“Not so,” countered Wilson. “Generosity, kindness, intelligence and loyalty. You have those qualities, and others, in abundance. And they’re probably far more valuable, ultimately, than simply being too clever for one’s own good.”
Adela almost reared back, shocked by the unexpected sincerity, and self-deprecation, of Wilson’s words. Did he mean it?
“You think I’m lying to you, don’t you? Sweetening you up for the kill.”
“It’s crossing my mind.” She sipped more of the robust coffee; it seemed more essential than ever to command her wits.
Wilson drained his cup and set it aside. “I want to fuck you, Della, obviously. And to do other things. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be honest about my general regard for you.” In a swirl of silk dressing gown he rose and strode across to the safe.
Adela finished her coffee, set the cup aside and leaned out to watch Wilson’s fingers dancing over the numbered dial. He spun it this way and that without even glancing at it, his head cocked to one side. It seemed as if he was listening to it, but that he didn’t need to look. After barely a moment or two, he swung open the heavy door and drew out her portfolio.
“It seems superfluous to give it back now,” Adela said as he strolled forward and put it into her hands. “You have other leverage to exert over me.”
“Very true.” Wilson’s silvery eyes were sharp, assessing. “But I thought you’d like it back all the same. Will you check to see that all is present and untampered with?”
Adela’s fingers shook as she negotiated the tapes that fastened the leather folder. Heat flooded her body as she thought of what she’d see. Wilson had seen them, too, and likely speculated and brooded, imagining her with the men she’d portrayed.
Lionel. Clarence. Handsome, mischievous Yuri. Why did she suddenly wish she’d never lain with them?
Anger boiled. She was entitled to her pleasure, entitled to frolic with her handsome, well-formed friends, and seek oblivion in their arms. Wilson had taken pleasure with women, and the sumptuous Coraline was not the only one.
I’m a New Woman. I can take what I want.
Adela flipped open the cover and this time she did rear back, despite trying to hide it.
The drawing at the top was superbly rendered, perfect in proportion and every detail of anatomy, as well as breathtakingly lewd and specific.
And it wasn’t one of hers.
16
A Practical Arrangement
“You drew this.” She didn’t ask. She didn’t have to. She was sitting beside the most accomplished draftsman she’d ever met.
“Yes. I was inspired by your work.”
What she saw seemed to have more in common with the naughty drawings that had been done for the praxinoscope reel. A man was spanking a woman, his hand caught in flight, speeding down toward her vulnerable flesh, although in Wilson’s world, both parties were participating in the game completely naked, and posed like a god and goddess from Greek mythology. The woman knelt on a couch—not unlike the one on which Adela and Wilson were sitting—with her sleek bottom offered to the gentleman behind her. The most delicate of cross-hatching indicated that he’d already been at her, and if the work had been tinted there would have been a patch of pink.
Adela leaned in closer. The detail was preternaturally fine, almost as if it had been drawn under a microscope. The spanked woman’s hair was draped over one shoulder, to show her profile, her throat and her bosom, and on closer inspection, she wasn’t completely naked. Around her throat was something readily familiar.
The Ruffington diamonds.
When Adela saw the necklace, she saw a lot of other things, too. The woman’s hair was dark and thick, and her profile wasn’t the pristine, harmonious line of an Aphrodite or a Helen of Troy. Her nose was slightly kinked. Only a little, though, not nearly so much as the real nose it was no doubt meant to depict. The artist’s hand was kinder than a certain unforgiving tree branch.
The man, too, sported a familiar look when studied more closely. His hair was wild and dark, and his body exceptionally lean, though poetic in its power. Hazily sketched in behind his athletic form was a dressing gown, laid across a chair.
“Well, if the technological consultancy ever runs dry, and you ever run out of ideas and inventions to sell, Wilson, you could make your living drawing for a certain magazine I know called Divertissements.” She cocked her head, still studying the drawing. “Although you might like to make everything just a little less perfect. People are flawed and have small quirks of appearance. They aren’t immaculate constructions in alabaster.”
