The Lord's Scandalous Bride Page 7

  Indeed, the outlandish school he had described seemed a more realistic prospect than the notion Lord Nele would truly offer his protection to a girl like Susan. If only, she had thought, Mr. Greatrex had driven me to Panton, and left me at that school. The tale of what Nele had seen and heard over the wall and through the window had fired her blood terribly, and she had measured from that wanton arousal how very far she had fallen—so far now that she felt certain within herself that Lord Nele’s protection could consist only of a squalid existence, financed by him, in some far corner: Wales, or even America. Susan found herself believing utterly, though she could not truly say why, in his fidelity, but her heart could find no way that in the world of Mr. Greatrex and Lord Granby, of the earl of Hobberly and of Nele’s own brother, he would be able to do anything for her that would truly be worth doing.

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “Many girls, though thus far he has kept himself to the lower orders. Mercester House has, I fear, developed a sad reputation—at least in the ears of such as I, though of course my mother has never heard it—as a place where the maids must expect to be punished and enjoyed by their master in the most shameful ways.”

  Susan’s eyes widened. “And does he take care of them?”

  “That is the worst part,” Nele said. “He does not. He is like your Mr. Greatrex in that, according to the maid I spoke to two years ago, for whom I was able to do something small in the way of money because I could not risk sending her to Miss Halton since my brother might get wind of it; he blamed her for his seducing her. He told her that he would not have ruined her if she had not looked at him with lustful eyes. She said that one of the maids at Mercester House had found a way to stay on: she would go to Robert to confess her sins and ask him to whip her and to do anything else she felt she needed, in order to return to the path of virtue.”

  Susan swallowed hard, finding herself damp under her petticoats at the terrible story. She knew the feeling very well, of helpless arousal at the terrible fate of another girl at the hands of a powerful man. She did not, however, think she had ever felt it quite so strongly as she did then, in the carriage with Nele.

  “The path of virtue, my lord?” she said. “Is that not… I mean, do you not purpose to return me…” Susan meant to continue to that path, but she discovered that her mouth had gone terribly dry, as if all the moisture in her body now traveled down below, to the place that made her heart beat fast with shame. She had felt so comfortable just the evening before thinking of that place as her cunt, but now she found her mind trying desperately to denominate it her private part or even her shameful place, as if she were just eighteen again, in the house of Mr. Greatrex. Was that somehow the path of virtue?

  Nele’s eyes narrowed; in the ruddy light of the nearly vanished sun, his pupils seemed to have a spark of fire within them. “It is, Susan. But here is the difference, and it is the difference my father, I believe, wished me to contemplate that day in the pleasure house where I am taking you now. I do not truly believe that punishing a girl and using her body for my pleasure will return her to the path of virtue. I believe that only taking care of her in body and in soul, and allowing her to find her own way back, can do that.”

  Susan had begun to breathe more heavily as Nele said these words. She would have supposed, she thought, that such soppy romantic phrases as taking care of her in body and in soul would leave her cold. She would have supposed indeed she might even feel disgust at herself and the man speaking them because of the huge distance between her—what was the word Nele’s father had used?—inclinations and those of the pretty misses who loved to hear about how a swain would take care of them.

  But not with Nele speaking the phrase. Oh, no. For Susan already knew that a vast and essential portion of the way he wished to take care of her involved the utmost satisfaction of those inclinations. Had he not promised to show her hairless cunt to the coachman? Had he not buggered her fiercely in the guest chamber the night before, after spanking her and fucking her and making her suck him?

  Suddenly the desire to have his… his manhood—not the other thing, the unvirtuous word—inside her mouth, so that she might give him his pleasurable way in exchange for the marvelous things he had said, nearly overwhelmed her. She took a deep, gasping breath, looked at Nele in hope that he would see how much she needed his touch. Find her own way back. Would it still be virtuous if Susan’s own way back involved submitting her body and her soul utterly to Lord Nele Lourcy?

  But though she thought she could make out in the rapidly failing light that his smile had become more cheerful, he did not reach out for her, and now Susan felt that if she was to honor his path of virtue she must not be forward—she must allow him to decide when her body should be gratified. She said in a whisper, “My lord, what is virtue?”

