Chapter Text
It all happened quite by chance that Viscount Anthony Bridgerton, a grown man some thirty years of age, was brought to a sudden stop at the mere sight of one singular Featherington girl. It’d never happened before, had it? He’d seen her lots of times – at tea with his mother, at soirees in those gaudy dresses her mother had forced her into, being dragged along into one scheme or another of his darling sister. Miss Featherington had simply existed amongst his world, with her sly smiles and her moon eyes for Colin alone.
But it was in the dead of night one balmy summer eve, when his skin was sticky, and clothes sat heavy on his shoulders that Anthony’s realisation of Penelope came completely out of the blue, a shock of lightning to his system.
Because there she was, shrouded by only the light of a single flickering candle, lounging on the chaise in his study alone, her robe gaped open to her gauzy nightgown, with one of his books in her hand and her hair wild and free, tumbling down her arm like a waterfall of flame.
She was fire and ice and curves and softness, innocence and guilt – she was made of multitudes.
And Anthony’s world reared itself into one of temptation and shock and sin so quickly that he could barely hope to move from the sight.
Truly, he had never cause much to think of Penelope at all before the moment he stepped a foot beyond the threshold of his own study. Maybe this version of her – a curved, shrouded goddess – was instead a dream, or a phantasm, or the consequence of his second glass of brandy. No matter the reason, the sight was something to behold indeed. It stole the breath from his body in the blink of an eye, and he saw her.
He was only just beginning to realise how shallow his understanding of Penelope Featherington was, as if the girl had constructed an elaborate brick wall around herself, designed to keep people from seeing more than she desired them to. Give her the dues, it’d worked well, considering Anthony had been acquainted with Penelope for years now, and had absolutely no clue that she possessed the utter gall that she did to steal from his private collection for her own pleasure to read alone in the middle of the night.
She hadn’t even bloody well noticed he’d caught her.
Anthony knew what he should do – what any gentleman probably ought to – but he had a lifetime of doing things he should. Of duty and honour, of responsibilities, corralling family and business and knowing what he was not allowed to have.
Perhaps it was the effect of the brandy (a flimsy excuse), or the sight of what he couldn’t touch (a slightly better excuse), but Penelope Featherington was suddenly far too interesting to ignore entirely.
Bridgerton House had been deathly quiet as Penelope crept through it, not even a lantern to light her way lest she be caught. Her heart hammered dangerously in her chest, though she knew no-one was anywhere near the study and would never dream to think she’d snuck off there when there were libraries and gardens instead to seek solitude.
Oh, it was wrong, of course, to give in to her curiosity and cave to the rumours she’d heard Genevieve speak of – ones of Anthony Bridgerton’s proclivities to what was mostly tantamount to books that nobody should see. She’d not quite believed her, but when Eloise had made mention of the loose floorboard in the study that she’d tripped over, something had clicked in Pen’s head.
She’d done the same, after all. Hidden her own dark secrets away under loose floorboards.
It scared and thrilled her to do it, to sneak into the Viscount’s study. The heavy door creaked as she opened it, stepping carefully to find the floorboard and sinking onto her knees to wrench it up, trying desperately to make little noise of it. But what a singular treasure she’d found there – a book no unmarried woman the age of one-and-twenty should ever be reading.
A sneakthief in the night indeed, she was, as she plucked the slim book from its hiding hole and clutched it in her own shaking hand with a victorious smile on her face, barely believing she had done such a brazen thing.
A hundred pages deep, and heat now bloomed on her chest, even though the light of the single candle she’d lit to read by was barely flickering on the windowsill; it was heat from her blood, and warmth that spread as she devoured every word in that sordid book. Penelope was far too deeply gone to feel guilt or impropriety anymore, not when she’d struck so lucky.
Her eyes flared with every single word she’d read, some she’d never seen in print and some she’d never even heard said aloud – filth that sounded like a foreign language, a tale of passion and lust and things she couldn’t understand but knew she had to find out about, if only to slake her rabid curiosity. Whatever harm ever came from reading a book, after all?
An hour went by in a blink, as lost as she was among a sea of ache and warmth, something curling in her gut growing and growing and growing.
Or it was, until she heard the study door snap sharply closed and there her worst nightmare stood – Anthony with a thunderous gaze of dark, wide eyes and tempest storms that flickered between her and the hole in his study floor wherein she’d wrenched open his floorboards.
