Page 7 of The Maid

The ache between my thighs pulsed like a second heartbeat.

“Thank you, Betsy,” he said. He knew my name? His voice had dropped half an octave, and his hand kept moving, lazy and shameless, his eyes never leaving mine. “That will be all. For tonight.”

I curtseyed—Gran would have been proud of that curtsey, if nothing else—and walked out with my chin up and my knees like syllabub.

For tonight.

It was only a matter of time. And we both knew it.

Three days later, Mrs. Marshton sent me up to clean His Grace’s bathing chamber.

At eleven o’clock in the morning. When the whole house knew the Duke returned from his ride at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Bless that woman.

The bathing chamber was a marvel—a great copper tub big enough for two—I was beginning to suspect that was not an accident—warm light through the tall window, the lingering scent of sandalwood soap and him. I rolled my sleeves to the elbow and bent myself over the rim of that tub like an offering on an altar.

I heard the door open, and I did not turn around. I scrubbed.

I scrubbed devoutly. I put my whole back into it—which meant my rump rose high in the air with every long stroke of the cloth, my skirts pulled taut across it, my unbound breasts swinging and swaying beneath me like the clappers of two soft bells.

The copper made a fine mirror, all warped and golden. I watched the tall blur of him stop in the doorway. Watched it go very still.

Come and see, Your Grace. Come and see what a hard-working girl I am.

His boots came across the floor without hurry. My breath went shallow and quick, my heart slamming, and still I scrubbed, though I couldn’t have said whether the tub was clean or filthy or on fire.

Then the warmth of him came down over me like a wave.

He molded himself along my backside, knees bracketing mine, one hand braced upon the tub’s rim beside my own…and I felt it, pressed hot and hard against the cleft of my arse through skirts and trousers both. The ridge of his—what had the Guide called it?—his cock.

That thick, scandalous word from page after wicked page, and here was the very article, branding itself against me, and it was nothing like the tidy little illustrations. A whimper escaped me before I could bite it back.

“Careful, lass,” he murmured, deep and amused, right against my ear. “You’ll scrub a hole through my tub.”

His hands slid beneath me and cupped both breasts through the thin gray wool.

We groaned together—his low and reverent, mine embarrassingly close to a sob. His hands were enormous and warm, and they squeezed, testing the weight and the give of me, and I learned in that instant that my breasts were not merely for show after all. Every knead of his fingers pulled a thread that ran straight down through my belly to the aching place between my thighs.

I caught him, I thought, giddy and breathless. The fish has taken the hook.

Though bent over a tub with a duke’s cock against my arse, I confess it was rather unclear who had caught whom.

In that moment, interestingly, I wasn’t thinking of thirty pounds a year at all. I was thinking of the pleasure of being bred.

The cloth dropped from my fingers with a wet slap. Slowly—slowly, so as not to lose one inch of contact—I straightened, sliding up the whole hard length of him until my back was flush to his chest and my head fell against his shoulder.

He rumbled his approval into my hair. His fingers found my nipples through the fabric and plucked, rolling them like a man testing ripe fruit at market, and my knees simply resigned their position.

“Oh—” I arched into his hands, shameless, whimpering, and ground my arse back against him in small, desperate circles, dragging along that hot ridge just to hear the breath hiss between his teeth.

“You’re a hot little lass, aren’t you… Betsy?”

He remembered my name. A duke, with twelve children and half the county’s mothers on his ledger, and he remembered my name. I could have wept with triumph.

“Y-yes, Your Grace.” Another slow pluck of my nipples, and I gasped, “Please, Your Grace⁠—”

“Please what?” His mouth was open against my throat now, tasting my skin, his beard scraping deliciously below my ear. He nipped, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world. “Please… stop touching you?”