Rose of Ebony Read online

  The Williams children were just as happy to break rules when they could get away with it, although they got into scrapes because it was fun, not because it broke rules. They were just as quick to share their adventures with their mother, though.

  Natasha Williams, the Countess of Innesford, was the actual host of this annual gathering, although for these five days the normal roles of host and guest were blurred. She had raised her children in defiance of all society expectations. Raymond had sometimes envied the Williams set as he grew up, for they had unfettered access to their parents at all times of the day, every day, not just for these precious five days each year. Seth Williams, the late Earl, had been passionately against segregating his children. The Williams family had scandalized society by encouraging their children to talk when they wanted to, to share their troubles and woes, to hug with abandon and to love openly and affectionately.

  Natasha Williams had proposed the original Great Family Gathering, fourteen years ago. She had also insisted upon the unfettered mingling of children and adults. Raymond remembered that first year with a fondness that sometimes stole his breath. It had been five days of sheer delight and pure happiness.

  Very early in the evening, Raymond felt the strain of travelling begin to tell. He rose from the settee where he had stayed for the evening, while a constant cycle of cousins, brothers and sisters had sat next to him. They had not seen him for a year. Lilly, who was the oldest Williams girl, had hugged him before settling her petticoats and hoops and asking him in her quiet way to tell her what he was feeling.

  It was an odd question, one that only a Williams could ask. Raymond had deflected her probing uneasily. It was difficult to speak of the odd ache in his chest, even to Lilly. The strain of putting her off finished the last of his energy. He got to his feet, nodded to everyone in the room and moved over to where Corcoran was standing by the sideboard, trying to look like he didn’t care that child-sized feet were tracking dirt over cushions and carpets, that small hands were ruffling the drapes, or dropping crumbs and cordial in crevices that would take a week to clean.

  “I was hoping I could use the carriage house again, Corcoran,” Raymond told him.

  “I anticipated you might, my lord,” Corcoran said stiffly. “Your things are already laid out and the bed made up.”

  Raymond gave him a grateful smile. “You are not going to try to argue me out of sleeping in staff quarters this year, Corcoran? You’re slipping.” On the very first Gathering, Raymond had argued that he did not want to sleep in the rowdy children’s dormitory that had been set up in the attic, where whispering, giggles and pillow fights went on all night. He had already been eighteen by then. Neither did he want to get lumped in with the adults, or worse, hear them move about their suites, talking and laughing, while he slept alone in one corner of one of the grand beds that were all to be had in the guest rooms of Innesford House.

  Natasha had been an unexpected champion of his desire to use the quarters above the carriage house. “Raymond is caught in the middle,” she had told Corcoran and Elise, who had been horrified by Raymond’s demand. “He’s too old to be with the children all the time and not old enough to enjoy our staid company for longer than a few minutes. Let him sleep in the carriage house. Everyone needs time alone to reflect.”

  Corcoran had protested, until Uncle Seth had lifted a brow and looked at him. That had silenced Corcoran that year, yet the redoubtable butler had argued every year since. His sense of proprietary had definite limits. Sleeping in servants’ quarters pushed beyond those limits.

  Corcoran looked at Raymond now with an expression that was both resigned and sympathetic at once. “It seemed inappropriate to bother you about lowering your standards for yet one more year.” Something glowed in Corcoran’s eyes. “You have difficulties enough, my lord.”

  “Thank you,” Raymond told him, with heartfelt gratitude. He stepped out through the big French doors onto the gravel and walked over to the carriage house. The lights from the formal drawing room fell upon the gravel in slanted squares, lighting the way. It was cool out, but not cold and it was refreshing after the stuffy air in the crowded and noisy drawing room.

  The quarters above the carriage house were reached by an external set of steps. They had once been an art studio for some ancestor of Uncle Seth’s, who had fancied themselves an artist. One of the landscapes the uncle had painted still hung on the wall at the top landing of the stairs and did much to explain why his ardour for oils had not been public knowledge.

  The studio was warm and clean. Despite the years since it had served its intended function, it still held a faint tint of paint in the air. There were odd corners to the single, big room, made by the shape of the carriage house beneath, big windows to catch the south light and oak panelling on the walls that had been painted white to encourage the light. The big bed that dominated the end of the room had hand-painted enamel plaques attached to the swirling lines of brass and copper, while the bed was covered in an antique lace bedspread tatted by some long-ago lady of the house.

  The hint of bohemian interests, the quiet and the light had made this room one of the best elements of the annual gathering. It was this room that brought Raymond back to the Gather every year, despite some years having to travel across Europe to arrive here in time.

  He turned out the gas light at the top of the stairs and closed the door on the rest of the world with a heavy sigh. This was a different type of being alone. He had deliberately sought this isolation, for the peace was never truly quiet here. He could hear the distant thunder of salty combers against the cliffs, the shriek of the wind over the top of them and the murmur of the family in the main house. They were close enough that he could seek their company as soon as he needed to.

  He removed his coat and cravat with impatient tugs. Part of Corcoran’s objections to Raymond using the carriage house was that a valet could not be near to hand to take care of Raymond’s needs, yet Raymond had privately enjoyed the independence. When everyone was running about the place in swim suits, or with rolled up shirt sleeves and loosened basques to better wallop the croquet balls, the odd missed button was not the disaster it would be in a St James drawing room.

