Blooming: Veronica (22 page)

He frowned at the shirttails that covered her ass. In a frenzy to see all of her at a glance, he grabbed hold of the collar and ripped everything away. Immediately, he looked over her bare shoulder to find her full breasts swaying back and forth, the nipples huge, reddened, and fiercely hard. The sight of her readiness inflamed him.

He dispatched the dildo from her body, got himself out, and mounted her as she writhed on hands and knees. One thrust sent his released cock into her buttocks, a shallow trespass.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she screamed, squirming. “More. Give me more. Give me your all.”

Normally, he was all self-control. With her, he was impulse, spontaneity, urges.

Ah, but without her, he was nothing.

Holding nothing back, not even encroaching insanity—a regular visitor to him lately—he gave her all that he had and then some, a wild pushing and plunging. And then the impossible happened. She began moving with him, her hands fisting in the coverlet as she rocked.

He came up on his knees, pulled her up with him, and roughly clasped her full breasts, one in each hand, as he went at her, grunting as he readied to leave his cum inside her, deep inside her, where no man had ever ventured before.

On a possessive shout, he ejaculated, the hot fluid flash gushing into her as he cried savagely, “Mine.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Wrapped in honeymoon bliss, Veronica went limp in her husband’s arms, his strokes calming the last of her tremors as he eased out of her.

No one knew the rules of Boston society better than she. Where before she had been a fallen woman, subject to having front doors unceremoniously slammed in her face, the possibility of redemption through marriage had still been hers.

One act had changed all that.

A wealthy husband could wipe out a wife’s sins and reopen formerly closed homes, but a woman who masqueraded as a boy in a private men’s club where she had allowed sodomy in front of an audience was forever untouchable.

Strangely, the fact that she was completely ruined, her actions calling her the worst sort of slut, had no effect on her. She freely admitted to being irredeemable. Not only because she had asked Talbot Bowdoin to sodomize her, but because she then had the lack of virtue to enjoy it.

And to want him to do it to her again.

Mr. Bowdoin had quite the way about him. He’d quite had his way with her. For a staid stick in the mud, he possessed a vivid imagination.

A portable vibrating dildo of all things! Where had he ever gotten the novel idea?

He really ought to try to sell the device. Women would take to it like ducks to water. Indeed, she had.

“You were very good, Mrs. Bowdoin.”

“How good?”

He handled a breast, his thumb rotating the tip, then flicking back and forth, batting the gold hoop. “Better than I have ever had. You please me very much.”

“Bully for me.” That he literally held her in the palm of his hand made her bristle.

“Since you asked, I thought you should know.”

Fabric rustled, a sign he was rearranging his clothing. Mattress springs rattled, a sign he was vacating the bed.

Sadness dropped over her like a shroud. She did not want him to go, but how to convince him to stay?

“I suppose I should wash and dress,” she said, her old listlessness returning.

“Not yet, darling. I like looking at you just as you are, my cum dripping out of you, your clothing in tatters on the floor.”

“That does not surprise me,” she replied, masking her happiness in sarcasm in fear of fate stealing it away. “Decadence is one of your finest qualities.”

And now that he had decided to linger, her listlessness departed. No sex was better than bad sex, but good sex made everything bad that came before it disappear.

She frowned. Did that mean the sex she’d had with…with…

What was her first lover’s name again?

Oh dear. That was a low blow, and very unkind. Unworthy of her to compare the two men. She had loved Robert. Disloyal to ruin the memory of what they’d once had even if it had not worked out.

From the most dire of circumstances, from the ashes of scandal, from the deepest of dark despair, from…from…the end of her world as she knew it…this odd marriage
was
working out, and that realization made her as euphoric as a bug in June.

It might have been that her mind was on insects flapping their gossamer wings while they mated midair or something else entirely, but whatever the motivating factor, a thought occurred to her, and that thought left her lips before she could stop it. “Do you still plan to share me with other men?”

