My Lady's Pleasure (26 page)

“We may as well begin at once,” she said, sighing and standing up. The earl stood also, and they started to make their way back to the house.

As they walked, he wondered that his hostess could let her spirits be brought so low by this mischief. He couldn’t know what was really on her mind, which was the image of her husband and her maid in their little dungeon. Neither said much.

They parted in the front hall, each with a job to do. For Lady Loughlin, it meant talking to her husband, and she went up to her room to pull herself together for the task. She never had the chance, for he was in their joint sitting room, waiting for her.

“Paulette.” He stood as she entered.

She sat down heavily, not saying a word. He started to speak, but she put up her hand.

“Before you say anything else, there are two things I must ask of you, and I want to get them out of the way.”

He nodded and sat.

“First, I just explained to Lord Grantsbury about the notes that Lady Georgiana and Miss Niven have received, and we have agreed that the best step to take is to offer the servants a reward for any relevant information leading to our finding out who is behind this. Can I ask you to take care of that?”

“Of course. Consider it done.”

“Second, I want Jean out of this house as soon as is humanly possible. I don’t ever want to see her face again. We can tell the guests and servants that her mother has suddenly taken ill.”

“She is packing right now, under the assumption that she must be gone immediately.”

The two looked at each other, and then Lord Loughlin said, “I can’t imagine what you must think, but I suspect this must be causing you much pain, and I am very sorry.”

“Did it have to be
my
maid?” she asked him in a low voice. “Couldn’t it have been the parlor maid, or the scullery maid, or the cook, or even the sheep, for all that?” Her voice rose in tone and volume. “But my maid!
My maid!
” For the first time since she’d found them, she felt anger. There had been sadness and a sense of betrayal. There had been bewilderment and plain old surprise. But now there was anger.
“Why?”

Her husband looked at the floor. “Do you want me to tell you how it began?” He spoke softly.

“Yes!” she almost screamed, and then, not so loudly, “No.” Then a pause as she considered. “Yes, yes, I do.”

The emotions she’d run through over the last hour had depleted her, and she felt her anger ebbing as quickly as it had come on. She leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them to look at her husband. “Tell me.”

He looked at her, took a deep breath, and began. He had felt Jean’s eyes on him from almost the moment she arrived. It was when Freddy was eight and Robbie was twelve, and Lady Loughlin had been so absorbed by the needs of her children that there had been very little intimacy between man and wife. But there was something about Jean—her look, her movements, the way she stood just a little too close to him—that made him think she was available to him.

Even so, he told her, nothing would have come of it had he not had certain . . . urges. At this, Lady Loughlin sat up a bit straighter. She knew nothing about these urges, and wanted to have them explained.

Explain he did: about his desire to be commanded, to submit, to play roles, to be hit. Paulette’s eyes widened as he spoke. She had, once or twice, heard or read that such people existed, but she never dreamed she was married to one.

She took it all in. When he’d told the whole story, about how Jean first approached him, about how he introduced her to his urges, about their games, she really had only one question.

“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” The hurt she’d felt at being betrayed was replaced by a different hurt. There was something important about him that he felt he couldn’t share with her. She had been excluded from this most intimate part of his makeup.

“How could I expose you to such a thing?” he asked, clearly distressed. “How could I ask you to participate in something like that? You’re my wife; you’re a lady; you have a position in society. I love you. How could I possibly expect that . . .” He trailed off.

“But how could you
not
have asked me? I’m your wife.” She said it simply.

He looked at her, surprised, and said, almost in a whisper, “I thought you would laugh.”

His eyes welled, and her heart melted. She went to him and knelt beside his chair. She took his hands in hers and looked straight into his brimming eyes. “I have been married to you for almost a quarter century, and in that time I have laughed many and many a time. But not one of those laughs, not one, has ever been at your expense. I never would have married a man I could laugh at.”

He closed his eyes, and he wept.

 

Dinner that night was a blur for Lady Loughlin. She made her way among her guests, laughing and smiling, but having little idea of either what she was saying or what was being said to her. She caught glimpses of her husband, engaged also in trying to make their guests comfortable, and she could see that he wasn’t quite as good at it as she knew herself to be. His smile was wooden and his laugh was forced. Still, she was happy to note, the atmosphere seemed merry and unconstrained.

Had the atmosphere seemed dampened by recent events, she might have exerted herself to remain with her guests until the last went up to bed. Since things were going well, she felt she could excuse herself with those who retired earliest. It wasn’t much past nine when she went up to her room. Without a maid to help her out of her frock or into her nightclothes, she simply stepped out of her dress and left it on the floor where it lay. She didn’t bother with a nightdress, and climbed into her bed wearing only her shift. Within moments, she was asleep.

She had been drained thoroughly by recent events, and her body was desperate to be rejuvenated. She slept deeply.

When she woke, she looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was seven, and she’d been asleep almost ten hours. It had felt like but a moment, but a moment so restorative that she felt like a new woman in a new world. Yesterday, it seemed that everything was collapsing around her ears. This morning she felt like herself again. The Lady Loughlin she knew herself to be could handle all that and more. She rang for tea and, when Rose brought it, she drank deeply and gratefully.

Her thoughts were of her husband, and when she’d finished her cup she got out of bed and pulled her dressing gown around her. She went out into their shared sitting room, and then to his bedchamber beyond. She knocked softly—she didn’t want to wake him if he was still asleep—and when she got no response she carefully opened the door and slipped in. She closed it noiselessly behind her and stood for a moment, watching him.

