Page 23 of The Widower Without a Will
The words lit Martha on fire.
He thought she was spectacular.
He considered her incomparable.
And he wanted her so badly that he was torturing himself to keep from having her.
“Because you have been a bad student,” she whispered, as wickedly as she might say a dirty word, “and you have not sufficiently considered alternate perspectives on this topic.”
He rasped back, “How am I to consider alternate perspectives?”
To which Martha replied: “Lock the door.”
Chapter Nine
Martinlockedthedoor.
All three of them: the one to the foyer, the one to the rear corridor, and the one to the side gallery in which residents sometimes sat to read the newspapers.
He locked the doors, and he was alone with Martha, who watched him with dark, expectant eyes.He thought he might die if she didn’t give him another command.His heart was beating wildly, his blood pumping through every artery of his body with a force it hadn’t known for decades.
Rising from her chair, she stretched out her hand.Martin closed the distance between them to take it.Her fingers were warm and sure.She tugged him as close as they had been moments before.“You are going to kiss me now,” she whispered, “and you are not going to feel any guilt about it, because I am asking you to do it and because you want to do it.”
He did want to do it.All he had wanted for these past three days was to consume her—even, at supper, imagining himself licking the mutton sauce from her fingers.Martin lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her smooth nails.He glanced up to see if he had earned a reprimand, but her eyes were darker than ever, her lips parted on a breath that never became words.He moved his way up her knuckles—small, then big—before flipping her hands so he could press his mouth to each wrist, one after the other.He tasted this soft skin with his tongue.She was a briny cream, a heady rose.
Martin wanted to kiss her lips, and she had asked him to, so he circled his arms around her waist to bring her close and dipped his mouth to hers.
They did not waste time pretending they were polite or demure.Mrs.Bellamy opened her mouth to his, and their tongues touched like the devils they were.Martin heard his breath become ragged.He bent down to her, craving every inch of her, and when her mouth wasn’t enough, he bundled her in his hands to lift her against his body.
Except, of course, she was no dainty debutante, nor he a well-formed rake.He lifted her a half-inch from the ground before his back objected painfully.Mrs.Bellamy pushed her feet back to the floor, glaring at him again with hungry impatience.“Take me to the sofa.”
He led her to the deeper, darker part of the study where bookshelves towered instead of sunlit windows.Here, not long ago, he had held her hand in friendship and told himself that it was enough.
Could he ever have believed that lie?
He meant to seat her on the sofa, as she had commanded.Except her hips were so inviting beneath his palms, and their lips had been separated for too long.She turned to look up at him the very moment he decided he had no more patience, and that was all it took for him to push her against the bookshelf for another kiss.
She wanted this from him.She would get it: every terrible, carnal desire, including lifting her once more—this time, using the power of his legs instead of his back—to prop her against the hip-level shelf that housed records of the estate.Martin could press his cock against her thigh now, stealing her soft warmth through their clothes.He moved his hands to her breasts, seizing them despite the corset that protected their shape, and took her right earlobe with the tips of his teeth.
“Oh yes,” she said on a breath that was far too tense to be a sigh.“Oh, be ruthless with me.Tease me—even when I want you to stop.”
So Martin lingered on that ear, making it wet with his tongue, scraping it with his teeth, blowing on it with soft breaths, until Mrs.Bellamy writhed against his cock so much that he couldn’t concentrate any longer.
He slipped a hand down to her ankle, which had coiled around his thigh.“What should I do next, mistress?”
Her hands gripped around his neck.“Find out if I am wet enough for you yet.”
How he had been hoping that would be her command.Martin slid his fingers up the inside of her skirts, tracing the skin of her calf, her knee, her thigh, until he found the coarse hair protecting her hot, greedy folds.They were moist but not so wet that his hand became slick, and so Martin pressed his thumb into her apex and asked, “What do you want now?”
“Your tongue,” she gasped, trembling a little in his grip, and Martin tortured her further by kissing her mouth first.
Then, sinking to his knees, he hooked her legs over his shoulders to share her weight with the bookshelf and positioned his tongue on her quim.Here, she tasted of salt water, like a tonic for a sore throat, and he partook of her like an ailing man.Desperately.Lustily.Demandingly.He explored her geography with his tongue and learned her desires as she panted against the bookshelves.“Stay right there,” she commanded at one point, “and don’t slow down.No, don’t speed up, either.Just like that.Stay right there.Fuck me with your tongue.”
And so he did.He was her pupil, the Socrates to her Aspasia, and from her he would learn why this was neither corrupt nor evil.
Or he would give over his soul to the devil, once and for all, and at last live free of the fear of failure and the chains of guilt.
She came, not in a burst or shudder, but in a light, surprised cry of, “Lord Preston!”Martin only knew she had achieved ecstasy—or he had delivered her to it—because her whole body relaxed, and she sighed, “Oh, well done.”
