But here in this secret zone where wishes could be real, he allowed himself what he denied elsewhere. Here in his imagination, his naked, adorable mistress sank to her knees beneath the cascading water and took his heavy flesh between her moist, caressing lips. Here, it was all right to give in to his every desire and urge and grasp her head, fingers digging into her sensuously coiling hair as he thrust unrestrainedly into the welcoming heat and wetness of her mouth. Here, it was all right to fuck that beautiful mouth, possess that loving, accommodating cavern and then empty his silky load of semen right down her throat.
“Oh Hettie,” he cried again, the words a sound of worship, of desperation and of resignation as his creamy tribute hit the shower wall and mingled with the water trickling down it.
“Doesn’t Signor Starr dine with you?” Darryl asked suddenly over coffee. He’d asked questions. Lots of questions. But Hettie had been both charmed and amused by the subtle way he’d brought her out of herself and finessed information from her. She’d ended up telling him about most of her life, up to and including her marriage to Piers, and was touched by his gentle condolences.
And she didn’t mind telling him things. After all, his well of experience had been cruelly emptied. The only way he could find out about life and the world was to hear what’d happened to others.
But this latest question troubled her. As a lot of things about her relationship with Starr did. More and more. Since Piers’ death, the dining arrangements had become an issue. She wanted the handsome blond to eat with her. He had insisted—with immaculate but unshakeable politeness—that it was inappropriate and he’d continue to eat alone in his room or in the kitchen.
“He’s just ‘Starr’, and no, he doesn’t.” She shrugged, wondering for perhaps the hundredth time since they’d sat down just what exactly her cool-eyed protector was doing all this time. “But it’s not for want of me asking him.” She took a sip of her Amaretto, and savored its fiery almond bite, trying not to dwell on Starr’s impenetrable foibles and idiosyncratic standards of what was correct and proper.
“He’s a very private man, Darryl, and he likes to observe certain protocols,” she continued, swirling her finger around the base of her glass, “Although God knows why he thinks dining with me is improper when he’s perfectly happy to—”
Good God, what am I saying?
She hesitated, but Darryl’s eyes were wide and bright and his silence tacitly urged her to continue.
“Well, he’s a bit more than just a servant, Darryl,” she murmured, blushing again.
“I know. I can tell.”
“It’s… It’s difficult to explain. I—” She studied the fine crystal pattern of the glass, unable to face him.
“There’s nothing to explain, Hettie,” Darryl replied softly, his strange composure throbbing in every syllable. “You need him and you’re fond of him, and it’s obvious he worships the ground you walk on. And neither of you owe me any explanations.” His long brown hand slid over her paler, more slender one. “I’m the one who’s in debt here. You’ve let me come into your house when a guest is the last thing you need.”
“But, Darryl—”
“It’s okay, Hettie,” he whispered, stunning her all over again by lifting her hand to his lips.
His mouth barely brushed her skin but it had all the impact of a real kiss.
Hettie bit back a gasp of confusion—as much from the import of Darryl’s words as from the contact between his mouth and the back of her hand.
Does Starr worship me?
She knew he felt something for her, but the wall he built between them was so hard to breach. It was so impossible to tell precisely what was going on with him, even in the throes of sexual passion. He almost always cried out her name as he climaxed, but it was never long before he reverted back to his usual respectful yet iron-clad emotional distance. He was like a perfect male robot, programmed to serve her. A beautiful, intuitive, thoughtful and sexually inventive robot certainly, but still one following a very stringent code of conduct.
“Goodnight, Hettie. Please don’t think I’m rude, but I feel very tired again.”
Hettie snapped back to full consciousness, realizing that Darryl was already taking his leave of her. She’d been so busy wool-gathering about Starr again that she hadn’t noticed that Darryl had relinquished her hand and was already on his feet.
“Goodnight, Hettie. And thanks for everything.” His gaze flicked down his own body and he grinned impishly, then with a spin like a dancer’s he turned and was through the door and gone before she’d even framed her answer.
