WidowsWickedWish

by Lynne Barron

  With gentle hands he slowly divested her of gown, stays, shift, drawers, stockings and boots. Those lovely black boots whose heels had dug into his backside while he’d fucked the lady up against a wall. Christ, she was amazing. Who would have thought it?

  He laughed beneath his breath at the wonder of the woman.

  “What’s funny?”

  He turned from where he stood draping her garments over a gaudy chair covered in bright red, yellow and blue plaid to find Olivia wiggling against the pillows behind her. She’d pulled the blue robe on over her tempting curves and lay on his bed with her legs stretched out before her, her ankles crossed.

  “Where had you come from when I found you storming down the street?” he asked rather than answer her softly spoken question. If they began discussing their wild, almost violent coupling, he would make a liar of himself. Just thinking about it had his cock twitching.

  “My mother’s house,” she answered as he started toward the bed.

  “Lady Hastings is at home on Thursdays?” he guessed.

  “I don’t really hate my mother,” she told him, her gaze dropping to her hands clasped over at her waist.

  “I know you don’t,” he replied, rounding the bed to crawl in next to her.

  “I think she might be…I don’t know…ailing in some way.” Olivia turned to face him and promptly fell into the mountain of pillows, her face and shoulders disappearing. She popped back up again with a huff of laughter. “Do you sleep with all these pillows?

  In answer Jack plucked them one at a time from the bed and tossed them over the side until only two remained. Olivia settled down onto the coverlet, one arm tucked under a pillow. Jack rolled over to face her, his weight on his elbow, his head resting in his hand.

  “Ailing in what way?” he asked.

  “She’s lost so much weight,” she answered. “And she doesn’t seem to stay within the natural order of time.”

  “The natural order of time?” he repeated.

  “Today I could swear she thought I was a young unmarried girl,” she explained, a frown marring her forehead. “She spoke to me as if I’d yet to marry, spoke of Belmont calling upon Uncle William.”

  “Odd,” he murmured. He’d only encountered her mother once since his wedding day, on the night of her ball. They’d barely greeted one another as he passed through the receiving line. But she’d watched him with pinched lips and slitted eyes.

  “She asked me to deliver a note to her particular friend, Connie,” she continued.

  “And did you?”

  “I’ve no idea who Connie is and before I could figure it out she…well she came to herself, to the present, and snatched the note from my hands before starting in on me with all the various ways I’ve disappointed her. Never mind. I don’t want to talk about my mother.”

  “I’m not surprised Fanny dislikes London,” he offered up into the silence that fell between them, determined to get through the long list of her troubles and set about solving them for her. “She’ll get over it in a matter of weeks and when it’s time to return to the country she’ll be crying that she hates the country.

  Olivia laughed in responses, slowly shaking her head. “I know you are right, but until she learns to enjoy Town she’s likely to drive me to drink.”

  “You?” he asked with a grin. “Deep in your cups? That I’d like to see.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she replied with a sassiness he hadn’t seen in her since their time together at Idyllwild.

  “What is wrong with Charlie’s foot?” he asked, his mind traveling through the litany of her troubles as best as he could understand them.

  “Nothing is wrong with Charlie’s foot,” she answered quickly.

  Jack only fixed his gaze upon her and waited.

  “He was injured at…when he was born,” she replied, her gaze shifting away, fastening on some point over his shoulder.

  “How?”

  “Charlie was breech and when the physicians turned him they somehow broke his foot. We didn’t realize at first.” She paused and took a deep breath, her lashes fluttering. “I didn’t realize he’d been injured until weeks later.”

  “The physicians broke his foot?” he asked in mounting alarm.

  “With their pincers,” she answered with a shiver.

  “Forceps?”

  “The forceps came later,” she replied. “They had this long metal thing, this instrument with tiny pincers at the end and they used it to turn him.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jack rose to sit staring down at her and Olivia rolled onto her back, her eyes fastened on his face. “They stuck this instrument, these pincers into your womb?”

