His Countess (Victorian Decadence Book 3) Page 7

  Thursby grabbed her elbow and pulled her down the hall so vigorously that Alys had to run to keep up. “Thursby, what is wrong with you?”

  “Did those two—maids go into the library, my lady?” she demanded, not slowing her pace.

  “Yes, they claim to be his lordship’s personal maids.”

  Thursby gave a choked snort as she yanked open a door, dragged Alys inside, and shut them in utter darkness.

  “Thursby, this is a linen closet. What is going on?” Alys gave a suspicious sniff. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Just a nip, my lady.”

  Alys frowned and prepared to deliver a scold. “You should—”

  But Thursby was having none of it and rolled right over her. “I’ve got something you should know, my lady—and I need to tell you right now.”

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  “Cor! Take a gander at this desk, Sooz, it looks like it belongs to a king.”

  Gideon flicked a glance of annoyance at the two noisy whores, who’d not stopped talking since entering the room—a room that felt more like a cathedral than any he’d been in. He stared at the stairs he could not use; they resembled something out of the land of faerie.

  A hand slid around his waist and dropped to his crotch.

  “Here, then, what’s this my lord? The earl’s scepter?”

  Gideon pushed her hand away. “Not now,” he said, his gaze riveted to the colossal rose window overhead. It was a bloody cathedral.

  Susan came to stand before him, her full lips curved into a wicked grin. “Are you going to fuck us in each room, your lordship?”

  Lucy laughed and came out from behind him. “That might take bloody months.”

  Gideon felt as if he were being buzzed by noisy insects. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “We thought you’d like your usual, my lord.”

  His usual was fucking one woman from behind while she pleasured the other.

  Gideon’s cock didn’t even twinge at her suggestion. “Not tonight.” He would have laughed at their expressions if he’d not been so irritable.

  Lucy, the smarter of the two, recovered first. “We’ll go up and warm your bed for you, then.”

  Gideon was about to nod when he recalled his room was the master’s and in close proximity to the mistress’s.

  Well, what of it? his baser self—the part usually giving the orders—demanded.

  Gideon had fully expected to fuck Lucy and Susan as freely, often, and openly as he had in his London house. But behaving like that in this place? He glanced around at the majestic beauty. Well, it didn’t feel right. Besides, three-quarters of his staff were as old as parts of the building, he’d be hip deep in bodies if he carried on in his usual way.

  “My lord?” Susan had come up before him and was lightly massaging his cock, which was grudgingly responding.

  Gideon removed her hand. He could just imagine the screeching that would ensue if the widow Taunton came back with her tea tray just now.

  “Go to your rooms. I’ll send Jackson to fetch you when I want you.” He scowled at Susan when he saw the way her bodice was unbuttoned. “And straighten yourselves up—remember you’re supposed to be housemaids, goddammit, not whores.”

  They both tried to adjust the low-cut bodices of their uniforms—uniforms designed by Gideon, as a matter of fact—but didn’t look pleased.

  Gideon had enough experience with women to know there was a storm brewing. Fine, as long as it wasn’t tonight.

  “But where do we stay?” Lucy pouted.

  Gideon strode to the magnificent brocade pull and gave it a yank. While he waited, he skimmed some of the shelves. It looked as if the collections of each master had been bound differently. How interesting. It was easy to see which were the newest and he took one of the books off the shelf and flicked it open: The Fourth Earl of Taunton. He closed it and examined the red calfskin binding, gold letters and a black spine. Handsome.

  “You rang, sir?”

  He turned and found Mrs. Tickle swaying in the doorway. Good God, didn’t she have somebody younger to answer his summons?

  “Lucy and Susan are my personal maids—they see to my chambers and such. Will you please show them the servants’ quarters?”

  Gideon didn’t bother turning at the outraged squeaks.

  Mrs. Tickle examined the two young women with a suspicious glint in her rheumy eyes. “Of course, my lord. If you’ll follow me.”

