Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  Thorn: When Luna mooted the possibility of identifying a similar role for Isabelle, Stefan’s response had been along the lines of ‘over my dead body’.

  Rose: Last month, Stefan had been approached by the production company behind The Triad, a business reality show he’d appeared in for one memorable series several years ago, which wanted to make a new programme documenting his efforts to construct a faithful recreation of the Dower House using traditional seventeenth-century building materials and techniques.

  Thorn: The producer who pitched to them also wanted to feature Luna in the programme. Judging from his jokey asides to Stefan, he envisioned her in the role of nagging girlfriend. Prompting a reaction of the ‘over my dead body’ variety from Luna.

  Rose: Roland was nearing the halfway point of his fictionalised account of Robert and Margery’s marriage and, at Luna’s suggestion, had begun to blog about his research and writing. The… ahem, intimate scenes in the story were surprisingly vividly portrayed, and Luna was genuinely excited about the book’s prospects.

  Thorn: His eye was off the ball at work, and Tours was beginning to suffer as a result. Somehow Alex Parker had become his de facto second-in-command, not an acceptable state of affairs in Luna’s view. Soon she would have to address the situation.

  Thorn: Mika, whose absence from her life Luna mourned daily. She hoped with all her heart that it wasn’t a permanent loss.

  Rose: Karoline, whose absence from her and Stefan’s lives Luna mourned not at all. She was aware that Stefan spoke to his mother occasionally on the phone, but the conversations were strained. In the spirit of being completely honest with him, Luna had told him about waking up in restraints in her hospital bed. And watched as something dark twisted within him, an echo of the look she’d seen on Sören’s face that day in his son’s hospital room.

  Rose: Kayla was going to be in a US cable mini-series! About an alien invasion. With puppets apparently. Last week, Luna, Stefan, Jem and Rod had all flown over to Iceland to visit her on location and had a lovely time whale watching, cycling across the plain where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates converged, meeting Kayla’s new Icelandic puppeteer boyfriend, and relaxing in Iceland’s premier hot springs, the Blue Lagoon, drinking slushies (girls) and beer (boys).

  Thorn: To both Luna and Jem’s amazement, Kayla appeared to have fallen hard for the Icelandic puppeteer, who, she revealed a little sadly, wasn’t the settling down kind. A disclosure that led Jem to blush, study her tangerine-coloured nails and reveal…

  Rose: Rod had proposed to her! And they were getting married in November! Cue 1) Extended screaming and ecstatic hugging in Icelandic puppeteer’s harbour-front penthouse apartment in Reykjavik; 2) A subsequent Facetime call with Nancy (who was in China on business and mightily annoyed to be the last to hear this news). More screaming; 3) Inevitable ‘always a groomsman’ jibes aimed at Luna’s own fiancé. ‘Maybe someday Luna will make an honest man out of you, Stefan,’ Kayla said, making soulful eyes at him. Then cackling.

  For his part, Stefan took the teasing in good heart, and said nothing to Luna about it later. Since his return to Arborage, the issue of when and where their nuptials would take place had taken a back seat to more pleasurable pursuits, to Luna’s profound relief. She was happy, quite frankly, to enjoy just being with him.

  Was it possible to love Stefan more than she’d already loved him before the incident in Stockholm? It was, because she did.

  Not for any of the predictable, near-death-experience, I-almost-lost-you reasons one might expect – though those were never far from her mind in the dark of night, when she lay watching him sleep, counting his breaths. Or the light of day, when she occasionally caught herself rushing to his side when some invisible internal clock told her it had been too long since she’d seen him, touched him.

  She felt the clock running down even now, so rose from her bench and began the long, slow jog back to the house. Exiting the walled garden, she rejoined the gravel path that bisected the Queen Charlotte lawn, her heart warming when she saw him running alone ahead of her, two hundred or so metres away. She picked up speed.

  No, she thought to herself. She didn’t love him more because she was afraid of losing him, but because now she knew with absolute certainty what he was to her. And she to him.

