Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 27

“Must you look at me … there?”

Lucian raised his chin from her bare thigh to meet her gaze. “Yes.”

They had woken late. Cool daylight filled the room, rendering visible freckles, creases, and scars, every secret of a naked body. And she was lying back in the pillows and allowing him liberties. She was far, far gone from the shores of propriety, adrift on a sea of passion, lost in a haze of lust. The weather had changed for the worse after their first night together, so Lucian had decided it was best to stay inside and keep warm, and since she had promised to honor and obey, she couldn’t very well object, alas. Over the past four days, her world had shrunk to a creaky bed, the sound of rain tapping against a window, and the addictive sensation of her husband’s hard, hot body easing into hers. When she was exhausted, she curled up and slept. When they were hungry, Lucian ordered a hearty meal to the room. They ate while wearing nothing but their robes. His had a habit of falling open at his chest and attracting her eye to exposed muscles, and that was when Lucian would put down his cutlery and drag her back to bed to slake more urgent appetites. They were creatures in a burrow, mating, eating, sleeping, becoming more instinctively attuned to each other as the physical boundaries posed by their bodies lost significance one heated encounter at a time.

Presently, Lucian’s desire was leashed, but his deliberate languor held its own lasciviousness.

“I want to look at your cunny all day,” he said, his deep voice husky with longing. “You are very pretty here.” He stroked softly with the pad of his thumb. “Like a flower.”

Delightful warmth bloomed under his caress, and her feet flexed restlessly. “Flower,” she said. “I like that much better than that other word.”

He lifted his head again. “I still can’t believe you didn’t know the name for your parts.”

She gave a shrug. “It’s not considered appropriate to know the names,” she said. “In any case, I prefer flower.”

He gave a shake. “What did you call her? Until today?”

“I didn’t.”

“But … how do you even think about a thing when you haven’t a word for it?”

She gave him a speaking glance. “One doesn’t, which is the point, I believe.”

He rolled to his side and propped up himself up on his elbow, his eyes narrowing at her. “But you must have thought of it.”

“It’s difficult to avoid,” she admitted.

He placed his big hand on her belly. “What of touching yourself?”

Well. “I think it would be considered sinful.” She must have looked shifty as she said it, for he raised a knowing brow. “So you do it, then feel ashamed,” he said.

“Possibly,” she muttered.

He moved his hand lower and began a gentle massage with his three warm middle fingers, and she gave a small moan. Yesterday, they had refrained from intercourse to treat the flower with some care, and Lucian had brought her to a lovely climax with his mouth. Then he had wrapped her hand around his thick length and she had satisfied him with her hand. It had been very wicked and exciting, but now she clenched around emptiness and yearned for the sensation of him inside her. Hopelessly debauched, after less than a week.

Lucian encouraged her moral decay. “What’s on your mind when you do it?” he asked, his eyes darkening by the moment.

“What a peculiar question.” Her voice was shaky. He was expertly skilled with his fingers.

“Tell me,” he murmured, “and perhaps I can make the bedding better for you.”

“I’m well pleased,” she assured him, but he smirked.

“There’s more.”

More.Her siren call. As luring as the caress of his now slippery hand.

“I thought of pirates.”

His hand came to a halt. “Pirates,” he drawled.

“And highwaymen. Sometimes Vikings.” In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Right.”

“Now you know.”

His smirk widened. “You like a bit o’ rough. I knew that already. We’d not be here, like this, if you didn’t.”

Perhaps she did. Perhaps she did like a bit of rough, as he put it, though she would have called it dark, determined, and a little dangerous. Someone bold and carnal enough to not drown in her desire for more but to match and master and pamper it.

“I thought about it,” she said. “And I think it is because a woman’s life in London … is complicated. Even the part where we lounge in a parlor and read books—they have to be the correct books and they have to be read at appropriate times. Propriety and etiquette rule every step we take, every word we say …. One should think we habituate to this constant implication of potential slander, but I don’t. Every day I feel one fateful, clumsy misstep away from scandal. One slip-up and I’m losing my worth. The awareness is always present, a current in the back of one’s mind no matter how happy the days. I hadn’t ever seen it clearly until you brought me here … because what can I do wrong, here on the heather field, or in this strange inn? It’s dreadful having to live under someone’s eye, being steered toward the same things everyone should like and do. It feels like a constant pruning of my self. So occasionally I cannot stand it and I run away from Mr. Graves.”

