Cry for Passion (9 page)

“Then where does it reside, Mrs. Clarring?” Jack studied her face in the flickering light of the lamppost: the pale slice of a cheek, the soft curve of a lip, the darkness of her pupils. “Inside a woman’s vagina?”

“No,” she said with conviction.

“You know that”—her flesh beneath her wool coat scorched his fingers—“how? Because you didn’t orgasm when your husband fucked you?”

“Don’t say that.”

“That your husband fucked you?” Jack deliberately asked.

“My husband did not fuck me,” Rose Clarring said tightly.

“But that’s what you wanted him to do, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You said you wanted to be fucked by a man, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack said, purposefully pushing, fingers throbbing, unable to relinquish her. “You said you wanted to feel his sex buried inside your sex, thrusting deeper, and harder, and deeper.”

“I said I wanted a man to take pleasure in the love we share,” she riposted.

“You said you wanted to experience passion.” The scream of a fire engine drifted over the Thames; the whine of traffic swallowed it. “How do you know, Mrs. Clarring, that passion isn’t just a splendid fuck?”

She had not once refused to answer in the witness box. She did not do so now.

“I don’t,” she said finally. Lamplight leaping . . . falling. “I don’t know.”

Neither did Jack.

Fingers tightening around the soft wool protecting her elbow, he guided her away from the lamppost.

“Where are we going?”

Jack propelled her toward the busy street. “To find passion.”

Stepping off the curb, he skirted a lumbering omnibus.

A passing Clarence cab sucked the air out of his lungs. An unseen wheel whipped the tail of his coat.

Pulling Rose Clarring closer—her hip intimately abutted the top of his thigh—Jack gained the opposite curb.

She stiffened, sighting the shop to which he directed her.

Jack jerked open the door to the Victoria Book Shop. A bell rang out; gaslight spilled onto the pavement, starkly illuminating her colorless face.

Rose Clarring did not step forward.

“This is why you came tonight, isn’t it, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack asked, feeling the rigidity of her bones throughout his entire body, “to find passion?”

Hot, painful color flooded her face. “I will not find passion inside a bookstore.”

“You, of all women, know”—deliberately he called to mind the words she had spoken the night before, that he of all men knew a woman need not divorce one man to take another to her bed—“that not all bookstores are what they seem.”

“Do you think, Mr. Lodoun,” she asked tensely, “that I’ll find passion in a dildo?”

“I think, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack said intently, “that you cannot know the difference between passion and the pleasure afforded by a stiff prick if you have experienced neither.”

Blackness swallowed her cornflower blue irises.

“Excuse me,” leapt between them. “Sir . . . madam.”

Gaze breaking away from Jack—dark, shamed color fading to twin circles of pink—Rose Clarring hastily stepped aside.

Cold air replaced the warmth of her flesh.

Jack opened the door wider.

He did not see the face of the woman who entered the store. He concentrated solely on the woman who stood opposite him.

“You’re frightened,” he said, echoing her words outside the Old Bailey Courthouse.

“This is a public shop.” Rose Clarring stepped over the threshold. “Why should I be?”

Because Jack was frightened.

He had made an adulteress of one woman, and now she was dead. He had destroyed this woman’s future, but he could not escape the need she evoked.

“Through here,” he shortly instructed, reclaiming her elbow.

She did not outwardly protest his touch. The stiffness of her flesh seared the palm of his hand.

The Hour Chime obliterated the soft murmur of voices and the beat of Jack’s heart: It was followed by eight bongs.

In nine more minutes the sun would officially set, ending the day and beginning the night. But Jack did not know what the night would bring.

A somberly dressed clerk stepped forward, blocking access to the door leading to the back of the shop. A sharp glance from Jack propelled him backward.

Jack’s pupils ate up the darkness in the dimly lit room. Behind him, the door clicked closed.

He watched Rose Clarring’s reaction to the secret sex shop that every parliamentary member knew existed but about which no one talked.

A junior MP—another conservative, five years younger than Jack—glanced upward, eyes widening at sight of a woman. Immediately his gaze was captured by Jack’s.

They stared at one another for long seconds.

