Agony/Ecstasy: Original Stories of Agonizing Pleasure/Exquisite Pain

by Litte, Jane

At first his long fingers brushed the valleys at the very top of her thighs, and his hand cupped her pubis. His touch was delicate, teasing, and it required all her will not to shift forward and press herself against it.

  Slowly, slowly, he dipped a finger into her. She shifted back on her bottom to give him greater access, but he prolonged his penetration.

  “Such a sweet, welcoming pussy,” he said, still gazing ahead, damn him. “Always wet and ready for me.” He slipped a second finger in and began massaging the walls of her pussy. By the time he removed his fingers, Thea’s thighs were quaking. He brushed them with his left hand.

  “Not yet, love,” he told her. “It will be more potent if I draw it out.”

  She struggled to take deep breaths, teetering on the edge of climax. Desire was a painful, sharp sensation.

  A distant carriage appeared in the lane opposite. Hugh trailed his fingers up again. One entered the opening of her bottom, while his thumb circled her clitoris, a hairsbreadth from touching it. Just as the Whitechapel cart approached them to the right, he gave her clitoris the contact that it burned for.

  While Hugh nodded politely to the carriage-driving farmer, the climax rocked through her like an enormous tremor from beneath the earth. She had to bite her lip to keep from screaming, and pray the other man would not look past the windscreen and her veil.

  She was still cresting on aftershocks when the carriage was long past and Hugh finally looked at her, smiling like a cat who had swallowed the cream and lapped up the butter. Then his eyes returned to the road.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He spared her another glance. “Would you like me to crash this motor?”

  Yes, she thought as she restored her clothes to order. That would be a sign of feeling. “How did you know?” she asked instead.

  “Know what?”

  “That I . . . thought of you and touched myself last night.”

  He took a long moment to answer her. “Because,” he said, “I thought of you then too, when I grasped and stroked my cock.”

  What a delicious admission. But she was still confounded by his having stayed away. Like a mountain climber unable to find another foothold, her mind swung to the night she tried never to think of. The bitter cold of the boat deck, the din of steam from the boilers roaring through pipes. And Cyril Darrow urging her to get in the lifeboat.

  “Tell me about your cousin,” she said. “If he is the reason that you married me then I deserve to understand.”

  For a moment she thought he would refuse. “It’s difficult,” he finally said. “To explain regarding Cyril I must begin with myself.”

  She waited.

  “My mother was a lady,” he said. “You must know of the scandal. In eighty-four, when she was just eighteen, she ran off with her father’s footman. Jack Carter, my father, was that man. He found other work as a costermonger, but took a bad chill and died two years later.

  “It’s one thing for a lady to marry a wealthy man of common birth.” He cast an ironic glance at Thea, who had done just that in marrying him. “But another to stoop to one’s footman. My mother and I were left alone, hungry, struggling to survive. She pleaded with her relatives to take us in, but they refused. Finally Cyril’s mother, a distant cousin to whom my mother had been close, implored her husband to shelter us. He was a haughty man, Cyril’s father. He never let any of us forget his generosity.

  “I know how ruddy sentimental it sounds, but Cyril’s kindnesses were the few bright spots in my life. When he was about, he didn’t allow his brothers, or . . . anyone else to abuse me.”

  “The servants,” Thea said gently. “They must have resented you.”

  “Oh, yes. They hated deferring to their so-called betters, but to a footman’s son?” He clenched his jaw. “There was resentment, and worse.”

  Thea’s heart ached for Hugh, and yet . . . If he could confide this much, show her this sort of trust . . .

  I could fall in love with this man.

  She took his left hand, and slowly, it tightened about hers.

  “After my mother died of consumption when I was five, Cyril was the only family left to me. He insisted that I be educated with him, and much later, lent me the first capital I invested. Of course, I reimbursed him in full, but even so, I owe him more than I could repay. He loved you passionately, you know. He wrote me that you had eyes only for Wilkes.”

