Ellie Pride

by Annie Groves

  As he started to weep in great choking sobs, holding up his hands in front of himself as though he could actually see blood on them, Jarvis looked at him in disgust.

  ‘Do you know what I think, Henry?’ He leaned closer to him, jabbing his forefinger in his son’s face to emphasise his hatred of him as he spoke. ‘I think it’s a great pity that you weren’t on that ship with the rest of that worthless scum, because if you had been, by now your bones would be lying bleached clean on the bottom of the South China Sea. And I wish to God they were!’

  Henry groaned. He was a failure, as a man and as a husband. He had done so much that was weak and wrong, and left undone so much that he should have done. Slowly, he started to make his way back to the house. Bleak despair filled him. He knew what he had to do.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Ellie breathed in and her senses swam under the power of Gideon’s proximity. How was it possible with just one breath to be transported back to a time – a feeling – she had long ago believed she had completely obliterated from her memory?

  To stop them from trembling she pressed her fingertips hard into his flesh, but that only made the tremors race down her arms, then along her veins and the innermost pathways of her body like molten heat.

  She felt the brush of his hair against her oversensitive flesh as he raised his head. He was looking at her, and somehow she felt compelled to look back, their gazes meshing.

  ‘Gideon,’ she whispered, her voice laden with longing.

  She was looking at him as though no other man had ever touched her, Gideon acknowledged dizzily, as though she had longed and hungered for him, as though he was the only man…

  Anger licked searingly through him. Did she think she was deceiving him? Was it amusing her to look at him so, her eyes all wanton, hungry need, whilst her mouth trembled for his kiss, as though she was afraid of her own reaction?

  His little actress friend, a woman he’d been seeing for a few months now, could never rival such a performance.

  She had to leave this house, to escape whilst she was still capable of leaving – Ellie knew that. How could she face Connie, or herself, if she did not? But instead of obeying the frantic urgency of her thoughts, her fingers were instead curling into Gideon’s shirt, clutching at him to draw him closer instead of thrusting him away. She drew a deep breath that exposed the slender column of her throat and lifted her breasts against the thinness of her chemise.

  Gideon’s gaze was drawn to her body, along the tender white exposed line of flesh, down to where the dark flush of her nipple was a tormenting shadow just discernible beneath the fine fabric. He wanted to reach out and touch it, pluck at it and feel it swell and harden between his fingertips. He wanted to roll it between his finger and thumb, and to ease her breasts free of her gown so that he could feast his eyes on them – his eyes and his lips; his tongue, savouring their texture, their tenderness, their responsiveness to him as he slowly sucked them into his mouth.

  Beneath the thin covering of her chemise Ellie could feel her nipples swelling and aching, hard eager nubs of longing, filled with a wantonness, a knowing that shook her and shocked her. It was as though a fire, a fever, had suddenly spilled through her, licking along her body like wine, lapping at every most sensitive part of it.

  Reality faded and time rolled back to a summer’s day on the river, and the exciting, dangerous intimacy that had followed it, the discovery of her womanhood, the sharing of their feelings for one another and the declaration of their love.

  Somehow she was that girl again, and Gideon that young man, only now a part of her recognised that she was also a woman – a woman who out of duty and love for her mother had cheated herself – her senses, her emotions, her body, her very womanhood – of experiencing fulfilment, of meeting a need so strongly rooted within her and so ferociously suppressed that, now it had turned the tide on her, she was overwhelmed with its intensity.

  Gideon – his scent, his feel, his reality – was all the more dangerous because of her own denial.

  She wanted him, Ellie recognised, with all the youthful passion of the girl she had been, and she wanted him too with the hungry intensity of the woman she had become – whose marriage was based on compassion and pride and duty.

  ‘Gideon!’

  When she said his name he lifted his head to look at her, his eyes darkening as he recognised the desire in hers. Her mouth was soft, her lips parted and inviting. Anger and longing twisted together inside him, a hot, acid-tipped bayonet that tore at his guts.

