Making him smile.
Would this warmth, this calm be with him always if she was beside him? Could she fill the emptiness inside him when the darkness closed in?
He shook his head. She’d made it more than plain that she didn’t want that.
Didn’t want him.
Still. Right here, right now, she followed him.
He turned the corner of the corridor and slammed into his room. Tess, who had been following loyally, went to her place by the fireplace and lay down with a great sigh.
The moment he closed the door, Freya pulled from Christopher’s grasp. She walked to the fireplace and turned, eyeing him. “Was it entirely necessary to beat Mr. Plimpton?”
He sighed, running his hand over his hair. Beating that ass, Plimpton, had been very satisfying, but had it been necessary?
He looked at Freya. “Yes. He refused to give up the letters until I beat him.”
Her brows drew together. “But why are the letters so important to you? I mean”—she held up a hand to forestall his interruption—“I know the letters reveal that Sophy took Mr. Plimpton as a lover, but she’s dead, Christopher.” She shook her head. “Is it worth it to avoid a small scandal? To assuage your male pride?”
He laughed then. “My pride has nothing to do with it, I assure you.”
“Then what?” she demanded, her brows drawn together over stormy eyes. “Did you love her so much?”
He closed his eyes and inhaled. This was what he’d wanted to avoid, but if anyone was owed the truth it was Freya.
He looked at her. “Open the letters.”
“I…” She glanced from the letters in her hands to him, uncharacteristically hesitant. “Are you sure?”
“I am. I think it the only way to adequately explain.”
She nodded and sat on one of the stuffed chairs before the windows and carefully pulled loose the bit of string holding Sophy’s letters together.
She opened the top letter and read as he poured himself a glass of brandy from the decanter on his washstand.
He watched her as he took a healthy swallow of the liquor.
Her brows slowly drew together as she read, and her lips parted as if she were about to say something.
But then she went to the next letter.
And the next.
When she finally looked up he’d finished his glass of brandy and was sitting beside her.
“They’re all…” She turned back to the letters in her hands. “How old was Sophy?
He smiled. Wearily. Sadly. “A year older than I.”
“But she…” Freya shook her head. “Her writing is like a child’s. The things she says in this letter are childlike as well. Was she…?”
“Yes,” he said, answering her unspoken question. It was almost a relief to do so aloud. “Sophy was very childlike. I didn’t know her before we married. As I said, I’d only met her twice. We were in company and she hardly spoke. I thought she was shy.” He shook his head, remembering. “She had a sweet smile.”
“But when you found out…”
He watched her, a corner of his mouth curling unhappily at her horrified expression. “I didn’t realize at first. There were signs, but I was caught up in the scandal, worried and afraid of what was happening in my life. I was selfish.”
“How did you find out?” she whispered.
“When we were finally alone on our wedding night she cried and pulled away from me. She refused to sleep in the same bed as I.” His mouth twisted as he remembered his shock. His bewilderment. “My father told me that most gently bred ladies knew nothing of the marriage bed. But that wasn’t the point, of course. Sophy wasn’t merely ignorant—she was simple. When I realized the truth, I knew I couldn’t bed her. It would’ve been fundamentally wrong.”
He got up to pour himself another glass of brandy.
“I’m so sorry, Kester,” she said, setting down the letters and rising to come to him. She laid her palm against his cheek, searching his eyes. “It was terribly unfair for your father to marry you to a woman who had a child’s sensibility. He should not have done it.”
“My father probably told himself that it was only what I deserved. He’d never been particularly affectionate with me, but when I was caught up in the scandal—when I ruined his name—he all but washed his hands of me.” He smiled wretchedly. “The point of the marriage was to put a patch on the scandal and get me out of the way. In that he succeeded. I doubt my father ever considered whether or not the marriage could be a happy one.”
She bit her lip. “How did Mr. Plimpton become involved?”
“That bastard.” Christopher felt his upper lip lift. The hatred he felt for Plimpton was hard to control. “He wormed his way into Sophy’s affections. He gave her flowers and cheap trinkets. By the time he told her that he was in need of money, she thought herself in love with him.”
“Oh no.” Freya’s eyes widened. “He seduced her?”
He grimaced. “I don’t think he actually bedded her—thank God. But he made her think he loved her and that she was in love with him. She gave him all her jewelry and then all her pin money. When I noticed some of my possessions missing—a watch fob, a hand-colored illustrated book of birds, a jeweled snuffbox—I finally asked her. She wept and told me that Plimpton needed the items because he would starve otherwise. I told the servants that he was no longer welcome in the house. Naturally, with his source of money dried up, he left—and broke her heart.” How wretched he’d felt then, with poor Sophy sobbing until she made herself sick. He looked at Freya. “I’d chased away the only thing that delighted her.”
“If you hadn’t he would’ve taken everything you and Sophy had,” she said gravely.
