Veronica: The Blooming Collection

Chapter One

Boston, the year 1890

Talbot Bowdoin presented his invitation to the butler at the mansion’s main entrance. In return, the manservant handed Talbot the bad news:

Tonight’s book reading is over, sir.

Talbot righted his slightly askew silk necktie, a red stripe pattern against a somber black background, all the rage in Europe that year. Might I inquire if the author, Miss Veronica Cooper, is still here?

She is. A book signing follows her reading. Go right in, sir. Front parlor to the left.

After reluctantly entrusting the servant with his natty bowler and smart cashmere topcoat, Talbot limped off in that direction. Passing a buffet table laden with finger foods, he stepped into the overcrowded room and took up a position against the back wall, wedging himself between a potted fern and a shark. The plant’s proper name escaped him; the toothy fish was otherwise known as Sidney Rowe.

Boston culture was a small pool. Generally speaking, painters floated alone, musicians treaded water in concert, dancers toed the surf in pairs, actors paddled about in groups, and writers clung to established schools – with the exception, naturally, of poets who swam against the tide while trying to make rhyme or reason of it all. And regardless of the talent, from guppy to whale in size, no artist was safe from the bottom-feeding newspaper reporter Sidney Rowe.

The man was a predator of the worst sort. A particularly malicious yellow journalist employed by the mud press, Rowe delighted in blackening reputations, ruining happy marriages, and ending flourishing careers. At the moment, he was tearing into a tuna salad sandwich. Hopefully, a full mouth would protect Talbot from his biting commentary.

Bowdoin, old man, how could you have missed the most breathlessly anticipated literary event of the season?

Chomp, chomp. The shark was circling.

In no mood to fight off a feeding frenzy that evening, Talbot answered with evasion in mind. I did not miss the event entirely. The author will remain at the podium to sign books, at least according to the butler.

Ah, yes, the butler. Rowe licked some leafy garnish from the corner of his mouth, then smacked his fleshy lips. That would be James. I greased his palm earlier. In return, he told me who here is in bed with whom, both professionally and personally.

Talbot forced himself to smile. Paying a sop to Cerberus, eh? Do tell.

Rowe brushed sandwich crumbs from his rumpled suit. If that clever bon mot means I pay greenbacks for gossip, hell yeah, I do tell, and far too much, at least according to some people. He wiped his fingers on his lapel. Present company excluded.

But, of course. Talbot’s smile thinned along with his patience.

So, old man, what was it that kept you away from the reading – the writer’s foul language or the book’s obscene subject matter?

When did you last beat your wife, kick your puppy…feel the need to strangle an impertinent scandal sheet reporter?

Loaded questions. And only the last applied to Talbot; he could easily throttle Rowe.

The shark smelled blood. If Talbot said anything, anything at all, he would find his name and quote plastered all over the next sensationalized edition of Around Town and in the Know, his words twisted, his remarks taken out of context.

Kept me away? Talbot drawled. Why, nothing kept me away. I always make a habit of arriving fashionably late to social engagements, style dictating I make a grand entrance and all that.

A lie. In actuality, his tardy appearance at the Beacon Hill house party hosted by famed mystery writer Roger Rogers had been governed by circumstances beyond Talbot’s control. All the week prior, printing production at his small publishing company had faltered due to the erratic operation of the infernally temperamental linotype. That evening, right before he left his office, the equipment screeched to a grinding halt altogether. Hellish nuisance and damnably inconvenient. And, to make a bad situation worse, only Talbot knew how to fix the ancient apparatus. He was said to have a gift for machinery, wheels and widgets and weights, and not to forget, whatchamacallits. He was said to understand mechanical devices better than he did people. Not one to argue the facts, Talbot said nothing in his own defense. The truth was…if given a choice between man and machine, he would choose an automaton every time.

Without question, the linotype needed replacing. But they went back a long way together, and Talbot could not bear to part with such an old friend. So kissing his overblown sense of dignity adieu, he loosened his starched white collar, rolled up his pristine linen shirtsleeves, and started tinkering. As his ink-stained knuckles would attest, he had labored like a common journeyman for hours over the linotype’s repair. Afterward, he had raced – a relative term and loosely used here – to the book reading.

No reason for Talbot to divulge any of that to a shark.

How about I bring you a chair from the drawing room, old man, so you can rest your crippled leg? I notice how heavily you lean on that red cane of yours.

The ill informed and badly intentioned – dirt slingers like Rowe – might view the object in his hand as a cane.

It. Was. Not.

And calling it so was an insult to all well-groomed gentlemen everywhere. His walking stick was a modish accoutrement, one of many haute couture accessories that enhanced Talbot’s impeccable style without once straying into obnoxious dandification. Like the waistcoats he changed daily, his sticks were his fashion signature.

