Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  ‘I should probably shower, shouldn’t I?’ he said, his voice hesitant. ‘I’m covered with sweat, we’ve been heaving bales around today – I probably have hay all over me too. You won’t want me in all of my dirt . . .’

  ‘Oh. Okay,’ she mumbled.

  Brianna Jade would have been very happy to peel her clothes off and go at it right now, right here, have him throw her on the brocade bedspread, cover her with his hot sweaty body, lick the salt from his shoulders as he drove inside her, smell his scent, which was fresh and clean, with a faint hint of the Imperial Leather soap he’d used that morning. She was more than ready, but hesitated to say that.

  What if he thinks I’m too forward? Or gross, for wanting to do it right now, with me all sticky from running and him from work?

  ‘Uh, shall I shower too?’ she asked, as he turned towards the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, my God, of course you’ll want to!’ Edmund looked horrified. ‘I’m so sorry – you must go first.’

  And of course she couldn’t suggest that they shower together, soap each other down, because the damn plumbing in this damn house was so messed up that they would literally never get clean if they stood under that trickle together. So she headed alone to his bathroom, a large space but pitifully bare, an expanse of ancient white tiles with a couple of small threadbare mats making the room look even bigger, the battered old bath with the rickety shower head above it at the far end of the room. She turned on the shower, pulled off her nasty, sweaty, clammy Lycra, and climbed into the bath. Of course, Edmund, being a straight man, had the most pitiful selection of bath products, just a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, a medicated shower wash and a bar of Imperial Leather soap.

  Brianna Jade got herself as clean as she could under the dribble of water, washed her hair as well – in for a penny, in for a pound, as Mrs Hurley said – and then realized that there was only one bath towel, as threadbare as the mats. It had been exquisite quality once, with hand-crocheted lace trimming it, but now it was worn so thin that she could see right through it in parts. Tamra had brought down stacks from Harrods, but, ridiculously, Edmund seemed to have been too scrupulous to use the lavish Egyptian cotton bath sheets before marriage.

  So Brianna Jade dried her hair as best she could on the hand towel, wrapped herself in the other, which barely reached from the top of her breasts to the top of her thighs, and padded out in bare feet to find Edmund standing by the bed, naked apart from a towel knotted around his waist.

  ‘I nipped down the hall to another bathroom and had a quick wash,’ he said, blushing. ‘I thought it would be weird to go in one after the other – but then I thought I was probably taking your water, and I felt awful, so I stopped . . . but I think I got fairly clean.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you did,’ she said at random, convinced that she was blushing too. ‘You look clean. I mean . . .’

  Thank God – good legs! she thought, glancing down at them. It was ridiculous to realize that she had got engaged to a man without ever knowing if he had skinny chicken legs. She’d read in a gossip magazine that Brad Pitt in Troy had bulked up to play Achilles, but had been unable to expand his calves in proportion to the rest of him; he’d apparently needed a calf double.

  Well, Edmund definitely wouldn’t need a calf double. The trouble was that now she’d looked down to check out his legs, she had to look up again, her gaze passing over the white towel wrapped around his hips; it was with a mixture of relief and embarrassment that she noticed him tenting against it, reacting to the sight of her in her own skimpy towel.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, blushing harder. ‘So, uh, here we are.’

  ‘It feels like a nice place to be,’ Edmund said, bright red now. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes! It does!’

  And she realized, again, that she would have to step towards him. Jeez, are all titled guys like this? He’s standing there with a boner and he can’t even kiss me, let alone throw me on the bed and ravage me like the Earls do in romance novels?

  Oh well, I guess husband material isn’t exactly the same thing as the hunk on the cover of Love’s Tender Fury . . . and he gets hard every time he kisses me or sees me with not many clothes on, so that’s half the battle right there.

  Stepping towards him, she put her arms up, wrapping them round his neck, pulling him down to kiss her; he responded with such eagerness that she was hugely relieved. Maybe some sort of gentlemanly scruples were making him nervous about initiating the first move. She hoped to hell he’d loosen up, learn that it was okay to reach out for her too, but right now, with his arms closing around her, his cock firm and hard between them, his lips on hers – oh damn, he brushed his teeth and I didn’t, I hope I don’t taste too bad – everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.

