Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3)

by Sierra Simone

  “Come here,” he growls, even though I’m arguably already here, and then I’m hauled squealing and laughing to where he wants me. And once I’m facing him and straddling him, he uses his fist to angle his organ upward and then orders me to sink down.

  “Slowly,” he cautions. He fists my skirt in one of his elegant artist’s hands, lifting it to my hip so that everything below my waist is exposed to him. “I want to watch.”

  I obey his will and lower myself onto his sheathed cock as he leans back and studies the sight like he’s going to paint it one day. It nearly kills me to go slow—my orgasm with Becket has done nothing but made me hornier it turns out, and I’m craving the rough bite that a fast ride would give me—but I know disregarding a direct request from Auden will have me ass up over his lap and spanked until I can’t breathe. And then he’ll punish me for real and refuse to let me come. Which will kill me at this point. So slow it is.

  Auden watches me work with a composed expression, his gaze unreadable and distant. Only the trembling of his hands where they grab my hips gives away his eagerness—at least until I’m fully seated against him, my clit flush against the abdominal muscle right above his cock and his desire spreading me wide, wide open.

  Then the trembling is all over—his thighs and his belly and his breathing, and his eyelids flutter, as if he wants to close them but can’t stop looking at the place we’re joined.

  “I’d give up everything I own for this cunt,” he says. And then a wicked smile cuts across his face. “If it weren’t already mine, that is.”

  His words are more effective than a thumb on my clit; I drop my chin to my chest and remind myself to breathe as my belly hollows at his coolly obscene observations. It’s so close to what Becket said earlier—I’d give up everything for this, for you—but it might as well be miles apart in meaning.

  Becket wants to belong to me. But I already belong to the filthy architect-prince with the lazy smile and the forest-colored eyes.

  And when Auden flicks those eyes up to me, I see the full force of his shameless want, of his crude hunger—all of it underpinned by another hunger—the same I saw twelve years ago when he kissed me for the first time. A hunger for my very heart.

  And oh, how I want it to be eaten.

  I feel a small flush of guilt that I can’t match the same surge of desire for Becket’s unselfish decency as I can for the person currently leaning forward to bite at my breasts through my dress. Although I don’t think it has anything to do with Becket or decency, and everything to do with Auden. And with Saint.

  If Becket were all I knew, he would be the most mesmerizing light I’d ever seen. But he’s not all I know. I’d met two bitter and beautiful boys in this house and tumbled into a new life. A life that was all stars and shadows, glimmers and gloom. And I was done for.

  “Make yourself come on me,” Auden says. “While I listen to every single thing Becket did to you.”

  So I tell him. I tell him about the kisses and the hard thigh between my legs for me to rock against. I tell him how Becket teased me with his cock until I begged for it, and how I came after he talked about coming inside me, even though we both knew he wouldn’t do it, not after I asked him not to. I tell him how Becket ended up finishing and making a mess on the bookshelf.

  “The wooden part,” I clarify, my breathing coming in short bursts. “I never would have let him—on the books—biological debris—”

  “Good. Biological debris on the books was my chief concern,” he says in a grave tone.

  I almost think he’s serious until I see the faint dip of a suppressed dimple, a quivering crenel that he tries and fails to hide, and then he’s grinning up at me. I swat at him, and he catches my hand, laughing.

  “You’re a good librarian, Proserpina, even if you do need to be fucked twice a day to keep you happy enough to work.”

  His voice is teasing, happy, but his words give life to one of my real fears, now blown to full life since everything that happened on Beltane. “Auden,” I say, hips slowing. “I mean, sir. Maybe…maybe I should look for another job. I don’t know that I should be your employee now that we’re actually together; I don’t want you to feel obligated—”

  Auden claps his hand over my mouth, eyes narrowed. “No,” he says firmly. “You can quit because you’re bored or because another position sounds more fulfilling or because you don’t want to be here anymore. You quit because you can’t stand the sight of me or my house. But you don’t quit because you think I feel obligated to pay you. I pay you because you’re good at what you do, because you came personally recommended, and because in the four months you’ve been here, you’ve done incredible work. I’ll write anything into a contract you’d like, but you don’t get to leave just because you think you should.”

