The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two

by Michele Jaffe

  He could feel her, her hands moving up and down his length, her mouth encasing him with its warmth and then pulling away, but with his head still outside the desk he could not see her. He had never had an experience like this, never had half his body suspended in a sensual dream, and it sharpened his senses. He closed his eyes and let his form fill with the feeling of her caresses, not separating them into mouths and tongues and teeth and fingers and hands, just letting them wash into him and around him. He felt himself sliding between her lips, into the marvelously smooth and tight passage of her mouth, her cheeks sucked in around him as she pulled him into her. She swallowed, pressing him against the roof of her mouth with her tongue, then let him slide in and out as her hands caressed the length of his shaft.

  The tension of the day turned to a different sort of tension within Crispin as her hands, both hands, moved over his slick, wet member. She sucked hard at his tip as she pushed her mouth over him, and then let her fingers reach out and stroke the base of his shaft. That touch tingled over him, sending all his emotion, all his tension, exploding and shimmering into her. Not knowing what she was doing, what he was doing, he panted and moaned and trembled and tightened his muscles and poured himself into her mouth. She pressed her lips against him and savored his climax, imbibing every glorious drop, every sweet shudder of his release, every sign of his response to her.

  When she moved her mouth away, the remainder of Crispin’s limp body slid through the opening under the desk. He staggered as his feet hit the floor, and would have fallen if Sophie’s smile had not helped him stand. She was wearing nothing but the red-and-gold silk dressing gown he had given her the first night he made her strip, and was standing in a small puddle of light being given off by a lantern.

  “I am sorry, my lord,” she said, with even less contrition than Basil had shown that morning when issuing the warrant. “I could not stop myself.”

  “And I certainly could not stop you.” Crispin move toward her and bent to kiss her red lips, then her eyelids. “I had no idea my father’s old desk could be so exciting.”

  “You have not yet seen the half of it.” Sophie pulled away to show him but was distracted by the sight of Crispin’s lower torso in the half-light. She sighed, then dragged her mind back to the exciting news she had for him. “If you put your bottoms back on so I can think straight, I will show you something amazing.” When he hesitated, her voice became plaintive. “Please, Crispin, it is a wonderful surprise.”

  “If you are sure.” Following her orders, Crispin pulled his breeches up. When he had securely retied each lace and retrieved the tray of food, Sophie reached for his arm. She lifted the lantern from the table next to her and held it above her head.

  They and the table were standing on a small wooden platform, Crispin saw, with wooden stairs leading off one side and down into the darkness.

  “I found the opening under the desk the other morning and told Thurston how to open it by pulling the daisy,” Sophie explained to Crispin as she led him down the stairs. “It seemed the perfect place to hide because the desk did not look big enough to conceal a person and the panels underneath would be expected to sound hollow if they were tried.”

  “Do you think this hiding place was made on purpose?” Crispin felt a strange sense of foreboding as he descended and thought he heard his father’s voice telling him to go back.

  “Oh, yes,” Sophie assured him, stopping their descent. “Just wait.”

  Sophie had used the secret door under the desk the day she undertook her escape and return to Sandal Hall, and had that day noticed the door cut into the wall of the passage, but she had been too preoccupied with trying to come up with reasons not to leave that did not involve wanting to see the Earl of Sandal again to bother exploring it. Today, however, in the long hours that followed Thurston’s closing the secret panel in the desk, she had returned to the mysterious door and been well rewarded for her curiosity.

  She now knew every horizontal, every diagonal, every dimension of the secret chamber, having traversed them all a hundred times as she waited for the search to be over. Her feet had barely kept pace with her thoughts, but they both seemed to come across immobile obstacles with some regularity. The most insurmountable of these, besides the walls of the chamber, was Sophie’s inability to believe that her godfather had been a counterfeiter. And yet, she had to admit that it made so many things—the blackmail, Lord Grosgrain’s recent battery of huge expenditures, his fear of the Phoenix—clear. But if he were being blackmailed because of the counterfeiting, why was he killed? Did it not make more sense to kill the blackmailer?

  As indeed, she reminded herself, someone had or at least had killed the blackmailer’s agent in the person of Richard Tottle. And if the evidence of the bill of credit and the pistol planted on the dead man’s body was to be believed, the same person committed both murders. Sophie had bashed her toe into a wall then, hard, and her thoughts had come crashing to a halt. When they resumed, she had the glimmer of an idea, the idea that perhaps it was not Lord Grosgrain who was being blackmailed but someone close to him, someone for whom he would pay the blackmail willingly, someone who wanted to stop the blackmail by killing Richard Tottle and was forced to kill Lord Grosgrain as well or risk raising his suspicions. Sophie recalled the morning she had gone to deliver the bill of credit to Lord Grosgrain, remembered the raised voices she had heard from his study, and the red face of Basil as he stomped by her out of the house, clearly unhappy after a meeting with his father. Could it have been Basil who was being blackmailed, Basil who—?

  Sophie hit another wall then, both literally with her toe and figuratively with the idea of Basil as a killer. She just could not see it—neither Basil as a murderer nor the wall. She realized then, with some shock, that her candle had burned out long before and she had spent the better part of two hours alone, in the dark. Without being afraid.

