In the Garden of Sin Read Online Free PDF Page A

to feel his sex moving in and out of me, rubbing me from inside, my heart hammering faster, faster…
    I had even dreamed about it at the inn we stayed in the night before, only to awaken with a start, hips squeezing as I lay facedown in my little bed, the flesh between my legs hot and swollen. The urge to press down hard, to grind my aching sex against the prickly straw mattress, was almost overwhelming.
    The dream had likely been inspired by the squeaking bed ropes and rhythmic thumping coming from the bedchamber next to mine, which housed the gray-haired but brawny Marquess of Tarwick. A female voice, muffled but recognizable as Bianca’s, cried
“Sì! Sì! Dio santo!”
    “Like it good and hard, do you?” Tarwick rasped as the squeaking speeded up.
    “Aye, my lord,
come una lancia
. Stab it in. Sì… Sì…”
    I lay there with my eyes wide and my ear trained, grudgingly fascinated by their raucous coupling.
    “By the rood, you’re good at this,” the marquess said, “bloody good. Can I fetch in you?”
    “Sì, I want you to. I want to feel the… how you say? Spitting? Spurting, that is the word.”
    The moans from the next room took on an urgent quality. Wedging a hand beneath me, I found my night rail soaked through at the juncture of my thighs, a phenomenon I had experienced occasionally, but never to such a degree. I stroked my sex through the saturated linen, inciting a sharp tremor of pleasure that seemed to emanate from a little knot of flesh at the apex of the cleft. It was the first time I had ever experienced such a sensation, having never touched myself there except when bathing. Drunk with arousal, I reflexively pressed my mons against my hand. There came a second tremor and an urge to thrust that was so powerful, I shook with the effort of resisting it. I felt as if I were on the threshold of a crisis of pleasure that might burst my heart were I to surrender to it.
    “Oh Dio!
Oh… oh…” Bianca let out a series of sharp cries that alarmed me for a moment until they devolved into breathless chuckles and I realized she was reacting to pleasure, not pain.
    “Oh, God,” the marquess groaned as the squeaks and thumps grew louder, faster. “I’m coming. Ohhh…” The squeaks slowed as he let out a long, low groan.
    I knew I should pull my hand out from under me, put the pillow over my head, and try to get back to sleep. I was no voluptuary enslaved by base physical urges but a scholar, a thinker, a creature of the mind.
    But not only did I leave the hand there, I pressed my finger into the slit through the drenched linen, brushing the little knot, which was hard as a pearl now. That light, fleeting touch triggered a contraction in my sex that sucked the very breath from my lungs. There followed a flurry of spasms so intense that I had to bite my lip—
hard
—to keep from crying out as I convulsed with a pleasure I had never known before.
    As I lay there afterward, catching my breath and marveling at what had just transpired, I reflected that I might have a great deal more to learn about carnal matters than I had previously thought. That realization only magnified my unease as our procession of carts, carriages, and horsemen drew ever nearer to Château de la Grotte Cachée.
    Lucy was complaining about Don Domenico’s “interfering in our love lives like some meddlesome old auntie.”
    “Love lives?” Sibylla said. “These are all wedded men, Lucy, most with mistresses as well. ’Tisn’t love they want from us.”
    “Is
he
a wedded man?” I asked. “Don Domenico?” The possibility had not occurred to me.
    “Constanze say he have no wife and no mistress,” Bianca told them. Constanze was her older sister, who had had been among Vitturi’s first group of neophyte courtesans seven years ago and was now one of the most sought-after courtesans in Venice. “She say once he have many lovers, and a very beautiful mistress, but now he only bed his
cortigianas
. She say when he is young,