Page 18 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

18

Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity, or of any other force, is not that the power is mysterious and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law.

—Michael Faraday

That was the most carnal fellatio Sam had ever received.

A lady, this lady, kneeling before him and swallowing the length of him, her cheeks red with exertion, her hair falling out of her pins and down her shoulders as she urged him on with her tongue and her fingers.

Her bloody fingers. Pulling at his sac and teasing the base of his cock with swift, then slow movements.

He didn’t say this.

He didn’t say any of this.

Instead, the pleasure she’d given him fled when she raised herself from her knees and stepped away, arms crossed, words brittle with ice, and fear lurking in her eyes.

“Well.” Only Phoebe could turn a one-syllable word into a paragraph of disdain. “I hope I gave your barmaid Rosie some competition.”

Ahh, the villainess had returned.

Undeterred, Sam pulled her right back into his arms and kissed her as if it were their last kiss. It might be, if he didn’t take care of Phoebe the way no one ever had. The way only he could.

She tasted like salt and ale, and Sam lost himself in the pure pleasure of exploring Phoebe’s mouth with his tongue. Dear Christ, but he wanted this woman.

When he was certain he’d convinced her of his appreciation, he broke the kiss, holding her flush against him.

“I don’t know anyone named Rosie,” he said softly, letting his lips touch only the rim of her ear, “and the only barmaid I’ve ever called by her first name is Harriet Blystone. She’s married to Dougie Blystone, who owns the pub down the road from us.”

Her shoulders dropped the tiniest bit and a single muscle twitched in her jaw.

“Harriet wields a bar clout like a whip. Once, she dragged young Pete Whetstone home by the ear and deposited him on his mother’s doorstep.”

Phoebe could only dream of intimidating Sam as well as Harriet Blystone had.

He absorbed the infinitesimal tremors of the laugh she tried hard to swallow.

This woman needed light and laughter—enough to uncover the dark places, enough so he could go there with her when she needed him.

Stuttering shadows curved around them as the oil ran dry in the small lamp he’d lit; difficult to see the details of Phoebe’s face, the dimness smoothed the tiny lines across her skin, evidence of a life lived outdoors, outside the gilded cages of the British aristocracy.

Sam didn’t need to see those details to know when she let desire take precedence over her prickly self-defenses. Although he was already hard again, he focused only on kisses. Gentle kisses taught him the shape of her lips, tiny nips so he could taste her, sucking her lip into his mouth and running his tongue back and forth, delighting in her responses; quiet whimpers and her fingers digging into his shoulder and his arse.

Once she’d melted and her body became pliant, Sam found the place right above her shoulder on the side of her neck where, if he covered his teeth with his lips and nibbled, she would rub against him. His hands cupped her bottom and he let out a grunt of pleasure when she wrapped one leg around his hips.

Even as he slipped his hands around her waist, up the back of her neck to hold her head still for his kisses, he was planning two moves ahead.

Before she broke his hold, he’d laid them both down on the nest of colored silk and velvet. Noting the stiffness in her spine, Sam decided now was the time to pay homage to her breasts.

“Look at how pretty you are here,” he whispered, fondling her carefully, rolling her nipples. “Like plums and cream. I want to fill my mouth with you.”

He did as he’d said and let his tongue trace the outline of her dusky rose areola, round and round until she relaxed beneath him and her fingers spasmed. Only then did he take one nipple between his teeth and gently bite, then cover her with his mouth and suck.

The tiniest of tremors and dampening of the cloth against his thigh told him Phoebe had experienced a small release when he’d done that.

Something to tuck away for future use.

Still aroused, still touching him—still consenting—Phoebe reached between them and guided his cock to her quim, pushing aside the material of her pantalettes. Sam levered himself up and over her to give her access to his cock. A dreamy smile lit her face.

“Where did you hide that tin?” she asked, her eyes closed, her two front teeth biting down at the corner of her bottom lip.

Jealous, Sam set his thumb to her mouth and pulled her lip away. If anyone was going to sink into Phoebe’s flesh, it would be him.

“Do not worry, my lady. I will ask for your aid when we are ready.”

He covered her quim with his hand and gently stroked her damp folds.

She gasped and her eyes opened reluctantly.

“Are we not ready now?”

“Impatient, my Phoebe-girl? First, I have to taste—”

“No.”

Phoebe’s hand moved from his cock to his chest, holding him in place.

Had he been too rough? Perhaps he hadn’t explained enough what he wanted to do to her and how it would feel. Galling as it may be, there was a good chance Phoebe’s previous lovers may not have used their mouths on her.

Witless fools, if this was so.

“You can tell me to stop if you don’t find it pleasant.” Sam pressed his thumb against the tiny pearl at the top of her quim, and she squirmed in pleasure. “I promise, when I kiss your qu—”

The squirming stopped. Phoebe’s dreamy expression turned pained, though she kept a smile on her face. “Darling…”

This was not good.