  What an oblivious girl she had been—a sleeping princess waiting to be kissed to life, little realizing how much life could hurt. Infatuated enough with Martin that at his suggestion, she’d cajoled her aunt into a trip to New York, where Martin had business dealings, so that she could remain in his company. Thank God, Aunt Lucia had survived Titanic. Theodora hadn’t lost a loved one.

  Hugh had not been so fortunate.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He seemed not to hear. “I don’t think Cyril would approve of all I’ve done to you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t entirely begrudge Wilkes his desire to survive, but that he should have you and your fortune after he attempted to bilk Cyril of his—Oh, yes, Cyril learned Wilkes was skimming from their joint shipping venture. But he put off confronting Wilkes because Wilkes was his sole connection to you. I believe he was trying to find the courage to tell you of his love and of Wilkes’ dealings, when that iceberg converged on your ship.

  “In any case, since Cyril never had the opportunity to do so, I set out to foil Wilkes’ plans myself. I told your father of the thieving, and suggested he tell you to pretend to Wilkes that you were being cut off from your fortune. But even after Wilkes broke off with you, I wasn’t certain you would not reveal that it had been a lie. Wilkes boasted to me that you had slept with him, and I feared that might make you feel obliged to marry the sod. And so I courted both you and your father. I sometimes use every means available to me. But then, you know that intimately by now.”

  Why did those words arouse her? Because despite the pain he had inflicted, she had been pleasured, too, by the punishment he’d meted out?

  As always, he seemed to sense the tenor of her thoughts. “Perhaps I should have been gentler on our wedding night,” he said. “But I was angry, Thea. No, not because you were not a virgin. I’m hardly one myself, now am I? But it seared me to know it had been Wilkes. And if you thought your having taken a lover worth confessing, you should have told me prior to the wedding vows.”

  What could she say to that? She would only look worse for defending herself, even with her father’s ill health.

  “What do you want from me, Hugh?”

  A rueful laugh escaped him. “Beside the obvious? I want you to acknowledge what you want. Christ, Thea, you’ve lived through something fifteen hundred people did not survive. And Cyril died so that you could. Throw caution to all four winds, grasp life about the neck. Live with abandon. Not many people get a second chance.”

  BUT at the house, a message from her father’s butler waited. “No,” Theodora said when she rang him back and heard the news.

  Hugh paled when she told him. “Let’s hurry,” he said. “I’ll drive you there.”

  This time there was no blunt conversation, no confident fingers exploring her. Hugh’s mouth was grimly closed, his strong hands both on the steering wheel. The Silver Ghost rushed through the afternoon at topmost speeds while Thea pleaded with God not to take her father’s life.

  They reached her father’s home at sunset. “A mild attack,” the physician said. “Your father’s heart will recover with rest.”

  That night, Thea ached for Hugh. Grasp life about the neck. Easy to say, when one was not a woman. Titanic flashed through her mind: her bows and her bridge submerging as Thea watched from the lifeboat, then the lights from the portholes dying at once. It had seemed irrelevant, after that, to wait for marriage to be with the man she’d believed she loved. And so she’d gone to Martin’s room, at a house party one night three months past.

  She didn�
��t trust her judgment. But sometimes, she thought now, one had to take a risk, even when one was afraid—or had begun to love a complicated man. She crossed the cold corridor between her room and the one her father’s housekeeper had given Hugh, and knocked on her husband’s door.

  He opened it. “I was on my way to you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Come inside,” he said. And when she had, “Your father’s heart was the reason you did not tell me sooner?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I’m terribly afraid to lose him.”

  “You’ve seen so much death. And I’ve refused to think of what that does. I’ve been such a rotter.”

  “Really, it hasn’t been so bad.” She blushed, and at that, a slight smile passed across his face, like moonlight peeking from beneath a cloud.

  “Cyril always was nobler than most; that never was your fault. I would have seen that sooner if I hadn’t been full of angry grief. And as for Wilkes—everyone makes mistakes. I’ve been a sodding bastard.”

