“Yes,” she uttered. “Touch me more.”
His hand slid between them and over her breast. Tavy thought she would die, the pleasure that assailed her was so intense. If this was what men and women did together in private, she finally understood the focused stares and whispered comments of the adults she had spied on for years. Ben cupped her breast, squeezed gently, and she ached so deep inside it took her breath. It hurt, but good, a throbbing pain that seemed to call for relief. His fingertips slipped along her skin above her bodice, skittering warmth across her bare flesh, then his thumb stole beneath the fabric.
She gasped into his mouth. He caressed her gently, then more firmly, and Tavy’s world exploded in a shimmering cascade of desire. It had to be desire. He touched her and she wanted to be inside him, perfectly fused. But she wanted him to continue touching her too. She sank her fingers into his hair and welcomed his tongue exploring her mouth as his hand made her squirm. Her nipple was so tight it felt as though it would burst. A sound came from her throat, a moan of pleasure, surprising her. His other hand pressed into the small of her back, trapping her hips against his.
He groaned and it seemed like frustration and pleasure mingled, and his mouth moved to her throat, hot and wet, his fingers caressing harder. Tavy arched her neck. It felt so good, almost like relief to press against him, their bellies flat against one another, and at the same time it heightened her ache. His thigh came between hers and a sharp tug jerked inside her, delicious and shocking.
She breathed his name. He kissed her shoulder, drawing her sleeve down, then caressing above her bodice along the line of her gown. “Kiss me,” she uttered, not really knowing her own words, thought gone in the torrent of sensations, of heat and him and aching need. “Kiss me.”
With alarmingly agile fingers he unfastened the hooks of her gown and drew down the bodice, sliding the fabric off her shoulders and along her arms. In a haze she let him do it, and to loosen the laces of her petticoat and corset until they sagged forward. The hard tips of her breasts stood out beneath her thin silk shift, damp from the heat and sticking to her skin. Her heavy breaths strained the fabric.
“Please,” she whispered, seeking his eyes, so dark they looked entirely black. She was dizzy from lack of breath and his gaze upon her body. “Please, kiss me.”
He put his mouth on hers, sucked her tongue into him and covered her breasts with his hands. In a moment her shift was open and his palms covered her, hot, smooth, holding her perfectly. She moaned, his thumbs passing over her nipples so lightly she wanted to die. But heaven could not be any better, this deluge of longing satisfied and still growing stronger with each caress.
He bent and licked her breast.
“Unh—”
A gasp swallowed her ecstatic utterance. She gripped his shoulders as he teased her nipple with his lips, circling and caressing, then biting lightly on the peak. He sank her in pleasure and she held him close. The pressure of his kiss was enormous and she wanted it to go on forever. She struggled to breathe, moving herself against his thigh, the feelings in her body more than she could bear, her actions out of her control.
He kissed between her breasts and her neck, her lips again. She met him fervently, hungry for his mouth that had touched her so intimately.
“You are beautiful.” His hands slid over her hips, gathering her skirts and shifting over her behind. He stilled. His palms curved over her, his breathing hard.
Earlier, dusk had sweltered and Tavy had not donned stockings or drawers, as she often did not. Aunt Imene never noticed, and her gown was perfectly demure without either. Now there was nothing between Ben’s hands and the skin of her thigh and buttock. He shifted his hold, smoothing over her flesh, and she nearly swooned.
“Oh,” she whispered, barely a sound, and clutched at his waistcoat.
He pressed her back against the huge tree, dropped to his knees and pushed her gown to her hips. He locked her gaze with his bright eyes and touched her between her legs.
Reality ground to a halt and something else frightening and wonderful took its place. She was hot and felt liquid, and a beautiful man was kneeling before her with his hands where she had never imagined a man’s hands could be. He stroked, and Tavy nearly choked on her own rapture. She dissolved, her legs going weak. He set her knee against his shoulder, wrapped his grip around her thigh, and his intense gaze held hers as he gave her the most sublime pleasure with his hand. Her breaths came faster, his caresses soft and steady. Inside, just beyond where he touched her, something built, thickened and shivered, then withdrew only to rise again. She whimpered, needing him, wanting him kissing her, her fingers gripping the striated bark of the banyan tree, her breasts aching so fiercely. Her eyelids fluttered, and she saw his eyes fevered. Then he leaned forward and put his mouth on her.