Jack knew the MP. Jack knew his wife.

Jack knew the MP liked young, virginal girls who were scarcely older than his thirteen-year-old daughter.

The junior MP glanced downward.

Dark pink stained Rose Clarring’s cheeks. She did not bow her head to hide from male perusal.

Admiration—sharp and piercing—shot through Jack.

Cursorily he guided her forward through the dim aisles, fingers sliding from her elbow to span the small of her back: It was as rigid as her elbow. “Over here.”

A glass display showcased a variety of sexual paraphernalia: cock rings. Nipple bobs. French chain cuffs.

“May I help you, sir?” enquired a timorous voice.

A clerk fixedly gazed up at Jack.

Jack glanced at Rose Clarring.

She stared down at the showcase.

The image of a man—of himself—squeezing his testicles and ejaculating into the air slammed through his thoughts.

Watching the curve of Rose Clarring’s nose and cheek—all that was visible underneath the brim of her bonnet—Jack said, “We wish to inspect the dildos.”

Nervously—gaze pointedly avoiding the woman who stood beside Jack—the clerk laid out a dozen phalluses: small ones . . . monstrous ones . . . glass ones . . . leather ones.

“Leave us,” Jack said.

The clerk was only too happy to oblige.

Rose Clarring stared at the instruments that were designed for no other reason than to penetrate. “I did not come tonight to have sexual congress with you.”

Jack ignored the sharp pang her denial inflicted.

“But you do wish to be fucked, do you not?” he pressed.

Her breasts rose and fell beneath the black wool of her cloak. “Yes.”

“Then choose your prick, Mrs. Clarring.”

Chapter 9

A muted cough broke the stillness, a caustic reminder they were not alone.

Men watched.

Her. Him.

Stiffly Rose Clarring reached for a small leather dildo that was hardly bigger than his middle finger.

“Take your gloves off,” Jack said shortly. Her hand froze mid reach. “Feel what it is you’re going to take into your body.”

She peeled off black leather gloves—the jet-beaded reticule looped around her left wrist glinted black fire—and stuffed the gloves inside her coat pocket.

Rose Clarring had small, slender fingers.

Carefully, as if it were a loaded pistol, she picked up the narrow leather dildo that measured some five inches in length.

“That’s for a woman’s—or a man’s—anus,” Jack advised, the scent of roses burning his chest.

Instantly her gaze leapt up to his. “Have you ever . . . ?”

“Buggered a woman with one?” he supplied neutrally, the gazes of men crawling on his skin.

“Been the one in whom it was inserted?” she corrected him.

Invasive memory wormed through his body.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

An inventive mistress had once introduced him to many erotic sensations.

Some of which he had shared with the woman he loved. Some of which he had not.

The cornflower blue eyes darkened. With curiosity, Jack saw; not repugnance.

A pulse leapt from the base of his spine and inched down his groin.

Freeing his hand from the electric heat her back generated, Jack reached for smooth glass.

It was both longer and thicker than the phallus she held.

“Try this one,” he instructed, and plucked out of her unresistant fingers the small leather dildo.

Rose Clarring cradled the glass phallus in her left hand; it overflowed her palm.

Jack stepped closer to narrow the gap between their bodies so that other men would not witness her erotic exploration.

She traced the clear glass.

Phantom fingers feathered Jack’s cock.

“Mr. Whitcox referred to these as widow’s comforters,” she said in a low voice.

The name of his lover’s husband prickled Jack’s skin.

He swallowed the objection that welled inside his throat.

He didn’t want to know about James Whitcox. But he did want to know about Rose Clarring.

Still without looking at him, she said, “You accused Mrs. Hart and Mr. Whitcox of learning about passion by reading ‘sexual perversions’ in academic books.”

Jack’s judgment outside the courthouse stood between them.

“But, in fact, Mr. Lodoun”—there was no judgment inside her voice—“we studied your so-called sexual perversions before Mrs. Hart joined the club. It was quite educational, actually. Did you know, in ancient Greece the city of Miletus was known for making olisbos”—a short, manicured fingernail scraped Jack’s glans—“dildos. By all accounts, it was quite a profitable enterprise.”