Without which he would fall flat on his face.

No two of his walking sticks were alike. He had engineered his ladies – and he did think of them as such – to provide him with various functions, some lethal, most benign. Ruby accompanied him at present, a lady who took him far but whom he never took fast. Her slowness in…er…coming had contributed to his late arrival this evening, which caused him to miss author Veronica Cooper read an excerpt from her first novel, the critically acclaimed, semiautobiographical work entitled –

Drum roll, please.

Diary of an Eager Virgin.

What could he say? In the publishing business, there was no accounting for taste.

Miss Cooper had courage, he would grant her that. Rather than hide behind a pseudonym, she had written the work under her real name, thus leaving herself open to ridicule by reviewers, censure by both church and state, and character attacks by sharks like Rowe, all of which she had received in equal measure to book sales.

A disgustingly large quantity of book sales.

Citing the work as obscene, lewd, and lascivious, as well as offensive in the extreme, a judge had banned the book in Boston under the Comstock Act. Immediately, underground distribution shot Diary up to bestseller status.

With a swivel of Ruby’s trim form, Talbot surveyed the front parlor. Yessiree. Smut enthusiasts had come crawling out of the woodwork this evening to hear Miss Cooper read naughty phrases like swollen cock and their Anglo-Saxon ilk in public. Avant-garde types lived to thumb their collective noses at the law.

The shark reporter took a soiled pad of paper from his torn pocket, brandished a stubby pencil from behind his waxy ear, and wet the lead point with a gob of spit. Rumor has it that a longshoreman has been Miss Cooper’s frequent companion of late. Care to comment, old man?

Talbot’s flesh crawled. I beg your pardon?

The shark moved in for the kill. By all accounts, Miss Cooper is no longer a virgin. This will surely impact the future sales of her book, a novel predicated on the author’s sexual innocence. An intact hymen was all the bitch had to write about.

In his outrage, Talbot’s language reverted to the tactless simplicity of his youth. Why you stinking pile of maggoty horseshit –

Rowe bared his teeth. But, old man, as the owner of Summer Street Press, you of all people must consider the significance of these accounts.

Of all the beauties in his walking stick harem, Ruby had the worst temper, a fiery ire to match her red handle…and her owner’s itchy trigger finger.

Talbot pulled the concealed lever on Ruby’s side, sending the mechanical device within her hollow base into action. Gears rotated, a sharp spike descended…

Into his companion’s instep, a point not terribly well taken by Rowe.

As the shark yelped in mortal agony, Talbot reversed the same mechanical process. When the bloodied spike was once again tucked neatly back inside the walking stick’s hollow base, Talbot limped away.

Chapter Two

Rat-a-tat-tat.

Dot and carry one – the arithmetic expression for a lame leg – Talbot danced Ruby across the mansion’s marble floor, a slow and slightly lopsided waltz.

Talbot had bigger fish than Rowe to fry this evening, and it was time he circulated, an obligation to mingle he took seriously. A standing-room-only crowd, his captive audience all waiting to speak to Miss Cooper, offered him an opportunity made in publishing heaven. After all, books did not sell themselves.

But sex did every time. All he had to do was stress that aspect of his current list.

To leave his right arm free to glad-hand the crème de la crème of Boston society, Talbot swung Ruby over to his left side and then flashed his dimples all around, dividing his wit and charm between diamond-encrusted dowagers and dour book dealers alike. Though socially awkward, he excelled at hucksterism. Some might even say he could peddle the Bible at a witch’s coven. In his host’s front parlor, Talbot dutifully scattered discreet hints about his company’s next book releases like…like…

Where was a good simile when he needed one? Talbot mused, craning his neck to the podium, where Miss Veronica Cooper stood waiting for the adoring applause of her audience to die down. As he slavishly lusted after her with his gaze, an appropriate simile came to him.

He scattered discreet hints…like veronica blossoms, the author’s namesake flower. Veronica blue, as in her round and guileless eyes. Veronica pink, as in her cherub’s blushing lips. Veronica white, as in her pale complexion.

Good Christ. He snorted. What cliché-ridden tripe. A mercy to readers everywhere that he had no writing aspirations himself. His skills lay elsewhere – in recognizing a talent for lyricism in others, to name one. He had devoured Diary of an Eager Virgin, reading the sensually expressive book cover to cover, five times in total, committing some – all right, most – charged passages to memory. He found Miss Cooper’s voice completely engaging, the writer’s sexual yearnings, so at odds with societal conventions, totally absorbing. As humiliating as it was to admit, he had ejaculated all over Chapter Six. The pages were stuck together when he was done.

And who could blame him?

