The Hellion's Waltz Read online

  “I never will,” Maddie promised recklessly.

  “You said you could make me scream.”

  Maddie’s throat went dry, and her voice roughened. “Little sparrow—”

  Sophie growled.

  Maddie felt goose bumps prickle all down her arms. God, but she wanted to hear that sound again. And every other sound Sophie made. “I would love to try,” Maddie said, licking her lips.

  Sophie’s eyes flared. Her hands slipped around to the back of Maddie’s neck and pulled Maddie forward into a kiss like drowning.

  Maddie had been kissed by so many people she’d lost count, but Sophie’s kiss eclipsed all the others. It felt like more than a single kiss—as though they picked up precisely where they’d left off in the tavern more than a week ago. As if the fire they’d started then had only banked itself, waiting for this moment to burn higher and hotter.

  So why go slow? Sophie’s hands were clutching at her, insistent and irresistible—Maddie gave in to their pull and tipped forward, sliding her own hands beneath the coverlet and filling them with Sophie’s plump and perfect breasts.

  The noise Sophie made in the back of her throat was half surprise, half plea.

  Maddie let herself taste those noises for a moment, licking hungrily into the heat of Sophie’s mouth. Her hands rested above layers—too many layers!—of gown and underthings. Maddie wanted skin beneath her touch, and more sounds to fill her ears. She told Sophie so without words, by curling one finger and scraping the fingernail over the peak of one breast, so that all those fabric layers buzzed with friction down to the nipple hidden beneath.

  Sophie tore her mouth away to pant for air. “Oh.”

  Maddie kissed her throat, tracing her lips over that most delicious spot where Sophie’s pulse fluttered. “Not screaming yet,” she purred. “How many of your clothes am I allowed to remove?” She added a scrape of teeth to make Sophie squirm. “I could do it without removing any, if you’d like.”

  “No,” Sophie said at once, though it was more than half gasp.

  Maddie stopped. Slowly she pulled away, her grip loosening even as her breath still came panting in her lungs.

  Sophie blinked up at her, dazed and dazzled. “You stopped.”

  Maddie nodded. “You said no.”

  “Oh.” Sophie cocked her head. “I did. But what I meant was: No, please get me as naked as possible. I see I shall have to be more explicit in future.” She bit her lip, a sight that made Maddie go hot from head to heels. “Please Miss Crewe, help me out of this gown. Tear it off, if you have to.”

  Maddie gasped as if scandalized. “Tear it? Why on earth would I do such a thing?” Clothing was costly—and it revealed a person’s secrets. If you were someone who knew how to read it.

  Maddie was an expert in that code. She let her hands coast over the brown linen again, from the ribboned neckline and over the swell of Sophie’s breast. “This is good whole cloth, without a mar or mend anywhere. What has it done to deserve harm at my hands?”

  Sophie shook her head, even as she arched into the caress. “It’s plain linen. Dyed plain brown.”

  Then why the ribbon? Maddie fought a smile. Sophie Roseingrave was practical but wistful; sensible and sensual both.

  Maddie slipped her hands around Sophie’s waist, then up to the laces at the back of the dress. Her hands busied themselves untying. She leaned forward to breathe her next question into Sophie’s ear. “How could you ever go home if I destroyed your dress?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sophie said at once. “I’d have to stay here helpless, to be used however you pleased. Utterly at your mercy.” She sounded anything but fearful, wriggling close to give Maddie’s hands more room to work behind her back.

  Maddie chuckled and bit Sophie’s earlobe as the dress loosened; the other woman gasped and giggled. Together they pulled up Sophie’s skirts and got the dress over her head and arms. Sophie’s petticoat and light stays went next—unboned, as Maddie’s were. “Your turn,” Sophie said, and reached for Maddie’s gray gown.

  Maddie caught her hands by the wrists and spread them wide, one to either side. “Not so fast,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

  Sophie squirmed. “If your plan is to make me scream in frustration . . .”

  Maddie simply looked—at the breasts curving so temptingly beneath the linen, true, but also at the garment itself. Sophie’s chemise was good cloth, but old. It had been much mended by a hand clearly hurrying through the job. Maddie dropped one of Sophie’s hands so her fingers could trace seams like old scars. She embellishes her sensible gown, but wears these wounds close to the skin, Maddie thought. She doesn’t expect anyone ever to see them—or to take notice of them when she’s being laced up at home.

