by Jagger, Kait
Contented smiles still plastered on both their faces, they moved about the room in a daze, murmuring occasionally to each other, starting to get undressed. Luna sat in front of the vanity table, removing her tiara and the umpteen hairpins in her bun as Stefan, in turn, removed his cufflinks and the studs of his dress shirt, dropping them with little pings into a dish on the bedside table. When her hair tumbled in a shining coil of curls and braids down her back, he came and stood behind her. She watched his hand in the mirror, caressing her cheek.
‘I am going to take a very quick shower,’ came his voice. ‘Will you do something for me, flicka?’
She was waiting for him, standing in the middle of the darkened bedroom when he emerged from the bathroom. He switched off the bathroom light, so that the only illumination that remained in the room emanated from the candelabra. He walked toward her, a hazy, glowing seraph in the darkness.
Then the Marquess of Lionsbridge inclined his head slowly to his bride’s, whispering against the silken membrane that covered her face, ‘Everything happened so fast this morning, I didn’t get a chance to truly appreciate how you looked in your veil.’ He tilted his face this way and that, the bridge of his nose sliding against hers through the thin covering that separated them. He inhaled, and the fabric briefly fluttered between them, drawn to him. His open mouth slanted lightly against hers, the heat of their combined breath dampening the silk. Lips against hers, he said, ‘And then the veil came off and all I could think was, Herre Gud, she is Nefertiti and Scheherazade and Ingrid Bergman all together, and she is making my legs shake…’
Unable to wait another moment, he gathered the veil in his fists, pulling it up, casting it aside. Luna had only a moment to look up at her husband, standing gloriously naked before her, his shoulders still glistening with droplets of water, before his lips were on hers again. Their tongues pressed joyously, simultaneously into each other’s mouths and Luna lifted her hands to Stefan’s chest, pushing him toward the bed. Down they fell onto the coverlet, mouths still welded together, ravenous for one another after a day spent in each other’s company, but never truly alone.
They broke off, panting, and Luna kissed a trail down his body, pausing at the scar beneath his left rib, encircling it with her fingers and venerating it with her tongue, before continuing down to his stomach, where the head of his beautiful, straining hardness awaited her, the slit at its tip shining with proof of his need for her. She swallowed him whole, no teasing, no preliminaries, taking him as far into her throat as she could. Sheathing him with her mouth, sucking, tonguing and enfolding him.
‘Luna…’ he moaned, an exultation, a lamentation. ‘Stop, my love, before you—’ He pushed her off him, flipping her over on the bed and surging toward her like a riptide, hooking his arms under her knees, entering her in a single, sleek stroke. He plunged twice, heard the sound of her wetness gushing between them and hissed, withdrawing from her and swiftly reaching his fingers down to spread her labia, burrowing his length into their folds.
She… Luna bit her lip, eyelids sliding shut… How did he manage to do this? To endow the blunt instrument that was his cock with the skill and subtlety to coax her clitoris to life, rubbing persuasively against it, first lightly, then with growing speed and pressure till her entire sex was quivering and swelling, rising to meet him.
Luna dug her fingernails into Stefan’s buttocks, a warning, a promise, and arched her back. ‘In me!’ she pleaded, her muscles clenching around him in welcome as he drove back into her. He stilled for a second, groaning as the waves of her orgasm gripped him over and over again until he had no choice, no reprieve other than to tumble with her, emptying himself into her.
‘Happy now?’ Luna enquired cheekily after they eventually fell apart and lay next to each other on the bed, chests heaving.
He half-laughed, half-groaned. ‘I have just made love to my new bride, the love of my life, in whom my seed has found purchase. If I were any happier, I would spontaneously combust.’
Luna nodded, resting her palm atop his still hard member, feeling it twitch promisingly. ‘“In whom your seed has found purchase”,’ she repeated, chuckling.
‘That one’s straight out of the Lord and Master handbook,’ he said. And rolled back on top of her.