  The women went, but not without a half-dozen resentful and imploring looks at Gideon. Well, Lady Taunton said there were no appropriate guest quarters, so they’d just have to make do. Besides, it looked as if the house might actually need a few more maids—at least until he could hire new servants. The women could bloody well earn their keep for a change.

  The door swung open and a footman and maid entered with a tea tray. Gideon frowned as the man set down the tray and the woman began to prepare the tea. “You can leave that; Lady Taunton will be returning shortly.”

  The girl flinched and flushed—she didn’t look more than fifteen. “I’m sorry my lord, but my lady said to tell you she’d become involved with a domestic matter of some importance and will not be able to join you.” She stood frozen with the teapot in her hand, her eyes anxiously sweeping his face.

  Gideon snorted. A domestic matter of some importance? That sounded like an excuse if he’d ever heard one. Well, what did he care? “I like my tea black and strong.”

  He’d have tea in his new library alone. By himself. And he’d bloody well enjoy it.

  Chapter Five

  Ahideous screaming sound yanked Gideon bolt upright.

  “What the bleeding fuck was that?” he yelled before his eyes were even open. “Oi!” He prodded one of the two lumps in his bed. “Did you hear that?”

  Beside him, either Lucy or Susan moaned and shifted.

  “There it is again,” he said, shoving aside the bedding. He forgot that he needed to use steps and hopped down off the high bed, jamming his spine when he landed too hard.

  “Dammit!” He rubbed his lower back, strode to the window, and pulled open the heavy velvet drapes.

  “Good God,” he muttered, sneezing at all the dust the action generated, staring through a veritable flurry of dust motes into the bright morning light. He glanced at the ugly china clock on the nightstand: eight o’clock. He’d slept in. He scratched his belly idly as he looked out over the scene.

  Hmmm, some sort of flower garden with a big fountain. Quite pretty. He yawned and absently stroked his morning erection as he looked past the gardens, the expanse of lawn, and toward a silvery ribbon that must be a stream. There was a wood to the east and the sunlight was streaming through it.

  A flicker of movement caught his eye and he glanced down to see Lady Taunton, staring up at him, her jaw hanging open.

  Gideon glanced down at himself and confirmed that he was, indeed, naked and hard and then smiled down at her and waved, with his free hand.

  She fled.

  He chuckled as he turned around, hearing the screeching sound again—a cock’s crow, he now realized. He grinned at the memory of her ladyship’s horrified face. Well, she’d been married—it wasn’t as if Gideon had showed her anything she’d not seen.

  He padded back to the bed and considered the two sleeping lumps. He’d sent Jackson for them last night, when he’d been unable to sleep. As was usual these days, he’d fucked them for hours without ejaculation. But he was hard right now—the sight of Lady Taunton’s plump-lipped, wide-mouthed stare fresh in his mind.

  He gave himself a few experimental pumps—yes, he was dangerously close to spending after no more than a glance at the bloody woman. Christ! What the hell was wrong with him? Why her? Gideon scowled down at his erection, but it simply stared dumbly back at him.

  Well, so be it.

  He’d consider the annoying possibility that he could only come when thinking about Lady Taunton later, when he was less distracted.

  He
located the padded steps and crawled up onto his great bloody bed.

  Once on top he slipped beneath the blankets and reached out toward one of the lumps. He encountered a fleshy bottom: ah, felt like Lucy.

  “On your hands and knees, sweetheart,” he murmured.

  She groaned sleepily but complied.

  Gideon knelt between her thighs, nudging them far apart, and then slid his hands beneath her hips. “Up,” he ordered, raising her bottom to the perfect height for his use.

  “That’s a good girl,” he praised, slipping his middle finger into her tight entrance and playing with her until the room was filled with the sound of wet friction. As usual, her responsive body was ready quickly and he could tell by her heavy breathing that she was awake and wanting.

  He nudged her shoulders down, until they rested on the bed, and stroked her wet slit with his cock, caressing her clitoris with his other hand.

