A Bluestocking's Vice: Dukes of the Demi-Monde: Book Four

by Felicia Greene

  It wasn’t meant to feel this way. She had done the correct thing—she had refused to meet a man with whom she had done unacceptable things. This was meant to feel pleasant—feel righteous. Like taking a charity basket to someone in need of it, or seeing a woman destined for a pleasure-house begin a decent working life elsewhere.

  She wasn’t meant to feel a swift, devastating blow to her very soul when she saw him from the end of the road. She wasn’t meant to feel tears gathering in her eyes as she saw him, John Peterson, dressed with the understated elegance of a man proud to meed someone he thought highly of.

  He didn’t think highly of her anymore. His face was dark with anger as he turned to look at her, the cold air blowing between the both of them.

  ‘I would say you’re late, but I don’t think this is you arriving.’ He swallowed. ‘I hope you’re not going to insult me with excuses.’

  ‘Being frightened is my only excuse.’

  ‘You’ve never needed to be frightened of me.’ Peterson’s eyes widened. ‘Have I frightened you?’

  ‘No. You—you fon’t frighten me.’ Rebecca’s tongue felt thick in her mouth. ‘I didn’t meant that.’

  ‘I asked you there in good faith.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you left me waiting.’

  Rebecca swallowed. ‘I know.’

  ‘It wasn’t a kind thing to do. Not at all.’

  ‘I know. I know all of this. But please—please speak to me now.’

  ‘I do not see why I should.’

  ‘Because I already feel as if I know you.’ Rebecca spoke quietly, feeling acutely alone in the cold air despite Peterson’s dark eyes trained on her. ‘As if I know you completely. It—it unnerves me.’

  ‘We do know one another. Or rather, we move in the same circles. I know you by reputation, and you—well. You know me better than most, after hearing my speech. If anything, we—’

  ‘No. Not like that. I don’t feel as if I know you like—like a friend.’ Rebecca studied the road intently, trying to find the words to express the fierce, overwhelming sentiments that had been moving through her ever since their first encounter. ‘I feel as if I know your soul. Your innermost self.’

  ‘That… that can happen, after what we did.’ Peterson’s softer, lower tone sent a shiver down her spine. It was as if they were back in the study of the Cappadene Club, with him telling her what to do. Telling her she could let go. ‘It—it doesn’t have to mean anything.’

  ‘Grant me the wisdom to know when something has meaning, and when it does not.’ Rebecca held her head high, suddenly angry. ‘I know that how I feel goes beyond that. I suspect it does for you too. Or I wouldn’t have hidden from you today, and you wouldn’t be so very angry about it.’

  She had never spoken with such frankness to a man. She shivered at the power of it—at the potency of her words, her sentiments, that made Peterson’s eyes flash as they stood in the empty street.

  ‘I know that it frightens you. The idea that we have an affinity beyond the elemental—that what we did in the Club could have a relevance, a weight, on the things we choose to do in our daily lives.’ Peterson paused. ‘I know that.’

  ‘You cannot know the fear.’ Rebecca shook her head, beginning to shiver in the cold. ‘It is impossible.’

  ‘Not impossible.’ Peterson’s voice softened. ‘I know it. I feel it.’

  Another strange, tense moment of expectation. As if a storm was building up around them, rain lashing, wind blowing… but all of it, every drop of rain and howl of wind, was happening in their two separate hearts.

  When Peterson turned away, the sudden absence of his gaze was as harsh as a blow. Rebecca waited, fighting the urge to ring his hands, as he walked towards the modest terraced house.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Oh, why did she sound so faint? She deserved nothing more than his oppobrium—his cruelty. ‘Don’t leave me here.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you there.’ Peterson kept his back turned, but Rebecca could hear the tension in his voice. The same storm that brewed in her. ‘My rooms are on the second floor. Come in.’

  Sparse. Clean. Few personal objects, but the ones on display were of the quality befitting a valet of one of England’s richest men. Rebecca, deeply aware that her presence in a single man’s rooms was already a most atrocious sin, observed everything with the fascinated air of a traveller visiting a distant land.