Any red-blooded male would have done the same. The way the writer unabashedly stripped her coming-of-age story of all romantic pretensions, putting the ache in her loins in every steamy word, thus laying bare her sexual fantasies, all the perverse acts she had a hankering to perform, caught his attention to no small degree.

Unsophisticated goose! She should never have exposed all her inner passions for public consumption and scrutiny like that. She should have held something back…

For her second book. A central rule of publishing was to always leave the reader hungry for more, preferably a sequel. Then, to compound her error, during a newspaper interview – not Rowe’s reprehensible rag, the legitimate press – she had revealed her intentions of writing a novel of blatant erotica next. That disclosure had not been in her best interests. Her loose tongue had created a firestorm of advance negative publicity.

That virtually guaranteed her sophomore effort would sell like hotcakes.

On second thought…perhaps the goose was more sophisticated than he had originally thought. Perhaps he had not given her enough credit. Perhaps she was, in reality, a goose destined to lay a golden egg. Drumming up controversy made for a brilliant marketing strategy. She had, indeed, left the reading public hungry for more.

Still – career guidance never hurt anyone. A judge might yet toss Miss Cooper’s bustle in jail for pandering in obscenity. Someone had to step in and save the naive writer from herself. Why not him? And if he also managed to turn a tidy profit for his company along the way, so be it.

Talbot grimaced. Whom was he trying to convince here?

His interest in Miss Cooper went beyond career guidance, beyond keeping her arse out of jail. And had his only intention been to pry her away from her New York City publisher, Rolph and Smeadly, sending her an irresistible financial offer via post would have done it. But no, he had dragged his hurting leg to this book reading, his limp more pronounced than usual due to all his rushing, to persuade the author in person to…to…

What?

Make mad passionate love to him with her whole being, nothing held back, as the precocious author herself had so lushly detailed wishing to do with a man in Chapter Three, paragraph two, lines four and five of her book?

Why, yeasssss. Precisely.

Talbot tapped his fingers on Ruby’s glowing red handle. He might as well get on with it. The sooner he propositioned Miss Cooper…er…offered her a contract for her second book, the quicker he could go home and soak his throbbing leg in some therapeutically steamy-hot water. Should she refuse him, he would simply sob himself to sleep over her rejection. Or something equally manly.

When the pianist struck up a sentimental parlor ballad, a cue for the author to graciously start autographing books, the ungracious Miss Veronica Cooper ignored her loyal readership, clutched her beaded drawstring reticule in her dainty hand, and swept from the podium without signing a single page of Diary. Her suffragist’s leanings evident in her militant stride, she headed straight for Talbot.

Although his muscles twitched from all the unaccustomed smiling he had done that evening, he plastered another improbable grin on his face and held steadfast as she approached, a publisher ready to conquer her writer’s heart…though a quick roll in the hay with the aloof Miss Cooper would also suffice.

As a man who appreciated female voluptuousness, he knew her navy blue shirtwaist with mutton-leg sleeves highlighted a spectacular figure, an hourglass silhouette owed in part to a swan-bill corset. Having undone more than a few corsets hypothetically, he was something of an authority theoretically. In his wet dreams, he was a hands-on expert. While awake, he had viewed plenty enough naked ladies to know Miss Cooper possessed astonishingly full, wonderfully round, titties.

Titties. Titties. Titties. May I have a peek, please?

Long-necked lovely, she had piled her warm brown hair – shot through with gold – high atop her head in a puffed chignon, a coiffure far too mature for her tender years.

Was she playing dress-up, perchance?

He had it on good authority the author had just turned an unpolished twenty-two. At nearly forty, he was nothing but shine. And dents and twists and bruises, and Lord, too many ugly scars to count.

Nevertheless, he stepped directly into the pretty baby’s path, a shuffle and a stumble, really, his bad leg cramping and dragging, which forced her into a pity stop for the hopeless cripple.

How clever of him. The sympathy ploy worked every time.

Miss Cooper, a moment of your time, if you please…

Not now. Circumventing him, she marched herself away.

The sympathy ploy failed this time, leaving Talbot to stare forlornly after her. He should have sent her a letter of formal introduction. Why had he ever come here in person?

Why? Why? Why?

Why, to meet the young woman attached to a flagrantly, fragrantly, wet cunt. Her words, not his, lifted from her semi-autobiographical book.

He sighed. All for the best that she snubbed him. Even if by some miracle he had gotten her into bed, whatever would they have done afterwards?

A woman who could express sexual desire as eloquently as she had in her book did not necessarily make for a fascinating conversationalist. Following multiple and simultaneous orgasms amidst the tangled and cum-scented linens – thinking optimistically there – they would have had but one point of discussion during the post-coital chitchat:

The whys and wherefores