Chapter 4: The Mistress's Choice
The marquess drew Catriona through the parting crowd, her fingers looped in his, and the murmur of the ballroom rose again like water filling a drained pool. Then it died. Lady Amelia Hartford stood at the top of the dais, one hand raised, and the silence she commanded this time was not asked for but taken.
"I have displayed my debutantes," she said, and her voice carried to the far doors without effort. "I have shown you what the season offers. Now let the estate offer something of its own."
She descended one step. Candlelight slid along the burgundy silk of her gown, over the deep valley of her cleavage, and settled on the smile she wore like a crown.
"Lord Rotheby. Lord Vane. Lord Osei. Come forward."
Three men detached themselves from the crowd. Astrid, standing near the gallery arch with her chosen nobleman's hand still warm on her waist, watched them pass and felt her breath shorten. She had marked all three earlier in the evening. Rotheby was broad as a bull, silver at the temples. Vane was younger, dark, with a jaw that looked carved for arrogance. Osei was a foreign lord, tall and bronze, in a coat of deep green, and rumor had followed him from the continent like a perfume.
They climbed the dais. Amelia circled them slowly, and the whole room watched her do it, and the whole room watched what her circling made plain: the heavy swelling at the front of each man's breeches, three distinct silhouettes straining fine linen and brocade.
"Mm," she said. She stopped before Rotheby and let her gloved fingertips rest on the bulge of him, appraising it the way a jeweler appraises a stone. "The girls have been generous tonight. It is only fair the estate return the favor."
She sat. The velvet chaise received her like a throne, and she arranged herself upon it with her knees apart, her skirt pooling in dark folds, her breasts rising above the neckline with every unhurried breath.
"Kneel for your queen."
Rotheby went first, dropping to one knee before her with the practiced ease of a man who had done this before and enjoyed the memory. Vane and Osei took their places on either side of the chaise, standing, their loins level with her turned head.
Amelia unbuckled Rotheby's belt with two fingers. She drew his cock out into the candlelight and the room drew breath as one. He was immense, thick as her wrist and still half-swollen, the skin flushed and the veins already rising.
"Ladies," she said to the watching debutantes without looking away from him, "observe. This is what ambition is for."
She leaned down and took the crown of him into her mouth.
It was not the delicate performance Catriona had given. Amelia worked him like an owner. Her lips sealed wide around his girth and her cheeks hollowed, and she fed him into herself inch by inch with a low hum in her throat that the first three rows could hear. Rotheby's hand found the back of her coiffed head but she batted it away without pausing, and she took him deeper on her own terms, until her throat bulged and her eyes watered and she still did not stop.
"Christ," Rotheby breathed. His thighs were shaking.
She pulled off him with a wet gasp, a rope of spit swinging from her lip to his shaft, and turned her head to Vane. Her gloved hand closed around Rotheby's slick cock and stroked him slowly, keeping him at the edge.
"Your turn, my lord. Do not be shy. I felt you watching me all through the toast."
Vane's reply was a groan as she swallowed him. He was longer than Rotheby, not as thick, and she used the difference, letting him slide until his head bumped the soft depth of her throat and then holding there, her tongue fluttering against the underside, her red lips stretched white around him. On her other side her free hand found Osei through his breeches and massaged the enormous shape of him, and he made a sound low in his chest, in a language not English, and pressed into her palm.
Astrid watched from the floor with her lips parted. She had thought herself bold tonight. She had thought herself the boldest creature in this room. Watching Amelia Hartford take a marquess's cock to the root while running her fist up and down another lord's shaft, all before a hushed audience of two hundred nobles, she understood there were weights she had not yet imagined.
The iron-grey nobleman's hand tightened on her waist. "She does this every year," he murmured. "Last year she took four."
Amelia came off Vane's length choking and laughing at once, spit smeared shining on her chin, her mascara unbroken. She turned back to Rotheby and engulfed him again, faster now, her head bobbing in long deep strokes, the wet sounds of her mouth filling the silenced ballroom. Her free hand kept Vane slick, and Osei she drew closer until the heat of him pressed her cheek, and she turned her mouth from one cock to the other like a woman at a banquet refusing to choose a favorite dish.
Rotheby broke first. His hips jerked and he grunted a warning, and Amelia did not withdraw. She took his release down her throat in thick swallows, her eyes closed with something close to luxury, and when he was spent she milked him with her lips until his knees buckled and he gripped the chaise's arm to stay upright.
"Delicious," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of one gloved hand, leaving a dark smear on the silk. "Now you. Sit."
Vane sat where Rotheby had knelt, on the edge of the chaise beside her, and she bent over his lap and took him back into her mouth at a new angle, deeper, her hand cupping and rolling his balls through the open fall of his breeches. Osei's cock brushed her ear as she worked, and she laughed around Vane's flesh, a vibration that made the young lord curse and clutch the velvet.
Osei unfastened himself. His cock swung free, heavy and dark, the biggest of the three, and Amelia pulled off Vane just long enough to look at it with open greed.
"The continent sends its finest," she said. "Hold still, my lord. I want to savor this one."
She took Osei in both hands first, worshipping the length of him with slow twists of her wrists, then opened her mouth wide and worked the head in. It was almost too much. The crowd saw her jaw strain, saw her adjust, saw her relax into it with a sound like a moan and a sigh, and then she was taking him, two inches, four, her throat opening around him in slow surrender while her hand kept Vane hard and dripping at her side.
She alternated. Osei until her eyes rolled, then Vane in fast greedy strokes, then back, her hands never idle, her mouth never empty, and the ballroom stood frozen in its own heat. Somewhere near the windows a woman moaned and was shushed. Astrid's chosen nobleman had pulled her back against him, his cock hard against her spine through his breeches, and she ground into it without shame, unable to look away from the dais.
Osei grunted something foreign and urgent. Amelia sealed her lips and sucked him through his climax, swallowing in steady pulls, and his big hand came to rest on her crown with something like reverence. She drew off him slowly, kissing the spit-shined head once, almost tender.
"Lord Vane has been patient," she announced to the room, her voice roughened. "Patience deserves reward."
She took Vane deep and fast, both hands working him, and he lasted perhaps a minute before he spilled into her mouth with a broken cry. She held every drop, then opened her lips to show the room, and swallowed with a visible glide of her throat.
The silence held one heartbeat longer. Then the applause began, low and rolling, and Amelia rose from the chaise like a queen leaving a throne, her gown rumpled, her mouth swollen, three great lords spent and panting at her feet.
She surveyed the hall, her gaze lingering a moment on Astrid, and smiled.
"The night is young," she said. "Do not let my example make you lazy."