Chapter 13 #2
Sybil hadn’t spoken with him since she had been seated at his side for supper. And even that conversation had been brief, yet stilted. He had been cool and short, his words carefully measured as if each one cost him dearly.
There was a gaping chasm between them, and she had no notion of how to bridge it.
She wasn’t even sure if it was possible to do so.
What she did know was that she couldn’t continue to live each day as if they were cold strangers.
She was weary of his iciness, of his clenched jaw, his cool, dispassionate stare.
She was tired of the only warmth between them sparking to life when he came to her in the night.
Where was he?
Growing ever more restless, she rose from bed where she had been once again trying to distract herself with a book.
It hadn’t worked. It never did. She reached for her dressing gown, which had been neatly laid out for her, and drew it on, her fingers working at the closures.
In an act of rebelliousness, she had told her lady’s maid to keep her hair pinned up as she had worn it for the ball, knowing Everett preferred it unbound.
She slid into her slippers, took up a candle, and decided to go searching for her errant husband.
Her first step was to venture next door into his domain to make sure he wasn’t within. His bedchamber, which she had yet to visit, was cloaked in shadows, the fire in the grate banked and nearly out. The room smelled of his scent, and she felt like an intruder, even though she was his wife.
Hastily retreating, she made her way down the hall to the staircase. As she began her careful descent, that was when she heard it. The faint notes of a piano playing a mournful tune. Somehow, she knew it was Everett.
Following her ears, she meandered through the darkened house, which had blazed with light and echoed with the noise of musicians and hundreds of guests. Now, all was eerily quiet and still, save for the song her husband played.
She found him in the ballroom, a brace of candles illuminating the chamber.
Although his back was to her, she recognized the moment he sensed her presence as she approached, for his shoulders stiffened and he sat straighter. At last, the song came to a haunting conclusion, and there was naught but silence.
“What are you doing here, Sybil?” he demanded without bothering to look in her direction.
“How did you know it was me?” she asked instead of answering.
Everett turned at last on the velvet-tufted bench, swinging his long legs around so that he faced her completely.
His handsome countenance was shadowed. “Your scent.”
Eschewing manners, he didn’t rise to his feet in deference to her presence.
Instead, he remained seated, his legs indolently crossed at the ankles.
She decided not to admit that she had applied extra perfume to her wrists and throat after dismissing her lady’s maid for the evening earlier.
Her pride wouldn’t allow the confession.
“What are you doing, playing the piano at this hour of the morning? You ought to have come to bed by now.”
A sardonic half grin kicked up the corner of his lips. “Were you eagerly awaiting me, darling wife?”
“I worried what was keeping you,” she admitted, though his suggestion had also been true.
She awaited him eagerly every night. Because she was a fool for him. She had been from that sunlit moment in the thickets between Eastlake Hall and Riverdale Abbey. Perhaps she would always be.
“You were worried for me?” He pressed a hand to his chest. “The cold recesses of my heart are warmed by your womanly concern.”
Clearly, the intervening hours since she had last seen him had not served to improve her husband’s mood.
She compressed her lips. “I thought you didn’t have a heart.”
“Touché.” At last, he rose, stretching to his full, impressive height. “You are correct. That fossil ceased to exist years ago.”
Slowly, inexorably, he moved toward her. There was a dangerousness to his mood. A darkness, too. But she had sought him out of her own accord, and Sybil refused to allow him to chase her now.
She tipped her head back as he reached her, holding his glittering stare. “Or perhaps that is merely a fiction you tell yourself, for I have seen evidence of your heart’s existence many times this last month.”
He caressed her throat above the prim collar of her dressing gown, his fingers slipping to her nape. “What evidence?”
A frisson of awareness skipped down her spine, her nipples pebbling to peaks beneath the layers that kept her from him.
She wetted lips that had suddenly gone dry and tried to tamp down the ache that had already begun to pulse to life between her legs.
Sybil hated that she could be so weak for him, that she still desired him so much, when he remained so cold.
“You love your mother and your sister,” she told him, vexed with herself for her breathlessness.
