‘Yes, I did, sir, I did. I drank him down, sir.’
The rubbing grew firmer and he planted a thumb between my bottom cheeks, the better to hold me in position.
‘Even though you knew he cared nothing for you?’
‘Even so, sir. If he asked it of me, I did it. I could not refuse.’
‘You can’t refuse?’
I was strung as tight as I could be now, gritting my teeth against the enormity of sensation.
‘Whatever you ask … sir … anything … you … want … ohhh.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he whispered, stroking me through it, bending low over me so that his cheek touched mine. ‘She belongs to me.’
I did, body and soul, but I didn’t want him to know it. I was too mixed up in my own heat and stickiness to disentangle the threads of what happened to me and what happened to Walters. We had, for that moment of undoing, become one.
Cruel Bastard had left the building, though, because Jasper lifted me gently to my feet and held me close, kissing my hair, caressing my still-hot bottom through the slit in my drawers, making me feel his heartbeat pound against my own.
‘It’s so good to be back,’ he said.
‘What, back in the Victorian museum?’ I said, with a yawn and a slight giggle.
‘You know what I mean.’
I thought I did, and it was a monumental admission. He was glad to be back home, but he wasn’t home – he was with me.
Did that make me his home?
Chapter Three
A few days later, my day off arrived and Jasper took me on a trip to London.
He had promised me treats and gifts and general spoiling, but I wasn’t sure what he had in mind when we turned into a narrow cobbled street in Spitalfields and he led me up it.
‘Are you taking me to the Dennis Severs House?’ I asked, excited at the prospect. I’d visited this museum many times – indeed, it was the inspiration behind our own Victorian house – but another visit was always a prospect to be treasured.
‘Not quite,’ he said.
I looked around me. The shops were all small fashion boutiques. It was Hallowe’en and a few of them had made a concession to the season, with cobwebs and rubber bats in the windows, but most were too cool for that kind of thing.
Our final destination was a shop that sold vintage clothing and accessories – lovely stuff with swirling 50s petticoats or flapper gowns glimmering with tiny seed pearls.
‘Gorgeous,’ I said, fingering a silk kimono-style wrap that came complete with a long, lacquered cigarette-holder, but Jasper whisked me away, tilting his head at the woman behind the counter.
‘We’re not here for this. We have an appointment upstairs.’
‘Go on up. She’s waiting for you,’ said the woman, whose multi-coloured bob fascinated me so much that Jasper had to drag me to the narrow stairs at the back of the room.
‘Who’s waiting for us? What’s happening?’
‘I told you I’d get you into a corset,’ said Jasper.
‘Oh, my God, really?’
‘Yes, really. Don’t you want one? Don’t worry – it won’t be the type to crush your ribs. No whalebone.’
We had stopped on the top stair. A door stood in front of us, bland and unassuming enough, but somehow it made me shudder as if it were a portal to the underworld.