The Dollhouse Society Volume IV: Lucky (Includes Lady Luck, House of Dolls, The Reluctant Bride, A Woman on Top, plus a bonus story!) (10 page)

“
What are you talking about? I’m always nice to you,” he said, his voice soft and intimate as his breath brushed against my cheek. I smelled tobacco on his breath, and brandy, which made me squirm even more. I had come to relish those manly scents. At least I knew now why his skin and cock always tasted faintly sweet. It must be the honey baths that his valet drew for him.

“
I went driving with Stuart in his hansom today,” I confessed. “We talked, just talked.”

I watched his face for his reaction but he remained expressionless, focused on his work of toweling me off. Finally, he said, “And what did you talk about?”

“
He told me our stocks had redoubled,” I said, hoping this would please Tiberius. At this rate, I would be able to pay him back much sooner than I had expected. “And I told him some scary ghost stories. But then we were caught in the rain, and we took shelter under a tree that was hit by lightning. The witch’s curse, you know.”

He tensed as he finished drying my hair. He looked me over suddenly as if afraid. “Are you all right? Were you hurt?”

“
No, we’re fine. We both were.” I looked at him, acutely aware of how he’d left Stuart out of the equation of his worry. But I wanted him to know. “Tiberius…I kissed Stuart. It was my first kiss.”

His face hardened. It made his facial scar stand out, his face being so tense that way. “That was hardly your first kiss…”

“
I mean…it was the first kiss I ever received from a suitor.” I immediately regretted saying it because it implied Tiberius was never a suitor, could never be a suitor. I immediately went on, “When I was a girl of courting age, no man in the village would kiss me, even when we played kissing games because they were afraid I would give them the curse.” I gathered the towel against myself, suddenly embarrassed to be sitting here naked and damp and confessing these things to him.

“
Why are you telling me this, Lucky?” He sounded weary.

“
I thought you should know. And…I wanted to know something.”

“
What’s that?”

“
Courtesans…are they allowed to court? You never said, and I wondered…”

He held my eyes. “They’re allowed to court, yes. If the gentleman deems it acceptable.”

“
I didn’t know. I thought, perhaps…”

“
What is it?”

I thought perhaps you would wish to court me.
But what I said was, “I thought it was a permanent arrangement.”

He stood up and went to the sidebar to pour himself a brandy. “It can be, if the parties involved wish it to be.”

I wondered what he meant, if he was offering. I waited, but he said nothing more, so I pushed. “Do you…do you wish it to be permanent? Because if you do, I won’t allow Stuart to court me, of course.”

He drank down the brandy before turning to look at me. Something passed across his eyes but it was there and gone much too quickly for me to decipher it. “No, of course not. I have the import business to see after. There is no way I could make a life for myself here in Smithtown.”

I felt a small part of me die inside. I pulled the towel close around myself. So it was true. He didn’t love me. I had held out hope that maybe…well, I reminded myself, that was foolish. I couldn’t give Tiberius an heir. And I was much too forward in my opinions. It was obvious why he didn’t want me. “I see,” I finally said.

The silence sat between us like a mountain before he said, “Is Stuart aware of your unique situation?”

I rubbed at my stomach, which had begun to hurt. “He knows. I told him but he still wishes to court me.” And then, to cover the hurt in my voice, I said, “And I understand your situation, of course. Smithtown is certainly no metropolis. Really, we must seem rather quaint and unsophisticated to you. When will you go back to London…or wherever the import business takes you?”

“
When I know the mill is running smoothly. A year, perhaps. Just until I know my investment is turning a profit.”

“
Yes, of course,” I agree. Tiberius was, above all else, a good businessman. “Then…you’ll allow Stuart to court me? No objections?”

He pressed his lips together but his face remained unreadable. “I can’t see how I can prevent it.” He set the brandy down and came to me, pulling me into his arms, against the warmth of his skin. He pulled his robe around us both. He held me like that for a long moment, his fingers playing over my hair as if I were some comforting old toy to him, a doll designed for his pleasure alone, and then turned with me in his arm and carried me to his bed. “You’ll make him a pretty bride, Lucky,” he said as he tossed me down onto the goose down mattress, “one day.”  

