All I Want Is You by Elizabeth Anthony Page B

letting out little gasps of pleasure.
    Likewise I pleasured her with my mouth, brushing my lips to and fro over her sex then driving my tongue deep inside her, thrusting steadily. She liked that best of all. She moaned, moving her head from side to side and calling out my name in her extremity, then we lay in each other’s arms while the autumn sun lit the room and we heard the motorcars coming and going on the driveway outside as more guests arrived for the old Duke’s funeral.
    ‘Have you heard yet?’ I asked her drowsily. ‘When Lord Ashley is arriving?’
    She shook her head. ‘Whether Ash is here or not for the funeral, you will still be my gift to him.’ She kissed my cheek. ‘You and I together – how can he resist?’
    Beatrice told me again and again what we would do when he did arrive. How when the time was right she would invite him up here to her rooms, where I would be waiting. We’d even chosen the garments we would wear. ‘We must remember,’ she reminded me, ‘that he’ll be enduring the funeral rites of a family that loathes him and wishes he didn’t exist.’
    I nodded, but my spirits were low. I was afraid, you see, that I would find him so repellent that I wouldn’t beable to do what I was supposed to do; wouldn’t be able to conceal my revulsion.
    What a fool I was, now that I look back on it all. What a fool, not even to start to guess.

Chapter Eight
    The news finally came that Lord Ashley would
not
be arriving in time for the funeral. The body had already lain in state in the Duke’s cold bedroom for several days so that everyone could pay their respects; the funeral was imminent. But a message had arrived on the butler’s telegraph machine to say that Lord Ashley had been in New York when he heard of the Duke’s death, and though he had boarded the next transatlantic crossing he would, of course, be late.
    Nothing, it seemed, could be a worse insult. The Duchess, Beatrice told me, was furious beyond imagining.
If there is any justice in this world
, the old lady said – Beatrice was an expert at mimicking her –
that man’s ship will sink to the bottom of the ocean
.
    ‘The funeral, of course,’ pronounced the Duchess in her grandest manner, ‘will proceed without Lord Ashley’s presence.’ Still Lord Ashley – never the Duke.
    ‘Of course, Your Grace.’
    ‘Your Grace.’
    More house guests arrived for the funeral with their valets and ladies’ maids in tow. The lower servants had to wait on them in addition to their usual work, and allhalf-days off were cancelled. Betsey, Harriet and the others grumbled increasingly about their workload, but they knew very well the Duchess would dismiss them – just like
that –
if they complained, and without a reference they would never find anything else.
    I kept my distance. I had become colder and harder, I knew; Beatrice had offered me the chance of getting away from here and starting a new life, and I wasn’t going to throw that chance away. The day before the funeral, she and I had dressed up in some new lingerie that had just been delivered from London. ‘Mourning attire,’ Beatrice had explained sadly to the Duchess when the trunks arrived, but once the footmen had hauled them up to Beatrice’s rooms we opened them together, exclaiming with joy over the contents. We dressed up – well, rather we
undressed
each other, then put on the exquisite slips of nothingness, the little satin brassieres and Milanese silk vests, the short chemises with flounces of lace, and then we danced.
    She was teaching me more tango steps, I remember, but her gramophone was turned low, so low. ‘Not suitable for funerals,’ she winked at me, while the Latin pulse faintly throbbed, stirring my blood as we stalked arm in arm up and down her room to the hypnotic beat of ‘My Tango Girl’
.
    We kissed, of course, and ended up on her bed, entwined naked in each other’s arms on the silken coverlet. But I think by then that I was aching in my