🔥 The Fourteenth Night 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from A Taste for the Widow by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after Chapter Twenty of A Taste for the Widow, the night after the thirteenth night. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

No bell. No tide. No clause. Mara has a list, and Sabine has fifteen feet of carpet to cross. Explicit content — 18+.

The Fourteenth Night

Nobody rang a bell.

That was the first thing. I woke at dusk in the green bed, in a vampire’s dressing gown, and lay there waiting for something to toll, tick, knock, lean or write on me, and nothing did. The pipes were only pipes. When I lit the candle on the nightstand it burned straight up, for no reason more sinister than physics.

For thirteen nights I had kept a count. Two down, eleven to go. Seven down, six to go. I like to know what I owe and when it falls due. Night fourteen was not in the codicil. Nobody had drafted it. It did not belong to Eleanor, or to the house, or to any clause I had ever signed.

I looked at my left hand for a while. Two pale points at the wrist. Nothing on the fourth finger at all.

Then I got out my legal pad, because I was raised to put things in writing, and I made a list.

At the top I wrote, for the benefit of the only other lawyer on the rock: Mrs. Vane. Privileged. Do not annotate.

The brown ink was there before I had capped my pen.

I was married to her, Miss Ellison. I do not require the transcript. — E.

It takes eleven minutes to light forty candles with a drugstore lighter. I know, because I did it, and somewhere around the thirtieth I missed Gideon Wren a good deal more than I had expected to.

The library had not changed. Two stories of books. The ladder on its brass rail. A desk the size of a door, with a leather top that had been made in 1760 and had seen worse than me. The glass over the mantel showed nothing, not even the flames. It had gone blind with every other mirror in the house the night before, and I found I liked it that way.

The Chippendale was the only casualty. I fed what was left of it to the fire, one split arm at a time. Then I went and got a kitchen chair, a plain one, with no arms on it whatever, and set it down fifteen feet from the desk, on the far side of the hearth.

I had paced it. Naturally I had paced it.

She came in at full dark, in black silk, and stopped on the sill.

“You have burned my chair.”

“It was a hazard. I kept the desk.”

“So I see.” Her eyes went to the kitchen chair, and to the briefcase standing beside the desk, and to me, sitting on the leather in her dressing gown with my feet bare and a yellow pad on my knee. Something happened at the corner of her mouth. “Am I to be deposed?”

“You’re to be read to. Sit down.”

She sat. She arranged her skirts. She looked for the arms of the chair, found there were none, and folded her hands in her lap, and I watched her understand that I had done it on purpose.

“In re the fourteenth night,” I said. “Item one. On the third night you sat fifteen feet from this desk and told me what you would do to me if you were permitted. I have it word for word.” I can quote. It is most of what I do. “‘I should be on my knees between those thighs. I should have your heel upon my shoulder. I should hold you open with both my thumbs and lick you until you could not have told a court your own name, and then I should set my teeth just there, where your leg meets your body, and wait to be asked.’”

She had gone perfectly still. Her eyes were not brown anymore.

“Item two. Same night, same chair. You said you would give a century of your life to cross this room.” I turned the page. “I’m not charging a century. Item three is in the briefcase, and we will get to it.”

“And the house? What is its position?”

“It doesn’t have one. I checked. I stood in here for ten minutes before you came down, thinking the filthiest things about you that I could come up with, and not one candle moved.”

“Ten minutes.”

“I’m thorough.”

“What manner of things?”

“That’s item four. You haven’t earned item four.” I put the pad down. “We’re going to start where we left off. You in the chair. Me up here. You tell me what to do, and the word is the same word it has always been. And when I say so, we find out what happens next. Is that a thing you want?”

“Mara.” Her voice had dropped a full register. “I have wanted it since the leather was wet.”

“In the first person.”

“I want it.”

“Then go ahead, my lady. I’m a long way off.”

She drew one slow breath that she had no use for.

“Take down your hair.”

There were four pins in it. I put them on the desk.

“Open the gown. Not off. Open. I should like to see my own silk fall away from you.”

I undid the sash. The silk slid apart and hung from my shoulders, and the air of that room touched me from throat to knee, and it was only air. Nothing was looking at me but her.

It was a great deal to be looked at by.

“Knees apart.”

I parted them.

“Wider. I am a long way off.”

“You said that last time.”

“It was true last time. It is the last time that it will be true.” Her hands had tightened on each other. “Two fingers. Along, only. Tell me what you find.”

I slid two fingers down through myself, and my breath went out of me.

“The same thing you found in the dream. I’m soaked. I have been since I started the list.”

“Show me.”

I held my hand up to the candles. It shone to the knuckle.

She made a small sound, like a woman who has put her hand on a stove.

“Put them back. Slowly. You touch yourself like a woman with a train to catch, and tonight there is no train.” I circled my clit as slowly as I could stand, around and around, with my heels hooked on the edge of 1760 and my thighs beginning to shake. “Inside, now. Two. Deep. Curl them. There. I saw that. Your thumb where your fingers were.”

I gave myself my thumb, and groaned, and kept my eyes on her.