  Crispin. Crispin had done this. Crispin had freed her from the fears of her past. Crispin had given her back herself. She realized with a start that she was no longer scared at all. Not of the dark. Or of the voice.

  She felt liberated and strong. And very, very grateful. Try as she might to redirect her thoughts toward Lord Grosgrain’s murder, they kept spinning back to Crispin and the magic he worked on her. Mercifully, Crispin’s voice calling to her had penetrated the darkness of the chamber then, because her longing to see him and tell him and thank him was hard to contain. She was filled with miraculous feelings that warmed even her much battered toes, and with a wonderful sense of expectation. She, too, could teach him something about himself he did not know.

  Her excited anticipation of the surprise she had for him had been building and came to a peak now as, hand in hand, she and Crispin arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Sophie led the way across the narrow corridor and through a door, holding her lantern low, so that Crispin could at first see nothing of the chamber around them.

  He had never been here, never even suspected the existence of a secret room under his father’s desk. But his surprise at finding it was nothing compared to the surprise he received when Sophie raised the lantern above her head.

  “Blasted Aunts!” he said, his eyes agog. It was a small, square room with its walls completely covered in mirrors. Each mirrored surface was lined with six velvet-covered shelves. And each shelf was empty but for the eight or ten enormous pieces of jewelry arrayed on them. The jewels were arranged by color, rubies with rubies, emeralds with emeralds, sapphires together with sapphires, pearls with pearls, all carefully displayed. There were earrings and rings, scepters and sword hilts, bracelets and belts and buckles and broaches, crowns and chokers, clasps and collars—every conceivable shape and size and kind of ornament so long as it was encrusted with gems.

  “You are rich,” Sophie trilled relieving him of the tray of food. “You are also the son of a jewel thief.”

  Crispin’s eyes bec
ame more agog. “No.” He was shaking his head in disbelief. “It is not possible.”

  “Look.” Sophie held up a sheaf of manuscript pages. “I found these down here. A meticulous catalog of the ‘collection’ of Hugo, Earl of Sandal, stating the date and manner of each acquisition, though keeping its provenance vague. Many of them are quite ingenious. My favorite is June thirteenth, fifteen hundred and sixty seven, when he made love to Countess V while prying her rings out from under the floorboards.”

  Crispin took the pages from her and moved into the light of the lamp. He passed his eyes over them quickly, skimming the outlandish exploits, matching the objects described there to those along the walls, noting in passing that it was not organized alphabetically.

  “There are some missing,” Sophie informed him as he got near the end. “Some that he describes are not here. I think you should demand their recovery. I for one would love to see the ruby bracelet he removed from the arm of Queen E herself while pleasuring her under the table at a state dinner.”

  “I’ll show it to you when we go back out,” Crispin said nonchalantly.

  “You mean you knew about this?”

  “No.” Crispin shook his head. “And I can still hardly believe it. But among the dozen or so secrets that my house has been keeping from me which were revealed today, were four caches of jewels. Nothing like this”—Crispin gestured around—“but each containing a few, worthy pieces, including that bracelet.”

  Crispin put the manuscript down and cast his eyes around again. Then he began to laugh. No wonder he had begun hearing his father’s voice as they descended. The man was probably haunting the place desperate to ensure that his secret not be found out. Dear Hugo, perfect, polite Hugo, Hugo to whom no door had been closed, nor any pair of soft peachy thighs, Hugo whom everyone adored, Hugo that spouter of wise adages, Hugo that model of gentlemanly comportment, Hugo—his father, the man he would never be—had been a jewel thief. What could possibly be better?

  And what would The Aunts say? As Crispin had that thought, the voices in his head began to jangle more loudly, warning Crispin to leave, berating him for probing secrets that were not his, for risking the family honor. In a flash Crispin saw that his father had been as subjugated by The Aunts as he was, that “your father, our brother, dear Hugo,” had been routed just as much, if not more than, his son. The horrible statue on Hugo’s desk had been the means of his escape, his relief.

  His fulfillment. Feeling a new affection for his father, and also a new pity, Crispin opened his arms wide and addressed the room.

  “Do not worry, Father,” he said aloud. “I won’t tell The Aunts.” And as if by magic, his thoughts fell silent.

  At peace again, Crispin turned to look at Sophie, but her back was to him. After inhaling half the asparagus and all the cherries, she had blown the dust off a ruby tiara and was settling it atop her red mane. As Crispin watched, she hooked a pair of dangling ruby earrings through her ears and clasped a matching choker behind her neck. Then she let the red-and-gold silk robe slip from her shoulders and turned to face him, completely naked.

  She was a goddess, an empress, a divinity come to earth, a siren, a sorceress, she was incredible and inexplicably beautiful. Crispin wanted to touch her, just let his fingers move near her skin, to assure himself that she was real, that she was there. She defied Crispin’s imagination, defied his capacity to understand or believe. Awash with rubies, she glittered and shone from every angle, stirring his deepest depths.