“What’s the matter with me?”
Alone and frustrated, Hettie prowled her room.
What’s happening to me?
One day she was a grieving widow, mourning the loss of a husband she’d loved deeply. The next she was some kind of insatiable sexual glutton, experiencing random pangs of lust and totally unable to organize her feelings or formulate any kind of plan that would help her resolve them.
I’ll have to say something soon…or I’ll go mad!
And yet she hardly dare think about her tall blond servant. Her relationship with him was already mutating faster than she could cope with. Nursing Piers, then mourning him, had allowed her to compartmentalize her peculiar interactions with Starr. But now that the keenest pain of loss was ebbing things weren’t so clear-cut.
For her, and maybe for Starr too. She thought about the massage. He’d come to her during the daytime—and taken her so hungrily she could still feel the effects of it.
What was all that about, Mr. Iceman? You broke a rule, Starr. Not mine…one of your own.
The resumption of sex between them had been a huge catalyst. It was no use fooling herself. It wasn’t as if she’d stopped missing Piers all of a sudden. She did miss him, but she’d been brought back to full sexual life again. She was a mass of surging hunger, and wild to fuck. It was as if she was trying to unconsciously make up for months of celibacy in the space of a few short hours.
And where was Starr tonight when she needed him? He was the one who’d started all this. She’d been assuming he’d visit her room again but as yet there was no sign of him.
Serves me right, Piers, doesn’t it? She glanced at her dead husband’s photograph as she slipped into a sheer black nightgown, then covered it with a matching floor-length robe. “Two lusty men in the house and neither of them here to service me!” she muttered, half amused, half irritated as she smoothed her fingers over the luxurious silk of her “mourning”. Even if the rest of her widowhood was becoming increasingly unconventional, at least she could observe the formality of wearing black.
But Starr might not even be in the house. She’d told Darryl that her servant was a private person and it was nothing but the truth. Starr was also a free agent, and when his duties were done there was nothing to prevent him from going out and leading his own life. His working hours had always been flexible, and neither Piers nor herself had ever expected him to be at their beck and call 24/7. Starr himself was the one who chose to be constantly at her disposal, but theoretically he was free to do what he wanted. He might be visiting friends. He might even have another woman.
No! Please, no!
Hettie sank down onto the bed, winded as if she’d been rabbit-punched. The thought of Starr with someone else induced a horrid, wrenching twist of jealousy and try as she might to control them, images assailed her. Starr in bed with a woman who wasn’t her. A laughing and relaxed Starr, fucking for himself and not because he felt duty-bound to service his employer.
Hettie had no way of knowing whether Starr maintained other relationships because he’d never once told her anything of his life beyond his employment in the Miller household.
Dare she go to him? That was another thing she’d never done. Only once during Piers’ illness had she suggested that she might visit Starr in his rooms. But that suggestion had been quashed with infinite tact and politeness. Starr was at her command and he woul
d come to her.
“Well, bullshit to that! This is my house and I do what I want!” muttered Hettie, cinching her sash of her robe more tightly and leaping to her feet again. She slipped out of her bedroom and made her way silently towards the staircase leading to the upper floors, mentally psyching herself up as she went.
What if he wasn’t there? What if he didn’t want her in his room? Invading his only private, personal space in the home that belonged to her. On the landing, a few yards from his door, she hesitated, gnawing her lower lip. Oh, Starr would be polite to her, as calm and cool and amenable as always. He would probably even willingly accompany her back to her room and make love to her. But she would always suspect he was only doing it because she’d forced the issue.
Her body shaking, and feeling a horrid sensation of cowardice, she backed away from Starr’s door and turned to go back the way she’d come. But as she did so, she noticed another door slightly ajar.
It was hot and stuffy in the old set of “nanny’s rooms” that hadn’t been used since Piers had bought the house a few years ago. Nobody had opened the windows in ages and there was dust on the furniture and fittings, but the closed circuit TV system that’d once been used to monitor the nursery was still in full working order.