  I try to speak against Auden’s palm, and he sighs but loosens it anyway so the words can come out. “I feel like I’m taking advantage of you. I’ve spent the day sleeping and playing instead of working.”

  “I know you have narcolepsy. And I wanted you to play. Do you really think,” he asks, pushing his hips up so I feel him deep, deep in my belly, “I’d rather you be scanning books than doing this?”

  “But—”

  “My god, you are stubborn,” he replies. Another sigh. “Can’t you just pretend that we’re opening a very twee and painfully overpriced shop on a high street somewhere? Or an apple orchard where we charge schoolchildren to come and visit? People in love own businesses and work together all the time.”

  “But we’re not working together,” I say, unable to let this go. “I’m working for you.”

  “Okay, we’re going back to the hand,” Auden says. And sure enough, the hand comes up to cover my mouth again. “You’re not in my library right now, you’re on my lap, and that means different rules, so shhhh. I love you and you belong to me, and once I’m finished using you, we will slide back into real life and make sure the terms of your employment make you comfortable. But in the meantime, please understand this: I. Trust. You. Inherently, explicitly, completely. I trust you with my house, with my old books, with my money, and now with my St. Sebastian. I trust you with everything, and I inflexibly and pertinaciously believe that our respective work is made better by us being kinky and playful and in love. Now, you still haven’t come, and that was the only command I gave you, which means I’m very close to bending you over my desk and fucking you that way so I can spank you as I do it. Can we be very done with this now?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, ducking and burying my face into his wonderful-smelling neck. The shift in angles rubs me both inside and outside in just the right way, and the next words come out husky. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me by doing as you’re told,” he says, just as huskily, but he turns his head enough to kiss my cheek. Lingering and warm. “I haven’t got all day, little one. I’ve got to get to London at some point, you know.”

  “I know,” I say, sitting up so I can properly fuck him some more. And also so he can see my little pout—which is mostly to be cute, but it’s also a genuine thing, because when he’s gone, the whole house feels like it’s made of yearning. Even the trees outside seem restless when Auden is away.

  “Little brides miss their lords when they’re gone, hmm?” Auden says, leaning back again and hiking up my skirt so he can watch as I fuck him.

  “Everyone misses you,” I whisper, watching his face as he watches my cunt. His eyes are hooded, a faint flush on his cheeks, and every now and again he pulls his lower lip between his teeth, as if he’s biting me in his mind. “Thornchapel misses you.”

  Four months ago, he would have scoffed or spat at that. He would’ve had some bitter, careless response, made some obscure or tenebrous pronouncements about Thornchapel’s future or his own, and then changed the subject. But not today. Not after Beltane.

  Maybe not even after Imbolc.

  Instead, he merely lifts his eyes to mine and nods, like it was something he already knew. And it’s as h
e’s nodding, as he’s tacitly admitting that the thing which started as a game between bored friends has now become something vividly and frighteningly real—it’s then that I reach my peak, lost in his eyes and the whisper of the waiting forest outside, waiting and rippling with cricket-green leaves for its king.

  I move against him harder, faster, urging my climax on and on and on, and it’s so much deeper and stronger and meaner and longer—it’s the kind of orgasm that possesses me, like everything below my belly button is no longer my own, it belongs to the wild world outside, it belongs to the wild god I’m riding. And I forget, I always forget, how much the pure rush of dominance gets him off, how watching someone else obey him is heady delirium, because the moment I finally come, he lets out a soft, tattered sigh. His cock swells big, so big, that last impossible bigness before the end, and then he releases into the condom with long pulses that make his stomach and thighs flex and tense against me.

  He only watches at first, chest heaving as he thickens and starts spending, but after the first few surges, he crushes me to his chest and holds me tight as he fucks his way through the last of it—hard, hammering thrusts that shouldn’t be as powerful as they are given his position, and yet he does it, lifting his hips and me with every single one.

