Page 5 of The Education of Ivy Leavold
Mr. Markham’s mouth twitched, as if he knew what I was thinking of. “Come here, Ivy,” he commanded.
I slid off the bed and walked toward him. I’d been put to bed completely naked and I remained that way, but I felt no shame. Indeed, I felt a sense of satisfaction at the way his eyes blazed at the sight of my bare breasts and hips. When I reached him, he issued another order. “Kneel.”
I obeyed without thinking. Whatever he wanted, I wanted.One flesh.Wasn’t that the wedding vow? We would be one flesh. And flesh cannot doubt itself. Flesh cannot deny itself.
“Good girl.” He stroked my tousled hair. “You know, I half-expected you to vanish in the night. To evanesce away like a phantom. Or a dream. I couldn’t fall asleep for fear that you wouldn’t be there when I woke.”
I turned my face into his hand. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
His eyes burned once more. “Yes. Yes, I’ll make quite sure of that.”
The boxes rattled in the back of my mind, the deep fears and the knowledge that I had buried, but I ignored them and instead pressed my lips to the inside of his palm.
He made a noise of approval. “You are still willing then, to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“And to have me teach you how to please me? And how to let me please you?”
“Yes.”
He unbuttoned his breeches, keeping his eyes pinned to mine, revealing his stiffening cock. Without warning, his hand was on the back of my head and he was feeding it into my mouth, forcing me to open, to take him as deeply as I could.
He groaned. “Fuck, Ivy. That mouth. It’s almost criminally good.”
I loved it. All of it. The salty taste of him as he slid against my tongue, the way I could smell soap lingering on the skin of his stomach, the groans issuing from his mouth. His hand on the back of my head as he drove the pace. The way he didn’t stop me when I used my fingers to caress him, to cup him, to dig into his thighs and hips and pull him closer to me.
“You are so eager to please. Look up at me—no, keep me inside your mouth as you do. Yes, that’s it.”
I kept my eyes up as I pleasured him, experimenting with flicks of the tongue and variations in suction, more aroused by his steady gaze and heavy, determined hand than I would have been by the enthusiasm and encouragement of any other man.
“You are so inexperienced, wildcat. I almost don’t want to teach you. There is something—ah yes—you are able to stoke me to impossible fire with your ignorant eagerness. Yes, just like that.”
I brought my hand to his shaft and began pumping him in time to my bobbing mouth.
“Yes,” he hissed, his eyes fluttering closed and his self-control finally ebbing away. “Suck it, pet. Suck hard.”
His cock swelled in my mouth, no longer flesh but stone, every vein and ridge as hard as marble. I expected him to ejaculate right then, wanted it even, but my head was tugged roughly back.
“Get your dress,” he growled. “Crawl to it.”
It took me a moment to remember the garb of green lawn that he had cut away last night, to remember that he had brought it upstairs with us. He released my hair and I crawled over to the bed, where I saw the ruined dress crumpled on the floor. My sex felt exposed as I crawled, exposed and wet and hungry, and when I cast a look over my shoulder, I saw Mr. Markham staring at me with a look so predatory it bordered on ferocious. I grabbed the dress, eager to get back to him, but stopped when I saw something under the bed. It was a small chest of rosy wood, bound with bright golden hardware. Inlaid into the side was more gold—swooping letters spelling out AW.
Arabella Whitefield.
It must have been her chest, and Mr. Markham must have saved it. Not only saved it, but stored it under his bed, as if he didn’t want anyone to find it. And the box gleamed and shone; it wasn’t dusty. It was dragged out frequently then, dragged out and its contents lovingly viewed and cataloged. My heart squeezed at this unexpected devotion he showed his first wife.
“I’m growing impatient,” he said darkly.
I turned away from the bed—and its tragic box—and brought the dress over to him, painfully aware of how tight my nipples were, how heavy my breasts felt as I crawled.
He sat still, as still and as composed as if he were at a formal dinner, his elbow braced on the arm of the chair and his head braced against his fingers as he watched me. But at formal dinners, men didn’t sit with their trousers open, their rigid dicks standing at attention, pre-cum glistening at the top. But even as it throbbed, even as I saw Mr. Markham’s pulse thrumming in his neck, he made no move to touch himself. He only watched, with hunger, as I presented my old dress to him.
“Spread your legs, Ivy,” he said.
I did, feeling the thick hand-knotted rug slide against my knees, feeling the cool air kissing the wetness along my center. The ache inside of me tripled, and then tripled again as Mr. Markham impatiently kicked my knees further apart. His cock pulsed, but still he refrained from touching it. I watched as a small droplet of pre-cum oozed down the silky underside of his dick, wanting nothing more than to lick it off, to lick him until he finally, finally, finally lost control.
“Not yet, wildcat,” he said, guessing at the look on my face. But I couldn’t look away from that part of him. It was so magnificent, so beautiful, and all I could feel was the emptiness in my cunt where it should be, stroking and rubbing me from the inside out. I wetted my lips and leaned forward and then my jaw was caught in his fingers, not bruisingly hard, but hard enough that a shiver of possession shuddered through me.
