A Lady's Pleasure (10 page)

Abigail had taken his pain and turned it into heart-rending pleasure.
Abigail had given back to him his soul.

contents
Abigail awoke to a warm flood of memories.
Robert kissing her between her legs. Robert buried so deeply inside her that they were one body. The taste of Robert on her tongue; the sound of his shock when she had shared that taste with him. Robert kneeling before her while she read to him from
The Pearl .
Robert's manhood pulsing against their entwined fingers while all around them her own flesh pulsed with the same aching need.
They should invoke shame, those memories. After all, she was a modern nineteenth-century woman raised to have a healthy aversion to human sexuality. At the very least, those memories should invoke embarrassment.
But they did not.
They reminded her that, whether she be a staid spinster or a genteel lady or a wanton seductress, she was first and foremost a woman.
Do you take me, Abigail?
I take you, Robert.
For the first time in her life she was thankful for her erotica. She would need every bit of knowledge she could gain if she was going to spend the rest of her life making Robert forget.
Smiling, she reached out a hand.
Only to encounter cold sheets, slightly rumpled where Robert had lain beside her.
Abigail's eyelids shot open ... to sunshine. And the shriek of a gull.
The storm was over.
Reality was sharp, invasive, words Robert had said in passion, words he had said in passing.
For the duration of the storm, let us simply be Abigail and Robert.
As long as the storm lasts, your body, your needs, your fantasies everything you have
is mine.
For the duration of the storm you are
my
woman.
She scrambled up in bed, ridiculously hoping that perhaps Robert was in the hip bath or kneeling in front of the stove, putting wood into it, anything,
but please, God, don't let him be gone.
But there was no place to hidethe cottage was empty. His clothes, which had been draped over the chair by the stove, were gone. In their place hung her faded green cotton dress and white silk drawers.
Abigail closed her eyes against the sunshine filling the cottage.
Like the storm, Robert was gone.
Suddenly Abigail could not bear the sheets that smelled of him and of her. She scrambled out of bed, wincing at the feel of the engorged sponge inside her and the greasy traces of butter between her buttocks.
She hurt. Between the legs. Her bottom. Her breasts. Her lips. Everywhere he had touched her, she hurt.
Yet everywhere she looked, the cabin carried a part of him.
The fire in the stove. The hip bath on the floor by the sink. The cupboard barring the window.
The Pearl ,
lying on the floor.
How could he leave her?
She had promised him! Promised him that she would not give up
Her dreams.
Outside the cabin, a horse neighed; it was accompanied by the jingle of reins.
Robert.
Abigail raced to the door, heart pounding.
It did not matter that her hair hung wild and tangled down her back. It did not matter that she was two weeks and five days shy of turning thirty.
The only thing that mattered was that Robert had not left.
His horse had thrown him, he had said yesterday. Duty-bound soldier that he was, he had left the cottage to find his horse, and having found it
"Be ye decent, Miss Abigail? I've come to clean fer ye. And I've brought more food fer ye and yer mister."
Abigail felt as if she had been shot by a bullet.
Or stabbed by a pair of drumsticks.
Robert said he had killed. That he would kill again.
And he had.
He just had not stayed around this time to see the look of surprise in the victim's eyes.
Through the door she could hear the ocean waves gently washing the beach. The lonely sea gull shrilled in the sky above.
Straightening her shoulders, she called out, "Give me a few minutes, Mrs. Thomas. I need to"
She closed her eyes against the truth.
She had had her two nights of passion and she would have no more.
I need to cleanse from myself the old life and step into the new.
Hurriedly she laid out the clothes she had arrived inbustle, corset, chemise, petticoats, stockings, garters, dress.
Tears.
They dripped onto the bed like fat droplets of rain.
She wiped her cheeksthere would be no tears; one did not mourn stormy fantasiesthen she pumped a bucket full of cold water and set about removing the remains of Robert Coally.
Only to end up in the ignoble position of squatting and desperately reaching into tender flesh for a sponge that would not come out.
It struck her how ridiculous she must look, perched on her toes with her tangled hairhair that he had promised to brush flowing between her outstretched thighs. The absurdity of it was the final straw, somehow.
Once the tears started, Abigail thought she would drown in them, fishing around where a lady's fingers should never be while silently bawling as if she had a right to.