“Enough talk. Let’s get on with this, shall we?”

Sam threw away his plans and recalculated. Perhaps this act was too intimate for her? He wanted to give her that pleasure, but Sam heeded her discomfort and gave her a reassuring smile.

“As you wish,” he said, leaning down and kissing her slowly, then pushing himself back onto his arms. “Let’s get to the part where you scream my name over and over.”

Phoebe’s smile broadened into something more natural. “Or vice versa.”

He laughed, relieved all was well again. “Yes, please.”

The wind picked up outside and the clouds began to move faster. The moonlight flickered in their wake and Sam watched her eyes follow him as he sat back on his knees, then pulled the tin of condoms from his pocket. He showed her a condom, the ribbon trailing down his finger.

“Why don’t you help me, Phoebe-girl? Tie this on while I take off the last of your clothes.”

“No.” Again the false smile flickered on Phoebe’s face.

No?

“Just…” Her smiled turned into a grimace. “For Christ’s sake, Sam. You must be the only man in Britain that won’t just get the job done.”

Sam was lost.

Job?

Was his touch a chore to be endured?

He moved his hand from her core to pat her thigh and leave her with a few more kisses, because he had to stop.

Job.

“No,” she blurted out. “Don’t look. Don’t…”

His hand stilled.

A surge of rage built even before he moved his thumb against the raised ridge of skin running across her thigh beneath the thin fabric.

A scar.

···

An unholy light glowed in Sam’s eyes, but Phoebe wasn’t afraid. Only ashamed.

“He…” Sam’s voice came from deep within him, nearly a roar. “Your father did this?”

Phoebe sat while he gripped her thigh, but not tight enough to hurt.

“No, he didn’t,” she said softly. No use trying to close her legs or pretend everyone was normal. When he’d understood that the skin beneath his hand was scarred, she had allowed Sam to pull her pantalettes to the side, and in the murky moonlight, the wavy lines shone a dull pewter against the alabaster of her skin.

“Who?” Barely articulated, it was more of a growl.

“I did this. I did it, Sam.”

Incomprehension created worry lines that hadn’t been there before on his smooth forehead and between his eyes. Somewhere deep inside her, her protective reservoir of exasperation and disdain awaited.

Some other day she might have tapped the source and told him to let go her leg, not everyone was as unblemished as he and his happy little family; that he was a child. A golden boy to whom life had been unfairly kind.

Except.

He dropped his head and smoothed the material to cover her back up, then moved away to sit beside her, not letting his skin touch hers.

Phoebe’s stomach dropped.

The scars revolted him. He was disgusted with her. She’d lived up to every drop of contempt he’d ever had for aristocratic women.

Wetting her dry mouth, Phoebe tried to find it in her to tell him she didn’t care. She didn’t care if he left and never saw her again. She didn’t—

“You do not owe me an explanation,” he said, looking over at her. “You owe men nothing, Phoebe Hunt. If you can, however, I would like to understand a little better why you might do this. Was it an accident? Did someone force you?”

Phoebe pushed her legs together and stared at her stockinged feet.

“Did you…Were your other lovers more worldly perhaps and had seen this before?” he asked.

Sam’s eyes rested on the side of her face, but Phoebe kept her gaze fixed on her feet until he slipped his hand over hers and curled his fingers.

The words spilled out. Like water. Like blood.

“My other lovers were a sight more eager than you, Sam Fenley,” she said. “They never bothered to undress me fully before we completed the act.”

“The act of making love?”

“The act of sex,” she corrected.

“Fecking idiots is what they were.”

Phoebe agreed but said nothing. She was an idiot, too, she supposed. Before Sam stumbled around with more questions, she told him. Curtly. As calmly as she could.

“I cut myself with a razor.”

His neck bent and she knew he was staring at her legs. It was stupid at this point to try and hide her shame.

Phoebe untied the tapes to her drawers and slipped out of them. They were both naked except for her stockings.

The lines stood out like a legend to a map of her adolescence. A small mountain there when her father had hit Moti hard enough to loosen a tooth. A thin river here when she hadn’t slept for two days and needed something to break through the fog. A cut there when the fear and pain were too much to bear. A cut here when there was no fear or pain or anything at all, and Phoebe worried she might have become a ghost without knowing it.

Sam curled his fingers round her hand tighter and tighter as Phoebe traced the scars and explained how she had a special razor with a pristine blade. That it was the sight of the blade parting flesh that calmed her almost as much as the sweet sting after.

Then the words went dry, and they sat some more.

“Where do you cut yourself now?” he asked. Phoebe sneaked a glance at him studying her feet. She leaned over and untied the ribbons of her garter and rolled down the stockings. Nothing to see there.