  “Is this your stitching?” she asked. Meaning: Did you hurry through a task you disliked, or were these marks made by someone else’s hands?

  “I’m not much of a mender,” Sophie muttered.

  Impatient, Maddie thought to herself. She ran her fingers over the soft fabric, almost transparent with age and wear. That thinness hinted at what waited beneath: softness and skin and sweet, slippery places. And somehow, despite all her teasing promises, Maddie hesitated to strip that last scrap of cloth away from Sophie’s body. It veiled her form—but it said so much about her choices.

  Of course Maddie yearned to see what Sophie Roseingrave looked like when she was bare and wet and willing. But apparently Maddie was greedier than she’d realized—because suddenly she wanted more than that. She wanted to see as deep as she could into Sophie’s mind and heart, too. To learn every secret that lived in the darkness there.

  The shock of all that wanting made her hands shake like leaves in spring wind.

  The impatience Maddie had deduced apparently got the better of Sophie. Her voice turned tart and teasing: “If my poor sewing bothers you so much, you need not look at it so closely.” She covered Maddie’s eyes with one hand and climbed into her lap, knees straddling Maddie’s hips.

  Her next kiss brooked no denial. Sophie slanted her lips hard over Maddie’s, her tongue stroking almost angrily.

  Maddie’s soul soared in the darkness and she yielded gladly. Who would have thought justice-minded Miss Roseingrave had such wonderful lechery in her? Sophie was a plump and perfect lapful, all hungry mouth and quivering thighs as she guided Maddie’s hand beneath the hem of that thin chemise. Tender skin, sweet curves, and—ah, yes, slickness and heat beneath soft curls. Maddie teased those soft folds until Sophie growled again—oh, that sound! Maddie drank it like wine, her eyes squeezed shut beneath Sophie’s palm.

  Sophie broke the kiss to offer a threat: “If you don’t fuck me now I’m going to do it myself and make you watch.”

  Maddie shuddered in delight. “Next time,” she gasped, then took two fingers and slid them deep and fast into Sophie’s cunny.

  Perhaps too fast: Sophie squeaked.

  Maddie went still.

  Sophie breathed out, long and low, and her hand trembled where it covered Maddie’s eyes. “Oh, yes,” she sighed, and spread her hips a little wider. “More of that, please, Miss Crewe.”

  Maddie didn’t need to be told twice. She pushed her fingers up again, heat engulfing her up to the last knuckle, feeling her way for the deepest, silkiest slide.

  Sophie’s hips bucked insistently. Maddie pressed up with the heel of her hand, grinding against the throbbing pearl just above where her fingers played. “Yes,” Sophie gasped. She kept talking, breathing pleas and encouragements and demands, her fingers pressing against Maddie’s eyelids, her palms going damp as her pleasure built. She rode Maddie harder, straining up on her knees to give her hand room to work. This had the delightful effect of bringing her breasts high enough that Maddie could lean down, eyes still covered, and suck at one linen-veiled nipple until it went tight beneath her tongue.

  Sophie cried out and came, her cunny rippling as Maddie’s fingers worked within her. She cupped Maddie’s face in her hands and kissed
her desperately, small sounds almost of pain pouring from her throat.

  Maddie kept her eyes shut tight through it all, drinking in every gasp and whimper, every sound of pleasure made by the woman above her. It was only when Sophie slumped with release, panting and spent, that Maddie realized she’d never removed so much as a stitch of her own clothing.

  The church bells of St. Severus tolled midnight.

  Maddie opened her eyes.

  “Oh!” Sophie sat up. Her face was mottled white and red, her dark hair all but falling out of its pins in tousled locks. Her chemise had rucked up around her hips, the neckline wantonly askew, and the linen clung wetly at her breast where Maddie’s mouth had been.

  Miss Roseingrave looked utterly ruined, lust dampened and pleasured within an inch of her life.

  “I’m meant to be asleep at home,” she said, “ready to open the shop in the morning while everyone else sleeps late.”

