Eight months, two weeks and three days.
I only knew that because it was the day Silas had found me crying in this very parlor. I hadn’t told him what had happened, I hadn’t given him any sort of explanation, and after it became apparent that I couldn’t be soothed in any of the normal ways, he’d carried me up to my room and my bed. He’d erased every tear with his lips, every foul taste with his own sweet tongue, used his hands and his cock to chase away the disgusting, used feeling I always had after Cunningham.
For whatever reason, thinking of that day, thinking of Silas and his tender blue eyes as he’d made love to me made me stronger. No, I wouldn’t open my mouth today. Maybe I wouldn’t fight back, but I wouldn’t give in. I would find another way.
My refusal only seemed to arouse Cunningham further, as he moved his hand faster over his prick, and then with a soft—almost feminine—noise, cum dribbled out of his tip, dripping onto my dress. I finally looked up at him, meeting his eyes for a moment before glancing meaningfully down at his fast-softening cock.
“If you’re finished, I’d like you to leave,” I said.
He gazed down at me, his eyes cold. “I think I got the answer I needed.” He reached down and used my dress to scrub the remaining globules of cum off his flaccid cock, and it was only the vivid image of getting arrested for assault that stopped me from jumping up and ramming my fist into his teeth.
“Oh, I love seeing you so angry,” he said as he let the ruined silk fall from his hand. “I am almost happy that you didn’t choose to become mine—this way it will be so much more fun to see your husband break you.”
“Hugh would never,” I countered.
“Maybe not, maybe not,” Mr. Cunningham conceded. “Regardless, I expect to hear your engagement announcement to the viscount very soon. The board is getting impatient.” He gave me one last look. “I prefer my women fresher anyhow. Untainted. Younger.”
I didn’t bother seeing him out. Instead, I stood and tore at my dress until my lady’s maid scurried in to help—together we stripped it off and consigned it to the kitchen fire.
Seeing my solicitor and banker had taken all morning and all afternoon, and by the time I left, the day was already fading into a hot evening, accompanied by a listless breeze and the racket of carriage wheels on the road.
I had wanted to spend the day otherwise. I told myself that I’d wanted to spend it meeting up with friends and acquaintances, but truthfully, I’d wanted to spend it with my face under Molly’s skirts. I’d left the Baron’s last night with a raging erection that refused to abate, despite the two times I’d stroked myself off. Last year—hell, even last week—I would have found a woman to take care of it. I would have charmed her into my bed and fucked her until we were both limp and sweaty.
But for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate to myself, I abstained. I settled for my hand and then woke up as hard as an adolescent boy as a result (and was forced to settle for my hand again.)
So I was already miserable this morning when I heard the rumors at a breakfast with Rhoda and Zona, rumors that infuriated me and frustrated me and made me even more miserable.
Hugh and Molly. About to be engaged.
Thus the trip to the solicitor’s. Contingency plans, my father used to tell Thomas and me as he managed the business of our estate. The secret to success is to always have a contingency plan.
And so here I was. Contingency plan in place, although I desperately hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
I didn’t feel satisfied, or even relieved, as I took a cab back to my townhouse, mostly because things were still so uncertain. There were only rumors, hearsay, the one thing that travels faster than the wind. And since this Mr. Cunningham I’d wanted to meet with had decided that our meeting should be put off until tomorrow, I would have no real answers until then.
It wasn’t until we pulled onto my street that I realized there might be someone else who had real answers, someone close to me.
Which was how I ended up in Mercy Atworth’s house, waiting for her in her front room, pacing the rug with long strides. I practically jumped on her the moment she entered, but I backed away when I noticed she was wrapped in a silk dressing gown and nothing else.
My groin—already aching from last night’s neglect—filled with blood.
“Silas, how unexpected. And wonderful. I’m sorry it took me a couple minutes, I needed to send word to a friend about something.” She raised up and kissed my cheeks in the Continental fashion, her nearly-bare breasts brushing against my chest as she did, the thin silk of her wrapper doing nothing to hide the erect peaks of her nipples.
