Celeste's Story Page 3
“One glass, or two?” He waggled his eyebrows.
She shook her head adamantly and, raising her hand with the forefinger extended, waved it from side to side admonishingly. “Not for me, Heath. I enjoy champagne and an occasional glass of Chianti, but I’ll never touch gin.”
“This isn’t gin. It is whiskey, m’lady.”
“Any way you look at it, it’s still hard liquor.” She cringed inwardly, understanding gin was her husband’s chosen poison. She made a conscious effort to banish all thoughts of Ralph from her thoughts for the rest of the evening. “And you’re not supposed to tease the person who has just given you a gift.”
It was Heath’s turn to waggle his finger in schoolmarm fashion. “My mistake, and my sincerest apologies. Now stay right here, Lady Celeste. It’ll take but a moment for me to return.”
His boyish exuberance seemed so thoroughly at odds with the powerful, protective man who had beat a man nearly to death for committing an act—attempting to rape a peasant girl—which many in the aristocracy did not consider a crime. Many of the landed gentry from London, to Edinburgh, to Paris, to St. Petersburg considered an attractive peasant girl fair game.
Alone, Celeste looked around the stable. It was clean and orderly, and she couldn’t help but wonder what Heath’s living quarters were like. He was the kind of man who wouldn’t simply assume someone else would clean up the messes he made. Though she had employed servants her entire life, she had never cavalierly left a mess for her maids to clean up. It was her mother, who had married into considerable wealth when she walked down the aisle with Celeste’s father, who had taught her daughter to treat the servant class with respect and dignity. Having met Heath, Celeste more than ever realized there was a reason for such dignity.
Throughout the stable was an aura of stability, of masculine solidity. There was the feeling of one man in complete control. The saddles were arranged on an A-frame wooden contraption similar to a sawhorse, though much longer, all four neatly arranged one behind the other. She wondered if Heath had made the apparatus himself, of his own design. For reasons she could not fathom, she hoped he had.
When Heath returned, she noticed he had tucked his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, though he’d left the collar and neck unbuttoned. He had two glasses in his left hand and the bottle of whiskey in his right. The glasses were cut crystal, and though she felt guilty for her upper-class suspicions, she wondered where a man like him would get such fine glassware.
“I brought a glass for you, in case you decide to change your mind.” He grinned, and his boyish dimple formed once again. “It’s been my experience that women change their mind quite frequently.”
“And you’ve quite a bit of experience with women, I’ve heard.”
The words were out of her mouth before she had the chance to censor them. She felt a blush creep up her chest and neck, touching her cheeks and ears.
“Well,” he said with a shrug as he pulled the cork from the bottle, “you can’t believe everything you hear, now can you?”
“No.” She was thankful he’d made it easy for her not to have to explain herself. “There are so many nonsensical rumors flittering about on the ton that a person would have to be an addle-brained fool to believe what’s said.”
Heath poured a glass half full of the amber liquid for himself then put a small amount in a glass and handed it to her. “Or, you could just avoid the ton altogether,” he said, clinking his glass with hers. “There’s always that option, you know.”
She shook her head, staring at the whiskey as she swirled it around in her glass. “No, for some of us, that’s not an option.” The corners of her mouth turned downward. “Somehow, some of us lose options when we get older.”
The instant the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She had come to the stables to thank a servant for being kind, not to pour her heart out. When she looked up into his eyes, she knew he understood not only what she had said, but what she had left unsaid.
“You’ve got more options than you think.” He took a half step closer to her. With his eyes locked with hers, he brought the crystal glass to his lips and took a swallow of the whiskey. He sighed with obvious pleasure, smiled, and said, “Now that’s some fine whiskey. Why don’t you give yours a try?”
She shook her head. “I really shouldn’t,” she said, paradoxically raising the glass to her mouth.
She took a sip, and when the liquor scorched a path down her throat, she put a hand to her chest, drawing his gaze to her decidedly extravagant bosom. She quickly moved her hand away from her chest but noticed Heath’s gaze linger on her décolletage a second or two longer.
“I don’t know how you can drink this,” she said, exaggerating the discomfort the whiskey had caused. Heath’s proximity and his towering stature made her far more uncomfortable than any liquor. “It’s positively dreadful.”
With no expression on his face whatsoever, he said in an eerily calm voice, “You shouldn’t have to put up with his guff. He doesn’t deserve you. You’re too good for him in so many ways.”
Nervously, she took another drink of her whiskey, this time taking a full swallow, emptying the glass. As the fiery liquid went down her throat, she spun away from Heath and coughed, bent over at the waist.
Heath took her by the arm to steady her and put his other hand lightly upon her back. “It’s my fault. I should have known better than to give whiskey to a well-bred lady.”
When the coughing subsided, she stood up straight. When she turned to face him, to look into his ice-blue eyes, she had to tilt her head back on her shoulders because he was so much taller and stood so close.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said quietly, unable to understand why her heart hammered in her chest.
“You should be treated like a princess, m’lady. There ought to be a crown of jewels on your head.” He took the empty glass from her hand then tossed back his own whiskey with a single swallow. When she stepped away from him, he set both glasses on the ledge holding the rasp files for the horses’ hooves and then closed the distance between them once again.
