Edward could feel the heat of Margaret's leg against his on the trap seat, even through the material of her long skirt and petticoats and his own trousers. He wondered if she could feel him too—and there at the shoulders too. He thought not, though, or that, if she could, she wasn't noticing. The ladies maid, Nancy, sitting reversed on the trap's back bench and clutching the picnic basket beside her, seemed more aware of where her back touched Edward's. She was trembling at the touch—or maybe she was just palsied. She was much too young to be palsied, though. She was a cute little trick, Edward thought.
His mind went back to his current plans of conquest, though. He'd been honing in on Margaret for months. He had decided that today, on the picnic down to Thrushington Lake, he was going to fuck her. She had played coy long enough. He knew she was game for it. He'd known ever since he'd been told—in twittered confidence, of course—that she was writing racy Romance stories for that
Life of Bliss
women's magazine. He'd read some of those stories, and they'd made him go hard, even if some of the prose was purple.
"Throbbing mass of manhood thrusting at the pearly gates" indeed, he thought. The woman was just a tease with him. She took cock; that was clear from the descriptions he could see under that florid prose she published. He made an excuse to pull back on the reins and, in so doing, brush her left breast. Touching the breasts, seemingly inadvertently, had always gotten his dick inside a woman before.
Nothing, though. She just sat there in the trap seat close beside him and stared down at the hindquarters of the horse.
It was a stallion, and not a gelding either, and what Margaret was staring at was what was hanging down between its hind legs.
Edward's efforts were for naught. Margaret, her attention riveted on that appendage between the horse's legs, was oblivious to him and to anything else other than the looming deadline for a Penny Passion pen name story due to
Life of Bliss
. She was feeling warm and moist . . . down there . . . just looking at the horse and considering it as a metaphor and thought maybe that the play on horse could be the hook for her story.
She might use the young, blond Lord Reginald, perhaps, a major conjured participant in her own time alone in her bed when she was pining over her lack of actual experience in these matters. She'd have him playing polo. The young daughter of his housekeeper, Pamela, who was visiting her mother at his country home and who he was being kind to by inviting her to watch him play polo would mistakenly enter his tent where he was dressing for the game and was shirtless and in his tight polo pants. She would be taken aback by seeing his powerful, muscled chest, tapering down to his flat belly and slim waist, and would stumble, almost swoon. Saving her from falling, Sir Reginald would hold her close in her arms and she could feel his manhood against her thigh. There would be some references to horses here, possible by writing the subtle image of her heroine standing next to Sir Reginald's obviously well-endowed horse before the match while looking up at the noticeably well-endowed Sir Reginald while he asks for her favor in the game—Margaret could work that out later. But her readers would get the point. Her faithful readers had learned to read between her lines.
They would kiss . . . deeply . . . without, of course, meaning to. But she would break away and flee the tent. Lord Reginald would be the deciding factor in winning the match, most certainly, and the blushing Pamela, never looking more beautiful, would cheer him on.
He, of course, would seek her out in his vast manor but not be able to find her until one of the serving men told him which chamber of the servants' wing she was sleeping in. He would arrive, at some point nearly naked, of course, but Margaret couldn't directly write that. There certainly would be a reference to horses here again, though. He would put a knee on the bed, hovering over her reclining body. His hand would touch her breast—which Margaret's readers would know sealed Pamela's fate—and brush aside the flimsy material of her night dress, revealing amply rounded orbs, heaving now as Pamela woke, her violet eyes wide open in shock.
The bed curtain would, of course, have to come down at this point, perhaps the reader's eye being taken up to the paintings of stallions hanging on the chamber's walls. The
Life of Bliss
editors would only let her go so far. But Margaret would hold the thought for when she was alone in her own bed that night. Then there would be no bed curtains to fall and she could be quite explicit in her dreaming of what the horse was a metaphor for. If only some handsome, blond, lord . . .