When Hettie switched it on, the image was surprisingly sharp for a not so young piece of equipment—and it was of the room that had once been a nursery but was now one of the guestrooms. Wearing an unbelted robe and toweling his jet-black hair, Darryl walked slowly into the camera’s all-seeing range and paused as if he knew she was watching him.
After a few moments, he tossed aside his towel, shucked off his robe and turned fully towards the camera, his hands rising elegantly to sweep back his tousled hair. Then he spread out his arms, stretched hugely, and as his naked body arched towards her, Hettie swallowed, her own body instantly stirring.
It was as if he were displaying himself to her. She gasped, feeling sweat trickle between her breasts and her pussy fluttering in the age-old female response to masculine beauty.
Darryl was skinny and sleek, just as she’d imagined him. An exquisite Adonis, smooth of chest and lightly muscled but with a cock between his shining thighs that was sturdy and impressive.
Goddammit, he’s nearly as big as Starr! Her hand flew unconsciously to her crotch.
He wasn’t fully erect yet, but Hettie could see that was about to change. She dropped into a chair beside the console, still watching, then reached for the contrast control. As the image sharpened, she saw Darryl lie down, stretch out his long brown limbs on the bed, then slowly and languidly reach down and take hold of his cock.
She watched entranced as he first pumped himself to a complete imposing hardness, then let his fingers stray luxuriously over the rest of his body. Slowly and at leisure, he touched his belly, his chest and his thighs—and then when he pinched his nipples, his hips bucked upward and his penis swayed spectacularly.
Hettie felt her own sex boil. Fulminating, it called on a primal, purely physical level to his penis, wanting it inside her. How would it be to climb onto that bed, kneel over Darryl’s slim silky body, and lower herself onto him?
She imagined him filling her and stretching her, pushing up into her, thrusting hard and fast and battering the mouth of her womb. His long drives would pull on her clitoris and in seconds she’d be spasming and moaning and clasping his cock with the wet, yielding walls of her channel.
And as—on the monitor—his fingers returned to his genitals, so—in the darkness of the old nanny’s bedroom—did Hettie’s fly urgently to hers.
Lifting the shimmering fall of her skirt, she arranged the delicate cloth in folds at her waist and eased her legs apart. As Darryl stroked the tip of his cock, stimulating the most sensitive part of his body, Hettie mirrored him by touching her fingertip to the most delicate and responsive area of hers. There was moisture in abundance in her sex and she smoothed it copiously over her clitoris, imagining it was the hand of her gorgeous houseguest that was anointing her.
“Oh God… Oh yes…please…” she moaned, then froze as the monitor showed her that he too was muttering. With her free hand she reached out to turn up the volume switch while the other resumed its delicate manipulation of her clitoris.
Husky groans filled the room, the raw sound of a horny man uninhibitedly enjoying his own body.
His noises were indecipherable at first, indistinct sighs and grunts and fragments of both English and Italian. But as he cradled his balls in one hand and stroked his streaming red shaft with the other, one clear unmistakable utterance seemed to fly out of the speaker and caress Hettie’s sex like a living, tangible entity.
“Hettie! Oh Hettie!” he cried, his voice musical yet strangled as his hips lurched up from the bed beneath him and milk-white semen jetted out from between his working fingers and flew in an arc through the air.
“Oh you sweet thing!” she gasped fondly as her own body gave itself up to pleasure and her clitoris danced beneath her touch. With her eyes locked on the jerking figure on the screen, she felt her pussy flex and pulse as if it were trying to grab the stiff dark thing that he held so tightly in his fist.
