I have no idea how long we were there, bound together, our hearts beating wildly against each other, arms and legs entwined, our bodies damp with mingled sweat, but eventually, at some point I became aware that Max rolled off me and lay panting at my side. I lay thinking wonderfully muzzy, warm, satisfying thoughts about the man I just realized I’d given my heart to, the man who touched my soul in a way no one else had, the man who filled me with the joyous feeling of being a part of someone’s life . . . and then he went and ruined it all.
“Good night,” he said, and got up and left the room.
I stayed in bed for exactly three minutes and twelve seconds (I know because I was staring in complete and utter shock at the door to the bathroom reflected in the mirror and the clock was right next to it) before I gathered my wits.
I grabbed the peignoir and without even donning it, marched through the bathroom to his room.
“You bastard!” I yelled into the darkness of his room as I headed straight for his bed. “You scum-sucking pig of a man! How dare you treat me like that!”
“Tessa—”
A match flared to life as Max lit the candle next to his bed. I threw my peignoir at his head. He pulled it off and glared back at me. “How dare I treat you like what? You liked me going down on you! You’re the one who was yelling me on!”
I looked around for something else to throw at him. Something hard. I found a book on the armchair next to the fireplace and threw it. He grabbed it before it could hit him on his pigheaded head. “You treated me like a whore! You can’t just come into my room and make love to me like that and then leave! I’m not just a convenient vessel to get your rocks off, you know.”
Max propped himself up on one elbow and fired up his really potent scowl, the one that can strip the hide off a mule. “I got your rocks off, too, if you hadn’t noticed, and I know you did because you damn near squeezed my penis off when you came.”
“Yeah, well, maybe life would be much easier if I did!” I bellowed, and plucked his hairbrush off a tall bureau, throwing it straight at his fat head.
He caught the hairbrush easily, too (I don’t have a very good throwing arm), and took a deep, long breath. I ignored the way his wonderful chest expanded as he did so.
“Tessa,” he growled. “Is there something in particular you wanted, or is this just your idea of postcoital fun?”
“Is there something in particular I . . . oh!” I threw a second hairbrush, a handful of thin black neckties, and his wallet at him, then marched over to where he sat surrounded by the debris of my fury. I fisted my hands on my hips, for once completely unconcerned that I was stark naked.
“Yes, Max, there is something in particular I want to say to you.”
His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. His chin lifted. “Go ahead, then.”
I leaned down until I was nose to nose with him. “It just so happens that I love you.”
With a style and panache I doubt I’ll ever again achieve, I whisked my peignoir from beneath his hand, tossed it over my shoulder, and sauntered nonchalantly out of his room.
He was in my room before I could close the door.
“You do not love me!” He looked outraged, utterly outraged, mad enough to spit. “I’ll thank you to take that back!”
I smiled to myself. Somehow I had known he wasn’t going to take the news with good grace. With great care and deliberation I donned the peignoir, shivering when the cool material hit my overheated skin. Max’s eyes greedily followed my hands as I buttoned the five buttons down the bodice. “Make me.”
“What?” His gaze shot back up to my face. “What did you say?”
Deep within me, in my feminine core (and no, I’m not talking about my crotch, for those of you who have smutty minds), a celebration of self-awareness broke out. I’ve never felt particularly powerful with a man sexually, but the desperate, hungry look in Max’s eyes spawned an epiphany, filling me with the knowledge of what it meant to hold a man in thrall. Only the fact that I loved him with every ounce of my being kept me from becoming some sort of sexed-up dominatrix who spent her days stomping all over her man just for the enjoyment of seeing him squirm.
Not that I wasn’t in favor of making Max grovel, but now was clearly not the time for that particular bit of fun.
“I said, make me. Make me take it back.” I stepped forward and ran my hand down his beautiful damp chest, his muscles tightening beneath my fingers as they caressed his warm flesh. “Come on, you’re bigger than me, you’re stronger than me—make me do what you want.”
