For just an instant, just a taste, she tilted her head, gave him better access. He pulled her back into his chest and kissed her neck, open-mouthed, wet. She bent her head, and he took his ministrations up her vertebrae to her nape. She let herself slide into the sensation as into a warm pool; she swam in it, in the starchy warmth of him, in the sure heat of his hands—they pressed her cape, flattened her bosom against her ribs. He rubbed her chest, flat-palmed, spread-fingered. Pleasure, oh, the pleasure of his touch.
Pure, limpid pleasure, as clear as glass, undiluted. When had she last really let loose and indulged in it for its own sake? She weighed that glowing possibility against how likely it was to fire in the pan, blow up in their faces. He didn’t understand…. He didn’t partly because she hadn’t let him. But there was a solution, an end one way or the other.
To James’s enveloping shadow, Coco murmured, “All right. Get your carriage.”
She didn’t mean for him to think, Yes, I’ll sleep with you. She was thinking, Wait. Wait till you see. Wait till you understand how complicated this could become, how difficult it is already, then you will either have full knowledge and be responsible for
yourself or you will stop everything and end the torture.
In the carriage, she gave him directions rather than the address. At least this way she wouldn’t have to argue or explain all the way home. His little calèche flew, a man with a mission. He said nothing, except the
yahs
and clicking encouragement to the horse. When they pulled up, he looked immediately the wrong way and said, “How funny. Your aunt works directly across the street from the Dunnes’ house.”
“She lives inside it. She’s their cook.” She opened the half-gate, leaped from the carriage without help, and went up the front walk.
It took James half a minute to rally, jump from his side of the carriage, tie the reins, and come after her. He was still trying to absorb what she’d said, trying to make it all right.
But something wasn’t all right. His heart began to pump hard. He felt…frightened, fascinated. Out of his depth. And was not even sure why. He took the front steps two at a time, then stood, agitated, unsure, while Coco hunted for a key in her pocket. They stood at the front door, he realized.
“I thought you said your aunt was the cook. This isn’t the servants’ entrance.”
She frowned up, lips pursed in the moonlit shadows of the stoop. “David didn’t like my staying in the servants’ quarters, so he had a word with the Viscount—”
“A word with Phillip? A twenty-two-year-old told Phillip Dunne he doesn’t like that his mother is staying downstairs with her aunt, the cook?”
“My aunt is quite revered. Besides, I’m not a
servant, and there was plenty of room in the guest quarters. And the family is out of town.”
“They weren’t out of town till today.”
“Phillip was.”
It was true. Most of the week he’d been in London. Though James couldn’t imagine why this was relevant. He said, “Well, it hardly seems proper—”
She found the key. Clutching it, she told him, “No one in Cambridge but you seems to care particularly which room I sleep in. And, since it makes David happy—”
“David? What’s going on here?” The anger from earlier began to course through James again, thick and hot.
It dawned on him. “Phillip,” he said incredulously. “You call him Phillip.”
“So do you.” But she grew wary and still.
James said, “Phillip Dunne is on your damn list.” Then another possibility shook him even more profoundly. “David. The missing father you’ve never mentioned. He’s David’s father.”
She said nothing, only standing there stiffly, brittle—proof enough for him. Her next words were no doubt the literal truth, though James was sure her omissions, all she didn’t say, amounted to a lie. She said, “David’s father is dead. Phillip, an old friend of Horace’s, is kind enough to appease the pride of an admiral’s son, who is sensitive about his mother’s origins.”
“Phillip. Nigel. Horace. Probably Tuttleworth, the present High Steward of Cambridge and recently drafted into a cabinet post, just your style. It’s a tight little group you work in, isn’t it? And
you’ve slept with every bloody one of them, haven’t you?”
For a moment, he thought she was going to deliver a not entirely undeserved slap across his cheek. She stood rigid, as if forcibly holding her arms down. He watched a faint shiver pass over her from tension, restraint. Then she said simply, “Good night, Dr. Stoker.”
And turned away. She inserted the key into Phillip’s front door. It opened. The house was dark inside, absolutely lightless. No servants, no one. She was through the door, closing it behind her with a click, before it occurred to James that he could have pushed his way in and there would have been little she could have done about it.
