It Stings So Sweet

by Stephanie Draven

  An incoherent protest bubbles up as he eases his finger in to the first knuckle. “Jonathan!” I gasp, hating every moment of it, but loving the way it turns me to clay to mold in his hands.

  “I’ll always stop when you say to stop,” Jonathan tells me. “But I don’t think you will. I think there’s nothing you’re not going to let me do. Starting with all the ways I plan to take you on this table.”

  Jonathan’s free hand reaches around in front of me and slips over my corset, nails raking the swell of my breasts. I know that I won’t have any mastery over what happens to me next. He reaches into my corset, finding the swollen nipple there, torturing it between his fingers until I can’t stand it anymore. Then he finds my other breast and tortures it with equal malice. Both nipples ache so much so that I beg him to undo the corset. I can’t bear the fabric scraping the stiff peaks, but he’s merciless, rolling them like hard pebbles in his hand until some invisible cord of arousal is pulled taught between my breasts and my womb. When I’m so needy that I think I’ll scream, he withdraws his finger from between my tight, forbidden passage, and takes the time to remove his jacket and tie.

  “Will you wear my ring again?”

  “Yes,” I say, this time from somewhere deeper than where I’ve found the answer before.

  He takes it and slides the glowing circle of gold back onto my finger, brushing his cheek against mine, the stubble of his beard prickly against my skin. “I love you,” he murmurs.

  I die a little watching him roll up his shirtsleeves before he picks the belt back up.

  “And I love you, Jonathan. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  I don’t know how many times I say it, even when the belt slams down on my tender flesh. The words dissolve into cries of pain as he swings his arm back and lashes me again and again. I don’t know how long he can do it. Each stroke becomes harder than the last. He’s testing me. Testing himself.

  It isn’t until I’m howling, gripping the table in pain, shifting on legs that no longer seem strong enough to hold me, that he stops to wipe sweat from his brow. “I think you’ve had enough.”

  Inconceivably, I moan in protest. “No … no … you’re not hitting me with your full strength.”

  He stills behind me. “I don’t need to.”

  “I want you to. Please … please … hit me harder.” What drives this fit of masochism I cannot say, except that I am desperate now to prove to him that he cannot break me. Frantic. So frantic that if he doesn’t do it, I think I’ll scream.

  The next moment, all my panic is obliterated in a flash of red-hot pain. My husband is stronger than I knew, and the next stroke of his belt hisses through the air. I hear him grunt with the effort, but the impact no longer registers as pain at all. A rush of euphoria runs through my blood, like a splash of cherry syrup. It stings so sweet that I’m in a place now beyond pain.

  Finally, Jonathan drops the belt. “My arm is starting to tire.”

  I scarcely hear him anymore as he strips the clothes from my oversexed body.

  I do nothing to stop him or help him. I do nothing but stand there, letting him peel back every layer of clothing until I’m standing naked in my own dining room, palms flat on the table. When he nudges my knees apart to enter me, I close my eyes and lose all sense of time and place.

  His hands clamp down on either side of my hips, pumping my body in an exquisite rhythm. Then his thick, muscled arm slips over mine, his fingers twining with mine in a fierce grip. Something warm, something wet is trailing down my back and I realize it’s his tongue. Licking me. Tasting me. Kissing my shoulders and the slope of my spine. The hair of his abdomen scratches the tender inflamed skin of my bottom as he grinds into my body.

  “I want you,” Jonathan murmurs behind my ear.

  “You have me.”

  “Not yet, I don’t.”

  He shoves aside plates and bowls, which clatter to the floor.

  “Jonathan!” I cry, shaken from my reverie.

  He withdraws, turning me to face him and he’s smiling. “You don’t care about society, but you care about the place settings?”

  I glance down at the broken shards of dishes and crystal, then back up at the sharp blue eyes of a man who loves me, and I say, “No. No, I don’t care.”

  I knock a saucer to the floor, utterly indifferent to its fate.

  He grins. Then Jonathan sweeps the rest of the table clean, tablecloth and all.

  The noise is cacophonous, an irrevocable crash that shatters everything we’ve known.

