Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
About A Gentleman of Indiscretion
About the Author
Extras
-Excerpt from Tempting the Bride
-Other books by Sherry Thomas
Copyright
Foreword
THE BRIDE OF LARKSPEAR STARTED as a story within a story, an erotic manuscript given by David Hillsborough, Viscount Hastings, to Miss Helena Fitzhugh, both of whom feature prominently in the Fitzhugh trilogy, three interconnected novels by Sherry Thomas.
Lord Hastings and Miss Fitzhugh have long had an antagonistic relationship. But unbeknownst to Miss Fitzhugh, Lord Hastings loves her. She, on the other hand, is in love with a most unsuitable gentleman.
Lord Hastings comes to fear that she will ruin herself over said gentleman. Should that happen, he would, of course, step in, offer his hand in marriage, and save her from being cast out by Society. And she would, if only for the sake of her family, accept him.
The prospect of such a marriage of necessity, with Miss Fitzhugh certain to be unhappy and he himself perhaps no less miserable, troubles him. And it is his fear—and his unvoiced hopes—that compels him to write this story.
(At some point in the future, Lord Hastings will learn, much to his surprise, that Miss Fitzhugh is still a virgin. But at the time of the writing of Larkspear, he is of the belief that she is experienced in carnal matters.)
Chapter One
1896, England
I SHALL BEGIN WITH A DESCRIPTION of the bed, for one must make the setting of a book clear from the first line. It is a bed with a pedigree. Kings have slept on it, noblemen have gone to their deaths, and brides beyond count have learned, at last, why their mothers ask them to “think of England.”
Tonight another bride will receive her lord and husband on this bed in the manner ordained by God. My bride, the woman I have desired for nearly half of my life.
The bedstead is constructed of oak, heavy, stout, almost indestructible. Pillars rise from the four corners to support a frame on which hang heavy curtains in winter. But it is not winter; the heavy beddings remain in their cedar chests. Upon the feather mattresses are spread only sheets of French linen, as decadent as Baudelaire’s verses.
Fine French linen is not so difficult to come by these days. And beds with pedigrees are still only furniture. What distinguishes this bed is the woman standing next to it—her back against one of the excessively sturdy bedposts, her wrists tied behind.
This being a work of Eros, she is, of course, naked.
My bride does not look at me. She is determined, as ever, to shunt me to the periphery of her existence, even on this, our wedding night.
I touch her. Her skin is as cool as marble, the flesh beneath firm and resilient. My hand on her chin, I turn her face to look into her eyes, haughty eyes that have scorned me for as long as I remember.
“Why are my hands tied?” she murmurs. “Are you afraid of them?”
“Of course,” I reply. “A man who stalks a lioness should ever be wary.”
A lioness—the way I always think of her, a creature of power and danger.
Earlier in the day she had been dazed, her eyes almost vacant, as we went through the motions of the hasty wedding ceremony that bonded us as husband and wife. It was as if she could not believe that her life had taken this particular turn, this disastrous plunge into the abyss.
But now that we are alone, in the midst of one of the most pivotal encounters of our lives, she has chosen to display neither hesitation nor fear. Instead her eyes glitter with calculation, as if assessing how she might turn being tied to a bedpost into an advantage for her.
“And what does that man do when he has caught said lioness and put her in her cage?”
It is high summer, but a fire has been lit in the grate. Her skin glows in the firelight. I brush aside a coppery strand of hair that has fallen before her eyes. “He teaches her that captivity can be wonderfully enjoyable—and trains her to become a tame house cat, a sweet, willing little pussy.”
Her eyes narrow at my not-so-subtle double entendre. “Lionesses do not become house cats—or have you not heard?”
My hand travels down and skims her rib cage. Her gaze follows my touch intently. As my knuckles brush the side of her breast, she shivers.
“Why belittle your ability to change?” I ask. “It is only your first hour of captivity.”
That we are sparring heartens me. We had spoken barely two words to each other during the rail journey to Larkspear Manor. She stared out of the window and I had pretended to be interested in my newspaper. I have a habit of needling her, but suffocating inside our rail compartment, I could find no lighthearted words to ease the tension, nor enough cruelty to remind her that had she listened to my advice and been more prudent in her conduct, she would not have needed to marry me to avoid being cast out.
She had been similarly silent and stoic as we dined underneath a thirty-foot-high ceiling, at two ends of a table so long we might as well have been on opposite shores of the English Channel. That resignation had remained in place even as I’d disrobed her, exposing her beautiful body inch by inch.
But now that I’ve tethered her to a bedpost, the lioness has reawakened.
“Surely you don’t take me for a silly female who doesn’t know her duties. You will have everything from me that a wife owes her husband.” Her tone is light, but there is a challenge to her voice. “Or is this the only way you can get other women to sleep with you?”
I smile in genuine amusement at her charge. “Do you want it to be the case, my dear? Would that make our wedding night more exciting?”
She pitches a haughty brow. “Can anything make a tonsillectomy more exciting?”
I rest my hand at the indentation of her waist. “How about when you find out that you won’t be getting a tonsillectomy, but instead a most pleasurable night of lovemaking?”
