Chapter 58 Stuck between two men (2)
Third person POV:
She shouldn't but she did. His face was fierce with desire, but something gentler flickered behind it, something almost like reverence.
“I will try to be gentle,” he said. “But you are mine now, Arabella. In every way.”
The blunt head of his cock nudged her entrance.
Arabella’s breath hitched; she felt herself stretched, impaled by slow degrees.
There was pressure, a burning sting as he pressed past the fragile barrier of her maidenhead, and then a sudden sharp pain that made her cry out and clutch his shoulders.
Sebastian stilled, buried to the hilt inside her, his own breath ragged.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” he whispered against her temple. “The worst is over.”
He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, the tears that had escaped despite her will.
Only when she relaxed by degrees did he begin to move slow, careful strokes that sparked pleasure through the fading ache.
Soon the pain was only a memory, drowned beneath a rising tide of bliss.
Arabella’s legs wrapped around his hips of their own volition.
Each thrust sent sparks skittering along her nerves; each drag of his body against hers stoked the fire higher.
She could hear her own voice soft, broken moans she did not recognise mingling with his low groans of praise.
“Beautiful,” he rasped, one hand sliding between them to stroke that aching bud again. “Come for me, Arabella. Let me feel it.”
She shattered. Pleasure exploded outward in white-hot pulses, her body clenching hard around him.
Sebastian followed moments later with a guttural sound, hips jerking as he spilled deep inside her.
For a long time there was only the crackle of the fire and their mingled breathing.
Eventually he withdrew, gathered her close against his chest, and drew the covers over them both.
Arabella lay stunned, her body humming with echoes of ecstasy, her mind a whirl of confusion and unwilling wonder.
She felt marked, claimed, irrevocably changed.
Sebastian pressed a kiss to her damp temple. “Sleep, wife,” he murmured. “Tomorrow is soon enough to hate me again.”
But as exhaustion pulled her under, Arabella found to her distant horror that hatred was no longer the strongest thing she felt.
The Duke of Ashford had taken her body with devastating thoroughness.
And somewhere, in the ashes of her surrender, her heart had begun against every oath she had ever made to follow.
Arabella woke to sunlight peeping through the curtains and the ache between her thighs that reminded her of everything that had happened in the dark.
The vast bed was empty, Sebastian had risen before dawn, some urgent matter of estate business, his valet had murmured when he brought chocolate and hot water.
The duke had kissed her forehead with surprising tenderness before he left, a gesture that unsettled her far more than his earlier possession.
She was still turning the memory over in her mind when the butler knocked.
“Mr. Edmund Vale is below, Your Grace. He insists the matter is most pressing and will not be denied.”
Edmund.
The name struck her like a lash across bare skin.
For four summers Edmund Vale had been everything, the second son of a neighbouring baronet, golden-haired and reckless, with laughing hazel eyes and a mouth that had taught her the meaning of longing in moonlit stables and hidden corners of her father’s garden.
They had kissed until her lips were swollen, had sworn eternal devotion beneath the old yew tree, had planned an elopement that never came to pass because her father’s debts had swallowed every dream.
And now he was here, in Ashford House, while she lay naked beneath the sheets with her husband’s seed still drying on her thighs.
Arabella’s heart battered against her ribs. She ought to refuse him.
She was a married woman now, and a duchess. Yet the thought of Edmund so close, after months of silence set her pulse racing with something perilously close to hope.
“Tell him I will receive him in the morning room in twenty minutes,” she heard herself say.
She dressed with shaking hands, a simple muslin gown the colour of spring leaves, she could not bear the thought of lacing, only a light chemise beneath.
Her hair was twisted into a careless knot. When she looked in the glass, her cheeks were flushed, her lips bruised from Sebastian’s kisses, her eyes too bright.
She looked guilty.
Edmund was pacing the morning room like a caged lion when she entered.
The moment the door closed behind her he crossed the carpet in three strides and caught her in his arms.
“Arabella.” His voice cracked on her name. “God forgive me, I had to see you.”
She was meant to step back, to be cool and correct and duchess-like.
Instead she melted against him, breathing in cedar and horse and the faint sweetness of the meadows they had once ridden across together.
“You should not be here,” she whispered, even as her fingers curled into his coat.
“I know.” He cupped her face, thumbs stroking the tears she had not realised were falling.
“When I heard you were married…Christ, Arabella, I was in Scotland, I only returned yesterday. They said it was done in haste, that you had no choice…”
“I had no choice,” she said bitterly.
Edmund’s mouth claimed hers then, desperate and fierce, tasting of rage and grief and four years of stolen kisses remembered.
Arabella kissed him back with a hunger that shamed her, hands sliding into his hair, pressing herself against the familiar hard length of him.
For one dizzying moment she was nineteen again and free.
A sharp rap at the front door shattered the illusion.
Edmund froze. Arabella’s blood turned to ice.
“My mother,” she breathed in horror. Lady Langley had written that she intended to call this morning to see how her daughter did on the first day of married life. Arabella had forgotten entirely.
Footsteps in the hall. There was no time.
Without thinking, Arabella seized Edmund’s hand and dragged him toward the small writing alcove beneath the window.
An ornate mahogany desk with a deep well beneath and a long embroidered cloth that draped almost to the floor. She pushed him down.
“Stay there. Do not move. Do not make a sound.”
Edmund’s eyes were wide, but he obeyed, folding his long body into the cramped space and pulling his knees to his chest.
Arabella dropped into the chair, arranged her skirts in a froth of green muslin that concealed him entirely, and had barely smoothed her expression when the door opened.