Captured

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520

Macon GA 31201

Captured

Copyright © 2008 by Anna J. Evans ISBN: 1-59998-226-9

Edited by Linda Ingmanson
Cover by Anne Cain

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: February 2008
www.samhainpublishing.com

Captured

Anna J. Evans

To my readers. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Lillian held her breath as she turned the key, willing the door not to creak on its hinges and alert the household staff still working the lower levels of the four-story brownstone. Her father and older brother were attending the morning service near Harvard and would be gone for hours if they went to lunch after church. She finally had time to take the first steps toward her utter ruination, and she would be damned if something as ridiculous as a squeaky door would stand in her way.

But all was quiet as she stepped down into the room that had once belonged to her younger sister Sarah. It still made her heart ache a bit to see the tiny bed in its place by the wall, the toys in their positions, covered in dust. Over a decade had passed since they put four-year-old Sarah and, soon after, her beloved mother in the ground during the winter of 1886, but Lillian still felt the sorrow living in the room. The emotion was not for the dead; Lillian had come to peace with their passing long ago. Her sadness was for her father, a man who had never recovered from the loss of his youngest child and the woman he loved more than anything else in the world.

“And now you would wound him again, perhaps as mortally as he was wounded the first time,” Lillian whispered to herself as she closed and locked the door behind her, smothering a cough as the dust invaded her nostrils.

Her gaze traveled to the camera, already mounted on its tripod in the corner, and she willed herself to be overwhelmed with guilt, to stop this scandalous plan before she could take it a single step further. She waited, breathed deeply and watched the motes float through the bright morning sun, but nothing stirred in her heart or mind. There was no guilt, no shame, only that same breathless anticipation that had tormented her the entire week, making her unable to finish her meals, or stitch a single straight line on her embroidery.

“You are a wicked girl,” she whispered into the quiet air, a smile on her face as the sun brightened even more, as if the very universe approved of her contrary nature.

No, you are not a girl, but a wicked woman. A woman long past due for a taste of the abandon you crave
.

The idea made Lillian giddy, and she slipped out of her house shoes without a second thought. The journey of a thousand miles began with one step, after all, and it would be better if the sound of her wooden heels weren’t heard tromping about. She was supposed to be taken to her bed with a stomach illness, and had asked her father to give her maid the message that she wouldn’t want breakfast or dressing help this morning. Margaret was notoriously overly solicitous, however, and Lillian knew she would be upstairs in a flash if she heard the slightest movement. She wouldn’t want Lillian to suffer a round of the heaves alone. The woman had been a mother to her since her own mother had passed when she was thirteen and took her position as such very seriously.

And what will Margaret think when the scandal hits? Will she despair that she taught you so very little? That she failed to bring you up to take your rightful place in Society?

Lillian pushed the thoughts away as she double checked the distance between the dark blue sheet she had laid on the ground and the camera. Carefully, she made a few small adjustments to the focus. She couldn’t think of Margaret or her father or her brother or she would never complete this plan. She must think only of her freedom, of the right to pursue a life beyond the advantageous marriage her father insisted she make within the year. She was already nearly twenty-three, practically an old maid, and he would wait no longer for her to make a match of her own choosing. Time was running out.

He said he was worried what would become of her if he were to take ill and die and she be left alone in the world, but Lillian knew the truth. Her dear father was far more concerned what would happen to himself and her brother, Curtis, not to mention the family banking business, if Lillian were allowed to remain a single woman. The longer she was unmarried, the more time she had to possibly make another “mistake”. Her father had moved heaven and earth to tame the winds of scandal the first two times, but they all

knew that such a miracle could never be wrought a third. In any event, he cared far too greatly for their place in Bostonian society to risk such a repeat offense.

The first time she’d landed herself in trouble, she’d been lucky enough to escape her father’s rage. Fair or not, the young man involved had borne the brunt of it. Still, she’d thought her life couldn’t become any more unbearable after that night. Losing the pleasure of
his
company, the comfort of the dreams they’d spun together, had been devastating, made her feel as if she’d lost her only friend in the world.

She’d been allowed more freedom than she realized, however, for her next indiscretion revealed how very narrow her world could become if her father so willed it.

She’d been watched like a wayward infant since the day two years past when her father discovered her on the beach near their estate in Martha’s Vineyard, wearing nothing but her undergarments while swimming in the ocean with two boys from another high-ranking Boston family. Nothing happened between Lillian and the boys beyond some innocent kisses, but from her father’s outrage you would have thought she’d been engaged in the sex act with both of them at the instant he found her.

Engaged in the sex act
. Good Lord, even thinking the words made things low in her body twist and a desperate ache take up between her legs. How she wanted something to fill her there, something hard and hot and masculine, something other than her own small, soft fingers.

She’d learned to give herself pleasure when she was barely fifteen with the aid of some naughty books she’d spirited away from the locked drawer in her father’s desk. The pictures of half-naked women, the stories of innocents being ravished, had made her long to be ravished herself, and led to nearly eight years of increasingly bold experimentation with her own body.