“There are no pirates in this story,” Lucian said.

“A pirate is free,” she said. “He has seen the world and does bad things and doesn’t care. He just does and takes as he pleases; it’s who he is. There’d be no rules with him.”

Lucian cocked his head. “Not sure whether you want to be the pirate or want to be ravished by one.”

She closed her eyes. Thinking was difficult with need pulsing away between her thighs.

“Perhaps both,” she whispered. “But most of all, I thought of ravishment.”

“I see,” he murmured.

“I imagine them handsome and dangerous and undone with want for me. There’d be no choice but to surrender if a ruthless man stole me, would there? Who would judge me?”

He was silent, his fingers at rest, and she kept her eyes closed, certain she had said too much. The erotic exploits of the past days had made the bed a place where the rules did not apply, either, and it had loosened her tongue.

Lucian moved, and she sensed his face was level with hers. His breath was soft on her cheek. “Look at me.”

She peered up at him.

The quiet intensity of his gaze turned her limbs as weak as water. He had looked at her like this once before, during their wedding night when he had ordered her to put her hands on his shoulders.

“I can do that,” he said. “Take you without asking, without stopping. Have you submit to indecencies. Do you want me to?”

She swallowed. The look in his eyes, the undertone in his voice, felt like a key sliding into the lock of a secret box harboring unspeakable desires. All she had to do was lift the lid …

“You’re hardly a marauding stranger,” she said. Not anymore, she added silently.

Lucian smiled faintly. Unexpectedly, he turned her over on her belly, and his hair-roughened thigh grazed over the backs of her legs and pinned them down. His arousal pressed hard into the side of her hip. “It’s good that you know me,” he said, his lips warm against the side of her neck. “You don’t truly want to be hurt, do you?”

“N-no.” He had slipped his right arm under hers and reached up, and he let his fingers play over her throat. “I think it is about the desire …” she stammered. “I want to feel madly desired and not be blamed for my indulgence.”

“Hmm,” he said. “And I could make it feel as though you didn’t know me much at all.”

Her pulse throbbed against his stroking thumb, her thoughts too scattered for her to speak.

His hips gave hers a nudge. “I could take you from behind,” he murmured. “I could hold you, just so.” His hand closed around her throat, lightly, but the suggestion made everything go still inside her head. “You wouldn’t see my face,” came his dark voice. “You could imagine some Viking in my place.”

She was panting and confused. Vaguely she realized she was rhythmically pressing her thighs together. Lucian’s fingers left her neck and glided up into her hair. He made a loose fist at the back of her head and tugged until she faced him, her lips aligned with his. “Though I’d rather you imagined me,” he said against her mouth. His eyes were flinty. “I’m not sophisticated; my tastes are base. I don’t share. I’m afraid any pirate making to touch you would live to regret it.”

She wanted to touch herself, right now while on her belly, trapped by the weight of his leg and his hand in her hair. Her tastes were base, too; how reckless, how wonderful.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Yes what?”

She held his gaze. “I want you to do it.”

He studied her, taking in her flushed cheeks and damp lips ripe for kissing. “All right,” he said, and released her. “Then we’ll do it sometime.”

She blinked. “Sometime?”

He nodded. Sudden outrage crackled along her overwrought nerves. His touch, his husky murmur, the forbidden images his words had painted, had stimulated her to aching point. The soft bedsheet felt abrasive against the overexcited tips of her breasts. She made an angry sound.

He stroked her shoulder. “You’re still new to this,” he said. “Perhaps your tastes are yet to change. And I’d want to read you better. And you’ll need a good grip on a word other than no for when you do want to stop.”

When she did not reply, he made to kiss her, but she pulled away. He gave a low chuckle.

“I’ve angered you.”

“Yes,” she snipped, feeling the chasm in experience between them and not in a titillating way.

Lucian rose and sat back on his heels. “I’d rather take your anger than your regret.” He surveyed her dissatisfied naked form. “Roll over.”

She gave him a sullen sideway glance. “Why?”

The amusement faded from his eyes and his features set in hard lines. “Because I’ll fuck you now,” he said calmly, “and I want to see your pretty face while I do it.”

A hot thrill shot through her center. “But you just said—”

“I know what I said,” he said. “I’m offering a taste—if you want it: on your back, miss.”

Trembling, she obeyed.