He shook his head. “Plimpton made sure to save the letters Sophy had written him. I think even in India he meant to blackmail me. He waited, though. It wasn’t until after Sophy died, after I became a duke and returned to England, that he made his demands. Money or he’d smear Sophy’s name.” He brushed her cheek with one finger. “You have to understand. I couldn’t let him do that to Sophy’s memory. I wasn’t a good husband, and at the last I failed to save her, but this—this—I could do for her.”
“I don’t think you were a bad husband,” Freya said. “I think you did the best you could with a marriage you never wanted.”
Then she stood on tiptoe and kissed him.
Chapter Thirteen
At last they came to a large clearing where crystals towered in jagged pillars and fairies, people, and other beings danced.
Among them Rowan saw Marigold.
Rowan started for the girl, but Ash laid a hand on her arm. “Wait, sweeting.”
He nodded to the center of the clearing.
There sitting on a crystal throne was a fairy wearing a crown of finger bones. He was cold and silver and still, and he was so beautiful he made Rowan’s heart hurt.…
—From The Grey Court Changeling
Freya pressed her lips to Harlowe, tasting the brandy on her tongue and his. He’d looked so sad. So tired. And she’d wanted only to give him some solace.
But her lips parted helplessly as he snatched the cap from her head and threaded his fingers through her hair, tumbling it to her shoulders.
Her heart was thumping, her breasts pressed to his hard chest, and excitement rose in her throat.
Perhaps she’d known, deep down, that this would happen if she touched him again. Despite her hesitation. Despite her philosophical doubts.
She wanted him with an instinctive pull that had nothing to do with higher thought.
The heat of his body, the prickle of his stubble against her face, the strength of his hands.
The sly, growing knowledge that she affected him just as much as he affected her.
She tore her mouth from his. “Show me.”
His eyes had gone dark, color high on his cheekbones, his mouth wet from their kiss.
She reached for the top of his shirt with one hand and began to undo it.
He stood frozen, like some classical statue in modern dress. She wanted to see what lay underneath.
She held his eyes and pulled open the first button, the fabric making a small rustling sound that was loud in the silent room.
He watched her without any movement to prevent her.
Her breath was coming much too fast. She raised both hands and slipped the second button free.
It felt as if she’d somehow leaped a great distance. As if she’d crossed a border into a strange, new country.
A country she wanted to explore.
The next button came undone and then the next, her fingers working faster and faster.
He groaned under his breath but still he didn’t move, merely letting her do as she willed.
And that—his tacit permission to play with him, to explore him—was more exciting than anything she’d ever felt.
The shirt buttoned to midchest and she was very careful to undo each button. Gradually the shirt parted, revealing his strong neck, the dip between his collarbones, and then whorls of hair.
His body was so different, so fascinating. She wanted to discover all the ways he was different from her. Wanted to map and trace and taste.
Freya breathed out, feeling her heart beat so hard she worried he could hear it. Fanny Hill’s lover had had body hair, and when she’d read that, curled in a window seat in a deserted library, she’d had to press her legs together.
She’d grown wet at the thought of a man naked.
Of a man’s body, so strange and different.
And now…
Now she had one before her to do with as she wished.
She smiled a private smile and tugged his shirttails free from his breeches.
He raised his arms without prompting, and she lifted his shirt as high as she could before he pulled it off the rest of the way.
He stood before her naked to the waist.
She stared.
Breathing in and out. Simply looking.
She thought him beautiful. That wasn’t the word one was supposed to use for men, but for him it was true.
Beautiful.
From the rolling muscles on his shoulders to the tiny red-brown nipples to the curling hairs that thickened at the middle of his body below his navel.
She smiled at him, looking in his eyes with delight, and his own eyes widened as if he was surprised by her approval.
His wife had rejected him physically. There had probably been other women, but such a basic blow would remain hidden under the skin, a bruise painful to the touch.
She could give him balm for that wound.
Her hand touched the left side of his chest. Over his nipple.
Where his heart might be under that smooth olive skin.
He had hairs on his chest, and she drew her fingers together, stroking, feeling the soft rasp, watching the curls spring back.
So foreign.
So wonderful.
Carefully she leaned forward and touched the tip of her tongue to the base of his throat. He was warm, living, and he tasted of man and faintly perhaps of salt.
She closed her mouth and kissed him there as her fingers worked on the falls of his breeches.
His great chest rose and fell beneath her lips. She felt as if she held a dangerous wild thing in her hands. An animal far stronger than she, who nevertheless permitted these liberties.
His falls opened and she worked more quickly at his smalls until she could push both down his legs. There it was, pointing at her, larger, thicker than she’d expected. His penis, cock, prick. There were so many names for it, but she remembered one from Fanny Hill: “battering ram,” which, really, sounded quite intimidating and possibly repulsive.
She wasn’t repulsed by this penis. It was ruddy and veined. Sturdy and somehow rather magnificent. She wanted to touch, but was forestalled as he stepped out of the clothes bunched around his ankles, kicking off his shoes as well.