Well, fuck.
“Miss Featherington.” He stood primly, though he looked half-dressed himself, out-of-sorts, unkempt.
“Lord Bridgerton.”
He took not even a single step towards her, stalled by the door in disbelief as she found her mind to scramble off the chaise, shoving the book shut. Far too late for that, she realised, as his dark eyes roved her form surreptitiously, a pinch in his brow unnerving her.
Eloise had often spoken of Anthony’s anger when it was directed at his siblings; of his endless tirades and ire, how he despaired of them, and Penelope rather wondered if he would dare to turn it on her as a guest in his house. The book belonged to him after all, and Pen now wielded it like ammunition in her hand, a secret so sordid that he’d stored away for the shame of it.
Penelope met his eyes with an unwavering gaze, and something changed – in her, she thought, as well as in him.
“Couldn’t sleep, I assume, Miss Featherington?” Anthony’s voice felt tense, though not with anger, something further away, tenuous but free. “Thought you’d try some light reading instead?”
Truthfully, Pen had had half a mind to take the book with her – to be so bold as to actually steal it from its hiding place. It would’ve been easy to point a finger towards Eloise for theft, or even Benedict, if his rake of a brother was bored of his own loose morals – before he would even think to accuse the person he had actually caught red-handed. But he had indeed caught her in a web, hadn’t he?
“Perhaps something like that, yes.” The blush that had tinted her cheeks previously now blossomed again, her eyes darting between Anthony and the book abandoned on the chaise. “Eloise tends to snore quite loudly. It’s a miracle any of you are able to sleep through it; I certainly can’t.”
“Eloise is unable to keep quiet most of the time. Not even in sleep has she ever been able to keep silent, I’m sorry to say.” His eyes flickered back to the book warily. “I’m amazed you found anything of interest in here to read. There’s not a lot, besides dry writing on business affairs from decades ago. You’d have had better luck in the library.” He said the last word rather pointedly, and she had the shame enough to feel guilt for a moment. “Have you been enjoying the book?”
Her eyes widened a little. Anthony knew what that book was. Penelope knew what it was.
“It was illuminating, before I was interrupted.” She could feel her heart still pounding, the man between her and the door, and yet she made no move to try and evade this conversation. “You’ll have to forgive me for wandering in my boredom, Lord Bridgerton, I’m an avid reader, and I must’ve read every book in your library ten times over by now.”
The sudden smile that cracked at the corner of his lips was captivating for its rarity and brilliance.
“I don’t think I have to do anything I don’t want to, Penelope.” He stepped towards her then as she made no move away from his advance, a lump in her throat as she waited for his anger, his famous Anthony Bridgerton temper.
Instead, he snatched the book up from where she’d abandoned it and her gasp caught in her throat as he perused the inside pages.
“The Debauched Desires of Miss Abigail Devereaux, a Wanton Woman.” He read, trying to sound stern and failing from the smile that was growing slowly. “Interesting title, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have thought you for the sort to read this kind of novel, as gently-bred as you are, Miss Featherington. Maybe it’s been you leading my dear darling sister to her rebelliousness all these years instead of the other way around, now I know what you like to do in your alone time.”
The cheek of him, she thought, her heart still pounding.
“I am not its owner,” Penelope said boldly, the blush across her cheeks matching the fire in her eyes. They had an impasse, it seemed. “Before you accuse me of intentionally seeking something so… so…” she could not even say.
“Lustful.” He turned the book, handing it back to her, a queer short of surprise coming over her at how plainly he stated the word. “Lustful, I believe, is the term you’re looking for. Or debauched. Filthy, if you like, or sinful if you’re a mind to consider lust a sin. Now,” Anthony’s eyes narrowed on Penelope, a tiny smile still there on his face, “whoever told you to even look there? When someone hides things under floorboards, they don’t generally expect houseguests to go about destroying the place in search of smut. I’m not sure why you’d even try, Miss Featherington.”
Pen folded her hands around the book, looking up at the man. “Curiosity. It can be very powerful, I find. Questioning why. Such as, why do you possess such a thing in the first place, Anthony?”
Her icy blue eyes sparked and caught and flamed as bright as the soul inside. The bricks fell from the walls she’d constructed around herself, now rubble at their feet and she knew now that he saw her.
