The Red Velvet Horse (Siren Publishing Allure) Read online

  The Red Velvet Horse

  The discovery of an erotic manuscript, written by a nineteenth century English woman, catapults a very modern heroine into a maelstrom of sexual experimentation and forbidden love.

  April Ingram is the proprietor of Village Antiques, which she runs with her business partner and lover Holt Schiller. One day she finds an old manuscript hidden in a secret compartment of an antique cabinet. It is the erotic story of Hannah Wilks, a young English woman who lived more than a century before.

  Hannah has been recently widowed. Almost destitute she ends up working in a dockside brothel to support herself. It is here that she is introduced to the joys and perversions of the Red Velvet Horse.

  April is entranced by Hannah's story and becomes increasingly drawn into her world. She is fascinated by her sexual exploits and feels compelled to act them out with explosive results.

  Sensuality Rating: SEXTREME

  Genre: Historical/Multiple Partners

  Length: 33,400 words

  THE RED VELVET HORSE

  Iona Blair

  EROTIC ROMANCE

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Erotic Romance

  ABOUT THE E-BOOK VERSION: Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to one LEGAL copy for your own personal use. It is ILLEGAL to send your copy to someone who did not pay for it. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner of this book.

  THE RED VELVET HORSE

  Copyright © 2008 by Iona Blair

  E-book ISBN: 1-60601-168-5

  First E-book Publication: November 2008

  Cover design by Jinger Heaston

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2008 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  THE RED VELVET HORSE

  IONA BLAIR

  Copyright © 2008

  Chapter One

  It was a strange contraption that reminded her of the type of thing that acrobats use, yet more luxurious by far than a vaulting horse, with its thick padding of red velvet. She had been told that it was used for birchings, and for couplings, with the gentleman mounting the lady, like a stallion a mare.

  * * * *

  “You know this could be Regency,” April Ingram said. But the old rosewood cabinet was so caked with dirt and mold it was impossible to tell. “Once it’s cleaned up a bit, I’ll have a better idea.”

  April had inherited Village Antiques from a Great Aunt. Pleasantly cluttered with treasures from the past, it sat between a jewelry store and snack bar in a trendy waterfront shopping market called Hermitage Quay. She ran it with her business partner and lover Holt Schiller.

  The chiffonier turned out to be a later reproduction and therefore, not as valuable, but it contained an interesting secret compartment which lay behind its main drawer. A find, which mitigated the disappointment of discovering it, was a fake.

  Secret hiding places were quite commonplace in old cabinets such as secretaries and chiffoniers, also in desks like davenports and bonheurs du jours.

  “I think there’s something hidden in there, too.” April reached her arm in as far as it would go. She strained to reach a pile of moldy old papers that were crumbling and yellowed with age. They had the appearance of being stuffed into the cramped hiding place with some degree of haste and urgency by someone in the dim and distant past.

  “They’re going to be difficult to read.” She placed the tattered pages on her refinishing table, separating them with care. The hypnotic ticking of several longcase clocks measured out the passage of time.

  “I think we’re getting somewhere at last,” Holt said, as he assisted in the delicate operation. “But some of these documents will have to be humidified first or they’ll tear.”

  Their mutual concentration was mirrored in the giltwood mirror on the far wall, the tall fair-haired man and the willowy blonde, she, clad as always, in elegant black.

  “But don’t let the coolness of her looks fool you.” Holt had once confided to a close friend. “Behind that ice-goddess image is one red-hot mamma.”

  “Let’s take a break,” he suggested. He ran his fingers over her breasts. “There’s an oak four-poster that just came in today, shall we try it out?”

  “Good idea.” April smiled. She pulled down the window blinds and stretched as erotically as a horny cat.

  She could feel the old familiar twitchings begin deep in her nether regions, her cunt muscles flexed in anticipation for the pleasure to come. Holt caressed her from head to toe, as if discovering all her treasures for the first time.

  He undressed her with maddening slowness, peeling off the sleek black shift and kissing her breasts through the brassiere before unclasping it.

  April felt dizzy with desire. She kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed, her face flushed with longing. She watched as Holt removed his own clothes before joining her, admiring as always his muscular physique and hairy chest.

  She moaned and grasped him to her, moving her feet and legs to accommodate him as he tugged off the black fishnet stockings and garter-belt, leaving her clad only in a pair of thong panties.

  “You taste good enough to eat,” he whispered into her hair, his hands traveling over her body appreciatively. Caressing, fondling, and then following the same route with his tongue.

  April responded by arching her back and flexing her toes, crying out in ecstasy as he tugged down the thong, and fingered her rigid clit. She was oozing wetness from a cunt throbbing in delight, her nipples hard and unyielding.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered, snaking her legs around him and rotating her hips in an urgent rhythmic tempo.

  “All in good time.” Holt grasped her by the ankles. Then he raised her legs high above her head and probed at her swollen cunt with his fingertips and tongue.

