“I don’t know,” I whimper, trying to arch against him, trying to rock into his hand, trying to chase down any friction I can get.
“How can you still love me when I mistreat you so?”
“Because it’s fucking hot, Auden, please—”
“No,” he says. Smugly. Breathlessly. Then he comes with a sharp breath and low moan, his shaft throbbing inside of me as it releases.
It was the act of telling me no, of denying me, that brought on his orgasm, as much as it was my body, and it’s so hot. It’s so damn hot.
“Fuck, you feel good,” he murmurs, his cock jerking a final time. “You always feel so good.”
“Sir—”
He pulls out, leaving me empty and aching, wet from his release. “You can come when I say so. How I say so. And not a moment sooner.”
“So not right now?”
Another slap on the backside, hard enough that I know I’ll be sporting a bright red handprint for the next hour. “Just for that, it won’t be tonight. Or tomorrow.”
I roll over to look at him as he sets his clothing to rights, keeping my sex shamelessly exposed—hoping he’ll change his mind, but knowing he won’t.
No, he’s too mean for that, and also too good a Dominant.
His eyes do drop down between my legs however, as if he’s drinking in the sight, and after he’s finished zipping himself up, he says, “Stay just like that. I like looking at you.”
So I stay on the floor with my legs spread and my skirt up, his orgasm slowly leaking back out. He sits on a trunk directly in front of me to enjoy the view, periodically reaching down to run an admiring finger through the mess he made. My clit is so swollen, I can feel every stir and puff of air against it, and I can’t help but rock against his hand whenever he deigns to touch me—something he takes advantage of, toying with my needy berry until my pleasure starts to build, and then backing off and watching with satisfaction as I wiggle and whine.
“You know you’re not selfish,” I say after a long few minutes of this. I say it even though every nerve ending south of my belly button currently disagrees, and even though the fresh erection visible in the leg of his trousers proves he’s enjoying my agony like only a mildly sadistic person can.
But it’s true. He’s not selfish.
“How can you possibly say that? You’re spread out on the floor with my semen dripping out of you, displayed for my liking.”
“You know what I mean.”
He sighs, looking down as his hair tumbles in front of his forehead. “There’s no material difference between my father’s selfishness and mine, Poe. I want you as thoroughly and as horribly as he wanted your mother, and God knows I still want St. Sebastian, even though I’ll burn in hell for it. How is that not the worst kind of selfishness? Doing everything in my power to possess the daughter of the woman my father killed? Barely able to keep myself from hauling my own brother off to bed?”
“But you do keep yourself from doing it,” I say, pushing up to my elbows so I can better see his face. “Even though I know you don’t personally believe you’ll go to hell for it. You do it for him, because it’s what he needs, and that’s not selfishness, Auden. That’s love. And as for me, we already know I want to be possessed by you. Your father didn’t want love or possession; he wanted to fill an emptiness inside himself, and that’s not what you’re doing or who you are.”
Auden doesn’t look reassured. “But what if it is me? How can I tell the difference?”
The world outside has darkened even more, and the roses falling over his messy hair and elegant hands are more black than red. Just like the roses around the door in the chapel.
I think of Estamond—a woman who had a child with her own brother, a woman who never refused sex or pleasure or fun, but who also paid the highest price so no one else around her would have to.
“The difference is in what you do,” I answer. “Not how you feel.”
“In my choices then.” A small, sad smile pulls at his mouth. He reaches for me. “Come here, wise girl.”
I come, settling onto his lap and practically purring at the contact.
“I trust you,” I tell him, tilting my head up to kiss his throat. “I trust you even if you don’t trust yourself.”
His arms tighten around me. “I don’t deserve that.”
“You do.”
“Promise—Proserpina, you have to promise me something.” His voice is that of a man harrowed. A man sacked like an ancient city. “If I ever go too far, if I ever really hurt someone the way he hurt people—you have to promise me you’ll leave. I mean it.”
