My Naughty Minette (Properly Spanked Book 3) Page 14

  Oh, but she ought to stop. She opened one button, then another. Her fingers brushed his skin through the thin linen of his shirt. His cock awakened with a vengeance, not understanding this was not the time, nor the place. “Minette,” he said softly.

  But he didn’t tell her to stop, and so she unbuttoned his breeches completely, allowing him to jut out in full and flagrant arousal beneath the curtain of his shirt’s hem.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said, and it sounded like a plea. Why was he pleading with her? He could button himself back up, stand, and leave the room, but for some reason he didn’t do this. She got down on her knees in front of him and he stifled a groan. No, no, no. Not no that she would do it, but no that he wanted it with a desire like fire. He wasn’t made of steel.

  It excited him to see her on her knees.

  He let out a long breath of self-loathing even as he reached to touch her hair. So soft, so fine. So blonde. So innocent. He screwed his eyes shut. Don’t think about that. She was the one who told him to close his eyes, and he determined to keep them closed as she drew away the tails of his shirt and exposed his pulsing length. She stroked his cock gingerly, with light fingertips, but the contact almost had him bowing off the chair. His thighs tightened.

  “What did you learn in those books, before you were interrupted?” His voice sounded rough. Uncivilized.

  “A lot of things. More than you think.”

  “Show me,” he said through gritted teeth, resting his hands upon his knees. Minette bent over him. He heard the rustle of her skirts, then felt the tip of her warm tongue trace a trail around and about his cock’s head. If only he wasn’t so damned sensitive, so overwrought from lack of release. She began to lick him like a sugar cake, with a maddening, tentative delicacy. He didn’t want this—he didn’t—but he couldn’t stop her. It had been an endlessly frustrating day, and he was weak and hungry with need.

  He felt her fingers grip him, not firmly, the way an experienced lady might handle a man, but with hesitant pressure. “Move it now,” he said. “Move your hand along my cock.”

  She obliged him. “Like this?”

  “Yes,” he said with another groan. “You needn’t be so gentle. Stroke it firmly up and down as you caress me with your mouth.”

  She tried, but like any beginner, did not do exceedingly well. He didn’t care. He ached to be touched and caressed. The fact that it was Minette was an upsetting detail, but he didn’t stop her, because her mouth was warm and her tongue was surprisingly deft. All that chatter, he supposed. Silly Minette and her chattering. Minette, who was stroking and licking his throbbing cock.

  He sat straighter. He meant to stop her then but she sighed and tilted her head, and licked lower, to the base of his shaft. She made a tentative swipe at his balls. They drew up at the thrill, the heady pleasure. Don’t do such things, he thought. “Yes,” he said aloud. “That feels good. Don’t stop.”

  She bent her head and attended to him, stroking, licking, kissing, a clumsy mishmash of erotic attempts that contributed to a marvelous whole. She was making him so hot he could feel the flush of pleasure in his cheeks and his chest. He moved on the chair, biting back a growl as she opened her mouth and slid her lips down his length as far as she could go. He gripped his hands in his hair, only so he wouldn’t bury them in her hair and impale her mouth with his cock. One didn’t do such things to one’s wife. One didn’t do such things to a young woman one considered a sister.

  And yet some tension was growing inside him, some ebbing of control. Misgivings were grinding against bodily needs, and reason was giving way to unruly fantasies. He had taken her once, his birthday night. Why not take her again? He wanted to be inside her so badly, fucking her, pounding into her. He could always push her skirts up over her face so he couldn’t see who he was violating. He could picture it. He could feel it. Rather than the tease of her lips, he could be enjoying the hot caress of her tight, wet pussy. He pictured her legs splayed out, and imagined tearing her bodice so her breasts spilled free—

  Abhorrent fantasies. Violent lust.

  “No.” He was telling himself no, that he mustn’t entertain such thoughts about Minette. She paused a moment in her oral exertions and looked up at him in question. He stared at her dumbly, too stricken to speak.

