Between the two rooms stood a large double staircase that curved to the west and east wings. The master bedroom was in the east wing, and that’s where the security guards had said they’d seen a light on when they drove by.
“Upstairs,” she said. “To the right. You don’t have a gun with you, do you?”
He laughed. “I haven’t been issued a sidearm yet, but I’m not sure what a gun would do against a ghost.”
“I just wanted to shoot a few holes in the bed.”
“Next time, I promise. I’ll see if I can’t get my hands on a grenade launcher.”
Arthur smiled and she felt ready to start up the stairs. They went up together, Arthur first, Regan behind him—his order.
The bannister was polished and gleaming in the light of the brass wall sconces. She kept a housekeeper on the payroll to see that things were kept up, but Regan wouldn’t have cared if she’d found the place covered in dust, ransacked with rats eating through the walls. No matter how well-tended the house, it was always damp, always cold and clammy, like Sir Jack’s hands.
They reached the top of the stairs. Arthur walked a few feet alone into the shadowy hallway. His silhouette was strong, tall and confident. His strength gave her strength. She went to him and he turned to glare at her.
“You said to stick to you like glue,” she reminded him.
“Which door’s the bedroom?”
“End of the hall,” she said.
Before they’d been married, she had hoped she and Sir Jack would have separate bedrooms like an old Victorian couple. In her fantasy, sex would happen once a month, if that, quickly and politely and with as little fuss or muss as possible. If only. Sir Jack had wanted her all the time, even when he couldn’t perform sexually. He’d made her play the part of the devoted wife. Never a partner in his life, merely a luxury accessory.
“I chose this,” she said softly, running her hand along the wall with disgust.
“You didn’t choose this,” Arthur said. “You chose safety and security and got fear and cruelty. It’s called bait-and-switch. Treating you like property was his choice, not yours.”
“My choice to stay. He never made me stop painting, you know. He told me to quit art school, but he never actually said I had to stop painting. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have plenty of free time. That wasn’t him. That was me.”
“You made a mistake,” he said. “You more than paid the price for it.”
“Yes, but—”
Arthur planted a hard, passionate kiss on her mouth, then pulled back and smiled.
“What was that?” she asked.
“That was me protecting you from saying something embarrassing like you deserved to be treated like shite by your husband.”
She met his eyes, glared. “I’d almost forgotten what a brat you are, Brat.”
He grinned wickedly. “That’s why I reminded you.”
They were at the door. Light streamed out from underneath it. No sounds inside. Arthur kissed her again briefly on the lips, then opened the door.
A large rectangular Tiffany lamp stood on the bedside table. It was on, but that seemed to be the only sign anyone had been in here. The bedroom was just as Regan remembered it. Dark wood wainscoting with hunter green wallpaper and a picture rail hung with the portraits of all Sir Jack’s illustrious ancestors trapped inside their dusty frames. And the bed, of course, large and layered with luxurious sheets and a brown and cream counterpane. All very male. All very stuffy and stodgy.
One thing had changed, however.
“What’s this?” Arthur asked as he stared at the painting hanging over the cold and empty stone fireplace. “Modern art? In this house?”
She recognized the painting at once. A painting of Mars, the Roman god of war and Venus, the Roman goddess of love. They lay twined together in a golden net that trapped them in a bed made of clouds.
The side of the bed belonging to Mars was midnight blue, heavy, manly, and the side of the bed Venus lay upon was pale pink and bright and light.
“I was inspired,” Regan said, “by the famous painting Mars and Venus by Angélique Mongez. She was the first Frenchwoman to become a full-fledged history painter. Very groundbreaking considering it was the early nineteenth century and women were only expected to paint family portraits if that. In her version of Mars and Venus, Mars is about to leave Venus to go off to war. He’s got one foot on his war chariot while Venus sits with their son Cupid, trying to lure Mars back to her. His side of the painting looks like a hellscape. Hers looks like a magical spring morning. I loved that, dividing the canvas in half—his and hers. I stole that idea, put my own spin on it.”
In her painting, Mars and Venus were floating in the sky—Mars in the night sky, Venus at dawn.
“You painted this?” Arthur asked. “This is one of yours?”
She nodded. “Mars and Venus In Vulcan’s Net. I must have known… Venus was forced into marrying the ugly old Vulcan and then she—”
Regan couldn’t even say the word “love” and despised herself for her cowardice.
She continued, “She saw the young soldier Mars and started an affair with him. Vulcan knew she was betraying him so he pretended to leave their home, and when Mars snuck in…he trapped them in bed together.”
“It’s incredible,” he said. “Really incredible, Regan.”
She warmed at his words, but quickly soured. “I didn’t hang this painting here,” she said.
Her blood was cold and she clung to Arthur’s hand, but he didn’t seem troubled at all.
“This must be it,” Arthur said. “Lord Malcolm’s trying to tell you to start painting again. Last night he gave you a vision of yourself painting again, and now this?”
“Why would he care if I painted or not? Or golfed or danced or started a bookshop?”