Why, though? To what purpose? He spun around on his heels and leaped down the front steps. Fine, he thought. Good. She was leaving sometime soon, anyway; she’d been hinting as much. If he never saw her again, that would be well and enough for him.
But he turned around and saw a dim light come on somewhere. The front parlor. And he suddenly found himself walking around the house into the side grasses. He walked through the dark, down along the parlors, till he stopped and saw her: Coco alone in the dining room, pausing to lean over some flowers. Roses. Fat, pale pink hothouse roses. Phillip had sent the roses to his house—for Coco, as he had sent the same to London a month ago. Willy, poor Willy…if she hadn’t been on her way to Bath already when these had arrived, she was in the process of being packed off. How else could the
family have left so quickly? The roses were never for her.
Be well. Love, Phillip
.
Vice-Chancellors. American financiers. Ministers. Admirals. Bishops. A French prince. The future king of England. Rumored sultans…czars…emperors…
James stood there in the dark, reeling with jealousy and fear, and in an uproar inside. Everything he’d hoped for seemed suddenly locked beyond him, inside that house with Coco, his greeds and hopes and longings. She embodied these. They grew horns and prodded him, becoming more than mere lust: a desiring willfulness, I, ego, the center of himself, a need as basic as the slippery, involuntary contractions of his own blood-filled heart.
She’d locked him out, but here was a man who knew where the servants’ entrance to the house was. James shoved tree limbs aside, striding along quickly, cutting over grass, through a hedge, then between the bushes of the rose garden—it was an overgrown tangle of summer shoots, prickly thorns, and bobbing flowers, but he pushed through anyway, which brought him round to the back of the house.
And there she was again. Coco set a gas lamp onto the cook’s table in the kitchen, took out a basin, then turned away. At the stove, she put on water to boil, then unbuttoned her sleeves, pulled at combs in her hair, stripped off jewelry. James stood in the dark, invisible. He pushed his hand back through his hair, his mouth suddenly dry. She was going to wash up, unaware he was there.
All wrong
, he thought. He should go; this was wrong. Or he should let her know he stood not ten
feet away. But he held his breath instead. Coco’s hair came down. It was dark, heavy, uniformly straight and sleek, like the shining, uncut hair of a maharani. Or of an odalisque, a concubine, a geisha. Heavy hair, so healthy and clean it slid against itself, a single entity. It poured like liquid down her back, pooling onto her bustle, spilling over it. As she reached for the kettle, he watched it part across her shoulder blades. She tossed her head and the mass of it slipped to the side, out of the way as she turned around. She came back, busying herself with the task of pouring hot water into the basin on the cook’s table.
She loosened her dress, pulled the ties of a side-lacing corset. She was about to wash, facing him, facing the darkness out the back servants’ entrance.
James stepped up onto the back stoop. He leaned his arms onto either side of the door, making himself known with the banging force of his hands, making himself visible through the door’s windowpanes.
Coco glanced, then leaped back. She stared at him, startled yet somehow oddly unsurprised. Then—the strangest thing—looking right at him, she lifted her chin in a kind of focused fury, her eyes irate somehow: and peeled her dress off her shoulders. The sleeves fit like skin, like a snake shedding.
James leaned his forehead into the window pane. “Coco,” he said, “let me in.” He wet his lips. His groin stirred sharply, a feeling accompanied by sudden rushes, filling, the hydraulic events of his body making him erect. His whole body seemed to fill up on the sight of her. He hit the wood frame of the
door once with the heels of his hands. “Let me in,” he said.
She only stood there, straight-postured, staring right at him as she took her chemise down as well. Bare bosom. Oh, God, she was pretty. Round, full breasts that bobbled with the tiniest of her movements. She lifted a sponge and squeezed water at her neck, bending forward slightly. Water ran between her breasts. They had large dark-pink nipples.
James tried the knob. He pulled on it, rattled it. “Coco, open the bloody door,” he called. “Open it.” He shoved on the door with his shoulder. It shimmied on its hinges.
She said nothing. She eyed him as she took up a bar of soap and rubbed it over herself, over her neck and shoulders, down over her chest, her palm sliding in circles over her skin. She cupped her bosom. She let the bar slide into the basin, then lathered, rubbing her breasts, pressing them. The tips of her nipples puckered tightly. He watched them shrivel into hard little knobs.