  He wanted her and yet at the same time he hated her and wanted to punish her. She was a married woman and he wanted to throw that fact at her, but instead he took hold of her, demanding thickly, ‘What is it you want, Ellie? Me? This?’ And he bent his head and took her mouth in a savage kiss, grinding her lips beneath his own.

  Ellie shuddered, her senses whipped by pleasure and pain, her body so acutely sensitised that the ferocious passion of his kiss sent sweet darts of aching heat all through her body, making the most intimate female heart of her tighten and coil; awakening sensations so unexpected and unknown that she cried out, recoiling from them.

  Gideon tensed as Ellie cried out, pulling back from her.

  ‘No,’ Ellie told him fiercely, reaching out to draw him back to her, her lips brushing his chin and then finding his. ‘Kiss me, Gideon,’ she pleaded softly against his mouth.

  She was begging him to kiss her! Now was his moment to reject her as she had rejected him, but instead Gideon opened his mouth to hers, exploring its softness with his tongue until Ellie moaned and clutched at him.

  ‘What is it?’ he demanded, lifting his mouth from hers, his hand meshing into the thickness of her hair so that she couldn’t escape. ‘You said you wanted me to kiss you.’

  ‘I do,’ Ellie responded passionately, ‘Gideon, I do.’

  It was his mouth that found hers this time, his tongue thrusting into its softness in fierce male triumph and possession. Hungrily, Ellie responded, shuddering in mute delight as she felt Gideon slowly ease her gown away from her body.

  ‘Look!’ Gideon demanded thickly, as his hands cupped her almost-naked breasts, lifting them free of her chemise. ‘They’re perfect. They fit my hands perfectly, Ellie, as though they were made for me to hold, as though you were made for me. But you married someone else, didn’t you?’ he demanded, his mood suddenly changing, anger taking the place of passion. ‘Do his hands fit your breasts perfectly, Ellie? Does he –’

  ‘Stop it!’ Ellie begged him. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Stop what?’ Gideon challenged her. ‘Stop this?’

  Ellie could feel his thumbs circling her nipples as he bent his head to kiss her mouth – not savagely this time, but with a slow, aching sweetness that turned her bones to soft melting honey. His tongue-tip stroked her lips and she tried to capture it, closing them around it, shuddering to feel him thrusting it between her lips, the friction setting off a thousand tiny quivering darts of longing.

  ‘Well?’ he whispered tauntingly. ‘Does he make you feel like this, Ellie? Does he make you want like this?’

  Wordlessly Ellie shook her head, tears flooding her eyes.

  ‘You’re crying,’ Gideon mocked her, lifting his left hand to her face, his fingertips on her tears. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want you,’ Ellie told him, lifting her hands to his face and cupping it to prolong the kiss.

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t approve of you doing this,’ Gideon warned her when he finally lifted his mouth from hers.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Ellie answered recklessly. ‘I don’t care about anything or anyone now, Gideon, other than this and you.’

  Surely she deserved this brief moment of pleasure, of knowing how it felt to be a woman with a man. The man.

  She trembled as Gideon pushed her dress further down her body, revealing its pale purity, yearning for the feel of his hands on her naked flesh. In the streets beyond the closed windows, the sounds of rioting and disorder had
already faded, but Ellie never even registered that fact. All she was aware of was Gideon and how much she wanted him.

  In the rose-gold glow of the dipping sun, Gideon stared absorbed at the naked beauty of Ellie’s body, the soft peachy flush of her skin, its warmth to his touch, its softness and responsiveness. Just by looking at her he could make her tremble, her nipples harden and flaunt themselves for his attention whilst her belly tightened.

  He wanted to absorb every bit of her, to drink in through each of his senses the ‘Ellieness’ of her, the reality of her.

  As Gideon lifted her body free of her clothing, Ellie reached out instinctively to cover the soft curls protecting her sex with her hand. In all the months she and Henry had been married he had never seen her naked. And he had certainly never looked at her with the hungry male need with which Gideon was now looking at her.

  Getting up, he took a few paces and, keeping his back towards her, hurriedly pulled off his own clothes.