  She didn’t know what she had expected. Perhaps she hadn’t expected anything at all; she had been so focused upon the vivid recollection of Peterson’s face, his body, that she hadn’t given any thought to the man’s immediate surroundings. Valets normally lived where their master did—although with Sir Marcus’s wife expecting, there was probably less need for his duties now. So he came here, to this small, neat set of rooms on the third floor of an unpreposessing house, with its wooden table and battered books, its single flower wilting in a vase…

  ‘I’m sorry. I would have removed the flower, but I didn’t know if you were coming. I—I assumed you wouldn’t be coming here.’

  ‘Quite.’ Rebecca bit her lip, knowing she should be flattered by the assumption of her morality, but feeling obscurely insulted all the same. ‘It—it is a pleasant space.’

  ‘Don’t be too flattering.’

  ‘There is no need for sarcasm.’

  ‘And there was no need for you to come to me in the street after missing our appointment, expecting—I don’t know what you were expecting.’

  ‘You are right.’ Rebecca tried to look at the flower again, at the table again, not wanting to meet Peterson’s eyes. Not wanting to see the truth that lay there—how poor her conduct had been. ‘You… you are perfectly right…’

  She couldn’t cry. Not here, in his house, after practically begging to be let in. Not in so many words, but he had read her thoughts.

  Why did she have to be so helpless, so incorrigibly weak, around the only man who had ever managed to read her thoughts?

  She let out a quivering half-gasp as Peterson moved closer. The tears gathering at the corners of her eyes wouldn’t stop, now—they began falling down her cheeks, a sob rising in her throat.

  ‘Don’t cry. I can’t have you crying.’

  Rebecca nodded, blinking away a tear as Peterson produced a square of linen from his waistcoat pocket, gently dabbing at her cheek. The guilt in his eyes only made her angrier with herself. ‘You do not need to worry. Everything you said was true.’

  ‘But it was angrily said. I am too brutish. I—I am not used to women.’

  ‘Good. I don’t wish to be cosseted, or petted.’

  ‘Truly?’

  Rebecca paused. She had said that she didn’t want to be cosseted so many times, ever since she was a girl, that she had stopped examining whether she believed it. ‘I do not know.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Peterson slowly, carefully wiped away the last traces of her tears. ‘And not just because I want to do both to you. I want to, but I don’t know how.’

  Hold me. The thought came so strongly to Rebecca’s mind that it felt like a shout. A wild call from her innermost self. Just hold me. Please.

  For all the times that John Peterson had managed to read her thoughts, this one had apparently escaped him. Rebecca, holding her breath, knew that this was another step she would have to take alone.

  Moving closer, not giving him time to step away, she buried her head in the warm hollow between his neck and his shoulder. Peterson’s quick intake of breath, the sudden tension in his body as she gently moved her arms around his waist, sent a thrill through her as sharp as any blade.

  Embracing a man she barely knew, in his house? It was the smallest of the sins she had committed over previous days. For Rebecca, breathing in Peterson’s dark, clean scent, it felt like the most sinful thing imaginable.

  She swallowed. ‘We couldn’t have done this in Vauxhall Gardens.’

  ‘I would have found a way.’ Peterson paused. ‘I would ha
ve liked the—the chance to find a way.’

  Rebecca bit her lip, shame flooding her. ‘You will make me weep again.’

  ‘No. Anything but that.’ Peterson’s rough hand was light against her hair as he stroked her, soothing her. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Then we are both sorry together.’

  ‘I…’ Rebecca paused, gathering her courage to say what she needed to say. ‘I am not sorry to—to stand like this, with you.’

  The gratitude in Peterson’s voice sent a shiver down her spine. ‘I am glad of it.’

  In the silence that followed, Rebecca fought against the current of awareness that flowed through her. Awareness of Peterson, his face, his body—the strength with which he held her close. The hardness of his muscles against her, solid, stable. She had carried the memory with her for more than a day—but the reality of him, the physical promise he held, was more thrilling than she deserved.

  With no Reviver to blame, she had to admit how she felt. How moved she felt, how —how excited she was, deep in her core, that he was close to her.