But she was tired of making herself splinter apart, tired of muffling her moans into her pillow. She wanted a man to take her, a man who set her aflame the way those books did, the way her fantasies did. The way Arnold Halewater, the fifty-something man her father had chosen as her betrothed, never would. The idea of losing her practically ancient maidenhead to Arnold was enough to turn her stomach, and provided excellent

motivation for her theatrics with her father that very morning as she feigned a vile intestinal ailment.

She would not let her long awaited first encounter be with such a fat, pasty-looking, self-important old poop.

“No, I most certainly will not.” She turned to look at herself in the small mirror on the wall as she shrugged off her thick cotton robe, letting it fall to the floor at her feet.

The sight of her own nude body took her breath away and immediately sent blood rushing to her cunny where she knew the petals there would start to plump, to grow slick and ready for physical love. Who knew the sight of her own form would be so incredibly arousing? She’d never had the chance to simply look at herself, her bare skin totally exposed, for more than a few stolen glances. She had been aided in dressing and undressing since she was a child, encouraged to struggle in and out of her wrappings as quickly as possible to avoid taking a chill even in the midst of the warmest summer days.

But now…now she could take her time…and maybe even imagine what a man, one man in particular, might think as he took her in.

Her hand trembling slightly, despite the warmth of the unusually fair spring morning, Lillian stroked the column of her throat, feeling the erotic pulse of her blood beneath the thin skin. She was pale still, as fashion demanded, but she knew her pallor would not last long once it was warm enough to take her bicycle out in the park for her regular morning ride. Her dark, nearly black hair spilled down around her shoulders, falling forward to cover her breasts. As she moved her hand slowly down her body, Lillian tossed the hair back, exposing her full, heavy mounds and dark rose nipples to the hungry eyes of her own reflection.

Her nipples were already puckered into tight buds that tingled and stung, aching for attention. Lillian let her fingers glide lightly over the tight tips. Air rushed from her parted lips as the cool skin of her hands met the hot, needy flesh of her breasts. It felt so sinfully beautiful to roll her nipples between her fingers and thumb, to feel the tightness in her belly burn into a fierce knot of pure heat, pure desire. She gradually increased her pressure, her breath came faster, and the reflection in the mirror threw back her head.

When she brought her face back up, her cheeks were pink, her lips parted and her eyes glassy, as if she’d had one too many after-dinner sherries in the parlor, lingering over a game of chess with Curtis. She looked wanton, abandoned and more blatantly sensual than any of the posed pictures in the erotic novellas she’d managed to hoard under her mattress during the past several years.

Lillian suddenly knew that this was the woman she had to capture, this was the image that would drive the man of her dreams straight into her bed and between her thighs. A quick comparison of the mirror and the sheet revealed the light in the room to be fairly even. The metering would still hold true. She had a gift for guessing the exposure she would need for any given photograph, could almost do so without the special meter she had purchased at the photographer’s convention in New York last fall. A glance from the camera to the sheet and camera to the mirror revealed them also to be of nearly the same distance. It was close enough for the focus to be sharp if she were simply to turn the tripod in the direction she now faced.

She’d spent hours devising a way to activate the shutter on her camera without standing behind the lens, creating a trip switch with an old bicycle pump and a length of rubber tubing and cleverly hiding the device under a pillow on the sheet. But now, she threw that preparation to the wind. A good photographer had to seize the moment, work with the subject as it chose to behave in its natural setting, even if that subject was oneself.

In seconds, Lillian had the camera positioned next to her, part of the tripod visible in the mirror, but the main focus on her own nude form. Unfortunately, her blissful, sensual expression had disappeared in the few moments she devoted to being the artist and not the subject, but she knew she could recapture the feeling easily enough. She just had to breathe, to relax, to concentrate on the lustful feelings that were always so close to the surface, and had been for more years than she could count.

She moved her hands back to her breasts, cupping their heaviness, massaging the erotically charged skin as she imagined
he
would someday very soon. With her eyes closed, she could almost convince herself that her small hands were large, lightly

calloused ones, and that the fingers she brushed across her nipples were dry and made rough from hours spent soaking prints in the chemical baths needed to develop photos. That roughness made them scratch delightfully against her sensitive skin, made her moan and her quim throb with an even more insistent need.

She could almost hear him moan in response, knew that he was losing control as he pinched her nipples almost painfully. He wanted her, this instant, but they’d both been waiting for this moment for too long to rush. No, he would take her slowly, wait until she wept with need for him, until the puss between her thighs wept as well, before he pulled down his trousers and revealed his long, hard—

Lillian reached over with one hand and hit the button to take the picture, eyes still closed. Quickly she advanced the film, opening her eyes only a split second before depressing the switch again. The look of surprise mingled with lust on her face excited her. The idea of the photograph she had just created excited her, and the idea that
he
would be the first person, probably the only person, to ever see that photograph excited her even more.