When he bent to his stockings—his only remaining clothing—she laid a restraining hand on him.
“Let me.”
He said nothing, but his lips parted, gleaming in the candlelight.
She knelt at his feet.
Strange, that. She was in the supplicant position and indeed she played the servant, carefully rolling down his stockings.
But it was she who was fully dressed. He who was vulnerable and naked.
She wielded her power at his feet.
And when his stockings were at last pulled off, when he was fully nude, nothing to shield him from her gaze, she knelt up and took his genitals between her palms.
He hissed through his teeth.
His bollocks were heavy, the stones within rolling like eggs in a sack. She might’ve kissed him there, but hair covered the orbs.
Instead she placed her lips on his cock head. She’d been shocked and not a little disbelieving when she’d first read of this act in Fanny Hill. But the longer she thought about it—and somehow she couldn’t stop thinking about it—the more intriguing it seemed.
She felt her legs shake as she finally tasted his prick.
Oh, it was hot, as if molten lava boiled beneath the fine silky skin instead of mere blood.
He made a sound over her, but she didn’t look.
Her attention was on matters below.
His foreskin was pulled back, the purple crown nosing out, and she licked the bead of moisture there and then wrinkled her nose. It was bitter.
Not distasteful necessarily. Just…different.
Unlike anything she’d ever tasted before.
She parted her lips and kissed him again, this time prompting a rumbling groan.
At last she looked up.
He stood, his legs braced, his face flushed. Obviously aroused but not acting on it.
Permitting her the lead.
She smiled and sucked the head of his cock into her mouth, even as she kept her eyes locked with his. She could feel the wetness at her center, seeping between her thighs. It seemed terribly odd, that this act she did for him should cause her such excitement.
“Freya,” he groaned, his voice so deep it sounded like gravel. He watched her with heavy-lidded eyes. “Darling, move your hand on my prick.”
She did as he bade her, touching him at first gingerly and then with more sureness. His skin moved independent of the hard muscle beneath. She could feel his heat and the pulse of his blood and suddenly it was too much.
She rose and went to his bed, flinging herself onto it, rolling to her back and looking at him, standing stock-still. She grasped her skirts in her fists and raised them, pulling the fabric clear past her thighs, over her hips, until her mound was exposed.
She deliberately spread her legs. “Harlowe.”
He was across the room at once, climbing onto the bed, climbing onto her, his face wild, his teeth bared.
He knelt over her, his legs between her widely spread thighs, and looked down at her like a lion at a fallen gazelle.
Except she was no gazelle.
She was a lioness—fierce and brave.
She took hold of his shoulders and pulled him toward her. “Now. Please, now.”
He lowered his hips, his cock skidding across her thigh. He nudged between her legs, making her widen them still farther, and his penis caught at her entrance.
She looked at him, memorizing his features in this moment. Feeling wild with expectation and triumph.
He speared her.
There was a burning pain, but she made no sound, and he retreated and drove into her again.
Spreading her.
Filling her.
Marking her.
If she was the lioness, then he was surely the lion. A mate fit for her, strong and protective. He thrust into her again and again, moving into her in slow increments until he was fully seated.
She was breached, impaled, and should have felt weakened by defeat.
But this was her victory. She arched beneath him, urging him to move.
&
nbsp; To complete the act.
He withdrew and thrust. Withdrew and thrust. She tried to mirror his movement, and for an awkward moment they merely clashed, bumping against one another.
But then they caught, rising in rhythm together.
She flung back her head, gasping at the sensation.
At the wonder.
Her heart was swelling, a strange affliction tied to what this man was doing to her.
She might be a lioness, but she knew now she wouldn’t leave this battle unscathed.
Her legs shook and her palms slid over his shoulders, slick with sweat, striving, striving for a summit, a common goal.
She groaned as his body drove her to feel things she’d never felt before. To doubt she could live through this.
“That’s it, darling,” he whispered, his voice strained. “Nearly there. Nearly there.”
But she wasn’t sure. Nearly where? Was this something she wanted?
And then she reached it, an impossible peak, and she shrieked, barely noticing when he covered her mouth with his.
She fell. Sparking, bursting, filled to overflowing with pleasure.
With feeling.
For this man.
For Harlowe.
She opened wide her eyes and watched him fall, too.
* * *
Christopher woke the next morning to the scent of honeysuckle.
His nose was buried in a tumble of red waves.
Carefully he sat up to lean over Freya and study her face.
She lay on her side, one hand curled beneath her chin, her plump lips slightly parted and her eyes closed. Asleep she looked sweet and young. A docile maiden waiting for a prince to wake her with a kiss.
Christopher snorted under his breath. Freya was no docile maiden, and he was certainly no prince.
Still, when he bent and brushed a kiss against her cheek it was soft and almost reverent.
She murmured, her nose scrunching.
He smiled and kissed her again, a trail of small touches over her brow and down to the tip of her nose.
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