  Enthralled Ellie watched him – the breadth of his shoulders, the strength of his arms, the solid muscles of his thighs – her hungry gaze drank them all in. She stared boldly, refusing to look away, her bottom lip caught between her small white teeth as her breasts rose and fell with the sudden agitation of her breathing.

  ‘What is it?’ Gideon demanded mockingly. ‘You’ve seen a man before, haven’t you, Ellie? After all, you’re a married woman!’

  The ugly note in his voice was lost on her. She just said wonderingly, ‘Oh, Gideon, you are so very, very beautiful.’

  Once, hearing those words, seeing her look at him the way she was doing now, would have made him feel like a king, but now…

  Unable to stop herself, Ellie went to him, reaching out and touching him, just with her fingertips, letting them tremble in awed pleasure against his arm and then his chest, and then Ellie could feel his stomach tensing as she touched it, her fingers moving lower, delicately and uncertainly drawn to the hard jut of his sex.

  Gideon had thought that he was immune to anything she could do, but now he realised just how wrong he had been. He heard himself moan beneath her touch, a shudder ripping through him that set off an answering surge of sensation within Ellie’s own flesh.

  Gideon picked her up and placed her on the bed, leaning over her. Ellie reached up and traced the shape of his face with one fingertip and then took it to her lips and placed a kiss on it, which she carried to him.

  When Gideon’s lips opened over her finger and sucked fiercely on it, Ellie felt the contraction of pleasure inside her body.

  ‘You want this, Ellie?’ Gideon demanded as his hand parted her thighs. ‘You want me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellie whispered. ‘Oh yes! Gideon, yes…’

  Her answer set off a reaction as incendiary as a match struck against the sharpest tinder, fuelling an explosion that gripped them both, fusing them together in the same ricochet of hot urgency.

  The sweet savagery of the way she felt when Gideon touched her, entered her, took her, was, Ellie decided, enraptured, the culmination of the aching wasted years of wanting, and denying that wanting. This was what she had been born for; Gideon was who her body had been made for.

  As her flesh tightened and closed around him, holding him, urging him, she had no thought of anyone other than him.

  Her body tightened and surged, fiercely urgent in its desire, climbing, climbing, urging her further and further into the intimacy of their togetherness. Her nails dug into the sweat-slicked flesh of his back whilst she wrapped herself tightly around him, the harshness of their mutual breathing filling the room with a rhythmic crescendo of sound, punctuated by Ellie’s sharp cries of anguished pleasure and Gideon’s deeper guttural sounds of male urgency.

  Ellie felt her body surge and teeter, clinging, wanting and yet apprehensive, and then Gideon moved within her and the feel of him pushed her over the edge, into the spinning, dizzying freefall of pleasure that rushed up to embrace her.

  She heard herself cry out a sob of disbelieving awed pleasure, and she heard too Gideon’s raw shout of triumph.

  It was over. She was clinging to him, her hot face pressed into his shoulder whilst she sobbed tears of release into his skin and felt as though she had somehow touched a miraculous place, as though she had been granted a glimpse into a special kind of heaven. Her body still trembled in small aftershocks. The scent of Gideon, his maleness, his mastery of her, and of their shared desire, his release within her, filled her, and she knew it was a scent that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

  The rest of her life…which she was committed to living out as the wife of another man! Henry, who was not and never could be a man in any of the ways that Gideon was. Henry, to whom she had sold herself in marriage for a dozen different reasons, every single one of which was a betrayal of, a desecration of what she now knew a relationship between a man and a woman should be.

  Gideon lay on his back, fighting to control his breath. No woman had ever affected him the way Ellie had just done. No woman had ever made him feel, made him want, made him give so much of himself in so many intensely intimate ways. He had wanted to lay his mark upon her, his personal stamp of possession, in the most primitive of ways. He had wanted to take his revenge on her, he reminded himself fiercely – to right the wrong she had done him! And he had done so!

  Instinctively, Ellie reached for his hand to hold it in her own, and then for the first time looked properly at it.