I skittered backward as he climbed over the foot of the vast, four-poster bed and crept catlike toward me, but before I’d reached the head of the bed and the mound of pillows there, he’d captured me, covered me, and was kissing me. He kissed me like he was dying and I had the breath to keep him alive. He licked my lips until I parted them for him, then he crushed his mouth against mine and his tongue went in, slick and fast and hot like the brandy. His hands slid along my sides, following the contours of my body, and I sighed into his mouth.

“
It would never work out between us, you realize,” he said breathlessly between his endless kisses.

“
Yes, of course,” I agreed. “You’re not at all suited to this type of life.”

“
Yes,” he managed.

“
And we’re completely incompatible.”

“
Oh, yes. Yes, we are.”

“
I would make you miserable.”

“
Yes. Absolutely,” he said as his hand slid between my legs. I spread my legs farther apart and angled my pelvis up to meet his light, fluttering touch. His fingers circled the edges of my sex before parting my labia and rubbing at the wet inner flesh. His mouth found the side of my neck and he growled faintly as he licked and bit the tender flesh there. I made soft, kittenish noises as he softly tormented me. “I’m not entirely certain I even like you, Lucky,” he said.

“
I
know
I don’t like you,” I groaned and gripped the edges of his dressing gown before pushing it off the broad expanse of his shoulders. “You’re awful, simply awful.”

“
An ogre,” he agreed. “And you’re cursed. A disaster.”

“
Yes, I know.”

Unlike most proper gentleman, Tiberius’s body was rigid and sun-baked from cavalry training on the Peninsula—not the soft, white bodies I was used to seeing here in Smithtown on both men and women. I knew from experience that his back and chest were covered in small scars from various battles. He had old knife scars, rapier scars, even a scar from a musket ball that had grazed his shoulder at a precariously close angle. I did not think that Stuart had any scars. He had never been in any wars; he was simply too young. He wasn’t like Tiberius; he was pale white, and whole, and young, and unmarked, and comely. A man any women would swoon for. Tiberius was as different from him as night was from day. I traced the musket scar near Tiberius’s clavicle with my finger while his fingers went deep into me and made me thrust up and up against his hand.

“
You’re always so wet when I touch you, Lucky,” he said softly and sweetly against my well-licked and well-bitten neck. “I wonder, will you be this wet for Stuart when it comes time?”

I moaned throatily as he pumped his fingers in and out of me. His lips dropped to my breast and he took one nipple in his teeth, hard, sucking and biting it as he continued to push me toward my release. My hips undulated against him and I could feel the lovely pressure building and building. “Come inside me,” I offered in an intimate whisper as I kissed the soft, rich dark curls of his hair.

“
Not yet,” he said and sucked each nipple deep into his mouth until they glistened with his saliva. “I want to watch you come for me first.” I squirmed uncontrollably beneath him until I felt a burst of pleasure and my body thrashed against his, gushing my wetness all over his learned fingers. When the wave of my release finally let me go, I fell back onto the bed, trembling and kissing the corners of his mouth.

“
Now,” he said. His roughly callused hands gripped my legs behind the knees and he pulled me frantically beneath him while simultaneously sliding my legs up over his shoulders, sheathing himself deep inside me all in one smooth, fluid motion, like he was the blade and I the scabbard. I cried out at the first hard thrust, but Tiberius caught my cry in his mouth and I quickly found myself panting and groaning into his mouth as he lunged fiercely in and out of me.

I raised my hips to boldly meet each shocking thrust of his cock so that for a time we strained against one another and the only sounds in the room were our short, staccato breaths and the slick wet sounds of him plunging deeper and deeper inside my body. As the ferocity of his rutting increased, the groaning and squealing of the bedsprings joined our personal symphony of lust. He was both fierce and gentle with me, pinching and twisting my nipples even as he drove himself to the hilt inside me over and over, almost but not quite hurting me. Finally, he reached up and gripped my reams of tangled, damp hair and rolled over so I had the privilege of being on top, a place I’d never been before.