  “You devil…” April gasped. “I’ll get even with you for this.” After she had climaxed, with his fingers stroking the inside walls of her cunt and his tongue circling her clit, she smeared her secretions over his face and mouth, but would not allow him to enter her.

  “Come on April…” he pleaded, his face contorted with lust.

  Someone started to rattle at the shop door and voices were raised in irritation. “They should be still open at this time, it’s not even four o’clock.”

  April smothered a giggle and knelt on the old four-poster, which had a hard lumpy mattress. “Okay, what are you waiting for?” She wiggled her upraised bottom in lascivious invitation.

  “You’re a scarlet woman. You know that don’t you?” Holt panted. He slipped his cock inside her and cupped her breasts and tummy with his hands. April could feel his balls banging against her ass as he gave her a hard no-nonsense fucking.

  “Remind me to give you a spanking for cockteasing when we have more time.” He delivered a couple of light spanks to her bottom and the backs of her thighs as a preview.

  The vigorous fucking was making April wild with longing. Holt moved his hand over her clit and strummed at it with hi
s fingertips. It was too much for her, and she could feel herself soaring…soaring above the clouds and then flying high towards the blazing blue heavens beyond.

  * * * *

  The old documents found in the chiffonier had humidified enough to risk trying to separate them. As April cautiously undertook this delicate task, she became increasingly fascinated by what they revealed.

  For it was a journal of sorts, written by a woman named Hannah Wilks who had lived more than a century before. A sort of haphazard account of her life and times that she seemed to jot down on impulse, rather than in any chronological order.

  “It looks as if she never really meant to keep a diary at all.” Holt leafed through the yellowing pages with careful fingers. “That’s why she just recorded her thoughts on single sheets of paper, rather than in a journal.”

  April nodded and then hastily put aside the tattered pages as a customer entered the store. She would take them home with her and arrange them as best she could.

  Hermitage Quay was also a bus loop, and on days when Holt needed the company van for pick-ups or deliveries, April would go home on the 244 Upper Ferndale. It was about a fifteen-minute ride up a steep hill, to the small house she shared with a tortoiseshell cat named Spice.

  It was a good night to be indoors. A gloomy November evening punctuated by the bleating of foghorns. April threw another log on the fire and curled up in her favorite armchair. The old documents recovered from the chiffonier on the table at her side.

  “As the winter draws in I fear for my survival,” wrote Hannah Wilks on another bleak November night of more than a century ago. A recent immigrant from England, she had been left virtually penniless in a rundown Vancouver boarding house when her husband had suddenly died of pneumonia. “No one will hire me in domestic service because I don’t look sturdy enough for the rigors of such a life”, she lamented unhappily, on an uneven scrap of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a ledger.

  Her landlady, Raisa Tarasov, was a hard drinking Russian émigré with a foul-mouth and quick temper.

  “I am not running a charity for beggars,” she would remind the unfortunate Hannah who had not paid her rent, in a guttural accent that made even the simplest word sound like a threat.

  “My friend Sophie Pitiuk runs a brothel on Water Street,” Raisa suddenly declared one morning, as I hurried past her in the dark hallway. I had a shawl drawn close around me for warmth against the cloying chill. When I gasped in scandalized effrontery, she swept aside my objections with a course retort. “Sophie has many clients who ask especially for innocent young women.” She then had the unmitigated boldness to reach out and grasp my breast.

  “I’d rather starve than submit to such an outrage.” I moved swiftly out of reach of her probing hand.

  “Well then that’s exactly what you’re gonna do,” she retorted angrily. She started to toss my few pathetic belongings out into the mud and squalor of Dunlevy Street.

  A dense and heavy rain pummeled down on me all night as I huddled behind a rough-hewn outhouse for shelter. By morning, I was shivering, starving, and was more than ready to swallow whatever pride I had remaining.

  “We’ll soon get you warmed up and fed, while I send a message over to Sophie.” Raisa wore a confident “I told you so” smile. “You’re quite a comely little thing with your big green eyes, and I’m sure she’ll be pleased with you.”

  I bathed in a chipped enamel tub drawn up in front of a coal fire, soaping my pale skin with a nervous hand, and rinsing my long chestnut hair in a small quantity of ale to make it shine.

  The thought of what I would have to do at Sophie’s house of prostitution made me feel sick and queasy inside. Nevertheless, I had no choice in the matter.

  “The gentleman’s already upstairs and waiting for you,” Sophie said, as soon as I presented myself at her door. So alike was she with the indomitable Raisa that I suspected they might be in some way related, perhaps sisters?

  “Pinch a little color into your cheeks,” she instructed. While I complied, she circled around examining me with a critical eye and clicking tongue.

  “If there were time, I’d try and find you a more suitable gown.” She looked with disapproval at my slightly threadbare skirt and blouse.