  I cry out against his throat, my climax still stuttering on, and he is relentless with me, fucking until we’re both panting and sweaty and until he’s made sure that I’ve milked him of every last second of pleasure.

  When he stops, I stay slumped against his chest a moment, listening to the pounding of his heart beneath his sweater, sighing through all those sweet aftershocks. He cradles me close and kisses my hair, and after a few minutes, he pulls carefully free and perches me on the edge of his desk while he takes care of the condom and sets his clothing to rights. Then he tugs me back into his lap, and I curl up there, feeling small and content.

  Auden begins stroking along my back, soothing, possessive strokes, and I close my eyes. “What should I do about Becket?” I murmur.

  “Do you love him?” inquires Auden. His voice is neutral, but there is a stillness to him as he asks the question. I have the distinct sense that while Auden didn’t mind loaning me out for pleasure, he’d feel a lot differently loaning me out for love.

  “No,” I say honestly. “I don’t.”

  My Dominant loosens a little beneath me, his voice more open when he says, “Good. I can share a lot, Proserpina, but I’m not able to—well, the problem is, I’m fundamentally possessive when it comes to you.”

  “And Saint,” I add for him.

  Auden draws in a breath. He lets it out very carefully. “And St. Sebastian,” he says finally.

  “Should I have known? About Becket?”

  “I think it’s been growing slowly over time—slowly enough it would have been easy to miss.”

  “But you knew.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  Auden sighs. “Becket told me once after Imbolc that he dreams of you—those strange God-dreams of his, you know. He dreams of you in the middle of everything, you in the very heart of the thorn chapel. After that, I began noticing the signs. Long looks. Prolonged quiets after you would kiss him hello on the cheek. I don’t resent him for it, even if I’d fight him bloody and bleeding if he tried to take you away.” He holds me tighter, in what seems like an unconscious reflex.

  “The thought of you two playing together—it’s quite sexy to me,” he says, “and more pertinently, I think it is very sexy to you, and nothing gets me off like getting you off. He is one of my closest friends, and I trust him implicitly to cherish and adore you. But I cannot stomach the idea of you being in love with anyone other than me and St. Sebastian. If it happens—if you love someone else—you must tell me. Please. I’ll accept it, but it will gut me, and I deserve to die on my feet. I—”

  It’s my turn to clap a hand over his mouth. I squirm in his lap until we’re facing each other, and then I tell him the truth. “You and Saint have ruined me,” I whisper. “More and more, I think it was that day when we were children. There was never any hope after that. It could only ever have been you two.”

  Auden blinks, looking bewildered and haughty and relieved all at once, in that way only rich boys are able to pull off, and I remove my hand.

  “And I know St. Sebastian feels the same way,” I reassure him. “He’ll never stop loving you.”

  “Oh,” Auden says, softly, as if I’ve hit him. “I don’t know about that.”

  A story—pages and pages of it—moves through his eyes, the shadows of a hundred hundred thoughts, the sparks of a thousand thousand unanswered prayers, and I am suddenly, acutely aware of how evasive he’s been about St. Sebastian all day. Acutely aware of our silent text thread, of my dark phone, of our missing lover.

  “Tell me,” I demand. “Tell me right now.”

  Auden closes his conflicted eyes and swallows. And when he starts to speak, his voice is threaded with so much pain it hurts to hear it.

  “Twenty-four years ago, my father had another son. Six weeks ago, I learned his name.”

  Chapter Seven

  Delphine

  I was wearing Cherry Tree when it happened.

  Sometimes I think about that night—I think about sitting in front of the mirror in my tiny room at the Grange. I think of all the other lip colors I could have chosen instead. The ones that would have been ironic—999 by Dior, maybe, or Tom Ford’s Bruised Plum; the ones with talismanic names, like MAC’s Angel or Heroine; the ones that would have been restrained and sweet: Jolly Molly or Georgie Girl or Christian Dior’s Grege 1947.

