Raising the Devil Read online

  Raising the Devil

  Diana Thorn

  Determined to forget the horrors of Waterloo, Stephen Fessingdon spends a particularly debauched night on the town with his former brothers in arms before stumbling into his aunt’s parlor and mistaking a respectable young woman for a notorious courtesan. The mistake is quickly cleared up, and just as quickly, he falls in love with the beautiful and sensual Catherine.

  After six years of wedded bliss, the only impediment to Stephen and Catherine’s happiness is their childlessness. To rectify the situation, the sexually adventurous couple arranges a house party. Catherine, masquerading as the well-known whore she resembles, will couple with five of Stephen’s closest friends—all men he trusts and admires—thereby procuring a child without the danger of Stephen’s jealousy or resentment fixing on any one man.

  But when an unexpected guest—Catherine’s long-lost fiancé—turns up at the party, Catherine and Stephen’s love is tested. And that is not the only surprise guest of the evening…

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Raising the Devil

  ISBN 9781419934520

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Raising the Devil Copyright © 2011 Diana Thorn

  Edited by Jillian Bell

  Cover art by Syneca

  Electronic book publication July 2011

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Raising the Devil

  Diana Thorn

  Chapter One

  The day Stephen Fessingdon met his wife, he mistook her for a whore. Two things may be said in his defense. He had been out drinking the night before, and it was an extremely expensive and beautiful whore for whom he mistook her. Nevertheless, such misunderstandings rarely result in matrimony, and almost never lead to six years of connubial bliss.

  Which made it all the more odd that Stephen Fessingdon was about to watch his beloved wife fuck five other men.

  * * * * *

  He’d been out on the town, carousing with his cronies from the Peninsular War. Five men closer to him than brothers. After coming home from Waterloo, they had all escaped together into a sort of second adolescence. It was following one of their more spectacular debauches that he stumbled, shirtless, into his aunt’s house at three in the morning and promptly passed out.

  He slept until noon and woke to find the duchess’s butler hard at work butlering what was left of his ensemble—with supplements from the late duke’s wardrobe—into something suitable for tea. Graham was good enough to inform him that he was being “taken in hand” and that the “indulgence permitted him after Talavera was quite over” and that he was “expected to be presentable” by three.

  His plan had been to show willing, butter up the matrons and make as hasty an exit as possible, until he saw her—the sylphlike body in striped muslin stirring his cock and his curiosity at the same time. Her back was turned, but that was the side of her he knew best anyway. He’d bought her favors once before. The lady was known for an erotic specialty—whipping—he enjoyed, but she’d been rather more professional and rather less enthusiastic beneath the lash than he had hoped, and he had decided against taking her on as a permanent mistress. The sight of the swanlike curve of her neck was causing him to reconsider.

  “I must say I didn’t expect to see you in such exalted company,” he drawled.

  She turned and the illusion crumbled. This was not Madame R. This was another woman entirely. Younger, certainly, and a dead ringer for the notorious courtesan if you did not see her mouth—wide, sensual, and altogether superior to Madame R’s.

  “I don’t believe we’re acquainted, so I’m at a loss as to why you expected to see me at all,” said the woman, in a voice an octave deeper than Madame R’s and with a trace of mischief that suggested he was not obliged to make a hasty retreat.

  “I’m terribly sorry. I mistook you for someone else entirely,” he said. Though by now he was not the least bit sorry.

  She raised one perfect brow, narrowed her eyes, and then he knew that she knew.

  “It is the most curious thing,” she said. “Gentlemen are always mistaking me for someone else, but they will never say who. They become quite flustered if I press them.”

  She was baiting him, the little minx. She knew it was a whore they mistook for her. “I expect they are too embarrassed to answer,” he replied. “The woman I mistook you for is a lady of negotiable affection.”

  Stephen spied his aunt looking on with approval from across the room. Gads. It was a setup. If she only knew what they were talking about! Oddly enough, for the first time in his life, he didn’t mind being the object of one of his aunt’s matchmaking schemes. But he had botched the thing entirely with his talk of whores. Best to change the subject immediately.

  “Oh, I had guessed she was a whore,” said the girl, scuttling all his good intentions. “But no one will divulge the specific identity of the whore.”

  Then Stephen Fessingdon uttered the cleverest conditional statement of his life. “If you let me call on you, I’ll tell you the whore’s name.”

  He never did tell her the whore’s name, but he did call on her. And within three months they were married. Six years of companionship and physical pleasure and understanding had followed. He’d never dreamed he could be so happy. And he was not alone. His former brothers in arms had also married, settled into private life and begun families.