He kissed her, and Tavy’s body came apart, a wave of pleasure seizing her, washing up then slamming down again. His tongue stroked, wet and firm yet wonderfully soft, pulling her under, submerging her in the sweetest delirium, rippling within her flesh in one after another shower of hot gratification. She made sounds she did not recognize. She shook, weak and in shock, exalted and thoroughly ashamed. Ashamed, because the instant the sensations subsided she wanted more.
Ben pressed his mouth to the inside of her thigh and Tavy dragged air into her lungs. He stood, letting her skirts fall, and curved his hands around her hips. She stared at him in awe, the songs of cicadas and crickets surrounding her, a distant macaw’s cry, the heavy heat of the night and silver moonlight shining in his hair like in a dream.
She grabbed his waistcoat, pulling him close, and he kissed her and held her against him. After everything, it seemed absurd that his hand spread on the small of her back gave her such enormous pleasure.
“Ben, I—”
He caught her utterance with his mouth then murmured in a low, beautiful voice, “Hush,
shalabha
. No words.” He stroked the side of her breast, then her hair, and she trembled. But his kiss seemed to retreat now, and his body was stiff with tension, like the tension still simmering in her despite how good she felt.
“I want to—” she stammered. “Can I do something to—to make you feel like you made me feel?”
His chest constricted in a taut chuckle. He brushed a stray lock from her cheek and shook his head.
“Not tonight, my—”
“Take your hands off of my niece.”
END-FOR-END. A reversal of the disposition of any thing is turning it end-for-end.
—Falconer’s
Dictionary of the Marine
A
unt Imene’s gravelly voice came from three yards away.
Tavy grabbed at her shift, pulling it across her breasts. Heat flooded her face as she scrabbled for her bodice. With unhurried care, Ben slipped each of her hands into the sleeves and drew her garments up, then stepped back.
“Aunt,” she choked, gripping her clothing together at her back.
“Be quiet. Your guests asked after you, so I came searching. How was I to know you were cavorting like a doxy with a—” She spluttered and raked Ben with a contemptuous sneer. “Get out of here.”
Tavy gasped. But he did not even look at her aunt. His black eyes glinted in the moonlight, questioning. Tavy nodded and whispered, “Tomorrow.”
Finally he glanced at her aunt, hardness forming around his perfect mouth. Then he turned and disappeared through the gate between their houses. Tavy had to restrain herself from running after him.
“You are a disgrace, Octavia,” her aunt ground out.
Tavy pivoted. “Aunt Imene, I—”
“Do not speak.” She strode forward, jerked her around, and roughly fastened her garments. She stepped away and her harsh gaze slid over Tavy. “Go in by the servants’ entrance to your bedchamber. Your guests must be content with learning that you have contracted a megrim.” She strode off, her posture stiff.
Tavy stared through the darkness toward the garden gate, her pulse fast. Then she did as she was told.
S
he did not sleep. The hours until dawn were a sublime heaven spent remembering over and over again his touch, his eyes, and what he had done to her.
As the sun crept above the horizon, over ships anchored in the bay and warehouses and the massive fort, then filtered onto the neighborhoods and into Tavy’s bedchamber window, she dressed in her most demure morning gown and arranged her hair neatly. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes bright, and she felt different inside and out, like a woman, and she wanted to look that way for him.
No one yet had come to the breakfast parlor. Nerves too high to allow her to stomach food, she went onto the veranda and paced, but as slowly as she could. She was no longer a child. She must control her actions now.
Some
of her actions. She closed her eyes, warm at the recollection of Ben’s mouth touching her intimately.
“What are you doing out here?” Aunt Imene crossed the veranda. “Come inside and take your breakfast.”
“Aunt.” Tavy clasped her hands. “I beg your pardon for leaving the party last night.”