James could barely catch his breath. He threw his full weight against the door. It gave slightly, the sound of splitting wood. He threw his shoulder into it again. And again. Beyond it, inside the kitchen, he heard a small shriek. He didn’t care. He beat on the door with his body. Till he heard the fracture of wood. The lock came off the frame, and the door banged open with such force that the knob or key in it, something, chunked solidly into the wall. Plaster flew.
Coco laughed at first. “You—you broke the door,” she said, incredulous, aghast. Yet her eyes were wide, bright. She backed up. “James.” She
laughed again; disbelief, nerves. “What are you doing? Go home.”
“What are
you
doing?” he asked. The words came out in a kind of whisper.
She laughed again, lightly. A nerviness in her gave the sound an exhilarated ring, a ripple of laughter that edged into a cackle of delight.
James walked forward, Coco backward. There was no fear on her face, possibly even the trace of a smile. The smile grew, half taunting, half sly; touched with humor. She used her arms ostensibly to cover her breasts, but where her arms pressed them, her bare bosom rose higher, came out everywhere, round, voluptuous, her nipples in view, her fingers spread over herself more like an embrace than a shelter for modesty. She licked her lips and James felt it in his penis, a throb in direct response.
He breathed like a bellows, from the hard work of breaking down doors but also from simply watching her. Coco, the female he wanted…so female with her soft shoulders and silky hair and soft, soft bosom. He could feel the churn of his testes, the hot pressure of his penis tenting his trousers like a pole.
And he hadn’t even touched her yet. He watched her back up, watched the wall and stove come up behind her, watched her startle as her bare shoulders collided into the corner where the wall met the pan rack hanging over the stove. James trapped her there, the flat of one hand on the wall, his other gripping the stove’s edge, while the rasp of his own breathing rivaled the scrooping scrunch of stiff taffeta as his legs stepped into the skirt, crushed it between them. He stopped there, all but up against
her, savoring the moment, knowing he had her cornered and willing. God bless, her expression…sloe-eyed, pupils dilated, lips parted. She seemed wound as tight as a spring, alive, waiting for whatever he might do next.
He took her hands away from her chest and let out a huge, shuddering sigh as his palms found both her bare breasts. Her skin was unbearably fine-textured, smooth, sweet to touch. She closed her eyes and bent her cheek to her own shoulder, moaning out a soft
oh
of pleasure. It was the smallest sound, but it tumbled him over the edge of any sort of restraint.
James began to slide his hands over her, along her bare ribs, down the front of her, pressing between her legs, feeling her through her dress, while he took her mouth. He kissed her, reaching round to the back of her dress, and pulled, unhooking where he found hooks, yanking where he didn’t, getting her out of the damned thing. He penetrated her mouth with his tongue, while his hands grabbed fistfuls of bustle. He buried his fingers in the cool, copious flounces of satin as he pressed her buttocks forward, bringing her hips tightly against him.
The second their hips met, he felt her push back, an instant rhythm between them. Her arms came up. There was no pretense to her, no feints or fluster, no sighing ignorance or conflict. No difference of opinion here. The field was level. She opened her mouth to him. The moment her skirts and crinolette were loose enough, she stepped out of them. When he couldn’t undo all the strings of her corset, she helped. He pulled at her chemise, at her drawers; he couldn’t get them off fast enough. “Get rid of
these,” he whispered insistently. She helped as he stripped her there by the kitchen stove.
And she liked it. Her breaths came light and quick, her eyes often fluttering closed. But when they were open, they were brightly on him. He maneuvered her till he had his hand between her bare thighs, pressed tight, his finger finding her. He felt inside her. She was silky-wet. And moaning, groaning in his arms. Her knees gave. James had to use the wall and his own body to brace her as he opened his trousers. Then events, and Coco, proceeded from here.
She displayed no distress—or no distress in any negative sense. She knew; she wanted. In fact, with a kind of panic, her hand came down between them, adjusted his erection the last inch, and—there was no other word for it—she took him: standing up onto her toes, pressing the head of his penis down till it was at just the right spot, she curved her hips forward and raised one leg round his waist. Her heel in the small of his back, she helped drive him into her.