  She bowed her head to caress him again. “No,” he said more loudly. He put his hands on her shoulders. “No, no more.” No more, or I can’t be responsible...

  “I don’t mind it,” she said. “I admit I was puzzled when I saw the ladies doing this in those books, but if it feels good to you, then I enjoy doing it too. There’s something about, oh, I don’t know, the lazy, wet, sensual abandon of it all.”

  “No, Minette. I have to go.” He felt close to breaking down, like he might erupt into a frenzy of emotion even worse than the frenzy of lust pounding in his brain. She looked devastated. “You did exceedingly well,” he said to reassure her, “but I think... I...”

  I think I want to throw you on the bed and ravish you. And I shouldn’t feel that. I don’t want to feel that, not toward you.

  He had to leave. He shoved his aching cock into his breeches and buttoned his flaps with frantic speed as he strode across her sitting room and fumbled his way out the door.

  *** *** ***

  They did not take dinner together that evening. His mother was ill with worry, and August felt too guilty to face his wife. Minette’s maid said she was asleep, and would perhaps like a dinner tray later. August couldn’t imagine how Minette had felt when he fled during her attempts to behave as a “proper wife.” He couldn’t bear to think about it. He drank a regrettable amount of brandy and went to bed.

  Now, hours later, a servant was nudging him awake. “My lord, forgive me. It’s the countess again.”

  He sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Where?”

  The servant brought his robe. “In the ballroom, at the piano. She won’t be led away.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  He accepted a candle from the manservant and made his way into the hallway. The house was quiet, still, a little threatening in the darkness. He’d been afraid of the dark as a child, afraid of so many things. He was afraid of Minette coming to harm in her nightly wanderings. She might sail off a balcony or fall down the stairs, or bed down too close to a fireplace when she finally came to rest. One more thing to fret about on top of everything else.

  The footman shadowed him as he made his way to the ballroom. August heard Minette before he saw her, faint sobs and jarring notes on the pianoforte. He gestured to dismiss the servant before he passed through the door. His wife was scarcely dressed, wearing only a woolen night shift. The maid in the shadows must have wrapped the blanket around her. He dismissed her too and sat beside Minette on the bench.

  “A-B-D and G,” she whispered, taking no notice of him. “A-C-G and, oh. Bother. I can’t even reach the keys.”

  She tried again, playing a raw, dissonant chord.

  “Your hands are too small for Telemann.” He laid his fingers over hers to still them. “It’s all right. Don’t cry.”

  She wiped her cheeks and then sat still with her hands in her lap. He wrapped the blanket closer around her in the chilly room. It felt oppressively dim, lit only by the moon and a single candle left by the servants. He leaned down to catch her gaze. “Dearest, are you awake or asleep now?”

  “I came here to practice,” she said, which didn’t answer his question.

  “It’s very late to practice,” he pointed out. “You ought to play in the daytime. You should be sleeping in your bed.” She reached to play again and he stilled her hand. “It’s too late to play, and you’ve chosen too difficult a piece, at any rate.”

  She resisted, fighting to move her hand. Groggy tears gave way to blinking awareness and finally, wakefulness. She rubbed her eyes, then sagged against his side. “I wanted to practice for tomorrow’s lesson,” she said. “I thought it was a dream.”

  �
�No. You’re walking about again.” He studied the music on the stand. “I haven’t played this in years. You’ve been riffling through my music in your sleep?”

  She squinted by the candle’s light. “Schwang-en-gess-gong...?”

  “Schwanengesang,” he provided. “It’s German, like Telemann. Do you know what it means?”

  “My German is not very good.”

  “Swan Song. It’s a rather sad concerto.”

  Minette stifled a yawn. He ought to carry her up to bed at once, but she felt so warm, and so close. “Swans are rather sad creatures. Or bad creatures, I should say. Very mean and given to violence,” she said in a drowsily indignant tone.

