The Lord's Scandalous Bride

by Emily Tilton

  “Do you think you truly have reason to thank her for that?” Nele asked, sounding a little incredulous. Susan looked up at him with a sad smile, trying to gauge his face and to see how much jealousy he might harbor for Lord Granby—or for Mr. Oldham. “From what you have said of Lord Granby, though you have not to be sure told the whole tale, which I assure you that you will tell soon, and from what I have heard, he is the devil incarnate with his… girls.”

  Nele’s face did betray a troubled aspect, as if his kind nature vied with his jealousy. Susan wondered whether, like so many good men, including Mr. Oldham, his natural dominance worried him. Perhaps he didn’t wish to admit to himself that he felt jealous of the men who had treated Susan as their whore.

  She looked steadily into his eyes, and said, so quietly that she feared her voice would be lost in the sound of the Oceanic’s engines and the roaring of the wind, “I imagine you almost said whores, my lord, just now. I want you to know that I am your whore, too, when you wish it.” She felt very warm, then, despite the outward chill; her face and her cunny both felt the effect of Nele’s burning eyes.

  “Come to the stateroom this moment, Mrs. Loomis,” he said, “and show me.”

  In their luxurious stateroom, with its beautiful gilt furnishings, Susan found it very easy to become Sue again. Facing Nele as he sat in one of the overstuffed armchairs, she unlaced her gown and let it drop around her feet, then did the same for her petticoat. She had not worn a corset now for days, since she had no one to help her with it, and that fact itself made her feel more whorish.

  When she stood before Nele in her shift and drawers alone, she said, “Do I please you, my lord?” Though Susan felt sure that many a modest bride had said the same, the question felt to her like the pre-eminent whore’s question: you have bought me, sir, and I hope that the merchandise meets with your approval.

  “You will please me more when you have removed every stitch of clothing, girl,” Nele said, wearing in his eye the look of mastery Susan had wanted to see there. She cast her eyes down to the floor, now, pulled her shift off over her head, then dropped it to her side. She reached for the string of her drawers but Nele said, “Bring me those breasts of yours, Sue, you little whore,” and she looked up, startled at the coarseness but of course flowing with arousal at it. She stepped forward to the chair and watched as he, intent not on her face but on her milky-white little breasts, began to handle them; watching his fingers upon them, molding and pinching her nipples until she gave a soft little cry.

  “You did not answer my question, Sue,” he said softly to her midsection. “I mean the one I asked up on deck, about whether you thought you should thank your friend for introducing you to Lord Granby.”

  Nele’s attentions to her bosom were very distracting, and now she felt, down below, his fingers delicately caressing her inside the split of her drawers. She sighed and, trying to concentrate, said, “While Lord Granby had me in his power, I admit, my lord, that I felt less gratitude than I do now, but…” The fingers had begun gently to drift up and down Susan’s cunny, making their slick way just inside the place where his cock belonged and then out, and up to her clitoris. “Oh, my lord…” she whispered.

  “Very well,” Nele said. “Continue your story, my little whore, who lived in a house of whores who did not quite name themselves that.”

  “I sh-shall… try, my lord,” Susan replied. “I think… I think I said that Mr. Oldham brought me there.”

  “You did,” Nele said dryly, beginning to undo the knot of the string that held up Susan’s last remaining garment. She watched his fingers with fascination, wondering how movements so simple could yet seem to her so commanding.

  “It was very late in the evening when we arrived, and the landlady Mrs. Wantage seemed to know precisely why Mr. Oldham had come with an eighteen-year-old girl to her establishment. I supposed at first it must be because she took care of many orphans, but I could tell from something in her manner that while she consented to give me room and board as a landlady she somehow knew that I had been ruined, and though my voice betrayed my breeding as very much better than her own, she would nevertheless lord it over me.”

  “Because of this?” Nele asked, Susan’s drawers falling to the carpet around her feet just as he spoke. “Because this sweet little cunt had let a man’s hard cock inside it?” He put his thumb on her clitoris and made a firm circle there. Susan jerked against the chair, against him at the lovely, shameful feeling that shot through her whole body.

