by Jagger, Kait
‘Let’s give Isabelle something to think about, shall we?’ she said, drawing up short, tossing her head back dramatically. And then, as Kayla’s sultry voice wove its spell over the gallery, Luna placed her hand on Tarquin’s chest and stalked toward him, forcing him to retreat step by step in time with her. They continued their backward journey till they were mere feet away from the band, and there Luna stopped, locking her glowing white-blue eyes with Kayla’s green ones in unspoken complicity. Kayla grinned wickedly in return and turned up the heat, shimmying in time to the music.
‘I say, Selkie,’ Tarquin marvelled, joining in the spirit of things, swiftly jerking her body up against his. ‘You’re a bit of a dark horse.’
Glass of champagne number four found Luna leaning against the bar, listening to Kayla’s between-song patter. ‘In this next number we pay homage to the Chairman of the Board, may he rest in peace,’ Kayla announced as she and her band members donned trilbies and the keyboardist played the opening notes of a well-known Sinatra song. ‘I’d like to dedicate this to a little tramp I know.’ Kayla zeroed in on Luna, nodding meaningfully. ‘She knows who she is.’
Suddenly a hand grasped Luna’s, pulling her towards the dance floor, where she found herself drawn up against a lean, muscular chest.
‘I’m tired of leading,’ Mika declared, blue eyes twinkling down at her. ‘You lead.’ Luna snorted, then began to laugh helplessly, drawing the gazes of their fellow dancers and Stefan, who was standing nearby with the magazine reporter. Their eyes met for an instant and a dark promise passed from him to her.
He watched her throughout the ensuing, slightly awkward dance, where she did indeed do most of the leading, barely waiting till Kayla belted out the final strains to make his way onto the floor and place a hand on Mika’s shoulder. ‘You don’t mind if I steal her away, do you?’ He smiled intently and Luna’s heart sank as Mika returned the smile in kind, giving Stefan look for look. After what seemed like an eternity, the Finn turned to her and lifted her hand to his mouth.
‘Thank you for teaching me,’ he said, and walked away.
Behind them, the musicians began putting down their instruments, four of them coming to stand in front of a microphone. Someone brought a high stool for Kayla, who removed her own mike from its stand and adjusted herself on the seat, legs crossed elegantly.
Luna, meanwhile, frowned irritably up at Stefan. ‘Was that really necessary?’
‘What exactly have you been “teaching” Mika, min älskling?’ he enquired in that oh-so-bland way of his that got right up Luna’s nose. Lips tightening, she made to shake free of him but his hand shot out to her waist, holding her in position.
The percussionist stood and removed his microphone from its stand, raising it to his lips, beatboxing the drum-brush prelude to a song Luna recognised from one of the band’s recent gigs in Soho, a little-known Adele duet that Kayla had transformed into an a cappella lamentation on star-crossed love. Kay was gathering herself now, slowly tapping her foot on the rung of her stool as her backing singers hummed the opening bars in fluid four-part harmony.
Unlike Mika, Stefan was an extremely accomplished dancer, dance classes having been included in the sports excellence regime imposed on him by his parents from an early age. Under normal circumstances, Luna loved being partnered by him, loved the way they complemented each other. This time, however, he signalled his intent from the very start, tightening his fingers on her waist and giving her a tiny shake. ‘No leading,’ he warned under his breath. Swallowing a retort, Luna pursed her lips and swayed into his arms.
At first, she concentrated exclusively on mirroring his movements, surrendering to the persuasive movement of his hips and his hand resting just below her shoulder blade, drawing her to him. His cheek pressed into her temple and for a few brief seconds Luna allowed herself to pretend that this was just another dance.
It didn’t last.
‘So,’ he murmured eventually in her ear, ‘I thought to myself, what do you get for the girl who doesn’t like Valentine’s Day? Nothing so obvious as flowers or chocolates, for sure.’ His tone was scathingly facetious and Luna gritted her teeth, choosing to focus on Kayla’s soulful voice mourning empty days and unanswered calls.
