Interlude: Lady Kaya [pt. III]

Kaya returned to the Welcome House late in the afternoon after wandering through the village and talking with shopkeepers, fishermen, and women returning from the market. For years, even the walk down the hill had been an expedition followed by bed rest. Now she could cross half the village and climb back to the mansion without once becoming faint.

Three weeks of hearty meals, late nights, and constant sex seemed to have done more for her than years of quiet convalescence. She went to bed exhausted and thoroughly used, then woke with more color in her cheeks and energy in her limbs. Perhaps lovemaking simply agreed with her.

Elise waited until Kaya had crossed the foyer and begun climbing the stairs. Then the head maid looked at the dirt and sailcloth fibers clinging to the front of her pale blue skirt.

"You've made a mess of your dress."

Kaya stopped with one foot upon the next step.

"I knelt on a clean sail."

"It wasn't very clean." Elise's gaze rose to Kaya's mouth. "You sucked someone."

Kaya looked down. "Harun."

Elise only nodded. "Make him ask properly and pay next time. Now go bathe, rinse your mouth, and put on fresh underthings. Tonight's captain paid the full rate."

Kaya went straight upstairs with flushed cheeks. She washed Harun's smell from her hair, rinsed her mouth, and put on fresh white lace. Elise had left the scarlet hostess dress on the bed. Its neckline exposed most of Kaya's small breasts, and the slit in its long skirt showed the top of one stocking when she walked. Kaya blushed at her reflection, but she did not change.

At sunset, the lantern above the entrance was lit.

The Patient Fortune sent twenty-three men up from the harbor in clean shirts and polished boots. That alone earned the crew Elise's approval. They surrendered pistols and knives at the lower entrance, paid into Merry's locked cashbox, and received colored ribbons showing which rooms and services they had purchased. Within half an hour, the reception hall smelled of roasted fish, bread, wine, soap, tobacco, and the first stirrings of sweat.

The Welcome House received them as though it had never spent years dark and silent. Village women sat upon sailors' laps while feeding them from shared plates. Mirka danced on a low table until a deckhand offered enough berry to persuade her down into his arms. Sophie led two laughing riggers toward the baths, announcing that she would scrub whichever one behaved better and make the other watch. Dilara occupied the first mate's knees like a queen claiming a padded throne, one thick arm around his neck and her free hand already inside his shirt.

"Your captain bought the young mistress," she told him. "What did you buy?"

The first mate looked down at the enormous breasts resting across his forearm. "At this point, probably more than I can afford."

"Definitely more than you've got," Dilara said, then kissed him while he reached for his purse.

Food kept the evening from becoming an immediate riot. The crew had spent nine days at sea, and even the men with women wriggling upon their laps devoted serious attention to bowls of fish stew and platters of glazed pork. Laughter rolled beneath the chandeliers. A fiddle competed with an accordion near the open garden doors. Every few minutes a woman rose, caught a sailor led him toward one of the rooms prepared upstairs.
Kaya moved through it all with the ease she had begun learning. She greeted the boatswain by name because Merry whispered it before the man reached her. She accepted a kiss upon the hand from the purser, redirected a drunk deckhand toward a willing hostess when he mistook her sleeve for permission to pull her into his lap, and made certain a nervous youthful deckhand receive a proper supper before an enthusiastic widow carried him away.

Captain Orin Pell came upstairs with five officers after the crew had settled below.

He was sixty-four and looked every year of it. A close white beard covered his jaw, thinning gray hair exposed a broad, weathered forehead, and old scars climbed from beneath the collar of his formal blue coat. He had once been powerfully built. The broad chest and thick arms remained, but age and good dinners had given him a heavy belly which strained his brass buttons and hung over his belt when he sat. His right shoulder moved stiffly, and one knee objected to the final stair.

"Lady Beyza," he said softly, then blinked and spoke more loudly, “Lady Kaya. Sorry. For a moment there... You have your mother's eyes."

