Vaughan cracked his hand across her backside for her cheek, causing the skin to whiten then fill with a rosy bloom. She moaned desperately, “More, milord. Give me another. The tingle helps me to relax. And do poke me with a finger or two to make the passage smoother.”
“You’re very dictatorial.”
“You claimed you liked a woman with a notion of what she liked and what to do? Perhaps that’s not true after all.”
He struck her again, then slicked his thumb with saliva and rubbed it against the puckered rosebud of her entrance. Meanwhile, Lucerne sought to increase her moaning by exchanging lip kisses with her.
“More,” she pleaded when for a moment he paused. “Oh, sirs I do so love to take two lovers this way. One prick isn’t enough for me.”
“Lust and avariciousness, how amiss of you,” Lucerne remarked.
Vaughan snorted. “As I see it, you don’t have either of us yet.” He nipped her earlobe. “But it’s a situation that’s easily remedied.” He took a chance then and touched Lucerne, wrapped his palm around the other man’s shaft and guided him into Jessie’s soft and very willing flesh before Lucerne thought to protest about it. If he was disturbed in any way by Vaughan’s action, then the emotion was subsumed by the rush of bliss caused by that first moment of penetration. Vaughan knew only too well that sensation, how streamers of joy crashed through his body, relaxing all the muscles and making the crown of his head tingle. He was anticipating it now as he prepared himself with the oil ready to breach her arse.
“Deep sir, you won’t hurt me.” Her voice sang, high and excited in encouragement to Lucerne. “You’re nice and big. I can tell this is going to be the best time ever.” A string of mumbles followed, which irritated by distracting him from his thoughts about how he had just wrapped his hand around Lucerne’s cock for the first time, and his friend hadn’t railed at him in alarm, or attempted to punch him or even questioned the touch. He’d just accepted it. That fact fanned the flicker of hope Vaughan carried inside about how the future might unfold. Someday, they would do this without a woman between them.
“That’s so good, sir. That feels so good.”
He had been quite serious about his dislike of constant chatter. Vaughan retrieved his cravat from the floor and gagged her, thus ensuring her further contribution to the conversation was reduced to the level of muffled grunts of appreciation. He didn’t want her to talk. He didn’t want a constant reminder that she was between them. Obviously, she was between them, but if he closed his eyes all he felt was flesh and Lucerne’s presence. It was close to perfect. And as close as he could hope to get right now.
Vaughan cuddled up to Jessie’s bottom and followed the rolling motion she and Lucerne had adopted. Only when the ache in his ballocks became too strong, and his cock started leaking silvery drops did he resume teasing her entrance.
Slow and steady, that was the key to using the servant’s entrance. That and plenty of oil to lubricate the way. He popped the cork on the little vial Jessie had provided and liberally coated his prick. It perhaps said much about his family that it was his grandmother, the dowager Marchioness of Pennerley, who’d taught him oil was the key, after she caught him pricking one of the kitchen maids. “Seeds only grow if they’re sown in the right place,” she’d explained. “I don’t expect you not to sow your oats, but see they fall on barren ground.” Then she’d handed him the butter dish and told him to be generous with it. He’d asked her some months later how she’d come by such knowledge. The old bird had peered at him with her rheumy eyes and cackled until her voice cracked. “How else do you suppose I managed so many lovers without the inconvenience of birthing twenty or so brats? The five I gave your grandfather were ample. Anymore and my bubbies would have dangled to my knees.” Her bosom at that time was still loftily displayed in a dress with a neckline so low some of the courtesans of his acquaintance would have shied from wearing it, and few of them ever worried about displaying a nipple. “Nice to see you’ve taken my advice, young man,” she’d said clapping a hand over his. “Too bad your father didn’t do the same, or he might have spared himself the joy of your mother.”
No one could ever accuse the dowager of mincing her words. He’d always loved her for that. Well, that and her ability to make his mother cower.
“Are you waiting for a cue?” Lucerne gasped, drawing Vaughan’s focus back to the present.
Vaughan straddled his friend’s legs and pressed his loins to the wench’s pillowy buttocks. He followed the rolling motion she and Lucerne were making for several moments, then wriggled a finger back inside her arse to further loosen her up. “You’ll need to be still a moment.”