“Good.” His stern expression hadn’t changed. He shifted his position until he knelt right at her feet. “Now spread your legs, nice and wide,” he said. “Knees up.”

Her muscles locked. She had let him look his fill just a minute ago, but he felt different now, looming and unyielding. She had always sensed such a side in him, but seeing it emerge made her heart race.

Briefly, his mouth softened. “Too much?”

She gave a small shake.

“Well then.” He tapped her ankle with two fingers. “Open. That’s good. Wider. Ah, no hiding.” She had put a hand between her charms and his penetrating assessment. “You know, hidden things only invite a more vigorous chase,” he said. He palmed his heavy erection, and his biceps flexed as he did it. She removed her hand very slowly. She wanted him vigorous.

“Will you hide again?” he asked, the steady steeliness of his voice seeming to reach her deepest places.

“No,” she whispered.

“We don’t want you tempted,” he said. “Put your arms above your head.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she did, and it lifted her breasts, presenting them to him. Her toes curled when the heat of his gaze brushed over her tender skin and she heard the steady rhythm of his breathing fracture. She had to make quite the picture, a luscious offering for him with her legs spread for his pleasure and her nipples red from days of his attentions.

“Cross your wrists,” he ordered hoarsely. She wanted to squeeze her knees back together, to hide and to soothe the ache between her thighs, but then he might do something outrageous and she didn’t feel that brave. She crossed her wrists.

“Difficult?” Lucian’s tone was faintly derisive, but he was watching her face carefully.

She licked her lips. “Yes.”

His gaze dropped back to her cunny and he gave himself a lazy stroke. “Lucky it’s just me enjoying the view, then, and not a whole crew.”

The thought of another dozen pairs of hungry eyes appreciating her most intimate place, the pretty place she was to keep concealed, nameless, and forgotten, made her face flame. She felt a rush of warm liquid to her entrance, and Lucian let out a low laugh. “You’re greedy, my love.” His hand settled heavily on the top of her thigh as he looked at her with his stranger’s eyes. Pirate, outlaw, thief. He slid his thumb through her softness, and she groaned when he rubbed over the sensitive spot at the top.

“Please,” she heard herself say.

His cool mask cracked.

She squeaked when he grabbed her bottom, pulled her up, and entered her. He didn’t pause; he held tight while he eased forward, and her breath came in erratic gasps. In this position, every minute nudge sent heatwaves through her limbs until she lay molten and boneless in his grip. She felt the rough hair of his thighs against her bottom. The press of his fingers into her hips. His labored breathing while he moved. He was looking down where their bodies were joined, and the dark intrigue on his face alone urged her onto a path straight toward bliss … until he stopped. Her indignant cry made him smile. “Now touch yourself,” he said.

“What?”

“Here.” He pressed his thumb down, sending a jolt of need through her. “Put your hand on yourself, the way you do it.”

He was mad.

Apparently, she was mad, too, for she put her hand where he had ordered it. She closed her eyes, but she still felt him watch, then adjust his own movements, until he took her in a glorious counterpoint to her own efforts, and it set the world on fire.

She couldn’t speak for a long time after the embers had settled.

“You all right?” Lucian was stretched out next to her, on his back, lazy and sated. Sweat had glued a curl to his brow. “No bashful thoughts?”

Thoughts? Her mind was quiet. She was glowing and alive. She smiled.

“Good,” he said, and the corner of his mouth tipped up.

This was why they kept young women in fearful ignorance. She would do reckless things for the rush of bliss that had just swept her away.

What change a little brazen honesty could bring. Lucian’s reaction to her fantasy had been unexpected and thrilling, like stumbling upon a hidden door that led to a vast, secret garden where she could breathe, even within the cage of matrimony …. It had brought her closer to him. She had just learned as much about him as he had learned about her. Apparently, he didn’t mind a wanton wife.

“I wonder,” Harriet said drowsily, “if it were women who held all the power in this world, and not because of our pretty faces … what would I have imagined in place of the pirate?”

He turned his head toward her. His eyes were heavy-lidded. “Whatever else you were taught to worship,” he said. “Or a thing you’d want solely for itself.”

“Does such a thing exist, you think?”

He glanced away. “I used to think it didn’t,” he said.

“You’re a powerful man. What do you dream of?”

“I don’t dream,” he said. “I plan.” He fell asleep.

