Chapter 65 Stuck between two men (9)
Third person POV:
Arabella’s wine glass trembled in her hand.
Conversation flowed around them politics, the scandalous new waltz, the Prince Regent’s latest indiscretion, but beneath the table a silent war was being waged for every inch of her flesh.
Sebastian’s hand slid higher, parting her thighs with shameless ease.
He found her bare; of course she was bare; both men had forbidden drawers now and traced one lazy line through her folds.
She was already wet. She hated that she was already wet.
Edmund felt it the moment Sebastian’s fingers brushed his.
For a heartbeat their hands stilled, locked in hostile recognition over her slick heat.
Then, as though by some unspoken treaty, they moved together, Sebastian circling her entrance, Edmund stroking feather-light over her clitoris.
Arabella bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper.
Lord Havelock was telling a tedious story about his hunter.
She nodded in all the right places while two sets of male fingers played her body like an instrument they had jointly mastered.
Sebastian dipped one finger inside her, slow and deep.
Edmund answered by pressing down hard on her swollen bud.
Pleasure stabbed through her so sharply she jolped, her wine slopping crimson onto the cloth.
“Clumsy, wife,” Sebastian said mildly, dabbing at the stain with his napkin while two of his fingers now scissored gently inside her. “Perhaps you are over-warm.”
Edmund’s hand withdrew only long enough to lift his own glass in a mocking toast.
“To my hostess’s health,” he said, voice perfectly polite, eyes burning. “May she find… relief.”
His fingers returned, three this time, sliding alongside Sebastian’s until she was stretched and full beneath the table, impaled on both of them while footmen circled with the removes.
Arabella’s thighs shook. She gripped the edge of her chair until her knuckles whitened.
Sebastian leaned close again. “Come for us,” he whispered, so low only she could hear. “Right here. Right now. Let him feel how perfectly you spend when we work together.”
Edmund’s thumb flicked once, twice merciless.
She shattered.
It was silent, brutal, devastating. Her spine arched against the chair; her breath locked in her throat.
Inside her, Sebastian and Edmund both stilled, feeling the rhythmic clench of her climax around their joined fingers.
A single tear slipped down her cheek, hidden behind the careful tilt of her head.
Sebastian withdrew first, bringing his glistening fingers to his mouth and licking them clean with deliberate relish while holding Edmund’s gaze across her trembling body.
Edmund followed suit more slowly, eyes locked on Arabella’s face as he tasted her on his own skin. His expression was savage.
The next course arrived. Conversation swirled on, oblivious.
Arabella sat between them flushed and shaking, her pulse roaring in her ears, the taste of her own blood on her tongue.
Sebastian lifted his glass to her in a private toast.
Edmund did the same a heartbeat later.
Two predators.
One prey.
And the town thought this merely another dull country dinner.
Later, when the ladies withdrew and the gentlemen lingered over port, Sebastian found Edmund in the shadowed billiard room.
They stared at each other across the green baize, the silence thick enough to cut.
“You felt it,” Sebastian said at last. “How perfect she is when she has both of us.”
Edmund’s jaw worked. “I felt her cry.”
Sebastian’s smile was thin and lethal. “She will cry again tonight. And every night until she chooses.”
Edmund stepped closer, voice raw. “She will never choose you.”
Sebastian’s eyes glittered. “Then we are at an impasse. Because I will never let her go.”
The cue ball cracked against its fellows like a gunshot.
Neither man flinched.
In the drawing room, Arabella sat at the piano forte, fingers moving mechanically over a sonata she had known since childhood.
She could still feel their hands on her, inside her, claiming her in perfect, terrible unison.
And for the first time she understood with cold, sick certainty that the game was no longer about whose bed she warmed.
It was about whose heart she would break.
Hers, or both of theirs.
The storm arrived without warning, as though the heavens themselves had grown weary of restraint.
It began with a sudden drop in pressure that made the candles gutter and the ladies clutch their shawls.
Then the wind came howling across the downs, rattling every pane in Harrington Park until the great house sounded like a ship under full sail.
Lightning split the sky in white-violet forks; thunder followed so close it shook the chandeliers.
Within minutes the lights failed.
One by one the candles snuffed out, drowned by gusts that found every crack. Servants scurried with tapers, but the darkness won.
The house plunged into black broken only by the strobing flashes that turned the ballroom into a fevered dream.
Guests laughed nervously at first country storms, nothing more.
Then the rain came a roaring, biblical deluge that turned the gravel drives to rivers and trapped every soul indoors.
In the grand saloon, someone began a game of blindman’s buff to pass the time.
Silk scarves were produced, giggles rose, and soon half the younger set were stumbling about in delighted chaos.
Arabella stood near the windows, watching lightning claw the sky, when a hand closed around her wrist.
Sebastian.
Another seized her elbow from behind.
Edmund.
Neither man spoke. They simply moved, guiding her through the crush with the sureness of men who had memorised every inch of their own house.
A heavy curtain swept aside; cool air kissed her face; then she was inside the windowed alcove that looked onto the rose garden, hidden from the saloon by folds of crimson damask.
The curtain fell shut behind them.
Absolute darkness.
Only the storm and the frantic drum of her own heart.
Hands found her instantly, four of them, certain and ruthless.
Her gown was unlaced before she could draw breath; cool air rushed over bared breasts, belly, thighs.
Silk pooled at her feet. She was lifted, turned, pressed back against the window seat.
Cold glass met her spine; warm mouths claimed her almost in the same instant.
She never knew whose lips closed over her nipple first, whose fingers slid between her legs to find her already soaked.
Thunder drowned her moan. Lightning flashed, illuminating them for a heartbeat.
Sebastian’s dark head bent to her breast, Edmund’s golden one buried between her thighs, both men kneeling at her feet like supplicants at an altar built for sin.
Another flash, and they had changed places.
She lost track after that.
There was only sensation, mouths sucking, teeth scraping, tongues lapping at every sensitive place until she was sobbing with it.
Fingers she could not tell whose, plunged deep inside her, curling, scissoring, stretching her open while another set rolled her clitoris in ruthless strokes.
She came hard and suddenly, thighs clamping around a head she could not see, hips bucking against a mouth that drank her down like wine.