by Jagger, Kait
‘Don’t stop,’ she begged. His mouth thrust against her again. ‘Please I—’ And again. ‘No, now, in me now, please.’ Swiftly he was back on his knees behind her, pulling her ankles apart till she felt the twine dig into them, thrusting into her till he was buried to the hilt. Ramming into her hard and fast, slapping against her, her clitoris so sensitive now that every thrust brought her closer. Her orgasm began to unfurl with overwhelming inevitability and Luna keened, and the sound of her own voice, high and desperate, was her undoing. He knew just how to finish her, swivelling his hips into her pubis, grinding into her until there was nothing else in the world but her sex exploding and contracting around him, rapturous sobs rising in her throat as he slowed the pace of his entry to help her ride it out, make it last.
When it was over, her thighs stretched beneath him, sweat pooling in the small of her back, he stilled within her, panting. Then pulled out of her again, flipping her over on the bed and, to her surprise, dragging the scarf from her face. She looked up to find him staring down at her, eyes alight with longing.
‘You… please me so much, Luna,’ he said, slipping his hard shaft back inside her. She widened her legs to accommodate him and the twine tightened, cutting into her wrists. ‘See how much you please me.’ He closed his eyes, pumping into her. ‘See how…’ he gasped, his brow creasing. He slammed into her once, twice and then cried out, convulsing against her.
Chapter Seven
The days ticked down to Christmas and life at Arborage began its annual slowdown. Mika left for Helsinki, laden with gifts for his family, and Stefan, finished with travelling for the year, split his time between the estate and his office in Mayfair. Luna, meanwhile, went through the motions of the season, hosting coffee and mince pies with her managers and making the rounds of team parties, carefully concealing her own ambivalence.
It had been fourteen years since she herself had celebrated Christmas. Usually she travelled at this time of year, to Morocco or Egypt, last year to the Devon coast. Likewise, she made an annual point of ignoring Valentine’s Day, which had been her parents’ special day, and her birthday, which to her was just a stark reminder that another year had passed since they’d left her. Her friends knew better than to press her on the matter, and only Nancy insisted on giving her a birthday present every year, something ‘extravagant and beautiful and useless, like you’, she joked.
Of course, all this was changing now that Stefan was in her life. On wheedling a confession from her that her birthday fell a day before the one-year anniversary of their first meeting, he’d insisted on making an embarrassing two-day fuss of her, full of gifts, breakfasts in bed and a memorable moonlit picnic. As to the yuletide season, well, he simply refused to acknowledge her ambivalence. She would be coming home with him to Stockholm for Christmas and that was that, he informed her when she’d uhmmed and ahhed.
And if she was quietly apprehensive about the prospect, she tried to keep it to herself. Just as she concealed her unease when, three days before Christmas, an invitation from Arborage’s freelance wedding planner appeared in her diary.
This was the third such meeting the planner had scheduled in her thus-far-fruitless quest to prevail upon Luna to set a date for her and Stefan’s nuptials. Luna had cancelled their first appointment in the estate’s chapel at the last minute, phoning from the adjacent graveyard, covered in cold sweat, to say she’d been unavoidably detained. She managed, just, to keep their next appointment in the permanent marquee beside the main house, palms sweating as the wedding planner waxed lyrical about guest lists, and vows and menus. But she’d ignored the woman’s subsequent missives warning her of the rapidly dwindling supply of available wedding dates in the marquee for the coming year. Until there were no dates left.
The planner’s final gambit had been to suggest a ceremony in the small chapel within the house itself. No weddings had taken place there for more than eighty years, but, the planner cheerily insisted, this didn’t present an impediment. Not for the Marquess and his bride-to-be.
‘Here she is, the runaway bride!’ the wedding planner trilled when Luna appeared at the top of the small staircase leading down to the chapel, carefully descending stone steps worn down in the middle from centuries of foot traffic. This was the very oldest part of the house, the only remnant that remained of the Tudor manor where Robert Wellstone had lived briefly with his wife Margery.