  Two hands on my waist, he gingerly lifts me up onto the table. “It seems sturdy enough,” Jonathan says, crawling atop me. “And I suspect it’s about to become a very treasured family heirloom with a great deal of sentimental value, given that this is where I intend to conceive our child.”

  Joy forces me to gasp and my eyes frantically search his for any wavering, any sign of doubt. “Do you mean it?”

  By way of answer he presses me down to the table with his weight, he kisses my mouth, my nose, my cheeks, my chin. I kiss him back, like a woman dying of thirst, drinking him in. My hand on his cheek, his fingers tangled in my hair, our noses pressed together, not a hairsbreadth between us. I cannot get enough of the way his mouth tastes. We kiss and kiss.

  It’s some kind of rapturous insanity we’re caught in now, and I splutter with laughter every time he lets me take a breath. Then he is laughing, too. We are filled with a mad joy.

  I throw my head back, my hair in a wild tangle on the table behind me, my throat quivering and bare, and he buries his head there, nuzzling against me with a gentleness that is completely at odds with the desperate clutch of his hands.

  “I love you,” I say, gripping his hair. “I need you to know it.”

  He smiles and takes deep breaths, like he has been delivered from some manner of drowning. I reach for his shirt, yanking it free, deftly opening the buttons and popping them when they won’t come free. I use my feet to help him ease his pants down, and then he positions himself over me.

  It takes only the nudge of his swollen erection at the entrance to my defenseless sex to start me careening wildly towards the edge. And when he pushes inside me, this time inch by slow inch, I exhale with a long shuddering sound of pent-up desire. “Jonathan …” I murmur, a warning.

  It doesn’t deter him. Pulling my leg up over his hip, he hits bottom and draws out again, the slide of his engorged cock through the velvet of my insides making the edges of the whole world blur. “Jonathan … Jonathan,” I cry again, pushing against his chest, trying to stop it, even though it is the thing I want most.

  There is nothing either of us can do or say to keep me from pleasure. “Do it, Nora.”

  With his permission, the flutter in my abdomen opens into a soaring expanse of ecstasy. I come. I scream. I lock my knees around his waist, pulling him into me, battering myself against his body as if swept up in a storm. The chandelier overhead blinds me with its brilliance, and I have a pure, white climax in which the world goes silent.

  I’m the earth to his plow, unbreakable, depthless, enduring anything. I writhe, my insides tumbling over one another as I squeeze him inside. He finds a rocking pace that I think he cannot possibly maintain. His arms strain, muscles bulging. The cords of his neck are visible as sweat trickles down between us. He’s a man possessed, his thighs flexing, his body thrusting into me. Though my whole body vibrates with the impact, I settle into it, a honeyed sweetness making me languid beneath him.

  The doorbell rings.

  I don’t care. It jars Jonathan, but only for a moment, because I kiss him, biting down softly, inhaling his breath, tasting his sweat. There is no one and nothing else in the world. He continues to piston down into me and a smooth answering heat coils inside. I tingle from the tips of my ears, to my curled toes. It doesn’t seem possible that I could be so aroused again, so swiftly, but we’re both close now.

  It’s going to happen again. I know it. When I’m under him, when his
hands are on my body, I am insatiable. I will never stop coming. Our hands clasp together, fingers straining as Jonathan’s excitement makes him swell and throb inside my pussy. I whimper as the pleasure sweeps over me, as I’m utterly at its mercy, whispering, “Jonathan, give me a baby.”

  That’s what he needs. A sound catches at the back of his throat. He convulses, eyes half-closed, and makes a guttural cry as his seed pulses up into me. It’s the feel of it, the rush of warm fluid from his body into mine that opens my womb for him and sends me into oblivion.

  He pumps his hips more slowly now, a new spurt of seed with each thrust. The cream pools deep inside me, so warm and filling. And I flush with the pleasure of knowing that in a few months, it will make my belly swell.

  I’m not sure which of us starts laughing first, but he laughs louder and I love the sound of it. His forehead touches mine, and we are tangled together in a heap. The doorbell rings again, and I wipe the sweat from his face with my fingertips, kissing him. “You know who that is.”