  Nele threw back his head and roared with laughter. Then he did gather her into his arms, and start to kiss her, over and over, his tongue inside her mouth, claiming her there and almost satisfying her need to give him his way with her.

  When he pulled his head back from hers, still holding her close on the carriage seat, he said, “A host of Oxford tutors could not, it seems, persuade me that anyone has yet found an answer to that question. Socrates himself despaired of finding it.”

  Long-forgotten things Susan had read, as a governess-to-be and then as a governess, came creeping back into her mind. Socrates. Would Nele tell her about Socrates? Perhaps while she suckled his hardness very gently, so as not to interfere with the lesson? She felt strange, and wild: she would be the best pupil Nele could ever have, ready to ask for the cane and for much more, wherever he wanted to teach her to be a good girl for him, if she made a mistake—or even if he felt it could do her good to submit to his rough will.

  “The best I have ever been able to do, in my own quest to discover the nature of virtue,” he said, smiling gently, “is to say that there is a virtue laid down by society and a virtue laid down by nature. I believe my brother has confused the two.” He kissed her again, and though she still felt desperate to please him more fully, to give him his way utterly, the way he had set her mind afire seemed equally thrilling.

  “Must we not follow society’s path of virtue, then, my lord?”

  Another, even longer kiss that put Susan’s wits in such disarray that she could barely follow his reply. “We must, but only insofar as it allows us to follow nature’s path of virtue. Society’s path speaks of what men and women—especially women—must do, and what they must not do. As you know, Susan, it is terribly easy to stray from that path.”

  She felt a sob rise in her throat but, it seemed to her, only because Nele had rendered it safe, here, to feel the regret that she had refused ever to feel, for how could any reasonable person see the things Mr. Greatrex had visited upon her as lying within her fault, or even her control? Nele seemed to sense the sorrow, and she felt his arms close more tightly around her; now their chins rested on one another’s shoulders. Susan realized that no man had ever held her this way before, and she gave another little sob.

  “But,” Nele said in her ear, very softly, “it is much harder to stray from nature’s path, and if we do stray from it, the way back is easy. We must only do what we can to live according to our inclinations, so long as in doing so we help others do the same.”

  Nele’s words seemed to dawn in Susan’s breast as if the sun returning from its dusk had elected to illumine only this little carriage. She found herself unable to keep from turning her head, seeking to kiss him, offering her mouth for his dominant kisses, for she would never be so forward as to try to enforce her will upon his lips: such did not lie within her inclinations. What lay within those wonderful, impossible-to-enumerate, wanton things was to be kissed, to be taken, and even to be used.

  He made a little tsking sound, as if to reprimand her for even this attempt to control his pleasure, but she knew—she simply knew, whether from some tiny aspect of the tsk itself or because she could now see into his thoughts—that it
was a smiling tsk. “There is another part of me that you must kiss now, Sue,” he said.

  Somehow, for Nele to use that diminutive of her name—which Lord Granby had used first, and by which the earl had always called her—brought out Susan’s wantonness more thoroughly than she thought anything else could, at that moment. Sue was a trollop. Sue had her cunt shown to coachmen. Sue sucked a nobleman’s cock in a carriage.

  She slid to her knees. Again it was like the moment in the railway carriage with Mr. Oldham. Hadn’t Nele said that he wanted the rest of that tale?

  “Take me out and suck, girl,” he said, though, commandingly. The harsh voice seemed to send shivers of arousal up and down her body. “When I have spent in your mouth, you will stay down there and tell me more of your story.”

  Sue’s practiced hands fumbled a little with the buttons of his flies, for they trembled at the extremity of her arousal. Her thighs, demurely hidden under her black skirts and her petticoat, nevertheless felt slick from the excitement Nele’s very voice seemed to raise in her. Then, from his cotton drawers his hardness sprang up, and without anxiety she felt herself as both Sue and Susan: Sue knew how to please a cock very well indeed but Susan had never done this before. It would be too big for Susan’s mouth, would it not, this truncheon of sinewy flesh that Lord Nele Lourcy had commanded she must please in this terribly degrading manner? She looked at it with apprehension that felt real—that was real, because he had made it so.