  “Y-yes, my lord…b-but of course…”

  “But of course no hard cock had been in here yet, had it?” Nele reached under, between her legs, obliging Susan to spread her thighs, so that he could lay a finger upon her cringing anus. “Only here. If Mrs. Wantage had known that, how much more would she have lorded it over you, do you suppose?”

  Susan could hardly keep her wits now, as Nele began to caress her resolutely, from anus to clitoris, claiming her bareness as his own whore’s cunt forever. “Very… very much… more, my l-lord.”

  “So Mr. Oldham fucked you that night?” he asked, now placing two fingers inside the place—the very place.

  “He d-did, my lord,” she confirmed. “I did not understand, at first, for Mr. Greatrex had never told me that a man could enter there, and though Mr. Oldham warned me that it would hurt, his desire grew wild, I think, at the thought of deflowering a girl who had come into his power so freely, and he did not comfort me when I screamed. Rather, he used me even harder, and said that girls who sucked gentlemen’s pricks in railway carriages must expect a sound fucking, their first time and every time after that. He had me three times that night, the last one in my bottom, which I could tell he had never done before, for he grew very hard inside me there, though he had already spent three times.”

  The creaking of the little bed, and herself crying out as the burning cock thrust in and out of the little hole, filling her and holding her open. The thought that surely Mrs. Wantage, or another of the boarders, must come running, and then the dawning knowledge that she could hear another girl, down the hall, crying out much as Susan herself did. Mr. Oldham’s voice above and behind her, murmuring, “Nice little bottom. So nice for a man to fuck. My special girl. My special bottom, from now on.”

  Nele pulled her around to the front of the chair, spreading his knees, still covered in the gabardine of his trousers. With his right hand around her naked waist, he drew Susan down over his left thigh, without speaking a word. She, in a reverie of memory and arousal, allowed herself to be positioned like a little girl in need of a parent’s disciplinary attention, her bottom up and her head and feet down.

  “Hands on the carpet,” Nele said gently. “You must not interfere back here.” He laid a hand on the roundness of her bottom, to tell her where he meant. Susan, blushing, put her hands in front of her, stretched them over her head until her palms came to rest in the pile of the oriental rug.

  Then, to her surprise, instead of the slap of his firm hand, she felt him pulling apart the halves of her backside. Her blush grew hotter as she pictured him looking down thoughtfully at the most secret, most shameful part of her.

  “You are most certainly a very special girl, Miss Grant, my little whore,” Nele said thoughtfully. Miss Grant, my little whore: he seemed to Susan to embrace with those words the complete range of her social existence, and her voluptuous existence as well.

  He kept her bottom-cheeks apart with his left hand, and with a fingertip of his right he pressed against the tiny ring that lay between them. Susan gave a sob of humiliation even as she felt her cunny grow so wet that she feared for Nele’s trousers.

  “I think your very most special part is right here.” The fingertip urged just inside her bottom-hole.

  Susan drew a gasping breath. To be reduced that way… to that part, where Mr. Greatrex had begun her ruin. It made her whole body seem to glow with degradation even as her amorous soul cried out that if Lord Nele wanted to call her bottom-hole he
r most special part, he should, for he had that right.

  “But,” he continued, “although I myself delight in fucking this wonderful little dimple, I do not mean that I believe that it makes you special for that reason.” Susan felt her brow furrow as her head hung over his thigh. “I believe that whether Mr. Greatrex somehow discovered something in you that he could not understand, that made him fuck you here, or somehow his fucking of you here awakened your specialness, your whole erotic being, Miss Grant, calls out for a mastering worthy of a girl whose bottom lends itself so very beautifully to the thrusting cock.”

  Firmly, but not forcefully, he pushed his three middle fingers inside her there. Susan felt her bottom working, struggling to accommodate them, to open like a good, special girl. She gave a whimpering cry.