“
Ride me,” he commanded breathlessly, his eyes gleaming wildly in the firelight, and I did. I rode him hard, taking him deep inside and letting my inner muscles grip his cock just as fiercely as I could, until his fingers snagged painfully in my hair and his eyes had almost rolled up into his head. Near the end he threw his head back on the pillows and let out a fierce, bearish groan of release and I giggled and leaned forward to kiss his exposed throat even as he convulsed within me and filled me with his seed.

When some of his senses had returned to him, he looked at me curiously. “What is it?”

“
You sound like a bear when you spend yourself,” I laughed.

He raised an eyebrow at that. “And how would you know what a bear sounds like when it spends itself? Have you been keeping company with a bear?”

I giggled at that too. He could be so funny at times! I wondered if Stuart was ever funny when he made love. “Have there been many women, Tiberius?”

“
You sound jealous.”

“
Tell me.” I slid my hands under his arms where I knew he was extremely ticklish, but he stayed my hands before I could torment him.

“
There haven’t been many women, no. Most ladies are afraid of this.” And he traced the scar along his face, following the line of it expertly as if he had touched it many times in the past.

I wreathed my arms around his neck and leaned down to kiss the scar. “Tell me about it. I keep thinking you received it in battle, that you saved a woman from being ravished by Napoleon’s troops, or a child from a crazed madman…”

“
Oh Lucky,” he said, sounding amused. “You do know you read too many books of romance?”

“
Tell me or else... ” And I started reaching for his underarms again.

He looked serious for a moment, then he said, “I was a young man when I received this scar. I was in love with a woman in London named Alice. She was the first woman I had ever had such feelings for. I was sixteen at the time, very full of myself.” He paused and his eyes turned dark. I tried to imagine him at sixteen, whole and unscarred. “Alice was married to a man named Hastings. He was older than me, a sergeant in the King’s army. When he finally returned from his tour of the coast, and he found I had been sharing Alice’s bed all through that summer, he was furious, of course. But I didn’t regret what we had done. Alice, like Hastings, was older than me, you see, and she taught me many skills in the art of pleasuring a woman.”

He fell silent for a long moment as if remembering those times. “Naturally, Hastings was furious. He challenged me to a duel to reclaim Alice’s honor, but since I did not know how to handle a pistol at the time, we settled on knives. I had grown up in the East End, you understand, amidst the criminals and moneylenders in the Yiddish slums. I was very good with a knife.”

I shuddered slightly.

“
Hastings was a soldier, he had military skills, whereas I had only my youth and my rage, and there’s something to be said for experience. The first strike was his.” Tiberius stopped to trace the scar on his face once more. “The pain and humiliation sent me into a kind of frenzy, I expect. I don’t recall much after that, except coming to my senses with Hastings’ body laid open beneath me. I remember thinking he looked like some slaughtered lamb…”

He trailed off and I tightened my hold on him, trying not to picture it all and failing horribly.

“
Alice was distraught. So much so that she threw herself over Hastings’s body and wept upon him. I remember her covered in his blood, and the hate burning in her eyes for me. I understood her love for him then, I think. That day, I finally understood what love was. Not two bodies writhing together in the dark as she and I had done all through that long, hot summer, but real love, the kind that’s seated in the heart. That’s the love Alice had for Hastings.” He paused and gathered my hands and settled them on his heart. His eyes seemed to pierce me. “Following that, I joined the King’s army myself. I wanted to learn to control what I had unleashed within myself. I wanted…well, I was a foolish lad back then. I expect I wanted to gain redemption.”

“
Did you?”

“
I don’t know. I don’t know that I ever truly can.” He traced a lock of my hair down my cheek with his fingertip. “Will you stay with me tonight, Lucky? Just for tonight? Sleep with me?”

I knew I would hear the cock in the yard crow, and that if I was quick, I would be able to make it back to my room before anyone else was awake and noticed me, so I nodded. He immediately rolled me to the side, his cock still buried deep inside me, and wrapped himself around me. He suddenly felt very cold against my skin.