Later, after dozing for a while, the candles in the room sputtering out one by one, Luna woke, crawled over her sleeping husband, and mounted him. She watched his eyes moving beneath their lids, tracking back and forth, and his lips, curving in an unconscious smile. She angled her pelvis, taking him deep into her, and he woke with a languid, answering thrust of his hips.
‘Stars and moon in the sky,’ he breathed, staring up at her as she rode him.
Later still, as he lay with his head resting on her stomach, marvelling aloud, ‘There is a baby! In here!’ Luna ran her fingers through his hair, opened her mouth, then shut it. Then opened it again.
‘Will you do something for me, Stefan?’
So the night ended with him carrying her to the end of the hall, through the rose-and-starch-scented linen closet, past the hidden door and onto the single bed that waited there.
‘You’re sure about this?’ he murmured, tying her ankle to the bed’s foot rail.
‘I’m sure,’ she said, watching as he stood, came to sit beside her, and began wrapping thick silk cord around her wrist. ‘I want you to wipe the memory of being tied to that hospital bed out of my head, älskling. I don’t want it between us. I don’t want to be ruled by it.’
He finished off a knot in his usual, arousingly competent way, and reached over to jerk her other hand to the rail. ‘Tell me what else you want, my wife,’ he said, his voice vibrating down the brass rail into her fingers, down her spine, into the soft, wet core of her.
Luna lifted her head up off the pillow and took his bottom lip between her teeth, tugging at it, then lathing it, then biting it, harder. She felt his ropes tightening against her wrists.
‘I want you to make me beg.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘I look like I’m letting myself go,’ came Luna’s damning verdict as she studied her silhouette in their standing mirror two months to the day after their wedding, on a muggy, early August morning.
Stefan came and stood beside her, threading a tie around the collar of his shirt. ‘You are eighteen weeks along, Luna,’ he said reasonably. ‘Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the time has come to announce your pregnancy.’ Their eyes met in the mirror and, seeing that he was about to reap the whirlwind of her dissent, he raised his hands in surrender.
‘Forget I said anything,’ he said drily. ‘We will wait till your waters break, or you bring the baby home from the hospital to make the announcement.’
She rolled her eyes at him, then froze. ‘Oh, oh!’ she said, grabbing his hand, placing it on her stomach. ‘Do you feel it?’
He rested his chin on her shoulder, considering. ‘No, nothing. Are you sure this isn’t wind you’re feeling, flicka?’
An involuntary smile spread across her face. She’d been feeling the baby’s movements for more than a week now, tiny drumbeats inside her, but they seemed to stop every time Stefan laid a hand on her. ‘I think someone knows it’s you touching me,’ she said. ‘You calm me down, and you calm our little friend down too.’
He kissed her neck, and carried on tying his tie. ‘I’ll be back by eight tonight,’ he said. ‘We can have a late supper, then I’ll settle down next to our little friend for the evening, search for signs of movement.’ He glanced hopefully at her purple University of Manchester hoody, which she’d surreptitiously rescued from the bin several weeks ago and which was fraying badly at the hem. ‘I could buy you a new one of those while I’m in Manchester…’
‘No thank you,’ Luna said primly. ‘It’s dress-down Tuesday, and I’ll be getting dirty. I’m spending the morning with David in our new field.’ A final
reminder of Putinov, the deed for the triangular plot of land abutting the estate had finally arrived with the lawyers, and she was itching to start putting it right.
She had cause to regret her sartorial choice two hours later, tramping across the field with David, watching as workers jackhammered out the concrete bollards blocking the access road. ‘Halleluiah,’ she said as the last one went, blotting her upper lip with her faded sleeve. A muggy start to the day had blossomed into a sweltering morning and she dearly wished she could strip off her sweatshirt, but the cut of the t-shirt she was wearing underneath was fitted enough that it revealed the swell in her stomach.
After an ill-advised detour to check out final preparation work in the outbuilding SL Associates would be moving into the following week, and a somewhat breathless call with James to assure him that all was well, Luna was actively perspiring by the time she’d cycled back to the barn. She climbed off her bike and parked it inside, casting a wistful glance at her Enduro, on indefinite hiatus till after the baby’s birth.