  She gasped as his hands slipped down to her bottom, his arms flexing as he lifted her easily off her feet, took a few steps across the room and placed her carefully on the bed.

  They were facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes; she pulled him on top of her, all worked up again and ready to go, wanting him inside her, but not knowing the words to tell him that he could do it right now, just pull the towels away and slide between her legs; somehow she couldn’t just whisper ‘Fuck me!’ to an Earl who’d just carried her in true gentlemanly style to his four-poster bed. Romance-novel heroines didn’t say ‘Fuck me.’ Well, historical romance heroines didn’t. And how modern could she feel right now, with deep crimson brocade hangings all around them, blocking out the daylight, hangings that had probably been draped around this bed for centuries?

  So she kissed him, and he kissed her right back, and, greatly daring, she reached down to ease his towel from his bottom; he wriggled to let her do it, his cock bumping out against her, and then he unwrapped her towel too and they were naked against each other, which felt so good it made her gasp and throw her head back and arch her crotch into his. He slid down her, careful to go slowly enough to give her time to tell him to stop if she wanted him to, which she didn’t, and started to lick her. It was rather too careful and worshipful for her liking, definitely the way a man went down on his wife-to-be, rather than, say, his mistress. But he was doing it without even being asked, which was great, and at least she knew that she was fresh and clean – that had been smart thinking of Edmund’s – and his tongue on her felt good, good enough for her to reach down and stroke his hair encouragingly, showing him she liked what he was doing. His eyes tilted up towards her, checking on her reaction, which always made her self-conscious, so she closed her own and concentrated on what he was doing and tilted her hips more so that he hit just the right place with his velvety wet tongue, synchronizing her breathing to his rhythm in a way she’d practised over the years when making herself come.

  With little moans and pants and ‘yeses’ and tilts of her hips, she let him know what she liked, her panting building to a crescendo, breathing into every lick and nibble with increasing strength, letting her orgasm rise to breaking point and flood through all the nerve endings that spread out through her groin, suffusing all of them with pleasure, crying out in delight, her hands gripping fistfuls of the brocade coverlet and then eventually letting go as the throbbing began to subside.

  She could have come again and again, wanted Edmund to keep going, but she was wordless, collapsed for a little while, eyes closed, and she felt rather than heard him climb off the bed, open a drawer, pull out a condom packet and rip it open.

  ‘I’m on the Pill,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Oh wonderful,’ Edmund said with huge relief, climbing back onto the bed again. She managed to open her eyes, scooch back to the pillows so her head was raised, and she could see him kneeling in front of her, face serious, his cock red and swollen as he looked down the length of her long slim body.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said reverently.

  Yes yes yes I know fuck me now, fuck me hard! she was dying to say, but still couldn’t quite manage; the setting, the
ancestral bed in which the Earls and Countesses of Respers had had marital sex over the centuries, was weighing on her as heavily as the brocade draperies hung on the carved oak frame. It seemed rude, wrong, to talk dirty in this hallowed room – Respers heirs and spares had doubtless been born in this very bed, a thought which didn’t help the situation.

  Jeez, I’m going to lose my lady boner if this keeps up! Come on, BJ, there’s a gorgeous guy about to fuck you, get with the programme . . .

  Brianna Jade held out her arms to Edmund, the signal that he had clearly been waiting for; eagerly, he shuffled forward on the mattress, taking his cock in one hand. She widened her legs to give him more room as he knelt between them, pressed the tip against the absolute centre of the delicious wetness of her pussy, and began, tentatively at first, to slide inside her; the moans she was making encouraged him, and in a few seconds he was filling her. She had known already that he was well-hung, had felt it when they kissed for the first time, but it was still a huge relief to know that any worries about performance anxiety or coming too soon could safely be dismissed.