I stiffen and try to sit up, but he won’t let me, he keeps me against his chest. “You know you won’t,” I say. “I know you won’t.”
“You have to promise,” he begs. He sounds pillaged and ravaged and more than a burning city now, he’s a world on fire. He presses his face into my hair. “Please, little bride. Please don’t let me hurt you. Please don’t let me hurt St. Sebastian. If I turn into my father, you have to go away from me.”
“We have safewords for that,” I say. “Neither Saint nor I would ever let you get that far. We wouldn’t even let you start.”
“Promise,” he insists. “Promise to leave. I have to—I have to know you’ll keep yourself safe, that you won’t make excuses for me, that you won’t linger just to be hurt again. Please, Proserpina.”
I know the man whose arms are around me, and I know his heart. I know he would never hurt someone the way his father did.
“Of course, Auden,” I murmur. He finally lets me turn, and I brush my lips over his firm, sculpted mouth, sighing as he opens to me. “I promise.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Proserpina
“If Auden doesn’t let you come soon, I’m going to be the one to die,” Saint says. He keeps his voice low because he’s about to leave for work, and the renovation crew is periodically coming through where we’re standing with their mysterious reels and unlabeled buckets. “How much longer is this going to last?”
“I don’t know,” I say, too miserable to even whine about it properly. Auden’s denied me climaxes before, but never this long—a week since that rainy evening in the tower—a week of fucking, spanking, all kinds of kinky sex, all kinds of fun orgasms for him and none for me. I’m not even allowed to come with St. Sebastian, which Saint is not happy about. And not a little jealous of.
He misses being Auden’s. He even misses the misery.
Saint opens one of the front doors, letting in a world of green and gold. Thornchapel in summer. Birds sing in the trees, and there’re so many bees buzzing around the roses on the front of the house that the air itself thrums with them.
“It’s too bad we’re not doing anything for Lammas,” Saint says, stepping out. I follow him as he walks toward the lane leading to the village. “You could use it more than ever.”
“Are you still upset we’re not doing a rite in the chapel?”
One shoulder comes up, drops back down. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
I look over at him as we walk. The trees are so thick and leafy that only ripples and dapples of sunlight make it down to us. They glint off Saint’s lip piercing and off the dark, dark brown of his eyes. “You don’t believe in anything,” I point out. “Not God, not church, not magic, and not . . . whatever we do in the thorn chapel.”
He stops.
“Why do I have to believe in something to want to do it?” he asks me. We’re standing on the narrow bridge over a small rill, and he keeps his eyes on the water as he speaks. “Isn’t wanting to do it enough of a reason on its own?”
“Sure. But it’s not a very strong reason.”
His phone goes off: an alarm letting him know his shift is in twenty minutes. St. Sebastian is many things, but he is never late for work. He silences it without pulling it out of his pocket.
“How about this,” he says, lifting his eyes to mine. “If I believe in anything, it’s this place. It’s the t
horn chapel. And it’s you.”
I can hear what he doesn’t say. It’s in the way he reaches up, as if unconsciously, to touch his lip.
And it’s him.
He believes in Auden too.
“It’s the closest thing to faith I know, what I feel for this place and the people here. That’s why I don’t want to give it up.”
And how can I argue with that? I let out a breath. “That’s fair.”
“It’s fair for you not to want to do it too,” he says softly. “Given what happened.”
And I definitely can’t argue with that either.
He leans in and kisses me, his piercing cool against my lips, his breath warm. His tongue perfect. He kisses me until we’re shuddering against each other and his phone alarms at him again.
“I have to go to work,” he whispers against my mouth. “But tonight . . . ”
“Tonight,” I promise, as he pulls reluctantly away. “You’ll have me for as long as you want me.”
“I better.” He gives me a final, smoldering look, and then I’m left alone on the bridge, with nothing but my own work and a week of pent-up climaxes to keep me company.
“You have to let me have an orgasm. You have to.”
