The Tainted Love of a Captain

He set the empty glass down, then unbuttoned his coat, raising his eyebrows at her in a gesture to tell her that he was looking forward to what would come next. That would taste sweet too.

With a cheeky smile she started undoing the buttons of her dress, hurrying to get her clothes off as last time she had hurried to get them on before they had separated.

She stepped out of her dress as he pulled off his shirt, his braces hanging loose at his sides.

She untied the tapes of her petticoats as he took off his boots. Then she sat beside him and rolled down her stockings as he took his off too. She stood, then, and turned her back to him, so he could pull the lacing free from her corset and after he’d completed the task she stripped off her chemise while he stood to take off his trousers and underwear.

When she’d taken off her drawers, he looked at her. It was a hot day, there was no need to rush for the warmth of the bed. But there had been no need for her to do so last time, yet she had done.

She looked at him and did not move, seemingly trapped in his gaze. She had a perfectly proportioned body, small breasts, a curve to her hips and long limbs.

She took a pin out of her hair. Some of the copper spirals fell down and touched the top of one pert breast. She pulled another pin out. More hair fell. He walked forward and began taking out pins too, until all her hair had fallen.

He held her hand and tipped the pins from her palm to join those in his, then set them aside with their clothes.

When he returned to her, he looked at her hair, touching it as he’d done the other day. It was such an unusual colour. He had lain with women with red hair before but not with such a rich colour as this. He wound it around his fingers and drew her closer, tilting her head back so that he brought her lips to his.

She opened her mouth instantly and their tongues began to dance. But their interaction still felt nothing like it had with other women.

Truth and honesty. That was what made her different from the women he’d bedded before her. She seemed to hide nothing of her nature or emotions.

He let her hair go and instead squeezed her breast as they continued kissing.

In answer, her fingers stroked along his erection, before closing around it.

He continued kissing her and let her touch him. It was the usual way for a whore to reach out and arouse him quickly. But this was not that.

After a few moments he ended the kiss and stepped away from her. He was still unsheathed. She climbed on the bed as he found his sheath and put it on, then he joined her.

She lay on top of the covers, not beneath them. It was too hot and she was clearly less shy today. He knelt between her open legs and slid his fingers inside her, watching his fingers work as she reclined. Her arms lifted and lay above her head, and her eyes shut. Even her eyelashes and eyebrows were a beautiful copper colour.

The expression on her face was one of focus, her mind was concentrating on the movement of his fingers, and her breaths were shallow and slow.

With her eyes shut and her arms relaxed and resting above her head she soared to her height and sighed as Eros’s bliss swept over her. Just that. Just a quiet sigh of pleasure. No writhing or crying out to make him think he was the best lover ever known. Just a short sigh of breath and sound.

He leant forward, resting the weight of his body on his hands beside her shoulders, then he looked down, angled himself and pressed into her.

When he looked back up at her face her eyes opened and the mixture of green and light brown looked at him as he moved within her. Her expression asked the strangest questions, as though she found him as much of an enigma as he found her.

Her front teeth pressed into her bottom lip as he continued working

He bent his head and kissed her again. She tasted of the lemonade and the icing on the bun.

The relief—the all-encompassing sensations of intercourse overtook him, and he let them, bathed in them, and let his spirit heal some more. Her fingertips pressed into his arms as she clung to him while he worked. Sounds of his relief carried on his breath with the sound of her pleasure.

His end came without him even attempting to change position and make this last. It did not need to last; it was the perfect escape just as it was.

When he’d finished he rolled on to his back and smiled at the ceiling, then bizarrely laughter gathered in his throat.

She leant up on her elbow and her fingers stroked over his cheek. ‘You make me happy.’

His hand lifted and brushed her hair to set it behind her ear. ‘You make me happy too.’

‘I am going to have some more lemonade. Would you like some?’

‘You are daring to risk the sourness.’

‘For the sweetness that catches on another part of my tongue, yes.’

He smiled. ‘Yes. I will have more lemonade.’

