“More cream for your tart, dear Constance?”

Lady Emma brushed my hand with hers as she passed me the silver-clad tub of whipped cream, and I blushed—not only at her intimate touch by a hand that had known me to the depths, but at the tight little smile and the arch that had gone to her well-plucked eyebrows when she mouthed the word “tart.”

I felt so exposed. I had never intended to be in the combined presence of the two, and yet here I was, sitting in a small glade above the Thames at Lord Thomas and Lady Emma’s Caversham Park retreat having a civilized picnic during an interval in the annual Henley Regatta, and the tension in the air was palpable. Or at least it was in my experience. I could hardly breath—and it wasn’t all because of the tightness of the bone corselet or the heat of the day heightened by the billowing skirt and layers of petticoats I was wearing. Thomas and Emma, conversely, looked perfectly comfortable and in their element.

I had not meant for it to happen—not any of it—most especially my trysting with Lord Thomas. But when that life-changing event occurred, I had barely come out of mourning for my dear Trevor, lost in the Boor Wars at such a young age and leaving me with barely enough wherewithal to exist and certainly with no skills to improve my lot unless I could find an appropriate place at court or as a tutor or as a companion for another, better situated, widow.

It had been my first outing to Covent Gardens after two years of widow weeds—and I had always been so young and gay before I lost Trevor. Lady Helen, my companion for the evening, succumbed to the vapors with the concert barely started, and, it was foolish and selfish of me, I know, but I had stayed on at the theatre when she had withdrawn. I assumed there would be carriages available for the return to my nearby modest mews townhouse—and there may have been—but Lord Thomas offered to accompany me home in his carriage at the end of the concert, and I had no reason to refuse.

I was so young and naïve then. I had known nothing of Lord Thomas’s reputation or his arrogance and audacity. But part of the fault was mine, I must admit. I found Lord Thomas intriguing, even when viewed from afar and regardless of my feelings for Lady Emma. I should have enquired about Lady Emma—asked why she was not with him at the theatre. But I did not.

And he did not take me home in his carriage—or at least not at once. Not for well over an hour. His carriage furiously rumbled out into the countryside and then back into London. On a rural byway, where there was no one but Lord Thomas’s driver—and henchman—to hear my pleas, Lord Thomas took advantage of me in his carriage, cruelly, forcefully, and despite my gasping begging that he forebear, with no one there to heed my cries of violation.

He was magnificent and so, so ... large.

I cannot accuse him of deflowering me, as I was a widow, and my Trevor, who had been highly sexed and—to my own enjoyment as well, I must admit—had claimed his husbandly right nearly nightly in our short time as man and wife. Indeed, on the night we were married, we were already well acquainted with each other in that way. Just as Lord Thomas had done, Trevor had taken me on more than one eventful carriage ride before we were married. I knew when I married Trevor what that man measured out to be. And such a claiming. I often wondered if he was consorting with tarts to expect me to accord him what he asked for. He was my husband, so of course I did what he could. Much of it, I must admit, was quite enjoyable. In fact, I ached from the absence of his more than dutiful cocking—which may have contributed to the ease of Lord Thomas’s victory over me.

Much of what my husband had asked of me was what Lord Thomas wanted as well. It had been so long since Trevor ... well, so it became something of a pleasure to accede to Thomas’s desires.

Almost before I knew what was happening to me in that darkened carriage, Thomas had one hand inside my bodice and the other under my skirts and on my mound. And then for miles and miles through the rural roads, I was trapped between the carriage seat and his plunging pelvis, as he pushed my skirts above my waist and spread my legs with his hands wrapped under a knee and around an ankle and cocked me with a member much more filling and able to reach deeper inside me than Trevor ever had done. Lord Thomas was so ... so ... large and a master cocksman, which I only later heard rumored frequently around court, and I was vulnerable and without attention for so long after a brief period of fully satisfactory lying with my young husband. And I am shamed and embarrassed to admit that I moaned and flowed for Thomas repeatedly in that lurching carriage while he seeded me twice—in separate channels. I later could attest that Thomas seemed to prefer the nether channel as being tighter and giving his cock more pleasure.

“It’s so much safer here, my dear,” he had said when first he, in his haste had, I thought, entered the wrong door, and no doubt he was correct.

Surprisingly, Trevor had taken that path as well, preferring that approach before we were married. When Lord Thomas showed such a preference, I admit that I didn’t try to prevent it to any heroic degree.

I don’t think Lord Thomas was being quite the gentleman, though, when he laughed at my request for his driver to take another circuit around the park.

I refused to see him after that—for a full two weeks. But one rainy afternoon, he had tippled too heartily at his gentleman’s club, and he forced his way into my small mews home and pushed me down on my knees in front of him and made me give him suck before he carried me up to my bed and pounded that big, hard, ruby-red-headed cock inside me while I gave him every reason to believe that it was just what I wanted him to do. When he finished in my vagina and, having hardened again, he turned me on my back and took me in the other channel—something my husband had only done twenty or thirty times. I denied him nothing and cried out for the feel of his semen flowing deep inside me. Nothing made me more lustful for a virile man than the prolonged loss of the one I once had. And Lord Thomas had a commanding presence, a comely body, and an oh so insistent and masterful hard member.

And, I cringe to say, it was all overwhelmingly exotic and arousing for me. In those two weeks I denied him, I melted to the remembrance of his member working inside me and mingling his flow with mine after more than two years of abstinence. And I blush to admit that I especially enjoyed the close fit of his cock in my arse channel. From there the decision was almost too easy to make to accept his offer of a stipend if I opened my legs to him whenever he called on me to do so.

A young widow who has been raised in the gentry and finds herself bereft of her honorable support has to do what she has to do. Life is cruel and a constant danger for such as I.

If that had been all there was to that, it would have been nothing special or unusual. But my wantonness inside the lord’s household had already been established before that momentous carriage ride.

I have no idea what working of the humor of the gods had set Lord Thomas on me, but perhaps my having already been a tertiary figure in his vast household had set his ardor and determination in motion. I had barely met him before he assaulted me and made me a wanton woman, however.

The earlier connection had been Lady Emma. Less than a year after I learned of my husband’s untimely death on the South African battlefield, I was introduced to Lady Emma, who was taking a tour of Italy, unaccompanied by her husband, and who needed a suitable traveling companion. A friend who knew of my plight recommended me to Lady Emma, and I found myself in Florence and then in Venice, and then, no doubt as a result of the exotic and sultry environment of the Italian phallus-shaped peninsula and all those suggestive statues of naked young men, writhing on a chaise lounge just inside a balcony on a Venetian canal with Lady Emma’s head between my parted thighs and her tongue lapping between my labia and at my clitoris.