  “Palmerton knew, somehow he knew the baby was a boy,” she replied as if those few words explained it all.

  “Jesus, Olivia,” he breathed in horror.

  “Charlie is fine. Truly, he is fine. He limps,” she hurried to assure him, laying a hand on his knee where his robe had fallen open, her fingers trailing over his flesh in what he guessed was an unconscious gesture of comfort. “A lot of people limp.”

  “Is there nothing that can be done for him?”

  “He’s seen more doctors than I can count. I was hoping to have a Scottish physician examine him.”

  Jack leaned forward and pulled the wide lapels of her robe apart to her waist, exposing her breasts and the slope of her belly.

  “Jack?” she whispered.

  “Shh, I just want to see you in the sunlight, Livy,” he murmured. “So this physician…”

  “Dr. Goldman is reputed to be the best at diagnosing and treating poorly healed breaks, resetting them so that they heal properly.” Olivia’s hand wandered under his robe to his thigh. “But he retired some years ago and now lives as something of a recluse.”

  “Perhaps if I contacted him I might convince him to see Charlie.”

  “I doubt that very much. I’ve sent him dozens of letters. I even polished up my title and tossed it about,” she replied with a rueful smile. “He sent back a note informing me quite succinctly that he wouldn’t make an exception for the prince regent himself.”

  “A Scotsman named Goldman,” he murmured.

  “I don’t care if he is a Hebrew. I’d allow an atheist to treat my son if it might help him.”

  “Of course,” he agreed quickly, his mind spinning. He knew a Scotsman named Jacob Goldman. They’d attended university at the same time, had even formed a tepid friendship. Two odd-men-out bonding for the duration of their studies, before losing contact when they’d come down from Cambridge. Could he be some relation to this physician?

  Not wanting to raise her hopes, Jack opted for distracting her while he continued to ferret out all the troubles that had brought her to her knees in his front parlor. He shifted closer to her, leaned over and placed his lips against the soft skin between her breasts.

  “Your brother is a grown man, Olivia,” he murmured, smiling when she shivered.

  “I know,” she whispered, one hand coming up to sift through the hairs at his nape. “But he will always be my little brother. I don’t know why he has decided to play the rake…”

  “I’d say Hastings has gone beyond playing the rake,” he replied, trailing his lips over the slope of one breast. “He’s rumored to keep two mistresses.”

  “Two?” Olivia’s fingers dipped down beneath the collar of his robe, drifted across one shoulder then the other. “And still he plays hopscotch through half the bedchambers in Mayfair?”

  Jack laughed, his breath blowing over one perfect nipple. Olivia trembled in reaction, the pink pebble brushing over his bottom lip as light as a butterfly’s wing.

  “Palmerton kept a mistress,” she whispered, her voice laced with shame. “A string of mistresses.”

  “He was a fool.”

  “How can men make love to so many women?” she asked on a stuttering breath.

  “I doubt there’s much lovemaking going on in such relationships,” he replied before sliding
his tongue around her nipple, slowly, lightly, barely touching her warm skin.

  Olivia rose into his touch with a soft sigh, her hand wrapping around his neck, gently pulling his mouth closer. “If men are not making love to such women, whatever are they doing?”

  Jack flicked his tongue over her pebbled flesh, once, twice.

  “Jack?”

  “Rogering,” he breathed the word around her nipple before pulling the peak between his lips to lightly suckle.

  “Rogering?” Olivia’s fingers clenched around his neck as she jerked beneath him.

  “Swiving.” He released her nipple to drift his lips down the slope of her breast and up the slope of the other.

  “Oh,” she breathed, both hands moving to the back of his head, gently leading his lips to her nipple. “Like we did earlier?”

  Jack raised his head and met her curious gaze. “That was more than swiving, more than rogering. That, my lady, was fucking.”

  “Is that was fuck means?” she asked with a laugh. “I once heard a man driving a cart tell a man who’d stepped out in front of the horses to go fuck himself. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he meant.”