  That was the shadow now hanging over Stephen and Catherine. Six years and no children. Six years of fabulous carnality and companionship with no issue.

  Up to now, they had talked around the topic. But it could be avoided no longer. Catherine wanted a child. Stephen wanted Catherine to be happy. And now he must sacrifice all of his pride to make her so.

  * * * * *

  Catherine Fessingdon was not superstitious. It was all hokum and nonsense. But still she found herself doing the most absurd things. She was carrying around a rabbit’s foot in her reticule, sleeping on a tiny sachet of the rice thrown at her wedding and brooding because she was not broody.

  Stephen had never uttered a single word of blame. He’d been impossibly patient, encouraging and hopeful. For years. If she expressed her disappointment when her courses came, he reminded her through skilled seduction that it was ever so much fun to try again. But his request to speak to her i
n his study, the austere little room he used to quarantine his professional life from their private one, foretold an end to that. She steeled herself to accept what was coming, what came to all barren wives. The loss of their husbands’ affections.

  She rapped once on the door before entering to find Stephen, as darkly handsome as the day she met him in his aunt’s parlor, rising hastily and looking flustered. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think. There isn’t a comfortable chair in this room. Not a cushion to be had.”

  It was not the opening she expected. She thought he’d chosen an austere room for an austere talk. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t expect this to be comfortable.”

  He took off his coat, wrapped it into a ball and made a sort of cushion out of it for her on the window seat, then slid in beside her. “I didn’t choose this room for its lack of comforts, but rather for its lack of servants. They never come in here, and I’d prefer we have some privacy. I’ve been dreading this.”

  “I as well,” she said. “Oh Stephen, I’m so sorry.”

  He looked baffled. “For what?”

  She was going to have to use the word. “For my barrenness.”

  And now he looked even more baffled. Then light dawned on his chiseled features. “Oh God, Catherine. I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d realized you thought it was your fault. My love, it is mine.”

  She was fairly certain it wasn’t. And she was caught quite off guard, which was why what she said next was so appallingly blunt. “Your cock works fine,” she said, using a word he’d taught her, which she’d spoken only during their most heated love play.

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Yes. It works fine. With you so close, it’s very likely to oblige you with a demonstration. But that isn’t what I meant. It’s always worked fine, my love. But I’ve never been particularly careful, and I’ve never fathered a child. Not with any of the women I was with before we met. There were enough of them that I should have suspected I might have a problem. And after six years together, well, I rather think that proves it. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Could she? She tried to picture her life with another man. Even with children, the picture was bleak. Stephen was her whole happiness. If she had known six years ago what she knew now, she would still have chosen him. “You had no way to know,” she said. “And I would not trade our life together for anything. But I cannot help but be a little sad.”

  “I want you to be happy, Catherine. Would a child make you happy, even if it wasn’t mine?”

  She’d heard of such things, of course. They had the money to do it. To buy a child from a couple who needed the coin more than they needed another mouth to feed. Or sadder still, from an unwed girl who could not keep the babe. They could pass it off as their own. She suspected one of her closest friends had done so. The woman had retired to the country long before she would have started to show and not been seen again until after the child arrived. Could Catherine sustain a similar deception? She’d yearned to be pregnant, but what was nine months next to a lifetime raising a child? “Yes,” she answered carefully. “I could love a child that was not ours.”

  “I’m sure you could, Catherine, and that is one solution, to get a child of someone else’s. But I said ‘not mine’, and meant just that. Most likely you are fertile.”

  Her hand went unconsciously to her stomach. She was. She knew she was. Could feel her body going eagerly through the motions of its monthly cycle, greedy for a child. Knew that this also was a solution some women opted for. Adultery. Quietly and with a purpose. But adultery all the same. They picked a man with looks like their husband’s. She could not do it.

  “I could never betray you, Stephen. I love you too much.”

  He took her hands in his. “Not a betrayal, my love. Not if I chose the man, and I was there.”

  Her heart beat faster at what he was suggesting. Their bed sport had always been adventurous. Their whispered fantasies were occasionally quite risqué. Sometimes he would fuck her, slow and leisurely, while spinning a tale in her ear of watching her disport with another man or two, or three. Once, he’d described to her what it would be like if another woman licked her pussy. She’d come so hard from his wicked words that she’d screamed.

  “It would not change anything between us,” he said, his hands drifting up to stroke her face, her neck, the swell of her breasts. “And you might enjoy it.” Now his fingers skimmed and dipped below her neckline. Her breath came rapidly and she closed her eyes.