“And do you expect that by the end of this magical night,” she answers in a sardonic, yet almost seductive whisper, “I will have turned into your pet, your sweet, willing little pussy?”
Her words, her insolence, her soft, rosy lips as they move in speech—lust swells in my blood.
“Yes.” I step closer, my lips nearly caressing the shell of her ear. “Maybe not by tomorrow morning, but by the end of the week, you will be thinking of my lovemaking day and night.”
I do not feel quite as confident as I sound. But if this is a battle, then I might as well approach it as the ancient Greeks did, with much boasting of victories to come before a single chariot had been unleashed.
My bravado is not without its intended effect: The pulse at her throat accelerates; her breasts rise and fall with greater rapidity.
I am reminded of the one time we kissed, six months ago. She’d panted afterward, entirely out of breath, even as she glared at me.
I want to make her pant again. I want to make her lose herself entirely.
Perhaps she intuits my intentions, for she inhales sharply. “You are a pervert, Larkspear.”
I bite gently on her earlobe. “And you are just the sort of woman to appreciate one, Lady Larkspear, whether you realize it or not.”
Her nipples tighten. Now I am the one to lose my breath. My lust threatens to burn out of control, like a forest fire in the midst of a windstorm.
“Don’t be so excited for me
,” I murmur. “You will make it less fun to prove that you have wanted me all along.”
“You cannot prove what doesn’t exist, Larkspear.”
It isn’t easy to tear my gaze away from those thrusting, gorgeous nipples, but I raise my eyes to hers. Familiar ground, this sort of verbal skirmish, even if this is our first time at it with one of us naked. But the engagement is an old one—we have been putting each other down with such speech for years. And for all the apparent fireworks it generates, I must still measure the distance between our hearts in light-years.
The time has come to break the cycle.
“Fortunately that is not my task here, which is only to prove the existence of something that you choose not to acknowledge.”
She tosses her head. A strand of her hair strikes me across my cheek. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
That is what I would love to prove to be true, but I do not inform her of my doubts. Instead, I hold out my hand and make as if to touch one nipple, but stop a fraction of an inch short. She half gasps, her eyes fastened to the sight of my fingers not quite fondling her.
“No,” I answer. “It’s what your body tells me.”
I settle my hand between her breasts and trace a line up along her sternum, lightly caressing her throat as I make my way to her lips. My thumb pulls down her bottom lip, revealing her small white teeth. Her breaths, rapid and shallow, tickle my hand. A flush spreads beneath her skin. Her eyes, raised to mine, darken—her pupils were dilating.
I lean in—and barely restrain myself from kissing her. This is not the time to betray my own sentiments, but to force a reaction from her so enormous and unmistakable that she will have no choice but to see me in a different light.
Our lips almost but do not touch. The timing of our breathing somehow aligns; we inhale and exhale with the exact same agitated rhythm. My eyes never leaving hers, I roll her nipple between my thumb and index finger.
Her eyelids flutter. Her toes dig into the Persian carpet. And behind her back, reflected in a mirror on the far wall of the room, her hands clench. I am unbearably aroused by her involuntary reactions.
I slide my palm across her nipple. Her lips part and quiver, her face the exquisite grimace of a woman trying not to moan aloud. My cock is as hard as a cricket bat, my heart aflutter with a nervous thrill: When I touch her, she cannot ignore me.
I lift her breast and bend close. “‘With my body I thee worship’—did not my vows thus command me?”
She trembles at the sensations caused by my breath. I lick her nipple, sweet and satiny upon my tongue, erect with her body’s interest in mine.
I look back at her face, even as I slide my tongue over her nipple. Her eyes are shut tight, her teeth gritted. But as soon as she senses my attention on her, she opens her eyes and stares back at me, refusing to acknowledge that anything I do can possibly have a significant effect on her.
I insert my hand between her thighs. She jerks but holds my gaze.
“You have beautiful eyes,” I tell her, intoxicated with my new powers. “It’s like looking into the heart of a galaxy.”
I regret my words immediately—they are too much those of a besotted man. A besotted man I am—and have long been—but I refuse to let it be known until her heart is mine. My pride cannot allow any other course of action.
Her reaction is one of suspicion: She fully anticipates that I will follow my compliment with something snide, possibly nasty. I have only myself to blame for her distrust: Instead of confessing the contents of my heart, at every turn I have insulted and slighted her, believing that any reaction from her was better than none at all.
“Are you drunk, Larkspear?” she demands.
“Yes,” I answer with the sort of dirty look she expects from me. “Intoxicated by you, my dear.”
I slide one finger along the delicate folds at the junction of her legs. Her softness is indescribable. My heart pounds, then pounds twice as hard as I encounter a warm, slippery moisture.
“You are wet,” I inform her. “Quite wet.”
Her gaze turns violent, as if she would love to take a bludgeon to my person. I, on the other hand, am overjoyed. Her heart might be aloof, but her body is far from indifferent to me.
“Yes, keep looking at me, darling. I will enjoy studying your face when you come.”