“Who knows what he knows that we don’t know,” Arthur said. “But even if he’s not telling you that, I am. My parents own over a dozen art galleries. I’ve been to a thousand galleries in my lifetime, seen a million paintings. I know talent. You have it.”
“Had it.”
“It’s still there. I know it is. God, this is so good. It’s stylized, like that Polish painter, I forgot her name, did those wild Art Deco portraits. Mum loves her work.”
“Tamara de Lempicka?”
“That’s her.”
“She’s one of my favorite artists. Big influence.”
“If you don’t want this, can I have it?”
He meant it. She could tell from the way he looked at her painting he genuinely admired it. It almost made her want to try painting again. Almost. But why bother? It would take years to relearn what she’d forgotten and she didn’t have years. Still…Arthur made her want to try anyway.
She felt something stirring in her heart, something she couldn’t ever remember feeling before there. Something terrifyingly tender, tenderly terrifying. And desire, too. Lust. Need.
“You can have it,” she said, “if you make love to me right now.”
He looked at her like she’d gone mad. “Here? In this bed?”
“Definitely here. And definitely this bed. I don’t want to be afraid of ghosts anymore—Sir Jack or Lord Malcolm.”
“Tell me what you want,” Arthur said. “Anything you want.”
She told him and his eyes widened.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She was sure. Scared, but sure. He undressed her quickly, and then stripped himself. He pulled her to the bed and tossed the covers back. The sheets were white, pristine, changed weekly by the housekeeper even though they were never slept in.
There had been nights in her marriage she had wanted to tear the bed apart with her bare hands, cut the sheets with knives, set the mattress on fire and watch it burn. Now she wanted the bed to burn with pleasure, to be defiled with her wetness and Arthur’s.
Arthur lifted her up and laid her on the bed. She waited, flat on her back as he looked through the bedside table drawers for
what he needed. When he found it, he came back to her, laying on her, both of them naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden.
Even as beholden as she’d felt toward Sir Jack, she had stood her ground and refused him sexual acts she thought she couldn’t bear. She had discovered with Arthur that she not only could bear them, but wanted them as long as it was with him.
Arthur turned her onto her stomach. She braced herself on her elbows, opened her thighs wide to offer all of herself to him. He had lubricant and used it to carefully fill that tightest hole with his fingers. Regan fought every self-protective instinct to pull away, to clench her muscles to force him out. He wanted her love, but she couldn’t give him what she didn’t have. She could give him her body, though—all of it, especially the parts of her she’d refused her husband.
Arthur opened her with one finger, the sensation was a welcome intrusion.
A second finger was uncomfortable, but the tension quickly passed. Soon she was breathing hard as he fucked her slowly and gently with his slick fingers. A third finger was almost too much, but she breathed through it and slowly opened up again.
The bed shifted as Arthur mounted her from behind, and she was certain she’d never wanted a man’s cock in her more in her life. Here. In the bed her husband bought, in the bed where she’d sold herself night after night of their loveless marriage, she was being entered in the arse by a man who would have been her husband’s worst nightmare—a man younger, fitter, more handsome. A future earl. A mere boy he’d have to address as “my lord.”
The tip of Arthur’s thick cock slid into her body easily, and Regan groaned as he entered her by inches.
The shaft of his cock was harder to take than his three fingers. He was so thick, so stiff…but also so gentle. He went slowly, easing his length into her with the slightest of thrusts. Regan spread herself wider, parting her knees and thighs. She arched her back and he moved in more, filling her to the point of pain, then retreating.
Slowly the orifice relaxed, gave way, made room for him. He applied more lubricant to her and himself and then it was easy going, almost, as he thrust in deeper. Regan moaned, mouth open against the bed. She closed her eyes tight and let herself feel every inch as he slowly speared her, every inch as he withdrew, every inch as he speared her again. Arthur lay himself over her, gathering her to him.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
She answered in all honesty, “Nothing has ever hurt me less.”
“Good,” he said, his voice low and husky in her ear. He kissed the back of her neck, all the while fucking her with the slowest, deepest, most sensual thrusts she’d ever felt. But this was only half of what she’d asked from him, half of what she’d commanded him to do to her, and if Arthur was anything, he was obedient.
With his arms around her, he rolled them both, still joined, onto his back so that she lay on his chest, her knees up, her thighs wide. Arthur had found one of the many vibrators Sir Jack had used on her in the table drawer, and now he would use it on her.
Arthur turned it to a low setting. The moment the tip touched her clitoris, she flinched reflexively.
“I can stop,” he said.
“Never stop.”
His soft male laugh in her ear was utterly pornographic, a laugh that said yes, maybe she owned him body and soul, but it was him spearing both her holes so take that, my lady.
Her clitoris swelled as he ran the tip of the vibrator over it in little circles, swelled and ached, ached and throbbed. Inner muscles began to lightly tremor. She felt the sensations swirling in her lower belly as the deep nerves of her clitoris buzzed and quivered. With his long strong arm, Arthur held her against him, held her tight, as he pushed the vibrator into her vagina, pushed it past the resistance and into the slick passage. Her inner walls clenched the phallus but allowed it in, an inch, then two, then three, all the way to the aching and waiting core of her.