  He slid his waistcoat buttons undone as he threw the coat and cravat over the back of the velvet chair in the corner. The collar pins tinkled as they dropped into the china dish on the dressing table. His collar and cuffs settled next to the dish.

  The tap on the door was soft, yet Raymond jerked upright as if someone had hammered on it with both fists. He stared at the door, his heart racing. He was expecting no one, although that quiet little tap reminded him of multiple occasions in previous years where the visitor had announced themselves in the same way.

  It couldn’t be her…could it?

  He hurried to the door, his heart moving faster than his feet, cracked it open a few inches and looked out.

  She was standing on the landing, a great fold of her skirt in her hand from the climb up the stairs, her pale face and big eyes looking up at him. “Raymond, it was you my secretary saw in Truro,” she murmured. “I couldn’t believe it when he told me. I had to come and see…” She bit her full lip.

  Raymond gripped her wrist and drew her into the room and closed the door behind her. “Susanna, I wasn’t expecting you—”

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Susanna said quickly. “I thought, that perhaps, as things have changed…”

  His heart wouldn’t steady itself. “I only arrived this afternoon. I didn’t think…” He shook his head. “Never mind. It’s all irrelevant, because you are here after all.” He let his gaze travel over her. She was wearing a deep blue velvet jacket that featured lace at the neck and satin lapels. No bonnet, for Susanna rarely bothered with such things. Her hair, ebony black and glowing in the gaslight, was piled upon her head in loose curls. There would be a single pin or clip in it somewhere that, once removed, would let her hair tumble upon her shoulders.

  Her face was very pale
, while her black brows rose in smooth curves over perfectly blue eyes that watched him warily, waiting for him to choose what happened next.

  The skirt she clutched in her hand was dark blue satin that matched the lapels of her jacket. It hung straight from her hips to gather about her boots in deep folds, unlike every other woman whose skirts spread wider than most doors, in pretty domes that made the most of their waists and forced the woman to negotiate narrow spaces carefully.

  “Where are your crinolines?” Raymond asked, his voice strained.

  “I left my carriage in the turnaround at the top of the drive to the house. I left my hoops in the carriage along with my underthings.” The corner of her mouth turned up. “It is easier to pass silently through woods at night if I have my skirt over my arm.”

  The thought of Susanna’s slender legs flashing in the moonlight as she dashed through the woods from the road to the carriage house made Raymond’s heart squeeze. His body tightened.

  Slowly he put his hand on her waist.

  “Then I should stay?” Susanna asked quietly, her voice low.

  “You should,” Raymond said. He drew her to him.

  Susanna pressed her hands against his chest. “I want you, Raymond. I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

  Electrifying words. Invisible fingers drew up his spine, making his already tight body tighten even more. Everything seemed to focus upon his groin. His shaft was already stirring. Anticipating.

  Raymond kissed her. Her lips were cool against his. She had just stepped inside. She slid her mouth from his and trailed her lips over his jaw, to slide her tongue over the flesh beneath his ear, making him shudder again.

  As she caressed his neck and jaw with her mouth, her fingers quickly slid the buttons of his shirt undone. She pushed the shirt and waistcoat aside and tugged at the undershirt beneath.

  Raymond was as happy to hurry things as she. His body was throbbing with the promise of what was about to take place. It had been four years since Susanna had come to visit him, yet it felt like only yesterday, for the memory of her touch and her whispers, her assurances that she wanted him, had never fully faded, despite the rigours of marriage and fatherhood.

  Did that make him a wicked man? It was a question that had he had often asked himself lately.

  Had Susanna reached into his mind and plucked from it his desire to see her? It had been buried so deeply that he had not been aware of the need until he had seen her upon the landing in the moonlight just now. Then the realization had swept over him that this was exactly what he needed. Yet, somehow, Susanna had guessed.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered than that she was here in his arms. He would worry later about what sort of sinner these moments made him.

  He pushed the braces down his arms with Susanna’s help, shrugged out of the shirt and waistcoat. While she bundled them together and pulled the shirt from his trousers, he removed the undershirt.

  She rested her hands against his bare chest, right over his pounding heart. “So strong,” she whispered. “Ah, you incite me to wickedness with your splendour.” She pressed her lips against his chest, as she dropped her hands to his trousers.

  Raymond stayed still, letting her work on the buttons. She was better at it than he and his fingers felt thick and clumsy right now, anyway.

  He saw the clip in her hair, as she bent to kiss his stomach just above the band of his trousers, making his belly ripple. As she freed the last button, he pulled the clip from her hair. As usual, the curly locks loosened and rained down onto her back.

  She glanced up at him with a wicked smile. “You know me too well.” She slipped the tips of her fingers inside his loosened trousers and drew them down his hips. She caught his underpants in her hands on the way and drew them both down to the top of his boots, freeing his manhood so it could spring properly upright, almost aching with the need to be touched.

  Susanna crouched, the blue satin pooling around her and removed his boots one at a time, along with his pants and underwear, leaving him deliciously naked.