“You think it so easy to—”
Her next word disappears into a whimper as I slip my finger inside her.
She is hot and tight—incredibly hot, incredibly tight. I force myself to speak normally. “Nice. I will relish fucking you.”
She grits her teeth. “Why don’t you do just that?”
“And forgo all the fun and games? I think not. Such pleasures should be finely drawn out, every second slowly and purposefully savored.”
Something that is almost fear shadows her eyes. The urge comes upon me to tell her that she needs to dread nothing, that I will perish before I will allow anything to mar her happiness or her spirits. But I hold back, reminding myself that there is a larger war to be fought.
And because I know that should I hold out my heart before her, she would smile and stab it with a dagger of disdain.
I play with her slowly and purposefully, as I’ve promised, arousing her sensitive flesh with measured strokes, with an occasional pinch thrown in for variety and interest—and to feed her antagonism, because old habits die hard and I am, alas, as much a creature of habit as the next man.
“Tell me how much you hate my touch,” I order her. “Tell me how you shrink from it. Tell me how you are absolutely, absolutely not getting wetter by the second.”
Her reply is a low growl. “And you think I will give you that satisfaction?”
“Someone should,” I counter, my voice losing some of its steadiness.
For in arousing her I have also aroused myself to a fever pitch. Her readiness drenches my hand. I am desperate to plunge into her, to claim her body as mine and mine alone.
I do not permit myself easy gratification. My aim is not simply to ejaculate deep inside her, however much I want it, but to possess the entirety of her. Her body, yes, but also her mind, and ultimately her heart.
And to achieve that, tonight I am interested only in her pleasure, her satisfaction.
I wedge another finger inside her and watch hungrily for all the signs of enjoyment she cannot suppress. The small writhing motions of her lower body, the further dilation of her pupils, the little whimpers that escape her clenched teeth from time to time. Inside my still perfectly pressed trousers, my cock flexes—and engorges almost beyond what I can endure.
“I love how pink your cheeks are, darling,” I dare to tell her, knowing she will interpret my words not as admiration, but goading. “I love how that blush has spread down your throat all the way to your breasts. And what gorgeous breasts. You should have lived a century ago, when ladies rouged their nipples and proudly displayed them above the décolletage of their gowns.”
To punctuate my words, I kiss her other nipple, the one I have yet to properly worship—closemouthed, almost chaste pecks first, then a graze with the moist inside of my lower lip, followed by leisurely licks and swirls of my tongue, before I draw the nubbin deep into my mouth and run my teeth lightly across it.
All the while my hand intensifies its wooing of her lower body. My fingers are hilt-deep inside her. My thumb teases and rubs one particularly exquisite point of sensitivity. Her breath catches, as does mine. It unnerves me how much I want—need—her pleasure to surge past that point of no return.
“How much do you hate it?” I whisper in her ear. “Shall I make it ten times worse? So terrible that you will shriek obscenities at the top of your lungs? Shall I kneel down before you and put my tongue where my hand is?”
I see it on her face—she shuts her eyes tight—before I feel it in her body: that ratcheting of tension, the tautening. She teeters on the edge for a long, long time before suddenly dissolving into quakes and shudders, the walls of her cunt co
ntracting as if trying to pull my entire hand inside.
She does not shriek, but her mouth opens wide, her breaths ragged. Her face, her neck, and her breasts are suffused with an even lovelier shade of blush. My gaze drops down the expanse of her belly to the sight of my hand still lodged inside her. My knees nearly buckle. My body screams for release. And I long, even more than to rampage her, to pull her close and embrace her hard in relief and gratitude that yes, there is a part of her that is within my reach.
But I do no such thing. When she opens her eyes, still dazed, I hold up my hand and lick each finger. “Delicious,” I tell her. “Utterly delicious.”
WHEN I UNTIE HER FROM around the bedpost, she sags a little. But as I place my hand on her elbow to steady her, she jerks away, her gaze hard. “I can stand, thank you. Now where should I place myself next for your pleasure?”
“For your pleasure, you mean?” I counter, some of the happiness in my heart dissipating.
Her hair has fallen forward. She flicks the strands behind her shoulders, plainly exposing her breasts, as if to demonstrate how little she cares about being naked before me. “Please, Larkspear, you only ever think of yourself.”
I turn cold. There is no possible defense against such a charge. Again, I have only me to blame, having always presented myself as a frivolous prick before her, for fear that doing otherwise would allow her to guess my true feelings.
“Well, then, for my pleasure, madam, you will occupy this bed.”
Coolly she climbs up, turns around, and lies down. Her hair spreads out on the pillow, a delta of bright red locks. Her eyes are fixed on the ceiling, upon which a mural brims with fat cherubs and golden clouds.
I bring out the black silk sash again. The first time I bound her, she’d watched passively, almost uncomprehendingly, before becoming alert to my nefarious purposes. This time, however, as I fasten her wrists to one of the thick slats in the headboard, she flicks me a look of contempt—with a twinge of disquiet, as if she hadn’t expected that I would continue to bind her.
The Bride of Larkspear: A Fitzhugh Trilogy Erotic Novella Page 1
