He lowered her until, to her surprise, she felt the give of the bed against the bare skin of her back.
He knelt between her legs, gently parting her thighs so he could dip his head between. And when his tongue first touched her, then stroked, the sound she made, an animal keening, shocked her. She had not known such pleasure could be had.
His tongue and his fingers colluded in driving her nearly mad. The velvet heat of his tongue against her slick heat, the searching glide and stroke of his fingers, mustered an unendurable need from all corners of her being. It was sinful sorcery, and she was the wickedest, luckiest woman alive. She moved with him, abetting him, begging him shamelessly.
She was going to scream. She threw her forearm over her mouth and did, coming apart with a sob of hallelujah.
He was on his feet to hook her legs over his shoulders, and the mad speed with which he plunged told her that he’d been wild, too.
She lay sprawled and sated on her back beside him, while he lay on his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows. He’d fetched the letter and read to her what appeared to be lyrics.
“‘Queen of the Deep, why must you’ . . . I believe this word is ‘abandon’? ‘forsake’? . . . ‘me. I am your humble servant.’”
“I think the lobster is singing to the mermaid,” he told her.
“Well, that’s very sad, don’t you think? Is the lobster in danger? Poor thing!” Her voice was drowsily amused.
He smiled at her and read on.
“I think it’s jealous of . . . I think this word is ‘Neptune’? The lobster is jealous of her lover Neptune. ‘My heart is on fire with jealousy,’ I think it says.”
He lowered the letter.
“This is a bloody masterpiece, Mariana.”
“It will be, when I sing it,” she said, placidly.
He smiled at her.
She’d been watching his face while he read with a little smile. When he turned to her, they gazed at each other silently for a moment.
She reached up and gently, with one forefinger, traced his eyebrow. Then the other. Her smile faded when she moved her finger to his mouth and traced it with a feather-soft touch. He drew her finger into his mouth and sucked gently.
Again and again, the luscious beauty of her stunned him like a club to the head. The tapering line from her full breasts to her round hips was his idea of a masterpiece. If the ceiling of his London townhouse had been painted with her image, he’d never see the floor again.
He dipped his head and closed his mouth over the little raspberry peak of her nipple in a languid, teasing caress of tongue, and teeth, and lips. Her eyelids fluttered closed, to isolate herself with the pleasure, and she absently stroked the back of his head. Her breath was ragged through parted lips.
“Oh . . .” she sighed.
He moved his lips to her other breast, and she shifted her body so that she was beneath him, and his swelling cock pressed against her hip. She combed her fingers up his neck, lightly around the whorls of his ears. It made him wild.
He knew from her shuddering, desperate breaths, the jump of her ribs, when she was ready, and he pinned her gently. She arched her hips up so he could ease into her, and she clung to him, her breath hot in the crook of his neck as he moved in her, slowly, slowly, teasing both of them, prolonging the mad, wicked bliss of being so tightly, hotly sheathed. The friction of his chest against her nipples. The heat of their gazes, locked.
“James . . . please . . . I . . .”
Her head whipped back and her body bowed beneath him. He followed her, seconds later, into the heavens, shattered into light and cinders, her name on a hoarse cry.
The clock softly bonged two o’clock.
“We’ve less than a fortnight before you leave for Paris,” he said.
The word “we’ve” was the first formal acknowledgement of their conspiracy. That this flagrant breaking of the rules at The Grand Palace on the Thames and sex after dark was something they were mutually deciding to do, and intended to continue doing until she was gone. They were officially lovers.
“Yes,” she said.
But there was no reason to think of anything other than this moment.
He had never before felt so full of things that he could not form into words. And he supposed that was the point of operas and sex, so that you could feel and communicate things you could never say.
She left with the full complement of hairpins she’d had when she’d first arrived.
Chapter Fourteen
Of the hundred tickets optimistically made available for the Night of the Nightingale, ten now had been sold.
“Perhaps people come the day of the show. Perhaps on the day of the show we can send Dot out with a bell to lure people back for a shilling,” Delilah said, half joking. But only half.
There was a silence.
“May I?” Dot asked quietly.
She loved the idea of shouting and ringing a bell. She fervently longed one day to do it. She hardly dared hope she would be allowed.
“I think not,” Delilah said regretfully.
Handkerchiefs, neatly folded and embroidered with TGPOTT, awaited early guests. Bowers of paper flowers bloomed in the sitting room.
The days seemed to pass rather too quickly.
Several of their handbills advertising the event had been slid under the door of The Grand Palace on the Thames. One had been violently hatched through with an “X,” on a second someone else had written, “Are you mad?” and on the third someone had drawn a surprisingly accomplished, very detailed penis.
They all mutely stared at it in astonishment.
I think I recognize him, Mariana was tempted to say.
She thought they might laugh. They were not milquetoasts, these ladies.
Then again, they might not. Recognizing penises was probably what harlots did, and her reputation had only recently been mildly rehabilitated by one article.
“It’s going to be a triumph,” Delilah maintained, firmly.
James could never possibly answer, let alone read, all of the letters sent to him.
His Man of Affairs did that for him, sorting out and setting aside the ones he thought he ought to see, or would prefer to personally answer. A fresh stack of these had just been delivered to him at The Grand Palace on the Thames. He reached for the one on top, from a Mrs. Anne Jenkins of Portsmouth.
He broke the seal on the letter. Something that flashed silver like a coin spilled out into his hand.
He exhaled. It was a Waterloo Medal. The heft of it was familiar; every man who’d been at Ligny, Quatre Bras, or Waterloo had been given one. He had one, too. He ran his thumb across the name engraved on the edge: William Jenkins.
The letter read:
Dear General Blackmore,
My son Billy passed of an illness recently. He said to me on his deathbed, “Send my Waterloo Medal to General Blackmore, and tell him he’s the finest man I ever knew. He’s the one who brought me home to you.” He was on a rough path, my Billy, before the army. I thought I would lose him to gaming hells and bawdy women and other bad sorts. We scraped all we had to buy a commission, and he said you made a man of him. He never left home without your book in his pocket. He married a good woman and we have two grandchildren.
Billy was my heart. I should have liked more years with him. This is a small thing indeed, but I wanted you to know that you had Billy’s gratitude and his mother’s. There are no words for how much you have meant to us.