  He closed his eyes. “Yes,” he murmured as he positioned himself at her swollen opening and then sheathed himself with a savage thrust.

  She wriggled. “Mmm, my lord, that feels so—”

  He kept his eyes closed and swatted her arse. “Don’t speak,” he ordered, the carefully curated image of Lady Taunton flickering dangerously, like a reflection in a pond. He began fucking her with long, lazy strokes while he reassembled Lady Taunton’s surprised face in his mind’s eye.

  She had looked countrified—a big floppy hat to protect her from the sun. He knew that her gown, although he’d not seen it, would be an old one. She held a basket of some sort over her arm and a pair of shears in her gloved hand.

  “Yes,” he whispered as the vision began to sharpen. He thumbed her slick pearl with more vigor.

  Her mouth—open in surprise—quickly shifted into a wicked smile of pleasure as he teased her: Yes, Gideon, please, she’d say in her hard as diamonds accent. Fuck me hard; make me come, my lord.

  “With pleasure,” he grunted, driving into her with brutal strokes.

  Her passage was slick and hot and tight and she knew just when to clench, working him on the inward stroke, releasing him on the outward, her body like a well-tuned piece of machinery. She shook and contracted with the violence of her pleasure.

  His own orgasm took him by surprise, barreling from his balls to the head of his cock before he could stop it.

  Too soon, it was too damned soon.

  He buried himself deep and pumped her full, shuddering with the force of each jerk and spasm “Take it,” he grated through clenched jaws. “Take it all … Alys,” he murmured as he collapsed onto the warm supple body beneath him.

  He slid into sleep, still hilted inside her.

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  Alys walked for miles.

  Every time she considered turning around, she saw that again—him again.

  He was—he was—shameless! Standing in front of the window with his god-like body as naked as the day he was born. Proud and erect. And then smiling at her and fondling himself when he knew she could see him.

  You could have looked away—you’d been watching him from the moment the curtains parted, at least half a minute before he saw you.

  “Oh shut up,” she muttered, lifting her mud-covered hem as she struggled over a stile.

  You became excited. Wet, her mental tormentor accused.

  She closed her eyes, as if that would stop the sensations, and promptly tripped on a root.

  “Oh God.” Alys fell to her knees, cradling her head in her hands: she had become aroused.

  Keeping her eyes closed was worse, because then she saw—in her mind’s eye—the scene that Thursby had described in scandalous detail.

  But instead of disgusting her through and through, it made something—her annoying female parts—pulse and throb. She’d experienced this sensation before, of course, but usually it only came to her in the middle of the night—waking her in the grip of exquisite pleasure. When she tried to go back to sleep to recapture it, it was always lost.

  She’d also felt something similar, on occasion, when she’d ridden astride. She’d wondered if that was why women were made to ride side-saddle? Because men wanted to deny them such pleasure?

  Merely looking at Gideon Banks had given her that sensation—seductive, painfully pleasurable, and wanton.

  What was she going to do? She couldn’t live in a house with him. Did he really believe he could keep two whores and masquerade them as maids?

  Of course he believed it! And of course he could do it: he was Lord Taunton and he was ridiculously—obscenely—wealthy. He could do anything he wanted and likely would.

  Alys stood and started back toward Foxrun. After all, she had nowhere else to go.

  That wasn’t true; the truth was that she wanted to go back. Why? Because she’d promised his lordship that she’d take an inventory of the house. He’d behaved like it was a favor he was asking, but the truth was that her heart had leapt at the thought of all the things she could do to Foxrun with his money.

  Every year the furniture had become more battered and broken, needing care and not receiving it. The roof—a nightmarish expanse of leaks and cracks—would require tens of thousands of pounds alone.

  She’d made do with old Jenks the gardener and three boys from town. With only a handful of maids she’d been spread thin even just keeping a few of the common areas clean.

  But with Gideon Banks’s money?