  She was fair sprinting by the time she caught up to him, veering off the path onto the lawn so he wouldn’t hear her approach, running like a pro. And that reminded her of a final…

  Rose: Thank God, she was at long last completely recovered from the attack in March. Only now, looking back on those dark weeks after the stabbing, could she appreciate just how dire her injuries had been, how completely her body had fallen apart in the aftermath. And now? She felt fantastic. Better, more healthy than before the attack, if that were possible. What a difference a few months made.

  Thorn: Luna thought about it for a second, bounding up behind Stefan’s flank, just coming abreast of him. Other than the fact that she had appointed herself his health guardian, conducting intensive research on the small but real risks of losing a spleen and subsequently imposing a rigorous vitamin-taking and immunity-building regime on him? No, Luna thought, grinning widely to herself, there were no thorns to this rose!

  ‘Mee-meep!’ she cried as she flew past him, Roadrunner to his Wile E Coyote. Taken off guard, he didn’t even try to catch her, pulling to a halt on the path and letting out a hearty laugh. Watching her go.

  She was already in the shower when he entered the attic bathroom, pulling his tank top over his head and peeling off his leggings. Luna twitched the shower curtain open as he bent to remove his socks, throwing his jaw-dropping gluteus maximus into flattering relief.

  ‘Are you objectifying me, Miss Gregory?’ he enquired drolly.

  ‘Hmm,’ she purred. ‘I’m afraid I am.’ And crooked her finger at him.

  And, ‘Hmm hmm,’ he chuckled as he climbed into the tub, his lips meeting hers, his tongue swiping at her chin, tasting the combined water and sweat there. Steam billowing around them, water pouring, his hands reached for her waist, her breasts…

  ‘Ah-ungh!’ she shrieked, slapping her hands on his chest, pushing him away. She backed up against the tile wall, lifting an arm over her breasts. ‘Too sensitive,’ she gasped, a drop of water hovering in the centre of her upper lip.

  Standing beneath the shower head, Stefan ran a hand over his face, clearing his eyes. The drop of water fell off Luna’s lip. He reached for her arm, pulling it away from her chest, giving her a reassuring look. And placed his hands under her breasts, cupping them gently, assessing their weight in his palms.

  ‘Luna…’ he began.

  Luna sat on her bed wrapped in her damp terrycloth robe, her hair in a towel. She heard the sound of pounding on the stairs, coming down the hallway. The door to the sitting room burst open and Stefan stepped in, dressed in a hastily donned sweatshirt and jeans, bearing a white chemist’s bag.

  ‘I bought three!’ he exclaimed.

  Moments later, Luna was perched on the toilet, trying to think watery thoughts while he sat beside her on the edge of the tub. ‘So, tell me again, when is the last time you remember having your period?’ he asked.

  ‘The beginning of last month. But…’ she hesitated. ‘It wasn’t a proper period, just a little spotting. I phoned the NHS helpline—’

  ‘You didn’t think to mention this to me?’

  ‘Well, no. The woman on the phone said it wasn’t unusual, given the shock my body had been through. She said it could take a while to get back to normal.’ Jesus wept, Luna thought, why couldn’t she wee? ‘Maybe I should drink a glass of water or something,’ she said plaintively. ‘No, wait, here it—’ She snapped her fingers at him and he passed her the first plastic stick, then the second, then the third.

  ‘That’s it,’ Luna said finally. ‘I’m out.’

  Th
ey stood next to each other after that, looking down at the three sticks atop the bathroom sink.

  ‘This one is just a normal test, with two pink lines if you are pregnant,’ Stefan said, consulting the boxes. ‘And that one gives you a plus or minus.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Luna said distractedly. ‘You know, I don’t feel pregnant. No nausea, no morning sickness. I don’t have any of the symptoms.’

  ‘Your breasts are telling me a different story, flicka,’ he demurred. And placed his arm around her, for two thin pink lines had appeared in the middle of the first stick, and a blue + had appeared on the second. Luna pressed a palm to her forehead as Stefan picked up the last stick. ‘This one is digital and supposedly tells you how many weeks pregnant you are, though I don’t see how a urine test can do that… Ah.’

  He passed the stick to her and she shook her head. ‘Three weeks plus,’ she read numbly.

  *

  The scan technician rolled a probe over Luna’s bare stomach, slathered in viscous green goo that made her feel like an extra in a sci-fi horror film. A squelchy, rhythmic noise sounded from the ultrasound machine’s speakers.

