An Introduction to Pleasure (9 page)

He turned his face away, and Lysandra stared. There had been a brief moment of pain on his face that was unmistakable. She recalled Vivien had said something about his “sad history”, but could it have something to do with a marriage? Dear God, she didn’t even know if he
was
married. She had assumed not when he took her into his home, but she could be utterly wrong.

“Do you have a wife?” she blurted out.

He jerked his gaze to her and held it there a long moment. Then he slowly shook his head. “No. My wife died three years ago.”

Lysandra swallowed hard. At least she wouldn’t be the “other woman” aiding in the painful deterioration of a marriage, but she could feel no glee about the reason. A death of a spouse, she knew how that had broken her poor mother.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He rose to his feet. “This is exactly what I’m speaking of, Lysandra. Your duty is to keep these painful thoughts, these proofs of reality, away from your protector’s mind. Create a world of fantasy and pleasure, nothing more. That is what he will desire.”

She stared at him. He was angry. Angry with her or angry with himself, she wasn’t certain. But before she could ask him, he spun on her.

“Stand up,” he ordered.

She flinched at the rough tone but did as he asked, shoving to her feet from the steaming water. She still felt a desire to cover herself, but it was beginning to fade. Andrew had already seen her in every intimate way, after all.

“Have you ever touched yourself?” he asked.

“Touched myself?” she repeated.

He stared at her. “As I touched you. Touched yourself intimately.”

She drew a few long breaths before she answered, so he wouldn’t hear the tremble in her voice.

“No,” she admitted.

He frowned. “Never? Not even in the dark of your room?”

She bit her lip. “No.”

“Hmmm, well then, your first lesson shall be one you carry with you the rest of your life. Know your body.” He smiled, but it was wicked. “To create pleasure in others, you must experience it yourself. Take the towel from the table beside the tub, dry off and lay down on the divan.”

Lysandra shivered, but she did as she had been told. Once she was dry, she moved to the divan, a fainting couch that was positioned in front of the blazing fire. Once she was lying across it, staring at him with anticipation heating her blood, he moved to kneel at the end of the couch.

“Open your legs, Lysandra and touch yourself.”

She sat up a fraction and stared at him. “Touch myself with you watching?”

He growled out his answer, “Normally, I would simply tell you to do so in the privacy of your chamber, but our time together is limited. I will be your guide in helping you find ways to give yourself release and then you must do this every night, whether I visit you or not. Keep your body at the ready and you will more enjoy your duties as my mistress.” He stopped and shook his head. “
A
mistress.”

Lysandra bit her lip. She had no idea how to proceed in touching herself intimately. But as Andrew tilted his head in encouragement, she realized that he wasn’t about to release her from his order.

She crooked her knees and spread her legs a fraction. He shook his head.

“No. All the way.”

“Splay myself out in an entirely unladylike fashion?” Lysandra burst out in horror.

He smiled. “You may be a lady in the parlor all you like—in fact, that is what you should do, no matter what your position in life ends up being. But in the bedroom, in private or with your lover, you must be willing to go further. To forget conventions which tell you not to look, not to touch, not to
feel
. Otherwise you will have very short and unsatisfying affairs, indeed.”

He reached forward and grasped her knees, then shoved them apart until she was sprawled across the couch in a most revealing position.

“Now place your hands on yourself and think of what has given you pleasure,” he continued, though his voice was becoming rougher and rougher with each order.

“Andrew,” she whispered, mostly because she was afraid.

Afraid of what fully surrendering to this life would entail, and worse, how it might change her. Already, she longed for his touch, for more of him, did that not make her a wanton?

“Stop thinking about everything that frightens you and do this,” Andrew said, breaking into her thoughts like he had a window into her tormented soul.

“How do you know what I was thinking?” she asked.

He laughed. “You have an expressive face, Lysandra. Now stop dallying and do as I say.”

Lysandra lifted her hand from her side. It trembled as she placed it flat on her belly and let it rest there. Her fingers had never felt so heavy or so hot to her before. She stared down at them, almost as if they belonged to some unwelcomed stranger.

“Slide upward and touch your breasts,” he said, staring at her hand as intently as she was.

Lysandra sucked in a breath and slowly, unsteadily, glided her hand up the apex of her body until her right palm covered her right breast lightly. Once again, she was struck by how foreign the sensation was. Of course she had touched herself innocently before, in the bath or while getting dressed…but this was something else. Now she noticed just how heavy and soft her breast was. How hard her nipple felt as her palm brushed it and how just that grazing touch could make a little frisson of pleasure jolt through her.

She gasped and jerked her hand away.

“No,” he urged, so soft and seductive. “Don’t stop.”

She shivered and then rested her fingers back against her flesh. They were beginning to feel less foreign now, which allowed her to revel in the brush of her skin, the heat that increased as she first rested her hand back in its original position and then began to gently knead the flesh there.

She thought of Andrew and what he had done to her both times he touched her this way. She thumbed at her own nipple and gasped when the pleasure her grazing touch had caused doubled, tripled.

“You see how much more aware you become of your body when you surrender to its desires?” Andrew asked.

His voice was so low and seductive that it seemed to dance along her spine and through her nerves to tingle at the tips of her breasts and in the area between her legs that she hadn’t even begun to explore.

“Tell me how it feels,” he encouraged her.

“Hot,” she admitted in panting breaths. “Tingling.”

