My Lady's Pleasure (9 page)

“Freddy!” his mother said. “Whatever brings you here?”

The young man went straight to the point. “Mama, I’ve been sent down.”

“Sent down!” his father positively roared.
“Sent down?”

“Yes, Father. Sent down.” Freddy tried to look neutral. He knew he must take this seriously, but he didn’t think what he had done was so very bad, and refused to look ashamed. A stoic dignity was what he aimed for.

He told his parents what had happened, and they reacted essentially as he had predicted to Georgiana. His father absolutely raged. His mother was irritated, but neither furious nor surprised.

She had never breathed a word of her preference, but she had always felt closer to Freddy than to his elder brother, Robert. Robbie was like his father, but Freddy had inherited her own spirited cheerfulness. That, coupled with a rambunctiousness she always attributed to his gender, got him into all kinds of scrapes. When he had gone up to Oxford, she would have been willing to wager that he would be sent down again—although not quite this soon.

And now, when her blue-eyed son stood before her, making an obvious effort at stoic dignity, she could not find it in herself to be angry. Scrapes were Freddy’s lot in life, and if this was the worst one he ever found himself in, he led a charmed life indeed.

Her husband had enough anger for both of them. After spluttering almost incoherent expostulations of his son’s thoughtlessness and stupidity, he realized he needed to calm down before he discussed this any further.

“We’ll talk about this later,” he growled to his son. “Right now, I need you to get out of my sight.”

Freddy was happy to oblige. He ran up to his room, changed his traveling suit for riding clothes, and headed for the stables—via the kitchen garden, where he pulled up two fat carrots. He was in no mood to explain his presence to any of the servants, and he went through the back door to the stall where his favorite of the Penfield horses was contentedly eating oats.

“Prancer, old girl,” he said to the horse, and she came over, nuzzling him to find the food she knew he inevitably brought. He gave her the carrots and stroked her nose. “I’m glad to see you,” he said softly, and he meant it. Freddy’s heart was soft and permeable, and a lively horse or a loyal dog could find its way in with very little trouble.

He saddled Prancer and rode off to the north, to the far end of the Penfield lands. There was a small dairy farm that abutted the estate, and the farmer was a German named Glück with a remarkable knack for cows. He owned only twenty acres, though, and such limited grazing could support only a small herd. Fifteen years before, he had approached the Loughlins and asked about leasing grazing rights for a thirty-acre portion that bordered his land.

The Loughlins liked Glück, who was enterprising and hardworking, and they were glad to grant him the lease. When Glück asked the price, they told him that he could have it for a thrice-weekly delivery of milk and butter to Penfield.

Glück protested that he couldn’t do business on such terms, that he felt as though he were stealing the valuable grazing rights for such paltry payment, but the Loughlins wouldn’t have it any other way, and the deal was sealed with a handshake. Twice since, the parcel Glück used had been expanded, and Penfield had been plentifully supplied not just with milk and butter, but with cream and Hirtenkäse, the dense, creamy cheese Frau Glück grew up making in her native country.

The leasing arrangement paved the way for friendly relations between the two families, and Freddy, as he grew up, often took a cart to the Glücks’ dairy to fetch what the farmer would otherwise have to deliver. In that way, he got to know the Glücks’ daughter, Gretchen.

Gretchen, Freddy thought, must have been the model for the milkmaid archetype. Fair skinned, peach cheeked, buxom, and firm, with a perpetual smell of new milk, Gretchen had been irresistible to Freddy from the day he knew what it was to want a girl.

The two were almost exactly the same age, and they couldn’t have been more than thirteen when they first began, haltingly and clumsily, to explore each other’s bodies in the fragrant hay of the cowshed. It wasn’t long before they were less halting and less clumsy, and Freddy owed his not inconsiderable experience to the fortuitous combination, embodied in Gretchen, of fondness for him and sexual curiosity.

 

Freddy had found women a bit hard to come by at Oxford, and as he rode to the Glücks’ his desire mounted. Unless their patterns had changed, he knew he’d find Gretchen in the barn at this hour, cleaning up from the morning milking. Thinking it might be inconvenient to be spotted by the farmer or his wife, he skirted the house and went straight out to the barn. He tethered his horse and went in.

And there she was, washing out the buckets they used for milking, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her heavy blond hair escaping its braid in curling damp tendrils. She was glistening from the exertion and her apron and clothes were stained with dirt, but that in no way diminished the appeal she had for Freddy.

She hadn’t heard him approach, and he watched her for a few moments before he said, “Gretchen, my girl, you look good enough to eat.”

Startled, she turned around and said, “Freddy! I thought you’d gone off to school.”

“And so I had, but I missed you dreadfully and so I’ve come back again.”

She laughed as he put his arms around her waist and leaned over so he could bury his face in her neck. “You are a liar,” she said, “but you are a charming liar.”

“I never lie about anything of substance,” Freddy said, “and so when I tell you that you taste marvelous, you can believe it as though it were one of the gospels.” He kissed her neck and ran his tongue up to her earlobe. He added, whispering in her ear, “And I did miss you, you know.”

Freddy slipped the string off the end of her braid and worked his hands through her hair to release it. He loved the feeling of her cool, fine hair running through his fingers, and pulled her to him as he ran his hands from her hairline to the back of her head, and then out to either side, over and over.

Gretchen buried her face in his chest—she was a full foot shorter than he was—and closed her eyes to better focus on the feel of his fingertips on her scalp. He pressed harder, and then harder still, and she groaned softly.