Jack did know, but only because he had read it in the minutes of the Men and Women’s Club.

“Many ancient treatises refer to artificial phalluses.” She rimmed the blunt tip of glass, as if searching for the tiny urethra that spurts sperm inside a woman. “Even the Bible. But we never called them dildos. We never called the membrum virile a cock. We never applied what we learned to our own lives, or even to our own times. Then one Saturday Mr. Whitcox brought in French postcards.”

The day Frances Hart had officially joined their club.

The secretary had recorded the April sixteenth meeting, but she had not described what it was that the pictures depicted.

“It was clear he had brought them for Mrs. Hart,” Rose Clarring said, fingertip probing the smooth frenulum, “to show her the various sexual acts that excited him.”

Jack remembered the postcard he had perused inside the Achilles Book Shoppe.

The thought of sharing the same sexual desires as James Whitcox—as he had shared the same woman—burned from his esophagus all the way down to his groin.

“In one of the postcards a woman held a dildo.” She rotated the glass, turning the frenulum toward her palm. “It was the first time I’d seen a picture of one. Her legs were splayed; there was no question as to what she was going to do with it.”

Left palm curling, Rose Clarring’s slender fingers circled the girth of the phallus.

“I thought how odd,” she continued in a low, distant tone, fingertips touching: thumb to forefinger . . . thumb to middle finger, “that a man would take pleasure watching a woman so fill herself.”

An invisible hand tightened around Jack’s penis.

“Have you ever watched a woman fuck herself, Mr. Lodoun?”

Rose Clarring addressed the dildo. Her question rocketed through Jack.

The answer was unwittingly drawn from him. “Yes.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

Images divorced from emotion surged through him.

A woman’s body. But he could not remember her features. The color of her hair. The scent of her skin.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is smaller than you,” she observed, fingers releasing the artificial phallus.

Jack did not answer: They both knew the size of his sex.

He waited for what she would next say or do, shoulder blades burning with the lust of the men who watched.

Rose Clarring set aside the glass dildo. Slender fingers hovered over a six-inch-long leather phallus . . . scooped it up and weighed it.

Jack’s sex felt suddenly full and heavy.

“Miss Palmer purchased one like this at the Achilles Book Shoppe,” she said. “So that she could experience the comfort of a man.”

Jack visualized the thirty-two-year-old woman whose face had blushed purple when examined, but who had unflinchingly answered his every question.

She had the day before the trial informed the fashionable girls’ academy at which she taught of her involvement with the Men and Women’s Club. They had dismissed her, she had testified, to save their reputation.

The Times had printed the name of the academy, ruining both the teacher and the school.

Setting down the six-inch-long dildo, Rose Clarring’s pale fingers skimmed over a glass phallus that was bigger around than Jack’s wrist, settled on a leather dildo that approximated his own dimensions.

A pulse throbbed to life in the crown of his penis.

She could not span the circumference that he had the night before spanned.

“This is thicker than the one Miss Palmer chose,” she noted dispassionately. And then, “Did the woman obtain an orgasm?”

The faceless woman who had taken an artificial phallus into her body while Jack watched.

“Yes,” he admitted, breathing in the scent of masculine lust and springtime roses.

“The instrument she used . . . was it as large as this one?”

“I don’t remember,” Jack said, ridiculous pride that she found him “large” flushing his skin.

“In the Bible, Ezekiel calls dildos ‘images of men.’ ”

Resting the brown leather in her left hand—beaded reticule clinking on the glass showcase—she placed a thumb at the base of the phallus and stretched out her right hand.

The shaft protruded several inches beyond her little finger.

Jack felt the brand of her splayed fingers run from the base of his cock to the tip of his glans.

Feathered bonnet rearing back—eyes devoid of color—Rose Clarring caught his gaze. “I’ll take this one.”

The phallus that was fashioned in his image.

“This is what you want inside you?” Jack asked tautly.

There was no hesitation inside her eyes, but neither was there desire. “Yes.”

Jack had two heartbeats.

One inside his chest. One inside his cock.

“Are you wet between your thighs?” he probed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you frightened?”

“Yes.”