The Rake

A Steam and Spells Steampunk Encounter

Mikala Ash

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Copyright ©2024 Mikala Ash

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Cover Artist: Margaret Riley

Adult Sexual Content

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The Rake

A Steam and Spells Steampunk Encounter

Mikala Ash

Captain Adam Rathbone has a friend; a fellow cavalry man who is just as handsome, brave and bold. After a fleeting kiss, Jemima Lipsey flies headlong into the scorching flame of his lust. Will Jaimie Dalgliesh do the right thing, or is he nothing but a cad, a dishonourable rake? Jemima’s about the find out.

The Rake

To Miss Blanche Rowbotham,

Oxford, England

Dearest Blanche,

I’ve just received a letter from Wilhelmina (redirected from Moradabad, so it’s a week late too) saying my last letter to her (and I suppose my note to you too) had been unaccountably delayed. Since the Mutiny absolutely everything has become deplorable, and I’ll be glad to move to the green hills of Surry as soon as Papa finishes his duties. The poor dear has not recovered since Mama’s murder (nor have I -- the nightmares are horrid, and I wake screaming and drenched in sweat), and it is beyond me how to calm his shattered spirits.

You’ll never guess who I met, quite unexpectedly last night at the Governor’s ball. Captain Jaimie Dalgliesh!

I was standing at Papa’s elbow as he officially welcomed the high and mighty (what’s left of ‘em), and in he swaggers. Resplendent in his regimentals, hand on the hilt of his sword, drawing the attention of every woman to the unmistakeable bulge in his tight trousers.

My quim ached as I recalled our last torrid meeting. I told you about how, one dreary afternoon he’d found me bored out of my skull and alone in the garden. With smooth as honey banter, he persuaded me to walk with him in the shade. I can’t remember how it came about exactly; I was quite distracted by his mere presence, and my heart was beating so very fast. Suddenly his mouth was pressing against mine, his moustache tickling my nose, and his hands gripping my waist. His lips were so insistent that I opened my mouth, and before I knew it, his tongue was wrestling with mine.

I’d never been kissed before, and any reluctance I may have had was swept away by the throbbing of my quim. I swooned, clutching him tightly to my heaving breast.

The gardener appeared, and we leapt instantly apart. Ever since that kiss I have yearned to see that encounter through to a conclusion. Last night I saw my chance, and resolved to follow Horace’s advice; to pluck the day, and trust not that there’ll be the morrow.

Please don’t chide me about the translation. I simply can’t remember it exact, but the sentiment took command of me. He smiled rakishly when he first beheld me, and I squeezed his hand just before he kissed my fingers, looking up at me and giving me a mischievous, or should I say, lascivious wink. It set my heart galloping, hardened my poor nipples, and turned my quim into a roiling crucible of lust. My resolve hardened, like the bulge in his pants, which had lengthened into a discernible log.

Oh, Blanche. My knees trembled, and what was already a sultry night under the ballroom lights turned positively monsoonal under my skirts. The army of punkhawallahs were doing their duty, furiously working the pullies to wave the fans and stir the heavy air, but to no avail.

After our official duties were done, Papa retired to the billiard room to talk with the governor and his generals. I sought out Jaimie at once, he had been waiting, and we took our first ever dance. Oh, being held by his strong hands made me shiver like a bee in a bottle. In a trice he deftly sailed us between the other couples, out the door and onto the moonlit veranda. From an automaton servant we each took a glass of cool lemonade, and said little as we sipped, our eyes doing all that was necessary to make our desires known each to the other.

Oh, how my heart trembled with anticipation of once again feeling those firm lips upon mine.

“This is a most excellent garden. Shall we take a stroll, Miss Lipsey?”

“I would be most pleased to do so.”

He took my arm and we glided across the lawn (I cannot term it something so mundane as walking -- I was floating on air!) and meandered between the trees and hedges. We passed the occasional couple, no doubt determined on their own surreptitious undertaking, till we came to a small gazebo overlooking the ornamental lake. It was deserted, and we sat on the cool marble bench.

“I’ve longed to meet with you again,” he said. “We were separated most abruptly last summer.”

“I remember.”

“Duty, you know. A bit of trouble had to be attended to. Poor Rathbone was wounded.”

“I heard. He is in England now, I believe.”

“Yes, and healing quite well. He wrote me. He has an attentive doctor at his beck and call, and a nurse as well to attend to his every need.”

“I’m glad of it.”

I bit my tongue in frustration. If only he would stop talking about his dashed friend, and say something to me! Then he did, and the Earth shifted beneath me, and I almost fainted.

“I have needs too. Do you understand what I mean? Do you have those same needs, Miss Lipsey?”

“Jemima, please. And yes. Yes, I do. Most keenly.”

He clasped my hand and drew it to his breast. “Is it too much to ask that we indulge those desires?”