Indeed, Anthony could count on one hand the number of times Miss Featherington had deigned him with conversation that somehow piqued the very core of those around her with a few choice words that seemed to slip from her lips before she could help herself. It was only in those words, the ones designed to cut, that he remembered seeing those flashes of this woman so brazenly asking him where he’d procured pornography. Those flashes of her were sparks that failed to catch tinder on which to flame – brighter than the fire, and far more fleeting, but blinding all the same.
How had he not caught them before, now that he was burning up from curiosity himself. Anthony had never more deeply contemplated the curiosity that was Miss Penelope Featherington than in this moment; brandy sitting warm in his belly, almost the entire occupancy of Bridgerton House asleep, and the tension of the day’s tasks rolling over his shoulders. There she stood with her spark lighting fire to his weary, lonely mind.
“I possess that book because it stirs me, Penelope.” The slow smile on his face turned into one made deeply of his own desire as Anthony’s walls crumbled too. “Does it not do the same for you?”
Pen’s voice caught in her throat, the candlelight flickering over half of her body to catch his eye to the curves he’d never paused to see, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. A woman who would not be his.
“Yes.” She said breathlessly, as if ashamed. “I couldn’t put it down.”
There’s something about her that Anthony still can’t quite put a pin in – what Penelope truly wants. Her words aren’t lies, that much he knows, but they definitely aren’t the whole truth either and he finds it fascinating to say the least – that she skirts a line so easily between fiction and reality.
And his curiosity only served to fuel him further.
“And how far did you read up to?” he asked, plucking a corner of the book still in her hands. “Before I rudely interrupted your theft and destruction, I mean.”
She swallows thickly in her throat, unable to look anywhere that isn’t at him, it seemed. “Chapter five, or thereabouts.”
Oh. “Chapter five, you say? All in one night?”
And to her horror, or excitement, or nerves, or whatever that swooping in her gut was, Anthony opened the book to a page somewhere a ways past chapter five, appraising it before handing it back to her.
“Lord Bridgerton…” she hesitated, taking the thing back from him.
“Anthony, if you please.” His eyes flared at her dangerously, the mirth hidden there. “You shouldn’t stop reading on my account, Penelope, not when you were getting towards the very, very good part. I’ve skipped ahead for you.”
Her mouth feels heavy and full of cotton, staring suddenly into a strange abyss where her looking up at him was endless desire. Anthony Bridgerton had never as much as spared a glance at her in any appreciable way, and yet now it felt as if she was bare naked in front of him.
“Read it, Penelope. Or leave, if you should want, and we’ll never speak of tonight again if that’s what you wish.” He was giving her a choice and daring her at once, taunting her to rise to the bait, and she felt for all the world like a sixteen-year-old girl once again and not a woman of one-and-twenty.
Whatever this was, it stayed here, in this study, in the dead of night – it had to. That much Pen knew.
“Thank you, Anthony,” she muttered, pleased at the way his eyes were far less shameful in taking in her curved body with intrigue no man had ever dealt her. “For such generosity.”
That sneaking smile grew, and she courted it a victory. “I should have you over my knee for not only theft but breaking into the floorboards and retrieving it from my private collection, but I’m nothing if not a courteous gentleman when presented with a beautiful lady in need.”
Something inside Penelope keened at the praise, unable to keep his gaze as she sat down far more properly on the chaise as ladies were taught, taking the book once more into her soul. Back straight, legs crossed demurely…
He only snorted at her, rolling his eyes. “Don’t stand to propriety on my account, Penelope. Pretend I’m not here.”
“I don’t know if I can pretend you’re not here,” she said, relaxing a little as he tapped two fingertips on her shoulder, getting her to lay as she had been. “Someone may find us, if we were discovered-”
“Anyone of any consequence is dead asleep on the other side of the house,” he waved off her fears, sitting down at the other end of the chaise as if they were lovers used to such proximity. “Besides, I’d be remiss if I didn’t see to the comfort of my guest.” He slung an arm over the back of the chaise, relaxing the tension out of his shoulders. “Now, pretend away, little sneakthief…”
Pen smiled slyly, lounging back in the chaise as if she hadn’t a care. “I should’ve known you were a kind and generous host, Lord Bridgerton, but I still cannot pretend you’re not here.”
