If it had been Nora kneeling between his thighs Edward would have fucked her mouth until the cords of her throat screamed beneath her white skin. If it was Nora, he’d ram his prick balls-deep and glory at the sight of her slim, taut body submitting to him and absorbing all the punishment he could inflict, her pale eyes always begging for more and more and more.
Edward closed his eyes and savored the mental image he’d just created, allowing his thrusts to grow more violent, until the sound of choking pulled him out of his fantasy.
Belinda’s tears were streaming down her cheeks and her entire posture was one of grudging endurance rather than Nora’s abject worship.
He risked a glance at Nora and shuddered. Lust, hate, fury, adoration, and pure misery had turned her eyes the hot white-blue at the center of a flame. His aching balls contracted and Edward rammed his cock deep, his hands like a vise on Belinda’s skull as he emptied himself in violent, jerking ribbons down her convulsing throat.
❈❈❈
His head had fallen back after his orgasm, his hands limp on the arms of the chair.
Nora stood silently but inside she was screaming.
You can’t let him see what this has done to you.
She looked away from him, turning to Belinda.
Belinda was sitting back on her heels, her lips fuller and redder and slick from Mr. Fanshawe’s brutal use. They curved into a smug smile as Belinda rubbed the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand, her eyes declaring what they both knew: Mr. Fanshawe had just made his choice, and it wasn’t Nora.
Nora had never been a violent person, but right then she wanted to jump on the devious whore and pummel her. Her own emotions shocked and revolted her; how had this happened to her?
Just what was it about this man?
She refused to show the agonizing pain and rejection that roiled in her belly, the constant companion of lust and arousal when she was with this man. Instead, she forced herself to smile at Belinda. After all, it wasn’t the girl’s fault she’d become a pawn between her and the cruel, mysterious man Nora was now certain she’d fallen in love with.
Mr. Fanshawe groaned and they both turned to look at him. His head rose slowly, his eyes heavy lidded and sleepy. He looked from Nora to Belinda and then back, as if he couldn’t recall where he was. And then he grunted and said, “You can go.”
Nora blinked. Surely he wasn’t talking to—
“Not you,” he said to Belinda, who’d begun to get to her feet. He turned to Nora. “You. Get out. I don’t need you.”
Nora realized her jaw had dropped and closed it, her heart beating in odd, spastic jerks. She masked her reaction, but it was too late: he’d seen it. An ugly sneer distorted his face—a knowing, satisfied smirk at what she’d inadvertently exposed: humiliation, rejection, and shock.
Even worse, he saw what lay beneath it all: a gut-wrenching lust that even now—at the peak of her suffering—sent her body spiraling toward climax.
He gave an ugly laugh, stood, turned, and walked toward the bedchamber. “Come with me, Belinda,” he ordered, not bothering to look back as he briefly filled the doorway between the two rooms and then disappeared inside.
Belinda trotted behind him, cutting Nora a grin that contained triumph and something else—pity? And then she shut the door and Nora was alone with the most shattering orgasm she could remember.
Chapter Three
Edward took off his spectacles and threw them hard enough that they bounced and skidded over the cluttered surface of his desk before tumbling to the floor. “Fuck!”
The explosive word caused his secretary, Simon Powell, to jump in his office chair. “Sir?” Powell’s gray eyes were magnified by spectacles that were as thick as plate glass.
“It’s nothing,” Edward growled at his meek and mild secretary, a man whom he paid a fortune to ignore his mercurial temper and obnoxious behavior. “Take the rest of the day and go. We can pick up with this tomorrow.”
Powell set about gathering his things quickly and left without a parting word, knowing how much Edward despised small talk and civilities like greetings and goodbyes.
Edward pushed himself to his feet and strode to a table loaded with decanters. He poured himself three fingers of brandy and went to stand in front of the huge fireplace, which was crackling and popping, a merry counterpoint to his bloody mood.