Robert Loughlin had ever been a dignified, considerate sleeper. He never drooled or snored, and when they shared a bed he stayed on his side and used no more than his share of the bedclothes. And there he was, lying on his side with his hands under his head, mouth closed, breathing silently.

She watched him for a few moments, and then took off her dressing gown and stepped out of her shift. She walked around to the other side of the bed, lifted the covers, and slipped in beside him.

Robert woke to the warmth of his wife’s breath on the back of his neck. As he came fully into consciousness, and the events of the day before came back to him, he felt flooded with gratitude and relief. He hadn’t known whether she would ever forgive him, whether she would ever come back to his bed, and here she was, her body cupped to his, her arm over his waist.

He didn’t know when she’d come in or whether she was asleep, and he lay still so as not to disturb her. As their bodies rose and fell with their breathing, he felt her skin moving against his, and it aroused him more than he would have thought such a small thing ever could. It had been months since they had made love, and the time apart combined with yesterday’s emotions made her feel new to him again. New and very much worth having.

She stirred, and he sensed that she was awake. She had never been asleep, but had only kept still for him.

He turned over and faced his wife. His beautiful, intelligent paragon of a wife.

He took her face in his hands. “My love,” he said, and kissed her.

She put her arms around him and cleaved to him. He was bare chested, and she relished the prickly sensation of his rough chest hair on her breasts. Husband and wife held each other tightly, gently rocking back and forth, each finding joy in the embrace of the other.

He was wearing simple muslin pants with a drawstring, and she reached down to untie them and push them down until he could work his legs out of them. They were both completely naked, and they ran their hands down and around each other’s bodies as though they had never done it before.

Robert marveled at her skin, still supple after a twenty-five-year marriage and two children. Paulette traced the muscles of his shoulders and arms, still firm from the active role he took in managing the grounds and the horses. She put her hands on his chest, a palm over each nipple, and felt its definition with her fingertips.

She took one hand away and put his small dark nipple into her mouth. She ran her tongue over and around, and around and over, until he groaned with the pleasure of it.

She turned him onto his back and sat astride him, his cock flattened under her, against his body. She ran her hands over the contours of his chest as though she were studying them for an exam, committing each curve, every freckle to memory. She touched every part of him, and every time she moved to reach him, he felt her vulva move against his penis, each time wetter and more frictionless than the time before.

He put his hands on her thighs and started to sit up, but she put her hand in the middle of his chest to keep him from rising.

“Let me do this,” she whispered.

She shifted her weight forward, came up on her knees, and put her hands on either side of his head. He felt the air, suddenly cool on his moistened cock. She bent her arms so her breasts came close to his face, and swayed, just a little, back and forth, to keep them in motion. He reached up and took one breast in each hand and buried his face between them, relishing their firm, supple, ripe feeling on his cheeks. He breathed in the scent of her. She never wore perfume of any kind, and her scent was all her. It was musty and musky, with a little sweetness and a barely detectable sharp note. He would have known it blindfolded.

She slid down his body so her breasts were on his chest and her mouth on his. She ran her tongue over the seam where his lips met, and his mouth opened to meet hers. They kissed like newlyweds, finding their connection in their intertwining.

Paulette sat back up so she could reach beneath her and find his cock. She held it in her hand, feeling its weight, its girth, and the hardness that still, after all these years, surprised her. She slipped it inside her.

Feeling him fill her, she wondered how they possibly could have lost sight of how right, and how important, this was. This was what completed them as man and wife. This was the privilege of intimacy. This was the joy of the freedom to do as you would with another’s body, and to grant the same freedom to someone else. They would reclaim that as theirs and theirs alone.

Her arousal had begun when she’d slid into bed beside him and felt his naked back against her chest. It had worked itself into a pressing need as she’d touched him and felt his penis harden beneath her. Now, with him inside her, that need was being answered. She braced herself against his chest and moved up and down, feeling her wetness and their sweat ease the motion. To be emptied and filled, emptied and filled, built up her pleasure to be all-consuming.

He took both her hands in one of his so he could pull her down to him, and now her clitoris was in contact with him. The combined sensation of having him inside her and feeling the friction of his skin on her clit drove her to the edge. She felt that last buildup as the warmth concentrated down the back of her legs, and then she was over, taking him with her.

It was a deep, long onrush of pleasure, and it took her over completely. She succumbed to it, letting it carry both of them to a place they hadn’t been in a very long time.

They lay together, her head on his shoulder, his softening penis inside her, for a long time. Gradually, the demands the day would place on both of them infiltrated the haze of their postcoital reverie, and Paulette extracted herself from the tangled bedding.

She pulled her dressing gown back around her and sat on the edge of the bed, smiling at her husband.

“We have a lot to do today if the masquerade is going to come off tomorrow,” she said.

“We do indeed, particularly if we want to avoid any further incidents,” her husband agreed.

“Will you get the servants together and tell them about the reward?” she asked.

“I did it last night after dinner, and then I made it a point to be available in the library to anyone who wanted to come forward in private, but no one did.”

“Do you suppose that’s because no one knows, or because no one’s telling?” she asked.

“I would imagine no one knows. There aren’t many on our staff who would want something like that happening in the house, and I suspect most would come forward even if there weren’t a reward.”

“I suppose all we can do is be vigilant and hope for the best.” Lady Loughlin smiled her characteristic sunny smile. “In the meantime, I will track down Freddy and see if he knows anything about this.” She leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and headed back to her room to bathe and dress.

As she was leaving, she turned back to him and said, “Once the party is over and the house is empty again, will you take me down to the cellar and show me what you have there?”

He gave a half smile. “I will,” he said.