  “Tell me,” she said, licking her lips, “what it would be like, watching me with another man.”

  “No.”

  She opened her eyes to see him concerned and serious, as she’d expected to find him when she entered the room. “This isn’t a game, Catherine. If we’re to do this, we must work it all out with clear heads.”

  Her heartbeat slowed. Her body ached with pleasure denied. And her heart ached because she’d hurt him with her eagerness, even if it was only eagerness to embrace the fantasy. She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous, Stephen. What if we did this and it drove a wedge between us? And what about the child? Could you fully love this child if every time you looked at him, you saw the face of another man who had been with me? And then there is the greatest danger of all. If someone found out.”

  “That’s why it has to be more than one man,” he said simply, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “And why none of them can ever know it was you.”

  Chapter Two

  She’d agreed that day, once he’d outlined his plan, and then they’d made heated love in that window seat. Now, a month later, waiting at their country house for his friends to arrive, Stephen battled his own misgivings.

  Not about the plan. That was perfection itself. And Madame R was the key. Catherine, clever, quick Catherine, had understood at once. “They will think I am Madame R,” she had said. “They’ll assume you’ve taken her on as your mistress.”

  “We’ll announce you are with child and confined to bed at home in London. And when I issue this invitation, my friends will assume that I am availing myself of the relief gentleman are entitled to.”

  “What is in it for Madame R?” Catherine had asked.

  “Rather a lot. We’ll pay her, of course. But an orgy will raise her reputation. Her last protector complained that she balked at some of his requests. I myself found her a bit of a disappointment. If she is thought to have participated in a little Hellfire Club-inspired debauch, perhaps with a bit of mumbo jumbo about raising the Devil, the gullible young men about town will flock to her once more.”

  “And the men?” she asked, unable to hide the frisson of excitement she felt. It had fueled his own as he took her in the window seat. She’d met all of them, of course, his closest friends. Married men. Men who would not have agreed to fuck his wife, but would think it jolly fun to take turns diddling his whore. It was the hypocrisy, he reflected, of their age and their class, and he was not above using it to his purpose. If all five of them contributed, so to speak, he would never be sure exactly whose the child was, never be able to fix jealousy or bitterness on any individual. And they were all good men. And if he made love to Catherine as well, there was always a chance, a tiny outside chance, that the seed that took root might be his.

  “If they see me too closely,” she’d whispered, spitting on his cock, the sunshine streaming in the window, “they’ll know I am not Madame R. We look quite alike, except about the mouth. Our mouths are entirely different,” she’d gasped.

  He’d taken his discarded cravat then and tied it over her open mouth. “Didn’t I mention?” he asked, cupping her buttocks and exploring the crease while she rode him. “You’ll be gagged while they take you. And bound. That’s Madame R’s specialty.”

  She’d come for him then. Partly from the suggestion of being bound and gagged and ganged, and partly because he’d pressed ever so gently against her rosebud at that moment. He had never proposed deeper, more inti
mate penetration of her ass, because she flew apart so easily at the lightest caress of that orifice and he cherished her delightful sensitivity.

  But now, with the event looming before him, just hours away, it occurred to him that things could get out of hand. They might want to use her mouth, which they must not see. Or her ass, which it was rumored Madame R had denied even to her most exalted clients. And if he was nervous about these things, no doubt Catherine was terrified.

  He abandoned the sitting room, where he’d been watching the windows for early arrivals, raced to her room and strode in the door. He’d given their regular servants the night off and hired temporary labor from London, just to be sure no one thought too hard about the resemblance between his wife and his mistress. But he hadn’t hired a maid for Catherine because she was supposed to be Madame R and you didn’t hire ladies’ maids for whores.

  Catherine stood in front of her glass in the filmy Grecian ensemble Madame R had provided. When the two women finally met, Madame R had confirmed the suspicion Stephen had long held, that the women were related. Madame R was a by-blow of Catherine’s less than fastidious father. Catherine had taken the news rather well, even joking that their sexually adventurous natures must be the old man’s legacy.

  The whore herself was spending the night at her sister’s in the country, so there was no chance of anyone spotting Madame R out and about when she was supposedly being tupped senseless at Stephen Fessingdon’s debauch.

  He’d seen Madame R in this particular ensemble. If memory served him, she’d sucked him off in it while he flogged her pert bottom. The gown was really just four strips of nude silk gauze secured at the shoulders, easily rearranged to access breasts, pussy and ass.