  Perhaps they didn’t need to talk anymore. Perhaps she didn’t need to apologise, or explain, any further. Perhaps all she needed to do was grip the top of his starched white shirt, look into his dark, angry eyes, and kiss him exactly as he had kissed her…

  … oh, what had happened to her? Why was sinning with John Peterson suddenly the only thing she wanted?

  ‘I… I cannot talk to you like this.’ She shook her head, a soft burst of tear-tinged laughter escaping her despite her best efforts. Peterson’s hands on her shoulders, gripping her skin, was the only thing that kept her anchored to the world. ‘Ever since that day—it is as if it is still in me, working through me. What I drank. I cannot sleep, I cannot work, I cannot do so much as look out of the window without… without imagining it. Without imagining you.’

  ‘But you didn’t come to me.’ The pain in Peterson’s voice was almost more than she could bear. ‘Why didn’t you come to me today?’

  ‘Because—because my public self has crusaded against every sort of sin ever since I became a woman.’ Rebecca bit her lip, trembling as she held back tears again. Looking into Peterson’s dark eyes felt like punishment and absolution, all at once. ‘Seeing a man in sunlight—sinning with him—’

  ‘We do not have to sin. We can walk, and speak, and write to one another as every courting couple does. How we begin does not dictate how we continue.’

  ‘But it does.’ Rebecca paused, preparing herself to say the words that shamed her as she spoke them. ‘Because… because I cannot be in your presence without wanting desperately to sin with you. To do things that we cannot do. It’s a hunger I cannot fathom—cannot contemplate. It consumes me.’

  Peterson’s eyes were impossible to read. His voice was a strange, intoxicating mixture of frustration and resignation. ‘In that, then, we’re alike.’

  In the silence that followed, a silence full of unspoken sentiment, Rebecca wrapped her arms tighter around Peterson’s waist.

  ‘I… I just want you to touch me. To kiss me, like you did. To—to tell me what to do. To please you, and please myself.’ She murmured the words into his shoulder, blushing too hard to show her face. ‘And… and it kills me to say it. To want it. But the pain of it, the shame… it only heightens the pleasure of it.’

  Peterson’s ragged breath let her know that he was as seized by the moment as she was. His hand tightened in her hair; the feel of his fingers against her scalp was dizzying. She had never been held as tightly by a man—by anyone. ‘Shame can excite you. But shame isn’t all this can be.’

  ‘I… I know.’ Rebecca privately doubted it—her shame felt too great to ever overcome. ‘It means that what I drank was nothing more than—than the unlocking of a door. That all the passion in me, all the—all the pleasure… it was in me, somewhere. Waiting to express itself.’

  ‘That’s a good thing. A beautiful thing.’

  ‘It makes me a—a whore.’

  ‘No such thing as a whore. Only women for whom pleasure is work, and women for whom pleasure is something else.’

  ‘That is an astonishing thing to say.’

  ‘Leave, if you don’t like me saying it.’

  She couldn’t move. No part of her wanted to—not even her rebellious, realcritant brain. Rebecca, with a harsh sigh of surrender, moved closer still.

  ‘I can stay away from you, if I can’t see you.’ She paused. ‘But when I see you… it gets more and more difficult, leaving you. It was difficult at the Club, difficult at the presentation… it feels impossible, now.’

  ‘I can’t be anything but glad.’ Peterson’s fingertips were unbearably soft as they stroked her cheek, sending a deep shiver through her. ‘I hope you know that.’

  ‘I know.’ Rebecca closed her eyes, quivering as his fingers traced the outline of her lips. ‘I am glad too. But—but I am scared.’

  ‘Do you think you’re the only one who’s scared?’ Peterson’s thumb rested at the corner of her mouth. ‘Even after I told you that I fear it?’

  ‘Fear what?’

  ‘The want. The want of you.’

  The swirling morass of Rebecca’s sentiments coalesced into a single, overwhelming desire. A need that she had never felt concerning anyone else.

  She was going to kiss John Peterson until she had no breath left.

  Peterson’s soft sigh as her mouth covered his was her first reward. His answering kiss, his tongue and heat and hunger matching hers, was her next. The hunger had clearly been waiting in him too, far more powerful than his anger.

