Cry for Passion by Robin Schone

already stretched too tightly.
    “Is there coal in the fireplace?” he asked shortly.
    It was spring, but spring nights were even cooler than spring days. He didn’t want her to suffer any more discomfort than what he could prevent.
    “Yes.” She stepped around him, topknot glinting gold in the light pouring through the gaslit sconce. Fine, fly away hair shadowed the nape of her neck. Inside the bronze-framed mirror above the small foyer table, lashes shadowed her cheeks. She pulled out the drawer to the cherry table—wood scraping wood—and stuffed inside it a black-beaded reticule. “I cleaned out the ashes this morning and filled it with fresh coal.”
    The duties of a butler. But now no respectable butler would work for her.
    Jack remembered the spurt of his ejaculate. Immediately the memory was replaced by Rose Clarring’s tears.
    He strode down the hallway into darkness, ground glass and red phosphorus burning his fingers. Rose Clarring followed, heel taps piercing his vertebrae.
    Inside the small drawing room Jack lit a heavy bronze lamp. The hiss of gas filled the pulsing silence.
    Rose Clarring’s gaze followed his motions . . . the taut splay of his thighs . . . the tensing of his shoulders . . . the reach of his fingers.
    The damp coals in the fireplace slowly caught fire. Jack opened the flue—a sharp clang shot up the chimney—and hunkered in front of the small iron fireplace until a sheet of white flame coated the black coals and the fire crackled with heat.
    Standing, dusting off his fingers, he placed the tin of safety matches on the mantel.
    Jack turned.
    He had known what was coming; he just had not known how it would come.
    The sight of Rose Clarring unfastening her bodice—dark lashes shielding her eyes—ripped the breath out of his lungs.
    “I know I’m not Mrs. Whitcox.” A sliver of white chemise shone above working fingers; she released a second satin-covered button . . . a third . . . a fourth. . . . “I know how difficult this must be for you.” Gaping black wool revealed the ever widening V of a pink satin corset until there were no more buttons to free. She peeled off the bodice, pale arms shedding black wool. “But I need you tonight.” Dark lashes lifting—bodice falling to the floor—she captured Jack’s gaze. Knowledge of how fully she was about to expose herself dilated her pupils until black devoured the light of blue. “I need you to see me, and not Mrs. Whitcox.”
    The dildo underneath Jack’s arm burned through the wool of his coat and the cotton of his shirt.
    He had the night before gazed at her naked desire until he could no longer watch, and had escaped in the arms of a woman who was now dead.
    “I do see you, Mrs. Clarring,” Jack said quietly.
    He saw her pain. He saw her need.
    He felt her utter aloneness throughout his entire body.
    Gaze dropping, she unfastened the band of her black wool skirt. “I was very naive—like women are—when I married.”
    The skirt fell, a rustling slide of wool.
    Jack stared at the lashes that fanned Rose Clarring’s cheeks and the shadows that consumed her life, thirty-three, the same age as Lord Falkland.
    “I thought love made babies,” she said, gold gilding the tips of her lashes.
    A soft thud pierced the hiss of gas, a bustle impacting wood.
    “Not literally, of course.” A soft swish—the slippery descent of a silk petticoat—scraped Jack’s testicles. “I wasn’t quite that ignorant.” The pain shadowing her face was momentarily erased by wry self-mockery; a second swish resounded over the pop of embers, another petticoat liberated. “I thought when Jonathon ejaculated inside me, it was a gift, a special way in which a man demonstrated his love for a woman. And I liked it.”
    Gaslight flared; gold feathered a delicate eyebrow.
    “Jonathon didn’t give me an orgasm, but I enjoyed having him lie between my thighs”—A sharp snap pierced Jack’s cock, the release of a corset spring latch—“and