“But…”
“No buts. I will take care of you. You’re mine, no one else’s.” The words wouldn’t be enough to change her memories alone, but right now they served to distract her. I took her mouth with mine, reminding her physically how much I felt for her with my lips and tongue.
After a bit of coaxing, her resistance fell away, and she gave into my kiss completely. I devoured her then, swallowing her raspy mewls and bracing her body as it shuddered with pleasure. I let go of her wrists and her hands flew to clutch onto my sweater, fistfuls of cashmere twisting in her grip. My own hand snaked underneath the hem of her nightshirt and into her pants where I found her wet and swollen.
It only took a few rough swipes of my thumb at her clit before I could easily slide two fingers inside her, bending them to stroke without mercy against her sensitive inner wall. Her whimpers turned into ragged moans as I continued the assault, pushing as far inside her as I could, urging her toward her climax.
Good girl, I thought when she erupted, unwilling to break the kiss to reward her with the praise directly. Be with me. Stay with me.
It was manipulative, yes, because I had an agenda, but it was also sincere. My desire for Celia reached epic proportions. It filled me like a reservoir in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, the water pushing unforgivably at the walls of the dam. The only thing that kept me upright in its wake was the secure foundation I’d built out of control and rage.
I wanted her, wanted to touch her and fuck her. Wanted to hear her gasp my name while she came all over my hand.
I also wanted her strong and whole and resilient and mine, and I knew how to have it all. If that made me greedy, so be it. It was greed that served her best.
So when she was still spent and pliant in my arms, I acted on that greed.
I walked her backward until she hit the upholstered accent chair. Then I spun her around and bent her over the arm. She was still getting her balance as I swiftly removed her pants, kicking her legs apart when they were gone so that I had plenty of room to step between her thighs. A handful of seconds later, my cock was out and lined up at her hole, ready to drive in with one aggressive thrust.
But first, I gathered my hands in her hair and pulled back, lifting her head so that she would see the painting on the wall as I shoved into her.
“No,” she cried out even as her body pressed back into me, meeting each controlled stroke.
To the side of us, the dressing mirror caught her reflection. Her profile showed her face was screwed up in an expression of pleasure/pain, her eyes closed tight against her view.
“Open your eyes, Celia,” I demanded, pulling her hair so hard her back arched in my direction. “Look at it.”
“I don’t want to look,” she begged.
“Look!” I said sharply, feeling her grow wetter at the strength of my demand.
Her eyes flew open, despite the deepening of her frown, as though she couldn’t help but obey. She always responded when I got a bit mean, whether she liked that about herself or not, it was who she was, and I understood that.
I rewarded her with more thrusts of my cock and praised her with my approval. “Here you are, bird. Good girl. Keep looking. Do you know why I want you to look? Do you know what I want you to see?”
“No,” she whimpered. “I don’t.”
In the mirror, I could see a tear running down the side of her cheek, caused by her approaching orgasm or emotional strain, I couldn’t be sure, but my cock thickened at the sight, turning into a rod of pure steel. My balls tightened, too, signalling the nearness of my own release.
This was going to be over soon. I had to hurry on with it.
Pushing my free hand underneath her bent upper half, I found her clit and pressed on it slightly. “I want you to see where you are and where you are not. You’re not in that place. You are not in that garden. You are not with that disgusting excuse of a human being. You are here, in my bedroom. In our bedroom. I’m the one who is with you. It’s me who is touching you. My cock inside you. No one else’s, do you hear me?”
Her eyes widened and her mouth opened, but all that came out was a single grunt of acknowledgment.
It wasn’t enough. I needed more. She needed to be convinced.
“Who’s fucking you?” I demanded, plowing into her so hard my thighs slapped audibly against the back of her legs.
“You,” she whispered.
“Say my name.”
“Edward.”
Fuck, the sound of my name on her lips nearly undid me. My rhythm stuttered, and I had to fight not to lose my load right then.
With a growl, I took hold of myself, increasing the pressure of my thumb on her nub. “Who owns this cunt?”
“Edward.”
“Who makes you come?”
“Edward.” Her voice tightened as she clenched down around my cock, her body trying to push me out as she came explosively.
I forced my way through her grip, determined to ride her until the very end. “That’s right. It’s me, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m here with you now, and it doesn’t matter what’s on our wall or what memories are lurking in the shadows, they can’t own you. You belong to me. Only me.”
My words strained with the last of my declaration as my release overtook me. With my hand still wrapped in her hair, I jerked into her, shooting every last drop of my climax into the tight sheath of her cunt.
I stayed inside her while my breathing slowed, running a firm hand up and down the length of her spine, reassuring her of my presence. I watched her still in the mirror. She’d laid her cheek on the opposite armrest, her eyes once again closed. Her features were soft, her expression sated. Or tired. Perhaps, resigned.
Was this really going to work between us?
This was who I was, a man who would keep pushing her comfort levels because it bettered her, yes, but also because I liked it. Could she accept that?
Could she accept it without losing everything she was?
I pulled out of her, and she let out a soft sound of protest.