  She put her hand on his lips, hushing him. “Hugh,” she said. “Be with me.”

  “Always.”

  Their nightclothes seemed to divest themselves. Naked, she lay on her side, turned toward him. “I’m falling in love with you,” he told her, and she shivered with joy. He seemed to know just what she wanted, for he lay beside her with his head near her thighs and said, “Lift your knee.” Ah, he put his mouth to her, and did, with utmost gentleness, what he had said he would not do on their wedding night: he licked her clitoris.

  Pleasure curled through Thea, irrepressible, undeniable, like a wave lapping the seashore, cresting higher and higher in the pull of the moon. She took Hugh’s cock in her mouth, as she had seen the two men she’d envied do, and felt the same freedom, the same equality, the same complete acceptance.

  Hugh’s seed spurted in her mouth just as that wave broke over her, splintering into sparks of sensation so intense that they were nearly painful.

  Pleasure and pain, she thought later as she lay in Hugh’s arms. Pleasure and pain were how one knew one was alive.

  “Mind you,” he murmured, “I’d still like to fuck your delightful arse from time to time.”

  “Darling,” she laughed. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Lily Daniels was born in Israel and came to the United States with her family at the age of eleven. Two years later she read her first romance, thus embarking on a decades-long love affair with the genre. She is currently working on a novel-length historical romance, and contributes book reviews to Dear Author under the name Janine Ballard. You can find her online at dearauthor.com and lilydaniels.com.

  SILVERHOUSE

  SARABETH SCOTT

  She was a symmetry of curves and arches. The curve of her neck echoed the curve of her hip. The bustle of her gown followed the same line as the lace at her neck. Her hair was up, intricately braided and immaculately confined around her head in a coronet the color of chestnuts. He knew her uncoiled hair would reach beyond the small of her back. So much weight to carry, wound around her head. There must be dozens of pins holding those coils in place.

  He pushed her shoulders down until she sat, regal and proud, on the low stool in front of him. There was no padding, just smooth walnut beneath her. He wasn’t gentle, but her graceful balance was not offset in the least. A small push was not enough to upset her.

  He began to pull the pins from her hair. His hands were brisk, moving quickly, not so much that he pulled her hair painfully, but enough that her braid unwound and slid in a languid curl down her back. The scent of soap, of her perfume, of sugared candies and beeswax in the parlor, of holly and pine in the drawing room, drifted up from her hair. All the scents he associated with her, her location in his life, combined in one moment and he was torn between breathing deeply, and not breathing at all.

  The fire beside them cast enough of a glow to warm them and the rug beneath them, but the rest of his chamber was hidden behind flickering shadows, no light penetrating the darkness. Only the gleam of tiny black polished boots reflected the fire from the far corner of the room.

  Her hair shone gold and russet brown in the light. He reached down for the end of the braid and wound it around his hand, pulling back her head until she was pinned low against his abdomen. She would feel his cock like an extension of her corset, pressing her spine and neck in a straight line.

  She pushed back against it, against him. He pulled harder on the braid coiled in his fist out of instinctive shock, but kept the tension after a moment’s thought.

  “You’ll pay for that,” he whispered.

  She said nothing. The temptation in the press of her spine was agony—he’d never thought a woman’s back would be so dangerous.

  “What shall the response be, Clara? All those little insults today. You’ve returned my gift. You’ve caused me pain.”

  He punctuated his sentence with a press of his hips against her neck and another tug on her hair. He heard and felt her low gasp. “Have you not pushed me enough, Clara?”

  She said nothing. She rolled her shoulders against his erection, and the soft pressure spread like fire through his cock, across his hips, and around his back like an embrace. The press of his body against that soft curve of her neck was arousing, and he pushed against her, making sure she felt the length and hardness.

  Then a pin pierced the placket of his trousers and stung him.

  He jerked away, and without the support, she nearly fell backward.