“I’d better be getting back.” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “I’ve spent more time here than I had planned.”
He placed his broad-palmed hands upon her naked shoulders, and a shiver went through her. I’m not a virgin, she thought, though she felt like one.
“If you were mine, I’d treat you better than the fool you married.”
“Stop it.” She placed her hands over her ears. “I can’t listen to this.” She started to move away, to get out of Heath’s company, because her body’s response to his blatant virility frightened her. But before she could get more than a step or two, his hand tightened around her left wrist. She nearly lost her balance when he spun her around to face him. She looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were fiery. He grabbed her by both wrists and raised them above her head as she put forward a futile struggle. A moment later, he wrapped the rope to the hayloft hoist around her wrists then pulled on the opposite end until her arms were at full extension. He secured the rope to the belaying cleat.
Her eyes opened wide in indignation. He stood with his hands on his hips, surveying her from a distance. The blue fire was still in his eyes, but there was another emotion going through him now, and she recognized it as lust.
The rope around her wrists was coarse, harsh against her skin, and as she came to the full awareness that she was bound and helpless against him, the tingling in her clitoris intensified.
“Now you’re going to listen to everything I have to say. You’re going to listen because what I have to say is what you need to hear.”
When he stepped closer, she was more aware than ever of his size. He was a full foot taller than she, and the breadth of his shoulders now seemed enhanced by her own vulnerability. The pulsing in her clitoris became a bit more insistent. Her breasts felt swollen, her nipples hard as pebbles.
“Lady Celeste, just loo
k at you.” He spoke the words softly, sexual tension coloring his tone. “You’re a goddess. A living goddess here on earth.”
“I’m a thirty-six-year-old woman, not a goddess,” Celeste replied sharply, trying to sound angry, though even she could hear the arousal in her voice.
“You’re a goddess, and I’m a twenty-nine-year-old servant who doesn’t know his place.” His heated gaze raked up and down over her body. “I’ve never been good at knowing my place in this world.”
He reached a hand out toward her breast. She tried to step away, but with almost no slack in the rope, before she could move much at all, she was forced up onto her tiptoes. She watched, trembling slightly, as he eased his forefinger between her breasts and inside her bodice, and then with an almost casual nonchalance, eased the finger to the side, freeing her breast by sliding the fabric beneath it.
“You need to be taught what it feels like to be a goddess.”
“Stop it, Heath.” She cursed herself for the lack of conviction in her tone.
With a lifetime of giving orders to servants bred into her, nothing in her background had prepared her for a man who simply wouldn’t listen to orders. And though she wanted desperately to be furious with this tall man who had tied her wrists with what appeared to be a certain practiced ease, her body responded favorably in ways she couldn’t understand.
“If you were mine, I’d give you a thousand kisses a day.” He bent low to kiss her lips, but she turned her face aside to avoid the intimacy. Her small act of defiance was blunted when he chose instead to kiss her temple, then cheek, and then her taut throat. His lips were warm and moist against her neck, and when his teeth nipped at her delicate skin, she uttered a high-pitched gasp of shock.
“Stop this, Heath,” she managed to say, failing to have the tone of indignation she’d hoped for.
As his warm tongue soothed the part of her neck he had bitten, he caught her exposed nipple between his forefinger and thumb, pinching and twisting with firmness, eliciting the maximum amount of pleasure while bordering on pain.
“Kiss me,” he said, once more trying to capture her lips with his own.
A rising sense of desperation flooded her senses. When he caressed her nipple, heated desire coursed through her veins, spreading outward from her breast. Her clitoris, which had come awake to the possibility of desire from very nearly the first moment she had seen Heath shirtless, itched even more than it had before, and the slick evidence of her own passionate excitement moistened the lips of her pussy. Against her best wishes, her body was preparing itself for penetration.
Heath moved slowly, a man in no hurry because she couldn’t leave the stable until he decided to untie her. He eased her neckline beneath both breasts to expose them to his gaze. She twisted to the left and right in a futile attempt to defend herself, but her struggles accomplished nothing more than to heighten her own rising desire.
“I would kiss these a thousand times a day, too.”
Celeste held her breath as he lifted each of her breasts then bent low and sucked upon one distended nipple. The pleasure was so forceful her knees threatened to buckle beneath her, and she would have fallen had her wrists not been securely tied by the hayloft rope. He drew a firm suction upon her breast, sucking much of the responsive tissue into his mouth. As his lips and tongue tantalized one nipple, his fingers and thumb tweaked the other.
“Ohhh,” she sighed, her mind in a whirl, her nipples feeling as though they were on fire. “Oh, God…”
Celeste was entranced with the lips and tongue caressing her nipples. When Heath’s hands slipped beneath her gown and petticoat and long, strong fingers cupped the cheeks of her bottom through her drawers, a moan was suffocated in her throat.
“Heath! Don’t! Don’t,” she said in a frantic whisper, unable to deny—even to herself—that the strong hands caressing her bottom intensified the heated tingles coming from her clitoris.
