Bared to the Viscount (The Rites of May Book 1)

by Lara Archer

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Author Note

  About the Author

  Other Books

  Bared to the Viscount

  Copyright 2015 Lara Archer

  Published by Sagitta Press

  Cover Design by Kim Killion

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at laraarcherromance@gmail.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For more information on the author and her works, please visit http://laraarcher.com/

  Chapter One

  April, 1817

  Birchford, England

  Mary Wilkins was the very definition of plain.

  Not hideous, by any means—she had no scars, no grotesque features or humps or oddities.

  Just plain.

  Her lips and eyelashes were pale, and her freckled cheeks resembled mud-flecked boots more than blooming roses. Her clothing was practical and modest, and the slim body beneath it lacked the mysterious curves all fashionable women seemed to have. Even her one fine feature—her thick, chestnut hair—did her no good, since a clergyman’s daughter had to coil it tight at her nape, turning it flat and drab brown, so her curls could never entangle a gentleman’s heart.

  Thus, here she was, at the ripe old age of six and twenty, and still unmarried.

  Without beauty, she had no lure. A rich dowry might have encouraged the local squires nonetheless, but she lacked that, too. The local farmers thought the excellent education provided by her clergyman father put her beyond their touch, so they tugged their forelocks when they passed her in the lane and called her “ma’am,” but never asked her to go walking after church.

  She might have made a decent wife for a vicar—that role virtually required plainness—but the only unmarried clergyman of her acquaintance was her own brother, the Reverend Mr. Thomas Wilkins, who became rector of St. Michael’s when their father died. Granted, there were bachelor vicars at both Soffett and Aldham, but one seemed unaware that cleanliness was next to godliness and smelled like an unswept goat yard, while the other spoke with such obsessive zeal of “evading the devil’s treacherous lures,” she’d much rather live a spinster than live with him.

  So she kept house for her brother in the vicarage where they’d both grown up, and would probably continue keeping house there whenever Thomas finally took his nose out of his theology books long enough to find himself a bride.

  Papa had had a sister in much the same circumstances: Aunt Eleanor, who tended house so Mama could tend the children. In the evenings, Aunt Eleanor sat in her rocking chair, knitting or mending, accepting hugs from little girls and boys whenever little girls and boys could be troubled to offer them. Which could not possibly have been often enough.

  No one asked if Eleanor was happy or unhappy. She just faded slowly over the years until one day she was found quite cold and still in her bed.

  A shiver went down Mary’s back.

  She busied her hands with folding the Lenten altar cloths she’d just laundered, preparing to tuck them safely away for next year. These would be the limits of her world—the vicarage, the schoolhouse where she taught local children a few days a week, and this back closet of the storage house behind the ancient church, where she kept the candles and vestments and tins of beeswax she used to polish all the pews. A place for purity and preservation. A fitting sort of place for a future maiden aunt.

  A very decidedly plain maiden aunt.

  Oh, what would it be like to be beautiful, to kindle men’s desires, to be yearned for by all?

  Or to be yearned for by just one man?

  A man like…Viscount Parkhurst.

  A warm flush went through her limbs.

  But it was a foolish thing to imagine. An utterly harebrained thought.

  To be sure, when they were children—he wasn’t a viscount then, just John—they spent as much of their time as possible together, roaming the countryside, happily climbing apple trees and dropping toads down one another’s backs.

  But Viscount Parkhurst inherited his title at just sixteen when his father died of a pneumonia. Soon after, he left for Cambridge, and then—against the advice of all older, wiser heads—for the continent to fight Napoleon. He was worldly now, accustomed to command. And accustomed to the glittering ladies of London. Certainly not likely to look on a drab little parson’s daughter with anything but a bemused remembrance that he’d once devoted so much time to her.

  It was all very humbling.

  And frustrating.

  Now that the viscount had returned to take up residence on his familial estate, the tenants and townspeople of Birchford chose her to bring him all their petitions: to dig a new well at the far edge of the village, to tear down a stone wall around an orchard that was commons in his grandfather’s day, to provide a parcel of land to build a county hospital she’d already spent years raising funds for, so local people might have more than one doctor within ten miles.

  Had she been a pretty girl, one whose person could offer temptation to a peer of the realm, no one would have asked her to serve as emissary—they’d have thought the very idea obscene. But no one objected to sending her. Plainness, apparently, was ample armor for chastity.

  To be sure, Lord Parkhurst had no difficulty resisting her meager charms. He treated her with the utmost respect, calling her “Miss Wilkins” now, never “Mary,” and talking soberly with her in his study or riding with her across his lands without the slightest hint of flirtation. Just as if she were a man.

  And that was precisely the problem.

  He might be oblivious to her gender, but she was far from oblivious to his.

  Viscount Parkhurst, it turned out, had matured into a very, very handsome man. He’d always been a sweet-faced boy, with his family’s aristocratic good looks, but now he was something more approaching an Adonis.

