by Rose Lerner
Exploring with his fingers, he discovered a small reddish-pink lump hidden by folds of skin, an inch above her slit. It looked almost angry. Curious, he licked it too.
Betsy gave a long, helpless moan, her hips tilting towards him like a flower to the sun.
Sucking the lump into his mouth, he licked again. Betsy panted, sinking back on her elbows. Her thighs shook on his shoulders.
So he kept going, feeling for her slick opening. His thumb slid in easily, not at quite the angle he’d ignorantly imagined.
“Ahh,” Betsy moaned. “Ah-ah—”
She was tight even around his thumb. Could she really make space for his manhood? Her inner walls gave encouragingly when he pressed them. She was all aquiver now, her moans feverish, not at all like the mild, friendly girl he knew. He frigged her with his thumb in a mimicry of coupling, his mouth on that tiny lump.
“Please. Please…” He thought there must be something more she wanted, but a moment later she said, “Oh—yes—yes—I don’t know if I’d ought—”
Her cunt tugged at his thumb hard, startling him. There was a pause, and then all at once she was boiling over, her heels drumming on his back, her insides rippling with astonishing strength.
So this was woman’s pleasure. Robert could hardly breathe for thinking of his cock inside her. That strength was meant to carry his seed to her womb.
He felt a pang at the thought, and tried to quash it. Children were just one more thing he didn’t have the money for. Pulling a stray hair from his mouth, he lifted her legs from his shoulder and stood.
Betsy lay back on the table, legs splayed, staring at the ceiling and breathing hard.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. “Have you—how do you avoid pregnancy?”
She blinked. “Er.” She blinked again, eyes focusing. “There’s a woman near town who grows pennyroyal.”
“That’s for unwanted babes, isn’t it?”
She closed her legs then, sitting up and fussing with her skirts. “Not only. If you drink pennyroyal tea before your menses are to start, it helps them on. Too early to call it a babe, or know if there was one.”
“Oh.” His cock was too hard to waste time in feeling unsettled. “Then may I…?”
Maybe it was rude to ask her that. Maybe he ought to wait for her invitation.
Her glow dimmed further. She chewed at the corner of her mouth. “Yes.”
* * *
Betsy’s body was still slow and warm from pleasure. It was good that he enter her now, when she was wet. She did want this. She’d wanted this for ages.
It just seemed complicated all of a sudden.
But Jemima would go with her to get the pennyroyal, later. She had weeks before her menses were due.
Mr. Moon tucked some hair behind her ear. “Be you certain?”
Oh no. He could see how unsure she was. She didn’t want to be a responsibility, or work. She wanted to be effortless and fun. He’d already been so kind to her.
So…magnificently kind. Her body pulsed with heat at the memory.
She smiled up at him, and halfway through the smile it was real. “Yes.” She pulled him down to kiss her.
He tasted odd. What—that’s me, she realized with embarrassment.
But he kissed her eagerly, already fumbling at his breeches. His hands brushed her thighs. He would be in her. The magnitude of it amazed her.
“Yes,” she said again, almost laughing with joy. “Hurry.” He smiled against her mouth.
Abruptly she felt the head of his cock poking at her cunny, round and hard and strange. It jabbed uncomfortably. He jabbed again, searching, and pulled away nervesomely. For a moment she panicked.
But Lenny had found his way in, and he had fit. So would Mr. Moon. “You needn’t really hurry,” she said. “Sorry.”
The tip of his cock slipped in with a bump, and his mouth fell open. His fingertips brushed her folds as he pushed himself into her.
Inch by inch, in he went, and she tried to relax and welcome him, because the look of surprised awe on his face made her want to give him anything, everything. Her heart swelled like rising dough, pressing gently against her ribs trying to get to him.
He thrust hesitantly.
She could feel him inside her, and suddenly that wasn’t just a polite way to say she was getting fucked. Inside her body was just herself, had always been just herself, and outside was everything else. But now he was here too. They were joined.
“How does it feel?” she asked shyly.