It was deconsecrated now, just another room on the house tour. And, to her relief, Luna felt… alright as she came to sit next to the planner in one of the oak pews, beside a carving of the seventh station of the cross. No heart palpitations, no sweaty palms, not even as the wedding planner assumed command in the manner of a Whistles-clad dictator.
‘Of course, we’d have to apply for a special licence to use the chapel for your ceremony,’ the woman said, adding swiftly, ‘but that shouldn’t be a problem. And it would have to be an evening wedding, unless you were willing to relax your rules a little and close the house to tours for the day.’ She shot Luna a hopeful glance, but found no quarter there. ‘Evening it is, then. The only other issue is room capacity. I estimate it at no more than thirty.’
‘So, an intimate wedding,’ Luna said quietly. Fourteen years and still the good ex-Catholic girl, keeping her voice down in church.
‘Yes,’ the planner hurried on, ‘but that’s not a bad thing, especially if one is inclined to pre-wedding jitters.’
‘Jitters,’ Luna repeated, resting her coolest gaze on the woman, practically hearing the panicked grinding of gears into reverse.
‘Not that you have jitters!’ the woman hastened to add. ‘Small weddings can be lovely. Just you, the groom, your families…’ Her family.
A missed beat in Luna’s chest.
‘I can just picture this chapel by candlelight, with little lanterns on the stairs,’ the woman twittered on.
Dampness in the centre of Luna’s palms.
‘And a small wedding gives you an excuse to have a large reception.’ On a roll now, the wedding planner assured, ‘It will be absolutely spectacular, I promise you.’
Luna got out of that chapel fast, as fast as she could reasonably fabricate an excuse about a forgotten breakfast meeting, fast as her legs would carry her up the stairs, practically running down the hallway. She found a quiet alcove near the portrait gallery, where she sat down on a wooden bench and put her head between her knees. Sometime later, she heard a primary school group flood into the gallery. Full of seasonal high spirits, they were singing a giggling rendition of ‘Little Donkey’, their voices so quavery and sweet, it made Luna’s eyes sting to listen to them.
Another Christmas. Another year.
Before she returned to her office, Luna blotted every trace of perspiration from her face, every outward sign of anything other than calm coolness. She walked into Stefan’s anteroom to find him and his right-hand man from SL Associates, James McGregor, drinking coffee and looking at architectural drawings. James immediately bounded up from the settee, kissing her on both cheeks.
‘Happy Christmas, Luna!’ he said, brown eyes shining.
Stefan had asked James there, Luna knew, to discuss tentative plans to relocate SLA’s London headquarters from its current, ultra-expensive location in Mayfair to a converted outbuilding on the estate. An opportunity for Stefan to both reduce his outgoings and consolidate his interests, though Luna sensed that city boy James wasn’t entirely sold on the idea.
And she was only too happy, after her aborted morning of wedding planning, to come along with them on a visit to the outbuilding. She fancied she and Stefan made a good sales team, her laying out the many perks of running a business from the estate while he cunningly played devil’s advocate, all the while discreetly nudging James in the direction of his preferred outcome.
‘I think he’s coming around,’ Luna said later, as she and Stefan walked back to the house together, sheltering unde
r a shared umbrella in the late December rain.
Stefan grunted his assent. ‘Quick thinking of yours, offering shared use of the staff canteen.’
‘Plus the discount at the farm shop,’ Luna smiled. ‘James likes his free-range gammon.’
*
Luna and Stefan flew home to Stockholm on December 24th, arriving at his father’s house to find his partner Christian putting the finishing touches on a proverbial smörgåsbord of food. The Swedish tradition was to eat the main meal on Christmas Eve, rather than on Christmas Day, and there was enough food on their dining room table to feed an army. To Luna’s amazement, the couple’s normally minimalist home was also heavily bedecked with Christmas decorations, including an eight-foot-tall fir tree in the living room and little tea lights all around their garden.
‘All Christian’s doing!’ Sören reported jovially, engulfing Luna in a bear hug. ‘He makes this house a home.’ The younger man adjusted his dark-framed glasses on his nose and ducked his head.
‘Ah, Pappa, you make him blush!’ Stefan laughed as he affectionately threw his arm over Christian’s shoulder.