  “Your father, I expect,” Jonathan says, glancing at the empty foyer. The whole house is silent, as if it had been listening. “I think the doorman’s too afraid to answer it.”

  “I can’t blame him,” I say.

  Jonathan strokes my hair, lips at my temple, rolling me over so that I’m cushioned against him. “I didn’t realize this table is so very hard on your back,” he says, absurdly rubbing my spine, as if that were the sorest part of me.

  “I don’t mind,” I say, burrowing beneath his arm. “I have a special fondness for this table now. You’re teaching me to appreciate things I’ve taken for granted.”

  A clang sounds out. It’s the door knocker. Three angry taps.

  My father is not a man used to being kept waiting.

  “Do you want me to answer it?” Jonathan asks, one eyebrow raised.

  “No. I don’t want to see him. I don’t have anything to say to him.”

  “Oh, but I have a thing or two to say to your father,” Jonathan says, inhaling the scent of my hair. “Maybe it can wait, though. I’ll send him a telegram from our summer house.”

  I imagine my father twisting his mustache in fury, red-faced and enraged. Receiving a telegram from Jonathan might well cause him to spontaneously combust. I am painfully curious. “What would you say?”

  Jonathan’s hand runs sinuously over the curve of my hip. “Most of what I’d like to say to him isn’t suitable for a telegram, but I can think of at least two words: I quit.”

  When I laugh, he nips at my earlobe, stroking me tenderly, kissing the supple peak of each breast in homage. Then he sits up and fastens his pants, threading the belt around his waist. I know I’ll never be able to watch him fasten a belt again without remembering this day.

  “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” Jonathan asks.

  “I don’t think I can. I’m sore to the bone.”

  He looks vexed until he sees me smile, then admits, “I worked hard to make you that way. And I’d like to look at you naked all day. But, I don’t think they’ll let you on the train unless you’re wearing at least a frock. You are looking forward to our summer together, aren’t you?”

  “But what if I can’t move?”

  “We’ll do it together.” His arm slips beneath the small of my back, and he scoops me up. He helps me dress, taking special care fastening my gown, his mouth pressed to the sweat-damp nape of my neck.

  “Careful of the glass,” he says, stooping to find my shoes.

  More knocking comes at the front door. I think I also hear my father’s muffled shout.

  Slipping his jacket on, and leaving his tie askew at the open collar of his shirt, Jonathan retrieves his hat and suitcase. I put on my shoes, preparing for the confrontation with my father. But Jonathan twirls me to him and says, “We have a back door, you know, as long as Dolly and the servants aren’t cowering in it.”

  Sputtering with something akin to delight, I say, “We can’t just slip out the back door and leave this mess behind!”

  “Why not?” Jonathan asks, in an echo of my earlier question.

  “And just drive off in the Bentley in a cloud of dust like a gangster and his gun moll?”

  “Why not?” he asks again, holding his hand out to me. “Will you come with me, Mrs. Richardson?”

  “Yes,” I say, breathlessly, lacing my fingers through his. “Yes, I will.”

  when i’m bad i’m better

  CHAPTER

  One

  Clara

  “Are you having an affair with him?” asks the stranger as he stoops to light my cigarette.

  In the chaos of the party it would be easy to ignore him. After all, there has already been a drunken fistfight and a couple caught having sex on the desktop in the parlor. Now the ragtime piano player is hammering at the keys with feigned gaiety while the guests talk too loudly, clinking their glasses of illegal liquor as if to banish the unpleasantness.

  If I want to turn my back on the handsome and impertinent stranger, no one would blame me, but I’m intrigued. “Am I having an affair? That’s not the kind of question someone normally asks before a formal introduction.”

  The stranger smirks and snaps his lighter shut. “You don’t need an introduction. Everybody who reads the scandal sheets knows who you are. Clara Cartwright. Box Office Gold.”

  “Then you have me at a disadvantage. I didn’t catch your name, Mr.—”

  “Vanderberg,” he says. “Leo Vanderberg.”

  It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. “German?”