  ‘Take me to bed. Please.’ Rebecca looked over his shoulder at the bedroom door; she could see the hint of a coverlet. ‘I may not know much, but—but I know a bed is crucial.’

  ‘For someone who’s never done this before, you have an expert knowledge of what is required.’

  ‘In order to prevent vice, one must know exactly what to look for.’ Rebecca laughed, shamefaced, still gripping the collar of Peterson’s shirt as tightly as she could. ‘But I have never been taught the exact words for it.’

  She felt fortunate, dizzyingly fortunate, to have no prior experience of such pleasure with anyone else. They felt new, completely new—as if she and John Peterson were creating something from nothing, bringing it out of the dark.

  It was wrong, of course. Wrong, and sinful, and against everything for which she had spent so much of her life campaigning.

  What a terrible pity, then, that she wanted it so much.

  Nothing had been lost. None of the freshness, the sweetness, the vibrancy—none of the shock of having Rebecca Westbrook in his arms. Peterson held her as gently as he could, terrified of scaring her. Rebecca was frenzied with want, wild with it, kissing him with a fervent ardency that he had never dared to dream of—how could he not respond with everything, absolutely everything, he had?

  She didn’t want to walk through the park with him. Didn’t want to drink tea with him in public. All she wanted was this—to throw her arms around him, kiss him, and huskily plead for more…

  It should have been enough. More than enough. It certainly was for his body; his cock was iron-hard, every muscle tense with want. Only in the back of his mind, his deepest self, was there a hint of sadness—as if he were already mourning something that hadn’t yet been lost.

  Enough foolish longing. Enough dreaming of things that could never, would never, happen. Rebecca was here in his arms, lush and soft, better than any dream of what could never be.

  As if coming to his senses, he kissed Rebecca with renewed vigour. Her ecstatic gasp, her shocked sigh as his tongue gently brushed against hers, only fuelled him further; he deepened the kiss, adding a touch of punishment to the pleasure. No daylight for them, no flourishing—well then. He would show her all the bliss that darkness and privacy could hold.

  Gripping Rebecca’s waist, ignoring her quiet moan of frustration, he took her through the door o
f the kitchen to his bedroom, striding over to his bed. Sitting down on the plain woollen coverlet, pulling her to him with a harsh, wordless grunt, he lifted her into his lap as Rebecca laughed in shamefaced delight.

  ‘I cannot sit astride you.’

  ‘You can, and you will.’ Peterson pushed away the frothy mound of Rebecca’s skirts, searching eagerly for the heat of her body. ‘Do you not wish to?’

  ‘I wish to. Of course I wish to.’ Rebecca paused, biting her lip with a quiet gasp as Peterson pushed away her shift, her thighs and damp, tousled curls of her mound revealed to him. ‘But I still believe that I should not.’

  ‘Then tell me to stop.’ God, she was beautiful like this; dressed but exposed, constrained and free at the same time. He could take her like this, fuck her like this, until he was spent. ‘Tell me I’m a wicked, vile creature.’

  ‘You are a wicked, vile creature, and I would like you to put your hand on my… my…’

  ‘What word do you use for it?’

  ‘None.’ Rebecca blushed, a deep rose that had Peterson reaching to kiss her again. The woman shouldn’t be ashamed of her body, her capacity for giving pleasure—but oh, she was beautiful when she blushed. ‘I have no name for it. Perhaps—no. Don’t listen to me.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well… if you know the words for it, you could teach me.’ Rebecca’s kiss came, her murmur soft and exciting. ‘You could name it for me.’

  God, she was so desirable it was damn near criminal. Peterson moved his hand to her mound, tangling his fingers in her rich blonde curls as his fingers brushed against her wetness. ‘If I name it, it belongs to me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rebecca nodded eagerly, her words trailing into a soft, yielding sigh as Peterson stroked along her inner lips. That flush was there again, at the base of her neck—she was as excited as she was.

  What good deed had he done to find a woman who shared not only his desires, but his dreams for a better world? ‘This cunt belongs to me now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘I—I can’t.’

  ‘Say it here, against my mouth, as I stroke you.’