For her own part, after placing the painstakingly wrapped gifts she’d obsessed over for weeks under the tree and accepting a glass of mulled wine, Luna stood in the kitchen watching the three men laugh and joke with each other – and felt entirely like an outsider. It was nothing any of them did; they were always careful to speak in English in her presence, Sören frequently drawing her into the conversation, his blue eyes sparkling just like his son’s. Christian, too, was nothing but cordial toward her.
But it had been so long since she had experienced a family Christmas. Watching Christian smile a special, private smile at Sören as he described some teenage scrape involving Stefan, Mika, a nativity crèche and the police (‘We were bearing gifts for the baby Jesus!’ Stefan protested amiably), Luna realised that, having elected to spend Christmas alone for the past fourteen years, she’d completely forgotten how to do it in company.
It got better later, when Stefan’s uncles Karl and Oscar, their wives and assorted children and grandchildren arrived and she and Stefan assumed the mantle of entertainment officers. Always more at ease when she had a job to do, Luna threw herself into organising a game of moving statues in the snowy garden, and later sat at the ‘young persons’ table’ with the junior Lundgrens, listening to family stories and amusing them with her beginner’s Swedish. Later still, she settled in front of the telly with his littlest cousins to watch Disney films, surveying the assorted tousled heads around her and smiling her own private smile at Stefan.
And much later, when all the guests had left and Luna and Christian had gone to bed, she left the door of her bedroom open purely to listen to the sound of Sören and Stefan in the living room, quietly talking to each other in Swedish. It was like listening to music, or a babbling brook, being gently lulled to sleep by their voices.
Stefan joined her in bed in the early hours, groaning, ‘I have eaten too much. I feel sick.’
Luna reached out to stroke his arm, before shifting uncomfortably and replying, ‘I feel sick too.’ Their eyes met across the pillow and she clapped a hand over her mouth, running for the bathroom.
Food poisoning, it turned out to be. Not from anything Christian had prepared, it emerged during the subsequent forensic investigation conducted by the entire Lundgren family, but from some pâté one of Stefan’s aunts had brought. Which struck Luna as particularly unfair, because she loathed pâté and had only eaten it to be polite.
Ever one to look on the bright side, Stefan remarked to Luna in the wee small hours of Christmas morning, as he hugged the sink and she knelt in front of the loo, ‘This is a good thing, flicka. Now we have seen each other at our absolute worst—’ he gagged and bent into the basin, ‘—and I still love you, and you still love me.’
Luna responded by curling up into a foetal position on the bathroom floor, and he went on, ‘Also, this gets us out of going to my mother’s tomorrow, which is a silver lining for sure.’
Chapter Eight
Stefan wasn’t entirely absolved of his maternal obligations for the holidays, of course. Karoline Lundgren hosted an annual soiree between Christmas and New Year, and the two of them were sufficiently recovered by then to attend.
Karoline lived in Gamla Stan, a small island to the south of central Stockholm comprised of cobbled streets, quaint squares and medieval churches. The dinner venue was a three-hundred-year-old restaurant located close to the headquarters of the Nobel Prize committee. Redolent of history and popular with the city’s cultural elite, Luna and Stefan had eaten there before with Karoline and, truth be told, Luna had found it slightly stuffy. Overly formal.
Sure enough, when they arrived at just after 7pm, the maître d’ hustled them straight past the bar, where she might have liked to indulge in a little Dutch courage given the opportunity, into a private room with low beamed ceilings and shuttered windows. Some thirty guests in evening attire were mingling amid tables immaculately laid out with white linen, gleaming stemware and cutlery. There were also, Luna noticed, ornately calligraphed place cards at each place setting.
‘Stefan!’ came Karoline’s unmistakable warble from within a scrum of women of a certain age, which parted to reveal his mother, resplendent in a cream-coloured full-length gown, her gamine haircut perfectly framing her angular face. She held her arms open to him.
