Invitation to Ruin Read online

  Pressing my upper body against the window, I watched for Louis to leave the stables. Would he look up? He had to. Not just because it was his nature to look over the house before he entered for the evening, but because I willed him to. My heart began to beat faster, pounding against my ribcage when I saw him barring the stable doors for the night. In the low light of evening, I stared at his back, watched the ripple of muscles as he lifted the heavy slat of wood and set it in place. He turned, his gaze going first to the kitchen entrance to the house and then traveling higher.

  He stopped at the second floor, his attention focused on the window opposite my bedroom door. So different the view must be now that he’d sunk his shaft deep into me, felt me squirming in delight along its length!

  Higher! I willed him, almost tapped at the window to make sure he would not miss me. But I didn’t need to. His gaze caught mine a heartbeat later, his dark brows rising in inquiry. I brought my hands to the front edges of my robe in answer, parting them slowly to reveal my breasts to him.

  Louis looked around at the yard—I imagine to make sure no one was watching our dirty little exchange. How I wanted someone to see it even though I half-feared the world’s hypocrisy and retribution should they find out. (I pictured myself like Mdm. “Bilodeaux,” confined to the company of women such as my mother with their pretentious attempts at reforming my soul.)

  I didn’t let the fear stop me. I pulled the robe’s edges farther apart and cupped my breasts, offering the tender tips to Louis like the rare delicacies they are.

  And then I backed away from the window and waited.

  He didn’t make me wait long. I heard the kitchen door open and close, heard Maria offer a tentative greeting, heard her voice falter as he moved past her to the staircase.

  “Where are you going?” she asked him. He mumbled a reply, something too low, too slurred with liquor or passion for me to make out from where I waited two floors up. She offered to do it for him and his voice sharpened to a stern rejection.

  I counted his footsteps, realized he was taking the stairs two at a time, my heart pounding in time with each fall of his boot on the risers. Quickly, I pulled my robe back together as I decided to make him work for another glimpse of my bare skin.

  “Beatrice…”

  There was a question in his tone, in the way he said my name. I think it was my sanity—or his own—that he was unsure of.

  “Louis,” I answered, my voice rumbling with the need that had grown monstrous over the last few hours.

  Below us, everything went quiet. My heart sang at the silence. It was as if the world had stopped for us and she would hear. Maria would hear my passionate moans. If she dared venture onto the stairs, she would hear the slap of our bodies against one another, hear him call my name.

  But the silence did not thrill him as it thrilled me.

  “Your mother—”

  “You know her, Louis,” I answered, my voice shrilling at his possible retreat. “She is in bed, asleep or with a dozen pillows propped around her head. We might as well be the only two people in the world.”

  I dropped my robe and moved to him. “We are the only two people in the world, Louis.”

  “Saints! I want…” he started.

  I rubbed my breasts against his broad chest, ran my hands up his arms. “What do you want, Louis?”

  When he only stood there, like a deer that had just caught the scent of a predator, I took his limp hand and shoved it between my legs.

  “Is this what you want?” He nodded his head, his gaze awakening with lust. “Then tell me,” I said and started to move away.

  He grabbed me, jerked my body closer and shoved his hands deeper into the pocket between my thighs. “I want you, Beatrice, this tight…”

  “Tight what?” I urged him to answer, flexing the muscles that his fingertips only dared to graze against. I knew nothing of the vernacular that he used. There must be other names for these pleasures points, for the honey pot so wet from the mere anticipation of his touch. I wanted to know what they were, hear them roll off his tongue, watch the shock spread across his face as I repeated them in turn!

  “This tight pussy,” he moaned and pushed a finger deep into me.

  I leaned my head back, thrusting my breasts up as I stood on tiptoe to ease the penetration of his hand inside me. “Pussy,” I said, echoing all the passion his voice had held. “You are making it wet, so wet.”

  I pressed my palm against the front of his breeches. “And what is this to my pussy?” I asked, squeezing its firmness for extra emphasis.

  “My cock.” He panted his answer, his hand sliding over my button.