It had been two weeks since he’d been to Tosca’s. Not since that night when he’d behaved like a bloody beast to the woman Belinda, all so he could give Nora an orgasm without even laying a finger on her.
He’d been as hard as a pike after he’d sent her away, using Belinda thrice more that night as if that would exorcise the memory of Nora’s erotic suffering, which he’d only glimpsed and now craved.
What he’d really wanted to do that night was drink himself into a stupor but he’d kept Belinda in his bed, becoming aroused at the thought that Nora would hear the other woman boasting about how he’d fucked her all night long. As ever, imagining Nora’s face at such humiliating information made him stiffen and throb.
Edward didn’t fool himself that any of the whores except Nora competed for him because they liked him or the things he did to their bodies. No, they fought over him because he paid twice as much as any other customer.
He was a pig—worse, really. Because all he wanted was to go back again and do something more—something worse—to make Nora look that way again. All he wanted was to see that indescribable expression on her face. An expression he fisted himself to every bloody night, sometimes twice or thrice. Not bad for a man over forty, but it was slowly driving him insane.
Today, at the monthly meeting between the four members of the syndicate: Edward, Stephen Chatham, Gideon Banks, and their fourth member—a man they only knew by the name Mr. Smith—his three partners had threatened to take him down to the Thames and drown him.
“Good God, Edward! What the hell is wrong with you? You’re always a bloody bastard but now you’re like a bastard with two sore heads.” This from Banks, a man who so terrified and mortified the servants at his London home that his staff turned over every six months.
“Go bugger yourself,” Edward had muttered.
“Really, Fanshawe, you’d better seek medical assistance for this matter,” said Mr. Smith—a man who didn’t hesitate to offer his advice and observations for all that he never shared a damned thing about himself. Smith chuckled at whatever he saw on Edward’s face.
Only Chatham refrained, although that was not unusual. Stephen Chatham was the quietest and most reclusive man Edward had ever met. He only spoke when necessary, and not even then. He was Edward’s favorite partner of the three—not because he knew him better or liked him more, but because Chatham spoke so rarely.
Edward wasn’t friends with any of them; he didn’t have or want friends. They were, like him, three men driven to build their empires, to insulate themselves from poverty with walls of wealth so thick they could never be breached. He knew nothing of their individual backgrounds but their pasts were as clearly stamped on their faces as his was. Gutter trash who’d clawed their way out of the sewers and would die before they ever went back.
“Whoever she is,” Banks had persisted, “You’d better do what you need to do before you make an ass of yourself.”
“A bigger ass,” Smith amended.
Edward ignored Smith’s sarcastic comment and turned to Banks, laughing. “What? You mean I should do like you’re doing and set up three bloody mistresses?”
Banks had flushed at that, but still managed a smile. “If you must.” The man had the fine-boned looks of an aristocrat, his blond hair and blue eyes like the paintings of angels Edward had seen on occasion. Talk about looks being deceptive. If there was any man whose sexual excess made Edward’s activities pale, it was Gideon Banks. While he’d mounted three mistresses, the man probably needed closer to five to satiate his needs. As it was, Gideon still accompanied Edward to the Bellaire and Tosca’s on occasion.
The whores flocked like chickens to corn to his angelic look and deep pockets.
Edward believed there was something seriously wrong with a man who required that much fucking. But, thankfully, it wasn’t his problem.
“Maybe what our Edward needs is a period of quiet reflection and abstinence,” Mr. Smith suggested. Even Chatham had joined in laughing at that.
Banks and Smith had continued to offer amusing suggestions, defusing the tension until they’d all gone back to the business at hand: the acquisition of an enormous parcel of buildings on the Strand.
Of course none of the men mentioned the possibility of marriage—at least not marriage to the women they all consorted with. Edward suspected the others viewed the matter of marriage much like he did: they would marry women who would advance their goals, women with connections to that strata of society they, themselves, could never hope to penetrate or join. Their marriages would be crucial business arrangements that would require more care and forethought than any other they would ever make.