  “Oh, my Lord, I am so sorry,” she cried, reaching up with her hands that had been folded in her lap. Her fingers dove beneath the collar of her dress and removed a single straight pin from the lace that lined the edge.

  “A pin? You stabbed me with a pin?” His voice was quiet and even, not even the slightest bit incredulous.

  “No, sir.” Clara kept her eyes downcast. “It is to keep my posture straight.”

  He believed her. “I don’t believe you.”

  He lifted the length of braid still partly looped in his fist and saw the tiny red welts on her nape, the remnants of one ill-timed slouch or another.

  “You punish yourself,” he said. He leaned down and ran a fingertip, then his lips, over each tiny scratch. Then his teeth.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  “You have wounded me by wounding yourself. These pinpricks are unnecessary.”

  She nodded, barely moving as his lips moved over her skin.

  His eyes narrowed as a thought occurred to him. “They are also far too small to adequately punish you.”

  He lifted his head from her neck and looked down at her for a moment. He released his grip on her hair and moved to stand in front of her. He undid his trousers with one hand and cupped her face with another. The placket of his trousers fell and he lifted his rigid cock forward toward her mouth.

  “Come. You will soothe the pain.”

  Her lips parted on a gasp, and he slid his cock between them, guiding it into her mouth, feeding her. His engorged cock slid past her lips an inch at a time.

  “That’s right. Gently. Lick it.” He kept one hand at the base of his cock and one hand on her cheek, his fingers, long and powerful, reaching toward the back of her neck, guiding her movements.

  “Suckle it. Just like that.” He didn’t let her move her head while he fed her his cock. He used his hips to slide it against her tongue. He felt her moan against his balls as he slowly thrust toward her.

  “Such pain you caused me. Suck my cock, deep into your mouth. Good girl.”

  He could barely keep from moaning aloud at the sight of her lips around his flesh. Her hands were fisted in her skirts, tight in her lap as she’d been instructed to keep them, and her fingers flexed as he fed her mouthful after sliding mouthful of his cock. He watched his flesh emerge shimmering and wet from between her lips as he slid forward and back, slowly pushing all the way into her, feeling her throat on the head of his cock, then pulling nearly all the way out.


  Her lips pursed around the head, just at the flare of his crown, trying to hold him inside her. She looked up at him. He pulled himself from her mouth roughly, the edge of her teeth skirting the flesh at the head of his cock. She didn’t look away from him, or reach for him with her hands. Clara paused with her mouth open, waiting for more of him.

  “Better,” he said. He tucked his cock away and rebuttoned his trousers and she followed his movements with an interested gaze, as if she were watching a play she’d never seen before. He knew she could see the ridge betraying his arousal, awkwardly defined against the fabric. He raised a brow at her when her eyes met his, and she lowered her gaze to the floor.

  “Stand,” he said. He did not offer his hand to assist her, yet she rose in graceful movement until she stood straight before him. Her lips were red. And moist.

  “Unbutton your dress.” Her hands flew to the line of buttons down the front of her gown, and in moments it lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  “Remove your stockings.” She perched on the edge of the stool, and slid the silk from her legs. The stockings landed in wanton curls atop her gown.

  “Turn.” He unlaced her corset using only the tips of his fingers so the sides of the tightly wrapped structure released themselves only a fraction at a time. He could see the flying pulse in her neck but her breathing remained calm and slow, deliberately confined and controlled. He wanted her to pant and gasp for him. Soon.

  He unwound the strings holding her corset tight against her back, keeping the long laces coiled in his hand as he placed them on the bureau, ready for him should he need to relace her again later. While the stiff garment fell away to land on the floor, he looked at what it left behind, the creases of her shift in fierce, sharp points after being pressed beneath a corset for so many hours. He followed the red marks on the skin of her back with his gaze, then one finger.

  “You had it laced more tightly than usual, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Again, unnecessary. And not enough.”

  He sat down on the stool, warm from her body and from the fire.