“Good, that is exactly how your pleasure should feel. Now lower. Move your hand between your legs and touch yourself there.”

She was too mesmerized by her own actions now to refuse his request. She glided her hand down her body, noting how the touch felt, how her body reacted. Finally, she hesitated just above the triangle of hair that marked the beginning of her mound.

“Think of how good it felt when I was tasting you,” he said, sliding closer. “And when I was inside you. Wouldn’t you like to have that kind of pleasure at your own command, whenever you would like it?”

She shut her eyes. He was like a seductive devil, daring her to be more than she was. And she had no resistance to him. She covered her sex with her hand and caught her breath.

“I don’t know how to…to touch myself here,” she admitted.

He leaned along the bottom of the settee until his face was mere inches from her sex. He parted her fingers to reveal her to him and smiled. Then he covered her fingers with his own, spreading her lower lips gently and gliding her fingers against the wetness they concealed.

“Feel how you are already aroused?” he asked, stroking her hand up and down the length of her entrance. The tingles she had felt when she touched her breasts returned with even greater intensity.

She swallowed hard. “The wetness, you mean?”

“Yes. It is how your body readies itself for a lover’s intrusion. And it is most pleasurable to feel that heated wetness around my cock, I assure you.” He removed his fingers and Lysandra continued the work he had started, rubbing the outside of her own sex in a rhythmic, repetitive fashion.

“Now press a finger inside your sheath,” he said. “As if it were my cock inside of you.”

She whimpered, but did as he ordered. Her index finger slipped inside with no resistance and she felt the wet walls flex around her hard.

“Oh God,” she whispered, tensing against the building wave of passion. “And then?”

He reached out and flicked at her clitoris with his finger. “Do you remember when I told you about this nub? When I licked it and made you come the first time?”

She jerked out a nod. “Yes.”

“Touch it like I am.”

She pressed her thumb to the bundle of nerves and began to grind against it. Her body lifted and her hips turned in time to this new wicked pleasure, almost as if it knew what to do, even if she didn’t. She cried out, pushing harder, driver her finger deeper into her sheath and the wall of release burst suddenly and powerfully.

She cried out as she came, shaking and lifting her hips, trembling as wave after wave of pleasure crashed over her, carrying her away until she was spent on the fainting couch and panting.

Before she could catch her breath or say a word, he rose up like a god, stripped off the trousers and shirt he had put back on when he called for her bath and stared down at her. Her eyes went wide as she stared at him. He was utterly beautiful and now his hard cock, jutting up against his belly, no longer worried her. She ached for it.

He obliged without her asking. He lowered himself over her and took advantage of her already spread legs. In an easy thrust he was buried inside her to the hilt. She gasped at the feeling, still shocked by how full and womanly and utterly wild his taking could make her feel.

He dropped his mouth down and began to take her with his tongue and his cock. Unlike the last time, there was no gentleness to his touch, he was demanding, driving into her hard and sucking her tongue, tasting her mouth with as much command. She surrendered to the domination without hesitating. She lifted her hips to meet his driving thrusts, arching and mewling as he claimed her hard and fast.

The pleasure she had experienced at her own hand was still tingling in her loins and within a few hard thrusts he stoked the fires inside of her anew. She pulled her mouth from his to cry out against his shoulder and he roared in response, then withdrew to spend away from her.

Lysandra collapsed against the settee once more, slick with sweat, the scent of sex in the air around her. But she had never been more satisfied in her entire life. And if
this
was what being a mistress would entail, she was beginning to think it might not be such a bad life after all.

Chapter Nine

Andrew sat on the same fainting couch where he had taken Lysandra not three hours before. She was curled up in the bed, sheets tangled around her waist, sleeping peacefully.

He hadn’t intended to take her after she pleasured herself. Nor had he intended to take her a third time after they shared a decadent supper in her chamber. Nor a fourth. He was no longer the libertine that could fuck a woman until they were both spent.

Except that was exactly what he had done tonight. Without thought, without hesitation.

Now, regret…well, that was another story entirely.

He stared at her. She wasn’t anything like his late wife, Rebecca. For that, he found he was glad. They didn’t even look alike. Rebecca had been fair and Lysandra was dark.

But there was something about Lysandra that drew him like a moth to her seductive flame. There was her beauty, of course, her sensuality that he was able to coax and demand because of the tutelage he was giving. But there was something more. A kind of sweet innocence that she maintained even as she opened her body to him with increasing fervor.

And there was a sadness that lingered in her eyes that he wanted to…heal.

He jerked his head away and stood up.

Heal her? That was ridiculous. Not possible. This agreement between them was for sex and nothing more. He could either help her to become a valued mistress to a long-term protector or help her see that she wasn’t equipped for this life. But that was all. He had no intention of creating more between them than that.

He turned on his heel and stalked from the room silently. He said nothing to the servants as he walked to his waiting carriage and gave his driver the order to go to his father’s home. It was late, but not too late to see the old man, and it would set him to rights. Make him remember who he was and why he had come to London in the first place. And it wasn’t to begin an affair with Lysandra Keates.

He would do well to recall that fact.

After a long while of twisting through streets crowded with carriages heading for the theatre or soirees around town, his rig came to a stop before his father’s London home.

As he stepped down, he stared up at the large, imposing home, so different from the modest escape he had just slipped away from. He had never liked the brashness of this home or even his own homes here in London and in the country. But they came with the title and his wife had wanted them to be impressive, so he had done what was expected of him.