“Shh,” I soothed her. “I’m not going anywhere.” I reached over to the wall and turned off the switch for the light on this side of the room. The painting disappeared into darkness.
Then I gathered her into my arms, kissing her temple as I carried her to the bed. She was half asleep by the time I tucked her in, but she reached for me before I could leave her side to get cleaned up.
“I get it,” she said. “And I’ll try. I’ll try to be here more than I’m there with him.” She nodded her head toward the now unseen painting.
I brushed the hair from her forehead. “You can ask Jeremy to have it taken down in the morning,” I told her. “It’s your choice.”
She nodded.
But she knew as well as I did that the garden and its swing was still there, whether it was on our wall or not.
Three
Celia
I sat up with a start, panting in the dark. My hand went automatically to my chest where I could feel my heart pounding. It felt like I’d been running, but the images in the nightmare I’d just had showed me in a confined space.
Just trying to recall more made my skin crawl. I shook the thoughts off of me with a shudder.
“Another one?” Edward’s voice graveled from behind me.
My shoulders tensed. This was half the reason I hadn’t felt ready to come back to London. He knew about the occasional bad dreams, but since he’d been away so much, he hadn’t been aware of the recent uptick in frequency.
“I’m fine,” I said, swallowing the truth. It was bad enough that I’d become so fragile in my waking hours. He didn’t need to know the extent of my weaknesses.
As always, though, he could see me, even when I tried to hide.
His palm slid heavy and comforting along my bare back, massaging the rock of a muscle lodged beneath my shoulder blade. “You won’t be able to go back to sleep until you tell me.”
I wanted to snap back at that, inform
him that it wasn’t true. I’d woken from recurrent bad dreams for years without him and been just fine.
But the truth was that I hadn’t been fine. I’d been suppressing a lifetime of experiences that I’d never fully dealt with. Traumas that left me emotionless. Wounds so deeply buried in my subconscious, that most of them didn’t even haunt me when I closed my eyes. In fact, the only dream I’d remembered having for the past several years had been a recurring one of a faceless man and a tightly bundled baby that I could never quite see.
Then Edward came along with his “sessions” and his constant probing into my psyche that compelled me to examine events in my life that I had wanted to never look at again, and now, along with having all sorts of feelings, I had all sorts of dreams. Terrible dreams. Fragments of memories, mostly, or variations on things that had happened to me in the past. He’d opened a gate inside of me, and everything that had been secreted away behind it refused to be shut up any longer. He’d forced me to deal, whether I wanted to or not, and now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Even when I was sleeping, the thoughts would come, begging to be processed. Pushing them away was impossible. The only way to be rid of them was to face them head-on.
“It’s a blur,” I said, unable to recall any of the pieces to describe them. “But I know what I was remembering. I can see that clearly.”
The bed lurched as he reached for the bedside lamp.
“Keep it off,” I snapped. As if remaining in the dark would help me be able to hide. “Please,” I added, softer.
He paused, and I could feel him deciding whether or not to comply before he sat up, the lamp untouched. “Something new?”
“Yes.” A lot of the memories I’d been dreaming lately had been things I’d blocked out, if that was the right term. At least they were things I hadn’t thought about in so long that I’d forgotten them.
“Something worse?”
I turned toward him, studying the outline of his features as if they could tell me the answer. The bulk of the pain that Uncle Ron inflicted had been cumulative. So many of his individual acts only became vile when added to the others.
But there were still moments that were singularly horrific. Auctioning parts of my innocence off to his friends had been the one that I’d considered the worst. As I began to remember more of what he’d done, other instances rallied for the title.
“I don’t know if it’s worse,” I answered, finally. “Just...different.”
“Different how?”
I groaned. I didn’t want to talk about it. It was easier to explain a bad dream than to share something terrible that had actually occurred. Nightmares came without my free agency, and yes, it could be argued that I hadn’t had agency when I’d been under Ron’s care, because I’d been too young to understand, which was the truth. But I’d been in those moments, and they hadn’t felt manipulative. It had felt like I’d actively participated. I’d let him hug me and fondle me. I’d let him bathe me and pamper me. How was I not to blame at least in part?
“Celia…” Edward pressed, his voice as hard as the force his hand was currently applying on the knot at my neck.
“Is this a session?”
“It is now.” His hand dropped, and the mattress shifted again as he started to get out.
I reached out and grabbed his thigh through the covers, stopping him. “Okay, but stay, please? I’ll talk but I want you here.” Next to me, instead of across the room. Where I didn’t have to face him. Where I didn’t have to see what he thought about me written all over his expression.
“If you think that will be easier,” he agreed, settling back into the bed. But he leaned against the headboard distancing himself from me even while remaining close.
His game, his rules.
Best just to get it over with.
“It was the summer I was ten, I think.” Then I knew. “Yes. I was definitely ten because Uncle Ron had made a big deal about me being finally a lady which meant I was old enough to have a ‘proper date’ and go to the ballet.”