  Jack laughed at her ready use of the word. Twice.

  “What did that man mean? How might the other man have fucked himself?”

  “How, indeed?” Jack replied before crawling over her until his hands rested on either side of her head. He loomed over her, wedged his knees between her legs and Olivia immediately opened to him, her robe parting from ankles to waist where the belt was tied in a bow.

  Jack leaned back onto his haunches and draped her legs over his thighs, his eyes wandering over the curves and valleys laid out before him.

  She looked like a pretty present whose midnight-blue wrapping had been peeled back to reveal a hidden treasure. Her skin was pale in the afternoon sunlight drifting from the open windows, her arms long and shapely where they rested on the folds of the velvet robe beneath her, her palms open in what stuck him as a vulnerable pose, submissive, supplicating. Her breasts gently rose and fell with each quiet breath she drew. Her belly was a long smooth expanse of taut flesh punctuated by delicately curved hip bones.

  Jack drew his thumbs over those hipbones and Olivia twitched beneath the featherlight touch.

  “You aren’t thinking to fuck me again, are you?” she asked, her voice little more than a throaty whisper.

  He met her eyes and smiled at the mingled hope and alarm he heard in her voice. “Ah, Livy. Fucking is all well and good. And sometimes, like today, it is beyond good, beyond amazing. But I’ve a mind to make love to you now.”

  “I don’t know that I can,” she replied shyly.

  “There are a multitude of ways to make love,” he promised. “What I have in mind will bring you only pleasure, no pain.”

  Jack leaned over her once more, his hands cupping her head, his fingers wandering through the soft curls. He brushed his lips over hers, gently, slowly, awash in tenderness for the woman who’d cried in his arms, not with fury or bitterness, but with fear and sorrow.

  For her children, for her mother and her brother, for a marriage devoid of affection and passion.

  He’d always imagined that Olivia glided through life, a perfectly pampered princess, content in the role to which she’d been born.

  As she’d poured out her heart to him, he’d realized she wasn’t content at all, likely hadn’t been for many years.

  Jack wanted her content. He wanted to see her smile and laugh as she’d done during their time together at Idyllwild. He wanted to lift all those worries and fears, all the sorrow and regret from her slender shoulders, to heft them onto his own and carry them off.

  And he would. As he trailed his lips over her cheek, down along the delicate slope of her jaw, he vowed that he would solve her problems, one at a time, until she was once again the smiling, serene lady who reveled in the adoration and reverence of all of London.

  He’d awoken her to the wicked delights of passion. Now he would gift her with tenderness and affection, show her how a man ought to treat his woman, his wife.

  Jack trailed his mouth, open and wet, down the fragile column of her neck, smiled against her flesh when she let out a soft, fluttery sigh and her hands rose to his shoulders. Her fingers skimmed him, her touch light, languid.

  “It is a sin against all that is holy that your husband withheld his affection from you,” he whispered into the hollow above her collarbone before dipping his tongue into the indentation.

  Olivia hummed quietly, tilting her head to afford him greater access to her neck and shoulder.

  “You deserve affection and tenderness,” he continued as his lips coasted over her shoulder. “That was your loss. But not introducing you to the wonders of passion, of desire and good old-fashioned lust, that was Palmerton’s loss.”

  “He never wanted…” she began before her words fell away when he trailed one hand along her side, his fingers lightly brushing over the slope of her breast, the indent of her waist, and the curve of her hip.

  “He was a fool,” he murmured as his mouth traveled down her chest and between her breasts. “Your passion is a gift, Olivia. A gift I will forever be grateful you’ve bestowed upon me.”

  “Oh, Jack,” she whispered, her fingers drifting down the back of his neck.

  Jack carefully scooted back on his knees, gently pushing her legs farther apart, while he placed a trail of warm, wet kissed down her belly, stopping to linger at her navel. He limned the tight little circle, delved his tongue into the tiny little crevice.