Her aunt stared at her, lips a thin line of disapproval.
“Did you arrange that assignation, Octavia?”
Tavy’s eyes went wide. “No!” But guilt nipped at her. She had met him in secret so many times. “I like him.”
Like
did not come close to describing what she felt. But she could not share those feelings with her aunt before she shared them with him.
“Yes, and he knows that now, doesn’t he?”
“Why shouldn’t he? He likes me too.”
“You may not take up with that man.”
“I didn’t say anything about ‘taking up with him.’ He is a gentleman, Aunt Imene, and I am a lady.”
“Neither of you looked the parts last night.”
Tavy’s cheeks flamed. She hadn’t felt very much like a lady, pressed up against the banyan tree. She’d felt like a dervish afire, a star being set ablaze for the first time by the hand of the creator, like the doxy her aunt accused her of being.
She wanted to feel that way again. With him. Many more times.
“He intends to pay his formal addresses to me,” she said a little breathlessly. “He is coming to speak with Uncle this morning.”
“No.” Her aunt’s narrow face set like stone.
“No? What do you mean by no?”
“He may not.”
Tavy blinked. “Why not?”
“He is unsuitable.”
“He is the son of a marquess. He could not be much more suitable, Aunt, certainly not for Miss Nobody without even looks to recommend me.”
“Do not be foolish,” Aunt Imene said tightly. “He is one of
them
, Octavia. Now, that will be all.”
“No, it will not be all. He has just come down from Cambridge. Before that he was at Eton.” She ticked off on her fingers. “His father is not the wealthiest man in England, but certainly not pockets-to-let by any means, and everyone knows he has inherited a fine income from his uncle’s business. And furthermore—”
“He is not acceptable.” Her aunt’s voice cut.
Tavy stared. Her fingers and toes, unaccountably, began to tremble. Why not the rest of her, she could not fathom. But her chest felt suffocated.
“His father is a marquess,” she repeated dumbly.
“And barely acknowledges him.”
“That is not true.”
“Are you so certain of that?”
“No. Of course not. I read the same months-old rags you do and they never—” She halted. She could hardly tell her aunt that for nearly two years she had scoured those journals for mention of him. She jutted out her pointy jaw. “Lord Doreé must acknowledge him in society.”
Her aunt shook her head. “I told your parents this time abroad would harm you. You are too impetuous for this country to have a worthwhile effect upon you.” She strode toward the parlor door, stiff skirts rustling with purpose. “I intend to write to your father about this immediately. He will call you home and that will be an end to it.”
“Good.” The trembling crept into her arms and legs and her lower lip. She bit down to still it. “Benjirou will no doubt return to England soon. He can call upon Papa and Mama there, and they will see that you are wrong.”
Imene rounded upon her. “You foolish girl. Who do you think you are to question me?” Her eyes flashed. “It makes no difference that his father wed his mother legally, a scandal when it occurred, although you are too young to know it.” She punched the air with a poker-straight finger. “His name means nothing to society, nor does his education. He knows that perfectly well. Why do you think he seduced you?”
Tavy gaped, scrabbling for words to cover up the ugly one.
Seduced?
“You know perfectly well why,” her aunt said before she could respond. “He saw how gullible and desperate for a man’s attention you are and thought to attach himself to a respectable family if he could.”
“No.” She barely managed the single syllable. “It was not like that.” Was it? The expression of disgust on her aunt’s face swirled nausea through her. Doubt followed, prickling and sticky.
Lucky for me, indeed
, he had said.
“Your naïveté is suitable for a girl your age,” her aunt said, less sharply now. “But it does you no credit in these matters. It is a good thing I happened upon you. He is far from the equal of his half brothers. To be associated with him would only denigrate your family and bring condemnation upon you greater than you can imagine.”
Tavy’s throat closed. She forced away doubt, forced herself to think the way her aunt would.
“Aunt Imene, he is the son of a peer. I could not do better for myself, even given his reputation.”