  “Hush, Susan,” Nele said. “I shall train your anus like this for a while, to claim your specialness as my own. Then I shall spank you, because a girl who has a special bottom needs it spanked regularly by the man who owns it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the eleven days of the voyage, Nele had intended to have Susan tell him the remainder of her story, and to administer his loving chastisement for her shameful misdeeds such as they were, but he found himself so reluctant to reach the end of the tale—indeed even to reach the meeting with Lord Granby that Susan had intimated to him would be quite a memorable episode—that he found other ways to occupy their time aboard the Oceanic. He promised Susan that she would whisper the story of Lord Granby in his ear on the train to San Francisco, and relate that of Sir David their first night within sight of the Pacific Ocean.

  It came therefore as rather a shock when a man in the White Star terminal, dressed in an impeccable suit of gray serge, called out to Nele as he and Susan passed by on their way to the stand where the hansoms waited, “Lord Nele?”

  The accent was American, at least, so Nele did not fear he had been recognized by someone who might have a connection to Robert and might therefore seek to expose Susan as something other than Nele’s wife. But he had also hoped to reach San Francisco without any delay in New York that might attract the attention of the American papers and, in turn, the British ones. The one means his brother still had of bringing Nele to his knees was to make Susan’s life impossible. America might be a land of liberty, in comparison to England, but to move in the social circles in which Nele must move if he were to keep them from squalor even in San Francisco would enforce a blameless appearance upon her—if he intended to have her by his side, at least. Nele didn’t want to contemplate the alternative: keeping Susan secretly and out of sight, changing her name and perhaps even having to move her to a different town.

  Wearily and guardedly he turned to the speaker, whose striking brown whiskers made him look the picture of American society as seen in the photographs that had begun to cross the Atlantic and provide curious Britons with a view of their strange—and yet familiar—wayward colonists. “My name is Loomis, actually,” Nele said, without specifically contradicting the man having called him by his true name.

  “Ah, yes,” said the man. “I understand, Mr. Loomis. And this is Mrs. Loomis, I presume?”

  Nele glanced over at Susan, who stood pale and wide-eyed beside him. “May I inquire…?” he asked.

  “I do apologize,” said the man with a smile, and holding out his hand so frankly that Nele almost drew back before he realized that such must be American manners. “Captain Samuel Allen, of San Francisco, though of Boston before that.”

  His chest now feeling light with relief, and trying to enter into the American spirit of familiarity, Nele reached out his own hand to attempt the sort of hearty handshake of which he had read, and thought he had succeeded rather well. “Captain Allen! I must say I’m quite surprised to meet you here in New York. I hope you’ll forgive me if I ask you to continue to call us Loomis for the time being.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Loomis.” He turned so politely to Susan that Nele couldn’t help feel a twinge of pride in the well-bred, reserved, and very English way she smiled back at the captain. “Mrs. Loomis, a pleasure to meet you. You’re as pretty as a picture, as we say in this country.”

  Nele felt his mouth turn up at the left. “What sort of picture? Do you only have one sort in America?”

  Captain Allen chuckled at that. “A mighty fine one, I wager. But let me explain. Your father’s cable found me here in New York after it had gone all the way to San Francisco.”

  Nele felt his eyes go very wide. Allen chuckled again. “I know. I fought in the war ten years ago, when the telegraph really began to work its magic, but I can still hardly get used to the thought that it takes only a few seconds for a cable to get from London to New York to San Francisco and then back to New York. At any rate, my wife and I were here on the East coast mixing business with pleasure and visiting my relations, that sort of thing, and it only meant a few days extra here to wait for you, so I decided we should all travel back West on the transcontinental together. I thought it might be an ideal way to get you started on your new lives even before you reached the Golden Gate. I hope you don’t mind!”

  “Mind?” Nele said, looking at Susan. “I can hardly think of a luckier chance.”

  Allen turned to her. “Esther—that’s my wife, Mrs. Allen—can hardly wait to meet you, Mrs. Loomis.”