“Not too much at all,” I answered, and leaned towards him so our lips could meet. The kiss was all that I remembered. I’d rehearsed it so often that I needed no encouragement to open my mouth and take in his tongue. My God! Blanche, it was so exciting. He drew me closer, one arm around my waist, the other behind my head.

The heat of the night was forgotten. Jaimie manoeuvred his hand under my ballgown, and parted my legs. Rather, I opened them quite freely, and the touch of his fingers as they inched up my inner thigh made me moan. I fell against him in complete surrender.

His fingers found my drawers, and then brushed against my secret lips, already sodden with lust and sweat. One finger slipped in, then a second, and then, oh My God, a third.

He encountered resistance. It does Jaimie credit that he stopped, and leaned back, his eyes glowing in the moonlight. “Do you wish it?” he asked.

“I do!” was my breathy reply. “I do!”

He lifted my skirts above my knees, and gently lay me on my back, my legs splayed either side of the bench. He kneeled between them and unbuttoned his trousers and released the serpent within. Blanche, I gasped in shock. As impossible as it sounds, it was bigger than the bulge in his trousers suggested, considerably bigger. Even in the dim silver light I estimated the shaft to be a foot long, and thicker than my wrist, topped by a bulbous head.

He fumbled about under my skirts, spreading the opening of my drawers. My waiting quim then received its first touch from his manhood. Jaimie used the head to part the lips of my cunny, and then fed it into me, inch by glorious inch.

“By God, you’re tight.”

Then his cock met the drumhead of my virtue.

“Hold on.”

One concerted push was all it took. A pinch of pain, and he was deep inside me. My sheath was a nebulous mass of wondrous sensation, my nub the focal point. Jaimie moved only a little before he groaned, and plunged all the way.

The sudden thrust, and the accompanying glut of warmth that spewed from him launched my own climax. An explosion of fireworks behind my eyes left me quite breathless. After a minute or so he lifted himself to his feet. I sat up and rearranged my skirts. Approaching voices made him quickly tidy himself. He took my hand, and led me back to the house. I commenced to giggle.

“What’s so funny?’ he asked.

“Your seed is running down my leg.”

“Better out than in.” Those were the last words Jaimie uttered to me. A quick kiss on the cheek, and he lost himself in the crowd.

Next morning, I awoke happy as a lark. After breakfast with Papa (I was mindful that it would kill the poor dear to know that I’d given away my virtue), I put on my most colourful day dress, and went to Jaimie’s hotel,

The man at the desk couldn’t hide a smirk when he answered my enquiry. “I’m sorry, miss. Captain Dalgliesh has already left to take an airship to England.”

My heart stopped. The ground tilted, and I gripped the counter lest I fall. Jaimie is a rake. Of course, I’d heard the rumours; indeed, you told me most of them. I shall wreak my revenge when I get to England. Mark my words, Blanche. I’ll either make him my husband, or castrate him.

Regarding his friend Captain Rathbone, Carpe diem! Wilhelmina is eager and apparently lives but a few streets away. It needn’t be too late for you -- if you really want him, that is.

Papa calls.

All my love,

Jemima Lipsey

Delhi, India

Cressida’s Moon (Empire of the Sky 1)

A Steam and Spells Steampunk Christmas Adventure

Mikala Ash

Authorized Excerpt

I was a bluestocking, eight and twenty years of age, and teaching at Mrs. Nolan’s School for the Poor in a small village in Shropshire when I met Jacob. I had been orphaned before ever knowing my parents. A typhoid outbreak in the year of our Queen’s ascension to the throne took them both away. I was raised by my childless uncle and aunt, he an infirm veteran of the Peninsular Wars, and she a charwoman. We lived in a small cottage just five minutes away from Mrs. Nolan. Though poor, I couldn’t have wished for a better upbringing. Aunt Jenny cleaned for the school, and it was through this stroke of luck that I had a place to learn, and then somewhere to work.

My aunt took in lodgers to augment her meagre wages. There was a succession of spinsters and widows, before Jacob McLeary, a fellow teacher at the school, came to stay. Jacob was a tall handsome man, sandy-haired, with bright azure eyes, and a fine blond moustache over his sensuous lips. When he smiled, which was often, the hint of dimples appeared in his cheeks at the ends of that moustache, and when he laughed, rarer but more affecting to the observer, the intimations were confirmed, and magnetically caught and held the gaze. He was eight years my senior, but his easy manner, quick sense of the ridiculous, and high intelligence captured my lonely heart the moment he was introduced. Though I had all but given up on the thought of love, I was besotted, and my innocent, but strangely feverish dreams were all of him.

