Chapter 13 #2
He glanced up from his task to meet those big, crystal-clear eyes, letting his hand remain temporarily captured. She was right, of course. It was just exceptionally difficult to maintain his hold on reason when his pulse kept thundering the way it did.
“Meanwhile,” she added as he retrieved the linen and coaxed her fingers to relax, “I have no qualms about riding over to Watley tomorrow and demanding he explain himself.”
His hand, warmed by the heat of her bare skin, suddenly felt frigid, and he stumbled again, the linen nearly slipping from his grasp before he caught it with stiff fingers.
She was trying to help; logically, he knew that.
However, the icy pinpricks that stabbed him to the core cared nothing for logic.
They cared only that every dilemma Violet encountered was met with the same solution: a visit to Watley.
Even after she could have been bloody well killed, she had no inclination to stay away.
“No.” It was the only word he could manage, spoken with a clipped, ominous quality.
What would it take to rid her of her wish to keep returning to the site of that blasted house party?
To keep crossing paths with the man she’d hoped to marry?
Was such a thing even possible, or would the desire remain with her for the rest of her days?
He focused on dressing her palm with almost fanatical precision, refusing to let his thoughts settle anywhere but on wrapping the linen with perfect folds. Not that his determination could stop his gut from roiling.
He could feel her eyes watching him as he worked. Could feel his insides clench and sputter, as if they contained a flame ready to burst into an inferno. And then, in a hesitant murmur, her words came. “You’re angry with me.”
He didn’t turn away from his task to answer. Perhaps she was hoping for a denial, for a return to their habit of exchanging only banalities, but he couldn’t comply. He was angry. He was fucking furious. Because Violet was bleeding. Because Violet wanted George Metcalfe.
“I know I went against your wishes,” she said, “but I was trying to help—”
“Perhaps, but I find myself wondering something.” He abruptly looked up, the frostiness of his tone ringing in his ears. Every nerve ending a combination of ice and fire. “Were you trying to help on all the other occasions you slipped away to Watley land, or did your visits have another purpose?”
Even while his body felt on the verge of combustion, he kept her hand secure within his, careful not to jostle it.
Yet suddenly, she flinched as though he’d doused her palm in vinegar.
She tugged it out of his grasp, scrambling to the opposite edge of the settee so an obvious gap rested between them. “What could you possibly mean by that?”
There was still time to douse the flames, to tamp down the ugly emotions coursing through his veins and return to a state of detached composure.
However, every unspoken shred of doubt he’d harbored since the day of their betrothal, every unwanted pang of envy, swelled within him until he was powerless to hold back.
“You insisted I not stray beyond the bounds of our marriage. Did you never think I would want the same courtesy in return?”
Her lips parted, her brows rising high on her forehead.
“You cannot be implying …” She sat with the declaration, unmoving, for several long, torturous seconds before her eyes narrowed, the vivid blue flashing dangerously in the candlelight.
“As husband and wife, you and I have done pitiably little conversing, so let me make something clear. I haven’t stepped foot in Watley Hall since the day of our encounter in the hut, nor would I have strayed if I had.
I don’t hold anything close to amorous sentiments for the gentlemen at that ridiculous party, least of all George Metcalfe, who was so appalled by my shocking behavior that he quickly hied back to London with no plans to return. ”
Now, Ben was the one who felt he had wounds drenched in vinegar. Or perhaps as though he’d been slapped to alertness. He’d … he’d been wrong. A realization that proved equal parts relieving and horrifying.
On second thought, the horrifying part took precedence.
He’d been an idiot, too cowardly to talk to his own wife.
And now, she was bolting to her feet, glaring down at him with unrestrained fury.
“How dare you question me?” she demanded.
“How dare you, when you’re the one who keeps shutting me out?
When you’re the one who’s keeping secrets. ”
She may as well have barreled over him with a gelding from the stables, for the air rushed from his lungs, and he couldn’t seem to refill them properly. Nor could he think in a coherent sequence.
To what did she refer, exactly? She’d said her mother enjoyed the gossip rags, where matters concerning the Prescott family had often appeared throughout the years for anyone’s perusal.
He’d never asked Violet which tidbits of gossip she’d read, but he hadn’t outright lied about any of it, either.
He’d partaken in omissions of truth, perhaps …
In any case, he could do nothing but rise from the settee and give his chin a stiff shake. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Somehow, that seemed to be the worst thing to say of all.
The thing that brought the glint in her eyes beyond outrage to somewhere dark, intent, and threatening.
She stepped forward, erasing the gap she’d created between them, standing so close that her bodice brushed against his waistcoat.
So close that he heard her trembling inhale before she opened her mouth and said, in a voice as expressive and clear as any Covent Garden actress, “‘You’ve misbehaved, Mrs. Rumpteaser. And with disobedience must come punishment.’”
Oh.
Oh.
He remained upright, his muscles achingly taut, although she could have knocked him over and broken him with a tap from her index finger.
And still, she didn’t relent.
“Her loins ached, quivering with a need that only he could satiate.” Violet’s words gained momentum, vanquishing the short-lived silence. “‘Fill me, my lord, fill me—’”
“Cease this at once,” he rasped, trying to move back but finding his legs had nowhere to go beyond hitting the edge of the settee.
His heart was pounding out of control, an errant hammer against his ribs.
This problem required an immediate solution, but he couldn’t concentrate, could scarcely even see straight.
Her lashes fluttered with feigned innocence.
“You don’t care to hear those passages recited?