As if he had promised her more than a stormy union.
A union that
she
had proposed.
To make him forget his past. To make her forget the future.
But now the storm was over and it was time for him to rejoin his regiment.
And it was time for her to put aside fanciful fantasies.
The cottage door opened just as her fingers gained purchase. The sponge came out in the same moment that Abigail came up.
Mrs. Thomas stood framed in the door in a spill of sunlight and dancing dust motes. "It be all right, dearie. Men be forever takin' advantage of us women. I told my mister he shouldn' 'ave left you alone in the storm. We'll watch o'er ye now, me an' Mr. Thomas."
Ignoring the sponge in her hand and the tears that refused to stop, Abigail grabbed the towel by the sink and wrapped it about her as if nothing more untoward had occurred than a maid inadvertently walking in on her bathing mistress. "Thank you, Mrs. Thomas. There is no need to worry. I have decided to return to London . My family needs me, you see. I would appreciate it if you would assist me with packing, however. You may then drive me to the train station."
"There's a train that leaves in two 'ours time." Mrs. Thomas's face was full of pitya far, far more devastating emotion than the shock or disapproval that a spinster lady who strays from the straight and narrow path would expect to see in the eyes of a virtuous married woman. She retrieved Abigail's chemise from the rumpled bed. "Plenty of time, we got. I got a nice pan of Cross buns, just baked 'em, and a fresh crock of butter"
"I am not hungry," Abigail interrupted abruptly, wondering if she would ever be able to eat butter again. Or tolerate the odor of brandy. "But thank you."
She accepted the chemise with quaint dignity. Mrs. Thomas turned her back when Abigail had to perforce drop the towel.
"Of course I will pay you for your trouble." Abigail's head cleared the neck of the chemise. "No!" Her voice whipped the dust motes surrounding Mrs. Thomas. "Leave it!"
Mrs. Thomas looked up from where she bent over the journal that Robert in his passion had ripped out of Abigail's hands and flung across the room.
"It is merely something that I purchased for my vacation." She hurriedly spanned the distance that separated them. "Here, let me have it."
Abigail grabbed the journal from the befuddled woman. Walking across the room to the foot of the bed, she lifted the lid of the smallest trunk and tossed inside it
The Pearl ,
edition number twelve. The brandy-soaked sponge followed. Opening the largest trunk, she retrieved her reticule, rummaged inside it until she located the small key she stored there for safekeeping. Then she locked the small trunk, returned the key to her reticule and wiped her cheeks before turning to Mrs. Thomas with a formal smile. "Would you help me with my corset, please?"
Mrs. Thomas was as good as her word. Abigail was dressed and packed in plenty of time to catch the train. While Abigail laced up her half-boots, Mrs. Thomas took care of the chamber pot and stripped the linen off the bed. Together they emptied the hip bath, then together they lifted up two trunks onto the back of the worn gig. Dusting her fingers with a handkerchief, Abigail lifted her skirts and stepped high to reach the metal step. There was pain between her legs when she settled onto the worn leather seat, yet it was strangely distant, as if it did not belong to her but to someone else.
Mrs. Thomas stood by the side of the gig. "Ye be forgettin' a trunk, Miss."
"No." Abigail stared at the rhythmical swishing of the horse's tailit was not bobbed, as were those of the horses her brother kept. A brutal operation, she had always thought, involving as it did the removal of several vertebrae. "There is nothing more for me in the cottage."
"But"
Abigail pulled out a gold sovereign from her reticule. She looked down into Mrs. Thomas's wrinkled, worried face. "I would consider it a favor, Mrs. Thomas, if you and your husband would destroy the trunk. Its contents are no longer of any value to me."
"Of course, Miss."
Mrs. Thomas turned and entered the cottage. She returned just minutes later carrying the basket Mr. Thomas had left yesterday.
Fleetingly she wondered what Robert had done to the crock of butterif he had put it back into the cupboard or if he had stuck it inside the basket. Just as fleetingly she wondered if Mr. Thomas had told his wife of finding Miss Abigail and her "mister" frolicking naked in the rain.
But of course Mr. Thomas would have told her.
The mortification that Abigail should feel would not come.