I took a step backward. And then deciding that wasn’t enough, spun around on the pretense of examining the clock on her mantel.
“What brings you here today?” she asked. “Are you lonely already? I figured there would be plenty of women at the Baron’s who—”
“You’re close with Hugh, aren’t you?” I interrupted her. “I mean, you spend lots of time together. You were on the train together two days ago.”
Mercy cocked her head a little, her chestnut hair sliding easily over her silk robe as if her hair were made of silk too. “Yes. We are close. Why?”
“Has Hugh offered to marry Molly?” I couldn’t keep the urgency out of my voice, and I didn’t really see the point in trying anyway. Soon, everybody would know what I was after here in London.
“Oh,” Mercy said, her eyes widening as if suddenly everything had become clear to her. She walked over to a sofa, and I tried not to notice the enticing way her ass and hips moved under her dressing gown. She sat and patted the seat next to her.
I obediently sat down, trying to keep as much space between us as possible, even as my cock lengthened down my pant-leg, as if trying to reach for her.
“Yes,” she said. “Hugh has proposed to Molly.”
I swore.
“And…” she looked a little hesitant “…he also approached the board of her company and got their approval. He’s the endorsed suitor for her hand now.”
I let out a long breath between my teeth. Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Hugh—I should have fucking known from the possessive way he acted at the Baron’s. I should have known he was doing more than escorting Molly for the night. He wanted to marry her.
“She hasn’t said yes,” Mercy said soothingly. “He proposed two nights ago, and she still hasn’t given him an answer.”
“She hasn’t said yes?” I repeated, hardly daring to believe it to be true.
Mercy nodded.
“The board,” I said. “Do they really support him? Can they force Molly to marry him?”
Mercy looked thoughtful. “I suppose it depends how badly Molly wants to keep her company afloat. Marrying is her only way to save it, and if Hugh is the only man they want her to marry…”
My face must have fallen, because she laid her slender hand on my shoulder. “But maybe she’ll decide her independence isn’t worth it and abandon her company. Or maybe she’ll stay and let them sell all of their shares. There’s no way it would stay solvent after the board left, but maybe she can start something new?”
I shook my head. “You don’t know Molly. You don’t know how much she loves that company—it was everything to her father, and now it’s everything to her. She’ll die before she gives it up.” My heart clenched. Was this it, then? Was this the death knell to my courtship, ringing out its demise before it had ever even started?
“Maybe you can meet with the board,” Mercy suggested. “And get them to change their minds?”
I did have a meeting with Frederick Cunningham tomorrow, the man I understood to be the informal leader of the board. “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “It has to be worth a try. I guess if it had to be anyone, Hugh isn’t the worst. At least I won’t have to worry about him taking advantage of her and her company since he has so much money already—”
Mercy snorted and I looked at her. Her face straightened i
mmediately, and she leaned forward, letting her dressing gown fall open. Heavy, ripe tits spilled out, the nipples dark and hard.
I shifted, my dick surging at the same time as my mind remembered Molly’s eyes last night, the gloriously furious way she’d yelled at me.
God. It was like I was two different people, and I wanted to be the good one, the one who only wanted one woman. Why couldn’t I just be the good one?
“You must really care about Molly,” Mercy said, her hand moving from my shoulder to my chest, from my chest to my abdomen. Her dressing gown opened further, exposing the smooth, soft planes of olive skin and the tiniest glimpse of dark, silky curls at the bottom. “I never thought I’d see the infamous Silas Cecil-Coke wanting to marry.”
“It’s a business arrangement,” I said automatically. My mind was chanting get away get away get away. “A partnership between friends.”
“You really know how to woo a girl,” Mercy teased and then her hand was lower and lower and fuck that felt good.
“Oh, dear,” she murmured. “You’re so hard. Silas, you poor thing.”
