The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo (Victorian Rebels, #6)(52)

The desk on which a dark-haired woman writhed and squealed and pleaded as Moncrieff’s head danced between her thighs.

Drawn by a macabre curiosity, Veronica returned to the spyglass, her breaths as loud as one of the band saws in her father’s factories.

The sight was no less shocking the second time, even though she’d prepared herself for it.

The woman was positioned so Veronica could see down the length of her naked body. Her coiffed, dark head lolled from the edge of the desk, her chin pointing at the ceiling.

Veronica could assess her every expression, though upside down.

Her eyes squeezed shut and her powdered skin stretched tight in a grimace of torment, or was it enjoyment? Her mouth remained open, forming perfect, rhythmic ohs.

Veronica listened intently. What she initially interpreted as pleas could very well have been demands.

But … why?

Heartbeats became claps of thunder as Veronica looked between—what she could only assume was a prostitute’s—quivering bare breasts, past her taut belly rippling with strain, to where Moncrieff’s bronzed hair gleamed from between the V of the woman’s open legs.

Veronica’s own thighs clenched on an aching pulse. The sensation threaded down through her veins to land in the very place that so absorbed his lewd attentions.

She remembered the times her husband had demanded to use her mouth. How she’d hated it. Hated him. Resented the pleasure he found there. The pain and degradation he left behind.

Never once had the possibility occurred to her that a woman might use a man’s mouth for pleasure.

That a woman might find pleasure at all.

The prostitute could be faking her bliss, she supposed. But why, then, would she hold such a craven look upon her face when he could not see it? The expression was so unnatural. So unpracticed. Almost madcap to an astonished voyeur.

Moncrieff pulled back, and the woman’s eyes flew open. She lifted her dark head, and said something in a frustrated whine that Veronica could not quite catch.

His wicked laugh awakened something inside of Veronica she wished she could lull back to sleep. Something that felt like the empty ache of hunger, in her belly

No, not her belly. Lower.

She watched the play of muscle on his arms bunch and ripple as he gathered his untidy hair into a queue and secured it behind him. His smile was teasing, dazzling. His words were guttural and crass, this she knew.

What did he say to the harlot? What wicked things caused the woman to moan and part her legs in further, seemingly desperate, invitation? One of the nude lady’s bejeweled hands lazily toyed with her own breast, and the other idly slid down her lithe body, finding their own way to her sex.

Veronica gasped at the luridness of it. The unabashed ignominy of them both. At the shameful response building in her own treacherous body.

He seemed to enjoy taunting the woman. In watching her as she stroked at herself. She, in turn, seemed to be attempting the same physical repartee. He encouraged her as his big hands stroked up her ankles, her calves, thrummed behind her knees, and smoothed their way across her splayed white thighs.

Her hips lifted off the table, and she made another desperate sound as his hands encircled her wrists and roughly pinned them to the desk beside her hips.

Veronica groaned in protest before she pressed a hand to her mouth. They were making too much noise to hear her, and the spyglass was simply too small to see through unless one was pressed to it.

Even so … it wouldn’t do to get caught.

The woman spat lurid curses at him, wrapping strong thighs around his shoulders.

Grinning lazily, he settled those broad, bare shoulders back between her legs, and lowered his full mouth back toward her sex.

The inside of Veronica’s own mouth dried, her chest stilled, all breath becoming a rote impossibility.

He hovered over the woman for longer than he ought, before his long, flat tongue slowly emerged and lapped at her softly. Once. Again. And yet once more.

The strength gave out of the prostitute’s neck, and her head collapsed back below the edge of the desk again, a relieved and triumphant smile spread on her face as her hips surged up, seeking his tongue. Demanding it.

He latched onto her, and in the space of a few breaths, the prostitute’s gasps became pants, her pants became cries, and her cries became screams as she bucked beneath him, her hands freed to wildly grip and clutch at his hair.

Something warm and wet released from Veronica’s own body as a persistent throb established in her sex and began to spread a foreign flush through her entire middle. She hadn’t realized her other hand had settled over her corset until she noticed it slipping over her womb and down toward her skirt.

She hadn’t known.

How could she not have known?

Those disgusting, straining distortions of Mortimer’s features when his rutting reached its pounding, painful climax … the pleasure her mother told her only belonged to a man … could be had by a woman?

A sob of wonder escaped her, and she looked from the pretty prostitute’s ecstatic expression back to the man who provided it.

He was staring at the spyglass as his jaw flexed and rolled with the unfathomable, magical motions of his tongue. His gaze glittered wicked speculations. But not at the woman upon whose body he dined.

At her.

Veronica jumped away, propelling herself to the far side of the room to lean against the wall beneath the open porthole. Her quivering legs refused to properly sustain her.