“I’m used to drawing diagrams, not people, and adhering to very fine tolerances. But I suppose I could learn to be a bit more slapdash, if it were required.”
“Oh, so you think my work slapdash, then?” Adela set the drawing aside and found a couple more examples of Wilson’s work, variations on the same theme, only showing the couple posed in different parts of this very same room. In one, the man—Wilson, why avoid the obvious—was right behind his paramour, his erect cock almost touching her as she lay prone, facedown over the large map chest. His hand was raised to spank, but his member looked as if it was finding its way to a target of its own, although which orifice, it was impossible to determine.
“I never said your work was slapdash,” said Wilson, reaching over and stacking his work to one side, to reveal Adela’s. She blushed on seeing a very full-blooded and decidedly unslapdash study of Yuri reclining on a daybed, fondling his cock, his eyes closed, near ecstatic. “Did you fuck him when you’d finished this?” Wilson added, flicking the study aside to expose another one, of Lionel this time, sitting on a chair, legs akimbo, member rampant. “And him?”
“No, of course not!” Adela snapped the portfolio shut and placed her hands flat upon it. “Work is work and...play is play. And I often draw entirely from memory, or even imagination, you know that.”
Wilson reached over, slid the folder from beneath her hands with barely any effort at all. Was he going to insist on reviewing everything? It seemed not, though. He set the thing aside.
“If I were the one posing, would you be able to resist then?”
No! No, I wouldn’t....
“You’re too busy and industrious ever to have time to spend lolling around stark naked long enough to be drawn.”
It was true. Adela had often wondered how he’d had the time to spend cavorting with Coraline, a famous sybarite and not known for any kind of productive or industrious activities. Had his scientific and technological consultations suffered from the liaison? Was that one of the reasons they’d parted, aside from the Italian duke?
“Ah, but even the most productive scientist or inventor needs to rest sometimes.” Wilson slanted her a look, his pale eyes sultry. “Sometimes a short period of repose, followed by an orgasm, can be most energizing. Don’t you find that, Della? Do you do your best work when you’ve diddled yourself...or been fucked?”
“Don’t be stupid, Wilson.”
He had a point, though. Release did revivify. She always felt lighter in spirit and had more zest when she’d spent.
“I’m not being stupid. I’m being rational.” He reached across suddenly and began unfastening the buttons of her bodice, taking up where she’d left off. “If you must continue to draw such esoterica for your paying customers, Della, I’m offering myself as a model, instead of these men. And I’ll save you a considerable expense, too.... I’ll fuck you for free.”
Adela’s mouth dropped open. In her mind’s eye, she saw it. Herself doing drawing after drawing of Wilson’s splendid body...then afterward, writhing in pleasure beneath that same body, naked, on this couch.
It was outrageous. But it was also, as he’d pointed out, completely rational.
“Don’t you see what a practical arrangement it is, Della?” he went on when she was unable to answer him. His fingers were still at work on her buttons, and a second later her bodice was fully open to reveal her undercloth
es. “We both get something we want. Nobody has to take risks. Nobody has to waste time doing the absurd courtship dance just to get the physical satisfaction they need.” Plucking at her dress, he began to push it off over her shoulders, and without thinking, Adela assisted him. It was like a dream.
“You make it all sound so clinical. So scientific.”
But as Wilson worked on her underbodice, it was far from clinical. She shuddered finely, the tips of her breasts tingling as she anticipated the moment when he finally breached all her layers. She wanted to rend her clothing like a madwoman, expose herself to him and be free. Petticoats, corset, chemise, the whole lot oppressed her. How delicious it would be to work in this room, sketching and drawing, wearing only loose, light, rational gowns...and nothing else. Then, when lust gripped her, she could simply fling the thing off, mount Wilson...and ride him.
“There’s nothing clinical about this.” His fingers drifted over the exposed skin of her chest, then dipped into the shallow cleft between her breasts, where they were pushed up by her corset. It was such a slight touch, but Adela almost growled, it stirred her so. Impatient, she knocked away his hands and attacked the next layer.