“You know,” says Auden over the phone, “I’ve never thought of it that way before. What a compelling argument you present, Proserpina.”
I lean against the outside of the car I borrowed from Auden, and then jump away. The metal is hot under the July sun.
“I’m dying,” I whine to him, turning to face the Kernstow farmhouse. “It’s been a week.”
“It’s been eight days and four hours and approximately twenty minutes since you came last,” corrects Auden.
Huh. So it has.
“You have a good memory.”
“Only for the most crucial things.” Auden’s voice is amused. “Is that wind I hear? Are you outside?”
“Saint won’t be home until nearly ten, and I was finished with my work for the day. I thought I’d come up to the farm for a while.” I’ve been coming here sometimes, just to walk along the ridge or sit on the old stone fence and watch the sheep. The wildflowers and blooming heather have done nothing to make it less lonely—if anything, the vibrant life around the crumbling farmhouse only highlights how desolate it is—but it reminds me of my mother all the same.
She was here once. She walked here and dug near here. She was happy and curious and alive near here.
“Be careful, Proserpina,” Auden says. I hear whirring on his end—whirring from the large format printer at his office—and I know he’s still at work. “I wish you weren’t alone.”
“I’ll be careful if you promise to go home on time tonight. Oh, and if you let me come.”
“So many demands,” he says tranquilly.
“Auden, please,” I say, walking up to the abandoned farmhouse, wildflowers bobbing tall and sweet around me as I walk, tickling my calves. “I’m dying. Saint is dying. You won’t be home for another two days, and I’ve been very good, Sir, please.”
I hear a door close where he’s at, as if he’s shut himself into an office so he can’t be heard. “You do beg so prettily,” he says. “But no.”
I don’t bother to stifle my groan.
“What a brat you are,” he says, sounding delighted. “I can’t wait to get back to Thornchapel. How many paddles do you think that groan was worth? How many minutes of being flogged?”
I hesitate. “…which flogger?”
“Buffalo hide,” he says, already sounding like he’s relishing it. “Or the rubber one.”
Fuck. “I don’t like the rubber one.”
“I’ll be sure to use it then.”
Well, I walked right into that. I decide to switch tactics. “You could come home early,” I say. “I’d let you tie me up and flog me with the rubber flogger until I’m begging to come.”
I can hear the crooked smile in Auden’s voice when he answers. “An alluring proposition with two logical weaknesses. Firstly, you’re mine to tie up and torture any time I like, whether or not you let me. Secondly, you’re already begging me to come. I hardly need to go to any effort for that particular pleasure, do I now?”
“You’re so mean.”
“You told me you liked that.”
This entire conversation has me as worked up as I was fooling around with Saint this morning, and Auden isn’t even here. It’s just his voice, sultry and arrogant, coming all the way from London.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, darling brat. I’m going to give you a choice. You can come tonight—and tonight only—but each orgasm will have a price, determined by me and unknown to you until I make you pay it. But if you choose not to come, you’ll be rewarded—again, a thing of my choosing and unknown to you. Does that seem fair?”
I think about this.
“No.”
His laughter is abrupt and boyish and perfect, and I just miss him so fucking much, my chest hurts with it. “Are you sure you can’t come home anyway?” I say.
He must hear the loneliness in my voice. “I would if I could,” he says, his laughter changing into pure longing. “You know, it’s not too late for you to come out here . . . ”
“I know.” Every time Auden leaves for London, he asks me to come with him. To stay in his townhouse and eat at fancy restaurants and have lots of kinky sex. And every time he asks, I say no.
Because my work is at Thornchapel. Because Saint is at Thornchapel.
I’d feel wrong the entire time I was without both.
That doesn’t make it easier to be apart from Auden, though.
“Soon,” he assures me. “I’ll come home in two days, and leave all kinds of marks on that lovely body of yours.”
“And in the meantime, it’s up to me whether or not I want to risk whatever diabolical punishments you’re dreaming up?”
