Joy V. Sheridan writes

Charity Amour

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE part 2

They became simultaneously aware of Charity moving into an upright position on the seat. She seemed to have come out of her intoxicated state and sat gripping the seat with both hands pressed tight onto the lounger, her eyes staring accusingly at them. She said naught, but her tremors were visible from a few feet away. Madame studied her with a cold detachment: “Perhaps Your Lordship,” her voice had been steeped in honey once more and she was doing her utmost to pander to the gentleman's rank and authority.

For he had indeed found her out and that anger he had distributed upon his entrance to the Château des Amourettes might very easily flare into life and be directed against her again: “She is bad luck?” 

She shifted her gaze away from Charity and her icen eyes looked hard into Lord Rispian’s own berry-brown orbs. 

“Dunno of that, I’m sure. But one thing seems for certain. There’s one game that’s all but forfeited now. Drat that oh-so-noble cousin of mine! I mean, Natalie, I sincerely believed we had come to some sound agreement between the two of us and things looked to be working admirably in our favour. Prithee,” – as she had feared, Lord Rispian’s voice had dropped an octave or two and now seemed to hint at a kindling venom, “that mayhap it was some of your portion of the work which brought the devil and his minions, in the shape of the alerted Lord Seyton Clover and his entourage, to prematurely spoil the show?” 

“How mean you?” Madame’s voice warbled with apprehension, not comprehending his words. “Oh, I dunno, but all this witchery and such like you steep yourself in, well, maybe something went amiss?” Lord Rispian looked thoughtfully down into his now empty glass. 

“Your Lordship! I run a place of delights, a house of pleasure. What, have you taken stories you have heard, rumours, you who know me so well and would believe that I should deliberately set about such traffickings? No. No, Your Lordship has got it wrong! Oh, mayhap, a little potion here, a little powder there, but there is no harm in it. Anyway, my girls and their clients, my associates if you like, they enjoy this frilling and rouching. It adds an extra spicing to their affairs: it lends an element of the ...unusual, the forbidden!” 

 

Madame was working hard to regain her ascendancy, to re-enchant her former lover, to captivate him, enslave him afresh. If not with words, then with the messages her body was sending only too clearly towards the abashed and now wavering nobleman. 

“But doncha think, Madame, that you went a bit too far with her?” 

He swung his head around and stared at Charity, still sitting, looking as though she had been nailed by fear to the very edge of the seat. 

“She is not used to the drinks. That is all, Fitzi. Why, I was only jesting when you arrived. If you would care to find out for yourself, you would see she still maintains her untouched state.” 

“Humm,” Lord Rispian sniffed, only half convinced: “’S funny Natalie," he continued, still looking in Charity’s direction, “But I felt I could not wait to take the wench. I have been, over the last few months, consumed with a demented desire for her. And then, things happening as they do, well it all but takes the edge off a man’s appetite. Why the girl’s unskilled, doesn’t even know how to kiss properly. I mean, in the French fashion. Oh I know, she has the biggest pair of tits I have ever seen on a well-figured young gal, but there are other things which make a man’s loins kindle with the heat of desire.”

The half-smile now upon Lord Rispian’s mouth and the faraway look in his eyes gave Madame d’Esprit all the coaxing she needed. There might yet be a way to bring her former ally, latterly an adversary, back into her camp again. She moved closer to him: 

“Do you remember, Fitzi, just those few years past, when we first met and spent such an idyllic time at my little maison near Bordeaux? Oh, say that you do,” she had snaked her arm about his neck and was looking with fixed ardour into his face, moving thus so, that her body came pressed quite close to his. 

“Yes, I do, Natalie. ’Twould be a mindless fool who could quick forget rapture.” 

Unconscious of what he was doing, Lord Rispian’s free hand, for he was still holding the tumbler, went about the woman’s waist. 

“Do you remember what things I taught you then? You were as green as salad, my love. I wonder if you recall a certain...game?” Charity’s ears were straining to catch their conversation. She was intent on fleeing from them and the house as quickly as she could. Now that she had come around from out the dream-like state and had seen that she was not forsaken, nor forgotten, by him whom she most loved dearly, she was prepared to commit murder if that alone should ensure her pathway to freedom. “The little house, Remember. So close to the sea. I still have it, Fitzroy, still have the house. We could go there sometime soon, just for old times’ sake.” “Yes, ‘La Farouche’. Do you still keep it reasonable?” “I do. There is a cottage there and I have a man who keeps the soil turned and the few vines in good repair.” 

Madame was tugging at Lord Rispian’s hand, pulling him towards the bed: “But maybe Fitzroy, you should be curious to know if I am possessed of any newly-acquired skills?” 

She had thrown a note of playful seductiveness into her tones, and was rubbing his hand hard up and down her partly exposed breasts. “Perhaps I should, my dear, perhaps I should. Shouldn’t we close the chamber first?” He let himself be arranged on top of the bed. “Why bother,” said Madame, who was now simulating the sort of lust which needed quick appeasement. In her mind’s eye she bore the picture of the dark gentleman, even yet as she had left him, asleep, deeply asleep and closeted in the adjacent chamber. 

The dawn-light was more pronounced now and as though to darken their antics, Madame walked across to the curtains and pulled the stuff of the curtains flush, to stop out any light. 

“I have an idea. Why not, by means of a distraction, get Charity to act as your pillow Fitzroy. Come now: bring her to you, shall I?”

His lordship did not hear for he was intent on loosening his suddenly restraining clothing. Madame lifted Charity off the couch, her hand goring into the flesh of the girl’s arm, feeling for all the world, to Charity, like an eagle’s talons.

She man-handled a breast, placing it into his lordship’s hard sucking mouth, very, very firmly.

Then, without further ado, she was down upon the man, feeling for his engorging penis. Going about the business she knew so well. 

Charity had lost track of time, though in fact, no more than fifteen minutes had passed, and Lord Rispian was in such a state of arousal, he was all but ready to shower the world, or the ceiling at least, with his unspent dynastic hoards. 

Madame, panting and professionally competent and meanwhile thinking back on her earlier cavortings with the dark gentleman, Monsieur Le Bon, urged his member to complete its speech of tactile empire-building. 

He had loosened his hold on Charity, and she, eyeing both the leaping a-kimboed figure of Madame d’Esprit and the heaving bulk of Lord Rispian, decided on her move. They both appeared to have their eyes tightly shut; their minds amidst the parliaments of sensuality. Throwing herself off the bed, she ran like the mistral, out of the chamber, her bare breasts moving like warmed-up glaciers. Pausing, she turned and touched the key in the lock. She moved it to lock the door. Looking rapidly to left and right of her, she headed the only way she could, down along the deeply carpeted and brocade hung corridor.