Desire tugged at her will, unraveling it. “You cannot put the patent in my name,” she blurted, attempting to cling to reason. “As a woman I do not have the status to carry it.” Heated emotions flared in her. Having a female monarch made not one jot of difference. “A scholarship to Cambridge for a woman of humble background does not change the fact she is a worthless woman.”
He stroked her woolen stockings over her knees and his eyes flickered, dark and possessive, his mouth pursed as he observed her. “Don’t be bitter, Nina. It doesn’t suit you. Besides, you were more intelligent than most of the men at Cambridge.”
More intelligent than most of them, except him. If she was, she wouldn’t have been captured here and at his will, all for the sight and touch of a machine that she could never own. Her thoughts were in chaos, because the position he had put her in splayed her intimate parts against his hard erection. Fighting to stifle her response, she pressed her lips together and turned her face away, when what she really wanted to do was rub against the hard bulk of his erection. He bent to kiss her in the dip of her cleavage.
“And more desirable than all of the women I have ever known,” he added. “Why else do you think I arranged this?”
She stared down at him, her eyes widening. This was an elaborate trap? He’d used the Daedalus to bait her, knowing that she would have to see her dream made real? All the evidence suggested it was so, but she could not believe it. Dominic had the world at his feet. He did not need to toy with her, a vicar’s daughter who had ideas and intelligence above her station—a burden if ever there was one.
“Ah, you see it now. Yes, that is how much I want you. I knew that you could not resist seeing it so I secreted it in the place that the local vicar’s daughter knows so well.” He ran his fingers down her cheek, and there was longing in his eyes. “If only I could lure you as easily as this machine has.”
“You can lure me all too well,” she shot back at him, “that is why I stayed away.”
“Why did you run from me?”
His question disarmed her. Months had gone by. She didn’t even think he cared, and had for a long time assumed he’d moved on to his future bride. “I left you a note,” she muttered.
“All it told me was that our relationship was over. Why?” His fingers stroked up and down the soft skin of her inner thighs, maddening her. The way he touched her while he quizzed her made her vulnerable, her desire undermining her will to defy him.
“I heard of your impending engagement to Lady Lucy Ether-ington.” The old familiar pain uncoiled in her gut. She lashed out. “I have too much wit and will to be designated the role of secret mistress until you cast me aside!” Her body rose against his, attempting to buck him off.
He pinned her down with his hands on her hips. “And you also have too much pride to ask me if the rumors were true.” He quirked an eyebrow to emphasize his point. “The match was discussed, but it was not for me. My father has been set straight on that matter.” He shrugged off his greatcoat, casting it aside. “There’s only one woman I want in my bed.”
The fine lawn of his shirt clung to the heat of his body, drawing her attention, making her want him even more. Ducking his head, he breathed along the skin of her cleavage. His mouth on her breast stole her breath away. Meanwhile, he pushed her farther up the flat surface, so that her bottom rested on it and her legs dangled, then his fingers breached her drawers, finding their way into the gap there. He stroked her puss. “I want you, Nina Ashford.”
His demanding approach made her pulse race. The damp heat between her thighs was impossible to ignore. She felt exposed, emotionally and physically stripped to the core, her will and being made freely available to him because she craved him so. Dominic did this to her as only he could. Moaning aloud, her head rolled.
He ran his fingers into the slit in her drawers, then stroked them up and down her damp folds. “Ah, yes, but you’re lush and ready for this.”
His voice was hoarse. She cried out, because the tantalizing touch made her want to rub against him. She hated him for disarming her so thoroughly and turned her face away.
“Your absence in my bed has driven me close to madness.” He held her jaw in one hand, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I must be inside you or I will not be held accountable for what occurs.”