  Very mean and given to violence. August remembered how sternly he’d spanked his wife earlier, only because he’d felt frustrated and cross. He ought to apologize to her. He would, perhaps, tomorrow, when she was not half-asleep. She gazed up at him with a fetching smile. Minette never held a grudge, not like those nasty swans.

  “I remember you telling me how unpleasant they were, and how you did not wish them at our wedding,” he said. “Do you know what a swan song is? They say that just before swans die, they produce a lovely song, vocalizing as they never did in life. And so a ‘swan song’ has come to mean any final or grand gesture before...the end.”

  He didn’t want to talk about endings and death, not here in the dark, with his father suffering a few floors away. The Marquess of Barrymore would have no swan song. He would die in horrible pain and agony, if the physicians were to be believed.

  Minette touched one of the keys, sounding a mournful note. “Well, that rather changes my opinion of swans. Perhaps they are only misunderstood. I mean, how remarkable, to sing a lovely song in the face of death. I wonder what it sounds like.”

  August’s throat felt tight. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone’s ever heard one.”

  “But they must have, if such a legend exists.” She tapped the music. “Telemann wrote this concerto about it. Will you play it for me? I’d like to hear how Telemann imagined the sound.”

  August dutifully leafed to the second part of the composition, the melodious swan’s song before the adagio and the swan’s death. He played the piece full out, there in the wee hours of the night, with Minette pressed against his left arm. When he finished, she laid her head against his shoulder and patted his back. “You are an excellent musician.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You haven’t any problems with Telemann at all, particularly this Schwaner— Schergang—” She took another stab at pronouncing the German title, slaughtering it badly. “Whatever it’s called. Say, do you remember when you gave me that porcelain swan? The one you found in France?”

  “Of course I remember.” They had all bought trinkets for Minette on their Grand Tour, since she had been left behind with her auntie and governesses. August had seen the delicate swan in pink and ivory, and gold leaf, and known he must have it for her. He somehow preserved it unbroken until they returned to England. When he handed it over, she had flown into rhapsodies over its gold flecked wings and slanted eyes, and the red lips painted at the end of the beak. It had been a silly thing, but she had been so delighted.

  “I’m sure it’s in one of my boxes somewhere. I kept everything you ever gave me.” She sighed against his shoulder. “I thought those keepsakes were all I would ever have of you. But now I have considerably more of you than I ever expected.”

  “Yes.” And here he sat, picturing his considerable girth surrounded by her lips. She must have done the same, for her features rearranged into a self-conscious mask.

  “Why did you leave so abruptly this afternoon?” she asked. “Did I make you angry? Was I being too...lewd?”

  In the dark, with her sad, plaintive questions, he could only tell her the truth. “I left because I was afraid of insulting you. Because I was imagining doing things to you that I didn’t want to do.”

  “Why not? Why wouldn’t you want to?”

  “Because I fear you wouldn’t like them, or that you wouldn’t understand. I know you want to be a proper wife, an experienced lover like Esme, but Minette...” He took her hand and held it between his. “You’re still so young and sweet. No. Don’t pout. To me, you’re still an innocent. And I am not.”

  “Josephine was innocent when she married Warren, and he was a terrible rogue, and they still managed to get along together.”

  “Your brother didn’t know Josephine when she was a child. Your brother didn’t bring Josephine a little swan and watch her pirouette around the room in short skirts. Please, I beg you, try to understand. When you’re more mature—”

  “How am I to mature when you persist in treating me like a child?”

  “I’m trying to show you respect. I’m trying to protect you!” He bit off an oath. His temper was slipping again and she didn’t deserve it. She was the wronged one, the neglected one, the one who walked the halls of his home in the dark like a wraith. He squeezed her hand and let it go. “What are we to do about your night-roving problem? You can’t keep walking about in your sleep. You’ll fall from a balcony or something, and your brother will kill me.”

  “I don’t know.” Minette pulled the blanket closer about her. “I don’t know what causes it, or how to control it.”