  Maddie allowed herself the luxury of one more kiss—a slow savoring of lips and heated breath. “Then let’s get you set to rights.”

  Back into the soft stays Sophie went, all her small scars hidden again from ravenous eyes. Maddie stood behind her to pull the laces tight and do up the brown gown, and consoled herself by dropping a kiss where the lovebird ribbon ended at the shoulder seam.

  Sophie finished putting her hair back in order and glanced at Maddie over her shoulder. “You will come see me if there is anything I can do?”

  “I will,” Maddie said. “Though we shouldn’t have to trouble you. We have plenty of hands available.”

  “Of course.” Sophie ducked her head.

  She looked so forlorn that Maddie stepped forward and embraced her, pressing comforting lips to the nape of that bowed neck. “You never did scream,” she murmured. “I have to keep that promise, don’t I?”

  Sophie nestled against Maddie’s chest, fingers twining together. “If you insist,” she said, in a tone so pristine and proper that it tempted Maddie to undo all that lacing and ravish her a second time.

  Maddie stole another few kisses on the way down the stairs, and again as Sophie wrapped her cloak and her muffler back around herself. She melted back into the night as quietly as she’d arrived, leaving Maddie to mount the stairs again one lonely step at a time. She undressed, wishing it were Sophie’s hands instead of hers on tapes and laces and linen, then she burrowed into the sheets in search of the ghosts of warmth and company.

  The bed smelled of Sophie’s pleasure, tart and luscious.

  Maddie’s hands dove between her legs. She made herself come, over and over, until her eyes drifted shut in wanton exhaustion.

  From the doorway of the Weavers’ Library, Maddie declared: “Miss Slight is a genius.”

  In the few short weeks since they’d begun planning their crime, the young lady had designed and built something truly terrifying: a tower of metal discs, half-corroded in a deeply alarming way and ringed by bubbling jars, linked to one another by twisting coils of wire. A branch of candles nearby sent light through the liquid to ripple on the floor in eldritch waves. The occasional spark spit out from this mess to extinguish itself on the thick fire-dampening cloth beneath.

  A thick coil of wire snaked out of the tower and connected to a wooden cabinet—a tall, varnished, hulking thing with six palm-sized holes drilled front and back like the pips on a playing card. It loomed in the center of the room, looking like nothing so much as a coffin stood on its end. On the side of the cabinet where the wire went in was a large lever, painted crimson.

  The whole apparatus looked like a device that could destroy the world.

  “Of course it’s perfectly harmless,” Miss Slight explained, as she and Alice Bilton dropped more dye and soda ash into the jars. “Anyone who knows anything about voltaic piles can see it’s all smoke and nonsense.”

  “I think we can trust Mr. Giles not to be one of those people,” Mrs. Money said, looking alarmed in contrast to the brave military cut of her gown. “But since I am also one of those people, I will ask again: Are you certain this is safe?”

  Maddie had been to the Slights’ shop—a place Miss Slight’s hands had filled with pocket watches and children’s toys and miniature mechanical birds that piped realistic calls. It was work that took imagination, care, and a zealous attention to even the smallest details. “I’m sure,” Maddie said firmly, and smoothed down her silk skirts.

  Tonight Maddie would be garbed in blue—the same blue silk they’d used as bait, but without the red and gold and green threads. It was the first time in years she would wear fabric so fine: she used to make herself things out of leftovers and the odd ends of bolts, back when she and her mother were weaving broadcloth, but since she’d moved to ribbon weaving she didn’t have scraps to play with the same way. She’d missed the weight of silk, as she held the bundled gown over her arms. She couldn’t seem to stop her hands from stroking the nap of the cloth.

  She wanted Sophie’s hands on this dress, and on the body beneath. Maddie had walked by the instrument shop once or twice, but otherwise she’d been keeping her distance from the quiet and too-tempting Miss Roseingrave, who knew too many of Maddie’s secrets. When this is over, she told herself. When it’s safer. But her resolve to hold that distance was weakening day by day. The feel of silk against her skin might shred it utterly.

  She wanted Sophie to peel this dress from her layer by layer, hungrily, until only Maddie remained.

