Page 2 of The Captive

“Tell him,” I said, “that I am a wealthy Englishwoman with papers, guards, and a truly formidable quantity of silver, and that I have talked my way past customs men, cardinals, and my own mother-in-law. I shall manage.”

Pyotr Ilyich translated. Semyon looked at me for a long moment—the same enigmatic way he sometimes looked at the weather—and said something short.

“He says the men here do not read papers.”

Well.

This time I did roll my eyes, and was answered with an amused-sounding snort from our native guide.

I should have been frightened, I suppose. I had spent thirty-six years being sensible: a sensible bride at seventeen, a sensible wife, a sensible widow who took sensible lovers and invested sensibly and raised a son so sensible he’d turned me out of my own house with perfect—sensible—courtesy.

Out here, under all that sky, I found I could not locate my alarm.

The fires caught. The horses tore grass in the dark, comfortable sounds. Hobbs laid out my bedding and my traveling case—which contained, beneath the laudanum and the letter-paper, a certain well-thumbed volume I never traveled without, because a widow’s education ought to be maintained—and the steppe went black and endless in every direction, and I lay awake listening.

Not to anything in anything in particular. Just…listening to the size of all that grass.

Something was out there. I did not know what it was or how it would affect me, but I discovered I was anxious to discover what it was.

Or perhaps I was just anxious in general.

Hobbs—who was a few years older than me—had once tried to explain that sometimes women of our age don’t need a reason to be anxious…we just are.

How perfectly wonderful, right?

Imagine me rolling my eyes.

Well, I’d discovered over the years that there was one tried and true way to turn off my mind—and the anxiety—and fall asleep…and it involved my favorite book and a bit of privacy.

Sure enough, after about an hour, the sounds from outside died down as our guards took to their posts or their bedrolls, and Hobbs’ breathing turned to soft snores from her mattress on the other side of the tent. My hand slowly burrowed beneath my pillows to remove a set of matches and my favorite volume.

I was not one of those women who traveled with an entire library; usually I needed nothing more than my imagination and a beautiful vista to write my own literature. But I had found, over the years of my adventures, that there was one book I refused to travel without.

A Harlot’s Guide to the Forbidden and Delightful Arts.

It was an old volume, originally written hundreds of years ago, based on the illustration style, by an unnamed noblewoman. She claimed it was a catalog of her sexual escapades, and I couldn’t deny that she’d been adventurous indeed; it took me years to find a set of partners to attempt The Twin Mountains, and I still hadn’t tried The Hairy Combover.

Perhaps by this point, I’d read the book enough that I had it memorized…but I still lit a candle and opened the pages.

As I flipped through the descriptions and illustrations, the familiar throbbing began between my thighs. I reached beneath the blankets and inched my nightrail up my legs, scooching higher on the pillows so I could read and touch myself at the same time. A word caught my eye and I paused my casual perusing.

Oh, yes. The Backwards Donkey.

My fingertip found my clitoris and I began to rub.

With the man in a seated position, the woman straddles his thighs, her back to his chest and her feet upon the floor, and rides him as if he were a stallion, only backwards. Particularly effective if she likes her hair pulled, or her nipples and clitoris stimulated.

The ache in my cunny built as I re-read the description and studied the illustration of the woman, her head thrown back in ecstasy, as the man tugged on her nipples. Soon my breathing was coming faster, and I bit down hard on my lower lip to hold in my moan.

I closed my eyes, and in my imagination, the illustration morphed into me sitting on a stranger’s lap, his beard tickling my naked shoulder as I rode him. His big, callused fingers found my clitoris, stroking me the way I was doing now, as his cock filled my aching core. It had been so long—too long—since I’d taken a lover, and none in St. Petersburg or Moscow had intrigued me enough to consider it. But my mystery lover, my faceless paramour? The one who now fucked me from beneath as he squeezed my breast, as if he owned me?

I came with a soft gasp, my inner muscles squeezing helplessly around nothing, and my eyes flashed open to stare up at the canvas above my head.

Well.

The orgasm was disappointingly empty, but it would serve its purpose.

I pulled my gown down, blew out the candle, dropped A Harlot’s Guide atop my valise with my daily accessories, and rolled over.