He grinned at her and thrust harder, somehow making a joke with it, a splendid joke. “I see what all the fuss is about.”
She had to swallow a light-headed giggle, of the sort that overtook her and Jemima when they’d stayed awake far too late and everything was suddenly the funniest thing in the world. “Go on, then.”
So he took his pleasure—but it didn’t feel like taking. He gave her his pleasure without stinting, trusting her to be kind with it.
It wasn’t quite comfortable taking him into her, not yet. But it was exciting, and by the time he clutched at her hip with one hand and leaned hard on the table with the other, pounding into her one last time—no, just once more—she was throbbing and eager again.
He rested his forehead on her shoulder a few moments, catching his breath, before standing to button his breeches. “Be you well?”
She nodded, but she was sore and empty, with wetness trickling down her thigh. She hated being awkward and unsure again, when a moment before she had felt her innermost self flowing towards him and gathering him in.
With an effort, she smiled. “I’d better clean up.”
When she was done she tossed the rag in with the other kitchen messes. The laundry bucket was growing full; she’d have to wash them all soon.
“Was I—all right?” he asked behind her. “I didn’t disappoint you?”
Her heart melted. In just such a voice, a minute or two from now, he’d ask her to taste the macaroons and reassure him that their texture was even, and that they weren’t too sweet.
She didn’t want him to know how ready she was to be pleased, how impossible it had been for anything but a refusal to disappoint her.
“You were perfect,” she said, trying to sound as if she were merely talking about biscuits. Smoothing her gown over her hips, she let her hands linger on her own curves. He saw her as a woman now. He must. “And…were you pleased?” She couldn’t turn and face him.
He chuckled tightly. “When can we do it again?”
She beamed at the bucket of rags. “As soon as you like.”
He nudged her gently aside to wash his hands, and by the time she got up the nerve to look at him, he was weighing sugar to be pounded for the Naples biscuits.
The rest of the afternoon passed like any other, except for mirthful, blushing glances and now and again a smothered smile, like two people trying not to laugh in church. Betsy didn’t know whether to be relieved that they could still work together or disappointed that everything wasn’t changed.
But when the kitchen was lamplit, after he’d washed the dishes and she had scrubbed the floor, he pulled her into the shadows, his hands still damp and rough.
“May I?” he asked, and when she said he might, he lifted her against the wall and took her again. “I’d like you to come while I’m in you,” he said earnestly, and she obliged him with very little effort.
She felt very smug indeed as she walked home. She was a seductress.
Betsy Piper, confectioner’s shopgirl and seductress. She ought to have cards made up at the printing office.
Chapter 3:
Thursday
Betsy let herself into the closed shop with her key, hopeful of a warm welcome but plagued with renewed nerves. Tying her faded green-and-white apron tighter than usual, so it curved closely to her breasts, she ventured into the quiet kitchen, a piece of stale seedcake in hand.
Mr. Moon sat sketching, his free hand fisted in his hair. Head-on, his long no
se with a bump in it gave him a coltish, raw-boned, friendly look. But there was something austere in his profile, like a hawk or a monk. Something pure and fierce.
Looking over, he smiled sheepishly, the purity and fierceness out of sight once more. But she knew they were there. “Morning, Betsy. Did you sleep well?”
I dreamed of you, she thought, but she’d never be able to make it sound like a flirtatious joke. It wasn’t even true, and he’d believe it.
“I did, thank you. Though I dreamed I was late to work,” she said honestly.
“I dreamed all my teeth were falling out one after t’other. I’ve dreamed that dunnamany times, and I don’t know why. I’ve good teeth and I take care to clean the sugar off.” He felt at his jaw as if reassuring himself that his teeth were still firmly in their sockets. “I’ve made a list of what we’ll need to lay the table at the Assembly Rooms. Some things we’ll borrow from Mr. Whittle at the Lost Bell, and half a dozen or so I’ve to beg Mr. Killick for the loan of.”