He stood stiff as a board, his eyes blazing with a myriad of emotions, too many to put names to. I licked the corners of his mouth, my hand stroking down the slick line of hair on his belly to where his penis was beginning to show new life. “What’s wrong, Max? Afraid you can’t prove me wrong?”
He made that noise again in his chest, the primitive, earthy noise, a mating noise, a noise a man makes when he is driven past endurance and stops thinking with his head, instead allowing his heart to take over. He snarled something unintelligible as he scooped me up in his arms and hauled me into his room, his eyes burning over my flesh as he threw me down onto the bed and literally ripped the peignoir off me. I had hoped to goad him into revealing his own feelings for me—despite the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure that he felt anything approaching what I wanted him to feel—but the hard, merciless expression that settled on his face was not what I was expecting.
“Eep,” I said, deciding that the better part of valor was discretion and all that as I tried to squirm out from under him when he leaned over me.
“It’s too late for eeping,” he said, wrapping one of his ties around my wrist, knotting it on the headboard. I stared at my bound wrist, unable to believe what he was doing, all the while he was tying my other wrist down. “You wanted me to dominate you. The least I can do is satisfy your desires.”
“You tied me down?” I looked from one arm to the other, testing the bonds. They held firmly. He hadn’t stretched my arms out—my elbows were close to my body—but still . . . “You tied me? This is bondage, isn’t it? I’ve never done bondage before. I’ve never known a man who got into that sort of thing. There are unseen kinky depths to you, Max, depths I had no idea existed.”
He smiled a hard, cruel smile, a smile filled with all sorts of wicked promises of retribution as he slid down my legs to my feet, running his hands down my legs as he parted them. “Do you still claim to love me?”
I looked from one bound hand to the other, then down to where he sat at my feet. I shivered at the hard look in his eyes. “That depends. What are you going to do to me? Are you going to arouse me with your hands and your mouth the way you did before? Are you going to drive me wild with need, but not give in and fulfill that hunger until I’m begging and sobbing for relief? Are you going to torment me by rubbing your body all over mine, making me arch beneath you, desperate to feel you, mad with longing and passion? Are you going to touch me and tease me until I’m half insane with the need for you to plunge into my body, again and again, harder and faster and deeper, your body slamming against mine over and over and over again until we share a screaming orgasm to end all orgasms?”
Max leaned forward on his hands, his eyes positively burning my flesh as he raked a gaze down my body so tangible, I swear it left scorch marks. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I warn you, Tessa, I am feeling merciless.”
“Oh, good.” I sighed, a ripple of pure pleasure skimming down my back. “I like you merciless. Go ahead, Max, conquer me.”
A long, long time later, after I had been conquered and done some conquering of my own, I kissed Max’s salty shoulder and snuggled closer to him. “Ah, Max, you are the perfect man.”
His sigh parted my hair. “I’m not perfect, Tessa.”
“You are in all the important ways,” I said sleepily, my fingers curled over his bicep. “I don’t know of any other man who would voluntarily lie in the wet spot just so I woul
dn’t have to. That’s perfect in my book.”
“Go to sleep.”
“I love you.”
“Good night, Tessa.”
“I’ll always love you, no matter how pigheaded you are.”
He didn’t say anything, but his hand continued its long, gentle sweep up and down my back. I smiled to myself as I drifted off to sleep. Sooner or later, he’d see the light. Sooner or later, he’d realize that I was the only woman who could make his life truly happy.
Right? Right. Thank you for agreeing with me.
Later that night, we were woken up by an incoherent Easter.
“You’ve got to come,” she gasped, clutching her night candle as Max struggled to light the lamp next to the bed. “It’s Mr. Palmer. He’s gone berserk! He’s attacked Mrs. Peters!”
Max and I looked at each other for a moment, then scrambled out of bed, slipping on our respective dressing gowns as we raced up the dark stairs after Easter.
“Oh, thank God you’re here,” Alice said, as we lunged into Mrs. Peters’ room. She sat on the bed next to Mrs. Peters, one arm wrapped around her. “I’ve sent Sam off to alert Roger, but I didn’t want to leave her alone, so I sent Easter for you.”
