by Cerys du Lys
“I shall write to my parents. I shall tell them I am well. The things you have unlocked within me… I want to know more.”
His eyes were dark and they narrowed as he glared at her. He grabbed her, clenching his fists around her upper arms, holding her tightly. “After everything…?”
“Because of everything,” she retorted boldly.
“Oh God.”
He pushed his lips onto hers, and she responded, her body cleaving to his. They kissed, the passion reciprocated, flowing between them. When he broke away, he was flushed.
“Write,” he croaked gruffly, and waved at the table. Before she could speak again, he was gone, and she was locked in once more.
* * *
She wrote her letters - one to her parents and one to Stapleton. She included Stapleton’s, unsealed, in the envelope into which she tucked her parents’ letter.
She told them very little. That she had sinned, and erred, and though she was safe, she was unable to return home. She told them that they would not want her, and she did not wish to bring shame upon her family, and that she was doing the best thing for everyone.
To her surprise, she did not cry. She pushed the paper into the envelope and felt lighter, somehow. Freed.
At first she waited, sitting at the table, for Tristan to come back in and collect the letters. The day dragged on wearily. She walked around the two rooms. She hummed to herself.
As the afternoon wore on, she resumed her banging on the door, though she knew it was to no avail.
Her thoughts began to spiral out of control again.
What did he want with her? She could tell that he was involved in criminal activity, in spite of his fine house and obvious good breeding. In fact, those things were probably assets. His brother was a rapist - just thinking the word in her own head made her feel sick, but it was true.
And Tristan himself was little better.
Or was he? He had brought her here and treated her well. But then, his aim all along was to have his way with her, wasn’t it?
Yet the way he had treated her was very different to how Hugh had been.
But he tied me down, she told herself crossly. And now I’m locked in!
But the way the bonds had held her ankles had been comforting, somehow. She hadn’t had to worry about what to do. She had only to lie there and be pleasured.
Pleasure! The word hit her hard. Yes. It had been pleasurable. Wrong, sinful, sordid… pleasurable.
He was mixed up. He was as mixed up in his head and his heart as she was.
He had a good heart, she decided. He was poles apart from Hugh, that much was clear. He might well be mixed up in all manner of terrible things, but surely it was Hugh’s influence. Clearly Hugh wanted to take the business - well, the gang - into a direction Tristan didn’t like. Yes! That was it! The brothers were rivals, and Hugh wanted to be in charge, but Tristan was older.
It all made sense to her now.
Poor Tristan, she thought. All that weight of expectation that fell onto the older son’s shoulders.
Eventually she had nothing to do but to go to bed. She was hungry again, but no one had brought her any more food. She undressed and wrapped in his robe again. She snuggled down into the bed, her eyes closing. So, she was locked in? She was safe, then. She took some deliberately slow, deep breaths.
She sank back, too exhausted to renew her fight by banging on the door and shouting.
The pillow was soft and warm. She gave in to it.
Tristan loomed into her dreams again. He was rich, strong, attractive, and determined. He didn’t need to be beholden to his brother’s bad ways! Why, all he needed was a woman to show him the error of his ways. Lead him back to the straight and narrow.
Her thoughts mushed. He was a good man - why else would he have rescued me? Now, I can rescue him!
She began to play a little fantasy in her head, picturing them living in a grand house somewhere - not London, of course. The temptations of his old life would be too great. And no doubt he had enemies here, too. Maybe they could go somewhere genteel like Bath or Harrogate.
Or abroad! The continent! As she fell into a deeper slumber, she was imagining them in a German spa town, taking the waters, attending concerts, both free from their histories.
He is a good man, she said again, over and over.
As if saying it would make it true.
Chapter Nine
Tristan felt as if his life was being shaken up and forced into a new shape that he barely recognized. And he wasn’t in control, and he didn’t like it.
She should go. She should be put out on his front step and abandoned, and Lord knew, he had done that to more than one woman - not just street walkers, but there was the wife of a goldsmith that he seduced and let go, and the niece of a rural circuit judge, too, although the only way he escaped public censure on that affair was because she promptly fell in with some tinkers and got pregnant.
Women were either whores to be fucked, or mothers to be left untouched and ignored, though they had to be praised when in polite company. With their smaller brains, their lesser capacity for reason, their frailer bodies and their tendency to let their emotions overwhelm them, women inhabited a world that he didn’t understand and had no interest in. Even his wife.
This one before her had shattered all his neat boxes. Whore? Yes - she was no longer a virgin, and was clearly taking pleasure in the sexual act. Yet she was innocent too. Frail? She was bruised and beaten and still standing, still fighting. She had been overwhelmed with tragedy but here she stood, still, asking for life. Experience. Adventure.
If I had had the misfortune to be born a woman, he realized with a shock that made the hair on his neck rise up, I would have been this woman here. Anna Rossington.
He stood by the bed and watched her as she slept. He wanted to wake her, and was about to put his hand on her shoulder when she stirred. She started, then smiled, with the fog of her dreams still hanging about her. She sat up.