The provocative statement left her speechless, but he moved his hand, rolling his thumb back and forth over her seat of pleasure. The relief she felt was immense. Then he shifted and ducked. His mouth engulfed her swollen nub. He grazed her tender flesh with his teeth and release barreled through her. He pushed his tongue inside her, collecting her copious juices. She was still gasping for breath when he rose up and tugged at her bodice, making her breasts rise from the tight fabric. Nina was so shocked by his actions that she stared up at him, then his hands moved and he arranged her legs around his hips.
As he did so he looked at the pistol strapped to her ankle boot with both admiration and amusement. Again his fingers roved over her puss. “Are you ready for me?”
She turned her face away. Ready? Her body clamored for him, her center alight with expectation, her core slick with her juices. “Make haste,” she blurted, “before I change my mind.”
Dominic gave a wry laugh and then unbuttoned his breeches. When she felt the blunt head of his cock pushing at her slippery opening, she clutched at his shirt. Then he reached past her and pushed a lever. The Daedalus roared into action, the engines huffing and whirring, the pipes that ran around the pod vibrating. One of the dials to the side of her head pinged loudly, startling her. Then the entire machine jolted, lifting up onto its legs—first at the front, then at the rear where she had climbed up the ladder.
Staggered by the sense of power and the sudden movement, she tugged on his shirt. “Dominic!”
The shunt and jolt of the machine as it rose up only seemed to assist his approach, angling her body to him. His cock thrust deep into her, stretching her open and filling her. She cried out, intense sensation rolling through her when he touched her center.
The machine swayed as it leveled, making her head spin.
“Oh, dear lord, how it rolls!” Delighted laughter escaped her.
“I took the liberty of lengthening its rise.” As he spoke humor flitted through his eyes and he put his hands beneath her bottom, lifting her in order to probe her deeper. Her corset seemed tighter still, pressing down against her womb where heat built and swelled. Meanwhile the Daedalus remained poised and pumping, as if waiting instruction.
The feeling of being filled by him was too good. Her thighs locked around his waist, her body arching up to meet his. The pressure of his rod at her center sent a wild flare through her entire body, a fiery reaction akin to that of the combustion engine that stoked the Daedalus. She was back at the precipice in moments, her groin alive with sensation.
He worked his length in and out of her sensitized puss, his hands locked around her bottom while he drove himself into her, relentlessly. “There is a way,” he stated, between thrusts. “Marry me, Nina. Take my name and it will be on the patent. The Daedalus is ours and there will be many more inventions with you as designer and me as engineer…it’s not the same without you.”
Her breath caught.
“Answer me!”
Defiance still underpinned her will. “You indicated the patent was for this favor.”
He shook his head, and his expression was thoroughly wicked as he clarified his meaning. He drove his slick cock in and out of her in measured strides, working her closer to spilling while holding his own release in abeyance. “You’re here. I’m claiming my reward. I want the rest…your name on the patent.”
She could see it was taking intense concentration for him to work her while he spoke, but he did so. “Marry me, Nina, make it so.” His fingers trailed along her throat, his expression growing serious. “Please, I need you.”
She loved him so much that his plea broke her apart inside. Never before had he shown her that need
, that affection. Her fingers dug deep into his powerful shoulders and her core clenched at his rod. He groaned and leaned closer still, bending her legs under him, his weight against her tender folds. Again she flooded. The release was so great that she felt dizzy even though she was flat on her back, but the hard rod of his cock inside and the pressure of his body against her sensitive, intimate parts kept her there.
The muscles in his shoulders and neck stood out, his eyes closing. His cock stiffened, stilled and jerked repeatedly. Another wave hit, her thighs shuddering as her entire body burned with the raw pleasure he’d brought about.
When he withdrew he rained kisses on her face, throat and chest, then reached out and pushed another lever. “Hold on tight,” he murmured.
Taking her hands in his, he guided them to a metal strut above her head then he rested over her. He held her steady while the engines roared and the Daedalus rose to its full height, bursting through the ramshackle covering above them.