The road to the station meandered around the ocean. At one spot a slip of the carriage wheel would plummet the vehicle over the cliff and into the water below.
"Stop!"
Mrs. Thomas nervously sawed on the reigns to stop the horse. Abigail reached into her reticule and grabbed the key to the trunk that carried her every fantasy.
How ironical that it should be dreams that had kept Robert alive these last twenty-two years.
They had given Abigail nothing but pain, isolating her from those she should emulate.
Before she could think about what she was doing, about what she was leaving behind, she stood up in the carriage and threw the key as far as she could.
It sparkled for a second, arcing over the water, then it disappeared. Into the air. Into the ocean.
It mattered not.
From this day forward Abigail had no dreams.
It was, after all, why she had chosen the isolated cottage, to say good-bye to the erotica that fueled impossible desires.
She closed her eyes against the sparkling clarity of the sea and made the decision she had been unable to make a week ago.
When she returned to London , she would accept the hand of the first man who her meddling siblings presented her with.
"You bloody horse, I should sell you to the glue factory."
Softly whickering, the horse looked over its shoulder.
And allowed Robert to grab its halter.
After a two-hour chaseand a three-hour hunt.
Robert stared into the horse's soft brown eyes and felt a melting sensation all the way down to his toes.
Toes that now sported a set of blisters, thanks to this great beast.
He had indeed lost his mind if every pair of brown eyes reminded him of Abigail, he thought in disgust.
Grabbing the pommel, he swung up into the saddle.
The sun was brilliant, the sky a cloudless blue as it can only be in the aftermath of a storm.
The melting sensation flowed from Robert's spine to his testicles at the thought of the storm ... and Abigail. And of how they would spend the rest of the day.
She would read from her erotica while he soaked his feet. Afterward, he would brush her hair as he had earlier promised. Then he would lick her and suckle her until she begged for mercy. And then ...
Then he would propose to her. She wouldn't dare refuse him, hanging on to the edge of release.
It was well after noon by the time Robert returned to the cottage.
He should have been warned by the lack of smoke trailing out of the chimney pipe in the thatched roof. He should have known that a cottage that appeared so utterly alone and desolate was just that. Being a military man, he should have noticed the fresh wagon tracks outside the cottage.
And he did. He merely attributed the lack of smoke coming out of the chimney to Abigail's exhaustion. And the wagon tracks only incited his hungerfor food. He had had nothing to eat since yesterday evening.
Stomach roiling, he burst inside the cottage.
Only to find emptiness.
The bedding had been ripped off the mattress. The floor near the sink was bereft of the hip bath.
For a second he wondered if he had gotten the wrong cottage.
One coastal cottage looked much like another. He could have gotten the wrong one ...
But of course there was the cupboard barring the window. And the small trunk at the foot of the bed.
Abigail was gone.
Pain filled his chest; it took his breath away. For a second he wondered if he had caught pneumonia from the storm.
But then the pain was washed away in a flood of rage.
Damn her.
She had planned it this way, from the moment he had introduced himself. While he had told her his full name, she had said her name was merely "Miss Abigail."
She had known then that with the end of the storm she would be gone.
How could she walk away from him after what they had shared last night?
He had felt her pleasure.
She had felt
his
pleasure.
Damn her to hell, she had accepted him,
all of him,
his body, his past, his fantasy.
She had taken his pain and turned it into pleasure.
For the first time since Robert had killed the
Sepoy
with a pair of drumsticks twenty-two years earlier, he felt like crying. Bawling like the gullible thirteen-year-old boy he had once been, forever searching for an easier way to live.
Fool that he was, he had allowed Abigail to become more than his fantasy woman. She had become a part of his soul.
While
he
had given her the weapon that she needed to sever the union. Ladies might dally with men raised on the streets of London , but they did
not
marry them.
No wonder she had fled. Last night he had asked her if she accepted himand she had said yes. No doubt when she had awakened alone, she had expected him to return with a preacher.
Angrily he jerked at the lid of the trunk.
It was locked.
He kicked it.
Only to burst a blister on his toe.
He hopped up and down.
Damn, damn, damn!
His hopping led him to the sink.
The hip tub was empty, propped up against the wall beside it. The water bucket sat in the sink. And the sponge ...