The responsiveness of her body had always been a wonder to Gretchen. When Freddy touched her breasts, or her pubis, or her inner thighs, the cascading warmth of her response made sense to her. But she realized years ago that he could touch her anywhere—the backs of her knees, the soles of her feet, the top of her head—and she would have that same response. A man’s touch made her feel as though she were made of nerves extending from a center somewhere between her hip bones, and radiating out to every square inch of her surface.

Freddy took the full heft of her hair in his left hand and pulled it, forcing Gretchen to look up. She did, and he kissed her fully and deeply. His tongue, flirting with her own, made her feel as though she were glowing, lit from within.

She ran her hands up the insides of his thighs until she found his balls. She took them in her two hands and manipulated them, one against the other, in opposing circles. Now it was Freddy’s turn to groan. She moved her hands up to his cock, which, while not long, was as thick as a sapling and hard as a cable pulled taut. She reached one hand down his trousers and held him, at first loosely and then tighter and tighter. As she squeezed, she started working up and down, up and down, and felt as the cable pulled tighter still.

Freddy was clearly nearing his limit. He put his palms on her shoulders and bodily separated himself from her. He took a deep breath and, leaving one hand on her shoulder, used the other to trace the outline of her breasts with his index finger, cupping each in turn as his finger went around the bottom.

After he’d made several circuits, he found the little hollow in her chest where her ribs met, and ran his hand straight down over her firm, slightly rounded belly, to the mound between her legs.

Neither of them could tolerate the layers of clothing between them, and Gretchen held up her skirts obligingly while Freddy took off first her boots, and then her drawers. He took the entire mound of her pubis in his hand and worked his middle finger inside her. She felt the pressure of the heel of his palm against her clitoris as he circled the finger inside, and she let out a sound that was part gasp, part moan.

Freddy released the pressure and stopped the movement, and he felt Gretchen’s muscles contract as though willing him to start again. Her eyes opened in time to see him smile, and he waited just a beat before he renewed his efforts. The next time he stopped, he knew she was too close for him to start again, and he removed his hand. He put his finger, wet from her juices, into his mouth and licked it clean.

There was a narrow, steep wooden stairway that led to the hayloft, consisting of two long pieces of wood with boards nailed across them, and Freddy backed her against it. They knew from long practice that, if she stood on the first step, she was at just the right height for him. He lifted her up, pulled up her skirts, and pushed them behind her, between two steps of the ladder, to keep them out of the way.

Freddy took two steps back. As he admired the sight of Gretchen, naked from the waist down, standing on the step and leaning back against the stairs, he unbuttoned his trousers and took his cock in his hand.

“I think that belongs to me,” Gretchen said, motioning him over to her. He came over to the ladder, and she took his penis in her hand once more. This time, though, she guided it inside her.

Gretchen loved the feeling of Freddy’s fully erect cock inside her. It was so broad that it seemed to plug her as snugly as a cork, and her insides felt almost pressurized. As he started slowly pulsing in and out, she lifted her right leg and wrapped it around his waist so she could work him in deeper. He held her leg up with his left hand and leaned fully against her, pulsing faster. With his other hand, he reached around behind her and gathered her hair up through a gap in the stairs. He gently pulled, forcing her head up and exposing her neck.

Gretchen was pinned to the stairs, and the vulnerability heightened the excitement for her. She gave herself over utterly to the sensation, letting the crescendo happen.

And it did. She hadn’t seen Freddy in weeks, and her body was more than ready to receive him. Every nerve, every muscle was doing its part to bring her to climax. And then she was there. The epicenter was the warm wetness between her legs, with Freddy’s cock driving in and pulling out, but there were tremors in every extremity.

Freddy was there a second behind her, and they reveled in their joint orgasm, almost as though they could feel each other’s pleasure. As it subsided, she leaned back against the stairs and he leaned forward against her, both attuned to the lingering softness of their intermingling.

They were spent, and they disentangled and put themselves back together. When they were presentable, Gretchen said, “Well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, tell me what happened.”

“Let’s go for a walk, and I’ll tell you the whole story.” They spent the next two hours wandering the fields, each telling the other everything that had happened since they had last met. Freddy basked equally in the warm sun and the warm affection, and told himself that he couldn’t regret Oxford when home held such pleasures.

I
t was midafternoon by the time Freddy finally returned to Penfield. As he rode up, he saw a crowd headed for the tennis lawn. He had no idea so many people were staying with his parents, and he wondered what was bringing them all out. Then he saw the two young ladies—one of them Lady Georgiana, the other unknown to him—dressed for the game, and it all became clear.

He was about to join his parents’ guests, but thought better of it when he reasoned that his parents themselves would probably arrive any moment. He wasn’t yet ready to face his father again, but he wanted to watch the game. He took refuge in the boughs of a beautiful copper beech tree that he’d climbed at least a thousand times. At eighteen, he was still almost as nimble as he’d been at eleven, and he had settled himself on a comfortable limb with an excellent view before anyone had noticed his presence.

The two women approached the lawn, walking companionably together. Miss Niven was wearing a tennis frock with a white bodice and a full light blue skirt. Lady Georgiana maintained that attempting to run around a lawn chasing a ball was a silly enough pastime, but to do it in a dress was ridiculous. She wore white trousers and a white blouse that buttoned down the front.

The contrast between the two women didn’t stop there. Georgiana was lithe to Miss Niven’s robust, fair to her dark, slim to her voluptuous. Most observers would have pronounced Miss Niven the more beautiful of the two, but Lady Georgiana’s sylphlike figure and knowing smile would always win over a small, unconventional minority.