It was broad daylight in a room that was almost half windows, yet she wanted to be completely naked and unfettered. As she fumbled with buttons and hooks, Wilson slid to his knees and unfastened her boots. Within moments he was sliding his hands up her legs under her skirts, then tweaking down her garters and the stockings they held up.
“Yes...yes...” he said, his deep voice exultant as he ran his hands up and down her naked legs. Adela parted her thighs, hoping to entice his wanderings through the vent in her drawers, but instead, he stood up and pulled her to her feet. So he could attack the fastenings of her petticoats.
Within a moment, she was stepping out of them, only for Wilson to kick them away across the carpet.
“You look very bonny in your corset, Della...but I want to see you nude again. It’s been so long.” His nimble fingers flew to the hooks down the front of her corset, uncoupling a few. “Adorable,” he said, inserting a hand beneath the boning, and inside the fine lawn shift beneath so he could cradle her breast.
It was another slight touch, but the heat in his fingers made her gasp. The nipple he laid his thumb against was already peaked, aching hard, and as he lightly flicked it, a delicious, voluptuous welling sensation between her legs bore witness to her wetness, her lusty flow. When he pinched her teat, her clitoris seemed to throb with a life all its own.
“Don’t savage your lip again, Della. Groan if you need to.... You’ve never been silent in your pleasures. Please don’t hold back now.”
He beleaguered her nipple again and a sob broke from her lips. If only he would touch her between her legs now. If only...
Adela’s eyes shot open. To the devil with “if only.” Reaching down, she slid her own hand into the vent of her drawers, searching for her center.
“You’re a wicked girl, Della.” Wilson brought his face close to hers, and she smelled coffee and a spicy exotic shaving lotion. Probably yet another thing he’d concocted for himself. “If you touch yourself, I’ll be forced to spank you, you know that, don’t you?”
“But you want to spank me, anyway,” countered Della. Why draw a spanking scene, and show her it, if he didn’t want to enact one?
“You know me well, cousin.” He kissed the side of her face and she could feel him smiling, even as she rummaged in her linen, impatient to find her clitoris.
“It’s not difficult. You drew me a picture, you fool— Oh!”
As she pressed her most sensitive place, he tweaked her breast again.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Her sex rippled, not quite climaxing, but almost...almost...
Grabbing her wrist, Wilson wrenched her hand away quite forcefully. There was a silvery fire in his eyes. A thread of fear wound through Adela’s desire. Full grown, Wilson was far wilder than the boy he’d once been, but the sense of risk made him ever more exciting.
“Enough with the prevarication.” Holding her wrist firm with one hand, he pinched her nipple again with the other. She could have hit him and wriggled away, but she didn’t. And when he released her, she renewed their struggle with the fastenings of her corset.
“Here...wait a moment.” Wilson produced his ubiquitous penknife from his pocket, opening the silver cylinder with an arcane twist. Then, reaching over and behind her, he sliced her corset laces in a swift movement. “Don’t worry, I’ll lend you some string if you must put the stupid thing on again afterward.”
As the corset started to slip, he sliced again at the laces until it was completely free, then flung it toward the ever-growing heap of her discarded clothing. Then, with rough, jerky, impatient movements, he pulled off her chemise and unfastened her drawers, compelling her to step out of the latter.
He moved away and perused her. Eyes narrowed, he was both draughtsman and libertine, and Adela’s skin was instantly awash with raging heat. Perspiration gathered in her armpits and her groin, and looking down, she could see a blush of pink across her chest.
Her fingers seemed to burn, too, alight with the urge to touch her sex again. But this time she resisted the compulsion. Fondling herself while naked would be far too lewd...and yet somehow, she knew Wilson would shortly ask her to do it, or perhaps order her sooner or later.