Alas, he was a recent widower, and in deep mourning. His wife had been consumptive and had lingered in a nursing home on the south coast to where the majority of Jacob’s money had gone to maintain her in some comfort. I would occasionally catch him gazing at her image in the gold locket he kept in his waistcoat pocket, his eyes glistening with incipient tears. Once a month, if his finances allowed, he would leave us for a weekend to visit her grave and was always very quiet and reflective upon his return. My heart broke for him.

When my uncle followed his dear wife to the grave, I inherited the tiny cottage, and despite the misgivings of Mrs. Nolan, that two of her unmarried staff shared the same roof with no chaperone, Jacob continued to rent the upstairs room next to mine. While we shared a bed at night, we maintained separate bedrooms so as not to arouse the suspicions of the charwoman. Every morning he’d swap the pillows and disarrange the blankets and sheets of his narrow cot.

What Mrs. Nolan didn’t know was that by then Jacob and I were secret lovers. I won’t go over the hesitant and protracted beginnings of our affair, except to say it was I who initiated and progressed it. Jacob was the reluctant party. Betraying his wife’s memory did not come easily.

That I had no similar scruples should bother me, I suppose. My moral judgement was impaired, obviously. I was raw, selfish, and madly in love. Now I am ashamed, I must admit, of the strategies I employed to lead him into his sometimes-crippling self-imposed dishonour. Subtle flirting in the beginning, followed by overt sweet-talking, then the staging of intimate scenarios that I blush to recall.

Our first kiss was everything I dreamed of. The soft warmth of his lips, the hesitant pressure, his surge of passion surprising me when his tongue forced my lips apart to explore my mouth in a most urgent fashion that hinted at long suppressed desire. His soft caresses set my flesh aflame, and inside I felt a sultry heat that echoed my feverish dreams, and his first touch of that sensitive little nub between my secret lips committed me to the roiling flames of passion. I can still remember in exquisite detail the explosion of stars in my head, and wave after wave of prickly heat that flowed through my entire body, leaving me shaking at the knees, and clutching him so tightly lest I fall.

Jacob taught me some of the crude names given to male and female genitalia, and I must admit to becoming somewhat flagrant in using those slang terms instead of the boring old vagina and penis of the medical publications. My private place, as my aunt had referred to my cunny, had a variety of bemusing names: tulip, quimmy, quimbo, horse-collar, poke-hole, nursery, love-trap and cock-trap, pleasure pit, flaps, clam, buttonhole, and Cupid’s furrow, as well as the more familiar curses: cunt, and twat. We had many a laugh over these, as well as those for the male member: dick, doodle, ploughshare, trouser serpent, poker, broomstick, sword, Adam’s dagger, and the buttonhole worker, among countless others. Jacob had garnered these from certain salacious publications he’d purchased to assist him in his loneliness.

Aunt and Uncle were still alive then, and we took to making long walks in the twilight. Those twisted amblings would eventually take us to the old cemetery where privacy was assured beneath the yews. We’d kiss, and he’d lay his coat on the ground between the ancient headstones, and there we would make love.

Oh, how glorious those times were. I learned so much about the breadth of sensations my body could experience. He played my body as if it were a musical instrument, extracting so many types of sighs, building into a spectrum of moans, groans, and high-pitched cries of release, culminating in whimpers of breathless dissolution.

Jacob taught me how responsive my nipples were to the gentlest touch, and how they ached for the next stroke, lick, and suck. How his breath on my neck and throat made my innermost walls throb and moisten. Soft kisses from my breasts to my pelvis sent quivers of expectation along every nerve and cell.

He was always considerate of my comfort and pleasure, and ensured I would experience a breathtaking release before he asserted his own desire with careful penetration. He never spent his lust inside me, fearing to worsen my dishonour with a child. Instead, after I had reached the pinnacle of pleasure and found release, he would withdraw, and his marvellous rod of steel would pulse and jump, firing pearly drops across my quaking belly.

Habits are difficult to break. While we were free to make love at home, we also enjoyed our walks in the parkland surrounding the church, and it was on one such tryst that under a full moon we sat on a crumbling stone burial vault sacred to the memory of Ebenezer Boyse and his devoted wife Maryanne, who had both departed this life in 1722:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Jacob’s head was hidden beneath my skirts, his face between my spread thighs, his agile tongue alternating between licking the labial flaps, spearing deep inside my quim, or teasing my clitoris. I was leaning back on my hands, lost in sensation, staring blankly at the silver orb hanging in the sky. My rising excitement inevitably led to a hysterical paroxysm, as the medical books termed it, and I moaned like a madwoman, and shuddered in convulsions of ecstasy.

* * *

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Mikala Ash

Aussie Mikala Ash used to be a mild-mannered training & development consultant by day, and a wild sci-fi and paranormal adventure writer by night. Now she is a brazen full-time writer and nature photographer who is concentrating on having among other things, “… bags, and bags of fun!”

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