He kissed down her back. “Why do you ask, my darling?”

She improvised. “To let you know I have no objections to a ménage or to a polymorphous relationship.”

A whopping hoot of a lie. She was not that sort. She was the sort for fabulously good and sometimes naughty sex with one faithful man to whom she would remain blissfully faithful.

She was also the sort for a whole brood of children and her inability to conceive those children suddenly threatened her newfound enjoyment of life.

“And if I do have objections?” he asked.

Please have objections, and please spell out what they are to me. I cannot give you a family. But I can give you me. Is that enough? Despite telling me once you have no desire for babies, please reassure me again…

When he said nothing to allay her insecurities, she pressed him for answers. “Why would you have objections, sir?”

She heard him withdraw from her, and fear made her raise her voice ever so slightly. “When will you make up your mind about the possibility of us having an open marriage?”

In her present turned-away positioning, she could not see Mr. Bowdoin, which made reading his thoughts all the more difficult. Even when standing face-to-face with him, interpreting his opinion was nearly impossible due to his closed-off expression. Facial neutrality made for excellent poker players but frustrating husbands.

Flopping over onto her back and seeing his retreat had not taken him far, she reached out a hand to him.

“I would rather you did not,” he whispered and took a step away.

“You mean touch you. You would rather I did not touch you?”

“Yes.”

Her chin dropped. “Back to that again.”

“It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me,” he was quick to say, most likely to spare her hurt feelings. Nevertheless, she did feel a tad rejected.

And that was just plain silly.

By her husband’s escort to this gentleman’s club tonight, he had shown his willingness to offer her the freedom she had always craved. Why push him like this to declare himself?

Because something inside her needed to know, needed some sort of firm commitment from him. Because something inside her no longer wanted sexual freedom.

Her palm still hung in the air. In slow motion, giving him every opportunity to still speak, to say something substantive—
Say something, damn you
!—to indicate his feelings, she took a sad breath and finally allowed her outstretched hand to fall to her side. There was nothing else left to do.

Except offer this unapproachable, uncommunicative man herself, nothing held back.

An unwise strategy, of course. Look at what a similar tactic had resulted in with Robert. She had tried to make him care, and see where that had gotten her.

She sighed. Once hurt, twice shy.

Still, despite what her head said she must do, she did reach out to him again anyway. Not with a hand this time, but with what intact pieces of her broken heart that remained. “About your not-touching rule—not to worry. I understand. Not as though this marriage is about anything more than sex, is it, sir?”

“Take a nap, my darling. You must be exhausted.”

“Will you return?”

“Naturally. Like any voyeur worth his salt, I am only off to have a look-see around the club. For inspiration. Expect to be awakened upon my return.”

“Before you go peeping, do you by any chance have a pencil and paper I might use?”

“In my satchel,” he said and closed the door behind him as he left.

Immediately, she raced for his leather bag. Inside, she found a brand new Moleskine notebook and gold pen, a ribbon wrapped around each. She took out the precious gifts and held them to her chest. Then, dismissing her husband’s ridiculously romantic gesture, she got down to work.

Gathering all her impressions together, she crossed her legs, one over the other, and began to write for the first time in months.

While naked and abandoned on a brothel bed.

Chapter Twenty-eight

After pulling himself away from Veronica, Talbot did what he always did when his life turned upside down.

He went in search of voyeuristic sex.

Watching lovemaking that he paid to view provided him with a sense of control over his world, as writing, he supposed, did for Veronica. Both of them could choreograph others, in her case characters, so that they, the voyeur and the author, could achieve an expected…and favorable…outcome, an ending they dictated. In the chaos that was life, where a young man could have his leg blown to smithereens in an instant, where a young woman could lose the baby she loved before the child was ever born, manipulation of circumstances was highly satisfactory. And calming.