‘I know!’ Stefan exclaimed softly, ‘I will surprise her, come home early so I can attend this special party of hers. Little did I know that the surprise would be on me.’ Luna huffed an exasperated noise and he retaliated by spinning her, lowering her into a dip, and grating out, ‘What exactly do the words “no rapprochement” mean to you? I stupidly assumed that because you speak French—’
‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,’ Luna hissed up at him, removing her hand from his shoulder and extending her fingers gracefully through the air, owning the dip even as she plunged perilously close to the floor.
‘I stupidly assumed,’ he reiterated, hauling her back up against him, ‘that you would understand I do not want to resume a relationship with my cousins. But instead I find you welcoming them into my home—’
‘—which was their home until last year—’
‘—encouraging them to act as hostesses—’ Stefan whirled her into the middle of the dance floor, shortening his steps to allow for the crush of surrounding dancers. Fighting against the silent pull of his body, the way it attracted her, weakened her, Luna tilted her head back and addressed him coldly.
‘You wouldn’t be so dismissive of family ties if you had no family.’ He tensed at this rare reminder of their different backgrounds and she immediately regretted saying it.
His head descended till his lips hovered above hers, poised, she presumed, to offer a concession, an apology. Instead his mouth twisted. ‘“Luna Gregory bows to no man”,’ he quoted, sounding derisive, and jealous, and furious. Another tiny shake. ‘You will bow to me.’ Before she could argue, he kissed her, open-mouthed, teeth scraping against hers, tongue invading her mouth.
The song reached its climax, a call-and-response middle eight that pitted Kayla against her four backing singers. And because he knew Luna, knew what Kayla meant to her, he relented then, releasing her from the kiss and twirling her so they both faced the stage, his arms clasped around her. At the song’s emotional high point, when Kayla’s lovelorn refrain climbed to a spine-tingling A sharp, Luna whooped in response, jumping up and down as a roaring round of applause went up in the gallery.
And then they were dancing to the final chorus and the only thought in her mind was how right Stefan’s body felt, how sure his movements were, how strong his arms seemed, lifting her up at the very end of the song till she hung suspended above him, her hands resting on his shoulders. Another burst of applause, this time as much for them as for the music.
‘The Marquess of Lionsbridge and his lovely dance partner,’ Kayla laughed into the microphone, gesturing toward them. ‘They’re here all week.’
*
Their truce held till the party wound to its close in the early hours of the morning, when Stefan escorted out the board members and Luna conducted a quick debrief with Ashley. It held as the two of them led their small group of overnight guests up the main staircase to the private wing, Mika and a giggling Kayla heading straight to the sitting room to ‘sample Stefan’s fine whiskey’, as Mika put it. It held even as Isabelle stood clinging obliviously to Stefan’s arm in the hallway till Tarquin was compelled to drag his protesting girlfriend into her bedroom and firmly shut the door.
Luna said to Mark and Helen, ‘I’ve ordered breakfast for nine tomorrow,’ and Helen opened her mouth to respond. But then Stefan came to stand next to Luna, eyes upon her, electricity humming between them. Throwing Luna what looked almost like an apologetic glance, Helen shut her mouth and withdrew into her bedroom.
And then they were alone. Luna made to move past him but Stefan shifted positions, blocking her path. She raised a hand to… what? Force him out of the way? Distract him whil
st she dropped and rolled past? It didn’t matter, because as she raised it the bell on her wrist chimed and the sound was like a flash of antelope’s tail to a lion. He was immediately upon her, crushing her to him, lifting her off her feet and driving her backward down the hall. Through the door of the linen closet, into the hushed rose-scented darkness, his hands on her arse, teeth at her neck, cock hard against her.
They rotated through the closet in a carnal parody of their earlier dance, hips straining together, bodies ensnared. God help her, angry as she was, Luna was panting for him, lifting her hands to his nape and jerking his mouth to hers, capturing his lower lip between her teeth and tearing at it.
‘Hands on the mattress,’ Stefan commanded after they’d stumbled into the Maid’s Room. Luna obeyed and he immediately bunched her velvet skirt in his hands, pushing it up past her hips. At the sight of her stockings and garters, he gloated huskily, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day to me,’ then ordered, ‘Head down on the mattress too. And get that lovely arse in the air.’