Because they could not while yet another day away in a lustful haze, not even a Sunday, Lucian worked on his list of MPs he wanted to lobby for tax reform after lunch. Hattie waited until Mhairi was free, and they paid a visit to Rosie Fraser to acquire her permission to use the miners’ photographs in an art exhibition.

“Art, in London,” Mrs. Fraser said, one hand on her sturdy hip, the other on her gleaming kitchen counter. “About us.” She exchanged a glance with Mhairi. “Who’d want to look at that?”

“Plenty of people as long as tickets are terribly expensive,” Hattie said. “They all have to have one then.”

“Pfff.” Mrs. Fraser shook her head. “And all proceeds would go to Drummuir?”

“Yes,” Hattie confirmed. “Including any money paid for the pieces.”

Mrs. Fraser considered it while she poured tea into mugs. “I’ll ask round,” she then said. “I’ll have a list of people who gave permission. But there’s one thing that I’d like to say, ma’am.”

“Of course.”

“How did you arrive here at Drummuir?”

“Why, by coach.”

“And before that?”

“By train.”

“Aye, and there’s a ferry, too, across the firth, isn’t there.”

She nodded. “Indeed. A feat of engineering.”

Mild sarcasm crinkled the corner of Mrs. Fraser’s eyes. “And all fueled by coal,” she said. “As are the factories that make the iron and steel. More than half the homes in Britain are kept warm thanks to coal. They say it’ll even fuel electricity one day. Mhairi, what do you put into your clothing iron?”

“Hot coal,” said Mhairi.

“So even our clothes are nice and smooth, thanks to coal,” Mrs. Fraser said, sounding satisfied. “You see, we rarely leave the collieries. But the fruit of our labor is in every house in Britain and out on the railway tracks and the high seas. Without these”—she held up her hands, raw and cracked—“there’d be no modernity. So, indeed it’s fine to have an exhibition, ma’am. But don’t make us a freak show.”

“I couldn’t,” Hattie said hastily. “We shall use your words, if you like. No, I shall hire you as my consultant while I’m working.”

Tawny brows pulled together. “Hire me—what for?”

“It’s quite simple—you think of the message you wish to communicate to the Londoners, and I shall put it into practice.”

“And how much does it pay,” Rosie Fraser said, “the consulting?”

“I have a generous budget,” Hattie said, thinking of her two thousand a year. “We could have a photograph of your hands, too. Next to the portrait. What do you think?”

Hamish ambled into the kitchen from the parlor, his blue eyes sparkling first at Mhairi, then at Hattie. “You’ve my permission to exhibit this perfect mug, Mrs. Blackstone,” he said, and stroked his angular jaw. “Watch out, Michelangelo.”

“Aye, it’s the perfect mug,” his mother said, “for a cartoon.”

Back in the inn, Hattie’s imagination was spurred to great heights. She was mixing silver nitride solutions with the help of Mr. Wright’s written instructions, because the engineer had returned to St. Andrews. She experimented with different light and aperture settings on her camera in the main room—the brighter the light, the better, she found, but then she had turned to practicing on her parasol instead of breathing, twitching subjects, so who knew how it would be once Anne held the parasol? She worked on mastering the exposure time, which required her to monitor her pocket watch while moving the lens cap from the lens and back again at the right interval, over and over, until the watch became superfluous.

“I shall master this,” she told Lucian, covered in chemicals and sweat, with the smell of dark cloth cloying her lungs.

He looked up from his two-days-old newspaper. “Of course you will,” he replied, and she detected no hint of sarcasm.

The following day, she paid one of the Burns sons, Calumn, to help her carry her equipment to the village school, and while he set up her camera, she went to visit Anne’s house. Anne’s mother answered with a naked, dribbling toddler on her hip. She barely reacted to the large tin of shortbread Hattie had purchased from Mhairi to bring along as a gift; she was not unfriendly, but rather harried and exhausted. She called over her shoulder for Anne while the toddler drooled stains onto the already dirty blue bodice.

“I thought it time you and I practice together, don’t you think?”

Anne was more interested in the peppermints Hattie had ordered from Auchtermuchty.

“Angel, why are you hobbling?”

The girl had been skipping alongside her; now that she moved normally, her limp was plainly visible.

“Is it your legs? Your feet? A blister?”

A shrug.

As soon as they were in the classroom, she ordered Anne onto a chair. “Let me see.”

The girl stuck out her leg, dispassionately watching Hattie’s examination as she sucked on her candy. The problem was quickly determined. “Your shoes are far too small, my dear.”