  “What did Warren do to stop you wandering about as a child?”

  “He slept beside me so he would know whenever I got up.”

  Damn and blast. Of course that was the most reasonable solution, to sleep beside her in bed. She’d be safe and secure, and he could sleep an entire night through without being awakened by servants. That is, if he could fall asleep beside her. Perhaps he could simply lock her in her room, or tie her to the bed...

  She shifted beside him, still going on about Warren watching after her, and being such a wonderfully protective brother, and the very pinnacle to sleep beside, since he didn’t snore.

  August wondered if he snored.

  “I suppose we ought to go to bed before dawn comes,” he said, cutting off her rambling with a sense of beleaguered purpose. “Shall we sleep in my bedroom, or yours?”

  She looked up at him in surprise. “You’re going to let me? Aren’t you afraid I’ll disturb your sleep?”

  “I doubt it can be any more disturbed than it’s already been. We can sleep in the same bed, but I ask that you lie as still as possible, and not talk as I’m trying to nod off.”

  Minette laughed. “Warren had the same rules.”

  Blast Warren. Blast Minette and her sleepwalking, and her bright innocence, and her goddamned swans. “My bedroom or yours?” he asked, snuffing the candle with his fingertips. Smoke scented the distance between them.

  “Yours,” she said. “So you will feel less annoyed at the inconvenience.”

  As he lay beside her later, he felt more annoyed than any man ever on earth. She felt too warm and comfortable as she huddled against his body, and smelled too alluring for him to find any peace. His bed was not his bed with Minette in it, just as his life was not his life, and his mind was not his mind. “You’re driving me mad,” he whispered into the dark.

  But for once, she was not chattering or questioning or making excuses for her irritating capers. Her breath came slow and even, her pretty features angelic in repose.

  Chapter Twelve: Trouble

  November turned to December, and the house made preparation for holiday callers, although there wasn’t much cheer in the air. August put on a brave face, and provided a shoulder for his mother to cry on, and a body for Minette to sleep beside at night.

  She didn’t sleepwalk anymore. No. Instead she slumbered upon his chest, or his shoulder, or nestled her face into the curve of his neck and stayed there all night, barely stirring. He was happy she was able to find restful sleep at last, but he barely slept at all.

  To be safe, he left off taking his usual drink or two after dinner. He felt he must be ever sober and on guard, lest he enact another Mary-the-Maidservant interlude
, and debauch his wife half drunk, in darkness and sleepy confusion. He feared he would grasp her and press himself inside her with thoughtless, inelegant force, just because she was there and because he was so, so tired, and because he remembered far too well what it had felt like to be within her.

  He ought to just take her. He told himself so every night, but when he reached for her, he would be assailed by poignant memories of her as a bright and trusting child. All his life, he had wanted to protect her, not defile her. He feared if he took her, their history would be lost, and he would never again be the object of her naive devotion.

  And he wanted that naive devotion. Selfishly, jealously, desperately. He needed her devotion to make it through these dark days before his father’s death. Now that she was here, he understood he could never again send her away. He enjoyed their dinners and he enjoyed their pianoforte lessons, where she made laudable progress. He approved of the way she spoke to the staff and won them to her side. He admired the graceful manner with which she disregarded his mother’s numerous barbs. He enjoyed everything about his wife except that he must sleep beside her at night and shudder with unsatisfied need.

  He watched her now from the parlor window with the best view of the garden, where Minette insisted his father take the sunshine on any passably seasonable day. The great Lord Barrymore lay slumped on his wheeled chaise, head to one side, eyes and mouth open, insensate and mute. Blankets and bandages shielded his mottled skin.

  The man’s remaining life could be measured in days, not months, and yet Minette insisted on reading to him, and blathering away as if he could hear her. She read books to him, and smiled into his staring, ulcerated eyes. His mother could not bear to be in the same vicinity as her husband, but Minette...

  “My lord?”