“I don’t. It stopped helping after a while,” she said, flexing her toes and shivering. Sam reached over and pulled one of the orange silk coverlets over her shoulders.

For a time, simply existing hurt. Phoebe lied when she insisted she didn’t care what other people did to her or thought about her. The truth was she cared so deeply, she was constantly in pain. The only relief from the pain was cutting herself. It made no sense and Phoebe doubted she would ever be able to explain it thoroughly.

“Are you familiar with Michael Faraday’s experiments with electricity?” she asked.

Sam’s mouth thinned into a straight line. “Are you going to tell me more math made out of letters?”

He’d wanted her to smile, but those muscles were numb.

“Faraday made a number of observations around electrical charges,” she said. The scientific words came easier than explanations having to do with emotions or the strange urges that lived inside her. “He conjectured the excess charge on a conductor stays only on the surface. It never passes through the conductor and has no impact on anything inside of it.”

Another time she might have teased Sam as he repeated her words, his mouth moving but issuing no sound. Instead, Phoebe struggled to make him understand.

“Faraday covered the walls of a room with metal and struck it with electrical charges. Although the effect was spectacular, like lightning crackling across a plain, he proved none of that charge could make its way into the room.”

“I think…” Sam chewed on the inside of his cheek. “The tumult and terrors in your life were the lightning. Wild and frightening.”

Phoebe nodded, then stared down at her toes. “None of it touched me. Nothing hurt. When I was a small child, this was a good thing. When I got older, the numbness scared me. All that lightning across my skin never finding its way inside. I needed to feel something, even if it was a terrible something. At first, a blade was the only way I knew to pierce my armor.”

“Then you found other ways to provoke pain,” he said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

No point in enumerating the variety of ways in which a young aristocratic woman could hurt herself, or others, trotting her self-loathing out for the ton to see. Phoebe wasn’t the only woman in a ballroom to disappear midway through the night and come back more relaxed. Sex, brandy, opium, gambling—the options were endless and most of the time affordable.

“I can’t,” he said, scooping her into a cocoon of silk and laying her down on the piles of velvet, careful not to touch her between the legs. He wasn’t aroused, but he raised his body over hers as a lover might.

“I don’t expect you to now,” Phoebe told him. “You must be disg—”

Sam set his finger on her lips. “I can’t hurt you.”

Phoebe said nothing, not understanding why he was still atop her, then.

“If you like, when you are naughty, I can spank you. Lightly.”

Her jaw dropped as Sam slid his finger from her lips, down her chin, down to the center of her chest where the coverlet edges rested. With the same finger, he gently nudged the coverlet away, uncovering her breasts.

The cold made her nipples hard. It was the cold, wasn’t it? It couldn’t be that Phoebe was aroused after making a cake of herself.

“I cannot go further than that, Phoebe. If you need pain to bring you pleasure—”

Was it desire lingering in Sam’s darkened eyes? Would he still want her?

“I don’t,” she assured him, gasping when he found the line of her collarbone with the tip of his tongue. “I don’t want you to hurt me. I want…”

Slightly fearful, slightly shamed, beginning to understand this didn’t portend the absence of pleasure, Phoebe let hope wriggle free. The memories would never fade, but she put them to the side when Sam whispered of his anticipation against the skin beneath her breasts.

If any man could pull joy from pain, it was Sam Fenley.

Phoebe pulled him up by his hair, shivering when he hissed his pain/pleasure of her touch. He set his bottom teeth to the base of her neck and scraped gently upward, leaving peppery sparks behind until he met her lips with his.

The kisses were forthright. Carnal. He took control and matched his tongue’s thrusts with the movement of his hips, his cock rubbing against her belly. This wasn’t what she wanted, though.

“I want you to please my pretty pink parts,” she said. “Like you would if I were Rosie.”

Sam, the gentleman that he was, readily obliged. From her mouth to her nipples to the backs of her knees until he settled himself between her legs, he suckled and nipped, bit and tongued the sweet pink parts of her, and everything in between.

“So pretty,” he whispered as he spread her with his thumbs then licked her with the flat of his tongue.

The silken texture of his hair brushed against the scars inside her thighs like a feather. Phoebe did not think she could watch and still enjoy the act but Sam, being Sam, turned everything upside down, then back to rights again.

He increased the pressure of his kisses and set one of her legs over his shoulder, stopping only to tell her how good she tasted and how pleased he would be when she came on his tongue.

Phoebe’s eyes closed and her head fell back. She almost left her body, except Sam would not let her.

He growled against her quim, then set his mouth over the pearl at the center of her and flicked it with his tongue until she shook, grabbing handfuls of silk in her fists and crying out.

“Please, Sam. Please make me come.”

So, he did.

She barely heard his self-congratulatory nonsense over the sound of her womb clenching deep within her and the blood running riotous through her veins. Phoebe rolled into a ball, trying to cup the pleasure and keep it close as she throbbed in release for long seconds afterward.