  Olivia twitched beneath him, her hips rising off the bed before falling back. She sighed around a fractured breath, the muscles of her abdomen clenching. Jack grasped her hips and repeated the kiss, diving deeper with his tongue, until she squirmed beneath him, her hands fisting in his hair as if she might yank his wet mouth away from her flesh. Instead she pulled him to her, her hips undulating beneath his hands.

  Jack’s cock twitched, began to pulse between his legs as he caught her scent, vanilla with a hint of lemon, underlain with the unmistakable scent of her arousal. He drew the musky aroma deep into his lungs and, with one last parry of his tongue, abandoned her navel for pleasures south.

  He knew the exact moment she realized his intent. When his lips drifted lower, when his chin brushed the dark curls between her parted legs, Olivia’s entire body quivered. Jack dipped his mouth, swirled his tongue over the soft curls above her mound, danced his lips along the skin just above, and waited to see if she would protest.

  Protest or not, he would put his mouth on her. He would pull her clit between his lips to lavish the tight bud, to torment and tease her. He would thrust his tongue into her quim, to stroke over her wet walls, to gather her dew, to torment and tease himself with the taste of her pleasure.

  Already his cock was a hard as a pike, just imagining her flavor on his tongue, her juices flowing over his lips.

  Jack dragged his hands from her hips, his thumbs coasting into the twin crevices where her thighs met her mound, and down along her nether lips. He pushed her legs wide, lifted them until, without a murmur of protest, she planted her feet on the bed and opened herself to him. Jack sunk his hands beneath her, gripped her round ass, and lifted her to his waiting mouth.

  “Oh, God,” Olivia groaned around a quick inhalation as Jack sifted his tongue through her curly hairs, aiming straight for her clit. He found the hard pebble, circled, once, twice, and again.

  “Oh Jack, oh Jack,” she chanted, her hips bucking and swiveling, her legs trembling.

  Jack flattened his tongue and dragged it over her clit, back and forth, increasing the pressure with each pass until she tilted her hips, pressing into his mouth. Her fingers clenched his neck, rose along the back of his head to grip him hard. She pulled him to her with a low moan.

  Jack continued to minister to her perfect little pearl, circling the jewel, flicking his tongue over and around, his hands gently squeezing her ass, hol
ding her in place despite her almost desperate squirming and twisting. He lashed her with his tongue, pulled her clit between his lips, to lightly scrape his teeth over and around.

  “Please,” she cried, her hands fisted in his hair as she undulated against his mouth, chased his tongue, raced toward climax.

  “Damn Livy,” he growled against her hot, wet flesh.

  “Help me, Jack,” she begged, pressing her clit against his tongue, her moist folds against his chin. “I need…I need…”

  Jack released one soft round cheek, drew one finger down the crease of her ass and circled the tight rosette he found there. He tapped the puckered little hole to the beat of his tongue flicking over her clit.

  Olivia writhed beneath him, raw, desperate moans falling from her open mouth, her legs shaking as she held herself suspended above the bed with only one of his hands to anchor her. With one final tap on her rosebud that almost penetrated the tight passage, Jack trailed his finger down to circle her sweet little cunny.

  She was wet, wonderfully wet. She swiveled her hips, chased his circling finger.

  “Yes, yes,” she panted.

  Jack dipped the tip of his finger into her heat before retreating to circle the rim of her tight quim again and again. And all the while he kept up a steady onslaught on her throbbing clit with lips, tongue and teeth.

  “Jack,” Olivia moaned, nearly unseating his mouth from her flesh as she bucked against him.

  Again he dipped into her hot cunny, carefully easing his finger to the first knuckle, the second. Her flesh was tender and swollen from the pounding he’d given her less than an hour before. He had no wish to bring her pain, had promised her only pleasure.

  Withdrawing his finger, he released her clit, smiling grimly at her wail of protest, and dropped down between her straining thighs. He fused his mouth over the opening to her body and drove his tongue into her tight channel.