“Is that what you came here to discuss?” he asked, lowering his face to her neck and dragging the tip of his nose along her throat to inhale her scent.
What had she come here to discuss? Her mind was fragmented. She could scarcely think.
She swallowed. “I…”
He kissed the shell of her ear, his breath hot on her, making her shiver. “You?”
Think, Sybil. Think.
“I was concerned about you,” she managed. “As I said.”
He worried the lobe with his teeth. “Or perhaps you were so desperate to have me inside you that you couldn’t wait until I retired to my room.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, her hands still at her sides. She refused to reach for him. To surrender. And yet, she found herself swaying toward him, like a blossom stretching for the sun.
“I assure you that I am capable of waiting,” she forced out, opening her eyes again.
He had taken off his coat and wore his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his broad shoulders on display for her delectation.
“Are you?” he murmured in her ear, his tongue tracing the whorl with such delicateness that she couldn’t help but shudder with suppressed want. “What if I lifted your skirts right now and touched you? Would your sweet pussy be wet for me, Sybil?”
His wicked words shouldn’t titillate her. He was likely being crude out of cruelty. And yet, she couldn’t control the effect they had on her body.
She would be wet for him.
In the absence of her drawers beneath her nightgown, she could feel the dampness between her thighs. And if he touched her, he would know her sinful secret. That she desired him despite his callous behavior. That there was no greater bliss than his kiss, his touch.
“You are being vulgar,” she murmured.
“Mmm.” He strung a path of hot kisses along her jaw. “But you like it even if you don’t want to. Your heart may belong elsewhere, but your body is mine, and it betrays you every time I touch you.”
What did he mean about her heart belonging elsewhere? Surely he didn’t think she would rather be back at Eastlake Hall, knowing what he did of her father’s viciousness. It made no sense.
His lips had reached the corner of hers then, and he took them in a deep, carnal kiss that erased the confusion from her mind.
She forgot to care about those troubling words and gave herself to him instead, reveling in his mouth.
She hadn’t come here to be seduced. But now all the pent-up strain of having to prepare for the ball was gone, and they were alone in a darkened room, and his lips were on hers.
And he was all she wanted.
His other hand clamped on her waist, and he kissed her hungrily, as if he were starved for her.
Kissed her with fury and passion, his mouth almost bruising with its intensity.
And she kissed him back, finally allowing herself to touch him, settling her hands on his shoulders and clinging to him.
She kissed him until her lips ached and she could scarcely catch a breath.
Sybil was kissing him still when suddenly he caught her around the waist with both hands and lifted her.
Her slipper-clad feet hung above the polished floor, and she grappled with her hold on his shoulders, her world upended.
On her shocked inhalation, he dipped his tongue into her mouth, claiming.
He tasted like champagne and sin as he carried her across the ballroom to the nearest wall.
She barely had the chance to tear her mouth from his when she was pinned against the damask, his big body and sheer strength holding hers aloft. She shouldn’t want him this way. Shouldn’t like the possessive hold he had of her.
But she did anyway.
“What are you doing?” she asked, vexed with herself for the breathlessness she had allowed to steal into her voice.
His head angled toward hers, but he did not kiss her. He just held her there against the wall in the ballroom that had hours earlier been brimming with London’s finest.
“Testing my theory,” he said, his voice low and deep, sliding over her senses like melted butter.
He shifted slightly, holding her up with his body weight and the leverage of his leg between hers, before releasing her waist with one hand and grasping her dressing gown and night rail as one.
Her husband intended to touch her, she realized. He would find her shamelessly soaked for him, her flesh all too eager.
“Everett,” she protested. “Not here.”
It was scandalous, despite the lateness of the hour. Anyone could come upon them. The doors to the ballroom were open.
But he ignored her, dragging his fistful of fabric higher, sending cool night air to glide over her ankles and calves, all the way to her knees.
“Why not here?” he rasped, still dragging her hems upward. “There is no one about to see us.”
His hand had slid beneath her robe and nightgown now, gliding over her thigh.