  ‘That’s baby’s heartbeat,’ the scan technician said, shifting the probe slightly. ‘And there’s baby.’ Inside a rounded black void, on the screen next to Luna, a tiny, blue, skeletal form appeared, curled up like a lima bean, with a teeny, flickering valve at its centre. The technician froze the image and reached for her mouse, positioning a cursor on the screen, making measurements. ‘Ten weeks,’ she said. ‘I’d put you at ten weeks.’

  ‘That isn’t possible,’ Luna said.

  The technician kept her eyes on the screen, like someone who’d heard this kind of thing from unexpectedly pregnant women before. ‘Ten weeks,’ she repeated laconically.

  ‘But,’ Luna looked up at Stefan, feeling a little panicked. ‘There’s no way. That was after the attack. We weren’t…’

  He lifted his eyebrows at her. ‘My father’s house.’

  ‘No!’ Luna balked. ‘But we stopped. You didn’t—’ She glanced at the technician, then made a surreptitious you know face at Stefan.

  Who cleared his throat. ‘I did.’

  ‘You did not!’ she protested.

  ‘Look, I’m not going to say it was the best orgasm of my life…’

  The technician stood in a rush. ‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ she said, tossing Stefan a roll of hospital-issue blue paper towels. After she’d gone, he rolled it around in his hands, ripping off a massive wadge of paper, and began rubbing the goo off Luna’s stomach.

  ‘I missed my pill,’ she blurted out, looking up at him. ‘After the attack, I missed it for a week… more… I’m not sure. And I didn’t think that you…’ She gave him the you know look. ‘…at your father’s house, so I just started a new pack when I got home. This is my fault.’

  ‘Your fault,’ he repeated, wiping her stomach one more time, then bending to kiss it. ‘You were knifed, almost bled to death, then you were with me at the hospital, then fighting my enemies in Venice and London. And during this time you quite understandably forgot to take your birth control. It’s no one’s fault, flicka.’ She pulled down her top and sat up on the scan table, and together they looked at the glowing image on the screen.

  They drove home from the hospital in silence, Stefan behind the wheel while Luna sat in the passenger seat, holding a small black-and-grey scan image and a stack of ante-natal pamphlets. This is what it feels like to be in shock, she thought to herself. I seem to be capable of sitting here, holding these pieces of paper, but nothing else.

  ‘So, I am thinking,’ Stefan said, pulling the Land Rover off onto a narrow country lane around five miles from the estate. ‘Twenty-eight is not such a bad age, is it?’ Luna turned and looked at him, thinking, yes, and I’m capable of turning my head too. ‘I mean, to have a baby,’ he clarified. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out; apparently she was not capable of speaking when she was in shock. ‘Because you’ll be twenty-eight by… December sixth did the woman say? I really don’t see how they can be so specific about these things…’ He carried on talking and all Luna could think was, I will have a baby by next Christmas. I don’t even celebrate Christmas, but next Christmas I would have to celebrate Christmas, because I will have a baby at Christmas.

  ‘And I would be thirty, which isn’t a bad age to become a father, either,’ Stefan was saying, his hands gripped on the steering wheel in the ten-to-two position. Driving very safely, because that was how he drove, the father of her baby. ‘Unless you…’ He spared a glance at her, voice unravelling a bit. ‘Unless you don’t… unless you want to…’

  ‘No!’ Luna cried out. Appalled that he would even think— ‘No!’ she repeated. ‘You don’t, do you?’

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed, and suddenly tears were pouring, actually squirting out of her eyes. With a swift, profane exclamation, Stefan pulled into a lay-by and commanded, ‘Get out! Get out of the car!’ He hurtled out of his seat, running to the passenger door, jerking it open and pulling her out, wrapping his arms around her. Holding her while she sobbed into his chest.

  ‘Don’t cry, sweetheart. Don’t cry. It’s just the shock of it all, that’s what’s getting to you,’ he correctly diagnosed.

  She nodded, drawing back from him and pulling a ball of blue hospital roll from her pocket, inelegantly blowing her nose. ‘Maybe I need to take a little nap when we get home,’ she said shakily.

