Caught in the Cogs Volume One (3 page)

She shrank back against the wall and hugged her knees close, willing herself to disappear into nothingness. Willing the pain to stop. Willing the desire to end. It had to end. She knew this in her fractured soul. Her very sanity was at stake.

What if her husband discovered her in such a position? Or the housekeeper?

Fear replaced the pain, as she pictured the look on her husband’s face. His astonishment confirming her pathos. His disappointment illuminating her worthlessness. She would be mortified beyond repair.

Yet her lust for Joshua engulfed her, again and again. She tried to keep it at bay. She tried to busy herself with needlepoint or reading or anything else, but the all-consuming need would not die. It overpowered her. Then she would return to the dark attic to take care of her needs. Alone.

She quite literally could not control herself.

The morning light, now well past dawn, filtered in from the solitary attic window at the opposite side of the room. After her eyes adjusted to the light, they caught sight of her hands resting on her knees. They were not the smooth, pale hands of her youth. They were her mother’s hands, perhaps even her grandmother’s. Thin skin hung too loosely over her fragile bones, and she swore even its brightness had faded over the years. Just as the rosiness in her cheeks had waned, except when she blushed from her own foolishness. Her shame colored her cheeks like that a rosy maid. It was less becoming on a woman her age.

Her thoughts retuned to Joshua, and she ran her withering hands down her body, trying to remember what it was like to be cherished by a lover, imagining him touching her. Her breasts, thought still full and relatively firm, were not what they had once been. They never would be again. Her hips and thighs, shapely, supple, and still quaking slightly from her phantom lover, were not those of a young woman. But they were not those of an old woman yet either.

By the time she caught her wits, her hands were again traveling up her inner thighs.

Back and forth.

“Stop it!” Her words sounded hollow in the empty room. After pulling her skirts down again, she tried to stand, but when she had risen halfway, the grief overcame her again and she collapsed back into herself against the wall. She muffled her agony by clamping her hands over her mouth. Reality, unforgiving and harsh, revealed her cell. The limbo of middle-age imprisoned her, for she would never be what she had once been. She would just continue to age, continue to become less and less appealing. A past full of promise and unrealized dreams haunted her. Her future...mediocrity, then death.

As images of Joshua returned, Lilah forcibly pushed them out, replacing them with that of her loving husband. She had been married at eighteen to a man twelve years her senior. She had been a maid, of course, and her husband was a good man. He had been a good father and provider, too. After three children and nearly twenty-five years of marriage, she certainly had thought the days of anyone yearning to touch her were long past.

Then Joshua came into her life, and now his lips haunted her every waking thought. They had only met a few times, but they had an indescribable connection between them that extended past basic lust. It was intellectual and soulful in addition to sexual desire, quite the dangerous mix. During the last soiree, he had found a way to get her alone. They had just been talking, enjoying the other’s company as they had in the past. Innocent. Just conversation. A meeting of minds and wits.

Until that night.

He had led her to a remote garden and embraced her there to say goodnight. Nothing else was spoken. No words of longing or love, just an embrace and a single kiss on her cheek.

Then another on her neck.

They said farewell and parted. Simple. Brief. Yet it was this restrained embrace that changed everything between them.

His kiss on her neck still burned her skin. She still felt the building heat between them on that cold evening, even all those long nights later.

“Joshua,” she breathed. His face once again filled her thoughts, replacing everything else in her world. She caressed every angle of it with her mind. Dark eyes. Dark hair extending down into long sideburns along a strong jaw. His bottom lip fuller than the top, begging to be tasted and licked and sucked between her own.

This was the last time she would ever feel desired, and the realization of that weighed heavy on her. At forty-three, she knew society would soon consider her an old crone. No one would see her anymore, not even Joshua. She would fade. Disappear. A single drop of rain in a storm. Invisible.

Only the faintest hint of her former beauty remained. But Joshua had seen it that night. She desperately held onto that, knowing he did feel something for her. Then her slipping mind went invariably back to his fevered kiss, to the torment of hope. Madness.

She looked to the light coming through the window and wiped the tears away and vowed that she would indulge in just a few more moments of the fantasy. When she thought of him, she felt like a young woman again. She felt beautiful and appealing for the first time in so very many years. She took far too much pleasure in getting lost in that feeling, slipping into the memory of ecstasy, bathing in the rain of desire. Even though it was only her fancy, just a fantasy, she held on to it as if it were her last breath of life.

“Joshua,” she whispered again, this time through her shameful tears, which were as unrelenting as her memory of that night. If he knew she was so distraught over a few shared moments, he would surely be done with her, as well he should be. Silly old woman.

“Enough foolishness for one morning,” she said to the empty attic, determined to pull herself together.

She set herself to rights, standing up and straightening her skirts. After tending to her mussed hair, she hid her zeppelin among some old boxes and left her secret behind.

The brightness of her bedchamber hurt her eyes, and she already longed for the darkness when she could be with him, if only in her delusions. She picked up her needlepoint and sat, like she did every day, on the settee near the front window across from the old grandfather clock. If someone came in, she would look busy with the needlepoint in her hands, like she had something else to do. Something other than just pining away.

She watched out the window, looking for any sign of his next communication. Searching the streets for just a glimpse of his face. Rushing below to see if a letter had come at every knock on the door.

She watched the grandfather clock’s pendulum swing back and forth. Back and forth.