As she was walking to the house her phone buzzed: a photo from Augusta, now Dowager Marchioness, of Regina and her five adorable newborn puppies. Luna forwarded it on to Stefan, imagining him melting into a blissful puddle right in the middle of the symposium he was attending in Manchester. Brutus? she put as the photo’s caption.
When she finally dragged herself up to the house, feeling bedraggled and sorely in need of a cold drink, Luna found a black Mercedes S-Class parked beside the portico. Panting slightly, she rested her hands on her hips, watching as two porters from the household staff removed a Louis Vuitton suitcase and matching toiletry case from the boot, plus two garment bags.
‘Be very careful with that!’ came a familiar trill from the entrance to the house. Karoline Lundgren descended into the portico, cool and breezy in capri pants and a sailor top. ‘There are many fragile treasures in those bags.’ She graced the porters with her trademark megawatt smile, and turned to Luna, looking her up and down.
‘Hello, hello! Here you are, back from…’ Karoline lifted her shoulders, ‘…running around the estate. How hard you look to be working, now that you are Marchioness.’ Her eyes did a little circuit, starting with Luna’s sweat-dampened ponytail, moving down to her unflattering sweatshirt and ill-defined midriff, rising back up to her face, shining with perspiration. ‘You look as though married life… suits you,’ she observed, disingenuousness personified.
‘I was devastated, of course, to miss the wedding,’ she said moments later as they walked back into the house together. ‘But with such short notice, I couldn’t drop everything in Stockholm and fly over. And then I have had my charity obligations, and my annual trip to the Côte d’Azur…’ She watched one of the porters struggle up the stairs with her suitcase. ‘I have asked them to put my bags in the same room Sören and I used many years ago, when Stefan was a boy. It is small, but it has a charming view of the gardens, I remember.’
She turned then, and to Luna’s fascinated horror, reached for her hands, failing to conceal a little shudder at finding them damp with sweat. ‘I want us to come to understand each other, you and I. I have been a part of Stefan’s life for thirty years. And now you are a part of his life. For his sake, we will become friends.’ She looked up at the nymphs and cherubs frolicking across the hall’s baroque ceiling. ‘Perhaps we could have tea later. You will arrange it?’ And with that, Karoline walked up the stairs, and into the private wing.
Well, Luna thought. An unexpected start to the day. She sat down on the bottom stair, placing her palms on its cool marble surface. In the distance, she heard the sound of a raised voice.
‘It isn’t acceptable! I ask you to do one simple task, and all you give me are excuses!’ Alex Parker, she thought to herself. She’d know that fey, whiny voice anywhere. Sure enough, there he was, exiting the main reception rooms with a hapless member of the Tours staff. ‘When I ask you to do something,’ he ranted on, ‘it should be the same as Roland asking you to do it. I shouldn’t have to supervise you every step of the way…’
He didn’t see her, but his victim did, glancing her way with an apologetic wince. Luna smiled steadily back at her, an unreadable expression on her face. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her pocket. A text from Stefan: Et tu, Brute? No!!! Lars? She pushed the call button.
‘I am not calling our puppy Lars,’ she said when he answered.
‘You’d prefer Octavian, I presume.’
‘Now you mention it…’ Luna lifted her ponytail from her neck, allowing the sweat there to evaporate. ‘How’s the weather in Manchester?’
‘Wet. Unseasonably cold.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Your, erm, mother is here.’
‘What?’ Stefan said sharply.
‘She tells me she wants us to be friends.’
A hissed oath on the other end of the line. Then, ‘I’m coming home.’
‘Stefan,’ Luna said calmly. ‘There’s no need for that. I can handle your mother, I promise you.’
‘No.’ She heard him make what sounded like a frustrated growl. ‘I don’t know why she’s come but these unannounced visits of hers must stop. You don’t need this upset, you and our little one.’
Nothing she could say would convince him, so Luna stopped trying. He said he’d text her when he got back to the airport.