  “Oh,” I gasped. “And that?”

  He gave the tip a rough tug that had me panting in unison with his heavily drawn breaths.

  “Your clit,” he answered.

  “Those are not nice words,” I said, feigning indignation.

  Pulling me closer, he shoved several of his thick fingers into me, his coarse evening beard scratching my throat and cheek as he nuzzled my ear. “Because you are a dirty whore,” he answered.

  And he meant it! I could hear the hate in his voice, the shame. But nothing spoke as loudly as his lust. It rumbled in his chest, rushed out hot against my neck. He meant it, but he didn’t mind because I was his dirty whore.

  “Yes,” I moaned and pumped against his fingers, my pussy jealous for his cock. “A whore, a bad little whore. And what are you going to do to me?”

  “Fuck you,” he groaned, pushing me hard against the wall. He tugged at his pants, freeing his cock from its unbearable confinement. Its tip bulged, the soft twilight that filtered through the window giving just enough illumination to reveal the translucent beads of his desire pearling in the slit. My own slit was already a flood of need and I arched my body, trying to raise my pussy high enough that he could spear me with his cock.

  I felt his hands curve beneath my bottom and he lifted me, my back sliding up against the wall. I spread my legs, wrapped them around his waist and he brought me down onto his shaft with a vicious tug that had me squeezing the air from him with my thighs.

  “Yes, fuck me,” I begged, then louder, that Maria might hear his betrayal. “Fuck me, Louis, fuck me!”

  The landing was narrow and the ceiling of the third floor low. I raised my arms above my head, placing my palms flat against the ceiling. My legs I thrust out until the soles of my feet met the wall, reveling in the control and penetration the tight space allowed.

  His fingers bit into the flesh of my bottom, the calloused tips carelessly rubbing against my nether hole as he lifted me up and down the length of his shaft. Craning his head, he caught one of my breasts in his mouth and sucked at the nipple, pulling it hard, stretching the tip and then biting the pale flesh surrounding it hard enough to mark me. (Ah, what will she think of those marks when she sees them!)

  The thick flesh of my pussy swelled from the relentless assault of his cock against and inside me. I cried out, nearly screaming as the tips of his fingers once again found the puckered hole hidden between the half globes of my bottom.

  “Yes, hold me like that!” I panted. I squirmed against him, trying desperately to bury his cock deeper and to pull his fingertips into that other hole even as my body recoiled in shock. I knew that if any part of his hand penetrated me there, my body would burst.

  He was grunting, sucking at my breasts like some newly birthed pig, noisy, greedy, his spit mingling with the light layer of perspiration that covered my throat and chest and the heavy drip of sweat from his forehead.

  “Like that!” I demanded again, trying to clamp down on his finger as it strayed closer to the hole.

  “You would fling us into hell,” he accused, letting go only to grab me by the waist.

  “Afraid of damnation now?” I laughed and he slammed me against the wall once in warning. I laughed at him again and he threaded one hand through my hair, pulling me away from him and forcing me onto the landing on my hands and knees
. I looked down the stairwell and saw candlelight still flickering up from the kitchen.

  “Fuck me, Louis,” I hissed and reached behind me to spread my pussy lips for him.

  His hands closed around my hips like a vise and he rammed his cock into me, my head bouncing once against the banister from the force.

  “Again!” I commanded him.

  He obeyed, leaning as he pumped his cock into me. His fingers, curled like meaty hooks, pulled at my breast, pinching the nipple to a blood-red peak. With my opposite hand on the floor, I braced one shoulder against the banister and began to rub my clit in time to the deep thrusts of his cock inside me.

  “Yes.” I panted my pleasure down the stairwell, moaning and groaning to Maria’s torment. “That feels so good, Louis. Sooooo good.”

  My nails grazed the skin of the two swollen sacs that hung from his cock and he shuddered against me, the tremble of it filling my pussy. “I feel like I am on fire, Louis.”

  Just as that heat began to blaze across my entire body, I felt his seed ripple through his engorged cock, felt the muscles at its base twitch inside me.