“If you were mine,” he said as he got down on one knee, “I’d kiss you everywhere.”
He raised her skirt and petticoat up to her stomach, untied the drawstring of her drawers, and brought them down to her ankles. Looking down between the trembling mounds of her breasts, she watched as he first looked up at her, then, with a distinctly predatory gleam in his eyes, removed her drawers with startling swiftness, then lifted her leg up over his right shoulder. An instant later he brought his mouth to her pussy, and for a blinding moment of lust-induced irrationality, she thought she might die. When his tongue slipped between the lips of her pussy, she cried out in shock. The jolting pleasure she experienced was frightening in its intensity, especially when he dragged his tongue upward between her labia then circled her clitoris with his tongue several times before finally licking the lust-stiffened nub.
Balancing on one foot, half-dangling from the rope surrounding her wrists, she had never known such disorienting desire. Everything she experienced was in the extreme. Though the rope around her wrists chafed her delicate skin, there was an eroticism to the sensation she could neither understand nor deny. The rustic surroundings of a dimly lit stable, so different from her world of chandelier-lighted salons, now seemed charged with taboo desires.
“Oh, God…oh, God…” The words came out as little more than a sigh. When she managed to say, “Please stop,” even she knew she didn’t mean it.
Sounds she had never before heard drifted to her ears, adding yet another element of arousal to her senses. Heath pleasured her with his lips and tongue, sucking and licking at the lips of her pussy and clitoris with a consummate skill, suggesting he was a man long accustomed to giving such intimate kisses to women. She had heard of her servant’s profligate reputation with the ladies, and as she felt herself rushing headlong toward an orgasm, she now understood why he was in such high demand by women seeking pleasure.
Her own fingers had caused the only climaxes she had ever experienced, but this lack of experience did not prevent her from sensing that the orgasm quickly approaching would be a powerful one.
When he slipped a single finger into her pussy as he sucked on her clitoris, the added stimulation was all she needed. She teetered on the edge of the abyss for several seconds, the pressure inside her so powerful it was actually painful, and then she tumbled over the edge and into the void as a wrenching climax claimed her senses. Powerful spasms gripped her, the contractions causing her body to twitch and tremble as she hung from the rope, barely managing to remain standing on one foot.
When the last of the contractions had shuddered through her, her expression softened. All her muscles felt weak, and she was grateful Heath had placed both hands on her buttocks to steady her.
“My…God,” she said softly, her mouth open as she gulped in air. The surface of her skin tingled in the afterglow of the most wrenching orgasm she’d ever experienced. “My God, Heath, what have you done to me?”
He chuckled as he eased her leg off his shoulder. “I’ve given you a lesson. Your first, I suspect, though it won’t be the last you’ll get from me.”
Chapter Three
On his knees, Heath pushed Celeste’s gown and petticoat just a little higher up her stomach and admired her shapely legs encased in white, silk stockings, her small, triangular patch of velvety pubic hair and pink-lipped pussy glistening with nectar. With his other hand, he eased his middle finger between her labia, watching as the digit slipped easily into her pussy. There was a smile on his mouth, which glistened with Celeste’s cream.
He slipped her leg off his shoulder and said, “I’ve given you a lesson. Your first, I suspect, though it won’t be the last you’ll get from me.”
He rose to his feet, allowing the skirt of her dress to fall around her ankles. Trapped inside his snug-fitting trousers was an erection aching to be freed. When Celeste noticed his intensely aroused condition, she gasped, closing her eyes and turning her face into her shoulder. He chuckled in response as he slipped his suspenders off his shoulders and then pulled his shirt over his head.
Knowing her curiosity would impel her to look, he waited until she opened her eyes before he unfastened the buttons. When the fly of his trousers opened, his erection, long and thick, sprang out. A blue vein ran a squiggly line along its broad upper surface, the shaft angling slightly upward. He was pleased when her eyes opened wide in shock upon seeing his cock for the first time.
“I have so much to teach you,” he said, keeping his distance so he had a better view of her charms.
He liked her hair better as it was now, tumbling over her shoulders, than when she pinned it up. Her eyes were the color of emeralds, and they shone in the candlelight. Though the gown hid much of the shape of her body, the fullness of her breasts was an ostentatious display of femininity. Just looking at her breasts as they trembled softly with her erratic breathing added size to his erection and prompted a pearl-like drop of fluid to form at the slit in the tip.
“I’ve never tied anyone up before.” His gaze went to her wrists above her head. The rope was taut, and he considered for a moment allowing more slack. Instead, he decided he liked her just as she was—securely tied with her back against the wall and her breasts exposed for his enjoyment. He closed the distance between them. “Lady Celeste”—he raised the sheer muslin gown up her legs—“you’ve bewitched me.”
He bent his knees as he slipped his hands beneath her dress. The feel of her silk stockings was a tactile reminder of the enormous chasm between their positions in society. His hands slid lightly up her legs, over her lace-trimmed garters, to her naked thighs, and finally, curling around her hips, he cupped the cheeks of her ass and squeezed.
“Kiss me,” he commanded, leaning into her. “Kiss me now, and you’ll taste your own pussy.”