  “Get your mouth on that cock this instant, Susan Grant,” he said. “You must learn your duty.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Susan lowered her head so slowly to engulf Nele’s cock that he thought seriously of spanking her there in the carriage, or of having William the coachman spank her later specifically for this infraction after he had taken his eyes’ fill of her pretty cunny. The urge to spank in recompense for some slight fault in her erotic behavior did not come infrequently to Nele, when engaged upon one of his amours, but with Susan Grant it seemed to arise at the strangest moments, just as the overwhelming need to have her on her knees before him with her mouth full of his cock had seemed only a moment before to come upon him like a bolt out of the blue.

  Not so very long before, he had promised to punish her for offering to do what he now demanded of her, and that must make part of the strange tide of amorous energy that seemed to flow from her to him and back again. It was as if the need to command her attendance upon him in that degrading way, here in the carriage, had lain latent and waiting for the proper moment to break forth into a scene of mastery like this one. Nele had certainly not told a false tale when he said that fucking in carriages had never appealed to him very greatly, but his need to have Susan submit to him upon her knees, in what Dr. Brown called The principal act of worship a natural man must not hesitate to demand of a girl over whom he exercises his erotic rights, came upon him now most extremely.

  Likewise, then, the urge to spank her if she did not perform that worship with the greatest possible alacrity. To punish a girl who seemed laggardly in her voluptuous duties—who for example did not spread her legs when told to do so in order that Nele might get a good look at her quim—made a part of the very fabric of Nele’s amorous character. But something in the way Susan’s mouth, in the near-dark of the carriage as the wheels rattled along under them the road to Panton’s pleasure house, descended inch by inch to give Nele’s manhood the adoration it deserved…

  He found he could not define it, or even really describe it, but he thought perhaps he could liken it to what the astronomers said about the moon and its orbit around the Earth: the Earth kept the moon in its path around itself, and the moon pulled upon the Earth’s seas and made the tides. He felt that just now his tide had risen very high indeed, and he wished for the satisfaction of Susan’s natural worship—the moon’s necessary reverence for the Earth that kept her steadily moving, to give light to her master in the night.

  Then at last her mouth had taken his achingly hard cock inside, and that marvelous skill she had shown the previous night made Nele groan with the greatness of the pleasure, increased so much by the anticipation through which he had just passed. She took him so very deep that he felt the lusciously soft and pleasing back of her throat in an instant, and he could not help putting both his hands atop her head, in her yellow hair that shone in the dim moonlight coming through the little window, brighter than anything else in the carriage, and keeping her there, all the way down his cock with her breath sounding in little puffs of her nostrils.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back, resting his head against the back of the carriage. He relaxed his grip upon Susan’s head to let her raise it and begin an expert imitation of fucking, bobbing up and down without closing her lips around him, so that her tongue and palate felt like a heavenly place for a man to enjoy himself. She brought her hand up, then, to caress his balls reverently, and that made him say, “Such a good, virtuous girl.” Then he felt the spasm start in his flanks and his hips, and he was gripping her head again, driving it down, wanting to make sure she must swallow everything he would bestow upon her.

  She did, dutifully, with her watering eyes still turned down to his dark lap. Nele, his breathing harsh with the feverish passion Susan had so ably produced and his heart beginning to cease its wild pounding, said, speaking gently despite the dominance of his words, “You will stay on your knees now, Sue, and tell me the tale of the man in the railway carriage.”

  The new element of calling her Sue, when he mastered her, had simply arisen without his intending it. Nele’s calling her that must mean that when she first became known to him—probably when Granby had her—she had gone by that name. In the days of her greatest degradation, then, they had called her Sue, and Nele supposed he had felt the need to have that part of her at his pleasurable service. The girl who must suck his cock in the carriage should be Sue, the little slut who belonged to any man who knew how to use her properly, as well as Susan Grant, the fallen girl now under Nele’s protection.