That was the confectioner at Lenfield House. As a boy Mr. Moon had walked there from Runford on his weekly half-holiday, an hour each way, to learn as much as he could from Mr. Killick.
“I need to be getting a start on the gum paste ornaments,” he said. “Can I send you to Lenfield? Only a few bitty things will need to be fetched today. I’ve marked them with an X—a sack or basket ought to suffice.”
It was a seven-mile walk, and half an hour after dawn the day was already warm. Betsy tried not to grumble. Someone had to go. “Aye, of course.”
He showed her his list, carefully describing each item to her despite the drawings he’d already penciled in the margin. Surely the shop would be a success, soon enough. Surely the love he lavished on it couldn’t be wasted.
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not a jot,” she said. “You know I want the assembly to be splendid.” She slipped the list into her bodice.
He raised a finger to trace the paper’s outline beneath her dress, its flowered print almost invisible with age. “Thanks. I’m sorry, but I think you’d better go before it gets too hot.” But he tilted up her chin for a quick kiss. “And there I’ve got a smudge of lead on you.”
He licked his thumb and rubbed it off, and the pink flash of his tongue made even that unromantic gesture unfairly erotic.
* * *
The columns for the round temple were crooked.
Robert felt the first cloying tendrils of panic in his nose and throat. Or maybe that was a coating of powdered sugar, from pounding gum dragon and sugar into paste all day.
He’d used this set of dowels a dozen times and never had crooked columns, so he must have coated them unevenly with gum paste. The whole thing would fall the moment someone tried to slice into the blancmange dome on its platter.
Betsy let herself into the kitchen. She looked hot and tired after tramping about under the hot sun all morning; he’d ought to give her a moment to rest.
“The columns are crooked,” he said.
Frowning, she set down her basket. “Are they?” Nudging a bucket in front of the door to let in a breeze, she came and stood at his elbow. “Only the smallest bit. Once you’ve dabbed them with royal icing and stuck the plate on, it should hold.”
“Do you think?”
“I do.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe a little crookedness could be overlooked. Lively St. Lemeston wasn’t London, after all. But he was grateful his old master, Mr. Killick, wouldn’t be at the assembly to see it.
“Mrs. Lovejoy came by while you were gone,” he said. “She said maybe there’d be two hundred twenty-five at the assembly, and insisted on adding two chocolate cream tarts to the menu. Said it came to her over her morning chocolate.”
Betsy rolled her eyes. “Is she paying us extra for them?”
Robert felt ashamed that he wasn’t a better negotiator. “She’s already paying us such a great sum, and it won’t be much extra work, just a little extra tart dough and shaving some chocolate…”
He went and got a platter so he wouldn’t have to see Betsy smothering her sigh. It wasn’t much use trying to make it balance before everything was pasted in place, but he held it above the columns to see how it would lie.
Mostly flat. Mostly.
“It’ll hold,” Betsy said firmly. “You’ll see. How much more do you have to do?”
“I’ve made the columns and the steps, but I’ve still to mold the architrave, frieze, and cornice of the dome, and all the flourishes and ornaments for the frieze.”
“The whats of the dome?” She pulled a roll from her basket and dug her thumbs into it to open it. “Would you like one?”
Robert realized that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Thank you.” He reached for it.
Prying a second one apart, she shook her head and disappeared into the cold room, no doubt for butter and jam.
“Ohhhh,” came her voice, loud and soft and loud again as the door swung. “Maybe I won’t be right back after all. Latch the door and come in here a moment.”
“I should start on the dome.”
“Just for a moment,” she called. “There are hours and hours of daylight yet.”
There were—thank God it was summer—and while Betsy might not be a confectioner she had a good eye and sure hands. She could lay the ornaments on the frieze as neatly as he could. They’d finish the temple by nightfall.
Robert stepped into the cold room, so named because it adjoined the ice room and was away from the heat of the ovens.
Oh. It had been devilish hot in the kitchen, hadn’t it? He’d not remarked how much he was sweating until the cool air hit him. He felt calmer and happier at once.