Edward had even begun to consider marriage—before his obsession with Nora had seized him all those weeks ago. He’d employed a reliable man to assemble a list of ten women with the bluest blood and highest pedigree. Ten pristine virgins whose families were forced by poverty to put their daughters on the auction block for men like Edward.
He’d yet to look into the list Mr. Brock had provided him, his mind too caught up in other matters. Matters like Nora.
Although Edward had mocked Banks’s suggestion, he’d lately given a great deal of thought to setting up a mistress—an action he’d always avoided as his desires could be mercurial and he never knew when he’d get bored with a woman and then have to deal with an emotional mess. Unlike Banks, however, he thought of setting up only one woman: Nora.
But then he’d recall that last time he’d seen her and how very, very close he’d been to kicking out Belinda and bringing Nora to bed and fucking her in the way that drove them both to a place that went beyond mere physical pleasure, into the realm of something almost religious.
Edward snorted at his idiocy. Religious? He threw back the rest of his brandy and went back to his desk. He deliberately opened the folder Mr. Brock had given him a few weeks earlier, selecting a carefully printed sheaf of paper with a photograph clipped to the top.
Lady Catherine Thurlow, daughter of the Marquess of Blandford. He flipped over the portrait and began to read.
❈❈❈
Nora felt as if she’d been working non-stop for weeks. It was just as well since she was less than useful when she had too much time to herself. Instead of painting or reading, she seemed to spend most of her spare moments in the only chair in her room, staring out the small square window that looked out onto sky, thinking about him.
It was three weeks to the day since the last time she’d seen Mr. Fanshawe and she was returning to her room after a vigorous evening with the young Duke of Glenway, a skinny, painfully shy boy of seventeen.
The duke’s uncle, Lord Anthony, had been a client of Nora’s since she’d first come to Tosca’s when she was eighteen. Lord Anthony was a thin, nondescript, and astoundingly virile man in his sixties.
It was on Lord Anthony’s last visit—after he’d sated himself for the third time that evening—that he’d brought up the subject of his nephew, the young duke.
Like Mr. Fanshawe, Lord Anthony always paid for an entire night, although he usually did not stay for the whole evening.
This last time he’d been lying on the bed, naked and slick from exertion, watching Nora as she gathered up the implements he’d used on her.
“Did I hurt you, my dear?” he asked in the lazy voice of a man who’d just enjoyed three orgasms over the course of the past eight hours.
He had hurt her, of course, and rather viciously, at that. But they both knew what he meant: had he caused any permanent damage.
“No, my lord, you gave me a great deal of pleasure.”
He allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction before closing his eyes.
Nora hadn’t lied to him. Lord Anthony, although nearly three times her age, was one of her favorite clients. While mismatched in years, they were extremely well-matched sexually.
He’d kept her bound in various positions for the better part of six hours while he’d satisfied both himself and Nora. He went through the same ritual each time.
First he had her kneel on the settee, bend over the back. He bound her wrists and ankles with leather straps and then whipped her with a crop until he was fully aroused. He then used her mouth with unrestrained savagery, until he spent inside her.
Next they would share an extremely expensive bottle of champagne or wine and eat a light meal while conversing on topics such as music, books, and art. Lord Anthony was both interesting and interested, never failing to bring Nora tidbits of news and ask her opinion on many matters.
After that he would tie her face-down on the massive four-poster bed, her legs and arms spread wide and restrained at the four pillars. There would be more whipping and then he would penetrate her vaginally. Sometimes he came, sometimes he couldn’t and just fucked her.
And finally, after he’d taken a brief nap beside her while she remained bound, he would flog her one last time, the effort required to summon a third erection usually driving him to brutality.
At that point in the evening her body had suffered not only extended, intense, physical pain but usually three times the number of orgasms as his lordship. The climax of the evening—both literally and figuratively—occurred when he entered her anally and rode them both to a satisfactory conclusion.