You know what? I was a poor thing. The woman I wanted didn’t want me, and she was probably about to marry a man I despised, and I would never be able to find anyone like her again, and I was so hard that I couldn’t think straight.
I gave Mercy a pouting look.
She moved like water, like satin folding against itself, smooth and silent, until she was kneeling on the floor in between my legs, looking up at me with dark eyes.
But when she reached for the buttons of my trousers, I stopped her, breathing hard. “Mercy, I want this, believe me I do, but it’s not right for me to do it when—”
Mercy raised an eyebrow. “When what? When Molly went home with Hugh last night? When Molly has been fucking him the entire time you were away in France?”
Jealousy only made my dick harder. “Shit,” I hissed as she ran a palm over my length.
“And didn’t you fuck women in France?” Mercy asked. “What’s so different now?”
Because I’ve seen Molly again.
Because I’ve told her I want to marry her.
Because no matter how many women I fucked in France, I could never forget that Molly was the one I really wanted.
But the words had trouble making their way to my mouth. Because she was stroking and squeezing me, and it felt so goddamn good, and maybe, if I was a little honest, I wanted revenge in some way. I wanted to erase the image of Molly and Hugh together with the image of me coming in Mercy’s mouth.
She unbuttoned my trousers, and I raised my hips to work them down far enough to free my cock, and then there it was, veined and rigid, framed against Mercy’s beautiful face and luscious lips, and then all of a sudden, they were on me, around me, and my cock was in a bed of wet, hot suction.
My balls drew up, my body ready to release the intense ache I’d been carrying since I impaled Molly’s cunt on my fingers last night, but my heart was pounding in my chest—not the pleasant thud of impending climax, but the sickening thud of wrong wrong wrong.
I didn’t want this silky brunette between my thighs. I wanted my redhead, freckles and temper and voracious sexual appetite and all. And I didn’t want impersonal release. I wanted to soar with Molly, I wanted her blue eyes locked on mine as I came. I wanted to fall asleep wrapped around her slender body, and I wanted to wake up before she did so that I could pamper her with tea and breakfast.
I did love Molly.
And I didn’t want anybody else.
Oh my God. I didn’t want anybody else.
It was so obvious, so blatantly apparent, and yet I had missed it. I had blamed my unhappiness on a variety of reasons, blamed the lackluster sex on the women and my boredom, and all along repeated my mantra: I don’t love Molly O’Flaherty. But who crosses the Channel and tries to marry someone they don’t love?
“Mercy, stop,” I said. And when she didn’t, I placed my hands on either side of her head and lifted, my dick stone-hard and wet as her mouth left it.
“Mercy,” I said again, ignoring the voice that told me to stick my cock right back in her mouth and fuck her throat until this erection was finally vanquished. “I really like you. But I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
But she wasn’t listening to me. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking past my shoulder at the entryway to the parlor, her expression surprised, and then I turned my head to see Molly standing there.
I stood abruptly, which was an idiot move, since my cock was still out. It was still hard, and worse, still wet from Mercy’s mouth, and now on full display for Molly, who looked murderous.
Maybe murderous wasn’t the right word. She looked like she could obliterate worlds, like the Hindu god Shiva, and every self-preservation instinct I had told me to run away. I had no interest in once again testing the boxing skills an impoverished Molly had learned as a girl in the gutters of Liverpool.
Instead, I buttoned myself up and walked towards her, debating what to do. After all, I’d told her when I’d proposed that we wouldn’t have to live as man and wife, and clearly since she was cavorting around with other men, she didn’t feel the need to prove her loyalty to any one person, so why should I? Our group had never been about sexual exclusivity. Even Julian had shared Ivy with our friends and me.
On the other hand, I had just realized something important, something huge, and it meant that I had betrayed her. I loved her and I let another woman put her mouth on me. Not just any woman, either. The woman who had driven us apart the first time.