"Merry told me you knew her." Kaya approached and offered both hands rather than one. Pell's palms were broad, callused, and warm around hers. "He wouldn't tell me what 'knew her' meant."

Pell's mouth curved beneath his beard. "I was nineteen the first time I climbed this hill. Your mother frightened me so badly that I poured wine down my new uniform before she removed a single glove. She laughed until she cried. Then she took me upstairs, and I forgot all about the wine."

Kaya tried to imagine her mother young, alive, and amused by the nervous erection of a sailor who had not yet grown old. The solemn portraits along the hall resisted the effort. Pell's face did not. For him, Beyza had been a warm woman with a wicked laugh rather than an ancestor preserved in paint.

"She liked nervous young men," he continued. "Said they tried harder."

"Are you still nervous?"

His eyes traveled over her chaste dress, lingering upon her narrow waist and the modest rise of her breasts. "A little. Didn't expect that at my ripe old age."

"Good. Maybe you'll still try hard."

Pell laughed, the sound deep enough to make the officers turn. Kaya guided him to the place set at the head of the table. He pulled out the chair beside his own, glanced at its empty seat, then remembered the customs of the Gecko Islands and looked down at his lap.

"I've been away too long," he said. "I forgot. Your mother would've laughed me out of the room. Sit."

Kaya gathered her skirts and settled sideways across his broad thighs. The position pressed her hip against the soft curve of his belly. Pell placed one arm around her waist, though the weathered hand resting upon her side remained so careful that he might have been holding a sick child.

She let him keep his manners through the soup.

During the fish, Kaya fed him Dilara’s cherries from her own plate and listened while he described the first ships he sailed into Syrup's harbor. During the pork, his hand descended from her waist to her hip. When the cook brought out a rum cake soaked in the dark liquor, Kaya shifted farther into his lap and felt a thickening shape beneath his trousers.

He tried to move his belly so she would not notice.

Kaya selected another cherry and touched it to his mouth. "You don't have to hide it from me, Captain."

"I was trying not to poke you through supper."

“Then stop being so considerate. I’ve rather enjoyed feeling it trying to get my attention.”

Pell's fingers tightened at her hip. Around them, his officers pretended not to listen with such concentration that even the surgeon had stopped chewing.

"That sounded like your mother," Pell said.

"Did she do this?"

Kaya took his wrist and guided his hand beneath her long skirt. His rough palm traveled up one stocking, crossed the warm strip of bare thigh above it, and closed around her bottom. The white lace of her panties offered almost no barrier. Pell drew a careful breath as his fingers sank into the soft flesh.

"No," he admitted. "Beyza would have skipped the demonstration and called me an idiot."

"She was probably right. I like this better."

She wriggled until his cock pressed firmly beneath her. The young heiress remained seated before his officers, calmly eating cherries while a white-bearded captain more than three times her age squeezed her nearly bare ass under the table. Kaya continued chewing as though nothing unusual were happening, but her pulse quickened and the lace between her legs grew damp. A month earlier, she would have struggled to imagine allowing any man beneath her skirts. Now the old sailor's hidden erection made her wonder what he would look like once she opened his trousers.

Pell studied her face, perhaps searching for reluctance. Whatever he saw caused his restraint to fray.

"I booked you until morning," he said quietly.

Kaya looked at him with open interest. "The whole night?"

"Indeed, I intend to have my way with you most thoroughly."

Most men Kaya had welcomed lasted somewhere between five and fifteen minutes once they began humping in earnest. The rest of an evening passed in talking, eating, dozing, washing, and waiting to see whether their cocks would recover. Only Tsujo had fucked for hours. He had stayed hard through one release after another, moving between Kaya and Alvida and sometimes taking one while pleasuring the other until he had satisfied both women again and again.

Kaya found herself wondering how often an old captain might manage before morning.

Pell mistook her thoughtful silence for doubt. "You really want this?"

"Oh, yes." Kaya leaned close enough for her lips to brush the white hair beside his ear. "I've been wondering all evening what you look like naked."