  Edmund was on top of her now, her arms around him, her legs wrapping around his lean hips as he pumped away at her with a regular steady pulse that showed no indications he might come too soon or lose control. She could trust him, give herself up to the rhythm completely, let it build and build: God, it felt so good! It had been ages since she’d got laid; she’d screwed around in West Palm Beach, of course, but those preppy boys hadn’t really been her type. She liked guys who worked with their hands, whose muscles weren’t gym-built but natural, and the fact that Edmund defined himself as much as a farmer as an Earl had, ironically, been a big part of his attraction for her.

  Her head was tilted to the side, her lips pressing into his shoulder; she kissed him, smelling the Imperial Leather soap he had just used, the tang of his skin, licking the hairs that curled in whorls, pressed down flat by the shower water. She dragged herself back a little, grabbed his head with her hands, made him kiss her as he rose and fell between her legs, his tongue driving in and out of her lips in synch with his cock; it was hypnotizing. They were gasping into each other’s mouths, Edmund groaning wordlessly as he worked away, holding himself to an even pace that let them both settle into the shock of a new body so intimately close. He was propped on his elbows, taking some of his weight off her very considerately, and that gave her just enough space to slip her hand down between their bodies, sensing if she wanted to come again – which she very much did – that it would be up to her to deal with it.

  As soon as he felt her move, he lifted to give her room; she couldn’t fault him, he was sensitive to anything she wanted to do. He reared above her in a push-up, watching her expression as her head tilted back as she started to work on herself, her fingers moving quick and frantic between her legs, easing his cock out a little so she could reach the exact wet nub that she needed to just stroke and flick that little, little extra that made all the difference in the world, trying not to catch her nails on his or her tender flesh – they were too long for this, really; usually she used a vibrator, had a couple in her room, she’d have to see if he was okay with that—

  She screamed, hitting the spot, arching back even more, and she was going to go for it again, to come and come with his big cock inside her, but he took that to mean that she was done and plunged back into her so eagerly that she had to pull her hand away so it didn’t get crushed between their bodies: she couldn’t tell him to stop, that she wanted to come again. She fell back, limp, Edmund following her, kissing her frantically now, his mouth glued to hers as his hips drummed a final tattoo between her thighs, his cock swelling inside her, a last strong stroke as it jerked and began to come in spasms.

  Edmund didn’t yell anything, didn’t make any noise but a long deep grunt of satisfaction. He collapsed on top of his fiancée, almost instantly sliding his body weight to the side to make sure he wasn’t too heavy for her. Brianna Jade wouldn’t have minded, would actually have welcomed the weight, but she wrapped her arms around him, held him close and kissed his shoulder again and again, grateful that the man she was marrying was this considerate of her. To her great surprise, he mumbled, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t need to thank me!’ she said, taken aback.

  ‘I just wanted to be polite,’ Edmund started.

  ‘Polite! But why?’

  ‘Well, you know . . .’ Edmund writhed a bit in embarrassment. ‘Thanking the woman after – it’s sort of the right thing to do if one’s being courteous.’

  Brianna Jade couldn’t help giggling. Just when you thought you cracked upper-class British manners, something new popped out at you – like thanking your fiancée after sex, as if women were still supposed to be less interested in it than men.

  ‘But I wanted it as much as you did,’ she said frankly. ‘And it was great!’

  ‘It was?’ Edmund had buried his face in a pillow out of awkwardness, but now he turned to look at her, their eyes very close, his features out of focus. ‘Really?’

  ‘Jeez, Edmund, you heard me screaming!’ she said, smiling at him, her entire body feeling happily released. Not completely sated; she could have done with coming a few times more, but hopefully that would sort itself out in future.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he said, smiling back at her, leaning forward to drop an affectionate kiss on her lips. ‘I thought it was more than great. My God, Brianna, the sight of you naked! I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful in my life.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ She kissed him back.

  ‘I’m a very lucky man,’ Edmund said, his grey eyes clear and sincere. ‘I’m probably the luckiest man in the world, frankly. I honestly don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you, Brianna, but I’ll spend the rest of my life doing my best to make you feel you haven’t made a bad bargain.’

