Evil's Niece (10 page)

The more Monique helped me follow my husband’s orders, the more tightly I got wound into her naughty, treacherous web. What a shock, to see young men who made such pretty women. Being utterly fooled by their voices and looks and mannerisms. I felt downright drab and uninventive, when I considered the efforts it took to carry out their deception.

Monique had obviously known their gender all along — and surely had her reasons for procuring them — but Chapin would see
nothing
funny about what hung in their panties. He would banish my Cajun maid himself when he learned she’d brought them here. The entire blame would lay on my shoulders for, as Monique had reminded me, I was responsible for the conduct and deportment of my staff. Thoughts of Toinette appearing in my pearls, or Cinderella coming to our masked ball in my spun-glass slippers, made my head spin.

Yet my curiosity was more than piqued. And with Monique gone for the rest of the day, I had the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with my new employees; to find out
why
three attractive young men chose to live as women and work as servants.

They stood at the table along the kitchen wall, their bare backsides exposed as they polished flatware for Fanny. My hand went to my mouth. Those stripes radiated heat and pain I could not imagine, for even though my parents had used the occasional willow switch, they’d never made
welts
. Everything within me railed against whipping them this way, yet Monique was right: if I contradicted her discipline now, my sissy maids would play us against each other. If Chapin found this out, there’d be even more hell to pay.

I could, however, show some compassion — in exchange for information. Walking alongside the sink, I picked up Fanny’s jar of bag balm: it was formulated for the udders of dairy cows, and it soothed human skin as well.

‘Good afternoon,’ I spoke, hoping to sound firm yet friendly. ‘I think we’ll all be happier if I apply some salve to those stripes. It hurts me to look at them, so I can only imagine how awful you must feel.’

The trio glanced over their shoulders with a mixture of expressions, while Mrs Frike, kneading dough for bread, rolled her eyes as though she thought I was pushing my case a bit.

‘We’ll be fine. Really,’ Cleopatra assured me.

‘Not like we haven’t had our bottoms whacked before,’ Cinderella chirped.

I twisted the lid from the jar of balm. ‘So, Miss Delacroix condones canings at her school?’

‘Oh, she lives for them, Miss Eve,’ Antoinette informed me. ‘She insists that the pain and humiliation make us better domestics. More penitent, and likely to strive higher next time.’

‘And do you agree with that?’ I then wondered if I should have asked. After all, I wasn’t paying my staff to have opinions. I scooped up a dollop of the cream on my fingertips and touched it to his crisscrossed bottom.

Antoinette sucked in his breath, and then stuck out his butt. His tawny eyes looked anything but penitent. ‘Not unless I respect the person cracking the whip. Some mistresses set behaviour traps for us, to satisfy their spanking habit. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think it’s a crock. A way for superiors to pick on those who have no choice but to take it.’

I gently smoothed the lotion over his pert, rounded backside, fascinated by the hard muscle beneath skin that radiated such heat…the give of the flesh at the fullest phase of his moons. ‘And your family perished in a fire? You went into service when you were orphaned?’

The weight of that stare made me glance up, into a face that looked hardened despite a feminine hairstyle and carefully applied cosmetics. ‘The authorities believed
I
set that fire, Miss Eve,’ he stated. ‘Miss Delacroix’s school provided me the cover to get on with my life, even if I’d rather not parade around like a lady.’

My hand stopped, cupping his warm, slippery underside. A surge of adrenaline, shot from his eyes to mine, made my pulse race. ‘And did you? Set that fire?’

Lord, the last thing I needed was an arsonist in my house! The kitchen felt airless for a few interminable seconds, as Antoinette challenged me with a taut-jawed gaze: it was the look of a hoodlum or a harlot, which no amount of powder or rouge could disguise.

‘No, Mrs Proffit, I did not.’

His whisper sounded strangely seductive, coming from a servant confessing a checkered past. ‘I was thirteen. Had gotten crosswise with the local constable, so I was the first person he suspected — despite the fact that I lost my
mother
and three sisters when that ratty old tenement went up like wildfire. So I ran — smack into Honore Delacroix when I rounded a corner.’