  But that would have to wait. First, she had to put on a little show for Mr. Giles.

  He arrived precisely five minutes late—punctual enough that he couldn’t be faulted for it, but tardy enough that he didn’t have to waste any of his own time waiting for anybody else. Mrs. Money greeted him and permitted herself to be kissed and complimented.

  Her smile never wavered, not even as Mr. Giles’s lying lips touched the back of her glove. Maddie wondered what it cost the onetime Jenny Hull, to bear that touch and stay so cool and aloof.

  “I must ask you, sir, to never divulge the secrets I am about to reveal to you.”

  “Madam,” he said, and for once Maddie could believe him sincere, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Mrs. Money waved Maddie forward; she put on her best sulk and obeyed.

  “Miss Crewe will be donning our dress for this transformation,” Mrs. Money said. “We have refreshed the color specifically for tonight’s demonstration, so that you may see how completely it transforms. Horace was very careful to make it so a lady didn’t have to remove any clothing for the process to work—in fact, he found it more reliable when it was on a person than when he used a mannequin. Something about animal magnetism, I think?” She waved a hand. “It’s in his notes somewhere, I’m sure.”

  “May I?” asked Mr. Giles, his eyes on the cloth. Maddie held out the gown, and let him poke and pull at the silk until he was satisfied to its quality and construction.

  “If you would, Miss Crewe,” Mrs. Money said, and Maddie stepped behind a screen with Alice and Miss Slight.

  “Would you like a closer look at the cabinet?” Mrs. Money asked.

  Maddie shed her plain gray wool and stepped into the pooled skirts Alice held as footsteps tapped a circle on the wooden floor, Mr. Giles murmuring soft questions and comments. “Are we sure it will fit over the hips?” Maddie asked, though the dress was already at her waist and she was sliding her arms into the sleeves.

  “It is a trifle snug,” Alice lied, her hands flying from button to button up Maddie’s spine. Only about a third of the buttons actually held the dress together; the rest were for show. “One good tug should do it—there.”

  “I can’t reach to do it up,” Maddie complained, slipping her wrists through the prebuttoned cuffs.

  “Of course not,” Miss Slight said, with an impatient huff. “It buttons at the back. I’ll get them. Start on the sleeves.”

  “I can’t—Alice is doing up the one sleeve, and I can’t button the other one-handed.”

  “Stop wriggling,
or this will take twice as long.”

  Maddie grinned, already dressed, ready to play her part to the hilt. She made her voice turn petulant. “What kind of woman wears something so hard to get into?”

  “It’s very fashionable,” Alice retorted sharply, though her eyes were laughing.

  “Is getting dressed what great ladies do instead of work, like the rest of us? Three hours to get everything buttoned and laced, an hour for tea, and then three more hours just to get it all off again?”

  Alice hid a silent snicker behind her hand.

  At last, Maddie stepped out from the screen, blue silk draped around her, her fingers supposedly struggling to do up the last of the small and fiddly buttons at her wrist.

  “Finally,” Mrs. Money muttered, then frowned. “Your hair, girl.”

  “What about my hair?”

  Mrs. Money held out her hand. “You can’t wear hairpins in the cabinet—unless you fancy ending up with a singed scalp, or worse?”

  As Mr. Giles watched avidly, Maddie pulled every last pin from her hair one by one. She dropped them in Mrs. Money’s hand and combed her fingers through her long auburn locks to ensure she hadn’t missed any.

  “Now then,” Mrs. Money said, pulling open the cabinet door. “Inside with you.”

  Maddie twisted her hands nervously. “Are you sure it’s safe, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Money’s voice was all impatience. “Come, Miss Crewe, we’ve tested it a dozen times, with but a handful of accidents. Have a little courage.”

  Mr. Giles looked at Maddie and twin hopes warred in his eyes. Either the experiment would succeed, or a woman he loathed would be grievously and painfully injured.

  There was no chance he’d look away.

  Maddie took a deep breath, made sure he could see her hands trembling, and stepped into the cabinet. Mrs. Money shut the door behind her, circled the cabinet once as if checking it over, and moved to the lever. Maddie could just see a slice of her through the cabinet holes on the left.