She had nothing to grip. That was what I had wanted to see. She sat fifteen feet away with her spine like a ruled line and her white hands locked in her lap, and she was leaning toward me from the waist as if somebody had a fist in the front of her gown.

“Faster,” she said, not steadily. “I want to see you take it.”

I worked my own fingers in and out of my cunt, in the light of forty candles, and listened to the wet sound of it in that tall quiet room. It was coming up quickly. I let it get all the way to the edge.

Then I stopped. I did it myself. I took my hand away and put both palms flat on the leather.

“Mara.”

“Ask me what I want.”

Her mouth opened and closed.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to cross the room.”

She could have been there before I blinked. I had seen her do it on the first afternoon, for one drop of blood.

She stood up, and she walked. Fifteen feet of carpet, at the pace of a woman who has waited since 1849 and will not be hurried by herself. I watched her take every step. She stopped between my knees, and the heat of her reached me before her hands did.

“You’re warm.”

“I have you in me. Since last night. It will last some days.” She was looking at my mouth. “May I?”

“You crossed a room because I said to. Yes. Everything on the list.”

She kissed me first, and that was not on the list. Open, and deep, and warm all the way through, with both hands in my hair and her whole body pressed up between my thighs so that I felt the cold little row of her buttons against my bare stomach. I got my wet hand into her collar and left a mark on the silk.

“Read me the first item again,” she said against my lips.

“On your knees.”

She went down. Black silk pooled on the carpet. She took my left ankle in her hand, and lifted it, and set my heel on her shoulder exactly as she had said, and then she laid her thumbs on me and opened me, and stopped.

“Don’t you dare commit it to memory.”

“I committed it on the fourth night. I am merely checking my work.”

Her tongue.

One long stroke, the flat of it, from the bottom of me to the top, hot now where it had once been cool, and I grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands. She did it again. Then she settled in like a woman with a brief to get through. She licked into my cunt, deep, and drank what she found. She came back up and closed her lips on my clit and pulled, softly and without stopping, while her thumbs held me wide and my heel dug into the bones of her shoulder.

“There. Right there. Don’t… God, Sabine, don’t move.”

She did not move. She stayed exactly there and hummed, and I felt it in my teeth.

When I was shaking all over she lifted her head. Her mouth was wet. Her eyes were black from lid to lid.

“State your name for the record.”

“What?”

“It was a term of the offer. Your name, Counselor. For the court.”

“Mar—” Her tongue went back where it had been, and whatever I said next was not a name. “Mara El… oh, fuck.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll stipulate.”

“The witness is unable to answer,” Sabine said, with enormous satisfaction, and put two fingers inside me.

I rode her hand and her mouth together. I had her hair in my fist, the silver wound round my knuckles, and I was saying things I would have objected to in anybody else’s testimony. Then she turned her face into my thigh, high up, in the crease where the leg meets the body. I felt them come to rest there. Two points, sharp and exact, lying on my skin with no weight behind them at all.

She waited.

“Clause four,” I said. I could barely get it out. “Not until the sixteenth. I can count.”

“So can I. I said that I should wait to be asked. I did not say for what.”

“Then stay like that. Don’t break the skin. I just want to feel them. And put your thumb on my clit, and don’t stop until I tell you.”

She did every word of it. Her teeth lay in the crease of my thigh like a promise with a date on it, and her fingers drove up into me, and her thumb worked, and I came with my head thrown back and my heel sliding down her spine, loud enough to bring dust off the upper shelves. She did not break the skin. I felt how badly she wanted to, and I felt her not do it.

It was the most I have ever been given by anyone holding still.

“Item three,” I said, when I could.

She was still kneeling. She had her cheek against my knee and one of my hands in both of hers, and she was cleaning my fingers with her tongue, one at a time.

“The briefcase.”

She opened it.

I will say this for her. In three hundred and fifty-nine years she has kept her countenance before kings, and she very nearly kept it then.

“You have been in my sea chest.”

“It’s my house. You quitclaimed it. Everything in it is in my inventory.”

“So I did.” She lifted the harness out by one strap. The buckles caught the light. “And the rest of it?”

“On the hearthstone. It’s been there an hour.”

She looked. Seven inches of black jet lay on the warm stone beside the fender, where I had put it before I lit a single candle.

“You warmed it.”

“You haven’t any heat to lend it. You told me so. I haven’t your patience. I have a fire.”

“Mara.” It came out of her unevenly. “I wore that for you. I had not thought—”

“I know you hadn’t. Is it a thing you want? Out loud. I’m not guessing.”

She looked at the harness in her hands. Then she looked up at me, and whatever she had been arranging in her face, she left off arranging it.

“I want it. I want you to wear it. I want to be laid down on that desk and taken, with your eyes on me, and I want you to be a very long time about it.” Her throat moved. “I have never said that sentence in my life. I find that it has been waiting.”

“Stand up.”

There are a great many ways to put on a French harness of 1740, and all but one of them are wrong. She did not help. She had been told once that she was not to serve, and she had taken it to heart. She stood with her hands behind her back and watched me fight a silver buckle, and enjoyed it openly.

“The left strap is twisted.”