‘And she took you in?’ I began to rub the other half of his ass with the bag balm, filing away these fascinating details for later. Toinette sounded quite sincere, yet I sensed an undercurrent of defiance and rebellion against authority.

‘She cut me a deal. Honore never fails to see the dollar signs in any situation.’ He sighed, letting his eyes go half shut. ‘Rub lower, please…yes, right there.’

My ploy was beginning to backfire — for what woman in her right mind fondled the help, expecting to maintain the proper decorum? ‘She’s taken advantage of your hardship then? Profited from your misfortune?’

‘Who hasn’t?’ Antoinette replied acidly. “When you’re born on the wrong side of the tracks — wrong side of the sheets — it’s a way of life. But I’ll warn you before you rub that stuff any lower.’

I looked up, my face unsettlingly close to one that could be my double.

‘The fire never goes out, Miss Eve.’

With a flick of the fork he was polishing, Antoinette drew my attention to the apron tented against the table. He was long and hard, leaving no doubt that in the right circumstances, he’d be hefting me up there and spreading my legs, and there’d be nothing of the sissy maid or Marie Antoinette in the way he claimed me.

I was flattered, yet flustered, and reminded myself to remain firm. ‘See that you never singe either of us,’ I replied, loudly smacking his slick backside with my hand.

The servants on either side of us were trying not to snicker as they studiously polished their silverware. ‘And you two — as accomplices — shall be held accountable as well,’ I added brusquely. ‘Monique may have procured your services, but I won’t hesitate to notify the authorities of what’s going on here, and at that school.’

I had no intention of following through on that threat, for it would only get me into deeper trouble with my husband. But they should know that Miss Eve would remain in control, no matter what their black-clad whipping mistress had implied. No special favours for Antoinette, simply because he’d opened his soul and flashed his manhood at me.

I stepped behind Cleopatra then, who still bore kohled circles around her obsidian eyes. ‘And you went into Miss Delacroix’s service when? Because your mother gave you up?’

Again I scooped up a gob of the balm, to spread over the olive cheeks sticking out beneath his apron strings. And again my gesture was met with a slight sigh and an air of cooperation I found heartening.

‘I sugar-coated the truth, if you must know,’ the dusky young man replied. The voice I heard was more masculine than when we’d met, yet it retained a timbre and pitch I would’ve attributed to a female, were I not witnessing the rise of his erection. ‘My mother sold me into service because, yes, there were too many mouths to feed. But I was prettier than my sisters, so I brought the nicest price when she put us on display at the French Market.’

My eyes widened. ‘Your mother
sold
you to —?’

‘It’s more common than you might think, among the poor,’ he sighed. ‘And since it was the illustrious Miss Delacroix checking my teeth and face, and then fingering my…privates, Mama drove a harder bargain. Honore represented a future for me, and her money fed the rest of them for quite awhile.’

My brow furrowed as I smoothed salve across Cleopatra’s stripes. He was taller than the other two, with glossy black hair pulled back at the crown, to hang past his shoulders. His skin was soft and hairless; his sinews more evident, now that he wore only an apron. With a male haircut and clothing, he would cut a striking figure even among the crowd Chapin associated with.

What a shame that he’d had no better choice as a child! Yet I sensed he was — like my husband — a man who would always revere and respect his mama. Even though he was living as a woman because of her, he would never stop longing for the mother who sold him.

‘How long are you required to remain with Miss Delacroix?’ I ventured, rhythmically rubbing circles around his firm young buttocks. He was leaning into it now, craving the contact of my hand as much as I enjoyed applying the ointment. ‘Surely there’s a limit to —’

‘We may leave when we’re twenty-one,’ Cinderella piped up. ‘But few of Miss Delacroix’s students really want to. Her methods are harsh, but her reputation and high fees assure us of work in the finest homes. On our own, we’d be hard-pressed to land such prestigious positions.’

Cleopatra and Antoinette nodded, picking up new spoons to polish. What didn’t fit, in this picture? Had life with a wealthy man made me forget the stigma of falling on hard times?

My own circumstances weren’t terribly different from theirs, since my marriage to Chapin had offset my parents’ debts. But I had agreed to this arrangement as an adult; I’d bartered myself into Southern society because eligible suitors in St. Louis weren’t pounding my door down, and because it seemed the prudent thing to do. These three had entered into some dubious relationship with Honore Delacroix as children and, by the sound of it, they’d become her…whipping boys. Maybe even her slaves.