  “I am coming,” he bit out, his voice and body exhausted as he yelled it again. “I am coming, Beatrice.”

  That was the final thing he said to me last night. His body locked mid-thrust, shooting so much of his seed into me that it spilled down my thighs before he even withdrew.

  Withdraw he did. Nothing sweet or lingering. There was no need for tenderness, after all, was there? Not for such a dirty little whore. No, enough that he had fucked me like I wanted him to. When he was done, he picked his pants up from the landing and left, his face a storm cloud of confusion.

  Me, I scooted down the stairs and crawled to my room. I pulled myself up onto the bed where I let my fingers explore the angry flesh of my pussy. How I wished it was daylight so that I could see the puffed red tissue, see the white pearls of his seed still dripping from me. I spread my fingers in the delicious mess, ran them over my clit and down along the crack of my bottom to that other hole to gently explore its edges, more fire bursting from my center as I probed deeper.

  And that is how Maria found me this morning, my hand still buried between my legs, my body rank with the sweat and seed of her beloved husband, my lover.

  March 22, 1787

  She must have threatened him. How else can his careful avoidance of the house be explained? That he didn’t want me? Impossible! I saw in his eyes how his desire still burns. And I have caught him looking up at my window each night since. But he stays down in the stables!

  Yet she could only keep him from me for so long, now that we’d been together. Duplicity or fate was bound to reunite us. Which it was, I still cannot say. Did I mean to cut Mother’s finger at tea this evening or was it really an accident?

  She was reaching for the bread, which was alongside a bar of butter. And I was reaching for the butter…with the saw-toothed knife Maria had used to cut the bread. Looking out the window, I was thinking of Louis and didn’t realize which knife I was holding until I heard Mother’s bloodless gasp.

  The lace tablecloth, on the other hand—not bloodless at all. Who would think that one bony little finger could channel so much blood? Even now, I wonder whether she sent me to the room, to him, because of her finger or the precious scrap of fabric.

  That she sent me, of course, is all that really matters. I had to bite down on my tongue to keep the tears of joy and laughter from rolling down my cheeks. Maria raced into the room, begging forgiveness for my clumsiness. Even telling Mother that it was sinful to send me for a beating! Sinful, yes, what would go on in that room, what had already gone on in that room. Still, I would wager my opal earrings that Maria will be on bended knee tonight at church praying that her lie be forgiven while I lounge in my bed, still playing with the wet field of today’s lust.

  His gaze was wide, frightened even, when he came in from the stables, Maria having been sent to fetch him. He smelled of sweat and horseflesh, but it only made me hotter for him.

  “Maria says you cut your mother?”

  Maria was standing in the kitchen, watching us, and he glanced back over his shoulder at her. She didn’t look away and he turned back to me.

  “It was an accident,” I told him, my voice trembling. How different from the last time I had sat on that wobbly stool with the broken pottery resting on my skirts. I had feigned being innocent then, now I truly was. But still I craved his punishment. I realized I had missed the feel of the board against my flesh, of his forced dominance of my body when he otherwise would shrink from his own desires.

  “This can be no accident, Beatrice.”

  “It is,” I protested. “I…I was thinking of you.” I looked at Maria as I said this, saw her eyes shimmer with unshed tears. Louis stiffened, his body freezing half an instant before he would have looked back at her.

  I hardened my tone, wiped any trace of timidity or fear from it. “But I am ready for my punishment despite such innocence.”

  His nostrils flared at that, his sensuous mouth pressing into a hard line. “You dare claim any kind of innocence?”

  “Yes.” So sweet was my voice, as sweet as the honey that pooled between my legs. He must have smelled my excitement, too, for his stance softened. “Look at me, Louis,” I entreated, still sweet, still light with youth. “I am just a girl, barely eighteen years on this earth.”

  I raised my hand and gestured around the room. “This house and the convent are all I know of the world. Mother, the sisters and girls at Sacred Heart, you and Maria, Mdm. ‘Bilodeaux’—these are the only people I know.”