She got up and brought the full glasses back to the bed. He sat up and took his. She put her glass down on the chest beside the bed, then turned and brought over what was left of the plate of sugary buns.

It was the oddest picnic; sitting on top of the bed, naked, drinking lemonade and eating the buns as a warm breeze swept through the window and stirred the hairs on his skin. He’d not think about home again when he tasted lemonade, he’d remember this.

Once the sugar of the lemonade and buns had replenished his strength, he set the empty plate aside. Then with a smile, he turned and took the empty glass from her hand.

He indulged himself again, enjoying her body as she enjoyed his. He’d always believed that he gave the women he’d bedded as much pleasure as he’d received. He doubted it now. With Charlotte… The unguarded expressions on her face and in her eyes and the sounds she made said she genuinely enjoyed what he did and she was earnest in her attempt to please him in response.

When he walked her back, he did not stop at the corner where they’d met earlier, he walked on past it towards Colonel Hillier’s house and damn—he thought about her with that old man. He did not want the thought in his head. He pushed it aside.

He stopped walking a street away from Hillier’s. She curtsied to him, in an awkward gesture. As she’d done the other day. He smiled, rejecting a desire to kiss her, then before they separated he arranged to meet with her again the next day.

In his own bed at the barracks, in the dark, he thought of her, of being in bed with her. A sharp breath escaped his throat as he awoke from a dream aroused with hot, damp skin. He had not dreamt of war. In his dream Charlotte had been unbuttoning his trousers with a promise in her eyes.

A keenness to finish his duty and see her gripped at the muscles in his stomach.

When he met her, he took her to a different inn. He’d decided it was better not to form a pattern. But he arranged for there to be refreshment in the room once more and they lay together twice again. Both things were novelties that he’d enjoyed the day before.

He could not then see her for four days; his rota of duties did not allow it and so the urge to kiss her as they said goodbye was even stronger because he knew it would be days before he could do so again. It was also harder to not think about her with Hillier—about what might happen in Hillier’s house at night.

But she had not spoken of it and he did not wish to acknowledge it. Nor even think about it! He yelled the words into his thoughts to silence them.

Chapter 4

There was a travelling trunk in the middle of the hall. Charlie clasped the bannister and stopped on the stairs as she looked at Mr Rook, the butler. ‘Who?’

‘Colonel Hillier is travelling to London, Miss.’

It was not an arrival then, but Mark about to leave. He’d said nothing to her yesterday. Yet that was not abnormal. She was his servant as much as anyone else in the house; he had no obligation to tell her anything.

She walked down the last few steps as he walked into the hall. The front door opened and men came in to lift the trunk out to the carriage.

‘How long are you likely to be away?’

He looked over. ‘Hello, Charlotte. I am not sure, a few days perhaps.’

A few days. She would have the house to herself for a few days.

He came to her and held her hands, then leant forward and kissed her lips. She pressed her lips back against his because if she did not he complained. Yet Mark’s kisses made her wish to wipe her mouth afterwards. Harry did not make her feel like that. She liked his kisses.

The hall was busy as the final preparations for Mark’s journey were undertaken. She remained there and watched, leaning back against the newel post. Then when the door finally closed behind Mark, she looked at the grandfather clock. It was twenty minutes after she had walked downstairs, a little after eleven. Harry had said he could not meet her because he had to work through the night. But if he had been working through the night then in the day he was free.

Her feet carried her across the hall and into Mark’s office, where she found out some paper, a quill and ink. She was not very good at reading and writing, but she knew enough to write what she wished to tell Harry.

She took everything back to her room and sat at her dressing table, then picked up the small ink bottle to open it. Her arm accidently caught the top of her perfume decanter and knocked it over. She hastily pulled the paper out of the way and righted the decanter, then mopped up the spilt perfume with a handkerchief from the drawer. But a few drops had fallen on the paper and so it smelt of the essence of roses when she began to write.

The tip of the quill scratched out the words, then she let the ink dry, folded the letter and sealed it with wax so no one but Harry would open it. She put on her bonnet, but did not call for Tilly to accompany her on the walk. She had not taken Tilly with her on the days she’d met Harry at the inns and to take her again now would stir questions she did not care to answer.