“Did you latch the door?” she asked, and he assured her he had.
They ate companionably, sitting on the edge of an ice chest, and by the time the jammy, buttered roll had gone most of Robert’s panic had too.
Snaking an arm around Betsy’s waist, he drew her against him. “I’m glad you’re back.” He caught the edge of a pleased smile as she leaned against his shoulder.
He twisted to kiss her. She kissed him back eagerly, and he thought, I could have her right now.
Only moments later, it had become, I have to have her right now. “Let’s—may I—”
She nodded urgently, her nose bumping against his. One breast was pressed into his side. He’d barely even touched those yesterday. Despite all she had allowed him to do, he still half expected a slap as he put his hands up and shaped them to her curves.
My, but her bosom was soft, softer than the yielding layers of linen that covered it. And there—there were her nipples, stiff beads against his fingers. She gasped and pushed against his hands, reaching under his apron for the buttons on his breeches.
“Not yet,” he said. “Let me take your clothes off.”
His whole body thrilled as he said the words. There was no confection or fruit the color of her skin, but he thought of delicious things anyway, peach custard and marzipan. That tiny sensitive part of her cunny was the delicate pinkish red of a translucent red-currant ice.
Betsy went stiff. Her nod was very slight.
Had he finally gone too far? Why should this be too far? He took his hands off her and laid them flat on the ice chest. “Do you not want me to?”
She took in a deep breath; he felt a pang of loss at her bodice pushing against air instead of his palms. “Go and check the latch again,” she said. “I’ll be along in a moment.”
He did as she asked, embarrassed in the brightly sunlit kitchen by his obvious erection. Maybe that was how Betsy felt about being naked—afraid of looking foolish. As if she ever could.
Robert laid his apron on the counter. Would it make her less self-conscious if he took off his own clothes, or would it frighten her?
She came in with a blushing smile and a bowl of ice. “You’d ought to take off your clothes too. Would you unlace the back of my gown first?”
“Oh aye,” he said eag
erly, to make her laugh.
Her stays laced in the front. He’d known that from touching her. He knew dunnamany things about her now that he hadn’t known two days ago.
Dunnamany things about her body, anyways.
But he knew her mind well enough already—didn’t he? They’d worked together for more than a year now. They’d talked for hours. He knew enough about the last twenty years of Sussex murders that he could write a book, if writing a book were a thing he could do, which it assuredly was not.
He knew about her best friend, Jemima, and her mother’s tiresome habit of cooking everything to a mush, and her little sister who wanted to go into service in London but hopefully wouldn’t until she was old enough to look out for herself.
He knew Betsy hated peeling apples, that her pattens always gave her a blister the first rainy week of the year, and that the autumn she was ten, she and Jemima had gone nutting every Sunday to see if the devil would really hold down the branches for them as superstition promised.
They stripped in silence. She pulled off her stays, contorting to keep the lace from coming entirely out of its holes, and rolled down her stockings swift and sure as she must do it every night before bed. He watched, and felt he knew her not at all.
What do you lie in the dark and worry over? he wanted to ask her. How many children do you want, and what sort of old woman would you like to be?
He couldn’t say that. It wasn’t bed talk—or kitchen-counter talk, as the case might be.
He took off his own stockings, and his breeches. “Smallclothes too?”
After a pause, she nodded without looking at him.
Robert obeyed, hoping she wasn’t disappointed, that his hips weren’t too bony and that she wouldn’t rather a man have more hair on his chest.
He was the furthest thing from disappointed when she pulled her shift over her head. The curves and angles and textures of her were flawless, all of them. Her golden forearms, neck, and face gave way in stark lines to the pale skin under her dress, inspiring an unexpected tenderness. The sweet curve of her hip and the deep shadows under her breasts made him wild to be in her.
He drew near to her. The possibility of coupling hung in the warm air between them like the smell of something baking in the oven. There were nerves in that too—will it taste as good as it smells?—but he was so eager to take the first bite of her, he couldn’t pay the nerves much mind.
