He stifled a groan and instead took a bite of rabbit pie. He couldn’t taste the flavors, so gone was he on the pleasure of watching her squirm, but he wanted to make a show of calm.
“And?”
“Trem,” she repeated, “I can’t explain it. I just need—you know what I need.”
“I do, my love. And if you tell me more, maybe you’ll get it.”
She exhaled a shaky breath. And then he felt her hand pressing harder on his cock, rubbing him through his breeches. His fork clattered to his plate.
“I feel like I want to spend but I am, at the same time, the furthest from it that I have ever been. When I move, I can feel the pearls weighing down on my insides, pressing me to spend, and yet there is no relief.”
Those words did him in.
“Fuck it,” he said, standing and pulling her up with him.
In thirty seconds, they were back in their room. He kissed her, ripping off her dress as he did so, and she bucked against him, blind to anything but the pressure that he knew, by now, must be so insistent between her legs.
Once he had her unclothed, he broke their kiss. “Lie down.”
She did so at once. And he got down beside her.
“You’ll feel each pearl as I pull it out,” he said. “Are you ready?”
She nodded vigorously.
He pulled the first and she groaned.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That was…”
He pulled the next and Henrietta cried out again.
In his experience, women didn’t make it past the third pearl without spending. But, then again, he had only used them a few times before and every woman was different. There were nine inside of her—if Henrietta was lucky, she would have three orgasms by the time he was done with her.
Henrietta writhed against the coverlet.
“Please,” she begged.
The surprise and tension were part of the fun of this game, he knew. He waited, drawing out the suspense, and then he pulled the third bead.
The sound of her orgasm rent the room. Her hands were twisted in the coverlet. And when she looked at him, he was surprised to see tears shining in her eyes.
He was instantly concerned.
“Did I hurt you? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, grasping his hand. “Far from it. The farthest. It’s just that I really needed that—after today.”
“Good,” he said, caressing her cheek. “Because we aren’t finished.”
*
The rest of the week passed in a happy blur of sexual adventures with his future viscountess and very wholesome visits to his future mother-in-law. How a week could be such a study in contrasts and yield such harmony, he wasn’t sure.
When they visited with Mary, they were part of a family life that seemed happier than any he had before witnessed, aside from John and Catherine’s. The night after the pearl incident—as Henrietta would go on to call that particular evening ever after—they dined at the Ryersons’. Henrietta often called her mother “Mary Forster,” but, really, as they both discovered, she was actually Mrs. Ryerson, a prosperous and popular matron with twin children, a boy and a girl, aged fourteen, and a husband who clearly thought his wife was a woman of singular powers.
Each time that Trem saw Henrietta and Mary together, he noted their growing closeness and Mary’s increasing affection for her. He gave Mary immense credit for having told her children exactly who Henrietta was to them. Over the week, he watched as they regarded their new sister at first with curious, wary eyes and then became more comfortable with her.
It seemed that, with her family, Mary cultivated an air of openness. He was impressed by how the Ryersons debated politics and literature at the dinner table; the children were not trained to listen to their elders but to offer their own opinions. Trem could hear the horror of aristocrats all over England when, one evening, the boy, Thomas, spoke up at the table and disagreed with his father over a matter before parliament. However, for himself, he had to admire it. He could imagine he and Henrietta having a similar family one day.
