoes as he came to a halt
upon seeing her kneeling in the dirt.

“I’d heard someone bought the Folly,” he called out by way
of greeting, his voice accented with the slightest Scotts burr. “You must be
Mrs. Bentley.”

“Lady Bentley,” Fanny corrected, hopping down from the
porch.

Olivia shot her a reproachful look as she came to her feet
and stepped over the newly planted bed. “Mrs. Bentley or Lady Bentley. I answer
to both.”

“Ah, a multi-faceted lady just as I’d heard,” the stranger
replied.

“Multi-faceted?” Fanny repeated, seeming to savor the word.

“Like a diamond. My people know a thing or two about
diamonds.” The man continued along the walkway, stopping a few paces from
Olivia.

Ah, of course. She should have known by the long sidelocks
and the austere dress that the man was a Hebrew. In truth she’d only seen a
handful of such men in all of her life and never had she spoken to one.

“My mother was the Diamond when she came out,” Fanny said as
she skipped to Olivia’s side. “She might have married a marquis and been a
duchess one day.”

“Fanny.” Olivia laid her hand on her daughter’s shoulder,
squeezing a warning.

“I’m going to be a princess and live in a castle when I grow
up.” Fanny twisted from beneath her mother’s grasp and continued up the path
until she stood looking up at the man.

“I’ve never been impressed by a title,” he replied. “And I
never will be.”

“Who are you?” Fanny demanded, hands coming to her hips.
“And what are you doing in my garden?”

“Francis Marie,” Olivia hissed. “Where are your manners?”

“Where are his manners?” Fanny countered. “What sort of
person strolls into a lady’s private garden without so much as a
by-your-leave?”

“You read private derrieres,” Charlie piped up, coming to
his feet and lifting one pudgy hand to shade his eyes as he stared up at the
man. “Fanny read a dead girl’s bottom.”

“Diaries,” Fanny corrected, shoving the book behind her
back.

The man shook his head, soft laughter tripping from lips
hidden behind his beard and mustache.

“Have you never cut your payot?” Fanny asked, all smiles as
she adroitly shifted the topic.

He reached one gnarled hand up to tug at the curl, pulling
it down his chest nearly to the first button of his coat. “What do you think?”

“What’s a payot?” Charlie asked.

“The curls he wears,” Fanny answered with a roll of her
eyes.

“I’ve never cut my curls. See how long they are?” Charlie
ambled to the gentleman, his limp more pronounced after hours spent kneeling in
the garden.

“You must be Lord Palmerton.” The old man peered down at the
boy with fistfuls of blond curls in his hands. “The boy with the special foot.”

“How did you know my brother has a special foot?” Fanny
asked suspiciously.

“I good friend of mine wrote to me of the little lord who’d
been born with a unique foot and I journeyed to Town to make the acquaintance
of the boy.”

“What’s unique?”

“One of a kind,” Fanny answered her brother, wrapping one
arm around his shoulders in a protective gesture.

“I’m sorry, but who are you?” Olivia stepped up to the man,
placing one hand on each of her children’s heads, hope soaring within her so
that she felt nearly faint.

“Did I not say?”

She shook her head, quite unable to form words.

“Dr. Goldman at your service.”

“Oh where the devil could he be?” Olivia murmured as she
brought the curricle whipping around the corner onto St. James’s Street,
narrowly missing two gentlemen just stepping off the curb.

“Female drivers,” one of them shouted, his fist waving in
the air.

“My apologies,” she called back as she scanned the street
before her.

Pendergrass had not been remotely forthcoming when she’d
arrived in Bedford Square with the children to find her husband gone from home.

“Lord Hastings came for Mr. Bentley shortly after you left,”
the butler had said, ignoring her agitation as she prodded the children up the
stairs.

“Henry? Where on earth would Henry and Jack go to in the
middle of the day?” she’d asked, darting a quick glance behind her as
Pendergrass followed her down the hallway toward the nursery.

“I’m afraid I can’t say with any degree of certainty, my
lady.”

“No, no. Of course not, but if you had to venture a guess?”

“I would not dare to presume.”

“Of for bloody sake, Pendergrass, presume.”

“It has been my experience that gentlemen of a certain
standing, that is gentlemen with time on their hands—”

“Out with it.”

“Maybe they’ve gone to Uncle Henry’s club,” Fanny had
suggested as she pushed open the nursery door.

“Precisely,” the butler agreed.

“Henry belongs to a number of clubs. How shall I find them?”

“Don’t you know anything, Mama? All those gentlemen’s clubs
are at St. James’s Street.”

