Chapter 21 #2
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she breathes, turning slowly in a circle to take the room in.
It is, I admit, a simply lovely room, its shape a perfect quarter circle, the exterior, window-lined wall fully curved.
The walls and floor and flower beds are all limestone, lending it a pale serenity that offsets the chaotic fronds of the plants themselves.
The ceiling, which is a quarter of a dome, is almost entirely glass, and, in a nod to the Victorian era of the room’s conception, a heavy cream velvet curtain with silk fringing hangs across the entrance to the room.
‘It’s very peaceful,’ I agree. ‘A very special place.’
‘It smells amazing.’ She sniffs hard, running her slender fingers lightly through the fronds of one of the nearest ferns, and I have the new and unwelcome sensation of being jealous of a plant.
‘Here.’ I sit myself down on the wide limestone ledge surrounding one bed and pull on the leather tie fastening the edge of one diary.
To my immense gratification, Ivy comes to sit next to me.
The ferns may smell divine, but they have nothing on the scent of her.
I shut my eyes briefly as I pass her the diary. ‘Take a look for yourself.’
Head bowed, she pores over the pages and, as I often do, I marvel at the thin, silken threads of history, of continuity, and the extraordinary ways in which they wind through our lives.
One and a half centuries ago, Alice de Vere sat in this room, painstakingly recording her most prized ferns frond by frond with paper and ink.
She noted every single way in which she cultivated them.
She recorded their food. Their light. Their water.
She preserved their habits, their idiosyncrasies, for the generations of de Veres who would inherit them.
In a few short months, my betrothed, Selena Wentworth, will assume responsibility for these diaries.
She will care for them and preserve them for our heirs, just as assiduously as Alice did their subject matter, but she may never love them.
She may never feel the awe, the wonder, that I feel as she gazes on them.
And now, a golden-haired woman of common birth sits next to me, incandescent in her beauty, her fingers trembling as she turns the pages of Alice’s life’s work, making tiny noises of surprise and delight as she uncovers each exquisite sketch, and it makes my breath catch in my throat.
It makes me wonder if these golden threads that weave through time and space, binding us together, have any fucking clue what on earth kind of pattern they’re trying to render, anyway.
I watch her in profile. Watch the delicate tilt of her nose and chin, the lustrous gleam of her hair and eyes, the ripeness of her lips as she reads the occasional passage. ‘Do you like them?’
She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she bows her head lower, presses her fingers reverently to a blank space on the old paper. ‘It makes my heart hurt a bit,’ she whispers, ‘that someone cared this much. That someone put this much love into something.’
I stare down at her, at the diary in her lap and the slim contours of her hands and at the dainty bone structure of her wrists. ‘I know exactly what you mean. It always makes me feel that way, too.’
She smiles a little. ‘Listen to this. Polystichum setiferum’—she stumbles on the Latin—‘the soft shield fern. Cook insists on feeding it weekly doses of cold tea, claiming the leaves grow more lustrous with each cup. I suspect she simply cannot bear to waste a drop, but the results are undeniable. Note: Lady Cavendish’s fern has never recovered from her housekeeper’s attempts at brandy feeding.
Some indulgences are best kept to humans.
That’s incredible!’ She glances up at me, her face shining, and it’s so infectious that I smile back.
‘I totally agree, but I thought I was the weird nerd.’
‘I’m definitely a nerd too. I was crap at school, but I could geek out for hours on shit like this.’
‘Look at us, poring over fern diaries on a Friday evening. My brother will have a field day. We’re basically Walter and Alice.’ The words sound almost reckless to my own ears.
She folds the diary carefully closed and cocks her head at me, as if she’s giving my throwaway comment real consideration. ‘You might be Walter, but I would never have been Alice. You know that. If anything, I would have been the maid.’
She’s still smiling, but it’s a wistful sort of smile, and I suppose she’s right. A century or two ago, our class differences would have been even more pronounced. Even more divisive. I purse my lips in reluctant agreement, and she leans in more closely, her voice dropping to a whisper.
‘I would have snuck into your grand bedchamber every morning to light your fire so you didn’t have to freeze your posh, aristocratic arse off when you got dressed.’
That makes me grin. ‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Yeah. And you would have totally abused your power and made me suck your cock, and I would have loved every fucking minute of it.’
My entire body goes stock still, right as a toxic concoction of horror and disgust and arousal charges through my veins. I stare at her, at the plush little mouth at the centre of the degrading Molotov cocktail of a fantasy she’s just chucked at me in the most cavalier non sequitur I could imagine.
‘Jesus, Ivy!’
It’s all I’m capable of, but I believe it reflects every bit of my inner turmoil.
Who the fuck is this woman next to me, a woman who let me strip her naked earlier in what is essentially a glass edifice and is now tossing out sexual grenades with casual disregard for common decency?
Can she really be as liberated as she purports to be?
Can sex, in all its guises, truly be as natural to her as breathing?
Or is she still somehow enchained in the Stockholm syndrome of her servitude to a sex club?
Does she still, in some unfathomable way, believe herself in servitude, and what does that make me?
A guy who preys upon the lack of value she places upon her own body, except that this time I’m not even bothering to pay for the privilege?
That feeling is back: that sense of vulnerability, of fragility, that I got from Ivy even as she bared her breasts for me in the lilac room. And with it, the equally fervent sense that it’s my duty to save her, somehow, or at the very least, put a firm end to this cycle of her being exploited.
This mental and emotional epiphany coincides with my dick stiffening at her words, at the picture she’s painted so rashly, and a wave of self-loathing washes over me.
Her face falls. ‘I thought you’d be into it.’
‘I’m not into anything that involves exploiting you,’ I lie sternly.
She actually laughs. ‘Xav. We’ve been through this. Women are allowed to enjoy sex. Shagging us doesn’t mean exploiting us. Believe me, if I got you to myself later, I’d exploit every last bone in your body. And, like I said, I’d love every minute.’
She glances pointedly down at my crotch, and the self-loathing ebbs away with the frothy edges of something that feels a lot like relief.
‘I don’t want the dynamic to be… uneven,’ I murmur, conscious that our faces are drawing closer even as I protest.
‘Well, I fucking do. You’re not the only one who needs reassurance, you know. You walked away, remember, when my mouth was this close to your dick.’ She holds her thumb and forefinger up, about an inch apart. As if I in any way needed a reminder of what unthinkable pleasure I declined.
She can’t possibly be in any doubt, after this afternoon, as to how much I desire her.
And as the mental scales tip from respecting her to showing her how badly I want her, I close the gap between us.
‘I want your mouth on my dick,’ I growl against her soft lips.
‘More than anything. I just didn’t want you being paid to do it—I couldn’t stand it. ’
Ivy is pure pleasure in a world of duty. Of obligation. Certainly, her form of pleasure is ill-advised, to say the least, but my willpower has snapped. My mental fortitude has gone up in smoke, and the responsibilities of my existence lie in tatters.
I couldn’t deny myself this indulgence, even if my future title depended on it.
I kiss her hard, clawing at her hair, taking great big handfuls of the silky mass as I slide my lips against hers and claim her mouth with my tongue.
It’s another test, another way of ensuring that she really wants this.
And, as she mewls into my mouth and grinds her tits against me, I grow pretty fucking confident that she’s passed with flying colours.
I break the kiss, breathing hard. ‘Expect me in your room later, then.’
‘You going to feed me a giant wedge of ducal dick?’ she asks, and I chuckle despite myself. She is unbelievable.
‘Maybe.’ I draw away, just enough so I can watch her face. ‘But mainly because I can’t have you under my roof and not spend the night with you. It’s unconscionable.’