  Alys laughed out loud; she was just as bad as women who bartered themselves for jewels and gowns, except for Alys it was this house, always this house, these lands, and the people who’d made her life bearable for almost a decade. Oh, none of them were her social equal and there was nobody she could confide the truth in—not even the vicar and his wife—but they were the closest thing she’d had to friends—to family.

  When she’d first been married there had still been a little money to entertain the local gentry at Foxrun. But that had run out by the second year. Without money, she’d not been able to accept invitations—how could she when she could never reciprocate?

  Every year Sebastian gave her less and less money for Foxrun. Every pound and pence he spent on the house—and there were few enough— he spent grudgingly.

  After Sebastian died, she pried into his locked desk, where the old steward had kept the books and looked at Foxrun’s long-neglected ledgers. She’d almost exploded with fury at the amount he spent on horses, gambling, clothing and other pleasures. All those years he’d taken and taken and taken from Foxrun and had given nothing in return.

  At least Gideon Banks, for all that he was a degenerate reprobate, appeared willing to pour his money into both the house and lands.

  Alys could tolerate a lot for that—she could tolerate his exhibitionism and cavorting with whores in the next bedchamber if he were going to help bring Foxrun back to her former glory.

  She climbed over another stile and stopped at the top to enjoy the view: Foxrun rising up before her like a magical castle. And it was magical, but it demanded money like mythical dragons demanded jewels and gold.

  Alys knew it was not normal to love a house, but what else did she have to love? As much as Sebastian tried to blame their childless state on Alys she knew it was likely Sebastian who was responsible. After all, she was his second wife and there’d not been a child or even a miscarriage from either marriage.

  As she tramped through the dew-dampened vale she considered her only prospect other than living in the Dower House: marriage. She was out of mourning and free to give herself to another man, perhaps one who might give her a child.

  She knew the local squire, Sir John, a recent widower perhaps ten years older than Alys, was looking for a wife to help care for his brood of children. Sir John had spoken to her several times in the months after Sebastian’s death. Of course they’d done all their talking outside the church, in front of the eyes of the entire congregation, so she couldn’t be sure of his intentions.

  He seemed like a kind man but when she tried to b
ring up his face, she could only summon the image of a certain naked cit-turned-peer.

  Alys growled at her idiocy and yanked a handful of tall grass, and then immediately felt bad for taking out her anger on blameless flora. As she crested the second rise, she stumbled and then gawked at what she saw lining the drive: men with ladders and scaffolding. Dozens of them, spreading out around Foxrun like ants surrounding a much larger foe.

  She paused to watch the commotion. While the front of the drive was hidden by the house, she could hear and see wagons rolling in; she counted ten wagons before she resumed her journey, walking faster now, her heart beating with excitement. How had he managed such a miraculous feat?

  Money, that’s how.

  Alys heard him before she saw him, his flat London accent carrying like the metallic clang of a hammer.

  “I’ll want you to do section by section,” he ordered a stout man who stood beside him, staring up at the new earl with his mouth agape.

  So, Alys wasn’t the only one he affected that way.

  “I know what you lot are like—even a whiff of rain and you’re not working. I don’t want to find myself bloody roofless all over the damned castle. Do we understand each other Mr. Floyd?”

  Mr. Floyd scratched his head. “A’right, my lord.”

  “Good. Now where is that fellow who’s come about the beetles?”

  A tall, soberly dressed man stepped forward. “That would be me, my lord. But I’m actually not here about the beetles so much—”

  Lord Taunton lifted a staying hand. “I specified in my letter I wanted to make certain the place wasn’t being eaten by beetles.”

  “Well, yes, of course, my lord, but I’m also a—”

  Lord Taunton raised the hand higher. “Can you, or can you not, find out if we have beetles in this house?”

  Alys had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. What the devil had gotten into the man about beetles?

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good, do so.” He turned on his heel and spotted Alys spying on him.

  She recalled the last time she’d seen him, mere hours earlier, and her face scalded.

  He grinned and winked, as if she’d said something amusing, and then turned back to his crowd of tradesmen.