  I have a therapist, and I know what she would say about my fixation on lipsticks, I know, I know. And it’s not like I think of Cherry Tree in the what was she wearing, did she smile at him, how much did she have to drink kind of way. It’s not like I needed to be wearing a peachy-nude lipstick to prove to myself and everyone else that I didn’t deserve to be raped.

  It’s more like—well—just—one never knows when the worst moment of one’s life is going to happen and so one never knows what tiny details are going to be etched into one’s memories forever. And sometimes it’s hard not to feel like everything would be so much easier if one could only go back and make this one tiny thing different. Because maybe I would have forgotten Angel or Georgie Girl. Maybe I would be able to think of the night with a wryly sophisticated distance if I’d been wearing 999.

  But I wasn’t able to forget Cherry Tree, and now sometimes I have to send back drinks if they have cherries in them. Once two years ago, I burst into tears at a dinner party with my parents, right there at the table, just because the dessert was cherries jubilee. Someone once gave me a cherry blossom scent, and then spritzed me with it without asking, and I spent the rest of the evening being ill in my cousin’s lavatory.

  At Girton, there was another girl living in the Grange whose favorite pair of knickers—delicate, silk, practically doll-sized—were embroidered with cherries, and she’d drape them over the radiator to dry after she washed them in the bathroom sink, because they were too fragile for the washing machine or the dryer. Which meant there was a solid year where I had to pretend the radiator didn’t exist, just in case I accidentally looked and saw cherries there inside of bare metal and had to think cherry — Cherry Tree — that night in Audra’s garden.

  Sometimes, even just the word cherry gives me that feeling of—of inside rain, like it’s raining inside my body as my stomach falls to my feet and my thoughts go a little dizzy-fuzzy and my skin is tingly, but in, like, big tingles, not little needly ones—like there’s more than one Delphine inside me, there’re lots of Delphines crowding inside my skin, and they’re tapping and kicking trying to find a way out. And I just keep thinking—no way would I be like this if I’d worn Grege 1947 that night. No way would it be this hard. No way would I be like Florence’s embroidered knickers, and be too fragile for ordinary life. Ready to unravel at the slightest touch.

&
nbsp; I’m wearing Pirate by Chanel as I follow Rebecca into her stylish Peckham flat. We set our bags on the floor, and she turns and looks at me.

  “Are you ready?” she asks. Behind her is a wall of windows, and behind those is a cloudy, purply twilight, with low cloud bellies underlit with every lamp, sign, and glowing window in London. She’s still in her trench coat—a sort of sand-colored thing, narrow and belted at the waist—and her braids are pulled up into a high bun. She looks like she just strode in from a chic London office—and I have a terrible moment where I think: this isn’t real, this isn’t real, this is all a joke, this is an elaborate lie. Rebecca is too disciplined, she’s too good, her cheekbones are too high, and her IQ is even higher—why is she wasting her time with me?

  Who could want me? asks the Greek chorus chanting behind these thoughts. Who?

  I swallow. I swallow the thoughts down like they’re knives and hope they don’t slice me open. I don’t want these knife-thoughts at all, but I especially don’t want them right now, when I’m finally here, when I’m finally Rebecca’s. I don’t want my new Domme to know that inside her chirpy submissive is a girl who questions her own worth and sometimes flinches at cherries.

  It’s the literal last thing I want.

  “I’m ready,” I whisper.

  Rebecca smiles, but it’s a small smile, and there’s something in it I don’t entirely understand. Almost like disquiet, but that can’t be right, because Rebecca is never uneasy about anything, ever. I’ve watched her stand inches away from landscaping machines that would liquefy her bones if they rolled over her foot; I’ve seen her sit composed and eyebrow-archy through chats about orgies and human sacrifice.

  No, she’s not anxious. She can’t be. It’s Rebecca.

  She doesn’t ask me to kneel yet; she doesn’t even take off her coat. Instead, she crosses her arms and walks over to one of the large windows, peering down onto the damp street below. “Do you remember the first time you came here?” she asks, not looking at me.