Regan could barely move with one cock in her arse and another in her cunt. She could only writhe in tiny tight circles as Arthur moved under her, with her, into her. She had never felt so full, so filled beyond what she could take and yet she was taking it and taking it and taking it.
Her orgasm built in record time and the pressure brought tears to her eyes. Her stomach muscles tightened painfully and her vagina poured wetness out of her and onto Arthur’s muscular thighs and the white sheets.
From under her, Arthur ground his hips into her, working his cock deeper. She was beyond pain, sobbing almost, panting. He gripped her breast in his free hand and held it tightly, clutching her to his chest as he used both her orifices for her pleasure and his.
Another hand, it seemed, grasped her by the wrists, spreading her arms to each side of the bed. Regan lifted her head–how could that be happening?–and saw a golden cord wrapped around her arms.
She was too shocked at first to react, especially with her body on the edge of orgasm. Another cord found her thigh, then her other thigh, prying her legs apart.
Arthur was able to say only, “What—” before another golden cord whisked from under the bed and wound around his mouth, gagging him.
In seconds, they were both tied down by powerful unseen forces, tied to the bed and to each other. Golden cords wrapped around their hips, locking them together, trapping Arthur’s hand between her legs so that he couldn’t pull the vibrator out of her.
Ecstasy and panic crashed into each other, spurring her to a climax stronger than she’d ever experienced before. Regan tried to fight against the orgasm, but twisting and thrashing against the cords only worked Arthur’s cock and the vibrator in deeper. It seemed every muscle in her pelvis and back contracted at once, every nerve fired, and she arched against the ropes, suspended in place by the staggering force of her release, and she shut her eyes and cried out in ecstasy.
When Regan opened her eyes, she saw a man slipping out of the shadows by the fireplace and advancing on them.
Sir Jack.
“No,” Regan said in horror, “you’re dead. I buried you.”
It was him, without a doubt—her husband, dead and gone since May. A distinguished-looking man, silver hair receding, eyes glinting hard as diamonds. A king in his own mind long past his prime.
He shrugged. “You fuck this child to spite me as if I were in the room. So here I am.” He lifted his hands and grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Let’s get on with the show.”
“This isn’t real. Let us go.”
She was terrified, humiliated to be caught like this, Arthur’s cock trapped inside of her, the vibrator still plunged deep, against her womb, silently stoking her toward another climax.
“Look at you,” Sir Jack said, his accent so proper, his tone a cold sneer of utter disdain. “Look at you in bed with a ripe young man and all you can think about is me… How could I possibly be dead? You keep me alive with your hate. How many times did you swear to yourself the second I was in the ground, you’d pick up your paintbrush and start your life all over? Off to Paris, to a studio with north-facing light, that you’d cut your hair like Coco Chanel and never put on another string of pearls ever again?”
The buzzing phallus inside her stimulated her g-spot and Arthur’s fingers brushed her swollen clitoris. The tip of the vibrator pulsed against her cervix, and she contracted sharply around it, gasping, nearly coming again even as her dead and hateful husband watched and laughed.
“If you won’t let me go, let Arthur go,” she said. He was gagged and couldn’t speak so she must speak for him.
“Let him go?” the apparition said. “He’s fucking my wife.”
“I’m not your wife anymore.”
“No? Then why do you act as if we’re still married, like my opinion still matters? He’s offered you everything and you can’t even love him. It must be because you still love me.”
“I never loved you,” she said and moaned. Tears trickled from her eyes. She was close to coming again, and she couldn’t let it happen, not with him watching her, not with the
cold dead eyes of all his ancestors glaring down at her from their frames like a Greek chorus of mockery.
“Shouldn’t I kill him? The man fucking my wife in my own bed? Any good husband would.”
“If you so much as touch a hair on his head,” she spat at him, fighting the ropes, ready to tear him apart, “I will dig you up just to burn your corpse to ashes.”
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill him. One, Reggie. Just one.”
Reggie. He’d always called her that, like a term of endearment, a name she hated beyond words and he knew it.
He lifted a poker from the fireplace, its iron tip burning orange. “What is he to you but a whore you hired to spite me? Isn’t that all he is? You don’t care about him. You don’t even want him. You only want to hurt me by having him. You certainly don’t—”
“If you touch him I will kill myself and hunt you down in Hell. Even Satan will show you more mercy than I will.”
“Because you love him? You can’t love. You never could. You never could and you never will.”
“I couldn’t love you, but I can love him. I do love him, you bastard. I love him, and I always will.”
And with those words, the cords broke like tender vines and disappeared into dust. The specter of Sir Jack vanished as Regan cried out, her very being shaken by an orgasm so powerful everything faded to black.
When she came to, she was lying on her back with Arthur staring down at her. Her body was limp, listless, almost lifeless even as her interior muscles continued to give little gasps and shivers.
She felt wetness, Arthur’s semen dripping onto the bed. When had he come?
“Regan? Are you all right?” He stroked her face. “I think you came too hard. You passed out.”
The Pearl (The Godwicks) Page 19