She went to the inn she had gone to the last time she’d written to Harry and gave the letter to a boy who was clearing out the stables, with a coin to encourage him to take it immediately. Then she gave a groom, who tried to stop the boy, money to let the boy go on her errand.

The day was cloudy and the sea loud as it rolled up on to the pebbles while she walked back to the house. There had been a storm last night and it had stirred up the energy in the sea, making the waves higher and seemingly angrier as they charged up towards the seafront. Yet there were still a number of bathing carriages out in the water, where some of the wealthy had chosen to swim.

Her strides kicked at her petticoats in her haste as she hurried back to Mark’s. It was going to be an intolerable day if Harry did not come. She would be wandering about the house awaiting him and she would be so disappointed. He had to come.

~

‘There is a letter for you.’

Every muscle in Harry’s body jolted as the envelope landed lightly on his stomach a second after he’d heard Gareth speak. Ash barked at Gareth, leaping off the bed, startled too.

Harry lay back down and let his muscles relax now he knew it was not a deadly threat but his friend.

Gareth stroked Ash’s head.

‘Must you keep walking into my room when I am asleep.’ Harry’s forearm fell on to his forehead and he shut his eyes again.

‘The letter smells of perfume and was delivered by a stable boy, who said he was told to ensure you received it urgently. I am merely fulfilling the direction and I think it is fair to guess, as the letter did not come in the post or with the dispatches, it is nothing to do with your family, which the smell of it would indicate too.’

Harry picked up the envelope and smelt it, without opening his eyes. Roses. Charlotte. He opened his eyes. ‘What hour is it?’

‘Just past eleven.’

His duty had finished at six. He’d eaten and then come here to sleep. He’d barely slept. But he lifted the sheet and then turned to sit sideways on his bed and opened the letter. Then he looked up at Gareth. ‘Thank you for this, you may go now.’

‘Dismissed for a woman. You are not going to tell me who, then?’

‘I am not going to tell you who, no.’

Gareth took Harry’s hat off the peg on the wall and flung it at him, then turned and walked out of the door.

Harry laughed, picked up his hat and put it on the bed beside him, then looked at the letter as Ash rested her head on his knee. The black tip of her nose sniffed the paper as Harry read.

Dear Harry,

I have news. Mark, Colonel Hillier, is away. He is in London for a few days and so I hoped, thought, that you might like to come to the house.

Officers call here all the time, it would not be at all exceptional for you to call here as a friend. We can spend longer together here and you must bring Ash. We could take her for a walk along the shore after luncheon. If you will come for luncheon?

Tell me you will come. You must come. It is such an opportunity.

Yours sincerely

Charlie

‘Charlie…’ he said aloud, his eyebrows lifting. ‘Charlotte… Charlie…’ The shortened, less-formal name suited her. ‘Luncheon…’ He looked at Ash and stroked her neck, laughing quietly. Then shook his head slightly. He’d be a lunatic to go. Like everything about this affair with her it rang of oddness and imbalance. The etiquette of a relationship with another man’s mistress was something he did not understand.

Was it really appropriate for him to call on her at Hillier’s? Yet perhaps Hillier knew, perhaps he was allowing this. She had left his house on her own for several afternoons.

He sighed. He hated thinking about her and Hillier. He would go, for good or bad, whether it was right or wrong. He wanted to see her again, he’d not seen her for four days. The abstinence had opened a cavern in his chest that he knew would be repaired by a few moments of her company.

It had probably reached and passed midday when he knocked on Colonel Hillier’s door, with Ash sitting close to the heel of his boot.

‘No, do not worry. I will answer it. You can go back to the kitchen.’ He heard the words, spoken by Charlotte, through the door. Then the door was opened. ‘Hello,’ she said in a breathless whisper.

‘Hello.’ He saluted her, in a teasing gesture. ‘I am here as ordered, Miss Cotton.’