  Susan’s brow grew troubled at that, and Nele could easily read on her face her besetting worry: no woman in England would ever say that she felt eager to meet a girl like Susan, least of all a woman of society such as Mrs. Allen must be.

  Captain Allen must have seen the look as well, for he said, “Now, Mrs. Loomis, you must understand that Mrs. Allen does know of your misfortunes. I hope you and she may become fast friends, and I expect that you will, and that she will tell you that she has very good reason to help you find your feet at the side of Mr. Loomis here.”

  Susan blushed and nodded, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Allen turned back to Nele. “I’ve taken the liberty of booking a room for you at the Grand Union, right by our new Grand Central Depot. It’s rather a journey from here, but Mrs. Allen has seen to making the room comfortable, I’m sure, and is waiting for us there.”

  They alit from the hansom cab in front of a building that Nele thought rivalled any of London’s railway stations. “Finished three years ago,” Captain Allen said. “When I left for the West they still hadn’t built the tracks onto Manhattan, and one had to take a ferry to New Jersey. Of course, my friend Sullivan and I rounded the horn on a clipper ship to reach the Golden Gate, as well. What a time we live in, Mr. and Mrs. Loomis.” Nele saw his lips twitch at the false name. “You’ve come to the right country, I believe.”

  In the hotel lobby a lovely young woman in a pink velvet gown—looking to Nele’s surprise to be about Susan’s own age—rose from a settee and came eagerly toward them, her gaze flitting from Captain Allen to Nele and Susan.

  “My dear,” the captain said, “may I present Mr. and Mrs. Loomis?”

  Mrs. Allen’s pretty brow creased. “Loomis? But, Samuel…” Then her eyes went back to Susan, and knowledge seemed to dawn upon her face. “Mrs. Loomis,” she said gently, “so very nice to meet you, and you, Mr. Loomis. I am Esther Allen, and I hope we shall all get to know one another very well.”

  Mrs. Allen had had tea laid for them in the sumptuous public tearoom, and they sat drinking it and attempting to consume inedible sandwiches while Nele’s and Susan’s trunk—”Only a single trunk?” Mrs. Allen had asked with wonder, and then nodded again with a compassionate comprehension that endeared her to Nele immediately—ascended the stairs to their room.

  “Now, then,” said Captain Allen in a confidential tone that nevertheless seemed to convey a certain authority Nele imagined he had won on the battlefield, “I wish to say two things, neither of them appropriate for a drawing room, I suppose, or even this dining room, but which must be said nonetheless. The first is inappropriate because it relates to business and, e
ven worse, money. The second because it relates to what I suppose I may best term matrimonial matters.”

  Nele found that he liked the captain immensely, above all for the way he seemed to combine American frankness with a sort of European delicacy. He seemed always to say, with his raised eyebrows, I know I must offend you, but I assure you that you will thank me for it.

  “Go on,” Nele said dryly, looking over to Susan to see how she had reacted. Her cheeks were pink, he could see, and she looked down at her teacup. Mrs. Allen’s own cheeks seemed to have developed rather a glow, but she looked at her husband with an adorable secretive smile.

  “Here’s my proposal, Mr. Loomis,” Allen continued with a smile. “If you’re willing to resume your… shall we say?… former dignity when we reach the West, I’d like to offer you a director’s position at the bank whose directorship I recently inherited. All I’d ask of you is to accompany me from time to time to meetings with clients and prospective clients, and—though I suspect this won’t be onerous—to cut a high figure in San Francisco society.”

  Nele looked again at Susan; her cheeks had gone from pink to red. The idea of being a milord in San Francisco had seemed so abstract when his father proposed it in the letter, but Captain Allen’s words about former dignity and a high figure seemed to add a troubling air of reality despite not really saying anything specific at all.

  “I don’t object in principle, captain,” Nele said slowly and thoughtfully, “but I think you know that my circumstances…” He let his eyes turn briefly to Susan so that Allen would gather his meaning.