“Sir,” she said. “Is it morning?”
“No, it is still night. Just past nine o’clock. I had not told my staff to feed you, so they didn’t; I am sorry. I was attending to business. I have brought some cold meats.”
“Thank you. I have written to my parents. Please do send the letter.”
“I saw. I read it, and the one to Stapleton within the envelope. You did not beg to help or escape.”
“No, sir. Sir, there is no need to lock the door.”
“Anna…”
“I am undone, lost, and yet at the start of something. Sir, may I stay? At least for a little while? Might you teach me more of what you have begun? As you said, you have to redress your brother’s ills. I will not fight you. I will do as you say.”
“Oh God,” he said. “Do you truly understand what you are saying?”
She hesitated. Oh, her honesty made her so vulnerable. She was different to the peacock-pretty ladies of artifice he met at balls and in salons. So different also to his wife. And to Beatrice, his maligned sister who had lived in sin and brought more sin onto his head than anyone could have imagined. How had Anna remained so untouched? Maybe she was so good at lying that she appeared to be this honest.
“Do you know what you say when you ask to remain here?” he repeated. “With me? At my… service?”
“You make me feel safe,” she said in a rush, blushing, and finally she broke eye contact and looked down, and he saw the way her hair curled about the soft skin of her neck and his cock, already half-hard, lengthened and thickened in his breeches, and he was undone.
“You make me want to fuck you,” he growled, and he dragged her body close to his, forcing a hard kiss down onto her still-fluttering lips. She fought at first, instinctively, then relaxed, and her soft body fell against him and her ripe breasts were pressed to his chest.
He wondered, did Anna know what she wanted? Or was she at the mercy of her body? Experimentally, he pulled her robe from her body, exposing her roughly.
/>
She let him, and when he stepped back to admire her, she waited for his next move. There was fear and uncertainty in her eyes - and arousal.
“If you stay here, you are mine,” he told her. “You do what I say, immediately and without question.”
She almost smiled. “Yes, sir.”
Oh God - was it true? That she longed for his direction, his orders?
“You are mine to do with as I will. Whatever it is.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Oh God - it was true.
And her submission made him want to keep her, own her, and protect her with a fierceness that astounded him. She was a precious gift.
“Take my cock from my breeches and suck me,” he ordered.
She sank to her knees, and fumbled with his buttons, unlacing him so that his cock sprang free. As her fingers touched him he trembled all over, and wove his fingers into her hair. This time, she was more certain with her movements and her mouth closed over his cock with a tantalizing firmness. She was soft and wet and he wanted to fuck her hard.
What devil was she, to do this to him?
“Enough!” he grunted. “On your feet - turn around. Bend over, hold your ankles.”
She stood up but she hesitated, questioning him with her eyes.
“Turn around!” he reiterated. “You are disobeying me.”
Hastily she spun around and bent forward, her ripe, round arse rising in front of him like a glorious sunrise. He grasped the globes in his hands, digging his fingers into the flesh, making it redden and whiten and bulge between his digits. His cock was pounding, needing to be buried deep inside her.
He pulled her buttocks apart and he felt her tremble. He pushed his fingers down, between her thighs, seeking her pussy; she was damp but not yet ready. God, he was, but he had to wait.
She must have thought he had designs upon her arsehole, because he heard her whisper, “No, sir, not there…”
“Yes! Exactly there if I so wish - do you understand, now, what you have asked for?”
She remained silent, and he struck her hard on the right buttock, making her call out in pain and stumble forward.
“Thank me for this correction. It is for your own good.”
“Thank you, sir,” she blurted out, her voice thick.
He struck her on the left buttock, and she kept steadier on her feet this time. “Thank you, sir.”
Again he spanked her, right then left, pausing to hear her thank him. Her pink and white flesh was blooming red, and when he pushed his fingers back to her pussy, this time he found she was running with juices, and when he probed deeper inside, her thick-ringed pussy walls pulsed and clamped around his fingers, drawing him in.
He wondered, then, how far he could push her. Where were her boundaries? Was she, indeed, a mate worthy of a man such as him?
He dragged his fingers out of her, and pushed her sprawling to the floor, where she tangled with her limbs and hair, and half-sat up, blinking in surprise.
To his immense gratification, she did not speak.
“Lie back and show me yourself.”
He could tell she wanted to prevaricate but she obeyed, spreading open her legs. She shifted uncomfortably on the rugs, and he remembered that her buttocks would be sore from his spanking. Good.
“Spread yourself with your fingers.”
She closed her eyes, and slowly, but inevitably, she displayed all her secret female parts to him, and he breathed out long and hard, trying to hold himself back from her wondrous beauty for just a moment longer. The lamp on the table cast a soft glow around her. Her long blonde hair spread out and her pale limbs were stark against the red and blue of the rug; she was like a painting.
And yet so fleshy and real.