“That’s steering.”

“It is an observation. I have made a great many from a chair.”

I got it right. I fitted the jet to the ring, warm as a hand, and felt the base of it settle against me, and understood at once why the duchess had sent to Paris.

Then I undid her buttons. Nineteen. For her that was practically casual. I took the black silk off her shoulders and the stays after it and the lawn after that, and she let me, and stood bare in front of a fire for the first time in my acquaintance, warm and pale and rose at the mouth, with Eleanor’s old scar on one side of her throat and mine, a day old, on the other.

“Get up on the desk, my lady.”

She got up on the desk.

I had not been ready for it. Black hair spilled out across the leather, the silver at each temple. Her knees drawn up. The whole long length of her laid out on two and a half centuries of English leather, looking at me as if I were the only light in the room.

“Where am I to put my hands?” she said. “I have broken a chair for you, and a door frame. I do not trust them.”

“On me.”

“Mara—”

“You didn’t break a ribbon. Hips. Go on.”

She set her hands on my hips as carefully as if I were made of glass. I took myself in my fist, and put the head of it against her, and she was so wet that it slid.

“Tell me you want it.”

“I want it. I want you in me. I am asking. Mara, I am asking very—”

I pushed into her.

Slowly. An inch, and then another, watching it go, black into the dark wet rose of her, watching her face. Her mouth came open. Her head went back against the leather, and the sound that came out of her was long and low and not arranged at all. When my hips met hers her fingers tightened, and stopped, and held.

“Oh,” she said, to the ceiling two stories up. “Oh, that is warm.”

“Too much?”

“Do not be absurd. Move.”

“A very long time, you said.”

“I have reconsidered.”

“I haven’t.” I drew back almost the whole length and gave it to her again, to the hilt, and felt the base of it grind against my clit so hard my knees nearly went. “You told me how it’s done at Versailles. Slowly. With conversation. So talk.”

She laughed. It broke in the middle on the next stroke.

“It is… you are very deep. I can feel the whole of it. I can feel where you have warmed it.” Another. “I had forgotten that one could be opened so. I had forgotten what it is to have a woman’s weight between one’s… there. Do that. Do that again.”

I did it again. I got my hand under her knee and lifted it against my ribs, and went deeper, and she said something in French that I am fairly sure was not in the duchess’s vocabulary.

“More,” she said. “I want more. I want it harder. I want to feel it at breakfast.”

“You don’t eat breakfast.”

“I shall sit at the table and feel it regardless. Harder, Counselor.”

I gave it to her harder. The desk did not so much as creak; they built for it in 1760. I put my thumb on her clit, and she arched clean off the leather, and her hands slid from my hips up my back and pulled me down onto her, and I fucked her like that, close, with her mouth open under mine and her heels locked behind my thighs.

“Look at me,” I said.

“I have not looked at one other thing since you came through my gallery door.”

“Then come. I’ve got you.”

She came laughing. I had not known that she could. It started low in her throat and broke wide open, and she came with her head back and her whole body drawn tight as a bow under me, laughing and crying out together, and her nails went down my back and did not leave a mark. The jet bore down on me with every pulse of her. I went over a second behind, with my face in her neck and both our names in my mouth.

Nothing broke. I looked. The desk, the lamp, the fender. Not so much as a pen.

We ended up on the hearth rug. I am not certain how. I had got the harness off, and she had got me down, and then there was only the fire, and her skin, warm, the whole length of mine.

“There was to be an item four,” she said, after a while.

“There was.”

“I believe that I have earned it.”

“It isn’t complicated.” I turned on my side to face her. “I stood in here for ten minutes and I thought, I want her hand in me and mine in her at the same time, and nothing on the clock. No tide. No cliff. No thirteenth anything. I want to go so slowly that we forget who started.”

She did not answer in words. She put her hand between my legs, and I put mine between hers, and we lay there face to face in the firelight and did exactly that.

It was not like the altar. At the altar we had been signing something. This was only two women on a rug. Two of her fingers, deep and unhurried. Two of mine. Her thumb finding me at the same moment that mine found her, so that we both made the same sound and then both laughed at it. I could see every separate eyelash. I could see the black come up in her eyes and stay.

“Say what you want,” I whispered.

“I want this. I want you here. I want to watch you while I… Mara. I want it to be tomorrow, and you still here.”

“That’s three wants.”

“I am three hundred years in arrears.”

I kissed her. We did not hurry. It came for both of us the way the tide comes over the flats out there, with no violence in it whatever, and it took everything, and we held on to each other through it with our foreheads together and our hands still moving.

Afterward I lay with my head on her shoulder and watched the candles. They were burning down. Not one of them leaned.

“Fourteen,” I said.

“You are counting.”

“Force of habit. There’s nothing to count to.”

“No.” She was quiet. Her hand moved in my hair. “Clause two. The term runs from night to night, and is renewed by no one but the person herself.”

“I know what it says. I drafted it.”

“Then you will know that I am asking, and not assuming.” I felt her breathe in. “Tomorrow?”

It was the first time she ever asked me that.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me again then.”

She has. Every day since.

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