  “My turn,” he told her, pulling her back onto her feet and drawing the lace away from her neck. It was a simple length of wide lace tied to cascade over the opening of the jacket. It also disguised that she was wearing nothing beneath the jacket.

  Raymond’s breath caught. His manhood—his cock, as she had taught him to think of it—pulsed at the glimpse of her softly rounded breasts beneath the jacket. Susanna always surprised him in some way. Sometimes the surprise came from her inventiveness in bed. Sometimes, from her wicked anticipation of carnal delights, as she had done tonight.

  Susanna loosened the many buttons on the jacket, so the front of it separated. Beneath was her creamy flesh and the skirt, fastened about her pleasingly small waist.

  “Take it off,” Raymond told her, his voice hoarse.

  She removed the jacket. Her high, small breasts gleamed. The tips were sharply erect. Susanna circled one of them with her fingertip, watching his face as she moved.

  With her other hand, she reached for his shaft and gripped it.

  Raymond groaned, as the hunger leapt in his belly. He pushed her hands aside, grasped her waist and pulled her over to the high end of the big bed. She kicked the blue satin skirt out of the way of her feet as she went. He moved around her so that he was standing behind her. “Hold the bed,” he told her.

  She reached for the bars with her small hands and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Lower.”

  She bent, her rear pushing out the satin in a rounded curve. Raymond ran his hands over it. The need to bury himself in her was pounding in his mind, taking over all other thought. He picked up the hem of the skirt and flipped it over her back, exposing her pale backside. She wore her black stockings, held up by high garters, boots and that was all. Everything else, all the layers a lady wore to maintain respectability, were back in the carriage that waited for her.

  Raymond gripped her hips. She did not protest that he was moving too fast, which was as well. He didn’t know if he could stop, now. It was as if he had been hungry for years, the hunger building and building, until she had been put before him and he suddenly understood how he had been deprived. He trembled with it.

  His cock found her opening and he thrust into her in a single, deep, hard jerk of his hips. It pulled a groan out of him and Susanna sighed. “Harder,” she told him. Her flesh around him squeezed, signalling her pleasure.

  The same pleasure gripped him. It crawled from the pit of his belly, stirred in his testicles, made his cock swell even harder. He thrust again, the deep satisfaction at being inside her supplanted by rising excitement.

  His thrusts were so strong, the bed shuddered with each stroke. Susanna just clung harder to the frame, her hips moving as she encouraged him.

  His rhythm hastened. His climax was tearing its way up from the sub terrain where it slept, ready to spring roaring to life. He dug his fingers into her flesh as the power of it stole his breath and his hearing. He spilled into her, shuddering, then grew still.

  His heart, though, thundered on. Every extremity tingled.

  The hunger was still there. It moved restlessly in him, still not satisfied.

  Raymond pulled out of her and stood her up again. He fumbled with the fastening on her skirt, until she smiled and undid the buttons and stays. The satin dropped around her boots and she stepped out of it.

  Raymond scooped her off her feet and dropped her on the bed. She gave a breathless, small laugh as he reared over her, her pale thighs shifting restlessly, giving him a glimpse of pink flesh between.

  He drew her hands up to the rails at the top of the bed. “Hold them again,” he told her. “Don’t let go.”

  She spread her arms and held onto the brass. “Oooh,” she breathed, her eyes narrowing and growing hot. “Something drives you tonight and it’s not me.”

  “Shh.” He picked up her knee and spread it, shoved the other out of the way with his knee and buried himself to t
he hilt inside her again. She was hot and slippery and rippled around him.

  Raymond rode her hard and Susanna merely panted and coaxed him, bringing her knee over his hip and pressing him harder against him. It was a goad. He groaned and grabbed the bedrail himself, using it as leverage to drive himself even harder and deeper.

  Perspiration built at his temples. His heart strained with the need to empty himself of the writhing, coiling emotions that had laid restlessly in his heart for too long now.

  He came with a cry, straining so hard he could feel the pressure in his neck and shoulders and the small of his back.

  He held his weight off her with one arm and hung his head, recovering his breath.

  Susanna rested her hand against his cheek. “It’s fine,” she whispered. “Everything is good.”

  Raymond pulled out of her and lay on his back next to her, breathing hard.

  Susanna lifted herself on to one arm and studied him. She brushed the hair out of his eyes with a gentle movement. “That was a long time coming, wasn’t it?”

  Raymond sighed. “Yes,” he admitted. Years, in fact.

  Her smile was knowing. “There is more to go, isn’t there?”

  He considered the state of his body. The roil of his thoughts and his heart. “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Hmm…” She bent and pressed her mouth against his chest, then trailed lower, licking his flesh and stirring his need. By the time she reached his cock, he was completely erect again, eager for her touch.

  Her lips closed around his shaft, hot and skilled and Raymond closed his eyes, letting the pleasure take him.

  It was always better when he kept his eyes closed.

  * * * * *

  It was close to two in the morning when Susanna got to her feet and dressed once more in slow movements. She didn’t ask for his help. Without a corset and linens, she did not need a second person to tie or button or fasten where she could not reach.