Chapter Ten
Anna was already flying free in her mind, each debasement unchaining her soul from the conventions of expected polite society. Nothing mattered; she was his, and his alone. He had saved her, and she - yes, she - would save him.
Her own fingers touched the places she had never before touched. She felt her power throbbing through, the sticky flesh pulsing as she pulled her labia apart and drew him in.
“Open your eyes,” he ordered and she did so, immediately, to see him bending over her, and lowering himself. His face was dark and tense, his jaw set, an expression of animal need consuming him.
And yes, that too was what she wanted. Not gentle laughter and sweet caresses. No, she needed to feel his urgency.
This was free and alive and powerful, and it unleashed her.
Tristan matched her and it scared her even while she recognized he wanted to keep her. Safety and protection? In a selfish and burning way, perhaps.
She stared into his eyes and he stared back, and his cock hovered at the edge of her entrance where still she held herself open to him, and waited.
She knew he would. He knew he would. She craved him, and she stared at him, and with a sigh that became a grunt, he surged into her, and she arched up and let go of her pussy and her fingernails scrabbled over his back as his muscles tensed and coiled with his thrusts.
It was getting easier to take his width and his length - the pain was a need, the need was an all-consuming desire. The more he slammed into her, the more she craved it.
He worked silently at first, breathing hard, but he began to growl and grunt and she could hear her own moans building to match the uncoiling urgency in her own belly.
And something exploded within her, her body tensing and shuddering and then, a moment later, his own climax claimed him and he pumped frantically into her.
“Oh God,” she was saying, over and over.
“Fuck,” he responded. Then he was slumping forward, resting more of his weight on her, and she could barely breathe deeply enough to keep the stars from blooming behind her eyelids. They were sheened in sweat and panting.
He rolled from her but this time, to her delight, he stayed lying alongside her. She moved onto her side and he drew her close to him, so that her back was along his belly. His shirt was rumpled and soaked, and his breeches strangely rough against the bare backs of her thighs.
But most of all, his strong arms held her tight, and she felt she could sleep safely for a week or more. Oh, that this moment might last!
But it wouldn’t last. She knew that. There were things in the wider world that needed dealing with.
“What business is it that you run with your brother?” she asked, nuzzling her head back against his chest.
“Did I say you could speak?”
“Did you say I could not? Sir,” she added, as a sop to his sensibilities.
“Well then.” His hand flexed warningly on her waist, but he answered anyway. “What do you think we do?”
“I do not think they are legal things, in the main.”
“No, of course not. When everyone is corrupt, then any successful businessman must be corrupt as well. Or we should never manage to prosper. No, we import goods that people want, and move sideways around the customs men, and have deals with the excise houses where we can.”
“What of your family?”
“You mean, what of our fortune,” he said with a laugh. “I am making it. All has been illusion in our household for generations - scratch the surface of any rich family and you may find the same. I would wager your own dear father has less real wealth than he would care to admit.”
“I have a thought, though, that you enjoy business,” she said tentatively.
He was silent for a long moment. Then he kissed the back of her head. “That is true. Were we as rich as Croesus, I think I might die of boredom. Or whoring. I do enjoy the challenge of being my own man, uncouth though that is considered in polite company.”
“I am jealous,” she admitted. “What might a woman do who is bored of polite company?”
“I think you are already doing it.”
She laughed. Now was the time, she reasoned, to say more. “What of your brother?”
“
We are brothers. So, we argue.”
“Does he want to run your business?”
Tristan spoke slowly, weighing out his words. “Of course we have rivalry. And different ideas as to the future. He takes care of the men we employ, and I am responsible more for deals and figures and money and bribery. But we are family. There is history… but…” He trailed off, uncomfortable.
“Perhaps you would be better alone. You’re a good man, and I think… I need to say that I think your brother is not a good man. He is dangerous and a discredit to you.” Her voice began to shake and she noted that his knuckles were going white. But now she had begun upon this course of conversation, she was compelled to continue. “What if the authorities come down upon you both? You would be dragged down with him.”
She stumbled into silence.
He did not speak. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck.
The stillness was painful, and she recalled her words in her head, over and over, looking for her mistake. What had she said wrong?
She could not see it, so she tried to explain herself. “I thought - we might go to the continent. We could have a life out there, you and I. You could start businesses, run things, just as you say you like doing. I would be free of the taint that will follow me here. I speak French, of course, and Italian. Your wife in Bridlington is happier there. You could be a free man, a good man…”
He moved slowly and deliberately, and in a terrifying silence. He moved away from her, and she rolled onto her back, and then sat up, watching him as he rose to his feet and re-did his breeches. He pulled his shirt from his back and padded through to the other room to seek another.
She stayed on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, a growing awareness that she had ruined everything poking at the corners of her mind.
When he came back out, he was dressed for the street in his jacket, cravat and high boots. He had white gloves on, and carried a cane. His hair was still tousled and his face quite set. He strode over to where she cowered on the floor, and glared down at her.