“Oh God, yes! Yes!” she whimpered, coming superbly, but also painfully aware that she was empty and she needed to be filled. That it wasn’t her new visitor that she wanted to share these moments with, but someone else. Someone who was close by, but as distant in some ways as the stars he was named for…
Darryl’s orgasm seemed to go on and on, his semen flying out into the empty air. Hettie panted, pulsing with him, her pussy a mass of quivering fire yet desperate for full penetration.
With a long moan, she detached her consciousness from his, closing her eyes tightly and slumping back into her chair, her bottom still wriggling convulsively against the plush upholstery beneath her. She was still coming slightly, her own body amazing her with both its power and its insatiable need and hunger.
But suddenly and incredibly, a facet of that hunger was satisfied. Two fingers slid into her empty channel. Two solid male fingers that filled her aching void and made a firm, sure foundation for the strong flat thumb that nudged her hovering fingers aside and settled fairly and squarely on her clitoris.
Hettie howled like an animal as her orgasm flared anew, then soared to an almost unbearable peak of sensation. Rapture consumed her, ecstasy drained her and there was no strength left to either lift her heavy eyelids or frame her brain around the words of a question.
As her belly beat and fluttered she felt a warm mouth settle there and kiss her, the touch of it so tender that her heart almost broke in gratitude. Then the fingers were plunging deeper into her, matching the rhythm of her flesh, their motion smooth in her wet silkiness as the thumb remained steady on her clitoris. Hettie’s legs flailed helplessly, her bare feet striking her caresser’s body again and again as she jerked and cried out in her climax.
It seemed a long, long time before her pussy stilled and her limbs lay loose and at rest. Splayed and bared, with her sex still glowing, she felt the one who’d pleasured her rise from between her legs, then heard a tiny click as the monitor was turned off and the post-orgasmic Darryl was consigned to privacy and presumably his sleep.
Hettie’s own limbs felt like lead and her body devoid of all energy. All she could manage was a sigh of contentment when she was picked up in a pair of powerful arms and carried from the room like a feather-light doll.
It was only when she was laid gently on her own bed and the strong hands that had held and caressed her started exploring her body again, that she finally came back to her senses. Thrills shot along her nerves as her robe and nightgown were quickly and efficiently stripped off and her thighs were taken hold of and eased apart.
And as she felt the hard, warm head of a penis against her wetness, and the beginnings of a slow, determined push, Hettie finally managed to open her eyes. Open them and look straight up into Starr’s calm, blue and unswerving gaze.
“My lady
,” he whispered, but before she could form an answer, his mouth plunged down on hers and his cock slid home.
Whatever she might have said to him was forgotten.
Chapter Four
“Why not ask Doctor Madrigan?”
Like everything Starr suggested, it was sensible, rational and probably the right thing to do. But sitting here in a chic Harley Street waiting room, Hettie wasn’t even sure quite what she wanted to ask. Precise questions hadn’t been an issue in the still, sweaty hours of the previous night.
After they’d made love—or she’d been “made love to”—she’d felt relaxed enough to air some of her general concerns over Darryl to Starr. In the cold light of day, she probably wouldn’t have voiced them but at night, feeling warm and loose in Starr’s arms, it had seemed as natural as breathing to seek his opinion on what to do to help her amnesiac guest.
The fact that he’d discovered her watching Darryl masturbate was not mentioned. Just like the fact that she and Starr had begun having sex again, it was clearly a nonissue and not to be discussed. At least not if Starr had his way.
But she was going to have to discuss it with Stevie. Which was why she’d come to Harley Street.
Stephanie Madrigan was a medical doctor turned counselor who Hettie had consulted in the confused days of Piers’ illness when she’d been torn between her own irrepressible libido and her devotion to her increasingly impotent husband.
It was surely no coincidence that the answer to that dilemma—Starr—was the solution that Stevie had so delicately and sensitively hinted at even before Piers had proposed it himself. And if she’d been right last time, there was no reason to believe that she wouldn’t have a sound suggestion this time.
So yes, an appointment with Doctor Stevie was the most logical course of action. Sort of…
Lessons and Lovers Page 6