“They saved me,” Mrs. Peters said, her eyes wild as she trembled in the aftermath of her attack. “They saved me from him! I knew they would, for I am a true believer, but never did I imagine I would have my belief tested in such a manner! Never!”
Max knelt down next to where Palmer slumped, dazed, against the wall, blood smeared across his forehead. “Palmer? What happened here?”
Palmer lifted his head, frowning as he tried to focus on Max’s face. “Oh, it’s you. I thought you were that she-devil, come to bash in my brains again.”
“The spirits saved me,” Mrs. Peters said, clutching the sleeve of my dressing gown. “He came in here, intent on having his wicked way with me—me, a married woman!—and the spirits of Worston Old Hall rose up and smote him!”
“Did they? How providential,” I said, looking back at Palmer. He didn’t look to be in any state to ravish Mrs. Peters. He looked bleary-eyed and very sleepy.
“What happened?” Max asked again.
Palmer belched. My nose wrinkled at the sour smell of wine. “Don’t quite know. Thought this was my room. Was having my bedtime constitutional—very good for the spleen, y’know—and decided to take myself to bed. Next thing I know, that woman is cracking my head open with a chamber pot.”
“He attacked me! The spirits saved me! The chamber pot rose of its own accord and smote him on his lecherous, alcohol-befuddled head! It is the proof of spirit intervention I have been seeking for so many years! No human hand could have wielded such a weapon, nor dealt such an unearthly blow!”
We all looked at a broken chamber pot that lay next to Palmer, one edge of its curved rim red with blood. It didn’t look unearthly.
“Tricky things, spleens,” Palmer bobbed forward to tell Max. “You have to exercise them or they go bad on you.”
The wisdom of his words was put into doubt when he pulled from his ratty silk bathrobe a thin silver flask. Max plucked it from Palmer’s fingers, ignoring the latter’s whine of complaint. “Need a jot of m’medicine. Suffer from migraines, you know. Bad spleen and migraines always go together, they do. Am having a hell of a migraine now. Bad for the spleen, that. Need m’posset.”
By the time Roger arrived and took Palmer off to get his head x-rayed, we had a pretty good idea of the events of the evening. Palmer—more than a little bit squidgy on his potent posset—evidently managed to climb three flights of stairs in his evening spleen stroll. Although Mrs. Peters refused to admit that he entered her room with anything but nefarious intent on his mind, we assumed he simply got confused and was trying to find his own bed.
There was little doubt that any spectral hand had been raised in the staving off of the (supposedly) lecherous Palmer, since Mrs. Peters bore a cut on her right hand that corresponded to a sharp edge on the cracked pottery. She claimed it was due to ectoplasmic backlash from the spectral hand that manifested to save her, but we all attributed it to the more mundane act of beaning a man on the head with a ceramic pot.
I’ll say this for Palmer—he has staying power. He was back on the job the following morning, having been given a clean bill of health from the emergency room doctors. He did, however, swathe his entire head in a particularly dramatic bandage, and made sure the camera was pointing at him both times he crumpled to the ground, moaning and clutching his head.
Max has forbidden Mrs. Billings to make him any more possets.
On Monday I had to send Bret and Michael into town to bring back some illicit supplies: rubber gloves, more washing-up liquid, and filtered cigarettes for the scullery girls, who swore they were going to leave if they had to roll any more of their own ciggies.
On Tuesday, Honey and Easter, two housemaids, had a huge fight over Bret and refused to sleep in the same room. Alice and I had a talk with them without the cameras present, and they agreed to stay on if they could sleep in separate rooms. Roger didn’t like OKing that, but he did when I told him he’d have to bring in new servants if we didn’t separate them.
This morning . . . oh, drat, I hear Barbara. Must go find another hidey-hole.
Wednesday
September 8
4:02 P.M.
Bathtub
Barbara is positively psychic, I swear. She routed me out in the linen closet, where I’d gone to hide from her. As I mentioned, Barbara without Henry as an audience means she’s glommed onto me as her new best friend.