“Are you well, Phoebe-girl?” Sam asked.

“I am…it keeps going and it’s lovely,” she said.

He laughed, that goddamned golden laugh of his, and helped her along to a second climax with his hand. By the time the pleasure began to taper off, Phoebe found herself rolled atop Sam’s hard body, the ribbons of his condom tickling the inside of her thighs.

“You are in control, my lady,” he said, holding her head still for a long, hot kiss, then releasing her and setting his hands behind his head. Everything about him glowed; his body drawing every ray of light to be found in the milky moonlit room, his smile its own small sun and his eyes taking in the sight of Phoebe sitting naked but for the gold silk coverlet she’d draped over her shoulders.

“That cape you wear puts me in mind of a queen,” he told her, his hands restless and petting the tops of her thighs, the sides of her hips.

“Not a princess?” Phoebe asked. Her own fingers traced the path of fine blond hair from between his nipples, down his flat stomach to the thatch surrounding the base of his cock that twitched in anticipation.

“Not a princess,” he promised.

No matter how intense the pleasure he’d given her, Phoebe was still happy the murk covered most of her scars. Not that Sam would see them.

His storm-blue eyes had turned black in the night, and they would not look away from her face. For the first time, Phoebe held herself naked above a lover. Slowly she pushed her hips down, fitting his shaft to her center and wincing slightly at how tightly he fit.

“Go slow, Phoebe-girl,” he said. “I want this night to last a good long time so you never forget how strong you are and the pleasure you deserve.”

The question of what she looked like through Sam’s eyes distracted her from the pleasure. She was older than him by almost five years. Did she look old to him? Did the scars on the inside of her thighs brush against his skin?

As though he read her mind—terrifying thought, that—Sam lifted his arms and cradled her breasts in his hands as she moved slowly back and forth, causing him to gasp.

“By God, you are a beautiful woman,” he said, only awe and wonder in his voice. “The way you look above me; regal but so soft .”

He slipped his palms to her sides and pulled her down for a kiss. Their bodies fused together, and Phoebe gasped when Sam thrust his hips to meet her gentle glide.

“Is that a happy sound or an unhappy sound, Phoebe?” he asked.

“Happy. Even happier if you do it againnnnn,” she moaned.

Clever man, Sam slipped his hand between the two of them and added to her pleasure.

“Trust me. Trust me to make it good.”

Nothing about Sam resembled a supplicant. Swaddled by a dark different than the place they’d come from—a dark mixed with the smell of dried roses, the sounds of skin over velvet, the sensation of safety—Phoebe allowed herself to let down her guard. To trust him.

“Do you know how smooth, like silk, you feel when I run my hand down your back and over your arse?” he whispered, caressing her bottom and pulling her ever tighter against him.

Instead of growing numb, her senses heightened. The slightest of breezes licked her shoulder blades and she shivered with joy. Phoebe grew dizzy with anticipation when Sam moved his mouth to her breast, holding her flush against him, hips grinding against hips.

“By God, you are sweet and wet. I want to put my mouth on you again,” he crooned, as if confiding a secret.

A long red thread of tension wrapped itself from her core to her spine to her nipples and out the top of her. Words broke apart in Phoebe’s head and all she knew was the red thread, the pounding of her heart, the hammering of the pulse at the center of her, and Sam, the source of this pleasure.

Blindfold her and she would find him by smell. By touch. Her body knew this man although this was the first time they were fully naked together.

Phoebe’s climax took her by surprise. One moment she was climbing, the next she was flying through a shower of sparks. Unable to look away, she held Sam’s gaze while she came apart. He took her face in one hand and shouted when he came, thrusting into her again and again.

How glorious. How beautiful.

Joy and contentment welled up in her and came out in a tiny burst of laughter. Sam, being Sam, smiled so widely, his face must have hurt.

Until Phoebe burst into tears.

Sam rolled them onto their sides without saying a word and held her close, running his fingers over her scalp and through her hair in a steady rhythm. He stopped only once to remove the condom, then pulled a coverlet over them both.

“I—I don’t know—” No words could explain why she cried. She didn’t even know herself.

“S’all right,” he whispered, brushing her cheek with the side of his thumb. “My sisters do the same when they are overwhelmed.”

He offered her a corner from one of the bolts of cloth next to their heads, and Phoebe blew her nose.

“You think your talents at lovemaking have overwhelmed me, I suppose,” she said after she’d blown her nose and dried the tears on her cheeks.

“No, Phoebe-girl,” he said. “I know my talents have overwhelmed you, but I don’t think this is why you are crying.”

Phoebe-girl. She should hate that name. Sam had her in bed, but he addressed her like a child?

She tried to work up a rage at this, but instead she snuggled her head on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. Because it didn’t sound like he was talking down to her.

It sounded like affection.