Pressing his way inside proved no more difficult than normal. Slow and steady, that was the way, giving her muscles time to relax and an accept him. She was tight, but then so too had been several of the bottom’s he’d fucked.
The genuine difference to those previous times struck him only once he was fully seated, and he realised that pressure he could feel was from Lucerne’s cock lying right next to his.
Arousal poured through him in intense waves. For several heartbeats Vaughan didn’t dare move. Worse still, his cock seemed to have developed a pulse all of its own. He ached. He needed friction… motion…something…more of that fierce tightness, more of that heat.
“Jesus, ever loving, God!” Lucerne growled. “Is that you? Fuck and damnation. Is it?” His eyelids fluttered, and his mouth opened around a desperate moan that entirely drowned out Jessie’s muffled mewls. “I had no clue it would be…Whoa! Pull back as I go forward.”
“Like this?” Vaughan did as asked.
“Yes. Oh my God, that is so…”
There weren’t words to describe how it felt. Leastways, none that properly conveyed it, so he didn’t try, he just let the marvel of it overwhelm him. He wallowed in it.
“I’m not going to last,” Lucerne confessed. Nor was he, but where was the sense in saying so.
“Come if you need to.”
“I can hold back a little longer until you’re ready too.”
Oh, he was ready. He’d been ready from the first second he’d felt Lucerne rubbing against him. He was just trying to savour the moment. “Try to keep the rhythm going.” Vaughan curled his fingers around Lucerne’s bicep, and held onto him as they stroked in and out, working in time like a perfect piston.
If he’d had any inkling how this would feel or even that it was a possibility before tonight then he’d have suggested to Lucerne they try it a whole lot sooner. Jessie had told him he and Lucerne would be stroking against one another, but he hadn’t quite comprehended her meaning. Now he understood. God help him, he completely understood. It was heady, addictive this motion, and he didn’t give a fig about what it said about his prowess that he was losing the battle to make things last, because he truly wasn’t the only one. The three of them were all crooning together. The only uncertainty was over who would come first.
Jessie, it turned out, and that was enough to undo both he and Lucerne. Her breathing which had been raspy and breathless became a pealing cry that not even the gag could muffle. Then her inner muscles squeezed tight and made him insensible to everything but flow of his seed pulsing from his cock. It felt as if he was tasting Lucerne’s ecstatic cries, and drowning in a sea of bright colours.
Spent, he flopped against Jessie’s back, hardly able to support his own weight. His head was stuffed with fluff, and he wanted to bask in the feeling of warmth and peace that filled him.
“You’re a little heavy, milord, if you could get off me,” Jessie protested, attempting to wriggle out from beneath him. She’d torn off the gag which now lay upon the patchwork quilt. Vaughan somehow found enough strength to support his own weight for long enough so that she could slither out from between them. He fell face down on top of Lucerne, who grunted and rolled him onto his back.
Evidently they could be close, but not yet that close.
“You win. You were right. One wo
man was more than enough.”
Vaughan’s grin stretched wide across his face, but he was still too addled to say anything. Instead he rested quietly alongside Lucerne, just listening to the other man breathe.
“If you’re all done with me, I’ll be about my business,” Jessie announced. Without him having observed it, she’d put on her clothes and straightened out her luxuriously curled hair.
“Pass my coat,” Vaughan instructed her, forcing himself to affect a semi-upright pose. He rewarded her handsomely for her services, because what she’d given him was invaluable.
“I don’t charge that much for a week,” she protested. Vaughan merely curled her fingers over the coins. If it wasn’t for the fact that she’d seen right through him, and been forthright enough to have enlightened him as to certain possibilities, he’d still have been downstairs wallowing in his own frustration.
“Shall I have some wine sent up?”
“Splendid idea.”
“No,” Vaughan countered Lucerne’s response. “I think we’ll away home now.” The temptation to push things too quickly might prove too great if they stayed here resting in a relatively narrow bed, while naked. “One wild adventure is enough to be going on with, don’t you agree, Lucerne? Besides, the wine here tastes like piss in comparison to the bottles laid down in the castle’s cellars.”
