Free Parlor Games by Leda Swann Page B

covered the sun, making the afternoon suddenly dull and dreary. “Am I that tedious to spend your time with?” Her words were brave, but he had cut her to the quick. “No doubt Mrs. Erskine would give you a part refund if you complained to her of me.”
    “I cannot afford to keep you to myself indefinitely. I was impetuous enough to pay for the first month, but to pay for a second would be sheer folly. I will have to give you up.”
    She had never imagined anything different, but still his pronouncement hurt her. “I cannot see what it is to me,” she retorted. “I did not ask you to buy my time. Mrs. Erskine will keep me on whether you pay for me or not. There were plenty of single gentlemen in attendance last night who would no doubt have been glad of my company.”
    A park bench stood at the far end of the tiny park. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the seat dry. “That is the problem. There will always be gentlemen glad of your company.”
    She sniffed dismissively as she spread her skirts and sat down on the bench. “That is hardly a problem for me.”
    “It is, however, a very large problem for me.”
    Her tears threatened to choke her voice. “You do not have to make it so.”
    He tipped her head back to look into her eyes. “If I could prevent it, my dear, I would.”

 
5
     
    Nearly a month of evenings passed. By now Sarah had suffered through twenty-three evenings in a row in which Tom Wilde had teased and tormented her just as much as she had teased and tormented him, if not more so. No longer did he ask her to take him as her lover, and for that she had been grateful. She was not sure that she could live for much longer without giving in to him.
    She had started to crave his touch, to live for the moment when she could enter the salon for the evening and he would come forward to take her arm and to claim her as his own.
    Twenty-three evenings. It was both too short and too long a time. Too short, for it seemed as if it had been just yesterday when first she met him. Too long, because with every day that passed, one day fewer remained of the time he would spend with her.
     
     
     
    Tom tightened his grip on Sarah’s arm as he led her to one of the sofas arranged in front of a large curtain. Mrs. Erskine had just announced that the evening’s entertainment was to be a play—a new variation on their amusements for the past three weeks and more. He could only hope that it would prove less inflaming to his libido than the usual games.
    Sarah still belonged to him for another week, if she didn’t kill him first.
    He could swear that she had kept him in a state of constant excitement since the day he had first met her, poring over one of Mrs. Erskine’s naughty books and stroking her sweet little pussy.
    How she’d blushed and stammered when he had caught her out. He’d thought she would be easy game, that she would fall into his hands like a soft, ripe plum ready for the picking.
    Hah. He could laugh at his conceit now. There was nothing soft or ripe about Sarah. She was as hard as any common street urchin and twice as remorseless. No woman with an ounce of kindness in her would have kept him on tenterhooks as she had kept him. One moment she was playing the most delightful games with him, undressing for him down to her thin linen shift, allowing him to view her nearly naked body and put his hands under her skirts, sitting on his lap and letting him kiss her on her cheek, her lips, her neck.
    The moment he took one step too far, though, she was gone in a flash. Touching her naked breasts was off limits, though she flaunted them in front of him nearly every night by wearing the lowest-cut bodices he could ever wish for. Though she let him stroke her legs whenever he was lucky enough to win a forfeit of her and asked for her stockings as a prize, she would allow him to go no higher than the top of her garters. Just the once, he had reached higher and stroked her pussy. It was