  “Dutch,” he says quickly, exhaling a long ribbon of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  I like his mouth. Firm lips beneath a shadow of stubble he ought to have shaved for this party. Lips that part in a narrow expression of vague amusement at our obvious instant attraction. I feel it, too. The inexplicable tug between us. “Well, Mr. Vanderberg, exactly who do you think I’m having an affair with?”

  He grins, leaning against the wood-paneled wall, priceless artwork framing his square shoulders. He holds an icy glass of bourbon at a precarious angle, and yet his hand is steady. Then his eyes motion to the host of the party. “I want to know if you’re sleeping with Big Teddy Morgan. He’s the fat cat throwing this bash in your honor, isn’t he?”

  “This party is for the studio … or didn’t you read the invitation?”

  His heated gaze slips over my silver sequined gown in apparent appreciation of the way it hugs my hips. “Maybe I don’t need an invitation.”

  He’s bold but I’ve managed bold men since I was fourteen. I let the smoke at the long end of my cigarette holder encircle my head like a wreath, then turn to my best angle to give him a better view. “Do you always go where you’re not wanted?”

  He smiles with those dark, dangerous eyes. “Oh, I’m wanted wherever I go …”

  This makes me laugh. “That’s a good line. I should steal it for my movies …”

  “Do they let you write your own lines now?”

  “Nobody lets me do anything, Mr. Vanderberg. I’ve scraped and clawed for everything I’ve got.”

  He nods, sipping from his crystal glass and I see that he’s not wearing a wedding ring. There’s a lean hungry look about him from the shine of his neatly barbered Valentino-style hair to his polished wing-tip shoes.

  “So are you?” he asks. “Having an affair with Teddy Morgan, I mean?”

  I don’t see the point in denying it. “What’s it to you if I am?”

  He leans in, close and predatory. I catch a whiff of the spicy scent of his aftershave. “I like to know the field before I make a battle plan. I like to know who I’m up against.”

  He’s so sure of himself that I have to knock him down a peg or two. “I’m a fight you can’t win, I’m afraid.”

  He glances over at my sugar daddy. “Why? Are you in love with him?”

  “I don’t fall in love, Mr. Vanderberg. When I take a man to bed, it’s got everything to do with the size of h
is bank account and what he’s got between his legs.”

  I say it to shock him. Possibly to offend him. But he just kicks up a brow in wry amusement, the sparkle of the chandeliers overhead reflected in his eyes. The ritzy glitter and glam of this party is getting to me and if he asks me to dance, I decide that I’ll say yes.

  But before he can, our host ambles over and throws one meaty arm around my waist. I don’t mind terribly; Big Teddy is just one more man in a long string of them who thought they were using me, and he’s not the worst of them by far. “Clara, I see you’ve run into our resident war hero! This is Leo Vanderberg. Flying ace.”

  I’ve met plenty of soldiers before but never a genuine flying ace. That explains the boldness. It takes a special kind of man to brave impossible heights in nothing but a little box. And that’s to say nothing of the kind of man who can shoot another person out of the sky. I look at Mr. Vanderberg with a trifle more wariness than before, then extend my hand as if we hadn’t already been introduced. “How nice to meet you, Mr. Vanderberg.”

  The aviator takes my hand. He kisses it. His lips linger too long. “Call me Leo.”

  Big Teddy doesn’t seem to notice the spark that crackles between us. “So, how many German aircraft did you shoot down in the Great War, Leo? Seven?”

  “Seventeen,” Leo murmurs.

  I blow a perfect ring of smoke. “Goodness! And what does a flying ace like you do with himself now that the war is over?”

  “I’m a test pilot,” Leo replies, his gaze steady on me. “I take the finest pieces of equipment available and push them as far as they’ll go.”

  Oh, my. Now I know where I’ve heard his name before. He’s not the most famous American aviator … but just about.

  Big Teddy snorts. “Sometimes you push too far, Leo. You wrecked the last plane my engineers designed. You may have walked away with your life, but you lost your chance to make that first transatlantic flight. You let Lucky Lindy beat you to it and it serves you right.”