St. James’s Street was terribly congested. Olivia maneuvered
out of the path of an oncoming coach, halted behind a slow-moving cart, and
waited for a break in the traffic. She swept her gaze over the buildings,
picking out numbers and realizing she still had a ways to go to reach those
blocks that housed the gentlemen’s clubs.

Pulling out from behind the cart, she gripped the reins
tight. Traffic had thinned out ahead and she fully intended to take advantage
of the open road, making up for lost time.

So much lost time. Years and years spent wishing things
might have been different. Weeks spent reveling in Jack’s arms while she
pretended the future did not matter, that she could somehow be content with a
short-lived affair.

And this past month. Good Lord, she’d been a fool to think
that she must hide her true self from him, that she must somehow make up for
all that he had lost in marrying her.

Jack loved her.

He’d shown her in myriad ways. With his tender touch, with
his unbridled passion, with his warm body spooned around hers in the night.
He’d riled her temper, listened to her wailing complaints, laughed at her
misspoken phrases, forgiven her part in her mother’s trap, taken Fanny and
Charlie into his heart, and accepted her barren state.

He’d encouraged her to embrace that daring side of herself
that she’d hidden away in order to become the proper wife she’d thought he
wanted, buying her a curricle and patiently teaching her to drive it. He’d
arranged for a night of gambling, foregoing the amusement for fear she would
turn up her nose at the impropriety had he been beside her.

He’d purchased a home for them, a perfectly wonderful old
house where the children could run screaming about the halls and roam free over
acres of land.

And today. Oh, today he’d made her fondest dream, her
wildest wish come true.

She didn’t want to waste another minute, wanted to shout her
love from the rooftops, and finally, finally become the wife he deserved, the
woman she’d buried inside her until he’d come along and set her free.

A flash of color up ahead accompanied by the merry tinkling of
bells pulled Olivia from her thoughts, forcing her attention back to the street
just in time to laugh in astonishment.

A bright yellow curricle perched high atop the tallest
wheels she’d ever seen turned the corner, white and blue ribbons streaming out behind,
fluttering in the breeze. The top was down and perched on the seat was a tall
woman with bright red hair spilling from beneath a pink and blue tricorne hat.
She wore a matching dress, yards and yards of pink and blue silk and lace that
swirled around her and drifted over the side of the smart conveyance.

The lady held the reins firmly in her gloved hands. Beside
her a young man dressed to the nines in a periwinkle-blue velvet coat and gray
breeches held on to his seat for dear life. As they came abreast of Olivia
where she’d halted in the middle of the street, his tall beaver hat flew
through the air, revealing a tangle of dark curls haphazardly tied back in a
queue.

“My hat!” the young man cried, his head whipping around to
watch as it flew through the air and landed to roll down the street.

“Hush, Tag,” the woman replied in the same husky voice
Olivia remembered from the day she’d seen her in front of Mother’s house.

“Good Lord,” Olivia breathed as the curricle and its
outrageously attired occupants flew past.

“Smart gig, Mrs. Bentley,” the woman called back over her
shoulder.

“Watch the road, Georgie!” cried the frightened young man,
little more than a boy really.

Olivia turned to watch the curricle dart around a wagon that
had stopped in the street. Yellow wheels lifted from the cobblestones before
landing with a jingle of bells.

“Get a move on up there!”

Spinning around to face the road ahead, Olivia realized
she’d reached White’s and there in the bowed window sat Henry and Jack, peering
out at the street.

Without a thought to the traffic behind her, Olivia yanked
on the reins, bringing the matched pair to a halt. Stopping only long enough to
set the breaks and loop the leather straps around the handle, Olivia lifted her
skirts up to her knees and scrambled down over the side, her booted feet
foregoing the stirrup and scrabbling on the spokes of the wheel.

She circled the horses, her gown gripped in her gloved
hands. Shouts and curses rose all around her as the other drivers realized she
intended to park her curricle right in the middle of the street. Olivia ignored
them all, intent only upon reaching Jack.

She edged around three gawking gentlemen, darted between two
more, before reaching the relative safety of the narrow walkway. Glancing at
the bowed window she found Henry standing with his nose pressed to the glass,
his mouth open in a perfect O of surprise.

The door swung open and Jack sprinted down the steps.

“Jack!” Olivia took flight, launching herself into the air,
trusting her husband to catch her.

“Olivia.” He stumbled back, his arms wrapping around her.

Winding her arms around his neck and her legs around his
waist, she held on to him for all she was worth.

“What’s happened?” he asked, his voice a deep grumble.

“You,” she breathed into his neck. “You happened to me.”

Jack laughed, tightened his arms around her and spun in a
slow circle.