  “This is my first time,” I confided nervously. I wrung my hands together and bit down on my lower lip.

  “Well that’s a bit difficult to believe, dearie,” she joked, but not unkindly, with a lewd wink.

  “I mean with a stranger…for money,” I stammered.

  “It’s no different, m' dear,” she assured me. “Just be sweet and do everything he wants.”

  The bedchamber was dominated by a brass bed and lit by a single oil lamp. “Come over here, I won’t bite,” a rasping voice greeted me from an armchair in the far corner, where a curlicue of cigar smoke drifted upwards towards the high ceiling.

  He was a shriveled up little monkey of a man, this first client of mine, with glittering black eyes and an incongruously bushy moustache.

  I did as I was bid, turning this way and that while he examined me like a prize heifer at a county fair.

  “My but you’re a bonzer little lass,” he announced appreciatively with just a hint of an Australian accent. He immediately began to fondle my breasts and belly while wheezing through flailing nostrils.

  “Now take off your bodice,” he ordered with a great lasciviousness of manner. When I obeyed, he licked and sucked at my breasts until much to my horror, I felt a dull ache of desire kindle deep within my groin.

  Next, he instructed me to remove my skirt and petticoats, leaving me standing before him in just my drawers, boots, and knee-high stockings.

  “Come here lass and let me feel your sweet little quim.” He slipped his gnarled fingers into the leg of my voluminous underwear and massaged my cunny until my breathing grew labored with desire.

  Then after much fondling of my belly, breasts, and bottom he bent me over the bed and entered me with his long wiry cock in one well-aimed thrust.

  “Ow,” I gasped despite myself as shuddering waves of muscle-tensing excitement coursed through me.

  Of all the possible outcomes of this forced visit to a brothel, I could never have foreseen this one. As quivering, moaning, and quite feverish with excitement I gyrated my eager hips around with utter abandon.

  “Gawd, but that was a bonzer piece of ass,” he groaned, after we had both spent with noisy ebullience. And was soon positioning me for another romp that would last even longer and be more explosive at its finale.

  So it was that I became a prostitute who actually enjoyed the jiggering and poking I was subjected to each night at Sophie’s dockside brothel. While feeling unspeakable shame that I had sunk so low.

  * * * *

  “Hannah Wilks starts off as this quiet little widow,” April explained to Holt, while they worked on the window display for Christmas. “And ends up not only working in a brothel, but actually enjoying it.”

  She swirled a strand of tinsel around a potted silver fir tree, and stacked a pile of presents in a Currier & Ives style sleigh.

  A bleak drizzle was trying hard to snow, and from the naked branches of a beech tree a lone cardinal whistled out his song.

  With eyes full of mischief, she suddenly tickled Holt under the armpits and grabbed his crotch without warning, before escaping to the storeroom, willing him to follow.

  “I’m going to get you for that April,” he obliged in a mock-angry tone, and she could hear him locking the door and drawing the blinds before joining her on the camp bed.

  “I mean it. I’m going to spank your butt.” His voice was thick with lascivious intent. And, as April struggled and giggled until she was helpless, he pulled her across his lap, raised her skirt, and gave her a long sensuous spanking on top of her flimsy tap panties.

  She was a tall woman, so was able to position herself comfortably for the spanking with her hands and toes on the floor. Holt steadied her with a hand tucked around
her hip and swatted away first at one cheek, then the other.

  He caressed her ass between spanks and patted the backs of her thighs. April moaned and felt her cunt engorge with passion. She wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer, and would soon reach a blistering orgasm without any sort of genital stimulation. Such was the extent of her excitement when getting her bottom spanked.

  She knew Holt sensed this, and eased up on the spanking to try and prolong her pleasure. She groaned and tossed her head from side to side like an unruly mare, and clenched her buttocks furiously.

  He rubbed her upper back to calm her and held her legs.

  “It’s no use…I can’t last…” she gasped, and he immediately tugged down her panties, leaving them straddled just below her ass. Then he caressed both cheeks before spanking her to orgasm. She thrilled as the powerful contractions ripped through her body and convulsed beneath his hand.

  * * * *

  Pleasantly exhausted after her amorous adventure, April relaxed on the bus ride home. As they climbed the hill, she could see the massive stone face of Grouse Mountain looming to the north. The lights of its ski run looked like a stairway to heaven. And that’s exactly what she had thought it was, as a child.

  At home, Spice wound himself around her legs and purred like a burr saw. She picked him up. “I know you’re happy to see me fella. Now what are we going to have for supper?”

  After they had eaten, she returned to Hannah Wilks' unusual story. It was too bad the young woman had been forced into prostitution. For once that happened, it was difficult to break away from the relatively “easy” money this sordid profession offered.

  The fact that Hannah had become terrifically aroused while servicing her clients would make it even harder for her to escape its lucrative yet degrading clutches.