  ‘Oh, Gideon…’ she whispered. All the pain she felt for him and for herself, and for all that they had both lost filled her eyes with tears of anguish.

  ‘Repulsive, isn’t it?’ Gideon gritted his teeth, wrenching it away from her. He had seen the look of shock in her eyes and he hated her for it. ‘I don’t need your pity, Ellie,’ he told her acidly. ‘Keep it and give it to the husband you have just cuckolded, along with mine!’

  His cruel words hit her like blows, the pain too intense for Ellie to be able to say or do anything to defend herself.

  Turning his head Gideon told her softly, ‘Remember all that time ago when you told me you didn’t want me, Ellie?’

  Ellie closed her eyes. It would be such a sweet relief, telling him now that she had never wanted to say that to him; that she had forced herself to do it, that she had realised a hundred times and more since, just how foolish she had been to want to protect her mother and to think that it was more important to do as she wanted than to follow her own heart.

  ‘Yes,’ she began shakily, but before she could continue, Gideon leaned over her, his face a rictus of bitterness and anger.

  ‘Well, you damn well wanted me just now, didn’t you? And do you know what, Ellie Pride? In the end you were no better than any cheap little whore I could have bought for the night. In fact, you were a hell of a lot worse!’

  White-faced, Ellie stared up at him. She thought she had known pain before – thought indeed that she had known it very well – but she had been wrong. Nothing she had experienced before came anywhere near this sharp, tearing, ripping agony.

  Whilst she lay on the bed, too afraid to move in case she cried out with the agony of what she was feeling, Gideon rolled away from her and stood up, keeping his back to her as he reached for his clothes.

  Ellie could feel her stomach clenching with misery and guilt as the hansom cab approached the house. She hated herself for what she had done and she hated Gideon even more – hated him. Dry-eyed, she managed to stifle the sob that threatened to betray her. She had caught the last train from Preston to Liverpool, and had telephoned Henry to explain that the reason she was late was because of the riots, but Henry had not answered her call.

  The cab stopped and she got out and paid the driver.

  Maisie let her in and told her that her father-in-law had not come home for dinner.

  ‘S’pose he’s gone to that Mrs Fazackerly’s,’ she pronounced darkly.

  ‘Where is Henry, Maisie?’ Ellie asked.

  All the way home, all she had bee
n able to think about was what she had done and how she had betrayed her husband and her marriage vows, and for what? Not for love, as she had so foolishly believed, but so that Gideon could be revenged on her.

  ‘He’s upstairs. Bin there all afternoon, he has. Not even had any dinner!’

  Reluctantly, Ellie went upstairs.

  Would Henry be able to tell what she had done? Would he look at her and know?

  Outside the bedroom door she took a deep breath and then opened it, calling out, ‘Henry, I’m so sorry, I’m later than I said. I tried to telephone. There were riots and…’ Her voice trailed away as she realised the bedroom was empty, and the door to Henry’s dressing room slightly ajar. And then she noticed the note prominently displayed on her dressing table, her name written on it in Henry’s handwriting.

  As she picked it up and opened it, Ellie’s hands were trembling. She read it quickly, barely able to comprehend its meaning, and then again more slowly.

  ‘My dearest wife,’ Henry had written,

  I am writing to say goodbye to you.

  You have been the kindest wife any man could want, Ellie, and I want you to know how much I bless you every day for being you, but I cannot continue as I have done, living with the terrible burden of guilt my father has forced upon me so I am tainted by his crime. At night I cannot sleep for seeing the dead faces of those murdered seamen, nor from hearing their screams. What I am doing is for the best, Ellie.

  I am your devoted husband, Henry Johnson.

  Ellie frowned in bewilderment to see that Henry had signed his name with his mother’s surname and not his father’s. Where was he? What did his letter mean? Why had he…?

  A creak from the dressing-room door caught her attention. Putting down the letter Ellie went towards it.

  Pushing the door open she stepped inside and then froze as she saw the inert body of her husband swaying gently from the makeshift gibbet he had set up in the corner of the room, a noose around his neck.