” And instead of retreating, she rose to her tiptoes, her breath a hot stream, her words a maddening siren’s song, against his bare throat.
“I’ll choose another, then. He breached her where she was hot and slick, her welcoming cunt enveloping him—”
“I said stop it.” His demand was rough. Raw. “You’re being obscene.”
“Obscene?” she hissed, her hands flying to his chest, the touch searing through his waistcoat and shooting to the marrow of his bones. “You damn well wrote the words!”
Stupid, stupid, stupid. He should have realized the scandal would follow him to Wiltshire, that there would be no avoiding it. Should have thought of what he would say, he supposed, even though he’d never anticipated having a wife with whom he’d share his confidences.
He hadn’t realized, though. Hadn’t thought. And now he did have a wife whose face nearly touched his as she waited for him to say something, and he didn’t know, didn’t know …
He didn’t know anything beyond that her flushed cheeks contained dirt and dried blood, that her eyes looked ready to burn a hole through him, that her mouth, which had so candidly narrated the explicit text, was very near to his.
His heart hadn’t ceased thundering, but for the first time, it occurred to him that maybe the frenzied thump, thump, thump originated from her chest as well as his own.
The air was so heavy, so hot, as if it contained invisible sparks, and he needed to get away but also couldn’t stop breathing it in—
Except then, she pressed her palms harder against his waistcoat and shoved away from him, and instead of her pattering heartbeat, he had only a cold void.
Her accusing stare. “I’m through here,” she muttered, her tone laced with ice.
“I won’t stay to listen to your self-righteous denials.
If you refuse to be honest with me, I don’t want to hear another word. ”
He staggered, blinking inanely while she spun away and marched toward the door like an unstoppable tempest. But he had to stop her, couldn’t leave things like this. “Violet—”
“Don’t.” She spared a fraction of a second to look back and bestow on him a venomous glower. A warning. And then, she was gone, her mass of tangled hair and mud-stained hem disappearing into the corridor.
He took a step forward. Backward. Forward again.
“Fuck!” He pressed his fingers to his temples, striving for clarity, sanity, any scrap of reason to which he could cling.
But there was none to be found. Nothing to do but stumble blindly into the corridor and toward the stairs, his head violently whirling. Blood pounding through his veins.
Never let the sun set on your provocation.
He’d wanted to make things right with her before the evening was through. Except then she’d gone missing, and the night had taken so many chaotic turns that he no longer knew which way was up.
She must have run all the way up the stairs, for no sooner did he reach the top landing than a door slammed shut, leaving no doubt as to where she’d gone.
Which was good, perhaps. He could do just as he’d intended earlier and knock on her bedchamber door. Try to explain.
Were he a better man—a sensible man, a genteel man—he would have chosen that path rather than bypassing her door completely and bursting through his own, kicking it closed with his boot and turning the lock.
But he wasn’t a better man right now. He was a goddamn mess.
He strode across the floor to his washstand, the mirror above it catching his reflection and revealing his disgrace.
The skin at his throat was dotted with his wife’s bloody fingerprints.
His white shirt had turned dingy, his waistcoat wrinkled and dirt-stained.
And his muddy trousers had become far too tight, for it would seem he’d developed a rampant cockstand.
‘Fill me, my lord …’
Hot and slick …
Welcoming cunt …
The words wouldn’t stop circling back to him. Neither would the glimmer in her eyes, the flash of her pink tongue as she’d uttered them so unabashedly.
He plunged his hands into the basin of tepid water, splashing it over his face and neck. Staring at the disheveled image of himself, watching the water run beneath his shirt.
Until suddenly, he pivoted, his fingers tearing at his fall, sending buttons flying to the carpet until his erection sprang free. He took himself in hand, stifling a groan at the first stroke of relief. He quickly established a rhythm, pumping up and down the turgid shaft.
What had she done to him? He’d never felt like this before. Desperate. Unhinged.
“Violet,” he choked out, the name rising unbidden from some place deep inside him. His current existence was composed of golden hair and full breasts pressing against him. Of floral perfume and hot breath and parted lips. ‘Fill me, my lord.’
His yearning spiked, ready to crash over a precipice. Which made it astounding, really, that the low sound from next door managed to reach his awareness.
It was a cry, soft and feminine. Wounded, perhaps. A cry that made his hand drop to his side and shame pierce his gut. What sort of husband induced his wife to weep? He was a reprobate, the worst kind of fiend—
But then, the cry sounded again. And again. Not the wail of a woman in distress but a needy, increasing moan.
Oh, God.
Oh, God; oh, Christ; oh, blistering hell, his wife was in the next room pleasuring herself. Not attempting to hold anything back.
He scrabbled frantically behind him for a towel, grabbing it into his fist at the same moment his other hand returned to his cock.
One more stroke was all it took for his seed to spill out in thick jets and heady waves to inundate his body.
Violet’s moans led him through every one of them until, at last, both his shudders and her temptress’s voice faded away.
He hastily cleaned himself, then staggered to his bed on legs that felt boneless, stopping just long enough to remove his boots before tumbling atop the counterpane, muddy clothing and all.
What in hell had happened? He stared at the plaster ceiling in a daze, satiated warmth running through his limbs. Proof it hadn’t been only a feverish dream, even though Violet’s bedchamber was now silent.
He could lie to himself and say that after this rare lapse in self-possession, he would spend all his days going forward level-headed and restrained.
The truth was, though, that beneath the vague aftershocks of pleasure lay a new and potent need he hadn’t even begun to address.