He stepped toward her again, standing so close that the silk of his dressing gown floated against her breasts, her belly and her thighs in a tantalizing infinitesimal caress. Slowly, he pressed a soft kiss to her lips, barely stroking their seam with the tip of his tongue. Then, as he probed for entrance, she felt his hands come up on either side of her, to her hair. Unfastening and unwinding it, then tossing away the pins, he let the thick, slippery weight slide over her shoulders like a cape. Her own arms had no strength and she couldn’t move them. They hung inert at her sides, constrained by his will.
Wilson dug his fingers into the thick tresses of her liberated hair, gripping her head and holding her while his mouth plundered hers far more voraciously now. Adela shuddered right down to her toes, drenched in the overpowering licentiousness of being completely naked in this high, sunlit room, locked in the power of this most beautiful, dangerous man.
As Wilson drew back, still holding her face, her sex overflowed and silky fluid slid down her leg. The way he breathed in, and then smiled, told her he’d smelled her.
“You’re a very carnal woman, Della. A creature of the senses. I wonder how many men in society would believe you lead a secret life when they see you so prim and composed in your black gowns, and with your quiet manner?” He breathed in again, then slid his tongue around his lips as if tasting the air. “You hide your true self so well. You act the respectable, dutiful young woman and yet your appetites are as voluptuous as any courtesan’s.”
He slid a hand down her body and cupped her between the legs, squeezing. Adela gasped, and fought for composure. “Men in society don’t often look at me, Wilson. Because of the sober dress I choose, and the fact I don’t put myself forward, and because my looks are indifferent.”
“Well, they’re all fools, and I should beat you for being so willful and deliberately obtuse, you witch. Always persisting in this claim you’re not beautiful. I swear you only do it to make me feel guilty because you ran from me.” He gripped again, and Adela tossed her head, bearing down, riding his fingers. “And who needs common prettiness when they have a nature like yours?” His face was next to hers once more, and he held her close, by a hank of her hair. Still massaging her sex, he kissed her again, hard this time.
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” he growled, almost into her mouth. “And yet you deny it...parade yourself as the grim, dried-up spinster, when really you’re a lush and juicy libertine. I’ll wager your paid-for boys think you’re a beauty. I bet they can’t believe their luck when you purchase their services.”
Swiveling around behind her, still clasping her puss, he grabbed her by the s
houlder and walked her over to a mirror that stood in the corner of the room. Adela tried to turn her head and not look. The shock of her own reflection was too much, the column of her white body blatantly displayed against Wilson’s clothed form. She’d never been one for admiring herself in a glass before her nose was broken, and since then, she’d mostly avoided it unless absolutely essential.
“Look!” he ordered her, fingers under her chin, thumb cradling her jaw. “And don’t try to hide yourself. Don’t insult me by hiding yourself.”
She snapped her eyes open, peered at herself framed by Wilson’s hold on her chin and her sex. His thumb and fingers divided the dark cluster of her motte, and she could see the muscles of his hand flexing as he worked her. Even as she writhed, her belly in a tumult of gathering lust, the detached aesthetician in her admired the juxtaposition of him and her, and stored the image for future reference.
“You’re magnificent, Della, magnificent.” Wilson rubbed his face in her unbound hair, like a male animal nuzzling its mate, a wild beast compelled into some kind of faux display of affection before mounting her and copulating. “You said I can have you, and I shall, but I’d like to spank you first. You have the most divine bottom....” For emphasis, he circled his hips, rubbing himself against her buttocks, butting at her with his cock, so hard inside his trousers. “I know you’ll never be one of these sniveling misses who grovel to please a flagellant...but at least I can fool myself for a little while that you might submit to me.” His teeth caught her earlobe and he nipped it lightly. “Even if I know you’ve got a spirit no man can conquer.”
Adela trembled from head to foot, almost spending, but whether from Wilson’s grip or his thrilling words, she did not know. His finger was hard in the groove of her sex, right up against her clitoris, and she imagined it still here while he slapped her on her bottom. Pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure, becoming one. Enjoying a few playful spanks from the boys at Sofia’s house had never stirred her like this. But with Wilson, all was different. All was real.
Portia Da Costa Page 19
