Page 11 of The Maid

I was to be bred like one of his best mares, and I was wildly aroused by the thought.

What could I do to convince him?

And then I remembered the way he’d reacted when he’d pressed his thumb against my tongue and murmured that’ll do nicely, and I knew my plan of attack.

Page twelve. The Supplicant Swan.

I slid from his lap to the carpet between his boots.

The Guide’s instructions surfaced as I knelt, unbidden as a hymn in church. On her knees, as if in prayer, the woman bobs her head, the movement akin to a swan. She takes her lover’s member into her mouth, as deep as she can, albeit if he is endowed that might not be very far, and uses her tongue and hands to make him ready.

His cock stood level with my face, curving up from his open falls, that bead of moisture back at its crown, and this close the scent of him—sweat and leather—made my mouth water. I could no longer blame breakfast.

A firm grasp, the Guide reminded me, for the instrument is not so delicate as it appears.

I gripped him at the root. He exhaled through his nose, slow, the way he’d breathed over my breasts at the brandy tray—a man savoring a course he’d ordered well in advance.

I leaned in and licked the bead from the tip of him.

He tasted of salt and clean sweat, blood-warm.

The sound he made was quiet, but I felt it through my hand where I held him, and triumph, neat as brandy, went straight to my head. I had done that. Betsy, the good girl, nineteen years of honor intact, had pulled that sound out of a duke with two inches of her tongue.

Begin at the crown, said page twelve, for it is the most grateful territory. Attend to the ridge beneath with the flat of the tongue.

I attended. Thoroughly. He groaned outright, one hand tightening in my hair—a rein laid gently on a neck—and said, rough, “Aye. Just there. Again.”

I took him into my mouth.

The Guide had devoted two full pages to the Supplicant Swan and not one line of them to the jaw. Thick as my wrist, I’d thought, admiring; my jaw now filed a formal complaint against my earlier admiration. I resolved to write the author a strongly worded letter.

Later.

Breathe through the nose, the Guide counseled. Let the throat learn patience. What the mouth cannot honor, the hand must.

So I breathed, and my hand worked the root of him where my mouth could not reach, and I learned him by inches—the weight of him on my tongue, the impossible softness of the skin, the twitch of him when I hollowed my cheeks and pulled.

The sounds alone were beyond obscene. Gran’s lessons had promised a wife’s duty and a maiden’s peril.

The Guide had promised power.

The Guide, as usual, had it right. A duke sat above me in his shirtsleeves with his head tipped back and his breath ragged, and every stroke of my tongue moved him like weather. His pleasure sat quite literally upon my tongue, exactly as page twelve had promised, and it was mine to grant.

“Look at you,” he rasped, gathering my hair tighter so he could watch my face. “My little virgin, reading the books Mrs. Marshton shares by candlelight. Now—Christ—now here’s my diligent little scholar, kneeling on my carpet with her mouth full of cock, sucking me like she was born knowing.”

I moaned around him.

He swore with impressive range.

The ache between my own thighs had built all through it, slick gathering on my folds with nothing to ease it, and my free hand began to drift down my belly of its own sinful accord⁠—

“No.”

I froze. His voice had gone ducal: the voice of a man reminding a girl who owned the carpet she knelt on.

“Hands where I put them, lass. Your pleasure’s mine to give.” His thumb stroked once over my cheekbone, where it hollowed around him. “And I’m not giving it just now.”

I whimpered in protest. Around his cock. Which—I felt him swell against my tongue, heard his breath tear—turned out to serve him very nicely indeed.