Guilt crawled up my spine and lodged itself in my throat.
I stopped just short of striking distance, deciding on cautious honesty. “Molly, I can explain. But before anything else is said, you need to know that I—”
Hugh stepped out from behind her, and it was clear he’d been hovering out of sight the whole time. The pompous needledick.
“Silas,” he said, sliding an arm around Molly’s waist. “Fancy seeing you here. How’s your face feeling?”
I wanted to rip his throat out. “Marvelous. Look, it didn’t even bruise.” I tilted my jaw so he could see how little damage his punch had actually done.
He looked sour, and that give me the smallest micron of pleasure. I turned my attention back to Molly, trying not to notice the way Hugh’s fingers splayed against her rib cage, trying not to think about them going home together last night, trying not to think about her fucking him like I so wanted her to fuck me.
“Molly,” I tried again. “This—I know this looks bad. And it is bad, I’m not denying that, but I realized something when Mercy was…” I trailed off. Fuck. There was no way to have this conversation without completely driving home the fact that I’d been, once again, caught fooling around with Mercy Atworth.
Molly didn’t say anything to fill the silence, but she met my eyes, and what I saw there punched me in the chest. Pain and betrayal and rage, and the same deep, deep sadness I’d seen in her last year. The kind of hopeless despair that seemed so unlike her.
“Will you say something?” I pleaded. I was used to people talking to me, I was used to people smiling and laughing around me, and I had no idea how to handle this silence. This stone wall of O’Flaherty. Say something, you idiot. Make her laugh or make her blush or make her mad—anything is better than this silence.
I decided just to go for it. To just tell her. “Molly, I love you.”
If the words sounded grand and important in my head, if I imagined them accompanied to music like they were part of a Gilbert and Sullivan show, I would never admit it to another soul, because in reality they came out weak and defensive and a tad bit manipulative. They in no way sounded noble or heartfelt or even genuine—they sounded like a kid telling his parents he loved them to avoid a strapping.
Molly responded predictably; whatever despair had been there before was now entirely wiped out by a fierce anger. She stepped forward, and it was only with great courage that I held my ground, bra
cing myself for the inevitable strike. But she didn’t hit me. Instead, she leaned forward and said in a voice so low that I knew only I could hear it:
“Get. Out.”
“Molly—”
“Clare,” she seethed.
Clare.
Fuck.
With one last glance—a glance that was more like a glare on her end—I left.
I met Frederick Cunningham over lunch at the Cafe Royal. The venue was my choice, as it was primarily frequented by a younger, more fashionable set than Mr. Cunningham was likely used to, and I wanted him to feel out of place. I also wanted to meet him on familiar ground. Home territory.
I watched his face crease with distaste at the ornate pillars and brightly frescoed ceilings, and at the women dining beside men, all in a jostling swarm of Bohemians, journalists, and military officers.
Good.
The more unsettled he was, the more defensive he’d be. And defensive people often revealed their weaknesses.
I stood to shake Mr. Cunningham’s hand as he approached, and then we both sat down, him appraising the restaurant while I casually appraised him. Mid-forties, good-looking—if a little prettyish for a man. Undoubtedly wealthy, given the expensive cut of his suit and the fob watch gleaming under his jacket. But as I watched him condescendingly place his order and then sip tiny, Lilliputian sips from his wine glass, I deduced that whatever power he held came solely from his money and nowhere else. He didn’t possess an innate respect for his fellow man—which meant that underneath his arrogance, there was a deep-seated and unconscious insecurity. And nothing about his carriage or demeanor belied anything but bored derision. No intelligence, no perception, no idea of his own soft spots. No inherent strength of will.
Plus, he drank his wine like a schoolgirl, and I made it a point never to trust people who were weak drinkers.
“So, Mr. Cecil-Coke, to what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting? I was rather surprised to receive a letter from you, given that we haven’t been previously introduced.”
The Persuasion of Molly O'Flaherty Page 5