She went from a rush of desire to feeling embarrassed and foolish in the span of a few moments. Then back again to desire. Back and forth. Her memory of the sensation of his closeness chased every other thought away. She could still feel his hands on her hips, his lips on her neck. Brushed. Just once.

Then goodbye.

She knew he was her last chance before age overcame her, so she clung to him too tightly. The few words of longing he had spoken in his letters she translated into volumes.

But that was just the beginning of her feelings. If she had not known better, she would call it love. But she was too old to be quite that foolish. This was not love. This was far more intense and dangerous than love.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Would the next message ever come?

He had claimed to feel a deep connection between them as well. He had told her in the letters that had followed that night, frequently at first. But the frequency of the letters decreased as the days passed. The few messages he did send lately were only in response to her own, and they were without words of longing. She feared she had already lost him. More than anything, even more than her husband finding out, she feared that Joshua’s passion for her had cooled. This terrified her.

By the end of the second week, his letters had lessened to the point of becoming nonexistent. She tried desperately not to contact him. Not to seek him out. But she failed every time.

She was a fool.

She had been too fervent. Too suffocating. Too obvious. It was not becoming of a lady, especially one of her age. and he had grown tired of her.

Yet, she could not let go.

“Ow!” She pulled her pricked finger to her lips and tasted the blood there. Her silly daydreams had once again injured her. A red dot of blood marred the floral pattern on which she had been working. She threw the needlepoint down in disgust and rose, pacing the floor. Back and forth in front of the window. Looking out every time she passed it to see if he was coming down the street, just seconds after the last look. Those seconds lasted lifetimes.

As she sucked on her injured finger, she thought of how every contact with him gave her a few more minutes of sanity. When she could talk with him or when she received a new letter or when they met briefly on the street and exchanged a secret glance, she believed again. She believed in the romance. She believed in the desire. After so long of feeling unseen, how could she not believe?

She drank in the attention and reveled in his seduction, imagining most of his desire for her, no doubt. Transferring her intense feelings for him, to him. Believing that he felt the same. But he was not free to do so. And neither was she.

“Foolish old woman.” Her breath fogged the window as she breathed the words, shocked to find herself absently gazing out of the window. How long had she been there? And so foolish to remain there. She knew he would not come. She had given him too much of herself, as always.

He had given too little…but then, it could never be enough to satiate her need for him. Plus, they could never be together. He was a decade younger if he was a day, and his young, bonny wife surely kept him most satisfied.

Intellectually she knew this, but she could not help dancing in front of the looking glass, in nothing more than her corset and pantaloons. Sometimes even without the pantaloons, when the house was dark and her husband asleep. Just the light of a nearby gaslight cast a soft glow across the room, softening the lines on her skin that had become too harsh with age. At least too harsh in her eyes.

Still she waited every day for the slightest communication or acknowledgment from him, and when she got it, however small the morsel, it was wonderful for a few moments. She felt satiated again, briefly, and she danced in front of the looking glass once more. But the hunger for more soon crept back in, more voracious than before.

Still, she thought of his lips.

Still, she thought of his hands on her waist.

Still, she thought of the embrace, full of unspoken desire.

But it had to end. Back to innocence. The way they had been before.

She had to be strong. She had to back off and wait, which, for her, meant that she had to forget him. It was never possible for her to linger in limbo for long.

Still, she waited. Still, she dreamed.

All the rest of the day and deep into the night she waited for him. She hardly ate. She hardly slept. She just waited.

The sound of her heart thumped, hollow and cold beneath her corset. The tick-tock tick-tock of the grandfather clock echoed her heart in a chaotic rhythm. The chaos began to work its way into her nerves and mix with the growing madness therein.

Just before dawn, she went to the looking glass to reprimand herself for being such a fool, just like she did every morning. She studied the lines on her face in her reflection.

At least it was still dark, for the dim glow of the candle light softened the lines on her face if she turned just right. With a little stretch of her imagination, she could look as young as she felt when she thought of him. And at the thought of him, the embarrassment was once again replaced with desire.

And so it was thus.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Shame and lust.

The torment of true passion.

Nothing could satiate such intense desire except giving into it, she decided at last. She must have him or go mad. She would risk everything for one night with him, just a few hours. She would give up her marriage, her life, her very soul.

She would go to him tonight. He would likely think her the fool she was, but she prayed that he did not see that truth. She prayed that he would only see her desire.

That evening, she donned her cloak and slipped out into the darkness. Three weeks to the day from the brief moments they shared on that moonlight night in the garden. Three tormented, wondrous weeks.

But tonight it would end. Either her fears would be confirmed and she would be broken, or he would take her in his arms and she would finally taste his lips.

She pulled the hood of her velvet cloak far over her face as she stepped into the night, hiding her shame in its shadows. She hailed a hansom once she was far enough from her place, for she did not want to be recognized. Social ridicule on top of this most certain humiliation she could not bear.

“Kensington,” she said to the driver and climbed inside.

The journey, but just a few miles, seemed to take an eternity. And she fought with herself the entire way, vacillating back and forth, back and forth in her nervous anticipation.

Upon arrival just a block from Joshua’s home, she asked the driver to wait. She stepped out onto the cobblestone street and looked around beneath the shadow of her hood until she caught sight of a young boy cuddled up in an alley.