When I glanced over at the fair features of my third servant — the one who’d mewed so pitifully when Monique whipped him — I sensed a different story, however. Cinderella had an air of high breeding the other two lacked; a poise and carriage and deportment denoting good lineage.

‘And what of you, Princess?’ I asked as I stepped closer, spreading the first dollop of balm on her pitifully crisscrossed backside.

Cinderella flinched, more from emotional pain than the fire in her stripes. She picked up a knife and began to polish it with sudden fervour.

‘My father declared early on that I would never meet his expectations as an heir,’ he replied in a high, tight voice. ‘I was an embarrassment to him, and a source of disgust to my mother, when they caught me wearing my sister’s shoes. “Why did
Lucy
get pretty kid slippers while I had to stumble around in clunky old boots?” I asked them.’

The blonde’s breath caught in her throat, from the moment’s emotion but also because she loved the caress of my lotioned hand on her backside. ‘I wasn’t yet seven when they took me to Miss Delacroix’s, on the advice of a family friend,’ Cinderella went on in a fragile drawl. ‘I suspect they made a large donation, for the privilege of sweeping me under her rug.’

My God, could I ever look at these three again without feeling sorry for them? I’d unwittingly opened a Pandora’s box that infuriated me, and incensed me, and insulted me. I knew them for the cross-gendered men they were now, as well as for the helpless boys they’d been before coming into Honore Delacroix’s School for Domestic Endeavor and, as I quickly completed massaging Cinderella’s balm, my thoughts collided.

I was ready to rail at Monique for getting me into this situation. Ready to lash out at Mrs Frike for the way her avid gaze followed my hands over those three attractive asses: she was old enough to be their grandmother, after all, and had all the allure of a lumpy mattress. And I was determined to meet with Miss Delacroix for an explanation of just what went on at her esteemed school, for it appeared Domestic Endeavor was her
least
concern when she accepted applicants.

I was also unspeakably horny. That was my own fault, so I left my new maids to their work before I succumbed to the temptation of grasping Antoinette’s randy shaft with my lotioned hand.

‘Thank you for your candour, and for the conscientious work I know you’ll do,’ I murmured, and then I went up to my room.

I’d had an eventful morning, and I needed to prepare myself for whatever the evening might bring. With Monique, I never knew. And if that handsome rebel lover of hers had a gift for me, the possibilities for pleasure would wag their finger in a come-hither gesture I couldn’t ignore.

My own fingers, slick with bag balm and still hot from massaging my male maids, found their way to my desperately wet sex, and I let imagination have its way. Thank goodness Chapin was out of town. He would never understand any of this!

*  *  *

The evening found me gazing expectantly into the moonlit gardens, from the railed gallery that spanned the back of the house. The maids had settled into their large dormitory room above mine, on the third floor, and Mrs Frike might well have slipped up from her quarters alongside the kitchen to tuck them in. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

The house was quiet. Not unusual, since Chapin was often out this late. Yet my pulse thrummed with the awareness that three young men now lived here. Perhaps I should check on them…just to be sure Fanny wasn’t harassing them, of course. But then a pebble clanged against the wrought iron and bounced on to the smooth porch floor by my bare feet.

I looked down, into the shadows of magnolia trees and manicured boxwood hedges, and saw two grinning faces framed by hair the colour of the night. Monique’s laughter reached me with her wave, filling me with her contagious sense of joy. My maid and her tall, muscular man stood naked and ready to play! Right out there in my garden!

I trotted down from the gallery, my feet barely touching the iron stairs. What would they do if Chapin had come home — or if Fanny saw them cavorting out here in the altogether? I was ready to demand. But Tommy Jon caught me around the waist to toss me against his chest while his other hand muffled my squeal.

‘You thought we forgot about you,
oui
?’

Monique was whirling like a dervish, her hands outstretched to catch moonbeams while her hair rippled in a black cascade behind her. Her breasts bobbed and her body flexed with each step, providing a breathtaking vision of young loveliness — which my captor couldn’t ignore.