She reached out and gripped the cloth of the sleeve of his scarlet coat. ‘Come in.’ Once he had been pulled inside, she whispered. ‘I am so glad you came.’ Ash paced about the hall sniffing everything as Harry took off his hat.

‘I have luncheon all laid out for myself in the parlour. I was going to eat alone but as you are here you must join me, Captain Marlow, with your dog!’ She spoke in an overly loud voice, he presumed for the ears of the servant who had been sent back to the kitchen. ‘You will, won’t you?’ This last sentence was said much more quietly, just for his ears.

‘I will, thank you. That is very kind of you to invite me to stay as the Colonel is not here!’ He smiled after he’d spoken for the ears of the servant too, then bowed slightly, in a gesture of habit, in the way he might have done had one of his sisters-in-law asked him to stay to eat.

Charlotte, or Charlie, turned and walked ahead of him, leading him to a room at the back of the house. It was relatively small and very feminine, very yellow. She held the door as he walked in with Ash at his heel, then shut it firmly, as though she shut out the world. ‘This is my room,’ her voice had become conspiratorial. ‘No one is allowed in here unless I invite them.’

There was an immediate difference in her. Her posture became less rigid and her movements more flowing and there was a hint of mischief in her eyes and her smile too. She was more relaxed here.

He glanced about the room. ‘This is a very pleasant space.’

‘It is, isn’t it. It is my hiding place.’

There was not much in the way of furniture, but there was a comfortable sofa and a chair.

‘Look. I am prepared.’

The food was on a table in one corner of the room.

She crossed the room, passing him. ‘Would you like something to eat?’

‘Yes, now you speak of it, my stomach is growling at me.’

She began filling a plate for him with sandwiches and small pies, then she held it out. ‘There.’

He stepped forward and took the plate from her hand. ‘Thank you.’ This was truly bizarre, when he’d thought this relationship could be no more peculiar.

‘Well, sit then, Harry, do, you are making me feel awkward.’

He smiled and did her bidding. Then put down the plate and took off his gloves. He dropped them on the arm of the chair before he began to eat. Ash lay on the floor before him, watching Charlotte, Charlie, filling a plate for herself. ‘You signed your letter ‘Charlie’…’ Would she prefer him to use the name?

She sent him a smile across her shoulder.

He would guess she did prefer it.

‘It is a nickname I have had since I was a child. I thought if anyone broke the seal they would think my letter from a man.’

He laughed. ‘They would not have. The perfume gave the intent of your letter away immediately and if that had not, your words would have done.’

She smiled as she came to sit next to him. ‘But no one intercepted it…’

‘No, no one opened it. Yet what would Colonel Hillier think of me being here, Charlotte? Charlie.’

‘I have no idea what Mark will think.’ Her chin lifted as she answered, in a way that denied any judgement. It reminded him of days when he had been challenged over his morals and behaviour by his father. He had always answered with an equally harsh dismissal; he had never cared for anyone else’s opinion.

But now he was older and wiser and her words made him less certain of his decision to come. He did not want any trouble with a Colonel, retired or not. ‘Is this sensible, then?’

Her chin lifted even higher. ‘If he complains, then I shall tell him that I am allowed to do what I wish, just as he does.’

The look on her face touched him, literally, as if her fingers had pushed into his chest. Her expression said do not deny me and do not judge me. How could he condemn her? He’d not led a wholesome life. And Hillier could not own her, as Harry had thought the other day; she was not a slave.

He smiled. ‘And send military men perfumed letters of seduction and tempt them into your parlour for luncheon. Am I to be snared in a web of deceit, then, Charlie?’ He joked to shatter the hard look of defence and defiance that had cast across her expression.

The words succeeded and the stiffness in her posture disappeared again as a laugh broke from her throat. ‘Yes, exactly that. I hope to snare you and I shall have you all wrapped up in my sewing threads.’

She stood then. ‘You do not have a drink.’ She poured him a glass of lemonade. ‘Since you introduced me to it, I have had a kitchen maid make lemonade every day.’

His smile widened when she handed him the glass. Once he held it, he lifted the glass in a toast. ‘To leading our lives as we wish.’