Only then did she realize that Dominic had incorporated a glass panel above their heads, and she was bathed in moonlight. In the gloom of the old moorings, the panels were not visible. Now they were. She was in ecstasy. With her eyelids lowered she felt every swift movement the machine made, how it emulated the leap and stride of the insects that had inspired it, as it made its way across the marshland. It rose and fell as it gained the measure of the uneven landscape beneath it, the pod acting like a massive spirit level just as she had dreamed. All the while Dominic held her tightly, staring down at her face as she took in the intensity of what they were sharing and what had passed between them. Pleasure spiraled through her. From her core, where she still throbbed in the aftermath of her release, it radiated through every part of her.
She stared up into his eyes, adoring him for his brazen cheek. “I can scarcely believe this,” she whispered.
“It is magnificent. Your talent for design is like a beacon showing the way to the future.”
It wasn’t what she meant, but she went with his flow. “You made it happen.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I get to share a little of the credit?”
Humility was not something she was used to him showing, and it made her heart swell. “A little. Come now, Dominic, it’s yours as much as it is mine.”
He fixed her in a glance. “And you? Say you will be mine.”
“Perhaps.” Nina smiled and rolled her hips against his, delighted when she felt him harden again.
“Nina Ashford, you will be mine,” he stated gruffly.
He claimed her mouth, not waiting for her to reply, but Nina didn’t care, because this time she didn’t want to disagree with Dominic Bartleby. He’d built her machine to win her back, but her heart was already his.
FOG, FLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT
Sacchi Green
Fog lay heavy on the city, muffling sound, blurring those few gaslights still lit, slowing life like a pocket watch in need of winding. To tell the truth, though, San Francisco even in winter is generally lively enough to make up for some dreary days, and this one had a hint of spring to it. In the past two years I’d learned to read the weather patterns of San Francisco Bay as well as ever I’d known those of Wyoming; this was a low fog that would burn off within the hour.
A hundred feet up I saw I’d been right. Above that dense, narrow layer, a nimbus of thinning mist glowed pale gold, and by two hundred feet it gave way to sunlight bright enough in the east to make me yank tinted goggles down across my eyes. Rising through dimness into light, from earthbound cloud into limitless freedom, always gave me a thrill keener than any other—except sex, and even then such peak encounters had been few. The only time I would have gladly traded for had been the day back in Wyoming when Miss Lily had first shown me the delights two women could draw from each other’s bodies.
That had been in this very wicker gondola beneath this same hot air balloon, patched with fancy silk sheets from her elegant whorehouse. I’d had a considerable variety of girls since then, and a man or two—though the one of those that most sparked my fancy didn’t seem to see me that way—but none could hold a candle to the joy of flying.
But my sky today was not limitless. On the fogbound earth Ho Ming and her crew waited for the signal to draw me back to the launching platform. I cut off the flow of coal gas to the burner, the air in the ballooning envelope of silk above being quite hot enough to keep at this altitude for some time. It was merely a tethered test ascent, the first since the Prairie Lily had been unfurled from winter storage; the view at three hundred feet would have to do. Fog still clung to the land, but sunlight flashed from wavelets in the bay, and the forested Oakland hills were in full sunlight. Directly northward the peak of Mt. Tamalpais stood clear and serene above veils of mist caressing its lower slopes.
I gripped the ropes connecting the gondola to the balloon, exulting in the freedom of my sky, my space; mine alone…
Until something denser than fog rose suddenly below, shattering my elation, very nearly stopping my heart. I pushed up the goggles and stared, unbelieving, as a great dark shape breached the mist like a whale surfacing from the ocean’s depths. Once in the sunlight it was dark no longer, but glinted with a coppery sheen. Not a whale after all, I thought, in a daze born of panic, but a fish, with scales…or…no, those were meant to be overlapping feathers, decorative traceries inscribed into a skin that was, in fact, metal.