  ‘Oh!’ She almost felt tears rising to her eyes. ‘That’s so lovely!’

  They kissed again, and Edmund, with a visible effort, propped himself up once more, his cock sliding out of her, slippery and bringing a rush of hot liquid with it.

  ‘Bugger, the coverlet!’ He jumped up and off the bed, galvanized, and ran to the bathroom for toilet paper, loping back to mop up his come and hand her another wodge of paper for herself. Then he took one of the discarded towels and rubbed vigorously at the stain. ‘It’s such hell to wash . . . I’ll pull it off in future. Maybe I can sponge it and hang it up over a window to dry in the sun? I feel a bit awkward about asking Mrs Hurley to get one of the girls to wash our, err, our—’

  Despite her frustration at the mood having been broken – she certainly wasn’t going to get her extra orgasms now – Brianna Jade couldn’t help smiling at the earnestness of his expression, at his concern for Mrs Hurley’s sensibilities.

  ‘Honestly, I wouldn’t like to ask her either,’ she admitted, pressing the toilet paper against her crotch, feeling his come ooze pleasurably out of her. ‘I could help you with the coverlet?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ the Earl of Respers said firmly. ‘I made the mess, I’ll clean it up. God, I’m starving. That definitely worked up my appetite. What about you?’

  ‘We’ve got courgette crêpes for lunch,’ Brianna Jade said. ‘Mrs Hurley told me.’

  Edmund grimaced.

  ‘I hope she’s serving loads of potatoes with that,’ he said. ‘Or bread. Or both. I’ve been shovelling shit all day and I’ve got more of the same this afternoon.’

  ‘Were you at the pig farm? I went there today,’ Brianna Jade said, sliding off the slippery coverlet and to the floor, Edmund very solicitously grasping her waist to steady her as she found her footing.

  ‘No, chickens,’ Edmund said. ‘Fantastic fertilizer. But that’s an extra reason I wanted to shower. Did you see Abel at the pig farm? You couldn’t possibly have missed him.’

  ‘Huge guy? Yeah.’ She walked towards the bathroom to wash herself. ‘He said “ooh-arr” to me. Like, lots.’

&
nbsp; ‘It’s a standard greeting round here,’ Edmund said, grinning. ‘I can do it for you if you’d like. I slip into the local accent pretty easily, though my mother always hated it.’

  ‘You really don’t have to.’ Brianna Jade was laughing now.

  ‘There’s a dressing gown on the back of the door,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you put that on so you can go back to your room and get dressed? I’ll wait for you and escort you down to lunch.’

  ‘We really need to get you a new robe,’ she called, dragging on the ancient faded near-rag she found hanging from the hook. ‘I’m going to order one for you, and I don’t want any argument, okay? I’m throwing this one away as soon as the new one comes. Plus the towels! Why aren’t you using the new ones?’

  ‘They were my grandmother’s,’ Edmund pleaded. ‘I know they’ve seen better days, but—’

  As he protested, Brianna Jade re-entered the room, walked to the bed, picked up one of the discarded towels and held it up in front of her face so that he could see how worn it was: her features clearly showed through it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, yielding. ‘You do have a point. New towels it is.’

  ‘Hey, I have lots of money,’ she said with disarming frankness. ‘We might as well enjoy it!’

  How great is this? she thought happily as she kissed him on the lips and went back to her room. Having sex, then talking about actual domestic stuff together, like we were married already. This is real now. Not that it had ever felt fake to her. She had liked Edmund from the moment she met him, would never have agreed to the proposed marriage if she hadn’t known she could have feelings for him; but somehow, the combination of good sex followed by a mutual agreement to throw out threadbare towels was a confirmation that they were embarking on genuine married life, not just a mutually beneficial arrangement.

  She was humming a cheerful tune when she emerged from her bedroom in a fresh linen dress and pretty summer sandals, her hair loose around her shoulders in golden waves, diamonds in her ears. Edmund was waiting outside for her in the blue and white finely checked shirt tucked into pressed jeans that was the Englishman’s version of smart casual.