Near dusk, Mama goes outside to watch for the search party’s return. She doesn’t come in until darkness has settled thickly over the land. When she enters the sitting room, her face looks wearier than usual.
“They didn’t come back,” she says.
“Maybe we missed them,” Anne suggests. “Maybe they found him and came out earlier, while we were busy.”
“It’s possible,” Mama admits.
“I’ll go into town tomorrow and ask for news,” my sister says. “You’re staying with Essienne’s children again, aren’t you?”
Mama nods.
“Then you’ll have the house to yourself tomorrow afternoon, Sybil.” Anne gives me a stern look. “No walking around, and no work. Yourest.”
“Yes,Mother,” I retort.
Rain moves in overnight, and Mama leaves early in the gray quiet of the next morning, bundled in her cloak. I watch from the sitting room window as she climbs into the carriage Essienne sent for her.
Anne departs around noon to inquire about the search party. She takes our one umbrella, a beat-up old thing that looks terrible, but sheds the rain well enough.
I’m left in the silent house with my thoughts, which is a dreadful fate considering my current frame of mind. To keep busy, I add some old lace to a well-used petticoat. My plan is to spruce it up and make it look fancy enough so that I can wear it to the next orgy under my cloak. Slipping out after my family goes to bed should be easier this time, since I’m sleeping downstairs, though I’m a little worried my crutches will make too much noise. I’ll have to use them as quietly as I can.
Rain drums on the roof and the windowpanes, and the gutter gurgles, reminding me that we should probably clean it out soon. Last time, the gutter-cleaning was accomplished with much difficulty, on a pair of shaky ladders, while all three of us shouted at each other about the best way to get it done. I dread going through the ordeal again. Perhaps I can persuade Beresford to lend us a couple of his servants for an afternoon to help us out.
Distantly, thunder rumbles.
The back door bangs open, then slams, and I startle at the violence of it.
“Anne?” I call. “Are you back already? Did you forget something?”
There’s a double-thump, like boots being removed and set down. Then footsteps beat rapidly across the floor, and Theron Beresford appears in the doorway of the parlor, dripping and disheveled.
“What are you doing here?” I exclaim, but he’s already tearing off his coat, throwing it down, striding toward me with flaming eyes. A bolt of panic and arousal shoots through my whole body, because I recognize the need in his fierce gaze.
He whips aside the blanket covering my legs. I didn’t bother changing out of my nightclothes or putting on underwear today, and when he shoves up the nightgown to find me bare beneath it, he groans with delight. He pushes my thighs apart and gives my pussy a sideways kiss, sliding his tongue through the groove between the lips.
“I didn’t bathe today,” I exclaim. “I wasn’t expecting company… Beresford… oh gods…”
He’s sucking, slathering, being utterly filthy with my cunt, shoving his tongue as deep inside as he can get. He doesn’t say a word.
My hand descends on the top of his head, and my fingers curl into his hair. “You fucking magician,” I breathe.
He’s a poet with pussy, writing sonnets to my body with deft strokes of his tongue and the ink of my arousal.
“What if they come back early?” I choke out. “Fuck, Beresford…”
With a needy moan of desperation, he eats me out harder, devouring me like I’m the cure to everything that pains him, like making me come would save his soul.
At first I try to stifle my cries, but the house is empty, so as he slurps and savors me, I allow myself to whimper and moan as loudly as I want. Fervent little gasps erupt from me, a crescendoto the peak of ecstasy, where I snap into quivering pieces. My hips arch against his bearded lips as he drinks in my cataclysm.
It’s bliss like I’ve never felt. It’s being wanted with a level of visceral need that I never expected or dreamed could exist. He craved me so badly that he came here straight from his home and walked right inside to taste what he wanted.
“How did you know I was alone?” I ask.
With his eyes closed and his brow furrowed, almost as if he’s in pain, Beresford gives my pussy one final, tender kiss. Then he stands up, wipes his wet beard with the back of his hand, grabs his coat, and walks out the back door, leaving me there with my pussy and thighs bare and flushed from his mouth.
The water on the floor dries before my family returns, but the area between my thighs remains damp, because every few minutes I think of Beresford striding in, giving me a stunning orgasm, and striding right back out. That act represented a level of obsession that’s nearly maniacal. And I fear that I love it.
8