  Crispin’s eyes glowed as he approached her, glowed with awe and wonder. They touched, still at a distance, then moved closer to one another, then closer. With each step Crispin shed another layer of his clothing, so that finally there was nothing between them but their skin. They pressed against the length of one another, pressing together, their eyes locked. Food was completely forgotten.

  Crispin spread the silk robe over the wooden floor, and they lay atop it, Sophie on her back, Crispin alongside her. Reaching out a hand he found a ruby necklace, two large stones on a fine gold chain, and dangled it over Sophie’s body. He moved the rubies like a pendulum over her breasts, then down her stomach, into the cleft between her legs.

  The red stones rested amid the red curls there until he gently pushed them down further. Sophie arched up as her aroused nub was deliciously sandwiched between the gems, and moaned as the gold chain followed them. Crispin carefully made the chain taut and pulled it back and forth on either side of her nub and below, rubbing it over the soft petals there, letting the rubies press into her, framing her tender place like a jewel in a golden setting. He shifted slightly so she could see into the mirrors alongside and behind them, so she could watch his fingers, watch the gems, watch herself in her pleasure.

  The feel of the gemstone between her legs, inside her, while the chain played over her nub made Sophie begin to tremble, but it was when she saw and felt Crispin add the pressure of his finger to the chain that she neared her threshold. She called out his name as he moved his fingers faster, moaned it out as he pressed the gemstones into her, and breathed it out as he followed the stones with a finger, slipping it smoothly between her wet folds. In the mirror Sophie could see his fingers working over her, dancing over her, the rubies appearing and disappearing between the wet folds of her body. She saw him push her nub with his thumb while sliding his middle finger into her, saw him lower his head over her slowly, saw his tongue, pointed, teasing her, watched it dart between the folds, following the rubies, looked at his golden head between her legs as he suckled her, then watched him rub her with four fingertips, and she exploded. Her climax crashed over his fingers, pulsing and throbbing around him, around the rubies, and her laughter whistled in his ears.

  It had not died down when she reached her hand out for his shaft. She needed to feel him inside of her, feel their bodies together. “Crispin, make love to me.”

  The words sounded different, tasted different, as Crispin kissed them off her lips, ambrosial words. He slid the ruby necklace from between their bodies, from between her legs, and felt Sophie shudder. Her cherry-flavored lips trembled under his as they kissed lightly, once, twice, once again. Their mouths parted then, gone exploring, moving across smooth skin, over soft hair, along necks, finding each other briefly and then separating to go on their individual expeditions joined by tongues, teeth, hands, feet. They drank each other in, savoring tastes and textures and smells, lapping at one another’s delicacies. Soon their bodies were pressuring them for more, to deepen the kiss, complete it.

  Crispin rolled onto his back and bent his knees to make a throne for Sophie as she raised herself and guided him inside her passage, still tight and wet from her climax. She leaned back against his legs, aware of every place his thighs touched her back, of the way her bottom pressed into them, while his member pressed into her. For a time neither of them moved or spoke or breathed, too busy memorizing the feel of their bodies together, of this new kiss, too busy looking into one another’s eyes. Never letting Crispin slip from inside her, Sophie lay down on top of him.

  Their mouths touched, lips pressed against lips, and Sophie felt Crispin bucking within her of his own accord. It was then that the kiss changed, became more insistent, more fiery. Sophie began to rotate her hips in slow wide circles, letting him slide in and out of her as she danced around him. She straightened her arms and pushed her body up over him, lifting her mouth from his so her breasts could caress his chest with her movements, and her eyes could whisper her desires to him.

  His eyes stayed on hers as he raised his head and took one soft pink nipple between his lips. He just barely touched it, then moved to the other, letting his lips, chapped from kissing, taste each first, fleetingly. Chapped lips parted then, sucking the softest, supplest skin on her body into his mouth, letting her nipples feel the warm wetness of his tongue. He rolled first one and then the other around in his mouth until they became firm and ere
ct, until she moaned once, then again, louder.

  Sophie felt his lips on her nipples everywhere. Every pull of his mouth, every skim of his teeth, spiraled through her body, bouncing off first one place then another, leaving points of heat and tenderness in its wake. When she moved to let him slide out of her, her bottom was caressed by his thighs. When she arched to take him back in, her hips grazed his, her breasts skimmed over his chest. Her feet touched his feet, wrapped around their ankles, were raised by them so she could take him in farther. Soon every part of her skin was alight, sensitive to the merest caress of his lips, responding to every thrust, every glide, every motion of their bodies.

  Crispin reached his arms up and pulled her back to his chest, rubbing himself into her, covering her lips with his again. Her legs were bent on either side of him so that she could lift herself off of him, pull him far out of her and then slide back down over him, all the way to the base, pressing him into her as hard as he would go. He reached his hands down to stroke her, having learned that her climaxes were even more resonant that way, and she responded instantly, quickening her pace, breathing faster, deeper. The way the tips of Crispin’s fingers brushed over her most sensitive place, the way that place felt when it was rubbed against him, when he thrust himself up to meet her, grinding himself and his hips against her, touching her with his entire body, immersing within her his entire length, made Sophie feel dizzy, alight, alive.