“Are we not banned from drinking them?”
“Barred, maybe, but I know a passage that’ll take us there.”
“Then let’s away.” They dressed quickly, and sang dirty rhymes as the trekked the several miles back across the fields.
“Down in the vale, diddle diddle
Where flowers grow,
And the birds sing, diddle diddle
All in a row.
A brisk young man, diddle diddle
Met with a maid,
And laid her down, diddle diddle
Under the shade…”
TWELVE
Christmas Eve, 1800, Pennerley, Shropshire
Twenty or so verses Vaughan recalled them having sung, each bawdier than the last, until they were so overcome with laughter they couldn’t form the words anymore. Back at Pennerley, they’d raided both the wine cellar and the cheese store, and then passed out, sprawled across this very bed.
Vaughan had woken the following morning and the first thing he’d seen had been Lucerne’s face. He’d taken it as a sign that he’d get what he wanted in the end, and he’d never allowed any other person to sleep here with him before All Hallows Eve. He looked down at Bella, whose head now lay in his lap. He hadn’t meant to allow it, but she was slowly wheedling her way into his affections.
He did care for her, no matter how hard he strove to prove otherwise.
Truthfully, maybe he always had. Certainly, she’d always excited his attention, and she shared his twin loves of wickedness and sex, as well as an affection for Lucerne. Thinking back, even their very first encounter had been charged with tension that wasn’t entirely attributable to rivalry. Sexual sparks had zapped between them.
He stoked her hair back from her face. “I care about you,” he said, trying the words out.
Nothing collapsed.
“No, more than that, I like…I love you.”
God help her. He did love her. Not quite in the way he loved Lucerne, but maybe that was just because it was so hard to open his heart after single-mindedly pursuing Lucerne for eight years.
“Vaughan,” she muttered, reaching a hand up.
He clasped it. “Go back to sleep.”
“Hmm,” she crooned. “I dreamed you told me you loved me.”
“Ridiculous. You know I have a stone cold heart.”
She pushed a hand between his legs and snuggled against his thigh. “Yes, but a nice stiff poker, and you do quite often love me with that.”
“Bella,” he sighed, patiently. “You really should stop muddling up sexual intimacy with affection.”
She just squeezed his thigh a little tighter.
He hadn’t meant her to hear his words.
Vaughan waited until her breathing had grown deep and even again, then he felt under his pillow for the knife he kept secreted there. One couldn’t be too careful. He’d been attacked in his bed before, although in all fairness, the assailants had both been disgruntled husbands.
“You don’t mind me taking a little keepsake, do you, Bella?”
She didn’t stir.
Vaughan cut a curl of brown hair from near her cheek, which he formed neatly around his fingertip, before opening the locket and stowing it in the other side of the pendant to where the curl of Lucerne’s hair was preserved. He’d have his jeweller fix it there permanently the next time he rode into town.
“Lucerne needs some time to realise what he’s lost,” he told Bella. “Once he does so, then you and I are going north to claim him.” It was quite clear to him that they all needed to be together, and he was sure there were ways they could devise to make it work out.
***
Vaughan, Bella and Lucerne’s story will conclude in The Serpent’s Kiss, coming soon.
Need more Scandalous Seductions?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief insight into the lives of Vaughan, Bella and Lucerne as they spend their first Christmas apart, and that you’re all fire up for the conclusion of their story, which will be told in The Serpent’s Kiss, due out in 2016.
If you haven’t read the previous titles about these characters, you might like to check out A Gentleman’s Wager, Indiscretions and Phantasmagoria.
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Thank you so much for reading THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST. Please consider leaving an honest review at the point of purchase so that others can discover the Scandalous Seductions series.
More Scandalous Seductions
A Gentleman’s Wager (Scandalous Seductions Book 1)
When Bella Rushdale sets out to win Viscount Marlinscar’s hand, she doesn’t expect her rival to be another man. Vaughan, the decadent Marquis of Pennerley has desired Lucerne for years, and now, on the wild Yorkshire Moors, intends to claim him.
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The Ghosts of Christmas Past Page 9