She’s not a bad woman, you understand, just a bit wearing. She’s found the last three of my hiding spots, flushing me out to force me into listening to her many confidences about how insensitive and uncaring men in general were.
I didn’t agree with everything she said, being heels over ears in love with her brother and all, but I did agree that there were times in the last forty-eight hours when I was convinced Max was too stubborn to admit a few commonly known facts.
Take, for instance, the fact that I loved him.
“You don’t love me,” he announced dramatically Tuesday, just two days after the very titillating Bondage Night. I was sitting in the morning room, having just done the menu with Mrs. Peters (still flushed with righteousness over the beaning of Palmer), trying to decide whether or not I should write to my sister in North Dakota with lavender or emerald ink.
“I don’t, huh?” I answered, turning around in the chair to look at him. He was wearing a dark green frock coat, gold waistcoat, and black pants. I allowed my eyes to play over his figure for a few seconds, mentally stripping the clothing off him and exposing every delicious bulge.
“No, you don’t, and stop looking at me like that.”
I let a wicked smile curl my lips. “Like how?”
“Like you’re a cat and I’m a bowl of cream. You don’t love me. You can’t love me.”
I licked my lips, just to tease. His eyes widened. “Why can’t I?”
“Eh?” His fingers flexed as I ran my tongue around my lips again. His eyes, beautiful in their icy disdain, melted into hot pools of shimmering blue. He cleared his throat. “Erm . . . oh, yes, you can’t be in love with me because I’m too young for you. You said so yourself.”
“Did I?” I tapped my finger against my mouth, then sucked on the very tip of it for a moment. Max twitched. The fun part of him, that is. “I was wrong.”
“No, you weren’t. It’s not right you being so much older than me. As you said, you are old enough to have been my baby-sitter.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t. I’ve changed my mind. Now I see the benefit of a younger man. Just think: I’ll have all those extra years of a young, virile, stud muffin of a man to satisfy my deepest yearnings, and, Max, I have a lot of yearnings. Thus, it makes perfect sense for me to be madly in love with you.”
Max opened his mouth a couple of times to object, but in the end he just snarled, “Damn
!” and stomped out of the room.
I smiled as the door slammed behind him. I wasn’t worried about him trying to convince me I didn’t love him. If he didn’t share any of those wonderful, warm feelings that I had for him, he would be behaving completely different: He would be kind and gentle and very, very sweet as he broke it to me that a relationship with him had no future. The very fact that he yelled and ranted at me and stormed around demanding that I admit I lied simply confirmed the fact that he felt the same things, only he had to take the typically male route of fighting the feelings for as long as he could, rather than just admitting to them like any sane person (read: woman) would.
“All right, how’s this,” he whispered later that day as I handed him one of the beautiful thin green china cups painted with willows and graceful swallows that we used at tea. Tabby and Matthew were filming us, but they were focused on Barbara sniping away at Henry. “You can’t love me because we’ve only known each other a week. That’s not nearly enough time to find out everything there is to know about me, therefore, what you’re feeling is a common garden variety of lust and not love. You’re in lust with me, Tessa. That’s all. It’s not love.”
“I fell in love with Peter the first day I met him,” I whispered back. “I’m a firm believer in love at first sight, and I can assure you, I’m very much in love with you.”
His frown darkened to epic proportions. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. Sugar?”
He reared backward, splashing tea everywhere. I grinned as Tabby swung the camera around to catch me innocently offering him the sugar bowl.
He muttered what I was sure were oaths under his breath.
“Lust is quite easily confused for love,” he said some six hours later, holding out his arm so I could tie his wrist to the bedstead. “It happens all the time—you shouldn’t be embarrassed by that fact. I’m quite willing to admit that I myself am in considerable lust with you. I feel no shame about it; it’s a perfectly natural emotion to be shared between two adults who have a mutually satisfying sexual relationship. In addition to being fun and enjoyable, a lust-only relationship has the benefit of not tearing people’s lives apart the way the other can.”
Corset Diaries Page 20