  The white-blond curls of his childhood had deepened into waves of manly bronze, and the boyish rosiness of his cheeks had been replaced by a soldier’s tan that made his sky-blue eyes stand out with dazzling clarity. His jaw had grown hard and firm, his nose appealingly Roman, and his cheekbones stark now that all trace of childish softness had been chiseled away.

  And the changes below the neck were even more noticeable.

  He’d grown remarkably tall since he was sixteen, and gained impressive inches in other places as well. His shoulders had broadened, and his chest seemed to strain the limits of his well-tailored jackets. In contrast to that breadth, his hips tapered in a tantalizing line
that drew Mary’s eye every time he was on horseback, or climbed a hill a few paces ahead of her….or for that matter sat in his armchair behind his desk.

  So even as she was trying to convince him to sponsor good public works, she discovered she was having what a proper clergyman’s daughter should probably condemn as Exceedingly Impure Thoughts about him.

  A clergyman’s daughter—especially a plain one—should certainly not imagine pushing that well-tailored jacket off a viscount’s broad shoulders, or undoing his neckcloth (she understood the mysteries of them, having washed and ironed her father’s and then her brother’s for years and helped tie them neatly under Geneva bands for Sunday sermons). She certainly shouldn’t be eyeing the viscount’s long thighs in his buckskin trousers and thinking the fascinating ridges and grooves resembled the powerful muscles of a hunting horse.

  It was utterly improper, and yet such images went through her mind half the day, and invaded her dreams at night.

  Her pulse was pounding just thinking of it now, and her cheeks grew hot.

  She gave her head a shake. Such thoughts were going to drive her mad, so she needed to shut them away—shut them up, just as she now shut the altar cloths in the cedar chest where they’d stay untouched and unsullied for another year.

  The lid of the chest closed with a soft thud. She straightened her spine and was turning to leave the storage closet, when she heard a key click in the front door to the storage house, and then the door bang open.

  She froze. No one should be in here this afternoon.

  The door slammed closed again, and the latch clicked shut.

  In a moment, whispers rose—one voice male, one female. Not the hushed, somber sort of whisper that was common enough on church grounds. No, this was mixed with muffled laughter.

  And it had an edge of raucousness, a hint of something conspiratorial and wicked.

  A small knothole in the wall between the closet and the main part of the storage building allowed Mary to glance out at the two newcomers. One was the handsome, dark-haired young sexton, Mr. Bassett, who was supposed to be tending to his daily chores caring for the church grounds. The other was Mrs. Trumbull, the widowed proprietress of the village’s most popular pub, The Fox & Crow.

  Mary was thankful she’d looked before simply walking out from the closet, because the laughter, apparently, was the result of what Mr. Bassett was doing to Mrs. Trumbull: embracing her from the rear and clamping his bare hands over the swells of her ample breasts.

  Mary drew back from the knothole with a little gasp.

  Mrs. Trumbull did not have the most sterling of reputations, it was true, yet Mary would have expected her to slap Mr. Bassett’s hands away. Mrs. Trumbull must be nearly forty, and Mr. Bassett was barely more than twenty.

  But Mrs. Trumbull did not slap his hands away.

  Quite the contrary—as Mary saw when she regained her courage and pressed her eye to the knothole again—the woman pushed her own hands on top of the man’s, encouraging him to squeeze her bosom harder, and let out a moan of pleasure.

  Watching, Mary felt an unfamiliar pulse of heat wash through her.

  She was not exactly naïve; she understood, in a general sense, that people did such things, regardless of the rules of church and civilized society. But she had certainly never watched it happen.

  She really ought to say something to stop them—at least to stop them from doing where she could see them. And yet, at the moment, it seemed quite impossible to move her legs or use her voice.

  Mr. Bassett pressed his mouth into the curve of Mrs. Trumbull’s neck, finding the sensitive flesh at the base of her gaudy red curls. His hands grasped the neckline of her bodice and wrenched it downwards. His hands dipped inside to cup her breasts and lifted them above the fabric, until their remarkable fullness was completely exposed. Her nipples were large, dusky red, and hardening to stiff peaks as the sexton took hold of them between his fingers and squeezed.

  Mrs. Trumbull gasped and laughed again, a throatier laugh this time, and wriggled her buttocks against the front of Mr. Bassett’s breeches.

  Now he moaned.

  Mary’s heart thundered, and a strange pulse went through the tips of her own breasts.

  Mr. Bassett’s hips began moving now, grinding against Mrs. Trumbull’s skirts.

  Mary was a clergyman’s daughter, but in truth her father had been a most freethinking clergyman, and had always spoken in the most respectful terms of the beauties of nature and the divine quality of the physical body. He had not raised his children to feel shame about the flesh, provided no cruelty was involved. People were physical creatures after all, no different in their basic animal natures than the cattle in the fields or the birds in the trees.