He spat into his hand and his fingers delved into the cleft between her cheeks, finding and stroking her. ‘Open for me,’ he whispered against her neck, and spat again, sliding his fingers around and into her anus, teasing, stretching, readying. It came to Luna that he was taking her this way for a reason: this position required complete and willing capitulation on her part. Surrender.
And surrender she did. When she felt the slippery head of his cock blunt against her, breaching her millimetre by millimetre, she focused on relaxing her muscles, exulting as she always did when her mind overcame her body’s instinctual refusal, permitting Stefan to fill her. He seated himself completely against her and stilled, hands on her hips, thighs pressed against hers.
Three growled words: ‘So.’ Thrust. ‘Fucking.’ Thrust. ‘Tight.’
His thrusts gathered pace and more words came, a profane hosanna to the power and beauty of her arse tumbling from his lips till words eventually deserted him and the only sound was of his flesh slapping against hers and his rhythmic, tortured gasps, ecstasy and agony combined. Sweet… ahh, he couldn’t make her come this way but Lord, how Luna wanted him, wanted him to take her, to pin her to this bed and fuck her till she couldn’t walk, couldn’t think.
Digging her fingers into the coverlet, she arched her back. ‘Harder,’ she entreated. And when he resisted, cursing and slowing his strokes, she rose onto the tips of her toes, grinding her backside into him. That broke him. Endowed with a mind of their own, his hips commenced to ram into her so hard and fast that her thighs were trembling. ‘Come for me,’ she gasped, her final words drowned out by his repeated snarls of gratification, one for each of his final thrusts.
Their legs gave out simultaneously and they collapsed on their sides atop the bed, bodies curled together, panting in unison.
*
Luna ended the night much as she’d begun it, perched on the armchair in her attic sitting room, the wooden presentation box on her lap. Stefan was quietly undressing in the bedroom, hanging his tuxedo in the wardrobe next to her velvet dress, silence stretching out between them.
She tried to undo the clasps on her bracelets, but her fingers were clumsy, ineffectual. She made a little noise of exasperation and Stefan came and knelt in front of her, majestic in his nakedness. Taking her wrists in his hands, he removed the bracelets, returning them to their box and placing it in turn on the floor.
‘Luna,’ he said, retrieving her hands. ‘What you did tonight—’ she bit her lip, bracing herself for a set down, but he gave her hands a squeeze and concluded, ‘—was the right thing to do. I’ve allowed my anger with Helen and Isabelle to cloud my judgement. You’re right, there are benefits to their continued involvement in the estate. But, flicka, why did you keep it a secret from me?’
His tone was gentle and perplexed, and it struck at the heart of her. ‘I… I thought you’d say no.’
He nodded sombrely. ‘I might have. But you can be very persuasive. If you’d explained your business rationale—’
She cut him off, shaking her head. ‘I didn’t do it for business reasons. The story, the magazine cover, those are collateral benefits. The more important thing to me was to mend the rift between you and them.’
‘And this is what I don’t understand,’ he replied, expression darkening. ‘From the moment we first met, I have watched Isabelle disrespect you, belittle you, treat you with contempt. And last summer Helen as good as accused you of being a whore, of fucking your way to the top. I don’t understand how you can forgive and forget these insults.’
‘I don’t,’ Luna said sharply, irises crystallising. ‘I haven’t forgotten the way they treated me, and I doubt I will ever forgive it.’
‘Then why?’ he asked. ‘Why do this?’
Luna tilted her head, mystified by his incomprehension.
‘For you,’ she said.
The two words reverberated between them, thickening, coalescing. Her opaque eyes remained fixed on his, but she knew without looking that his cock was hard again. Without breaking eye contact, he reached to the sash of her robe and untied it, revealing her naked body underneath. ‘Open for me,’ he said for the second time that night, and parted her legs, pulling them toward him till she lay supine, her head lolling on the upholstered back of the chair. He bent to bury his nose in her sex, drawing in her fragrance.