Her breath caught. “But they could be.”
“But they aren’t.” That wicked hand of his traveled still, not stopping until it was between her legs. He slicked her wetness over her seam, humming with approval. “And you are deliciously wet, my love.”
He had discovered her secret. But it was the only one she would give him. The other—what lay in her heart—was hers alone. She bit her lip, jolting against him when he swirled the pad of his forefinger over her clitoris, sending white-hot desire unfurling.
She was almost painfully sensitive there already, and she knew that it would require hardly any effort on his part to wring a release from her.
“So wet,” he repeated, exerting a bit more pressure, his fingers twisting over her a little faster. “And ready for me.”
She was completely at his mercy, captured against the wall, held in place by his solid form, her feet still dangling above the floor.
She was at his mercy, and she liked it. Wanted it, in fact.
This wasn’t what she had sought him out for, but now that she was on the edge of losing control, Sybil could think of nothing she needed more.
“You want this, don’t you?” Everett whispered. “You want me to take you here, now.”
She did. God help her, she did.
She gasped as he caressed her clitoris, rubbing herself against him. “Don’t we require…a bed?”
Her mind couldn’t begin to fathom how he would possibly make love to her in their present position. Unless he intended to lower her to the floor…
He chuckled, nudging her lips with his as his fingers continued to play over her nub. “There are so many ways to fuck, darling wife. I can see I’ve been remiss in not providing you with proper edification.”
She wanted that mouth, that wicked, sinner’s mouth that was so oft stern and harsh and forbidding.
So, she kissed him herself. Kissed him and rocked against his hand whilst he held her pinned to the wall.
Kissed him and pushed her tongue into his mouth as the molten sparks of her release tore through her.
She came hard and fast, the rush of being suspended heightening the pleasure.
Sybil had almost no time to recover from the ferocity of her pinnacle when he broke the kiss and took one of her hands in his, guiding it to the fall of his trousers where his cock strained, rigid and ready, against the placket there.
She gave his length a firm caress, gratified when he hissed in a breath and kissed her again, harder this time, his mouth punishing, demanding as much as he gave.
“Take out my cock,” he told her. “Put me inside that gorgeous, wet cunny of yours.”
She reached for the buttons on his falls, obeying him, needing him inside her.
Needing the finality of being stretched full, of him making love to her completely.
Her fumbling efforts finally resulted in his cock springing free, thick and long and erect.
She wrapped her fingers around him, stroking from base to tip, allowing her thumb to swirl the liquid seeping from the slit around his cock head.
His groan rewarded her as he guided her leg to his hip, opening her to him.
“Go on,” he urged.
Sybil gave them what they both wanted, bringing his cock to her entrance and slicking him through her wetness.
She panted, writhing against the wall, against him.
How she wished they were naked. That his lips were latched on her breast. But this would have to suffice, coupling like two animals against a ballroom wall, because she wouldn’t last until they made it upstairs.
He shoved into her with one hard thrust, impaling her on his cock.
The hot, hard glide of him in her depths was exquisite. She wrapped her other leg around him, tightening them, holding him deep inside her.
His head tipped toward hers, their foreheads meeting, his breath falling over her lips like a curtain. “I’m going to fuck you properly now. Hold on.”
She understood his warning as he began thrusting in and out of her, fast and deep.
Her head thumped against the damask-covered wall.
A strangled sound tore from her lips, and he muffled the rest of her cries with his mouth, kissing her as frantically as he pumped within her.
Driving her all the way to the edge and then beyond.
She was mindless, weightless, unbridled ecstasy rushing over her like the waters of a flood. Sweeping her away until there was nothing left but the two of them, clinging to each other, finding that delirious bliss together. With a moan that was muffled by their kiss, he spilled inside her.
Sybil held him tightly as the last flutters of her release went through her, his cock lodged deep, so deep. As his heart thundered against her breast and his lips gentled on hers, she told herself that mayhap, just mayhap, if this pleasure was all they could ever have, she could learn to accept it.
That she might love Everett enough for them both.