The taste in my mouth soured as the words crossed my lips, not only because of the sick way my uncle had referred to an outing with a child, but because of how excited the pronouncement had made me. There had been so many things I’d been left out of then because I was too young—parties and events that my parents had told me weren’t appropriate for a child. It had been maddening being left with a sitter when I’d felt grown-up and independent. I’d wanted nothing more than to be treated like the adult that I knew I was.
Ron had fed on that desire. And I’d eagerly given him more of myself to devour.
“He bought me a pretty formal dress. Which had been one of the best moments of my life to that point because he’d taken me to a fancy private boutique, and I’d had all this personal attention from him and the attendants when I modeled each of the items.” I shifted toward Edward. “It’s disgusting when I say it now, I know, but for a ten-year-old girl, it had been the best day imaginable.”
“Don’t make apologies for how you felt. Those feelings were honest. The disgust is in how he manipulated them.”
Right.
My therapist said that a lot too. It was sometimes hard to remember.
I turned forward again, lowering my eyes to my hands gripped tightly in my lap. I could almost picture them back then, newly manicured with bright pink polish, innocent in their movements.
I was getting ahead of myself. “Anyway, he took me to a salon too and had my hair curled and my nails painted princess pink. The whole shebang. Then he took me to the ballet. Romeo and Juliet. He’d told me he’d chosen it just for us. That Romeo and Juliet had a love that people didn’t understand, the way that people would never understand how he and I loved each other.”
“He was a monster,” Edward muttered. “That wasn’t love.”
“He was a monster,” I agreed. “And it wasn’t love. But it sure felt like it at the time. The Romeo and Juliet references went over my head, of course. I didn’t really understand the story, and I’d been a little bored because it was so long, but it was hard to really be irritable when I was dressed so pretty.
“He told me how pretty I looked too. Over and over. Every time I started to get restless, he smoothed his palm over my hair and whispered in my ear. ‘Pretty girls sit still and don’t fidget so other people can truly enjoy looking at them.’” I swallowed the bad taste back. “I think he probably watched me more than he watched that performance. And I loved it. I felt like I was glowing from all the attention.”
Edward’s fingers pressed lightly on my lower back. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, guessing where this was going, and I suddenly realized why he usually sat away from me during these sessions. Across the room, it was easier for him to listen objectively instead of consoling me.
It was also easier for me to go on without the endearment.
Right now, though, I was grateful for it.
I swiveled my head in his direction. “Let me tell the story, would you?”
His lips pursed, but he nodded, letting his touch linger for another beat before folding his arms tightly across his chest.
“We didn’t go to the city often, but when we did, there’d be a driver. Charles was the name of the guy who drove us that day. He was new, and I’m not entirely sure he was even really a driver. I never saw him before or after, but I liked him instantly. He’d made the outing feel special as much as anything else. The way he called me ‘Ms. Werner’ and held the door for me like I was important. He let me tell him all of my terrible knock-knock jokes on the drive too, which made him a pretty cool guy in my book. He joined us for dinner too at this fancy restaurant that was famous for their ice cream concoctions, and then I had both of them talking and laughing and fawning over me. I had never been given so much attention in my life, and I remember thinking, ‘This is what it must feel like to be grown-up, all the time.’ It was the best.”
“Then what happened?”
He was rushing me, and I al
most turned to glare at him for it.
But all the expositional parts of the story had been shared now, and I was at the part he was pushing me to get to, so might as well just go there. “We drove back home. I slept most of the drive, and the Bentley was already pulled up in the driveway when Ron woke me to say we were back. I waited for Charles to open the door for me, like I’d been taught to do, but instead of stepping aside for me to get out, he got in. The backseat was spacious, but it was weird—all three of us sitting there in the driveway in the dark, me sandwiched between the two of them. I got nervous then. I remember worrying I did something wrong. I don’t know why I immediately thought that after the rest of the day had been so fun. There was just a shift in the energy somehow.
“Ron asked me if I loved having Charles around, and when I told him I did, he said that was really good because Charles loved being around me too. He said that I should call him ‘Sir,’ because that’s what grown-up girls called the men who loved them. He said I should call them both that, that it would be a special code between all of us. A fun way to express our love without anyone knowing.
“And then his voice got really sharp and he told me again how pretty I was. But that there were consequences for being so pretty, and it was time for me to address my responsibilities since I was such a grown-up girl.” I swallowed, embarrassed at how much the memory affected me, at how believable his proclamation still felt.
“What did they force you to do?” Edward’s tone had changed. It was softer, no longer pressing but reassuring. As though he suspected the words were stuck in my throat and needed a hook to pull them out. He would be that hook.
“They didn’t force me,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat. “Convinced me, is more accurate. Ron pointed to Charles’s lap. I’d always been taught not to look at men’s crotches, and I knew nothing about erections, but I did know that the bulge in his pants wasn’t right. I’d felt Ron’s pants get stiff a lot of the time when he held me on his lap, though, so maybe that clicked for me. I’m not sure what I thought, really, except that I shouldn’t be looking at where Ron was telling me to look.
Revenge Page 4