‘When I was taking you earlier I thought of this,’ he said, homing in on the spot where her nether hair yielded to soft, delicate flesh. ‘The way you smell, the way you taste, the way you… mmm…’ His tongue sought the entrance to her vagina, plunged into it once. And again, deeper. ‘Even if I could never fuck you again, I would be happy just to do this, to feel you under my mouth, to bring you pleasure and hear you call my name when you come. Will you, Luna?’ His tongue entered her again, deeper still, and Luna’s clitoris leapt in anticipation of what was to follow. Stefan lifted his head, eyes burning bright up into hers. ‘Will you say my name?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, her voice low and aching. She reached her hand down to his cheek, slid it through his hair to his nape and kept it there as he returned his mouth to her, sipping at her, then nursing at her, patiently suckling her clitoris till her eyes rolled back in her head and her entire sex spasmed beneath his tongue.
She did just as he’d asked, in the end, weeping over and over, ‘Stefan… ah, Stefan.’
Chapter Thirteen
Luna overslept the following morning, creeping down to the family dining room to find her entire contingent of overnight guests halfway through breakfast.
‘Good morning, flicka!’ Stefan greeted her heartily from his seat at the head of the table. Luna tried to slump inconspicuously into the empty chair next to his, but he reached out and snared her arm, pulling her onto his lap and kissing her soundly to the accompaniment of Megan and Tilly’s delighted titters.
Luna squirmed away from him and reached for the coffee, enquiring sheepishly, ‘Did everyone sleep well?’
‘Like the proverbial dead,’ Tarquin affirmed, provoking another flight of giggles from the girls.
Kayla, in the meantime, gave Luna a thorough once-over from across the table and mouthed at her, You naughty girl.
Only Isabelle and Helen seemed subdued, the younger Wellstone sister toying with the food on her plate and the elder glancing anxiously at Stefan. Luna threw Stefan an accusatory look, but he widened his eyes innocently and, with a small shrug of his shoulders, slid that morning’s Times supplement toward her.
‘We didn’t know anything about this,’ Helen said anxiously, looking thoroughly miserable.
the disinherited, read the headline, under which ran a subhead: british aristocrats mourn the loss of their traditional lifestyle. At the bottom of the page was a photo of Florian Wellstone standing in a field choked with thistles, Arborage House looming in the background. His expression in the photo was nothing short
of tragic. No prizes, Luna thought to herself irritably, for guessing whose field he’d had it taken in. Hurriedly scanning the first few paragraphs of the article, she began to rise from her seat, poised to ring Caitlin, but Stefan placed his hand on hers.
‘I’ve phoned her. It’s in hand,’ he said. ‘Sit and eat.’
Their guests decamped en masse after breakfast, Stefan and Luna coming down to see them off in the portico. It was better parting with Mika this way, she told herself as she watched him load his luggage into the taxi he and Kay were sharing into London. Long goodbyes, any goodbyes really, made her melancholy, and she was already sad enough about his departure.
‘So,’ she whispered to Kayla as they hugged goodbye. ‘Anything happen between you two?’
Kayla pulled back from her, giving her a quirky, weirdly benign little look. ‘Ah, no, babe…’
The Finn himself seemed in a hurry to be gone, evading Luna’s attempts to thank him with a clipped, ‘I’ll text you.’ She watched their taxi pull away down the drive, feeling ever so slightly teary. Tiredness, she told herself. Hangover.
‘Please, Mummy, please,’ came a plaintive cry behind her. Luna turned to see a red-faced Tilly pulling on Helen’s arm, herself looking weepy. ‘Just ask her.’
‘We need to get home, Matilda,’ Helen said firmly. ‘You have a riding lesson in less than an hour.’
‘I don’t want to have a lesson,’ Tilly retorted, stamping her foot. She turned and appealed to Luna, ‘You wouldn’t mind me staying here today, would you? I promise I won’t be any bother.’
‘Well…’ Luna cast Helen a hesitant look.
Helen bent down to whisper furiously in her daughter’s ear and Tilly’s face went from red to scarlet whilst behind her Megan rolled her eyes in pained anticipation of what was to come. Hoping to extricate herself from a threatened meltdown, Luna stepped aside, only to bump straight into Isabelle. Who cleared her throat and pronounced carefully, ‘Thank you very much for including me last night.’ Isabelle’s eyes shifted to Tarquin, who returned the look so balefully she swallowed and added, ‘It was very thoughtful of you.’ Well, Luna thought, this was certainly a turn-up for the books.