  I let my gaze play over his safely cloistered cock, its swelling already evident, and then raised my head to stare him down. “If I have lost any claim to innocence, where, among so few people and places, should blame be placed?”

  His arm shot out, pushing the door to the pantry open. “Get inside!”

  “Louis, no!” Maria moved across the kitchen, her hand extended as if its frail strength could stop him. “Do not do this.”

  Ah, my own entreaties thrown back at him in his wife’s voice. No, Louis, do not. Stop. Do not stop, Louis. Yes, that is what I had meant all along, perhaps even that first day when I thought my struggles real. And I had made him immune against such pleas. What were her tears and threats compared to the pleasures my body offered him?

  I was still sitting on the stool and he grabbed me by my upper arm, pulling me to my feet. She reached us before he could shove me into the room and I let each of them tug at me. I tugged back, feeling my bodice stretch as husband and wife yanked at a sleeve. The lace binding loosened and I smiled in anticipation of a breast popping free as Louis tried to drag me into the pantry and ravish me while Maria tried to stop him.

  He let go of a sudden and I crashed against Maria, my full breasts pressing against her smaller ones. Our faces came so close I could have kissed her on the mouth, let my tongue play over her thin lips before charging beyond the pearl gates of her teeth. She must have seen some of my intent written across my face. She scrambled away, but not before Louis caught her. She paled beneath his tight grip while I thrilled at the raw passion that blazed across his features. He would not let her come between us again.

  “Get inside,” he repeated, not looking at me, knowing innately that I would obey, that my whole body was shaking with the need to obey.

  He released Maria and dismissed her with a stern command to return to the kitchen. He closed the pantry door and dragged a heavy sack of flour against it, then looked around the room, measuring and discarding potential implements of pain and pleasure.

  “Take your clothes off,” he ordered.

  I started stripping, stopping every now and then as I watched him arrange the crates in the room. Each time he would urge me on in my disrobing with an enraged gaze that promised a painful retribution. At last, I was naked in front of him, my hands across my breasts as I tried to calm my excitement.

  He had made a rough set of step
s with the crates, one serving as the bottom step and two more stacked together to form a top step or platform. Grabbing the paddle from next to the door, he tapped the lower crate.

  “On your knees, Beatrice.”

  As I moved to comply, he shoved me forward and pressed my chest against the top platform. Slamming the paddle down next to my head, he grabbed my arms and pulled them back until one of his large hands encircled both my wrists. He fished a loop of leather lacing from his pants and bound my hands together.

  “What—”

  “Quiet!”

  God help me, a fresh burst of cream coated my pussy at his barked command. I shut my mouth only to have him pry it back open when he forced his belt between my teeth. Only my moans were tolerated, his breathing growing heavier with each delighted squirm of my body as I waited to find out what he would do next.

  Keeping one hand on the belt’s ends, he twisted the strap until I was forced to look back at him. His pants fell to his ankles and his cock, purpled with his readiness, pulsing in the air like a third arm. He stroked it a few times, my mouth and the leather between my teeth growing wet as I watched his hand sliding over his shaft. I squirmed some more, damning the string that kept my hands from touching him or relieving my own need.

  Releasing his cock, he picked the paddle back up and delivered the first blow to my bottom. The wood of the crate, unsanded, scraped at my breasts as the power of his arm pushed me across the crude platform’s surface. Again he hit me, my bottom surely purpling to match his swollen cock. I jerked, pain and pleasure combining until my pussy was a mad throb of need.

  Another hit and frustrated tears rolled down my cheeks. Yes. More, please. Take the gag from my mouth so that I can beg you for more, Louis. Unbind my hands so that I may grovel with them clasped around your ankles!

  Another hit and the dam broke, my body thrashing violently as my pussy constricted with pleasure. He dropped the paddle and took a belt end in each hand, pulling my head back as he kicked my legs to the sides of the first crate, stretching my pussy tight before he rammed his cock into me. Louis worked the makeshift rein, pulling back again and again as if we were at full gallop, playing the roughrider to my tender mare.