‘You are late,’ she purred as he kissed her cheek. Then she turned to Luna and smiled her brightest smile, a smile that – did Luna imagine it? – faltered almost imperceptibly as she took in Luna’s form-fitting lace minidress and matching thigh-high suede boots. The moment passed. ‘Come, come,’ she said to them, dragging them toward her group of friends. Karoline’s inner circle, her ‘disciples’ as Stefan somewhat disparagingly referred to them, were a combination of carefully preserved society matriarchs and strangely asexual men. Who, whether by design or tacit agreement, often seemed to dress in black, hovering around her like a murder of crows.
‘Ah, the happy young couple,’ pronounced one wraith-thin woman with a face rendered almost completely immobile by cosmetic interventions. ‘When is the wedding, Stefan?’
‘Perhaps before the night is through you can convince Luna to name a date,’ Stefan responded lightly.
Thankfully at that moment Luna spotted Mika and Matthias entering the room trailed by Astrid, an ex-girlfriend of Stefan’s. The rosy-cheeked athletic blonde raised her hand and made to come over, but was stopped in her tracks by a single, imperious clap from Karoline, beckoning her guests to be seated.
There followed a surreptitious game of musical chairs, wherein Luna and others glided through the room in search of their place cards. Karoline Lundgren was a throwback to a starchier era, where arcane matters like one’s placement in a room mattered, so Luna wasn’t entirely surprised to eventually find her card at a small table in the corner of the room populated by a disgruntled-looking middle-aged couple and an affable octogenarian.
Pulling out her chair, Luna summoned up her very best Swedish, enunciating carefully, ‘Hej, trevligt att träffas, mitt namn är Luna.’ And almost immediately regretted it when the elderly woman launched into a long counter-greeting in Swedish, very little of which Luna understood. Eventually the middle-aged woman, whose hair was dyed an entirely implausible shade of red, cut her off, honking impatiently, ‘She is English, Mamma,’ before adding something in Swedish along the lines of Karoline’s future daughter-in-law. Accompanied by a dead-eyed, unenthusiastic stare at Luna.
Stefan didn’t look too happy either, sitting at the top table next to his mother, when his eyes sought and found Luna across the room. He frowned and made to come to her, but Luna gave him a cheery, don’t-worry-I’m-fine thumbs up, gesturing toward the Salonen brothers, who were assigned to the table next to hers.
A long evening, it turned out to be. Upon being presented wi
th an appetiser of, Jesus wept, pâté, which Luna gamely pushed around her plate with her knife and fork, she set about trying to converse in pidgin Swedish with her elderly dinner companion on the left, whilst fielding silent waves of disgruntlement from the woman’s daughter on the right. Who, Luna gathered from the whispered, accusatory conversations she kept having with her husband, was unhappy with her placement in the room, well out of Karoline’s orbit.
And then the speeches started. The Swedes were big on long, drawn-out toasts, Luna had found, and Karoline’s guests were no exception. Between her uneaten appetiser and an equally uninspiring main course of dumplings and lingonberries, Luna counted eight toasts. All in Swedish, of course. Judging from the few words she understood and, more tellingly, her future mother-in-law’s frequent, girlish demurrals, Luna concluded that the main topic was Karoline’s peerless reputation as a hostess. Her attention began to wander, and she wasn’t the only one. During a speech by a lugubrious Stellan Skarsgård lookalike, Luna’s eyes fell on Astrid, who was seated at the end of the top table contemplating a large glass of red wine. Approaching the climax of his toast, Stellan gestured extravagantly toward Karoline and the room broke out in enthusiastic applause. Astrid, meanwhile, took a slug of her glass, looked straight at Luna. And crossed her eyes.
Luna snorted involuntarily, drawing a baleful glance from her right. Suddenly, the back of a head inclined against hers. ‘Having fun?’ Mika enquired sotto voce.
‘Yes indeed,’ Luna whispered in return. ‘You? Did you have a good Christmas?’
‘Better than you.’ A pregnant pause. ‘Head, not down toilet.’
Ah, God, it was too much. Luna’s shoulders started to shake, a bubble of laughter fighting its way up inside her. There came another burst of applause and drinks all around as Stellan concluded his toast. Breathing deeply, trying to think unfunny thoughts, Luna reached for her glass of wine, when suddenly a hand gripped her left wrist.