In the left shoe, the girl’s toe was about to break through the careworn leather. On the right, the shoe had won. The removal of the dirty stocking revealed small toes, curled and bruised.

She looked down at the pale little foot in her hand and fought the urge to kiss it better. Anne didn’t need sympathy. She didn’t need shortbread or photographs, she needed shoes. New stockings. A warmer coat. Her mother needed a week of leisure by the sea.

She was unfocused under her dark cloth, wasting dry plates with poor exposure timing. She wanted to take off her pearl earrings and send them home with Anne, but she couldn’t just dispense random charity. She gave Anne the whole bag of peppermints.

That night, she couldn’t sleep. Lucian was behind her, holding her and dozing after exhausting himself over her. Her mind was going in circles.

“Lucian,” she whispered into the dark.

A grunt was the reply.

“Am I a hypocrite?”

Her question pulled him back from the brink of sleep. “What can you mean?”

“I like to be warm and have lovely things,” she said. “But I cannot stand for children, or anyone, working themselves to death for my comforts. And …” Her breathing was shallow. “I think I’m afraid—afraid of what will become of me if I don’t wish to be a hypocrite.”

“Ah. You’re afraid of becoming a radical.”

“Is that what it is?”

He gave her a light squeeze. “Afraid of having to live naked in a barrel to not feel guilt?”

“It almost appears to be the most consequent consequence.”

His chest shook against her back, as though he was laughing quietly. “Nah.”

“But isn’t it? What good is frippery when there is misery?”

“Wasn’t it you who said every woman needs something just because it’s pretty?”

“Perhaps I was misguided,” she whispered.

He rose on his elbow and looked down at her in the dark. “If no one purchased frippery anymore, how would the seamstress make her bread?”

She considered it. “Perhaps she wouldn’t have to work for her keep if we all lived in a barrel.”

He scoffed softly. “You think everyone living off the land, hand-to-mouth, like the days of the clans, was an easy life, or a good life?”

“Probably not?”

“Trust me, it’s not,” he said. “You know what drives inventions that keep everyone warm, not just the inventor? Or the progress in the medical sciences? Or systems that govern groups of people beyond family size?”

“Clever minds?”

“Time,” he said. “Spare time. Because the clever mind can think and tinker instead of foraging for food and doing battle with other clans who try to steal your cattle all day long.”

She contemplated it. “The same is true for the arts,” she then said. “Written stories and music … paintings.”

“Yes,” he said. “So, I cannot think of a division of labor or owning the means of production as the root of evil.”

“But some people paint,” she said, “and others are stuck in a tunnel.”

“You’d be worse at wielding an ax than Boyd, just like Boyd wouldn’t have patience with a brush or camera,” he replied. “But you enjoy a warm hearth, and Boyd will enjoy your photographs. What you must do is pay a fair wage and provide good working conditions. When your seamstress loses her eyesight because she works long hours without pause to put food on the table—then you should feel guilt. That’s something you shouldn’t stand for.”

“I don’t,” she said. “But who decides what’s fair?”

There was a long pause. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I tried to read the works of men who are more educated than I to understand it when I first owned property. Locke and Coleridge and such. What I know is that market forces alone are never fair. Which is why we need regulation and systemic wealth redistribution.”

“What about Marx?” she murmured. “He’d say you’re so wealthy because you keep your workers poor. Have you read his work?”

“Some of it,” he said. “Agreed with his criticisms, disagreed with his premises. But even he’d say there’s room between a hypocrite and living in a barrel—what was his name, the philosopher’s name, who did this?”

She smiled. “Diogenes.”

“Right. Well, what ills of the world did he solve, there in his barrel, celebrating poverty?”

“None, I presume.”

She felt his hand on her hip, heavy and warm, and her body softened in response. How fortunate, to have a husband who knew how to settle her.

Anne’s bruised little foot flashed before her eyes. She raised her head. “Do you really believe a nation can abolish poverty?”

“Relative poverty?” His arm tightened around her. “No. But absolute poverty? The destitution on every street corner, the workhouses, the slums? Piss-poor housing for workers? Yes. We will make it so.”

A warm emotion welled from the depths of her and spread and spread until it felt she might burst from it. Her chest ached. Her lungs burned. She was trembling quietly in the dark. I’m in love with him, she thought. Help me, I’m in love with him.