Alfred stinted in neither his tailoring nor his gentleman’s club. Both offered a little something carnal for everyone, from the uninitiated to the connoisseur. As a voyeur of some experience, Talbot appreciated the scope and variety of activities offered for viewing and confessed to enjoying just about everything, from foreplay to intercourse to the cuddling afterglow, all from the stance of watchful noninvolvement. Tonight, he had a yen for something spicy.

The medieval-style dungeon located in the club’s basement offered all sorts of bondage scenarios. On any given evening, the establishment provided everything from whippings to candle-wax play to torture devices. All came with unclothed damsels screaming in distress. Not generally his cup of poison, but he was in one of his punitive moods.

The layout was divided into several unique cells, the configuration of which changed according to the nature of the dominant and submissive games in session. To keep the games fresh, Alfred made sure his staff varied the play. Although Talbot had visited the dungeon on many occasions, he always found the constantly shifting scenarios somewhat confusing. Figuring out the lay of the land took him a while and frankly disconcerted him. Since boyhood, schedules comforted while change upset him.

Marriage was a huge change, one he had entered into blindly, driven solely by his admiration for and need to protect a writer’s creative ability. Assuming Veronica would have no impact on him, he had never really taken the woman behind the gift into consideration.

His assumption had been erroneous. She had most definitely impacted him, every facet of his life, in fact, and he had not yet resolved how to proceed. Veronica was not a steam-powered machine, not an automaton, and adjusting to her humanness would take him a while.

Now that he thought about it, the feelings she inspired in him confused him the same way these shifting walls confused him. Oftentimes, her mercurial mind puzzled him, just like this dungeon.

She had lost him tonight, so he had come downstairs to the dungeon to sort things out.

He loved her. At least as he defined the word. To him, love meant devotion. The same devotion he applied to his mechanical inventions he now applied to her. Springs and levers, weights and cylinders, pistons and valves—they made sense to him. But the inner workings of people often escaped him.

Veronica’s suggestion of an open marriage baffled him completely.

And so he had escaped down here, where the walls shifted but where the barred windows on the oak doors offered him a wide glimpse of the activities that went on within the cells. Would that his bride’s unfathomable mind came with a similar window for him to peep through.

The corridors twisted and turned, and Talbot wandered them aimlessly, nodding at several leather-clad dungeon guards as he looked, then discarded, every activity offered.

Usually, he was easy to please. But tonight, nothing held his attention, not even the orgy he passed. Too many writhing bodies for his tastes. Were they snakes or people, vipers or lovers?

His search ended at a dimly lit cell. It was mercifully quiet in there, no screaming damsels in distress, no cracking whips to be heard. Lit only by candle sconce on the wall, a hooded prostitute lay naked on a thumbscrew rack, her arms cuffed together above her head with chains, her legs splayed and tethered to the rough wooden table beneath her.

After turning over the sign outside to read OCCUPIED, he entered the cell, locking the door behind him.

Rather a dramatic departure for him. For years, he had acted the role of onlooker, not participant. The best he could do under the circumstance was to offer up an unrehearsed hello.

No answer.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

She shook her head in the negative.

“Gagged?”

This time, she nodded.

An anonymous female in a spread-eagle position, her head covered to remove her identity and humanity, unable to chat, her lithe body naked and there for the taking, no bonds except metal, no commitment beyond ejaculate—a near perfect fantasy woman for a man who preferred the company of machines to people.

She had nice breasts too, small and round as apples. Her pussy was shaven, but light curls under her arms told him she was fair. Some gentlemen preferred blondes. He preferred a metallic sheen in his consorts.

Except for one. But he would not think of Veronica now.

“I would like to do a few things to you. Tinkering,” he said politely. “Like so.”

He covered an uptilted nipple with a palm, and the flesh remained soft with disinterest.

Mirroring his own ennui.

He swept his hand over her tight body, then dipped two fingers between her thighs.

Regrettably dry.

As was his flaccid cock.