“Then don’t.” He said slowly, gripping the back of the chaise. “Read it aloud, Penelope. Read it to me.”
Aloud? Oh, how she shuddered at the thought, stuttering in her brain, aching somewhere deep at the way Anthony was looking at her – at her! – like a meal he was waiting to devour eagerly and denying himself.
Penelope licked her lips, the heat in her cheeks a blazing fire. He wasn’t touching her, and if it were Benedict or Colin, she might’ve considered it a game or a joke, but this was Anthony – she wasn’t sure if he possessed the ability to be anything but serious in these moments.
And so, she made her choice, sliding her eyes firmly to the open book in front of her, the page he had selected, just past chapter five.
“Abigail felt firm, strong hands parting her trembling thighs, though her flesh quaked with need instead of the trepidation she once had in knowing that her desires were forbidden to be expressed by an unmarried lady in polite society. She wanted her lover all the same, as she had every time since the first. She needed…” Pen stumbled, flicking her eyes up and catching sight of Anthony still sitting at her feet. “She… she needed…”
“Go on, Penelope,” Anthony muttered lowly, a knuckle grazing her own bare ankle. “Say it.”
“She needed his… his cock inside her womanhood again, to be filled and whole and pleasured as intended, willed on by the lust coursing through her blood. It could not be wrong, for it had never felt wrong, for him to drive himself wild for her, to take and claim with hands and teeth marking her flesh.”
Pen dared to look up at Anthony, his eyes trained on her heaving chest and her shifting thighs as she willed her ache away lest he knew how it was affecting her.
It was some kind of burning faint in her soul that it had been Anthony to see her and not… not him.
“There was fire in his veins that met her own in an inferno of passion. Roughened fingers sli... slid down to her sodden quim, parting her folds lewdly to peer upon what he demanded was a beautiful sight he longed to taste on his tongue.”
Her own thighs were quivering beneath her nightgown as she forced her own desire to abate, though it had only grown when she felt more of Anthony’s fingers on her leg, idly stroking as chastely as they could to drive her insane. But the ache would not go, her skin feverish and slick from the words on the page.
Anthony had paused as she had, leaning forward and drawing his eyes from her squirming thighs to meet her gaze.
He whispered lowly, a hand drawing up to one of her knees. “Don’t stop. You’re nearly there,” his voice dropped even lower, “to the very, very good part.” And the hand pushed on her knee, parting her thighs from relieving her ache, her nightgown shifting to gather there.
Pen didn’t know if he could see how soaked she was, but she could feel the cool air hit her heat and send her in a dizzying spin, clutching to the book for dear life, ignoring the hand still on her knee and the wetness seeping down her own curves.
“He proclaimed her cunt to be the sweetest, most delicious treat a man had ever tasted, slicking her with his lust for her, directly from his own filthy mouth to her greedy hole. Abigail knew nothing but searing pleasure only for her, in a selfish manner, in a dastardly manner, she wanted this always, to have a man’s head between her thighs and his tongue on her pearl to give her nothing but pleasure.”
Her heart pounded threateningly in her chest as Anthony spread her thighs further apart, his fingertips grazing hers when she reached, desperately, to end her torture.
“Penelope?” He stalled immediately, backing off though his brow furrowed, surveying her. “What do you want? Tell me.”
“Touch me,” her voice was weak and thready, wanting things she dared not voice. Colin had never seen her, perhaps nobody ever would see her as desirable again. She was half-convinced Anthony only did for the words she was reading from a book. “Please, just touch me, Anthony. Just tonight.”
The singular moment seemed to stretch with nothing but a flicker of candlelight and the ticking of a clock to break it. It sank in her gut, how he tensed, warring, those deep eyes somehow blown black and penetrating.
“Keep reading, Penelope.”
He kept his hand on her bare thigh as heated and searing as the blush across her heaving chest, but she obeyed his command, hoping beyond all hope that he would just touch her once. Just once so Pen knew what it was like to feel a man's hands upon her own aching, slick flesh.
“How she longed to sit on his handsome face and have him devour her cunny,” she felt his hand inch towards her, sneaking under her gown to soothe circles on her soft inner thigh. “… to… to feel his thicker fingers inside her until her walls clenched and she drenched him with that same sweetness.”
