green stalk. Then her eyes never leaving his, she bit the flower-headed tip from the asparagus and swallowed it down. She sucked upon the stalk, taking the sweetness from it, and then cast it aside. Now she offered him one, but he shook his head.
'They are all yours,' he told her with a small smile.
She smiled back and proceeded to eat the vegetable slowly and sensuously as he watched. She could see the bulge in his breeches with each nibble she took. At one point she reached out, patting it. When the asparagus were all devoured, Lucinda gave him her fingers to lick. He sucked upon each digit with very explicit meaning. The last item left on the tray proved to be a dish of strawberries. They fed them to each other until their fingers and their lips were stained red with the juices of the sweet fruits. When the berries were gone and they had licked each other's fingers clean, he brought them each a crystal goblet of wine. Together they drank it down.
'Are you satisfied now?' he demanded of her when the tray had been decimated.
'No,' she said. 'There is one more thing I desire, Robbie.' He laughed. 'You are a true vixen, Lucinda,' he told her. 'Very well, as I am not yet satisfied either, you shall have a second dessert. Come,' he said, and pulled her up. Then spinning her about, he bent her over the settee, lifting her night garment.
'Ohh,' Lucinda exclaimed, 'how deliciously wicked!' The Master loosened his breeches, releasing his male member, and moving carefully behind her, clasped her hips in his hands while he nosed his love lance beneath her into her hot little sheath. 'Tis you, my pet, who are wicked,' he murmured in her ear as he bent over her. 'You are all wet, and ready for me.' He thrust deep.
'Ahhh,' she cried, 'I have never before done it this way!' 'There are several ways you have not done it, my pet, but I assure you that before you leave here in September, you shall know them all, Lucinda. Ahhh, that's it, my angel, come back onto my cock!' He pumped her vigorously, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips.
'Ohh, Robert!' she sighed gustily. 'I want to learn everything you can teach me before I return to London. Ohhh, yes! Yes! Yes!
Chapter Four
It was, Lucinda thought in later years, one of the loveliest summers of her life. It was, she realized, the first time in all of her life that she had really been free to do as she pleased, and not what someone else wanted her to do. She had a lover. He was intelligent, charming, and amusing. He was incredibly passionate. She was in love with him, and she had known it almost from the first moment they had met. She knew that she must learn his identity, for the man who called himself The Master, or Robert, was the only man she would marry.
His house was delightful, built, as she suspected, in the reign of the first Elizabeth when his family had made their fortune in the beginning of the Indies' trade. Their title, he said, predated their short-lived wealth. It went back to the times before King William, he who had come from Normandy. It was, Lucinda felt, a home before it was a great house. The walls were paneled; the floors, wide boards. Both were black with age. There were fine, but worn, Turkey carpets in the public rooms, a wonderful library and a picture gallery filled with portraits of the ancestors.
'Do you look like any of your antecedents?' she asked him one day, and he had laughed.
'No,' he said. 'I look like my mother, and there is no portrait of her as there were no monies to pay an artist when she was alive.' He tipped her face up to his, and asked softly, 'Does it matter to you what I look like, Lucinda?'
'No,' she said, 'but you cannot expect me not to be curious, Robbie. For two months we have been lovers, and you have been masked the entire time when you are with me. Even when we ride out across your lands. I understand your reasons for keeping your face from me, but I shall never wed a man who inhabits high society. It is unlikely we would meet socially.'
'But if we do one day, and you have not seen my face, then you shall not be ashamed or embarrassed,' he replied.
He never spent an entire night with her, disappearing after their lovemaking to his own bedchamber next door, which was firmly barred to her, and to Polly. ' I must know who he is!' she said to her maidservant. '
'Shouldn't think you'd care given the skillful way he wields that big cock of his,' Polly answered saucily. 'I asked John what he looks like, and he says he ain't anything special.'
'You and John are rather thick,' Lucinda noted.
'He wants to marry me, m'lady,' Polly confessed.
'You'd marry a man who practices such a profession as he does?' Lucinda was surprised.
'John's pa wants him to come home to Hereford and take over his smithy, m'lady,' Polly said. 'He only went into service to better himself, but he says now he realizes he's better in the smithy.'
'Do you want to marry him, Polly?' Lucinda asked her maid.
'Oh, yes, m'lady, I do!' the girl said. 'I'd have me own house and everything. John's pa is a widower.'
'You two seem to have discussed this quite thoroughly,' Lucinda said thoughtfully. 'When do you plan to leave me?'
'John and me both agree, m'lady, that we won't go till this is over and done with. I explained everything to him, and he thinks you're ever so brave to do what you must do to have your revenge,' Polly told her mistress. 'He says The Master has been a good master, and he knows he's not going to do this any more after you are gone.'
'Do you mean to tell me Robert is retiring as The Master of the Devil's Disciples?' He had really meant it, Lucinda considered, excited.
'Yes, m'lady, he is. He says he is bored and tired of it.'
'I
'He might,' Polly said, 'but I don't think he'll betray The Master, m'lady. Why is it so important to you? Certainly you won't ever want to meet this gentleman after we have left here. You may not wed the duke, the marquess, or his lordship, but one day you will certainly marry again. What if your husband knows this man? Or you meet him at a ball, or a rout? Tis better you don't know, m'lady.'
'The Master,' Lucinda told her surprised servant, 'is the only man I will marry, Polly. He has promised to come to the Countess of Whitley's ball where my brother must announce my betrothal. If I don't know who The Master is, how can George announce my engagement?'
Polly's eyes were big with her astonishment. Finally she regained her voice, and said, 'But what if The Master ain't a gentleman, m'lady?'
'I know this house is his. His ancestors hang in the portrait gallery, Polly. He is a gentleman. One, I realize, of small means, but a gentleman nonetheless. There has to be a way of learning his true name and rank.
Polly shook her head. 'I'll tell John what you've told me, m'lady. He'd like to see The Master happy as we're happy, I know, and he'll keep yer secret if I asks him to keep it.'
To Lucinda's surprise it was the footman who approached her several days later. 'If your ladyship were to go into the library some day,' he said quietly, 'she would find a large volume upon an oak stand, where the answers she seeks are to be found.'
'When?' Lucinda asked softly.
'He has to be away all day tomorrow negotiating with a prince who wishes to purchase one of Rhamses's ungelded male offspring for his own stud in Turkey. The prince is staying nearby at Lord Bowen's home. Dick and Martin like to sneak into the village when The Master's away. The barmaids at The Frog and Swan are most accommodating, and as The Master ain't let them at you, m'lady, they're right randy. I've had some time of it keeping our Polly safe from them two, I can tell you. When they've gone off tomorrow, I'll send Polly to fetch you. Then it's up to you to find the information you need.'
'Can you tell me nothing of him?' Lucinda queried the footman.
John shook his head. 'We actually know little more than you do, m'lady We was told when we arrived that we was to call him The Master. We was all in service at Lord Bowen's. Dick and Martin will go back, I'm certain, when
