Darker Than Love Read Online Free PDF

would not have wanted it any other way. Black, quite frankly, didn’t suit her, at least not head-to-toe black. Far better, she thought, to pursue all the rich pleasures to which Robert had introduced her. It was a much more sincere and personal tribute to his memory.
    Lucy unlocked the door and was satisfied to find the house in hushed semi-darkness. Her servants had long since learnt when to be discreet and when to tend to her. There was no one standing by to take their cloaks and nothing but an oil lamp awaiting her return. Lucy clasped its heavy gilt base and crept up two flights of stairs, forging a path through the gloom with the lamp’s bleary incandescence.
    In the bedroom, shadows leapt and Julian’s stretched silhouette momentarily reared up to the high coved ceiling. Either side of the fireplace mirror, gaslights burnt within frosted half-cups, suffusing the room with a honeyed glow and gilding the brass bedstead. Lucystood the oil lamp on a pier table and turned its wick low.
    Oh, how inviting that bed looks, she thought. But she knew she would have to wait. If Julian had a gift, then she was in no position to make demands.
    ‘And so?’ she said, draping her mantle across the ottoman. ‘Am I to receive my present now?’
    Julian, setting down his beaver hat, ignored her. The silence lengthened as, without hurry, he removed his gloves, his bow tie, and finally the high, starched collar of his shirt.
    ‘Indulge my prurience,’ he said, seating himself in a velvet-cut armchair. Slowly he folded one leg over the other and laid his walking cane across his lap. ‘Tell me, in lurid detail, how you intend to educate this country cousin of yours.’ He smoothed a finger over his pencil-fine moustache, calmly awaiting her reply.
    Lucy stood by the dressing table, her mouth curving in a challenging smile. She recognised Julian’s disdainful manner as the prelude to a game in which she could do no right. He would conjure up whatever misdemeanours he could and then, oh how deliciously, she would be punished for them. Her stomach fluttered with apprehension and her groin thrilled with lust.
    ‘I shall reveal nothing until I receive my present,’ she said, deliberately antagonistic.
    ‘Do you think you deserve it?’ asked Julian, his stern blue eyes raking her body. ‘I wonder, how did you conduct yourself during my absence?’
    Lucy opened her mouth to speak but Julian stopped her with a raised hand.
    ‘No. Let me guess. Impeccably?’ he asked in a voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Or perhaps imperfectly? But no. Only a generous soul could say such a thing. Come here.’
    He indicated with a tap of his ebony cane where she should stand. Wordlessly, Lucy complied.
    ‘Or …’ Julian pointed the jewelled tip of his walkingstick at the tiers of lace hanging below Lucy’s ruched overskirt. ‘Immorally?’ He lifted her petticoats. Her shoes were lilac satin, a matching rosette adorning each square toe. Her openwork stockings were of the palest blue.
    ‘Such dainty feet,’ he mused. ‘I should dearly like to know how many times they’ve been up in the air of late.’ He touched the cane to an ankle then trailed the slender staff along the inside of her calf, lifting the weight of the fabrics.
    Lucy shuddered as, with agonising slowness, he reached the frilled knee of her drawers.
    ‘For I am quite sure,’ he continued, raising her layers higher and higher, ‘this is not the only stick you have felt in recent days.’
    The cane slid over her silk-clad legs then lightly nudged at the juncture of her thighs. Arousal, warm and dewy, moistened her sex, and her labia twitched with gathering hunger.
    ‘How many cocks have you had in here?’ he asked, pressing the ebony shaft into the split of her drawers. He slotted its cold, hard length into the damp cleft of her pouting vulva and moved it back and forth.
    Lucy, murmuring pleasure, widened her stance.
    ‘Ah, but still hungry I see. How many?’ Julian tapped the