  “I think I mentioned Mr. Oldham’s name, my lord,” Susan said, looking up at him, “when I listed the men who have had me.” Nele’s flies still lay undone, and his cock, soft now and still glistening from its time in a trollop’s mouth, lay along his thigh, a few inches from Susan’s face. To his charmed surprise, she bent her face forward and kissed it. “Would you like me to put your trousers to rights, my lord?” she said very innocently, as if a good maid should always be ready to handle the most menial duties attendant upon a gentleman’s having a cock that must receive her reverent attention at all times.

  “Yes, Susan,” he replied with a smile. “I think that would be best, for now, though you must expect to see my prick again very soon, and to give it a good deal more pleasure.” Nele watched with growing fondness as she gently placed his cock back inside his drawers and then buttoned the flies of his trousers.

  When she had finished the little task, performed with her eyes bent to her work, she looked up again at him and said, “Mr. Oldham had a manufactory in the North, and he came down to London once a fortnight. Like many men, I think, he had a wish to…”

  Nele knew Susan well enough now to tell that she had once again almost said fuck, and he praised heaven for the inspiration to make reforming her trollop’s tongue a part of this marvelous bargain they seemed to have struck to find pleasure in returning to Sue the slut the innocence of Miss Susan Grant. In her voice, as she proceeded, he heard a blush.

  “…to have pretty girls, and to receive from them the sorts of voluptuous favors that kind gentlemen from the North don’t get the chance to request—let alone to require—as a rule. He always swore to me that the night I pleasured him upon my knees in the railway carriage was the first time he had received such amorous attentions from any girl at all, even his wife, for you must understand that he was—and is still, of course, for the scene, and the six months he kept me, occurred only a little more than a year ago—married.”

  “You sucked the
cock of a married man on the railway train to London, then, Susan Grant? You must be soundly caned for that, I fear.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Susan said meekly. “I was terribly forward, and I know I must learn a lesson.”

  Nele chuckled. “That maid in my brother’s house could not have said it better, I imagine. Go on with the story, if you please.”

  “I do not believe it was in Mr. Oldham to refuse to let me pleasure him, as I took him by surprise and he had gone, as he told me later, a very long time without the slightest caress. He… had his release very quickly, indeed. But he could have taken his pleasure and then reported me to the railway police, or simply found another compartment at the next station. I would never have tried to follow him, and I suppose I expected to be reported to someone. But after he spent I could tell he felt terribly guilty, and he raised me up and heard my whole story of Mr. Greatrex and the things he had done to me.”

  “Mr. Oldham found the tale rather arousing, I warrant,” Nele said dryly.

  “I think he did, though at the time I did not know why he seemed to keep clearing his throat and shifting in his seat. When he heard of how exactly Mr. Greatrex had me—that is, along the unnatural road, if I may put it thus, my lord…”

  Nele felt a smile break out on his face at the growing skill Susan seemed to have at finding elegant, innocent ways to speak of the unspeakable. “You may indeed put it thus, Miss Grant. It is an admirable turn of phrase, in my opinion.”

  In the darkness, Nele thought he saw her start to be called Miss Grant. Suddenly, to his surprise and, he thought he could hear in her tone, to her own, she changed the subject. “I come from Shropshire, my lord, though I was born in the Scottish borderlands. My parents died when I was not four years old, and I was sent to live with a cousin who had no love for me at all, though he sent me to school for which I must always be grateful. I thought that to be a governess, and then perhaps a schoolmistress, might be the path along which Miss Grant might find her way in the world.” These words had all come out in a rush, as if Susan felt a compulsion to have them said though she had no desire to say them and even feared that to interrupt her tale of lewdness with the gentleman from the North might earn her further punishment from Nele. When Nele did not respond immediately, Susan went on, much more slowly, “I am telling you this, my lord, I suppose, because of course I told it to Mr. Oldham, and so it makes part of my story, but also… you called me that… which is something no one has called me in… it is only two years, I suppose, but it seems a whole lifetime ago, too.”