  Certainly, the two people before her were enjoying the pleasures of the flesh.

  Mrs. Trumbull had her head thrown back and her chest arched outward, urging her breasts further into Mr. Bassett’s eager palms. Her skin was flushed, and even at this distance her pulse beat visibly hard beneath her jaw.

  Mr. Bassett’s breathing had gone harsh and rapid, and all at once he reached down with one hand and hauled Mrs. Trumbull’s skirts up above her knees. And then upwards farther still, exposing her plump, pink thighs, and then the reddish curls at the joining of her legs.

  One of his hands spanned both Mrs. Trumbull’s breasts, continuing to massage the dusky nipples, making the woman writhe, while the other hand plunged straight between her thighs and began to caress her there as well.

  Mrs. Trumbull responded with a breathy moan, and reached behind her to grip her lover by the hips, pulling him hard against her backside. Her knees bent and her legs trembled as the sexton stroked and rubbed his hand against her most private place.

  Mary felt her own pulse pound at the juncture between her thighs, drumming in her belly and through her breasts. Her mouth was dry, her breath short and fast. She could almost imagine a man’s hand stroking her in that very same place. Viscount Parkhurst’s hand.

  Her head felt dizzy at the thought, and her bodice seemed to have grown several inches tighter than before.

  Mrs. Trumbull was panting now, and making desperate mewing noises as she ground her hips downwards against the sexton’s caressing fingers.

  Suddenly, Mr. Bassett, drew his mouth away from the woman’s throat and whispered hoarsely in her ear, “Bend over!”

  Mrs. Trumbull gave a lascivious smile and did as her lover bade her. She bent herself in half, pressing her face against her knees, with her wide buttocks in the air above her.

  “Grab your ankles, now,” he ordered.

  Again, the woman did as he said, wrapping her fingers around her legs just above the tops of her half-boots.

  A look of keen lust tightening his features, Mr. Bassett hoisted Mrs. Trumbull’s skirts up and bunched them around her waist, so her round, bare bottom was entirely exposed to his view.

  For the first time, Mary could see that the front of his trousers was bulging as though he’d stuffed a couple of large potatoes into it. In a frenzy, he tore at his trouser buttons, and soon released his member.

  It stood up, stiff and red and proud.

  She’d never seen a man’s member exposed before, but it was like that of a horse about to mount a mare—huge, hard, veined, and dark with the inner pressure of his pulsing blood.

  Mary’s blood was pulsing, too—it beat hard against the surface of her skin, heating her face, swelling her breasts, making the flesh between her legs throb.

  Without thinking, she laid the heel of her hand low on her belly, then lower still, pushing against that place where the sensations were rioting. She curved her fingers inward, pressing through her skirts to the joining of her legs, and the instant jolt of pleasure made it nearly impossible to hold back a gasp.

  In the outer room, Mr. Bassett stroked his member a few times, rough and hard, then gave Mrs. Trumbull a resounding slap on her naked arse. Then, putting one hand to each of the woman’s hips, he set his stra
ining member against her wet slit and shoved it inside.

  He groaned and Mrs. Trumbull cried out in pleasure.

  The sight was almost too much for Mary.

  The pressure of her hand through her skirts was no longer enough. Blushing at the impulse that possessed her, she lifted her hem, touched her shaking fingers to her calf, to her thigh, and slowly let them glide up to touch that most exquisitely, painfully sensitized spot at the juncture of her legs.

  She had explored herself before, a few times, in bed at night, but never when her body was fevered like this. Her cheeks blazed at her own daring, but the need to stroke herself was overwhelming. Her nerve endings seemed to spark as her fingers moved over her flesh, sending rippling warmth through her belly, through all her limbs, making the muscles of her thighs clench and her knees buckle.

  She had to lean her shoulder against the wall in front of her to keep herself upright.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Bassett pulled his hips backward again, withdrawing his hard shaft, now shining with the moisture from Mrs. Trumbull’s quim, and then slammed forward again, drawing another cry from the woman, who stayed bent with her hands around her ankles.

  Again and again, Mr. Bassett pulled out and rammed himself in, pumping his illicit lover with all the fervor of a rutting stallion.

  In rhythm with his movements, Mary caressed herself, slick wetness gathering between her legs and making the pressure more stimulating than ever. Images of Viscount Parkhurst rose in her head—his broad shoulders, his strong thighs. Oh, the idea of him standing behind her, his trousers lowered, the muscles of his hips working as he pumped in and out of her…. She was trembling now, gasping for breath, fighting not to moan.

  Luckily, neither of the people she was watching seemed to remember the need to whisper anymore, and were making far too much noise to hear anyone else. They grunted and whimpered and Mr. Bassett let loose with a string of filthy words: “God, yes, you’re hot and wet, Dinah. Always so slick and hot.”

  Mrs. Trumbull answered him just as filthily. “Take me, Joe, take me hard. Give me all your cock, make it rough—yes, just like that.”