At first, Lise thought it must be her husband, inexplicably home early from his intended fortnight in town. She blew a blonde curl off her forehead, straining her eyes to see through the gloom outside. The tall figure coming up the drive looked just like his, although all features and costume were lost in the growing dimness of approaching twilight. But then she saw the faint stutter in the figure's stride and knew that it couldn't be Charles.
Damn it, she thought, another visitor. And a rude one at that. The hour for paying social calls was long past.
Balancing her weight on her knees and only one hand, she waved the other behind her until it hit sweating male flesh.
"Finish quickly," she commanded, pushing her fingers between her legs to help things along. He could never be trusted to think of her pussy when he was pleasuring his cock. "Someone's coming to visit."
The steady rhythm that was her favourite trait about her husband's young valet was soon broken as he struggled to finish. He was like that, easily flustered, which was why they only fucked when Charles was out of the house. However much she tried to lure him with a quick tumble in an empty bedchamber, he always demurred. It was one of the things she liked about him, his stiffness that bordered on rigidity in front of others, and his eager willingness to fuck her from behind in private. She enjoyed looking out of the window at the other servants going about their daily chores while he was screwing her.
She looked at her reflection in the window glass, her smooth forehead creased over her wide green eyes, as she tried to think of who the stranger could be. Unannounced visitors often meant bad news, but with a well-run household and a wealthy husband who was very careful of his own safety, she doubted it would be that today.
Whoever the stranger was, he must be shown true Hessell hospitality. Charles would expect it of her. If the stranger had come from far, she would be expected to feed him.
Supper had already been eaten. She hoped that Cook had left some of the roast chicken instead of gobbling it up herself, as she was wont to do. Charles swore that Cook ate more than the two of them combined.
Lise turned her head away from the window, not wanting whoever it was to find her hanging out of it, staring at him, the valet's pale face sweating over her arse cheeks. Even if it had been her husband, she would not have done anything different. She had cut it close before. Fortunately, she and Charles did not have the type of marriage where she would be expected to meet him in the front hall upon his arrival. Really, she thought, no one seemed to have that sort of marriage, least of all her friends and neighbours, although the prospect of love within marriage was realised often enough in novels.
Her husband would say she read too many novels. He was a typical out of doors gentleman. He only read serious tomes on horticulture to improve his farms and occasionally a book on history to widen his mind. Aside from that, he eschewed words and indoor pursuits. At supper parties, he bored their guests to yawns with his schemes to replace his innumerable fields of barley with wheat and rye, convinced that this was a cure to the agricultural depression that had hit England since the end of the war.
It was always left to Lise to coax one of their guests to the pianoforte and another to sing, or else to ply the former instrument herself and attempt to drown out her husband's talk of sowing and threshing.
Lise had been raised to consider it poor manners for a gentleman to speak on how he earned his income. But short of speaking to Charles directly, which after three years of marriage she dared not do, she must bear his boorishness. In spite of the depression, the Hessell family's income from those fields Charles spoke about too often was the only thing she could not complain about.