“Only if you’d like to come,” he says evilly.
Only Auden could make a liberty feel like a restraint, like a persecution.
“Are you going to have fun thinking about me deliberating over this?” I ask.
“Proserpina, we both know you’re going to deliberate for about three seconds before you find St. Sebastian and make him fuck you. You like orgasms and punishment too much. No, I’m going to be having fun anticipating exactly what I’m going to do to you, and how much you’re going to hate it and love it all at the same time.”
I’m breathless by now. “Or I could do it right here,” I whisper. “Right now. On the phone with you. I’m in a dress and I could just stick my fingers in my panties and come for you.”
His pause lets me know he likes that idea a lot. But he’s stronger than I am. “If you do it, I won’t be complicit,” he says, “no matter how tempting the reality of listening to you get yourself off would be. I want you to choose naughtiness all on your own.”
“All the better to punish me for?”
“Clever girl.”
I sigh. “Fine.”
“Fine what?”
“Fine, Sir.”
I can hear his satisfaction all the way from London. “That’s more like it. Text me when you’re safely home again.”
I agree that I will, and we hang up. For a moment, I stand in front of the farmhouse, feeling so in love I can’t stand it. Getting to start the day with Saint, some delicious torment from Auden . . .
I feel like Dartmoor itself right now. Sweeping and open, in heady bloom.
In the full fulgor of happy summer.
I’m smiling to myself when I duck through the doorway and nearly trip over a priest sitting on the floor.
“Jesus!” I mutter, catching myself before I actually tumble over onto the dirt-covered flags. “Becket, what the hell?”
Becket doesn’t answer me.
After so many times coming here alone, of being here with no one else, seeing another person inside the broken farmhouse is unsettling. Not because it belongs to me as a Kernstow descendant, necessarily, but because it
’s the kind of place that doesn’t belong to anybody at all. Like the moors themselves, or like the empty tombs up on the ridge.
The early evening sun is still bright and hot and eager, sending thick shafts of golden light into the mossy ground floor of the farmhouse. Becket sits just out of reach of the sunshine, his legs crossed and his hands in his lap. In front of him is the old hearth of the house, carved with the antlered god.
His eyes stay on the etching even after I nearly fall on top of him, even after I say his name.
“Becket?” I kneel next to him. “Is everything okay?”
He still doesn’t answer. His eyes are so blue they barely look real. Like fires from another world.
I look at the god chiseled into the hearth, wondering if I’m missing something, if it’s changed somehow since the last time I’ve been here, but it hasn’t changed. It’s still the horned god, still carved in simple, abstract lines, his stick-figure legs crossed as Becket’s are and antlers twining out from the vaguely humanoid shape of his head. Swirling spirals rest on each outstretched hand, mirror images of each other—one spiraling clockwise and the other counterclockwise. The outer curves of the spirals disappear into the god’s arms, connecting them to him in the most elemental way.
One spiral represents life. The other represents death.
“Becket,” I say, turning back to him. His face doesn’t change, his eyes don’t leave the carving. The pulse at the base of his neck beats fast and hard, though, and I can see the heaving of his chest and the sweat misting along his hairline. He’s in an athletic T-shirt and shorts, his running shoes on, and he must have run here from the rectory—over five miles away.
Worry fills me. I touch his knee. “Becket? Hey. Becket, it’s me.”
His lips part, but his eyes don’t slide away from the god. Those eyes are so blue, so very blue, and goosebumps erupt all over my arms and legs.
I put a hand to his shoulder, whispering his name, then I move it to his heart. He doesn’t react, doesn’t seem to see me, and so I lean in and put my lips to his.
Our mouths brush together, parted and breathy, and for a moment, I think it hasn’t worked, that I haven’t broken him free of whatever trance he’s in . . . but then I feel his firm lips move the slightest bit under mine. His tongue flicks cautiously against the crease in my lower lip.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 30