This was no monster or wild delusion, but a machine, some sort of flying device! A machine, however fantastical it seemed, was something I could understand. More to the urgent point, it had moved sideways enough that it would miss colliding with me as it rose. A flying machine that could be steered, and propelled! And with lift enough to cloak its gasbag with copper!
I didn’t realize my breathing had stopped until it started up again. Then I gasped again, and cursed, as air currents stirred up by the intruder hit and made my gondola pitch and sway. It was all I could do to hang on and not be tumbled out, and the Prairie Lily above me thrashed about until I wasn’t sure the tethers could hold her.
Observation of much about the flying machine rising past was impossible, except to note that the gasbag was oval in shape and so was the enclosed gondola tucked up close beneath it. But I did catch a glimpse of a face at a window, helmeted and goggled and hidden as well by a short black beard. I recognized that beard with its jagged silver streak on one side. To my shame, I’d even dreamed about that beard, in vividly improper ways, proceeding from stroking it with my fingers to feeling it against my skin in a very different region.
It was Miklos, that cursed lecturing fellow from the symposium!
When I managed to look again, his gondola was higher than mine, though scarcely a stone’s throw away. I fervently wished I’d brought along a supply of just such ammunition.
He’d shut down his propelling devices, at least, so the air wasn’t battering at me much. I glared across at him. He pushed up his goggles and looked nearly as panicky as I’d been, but when I let go of one rope to shake my fist at him, he flashed the broad smile that had also figured in my dreams, put a finger to his lips as though signaling a secret, and drifted away upward before restarting the propellers. From below I could see that both gasbag and gondola were colored a misty white on their undersides, the way some birds and fish try to blend in with the brightness above them. Then he set off toward the northeast, confident in his craft’s ability to cross the Bay to its northern tip without depending on the whims of the wind.
I shook now not with fear but rage, and a burning envy. A directable airship! What was the word from that lecture? Dirigible? But he’d made it seem all theory and speculation, and wild speculation at that; nothing already possible, already built and fashioned with such attention to fanciful detail. Who could ever see that tracery of feather shapes on the top surface? Unless they were flying in another such airship—or a hot air balloon like the Prairie Lily, which he’d clearly regarded with a degree of condescension when we’d conversed after his lec
ture.
Later, though, when the old professor had brought him along to Ruby Lou’s notorious parlor house, he’d appeared to take some interest in accounts of my uncle Thaddeus Brown, who’d flown surveillance airships with Colonel Lowe’s aeronauts in Mr. Lincoln’s war, and who had left the Prairie Lily to me when he died. I’d even begun to think this attractive young man had taken some interest in me, Maddy Brown, though it was clear I wasn’t one of the girls for hire. But then the new French girl in a satin corset and not much else had attracted his interest enough to lead him upstairs, both of them babbling away in the French language. He came back every night for a week, and would converse with me about scientific matters and foreign countries and even my life in Wyoming, in quite a lively fashion, until some sort of inner reminder would strike him, and he’d go off with one girl or another. In all that time, he’d never mentioned flying a true dirigible airship.
So now that I had seen the reality of this airship, did he truly think I wouldn’t tell? Well…I might not, at least not yet. The notion of a possible hold on him calmed me down somewhat and warmed me up a tolerable bit as well.
A light breeze was building from the west. I was pretty sure the air currents could be sufficient as the day progressed to take me all the way across to a landing in the East Bay, but without a paying passenger I couldn’t afford enough fuel for such a flight. The air in the Lily was cooling already, and we were beginning to descend. I increased the gas flow just enough to keep from falling too fast. The crew would crank the tethers onto their giant spools as soon as they felt the slack.
Ho Ming’s customary impassive expression was just a hair less impassive when I climbed out of the gondola. The flailing of the balloon must have been felt through the cables, but I was glad enough that she said nothing beyond the necessary, and neither did I. Once we had the Prairie Lily and gondola safely packed up in the wagon and were making our way back to Ruby Lou’s I thought a time or two that she was about to ask, but it never quite came to that.
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