Penelope keened and bit back her own cry as Anthony slid his fingers down her own drenched slit, saying not a word.
“He had told her long ago that there was no greater pleasure than her indulging his generosity. He was a man starved of simple closeness and he wanted to drown in her.”
She bit back a moan as his thumb found her swollen nub, grazing it delicately. Pleasure speared through her body like a hot iron, lighting her senses in a multitude of colour and need.
“But she needed more still, the emptiness of her body only growing the longer he was not inside her as nature intended. Her lover’s cock was thick and curved as if sculpted by God himself to bring her pleasure.”
Anthony pressed at her swollen, slick flesh, ghosting over her entrance to slicken her further, his lips pressing to the knee he had bent. Penelope dared a look and saw him raw and hungry, devouring the view of her bare, dripping sex like she imagined Abigail’s lover had, that same burning desire that coursed through her.
It was building inside her belly like it had at her own hands and nothing like she had ever felt before in her fantasies. It was new. It was everything. It was why even the most devout of gentlemen and ladies sought dark hidden spots for doing dark deeds.
(Even if he was the wrong brother doing them)
“Every minute that she could… could … not feel his c-cock splitting her in twain,” she gasped as he worked her further onwards. “and driving her to glorious heights was a minute spent hollowed, empty, bereft.”
“Here comes my favourite part.” She felt Anthony whisper into her knee, spreading her slit to his hungry eyes.
“As if he knew, as if he could read her desperate, lewd thoughts, he flipped her onto her stomach, bending her in half and fu-fucking her before she could… could think.” Her breath grew short, struggling with every word as the pleasure grew and grew on itself like never before. “Abigail cried for how he filled her emptiness, stretched her wet channel and took, professing no less than his undying, unending love for her, for being inside her… poun-pounding her to fill her. To take his cock and seed and be claimed until her cunt was forever filled…”
Pen cried out, bucking her hips as she broke in a white-hot light.
Anthony scraped his lips along her knee, unrelenting. “That’s it, that’s it, sweet girl, so beautiful…” he murmured, letting her crest and break until her body was sated. “So, so beautiful.”
She slumped back onto the chaise, dumbfounded, broken, speechless, as he brought his sodden fingertips to his mouth and devoured her taste, the book abandoned on her stomach when he pressed one final kiss to her knee.
Penelope looked like the kind of sin Anthony had never encountered – lush and ripe and pink and thickly curved – and the only woman he truly could not let himself have for a wife. He knew that he couldn’t allow himself any more indulgences than he already had, even as warm as he was on the headiness of her cunt that begged for his tongue to clean her.
He would not.
He could not.
And she knew too, if only from the way her sticky thighs slid back together, hiding her from his view once more. “Lord Bridgerton, I-”
“Hush now,” his hand soothed down her calf, taking all that he could get as the chance for something incredible slipped past him while his grip loosened further. “No need to worry, Penelope. He’ll never know from me, that much I promise you.”
Her eyes widened, her head shaking in denial. “I don’t understand.”
But Anthony set his jaw at her fiction once more, seeing her walls bricking back up by the second. “You are Colin’s, that much I know. I’m only sorry he is making you wait to see it.”
Penelope swallowed, her eyes darting over Anthony’s face. “He does not-”
He rose from the chaise, tearing himself from the one thing that would break his family apart, if he stole the only love his brother had ever known, even if the boy was too obtuse to see it.
“You are Colin’s. As he is yours.”
“I… I don’t…”
“Yes, you do, Pen.” Tilting her chin up, he pressed a final kiss to her cheek, forcing himself not to linger on the sight of her breasts, of her flushed skin and wild hair. It was not for him, not anymore. “You can keep the book. Just… don’t share it.” Anthony smiled so soft and sadly, letting her see the entirety of himself.
He might’ve expected her to fight, but she only nodded, meeting his lustful gaze for one last time. “It will only ever be for you and I,” she promised him, a vow he knew she’d keep.
If Penelope had given him that spark, then he would be happy to forever burn, set aflame from the broken moans and the taste of her on his lips.
But worry piqued in Anthony’s mind, even as he walked away from her.
Someone would see her one day soon. Someone who was not Colin’s dearest brother. Someone who would not give her up without a fight.
He only wished Colin wouldn’t be too late to feel burned on her too.