Chapter 64 Stuck between two men (8)
Third person POV:
She pictured the two of them on a ship bound for Italy, wind in their hair, no dukes, no bargains, no bruises hidden beneath pearls.
She pictured waking every morning to this slow, tender loving instead of Sebastian’s fierce possession.
But then she remembered the way Sebastian had held her after the library, the way his voice had roughened when he called her “my darling wife,” the terrifying possibility that some part of her, some dark, faithless part, was beginning to crave the storm as much as the sunrise.
“I can’t,” she sobbed. “Edmund, I can’t.”
His rhythm faltered. Pain flashed across his face, raw and unguarded.
“Then let me love you anyway,” he said fiercely, and kissed her again, harder now, hips snapping faster.
The gentleness burned away into something desperate.
He took her against the glass with the rising sun gilding their joined bodies, her nightgown rucked to her waist, his shirt soaked with sweat and her tears.
She came again, clenching around him, muffling her cries against his shoulder.
He followed with a broken groan, pulsing deep inside her, holding her so tightly she could feel his heart trying to batter its way out of his chest to reach hers.
They stayed locked together long after the pleasure faded, trembling in each other’s arms.
At last he let her slide down his body until her feet touched the moss. He rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed.
“I won’t ask again,” he said quietly. “But I won’t stop loving you either. Not while I breathe.”
Arabella pressed a trembling kiss to the corner of his mouth.
“Edmund…”
A soft sound the creak of a door at the far end of the conservatory.
They froze.
Footsteps, measured and unhurried, moving along the gravel path between the citrus trees.
Sebastian.
He appeared like a dark angel between the leaves, impeccably dressed for riding though the hour was barely five, crop in one gloved hand.
His gaze took them in Edmund’s open breeches, Arabella’s nightgown clinging damply to her thighs, the unmistakable scent of sex hanging heavy in the humid air.
For a moment no one spoke.
Then Sebastian smiled, small, lethal, almost tender.
“Payment is due, wife,” he said softly.
Edmund stepped in front of her instinctively. “Touch her and I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” Sebastian’s voice cut like a whip. “Challenge me? Kill me? You forget, ValeI, I allow this.”
He flicked his crop against his boot, the sound sharp as a gunshot in the stillness.
“Step aside.”
Edmund’s fists clenched. Arabella laid a shaking hand on his arm.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, though her voice cracked. “This is the bargain.”
Edmund looked at her as though she had stabbed him.
Sebastian extended one hand to Arabella, palm up. An invitation and a command.
She went to him.
The moment her fingers touched his, he pulled her close, spun her so her back was to his chest, and tilted her chin with the crop beneath her jaw.
“Watch him,” he murmured in her ear, loud enough for Edmund to hear every word. “Watch what you do to us both.”
Then, never taking his eyes from Edmund’s white, furious face, Sebastian pushed her nightgown up, bared her to the dawn, and took her right there against the orange tree slow, deliberate thrusts that made her sob with overstimulation and shame and a pleasure so intense it felt like dying.
Edmund stood rooted, forced to witness every stroke, every helpless moan Sebastian wrung from her throat.
When Sebastian reached around to circle her clitoris and she came yet again with a broken wail, Edmund made a sound like a wounded animal.
Sebastian finished inside her with a low growl, biting down on the curve of her shoulder hard enough to leave teeth marks through the thin fabric.
Only then did he release her.
Arabella slid to her knees in the moss, shaking, tears streaming.
Sebastian adjusted his clothing with cool precision, then looked at Edmund.
“The next time you make her cry,” he said pleasantly, “I will not be so generous.”
He offered Arabella his hand again. This time she took it without hesitation, letting him draw her to her feet and into the crook of his arm.
As they walked away through the scented green dark, Arabella glanced back once.
Edmund stood alone among the orange trees, golden hair tangled, eyes dead.
And for the first time she understood the true cost of the devil’s bargain she had made.
She was no longer simply torn between two men.
She was destroying them both.
~Dinner at Harrington Park.
Dinner at Harrington Park was always a battlefield disguised as a banquet.
Tonight the weapons were crystal, candlelight, and the slow, deliberate torture of two men who had decided to make Arabella their prize in front of thirty witnesses who must never suspect.
The long table glittered silver epergnes overflowing with hothouse peaches, a hundred candles trembling in the breath of hidden desire.
Arabella sat between Sebastian at the head, Edmund placed at her right by some cruel sleight of seating cards.
Her gown was emerald silk so dark it looked black until the light caught it, cut low enough that every breath threatened to spill her breasts into the soup.
The pearls at her throat hid the fresh crescent of Sebastian’s teeth; rice powder barely concealed the faint bruises on her collarbones.
Across from her, Lady Whiston watched with the bright, predatory eyes of a woman who scented blood.
The first course had scarcely been removed when the game began.
Sebastian’s hand settled on Arabella’s left thigh beneath the damask cloth gloved, warm, impossibly steady.
A moment later Edmund’s bare fingers brushed her right knee, tracing the edge of her garter with heartbreaking familiarity.
She froze, her fork suspended halfway to her lips.
Sebastian leaned toward her as though to murmur some husbandly nothing.
“Breathe, darling,” he said against her ear, loud enough for only her and Edmund to hear.
“We would not wish the company to think you unwell.”