“You are infatuated with him because you see him as exotic. You have always shown a misguided interest in things a proper English girl should hold at a distance. But your penchant for adventure has served you poorly this time. I am relieved I stopped you from making a greater mistake before it was too late.”
“Aunt—”
“You will learn to listen to those who wish the best for you. And you—” She stabbed her finger toward the garden. Tavy pivoted. Ben stood in the ochre morning light, one foot upon the step from the garden as though arrested in his arrival. His jaw was taut, his eyes glittering with anger. Tavy’s heart spun.
“You,”
her aunt continued as though the words could poison, “you are not welcome here. If you so much as glance at my niece again, I will have you arrested for battery. I know what you intended, but I have found out your game in time, thank God. You will not inveigle your way into my niece’s bed or polite society, no matter how prettily you have seduced her.”
Tavy gasped. Ben did not speak.
She pressed a palm to her stomach. His gaze followed the action then lifted to hers, hard as polished steel. Completely foreign.
Her certainty wavered, then beneath his cold regard crumbled.
“Is it true?” she asked, realizing more with each moment what a fool she had been. To imagine he might like her—silly, babbling, awkward—that he might truly want her—plain, unnoticeable, all elbows and knees and freckles. It now seemed ludicrous.
They had always met in secret, outside the notice of her aunt and uncle and the rest of English society. She had not questioned it. She
encouraged
it. He was her adventure, and she knew it was wrong. He never called upon her at home and she absolutely loved that. She adored having the clandestine company of a man of questionable reputation. A handsome, charming, reckless young man who seemed nevertheless to command the respect of every native in Madras.
How foolish could she have been? How blind? For what else would a man like him want a girl like her?
“Of course it is true,” her aunt spat out, gesturing to the garden gate. “Why else would he come here like this? He knows he cannot enter through the front door.”
“Is it as she says?” Tavy uttered, but his eyes already told her. They were blank, as she had never seen them. “It is, isn’t it?”
“It must be.” His voice sounded nothing like him.
“Young man,” her aunt said stonily, “if you do not remove your person from this property I will have the guard summoned.”
His eyes flickered with anger again for an instant, then coldness. Without another glance at Tavy, he turned and walked away.
H
e did not return, although she waited, lying upon her bed, weeping, knowing she could not have been so mistaken in him, then knowing that she was the naïve fool her aunt claimed.
The following afternoon her aunt and uncle closed up the house and took her north. Uncle George, it seemed, had business he was obliged to attend to in distant Calcutta. Tavy waited for her aunt to redouble the condemnation, but she behaved as though nothing at all had passed.
Uncle George, however, changed. Before, he had been kindly neglectful. Now he grew diffident, treating her with an odd, distant respect. Tavy didn’t know what her aunt had told him, but she could not help wondering if Ben had spoken to her uncle that morning instead of Aunt Imene, whether matters would have gone differently.
Six months later when they returned to Madras, Ben was gone. It was only then that Tavy learned how his uncle’s death had left him the wealthiest Englishman in India, and amongst the wealthiest natives. She also learned what he had not told her, what perhaps her aunt had not even known. His future was already set.
“He is a veritable Midas,” a gossiping matron said at tea in the vice-governor’s home.
The matron’s companion tittered. “He is expected to make some Indian princess a handsome prince.”
But he did not. Upon his return to England, only two months after his second brother fell beneath cannon blast at Waterloo, his father and eldest brother perished in a fire that burnt down the family hunting box and killed six servants in their beds. Alongside the death notices the London journal printed the information—as though an afterthought—that the new marquess was expected to marry the heiress his eldest brother had been betrothed to since childhood, the daughter of a recluse Scottish duke who had made his fortune in East Indies trade.
No more Indian princess bride. Benjirou Doreé was a Lord of the Realm now. As such, he was expected to wed as one.
Tavy cried herself to sleep that night a final time, but never again. The young man she had fallen in love with—beautiful, laughing, kind—was no longer. He had disappeared the moment he walked away from her in the garden that morning, leaving her heart torn open. The new Marquess of Doreé, so high above her touch he might as well be a god, meant nothing to her.