His hand closed hard enough to draw a gasp from her.

"Careful, girl."

"Good. Keep your hand there."

Pell pushed back from the table and stood with Kaya gathered against his chest. His knee protested and his breath caught beneath her weight, but he refused to set her down. The officers cheered. Somewhere near the far end of the table, the first mate called that the old boar had finally awakened.

Pell carried Kaya toward the door without looking back. “You can laugh while you’re scrubbing the bilges tomorrow.”

"Aye, Captain," several men answered through their laughter.

Kaya wrapped her arms around Pell's neck. His beard scratched her cheek, his belly supported the curve of her bottom, and every step reminded her that the dignified old man carrying her upstairs had purchased the right to spend the night between her young thighs.

The thought made her pussy wet before they reached the landing.

The captain's suite, otherwise known at Kaya’s bedroom, glowed in amber lamplight. A dark bottle of Lvneel rum stood beside the broad blue bed, with cherries, cold meat, and fresh bread waiting beneath a linen cloth. The heavy washbasin had been filled, the fire laid low, and a long blue couch waited beside the hearth. Above it hung a nearly life-sized portrait of Kaya's mother in a cream gown, her painted hands folded and her expression calm enough to seem almost severe.

Pell stopped when he saw the portrait. "She never looked that serious."

Kaya followed his gaze. "That's how she looks in all of them."

"Then I'll tell you some better stories."

Pell kicked the door shut and set Kaya upon her feet. For one suspended moment, the old captain and the young mistress faced one another in silence.

Then his hands seized her bottom and his mouth came down upon hers.

The kiss tasted of rum cake and cherries. His beard scraped her lips and chin while his tongue pushed into her mouth with none of the careful courtesy he had shown downstairs. Kaya rose onto her toes, pressed her small breasts against his broad chest, and kissed him back until his breathing became rough.

"I paid a shameful amount of money for this pussy," Pell said against her lips. One hand dragged her against the erection beneath his coat. "I plan to get my fill of it."

Kaya felt a shiver run from the hand on her ass to the wet opening between her legs. She gave him a soft giggle. "Then I hope you have a very good appetite."

Pell's grip tightened, though his eyes still searched her face. Kaya smiled and started taking off her dress. "I want you too. You don't have to be so careful with me."

That was permission enough. Pell helped with thick fingers poorly suited to delicate work. Kaya helped before he tore it, opening the dress from throat to waist and allowing it to slide from her shoulders. His stare followed the garment to the floor.’
The white lace beneath was nearly transparent. The brassiere lifted her modest breasts without hiding her nipples, and the narrow panties disappeared between the cheeks his hands had been squeezing at supper. Stockings rose to the middle of her thighs, leaving a strip of pale skin bare below the lace.

"Gods," Pell murmured. "You walked around the house dressed like this underneath?"

"Most of the day."

"While men called you Lady Kaya and asked about supper?"

"Nobody asked to inspect my underthings."

"Their loss."

He cupped both breasts. His weathered palms covered nearly all of them, squeezing their small softness while his thumbs worried her nipples through the lace. The contrast between his hands and her body held him fascinated. Kaya let him look. She enjoyed the disbelief spreading across his old face, the simple male wonder that this young, pretty body had been reserved for his use tonight.

Kaya reached behind herself and opened the brassiere. Her small breasts fell free, pale and gently rounded, with stiff pink nipples pointing toward him. Pell weighed one in each broad palm and smiled.

"You have her coloring," Pell said. His thumbs passed over both pink nipples. "She was much fuller here, though."

Kaya giggled. "I know. The portraits make that rather obvious."

"Beyza was proud of hers."

"I would have been too." Kaya placed her hands over his and helped him squeeze them. "Elise says mine may grow after I have my first baby. I hope she's right."

Pell glanced from her hopeful face to the breasts in his hands. "Nothing wrong with these."

"No," Kaya agreed sweetly. She pushed one a little more firmly into his palm. "But a little more would be pretty."