  ‘Maybe so,’ Stefan agreed, cuddling her. He leaned back against the Land Rover’s rear passenger door, still holding tight to her. In the field behind them, swallows swooped and dived, chattering industriously to each other. ‘I was afraid for a second,’ he murmured eventually against her hair, ‘that maybe you thought, because of the way this baby was conceived…’

  Luna looked up at him and shook her head vehemently. ‘I loved you when I walked into your father’s house that day, and I loved you when I walked out.’ She buried her face in his chest again, smelling the good, clean loveliness of him.

  ‘Then it’s all good then, isn’t it, flicka? We’re having a baby.’ She could hear him smiling and she smiled back into his sweatshirt.

  They got back into the Land Rover and their joint happiness lasted for all of three minutes of the remaining drive home, ending with the words, ‘So, now all we have to do is get married,’ uttered with quiet determination by Stefan.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any need to go rushing off half-cocked,’ Luna replied with equal quiet determination.

  Stefan’s knuckles whitened in the ten-to-two position. ‘It’s hardly “rushing off half-cocked” for us to contemplate formalising our union after a year of being engaged.’

  ‘It hasn’t been quite a year yet and—’

  ‘—a solid year of waiting, whilst you have shot down every possible venue, driven the wedding planner to such distraction that she has appealed to me for help.’

  ‘The fuck you say,’ Luna fumed. ‘I hope you gave her short shrift.’

  ‘I did, but that’s beside the point.’

  ‘“Here she is, the runaway bride!”’ she piped in a sarcastic falsetto.

  ‘Don’t—’

  Luna affected a prissy simper. ‘“Oh, you with your pre-wedding jitters!”’

  ‘Stop trying to change the subject!’ Stefan yelled, turning past the gatehouse, starting along the drive towards the main house. ‘The point is, you are pregnant, and we need to get married.’

  ‘How very… nineteenth century of you, Lord Wellstone,’ Luna observed deprecatingly.

  It was a mark of just how unhappy he was with the way this conversation was going that Stefan lifted the ten o’clock hand off the wheel to shake his finger at her. ‘Admit it,’ he said. ‘You have looked for every conceivable excuse to put marrying me off. You want to know what I think?’

  ‘No, but you’re go
ing to tell me,’ she replied crossly.

  ‘I think that if it were up to you, we would just stay engaged forever. I think that’s good enough for you.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said, biting her lip. He happened to glance at her at just that second and wagged his finger again.

  ‘Ha ha! I knew it! Well, let me tell you something, flicka, all that’s about to change. It’s not just you and me we have to think about anymore.’

  ‘Stefan,’ she said in her most reasonable tone. ‘I’m only ten weeks pregnant. Not even through the first trimester yet. Don’t you think it’s tempting fate a little, rushing into a wedding?’

  ‘No I do not,’ he said obdurately. ‘The Lundgren sperm are strong and they make strong babies. This baby is here to stay.’

  She opened her mouth to reply, then replayed his words in her head and felt an entirely inappropriate ripple of laughter rising up in her chest, her throat. The Lundgren sperm. Quashing it as best she could, she looked out of the passenger window at the parkland rolling past.

  ‘So we get married as quickly as possible, and that’s that,’ Stefan said.

  A sudden prick deflated Luna’s humour. ‘But… Nancy’s in China for another month. And Kayla’s on location till October.’

  ‘Well, at least Jem can come.’

  ‘But, no,’ she said. ‘The other two would kill me if I invited Jem and not them. If we get married right away, it’d mean I couldn’t have any of them there.’

  ‘Enough, Luna,’ he said sternly. ‘Enough excuses. The only thing that matters now is this: our child must be born in wedlock. I will not have even the slightest taint of illegitimacy touching my daughter or son. My heir.’

  She turned her face back to the car window, unwilling to let him see how her lips were trembling, her eyes filling. He’d trumped every argument she might possibly have against marrying quickly – he should have just said that to start with, instead of letting her make a fool of herself rattling on and on.

  He pulled up in front of the portico and turned off the engine. Luna angled her body a little further toward the window, away from him. She lifted a corner of the now thoroughly sodden blue paper towel to the bottom of her eye.