Builders were busy sanding walls and applying primer in the private sitting room when Luna came upstairs. She and Stefan had decided after the wedding that the time had come to make the family suite their own. With some advice from Sören, the most effortlessly tasteful man she knew, Luna planned to convert the sitting room into a more pared-back, Scandinavian style.
After making a round of brews for the builders and a mug of tea for herself, she wandered down the hallway to her and Stefan’s bedroom. She thought she could hear Karoline behind one of the doors, giggling girlishly, talking in Swedish. On the phone with one of her Stockholm cronies, no doubt.
As Luna kept on walking, she made a list, like the efficient ex-PA she was, of all the things she wanted to do that day, before Stefan got home. Lots of things…best get a move on.
*
After she’d showered and dried her hair, Luna sat at her dressing table, her tools laid out before her: a hairbrush, rat-tail comb, kirby grips, U-shaped hairpins, and a canister of Elnett. She extended her right hand, studied it, gave it a little preparatory stretch.
The secret to creating a perfect French twist, Luna had found, was relentlessness: once you start, do not stop, do not hesitate until every last bit of hair is in place. The first step was to brush her hair till it was completely smooth, eradicating any tangles. Then, using the comb, she carefully sectioned off a ‘V’ of hair at the top of her head, widest at her forehead, narrowing to a point at the back of her crown, and pinned this hair out of the way.
The most intensely physical part of the process came next. All her remaining hair had to be subjected to rigorous backcombing to give it enough texture that it would hold the twist. And then the resulting, teased mane had to be swept over to one side of the back of her head and pinned in place from nape to crown in a crisscrossing pattern.
Then came the fiddly bit, the bit where, until now, she hadn’t trusted her right hand to perform adequately. Beginning from the nape, Luna carefully but without hesitation built up a twist of hair sitting just over the wall of kirby grips, inserting U-shaped pins as she went along to batten down the twist.
When she’d finished she gave her right hand a little shake, then held up a mirror at the back of her head, angling it toward the dressing-table mirror to inspect her handiwork. Not bad, not bad… only a few little bits left to do now. She tucked any remaining strands of hair into the twist with the handle of her comb, and smoothed out the resulting neat funnel. Then took the remaining ‘V’ of hair in the front, pulled it straight back from her forehead, and merged it into the
twist, pinning it, too, in place.
Last step, one final smooth with the comb to eradicate any loose strands. And Elnett. Loads of Elnett.
Hair completed to her satisfaction, Luna stood and went to the standing mirror, studying her figure in her black pencil skirt and white silk blouse. This would be the last time she managed to wear them. She’d had to adjust the skirt so its waistband sat slightly above her stomach, but happily, the ensemble effectively camouflaged her pregnancy. After inserting her mother’s diamond earrings, she slipped into her Ferragamos and opened her tube of MAC Russian Red lipstick, applying it carefully.
Leaning closer to the mirror, she pursed her lips, rubbed them together, and tilted her head.
‘There,’ she said to her reflection. ‘That’s better.’
*
On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Luna woke in her room at University of Manchester’s halls of residence feeling… okay. Not good, but not as bad as she’d felt on this day for the previous five years. It was getting better, the pain of her parents’ loss; an aching undercurrent to her life that ebbed and flowed, rather than the constant, agonising torrent that had brought her almost to her knees in her early teens.
She looked across the room at the American, still asleep in the other bed. Somehow there had been a mix-up when they came to check into their rooms during freshers week, and they found themselves assigned not to the two singles they’d requested, but to a shared family room.
The American, or J Crew, as Luna had privately nicknamed her, for this girl had an eye-numbing collection of khaki trousers and Oxford shirts, had been happy to share. ‘We’ll be a double act,’ she’d said in her slightly raspy voice. ‘You can teach me proper, British English, and I’ll teach you how to party.’
The American clearly thought Luna needed instruction in the partying department, mistaking her quietness for timidity and moving quickly to fill what she saw as a vacuum. And, so far at least, Luna had allowed it – she figured it was easier to be a follower, to go where the American led her.