She raised her glass in the same gesture. ‘To freedom.’ Then drank when he did.

The sourness tingled on his tongue, then the sweetness flooded his throat.

He laughed a lot as they ate, because she did, and her laugh had an infectious quality.

After they’d eaten they walked Ash along the seashore as he’d always done alone. It had become normal now for her to be there. Even Ash seemed to think it right that she was there. The dog walked at her side not Harry’s.

He was tired still, and the world felt surreal with that strange sensation that was a symptom of being only half awake; it gave his hours with Charlie a dream-like quality. He was lucky, probably, that they met no one from the barracks, otherwise the men might have guessed the origin of his scented letter, yet she’d seemed convinced by her desire to do as she wished, as though it really did not matter if Hillier knew.

He accompanied her home after their walk, but he did not go back inside when she invited him. ‘No, I need to rest, I am on duty again tonight.’

‘But will you call on me again tomorrow?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Of course I wish.’

He smiled and bowed his head. ‘Then I will call here. At what hour?’

‘For luncheon again…’ she proposed.

‘Very well, for luncheon.’

For the first time, she did not curtsey to him when they parted; instead she simply turned and opened the door.

When she went inside, he walked away and something clasped in his chest with a hard sudden grasp. He leant and patted Ash’s head. ‘Women are the strangest creatures.’ Yet he’d thought he had mastered that knowledge years ago. Charlie was proving him wrong.

He had a sudden desire to break into a run, though. There was a lightness inside him, a strange emotion that expressed a sense of escapism—and the feeling had not come on the back of a physical encounter; they had not gone near a bed. This feeling was due solely to Charlie’s conversation, her laughter and her smiles.

The next day he arrived at midday. With a smile on his face as he and Ash waited on the doorstep for the door to be opened. His heart had a full feeling, as though he’d just eaten a very rich meal. He had completed his duty and now he had two days to do as he wished.

Charlotte, Charlie, opened the door.

‘Hello. Come in.’ She took hold of his coat sleeve and pulled him over the threshold once more. Then her other hand lifted his hat off his head, before he could do it himself. She put it aside on the hall table. ‘We have the whole house to ourselves, I told all the servants to go out.’

‘You will have me strung up,’ he said as he stripped off his gloves.

She only smiled. Then took his gloves from his hand and dropped them on top of his hat. ‘I have luncheon ready in my parlour.’

‘And lemonade?’

‘And lemonade,’ she confirmed with a nod, holding his hand and then pulling him towards her parlour.

‘This is your lair I am being lured into again. Am I to be the luncheon today?’

‘No, you will be dessert.’

Uncertainty lifted his eyebrows, although his smile still broke, yet that twisted a little. He was still unsure whether or not it was wise to call on her here.

They ate their luncheon in her little parlour and drank the lemonade, just as they had done yesterday, talking and laughing together. Then she stood suddenly and took his empty plate from his lap. ‘Shall we go up to bed?’

He glanced at Ash, with a desire to laugh at himself whipping at his chest as his eyebrows lifted again. He was in a strange play. The set for it was perfect; in a feminine parlour. And the scene; the demise of a lustful, sinful soldier. He was still tired from the hours he’d worked through the night, though. For two days he’d had only a couple of hours’ sleep and it made his thoughts disjointed.

He looked up at her as she stood before him, trying to search for some common sense in this. ‘And what will be said by the servants?’

‘They are all out.’

‘I know, but if anyone returns?’

‘I have locked the door between the downstairs and the upstairs and only I have the key,’ her pitch was proud and self-satisfied and her chin tilted upwards, just as it had done yesterday when he’d questioned her judgement.

Damn. The laugh escaped his throat. He could not help himself. The woman was so confusing and enchanting. The Charlotte he had met here, Charlie, was an entirely different person to the trembling woman who’d joined him in a bed in the inn for the first time.

He reached out and held of her hand, without standing or making his decision to accept. Her fingers closed about his as her large eyes looked earnestly at him, asking him why he had not moved yet.