He scheduled her only once a month but he paid for two full days of her time—the extra day to allow for the welts to go down and for her body to recuperate. He’d left strict instructions with Nora to tell him should Madam ever try to work her the next day.
Nora had just added more coal to the already raging fire—Lord Anthony was as slender as Nora and the two of them were always cold—when his voice came from the bed chamber behind her. “Come sit with me, Nora.”
He was propped up against a mountain of pillows, his thin body hidden by twice the usual amount of blankets. He flipped back the covers and patted the bed with his hand. “Take off your dressing gown and get in beside me.” He smiled, which was so rare it caused a flood of apprehension; was he about to leave her, too? She didn’t love Sir Anthony, but she found his habitual regularity soothing. Losing him as a client would be . . . unfortunate.
She laid her robe on the foot of the bed and did as he bade her.
“Turn onto your front, Nora so that I might admire my handiwork.”
When she did so, she felt the touch of his fingers on the sensitive, raised welts. She bit her lip to keep the hiss of pain behind her teeth.
“These are lovely,” he said, his voice slightly deeper as he stroked harder. “You have such beautiful skin.”
“Thank you, my lord.” As ever, Nora’s sex began to swell with each agonizing pass of his hand. She’d long ago quit trying to understand why she found pain so arousing.
“I want to engage you for this Friday,” he said, employing his closely cut fingernails on her bruised flesh to amplify his painful stroking.
“I would be honored, my lord.” She barely forced the words out from between clenched jaws.
He chuckled. “You are such a naughty little thing. Quite insatiable,” he added in a musing, almost wondering tone, as he caressed her harder, the action drawing a low groan from her. “You’d like me to take you again, wouldn’t you, Nora?”
She grunted as he dug his fingernails into her sore flesh. “Yes, my lord.”
He made a sound of regret. “I wish I could,” he murmured, his voice husky as his slim fingers drifting down her back and over the curve of her arse. “I’d take you here.” He slid a finger between her cheeks and probed her stretched and sore back entrance lightly. Her hips rose with no instruction from her brain, her thighs spreading to take him dee
per.
He laughed and gave her bottom a sharp swat. “You are bad to tease an old man, my dear. I’m afraid three has become an increasing challenge for me of late.” Before Nora could demur he leaned back against his pillows and continued, “The appointment I speak of is for my nephew.”
Nora turned onto her side then, watching as he shifted his weight and grimaced at some ache or pain as he made himself comfortable. She waited silently for him to continue. It was her habit to never volunteer information or ask questions unless a client specifically asked her. After all, they were the ones paying.
“My nephew is seventeen and hasn’t tupped so much as a serving wench or chambermaid yet.” His lordship frowned at some distant point in the room. “He is painfully shy and requires bolstering if he is ever to grow out of this lamentable phase and take up his responsibilities.” He looked at Nora. “I think you would be perfect to cure him of his virginity.”
“I would be honored, my lord.” Her words were not quite true. While she didn’t mind breaking in young, untried boys, she always felt a sense of responsibility initiating them into physical love. Her own first time had been unsatisfactory and had made her realize just how varied sexual preferences could be.
“You’re a good girl, Nora,” his lordship said, the words distorted by a yawn as his eyes drifted closed. He fell into a deep sleep within mere moments and that was the last they’d spoken on the matter.
She had met Lord Anthony’s nephew—the least regal duke she could imagine—and had sent him home just an hour ago with a smile that stretched ear to ear.
Now she was bone-tired and was going to do nothing more today—her one free day—than sleep. And perhaps finish her current painting if she woke up in time to catch any sun.
She reached the top floor of the house and tiptoed to her room, not wanting to wake any of the others. She opened the door to her room and then stopped in the doorway.
His Harlot (Victorian Decadence Series Book 1) Page 3
