“I’m your wife.” Her indignant exclamation rang out in the silence. “You’re supposed to want me to stay. I love you.”
“You shouldn’t,” he groaned, turning away from her.
She was instantly at his side, tugging at his arm. “I love you, August. Until recently I never understood why, but now I do. There’s a secret person inside you who’s dark and hurting, who hides away because he’s ashamed or afraid or unable to ask for help. But I knew about that person. Do you understand me? I think I knew about him even as a child.”
The more she spoke, the more tears overflowed her lids. He stared at those tears, watched them drop onto the swan’s glossy back and roll off the painted-on feathers. He wanted her to stop talking. He wanted to clap his hand over her mouth but he knew he’d never silence her. He pulled away instead, and put distance between them.
“I know you, Method,” she cried. “And everyone has always said that I was put on this earth to bring brightness to the world, but I think I was put on this earth to bring brightness to you. Because you’ve lived long enough in this darkness and fear, and sadness, and loneliness—”
“Stop.” He threw out a hand. His voice echoed off the paneled walls of the parlor. He turned away so he couldn’t see her cry, or perhaps it was so she wouldn’t see him cry.
Icy. Emotionless. Frosted glass.
“You don’t belong with me,” he said. “I have enough darkness inside me to eclipse us both.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving. I’m meant to be with you, to bring light into your world. Don’t you see, that’s why we belong together, that’s why I’ve always been drawn to you, even though everyone said we were so different.”
“You’ve been drawn to me because you developed some childish fantasy when you were a girl.” He spun back to her, eyeing the swan clutched against her chest. “And I encouraged you because yes, I was lonely, and yes, I only had big, mean sisters who taunted and laughed at me. I thought you were cute. A cute little sister. I still think you’re cute. I think you’re adorable.” He said
adorable
in perhaps the cruelest way it had ever been said.
“You treat me like some fragile trinket,” she said, advancing on him. “Like this swan, but I’m not a swan. I’m not fragile, I’m not your little sister. I’m not cute and adorable. I’m a grown woman and I want to be your wife. I want you to accept me and let me love you, and bring cheerfulness to your life.”
“You can bring all the cheerfulness you want,” he shot back in a hard voice. “It’s not going to change our unsuitability for each other. It’s not going to change who I am.”
“It doesn’t matter. I love you beyond all reason, beyond all meaning, whether we are suited or not. Why won’t you love me back? I want you to love me.
I want you to love me!
”
Her voice had risen over the course of her speech to a level of hysteria, and on the last word, she raised her arm and flung the swan toward him in her fury. In the dismal space between them, it crashed to the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces.
For a second, two seconds, they both stared down at it. “Oh, no,” Minette breathed. She rushed, weeping, to the pile of shards.
He hurried to her side and pulled her back. “Don’t pick up the fragments. You’ll cut yourself.”
“It’s broken.”
“Don’t touch it.” He carefully extracted one of the larger pieces from her hand. “Don’t. Don’t cry. I’ll get you another one.”
She turned to him in a rage. “I don’t want another one, damn you. I want you to love me.” She pulled her hands from his and beat them against his chest. “I hate you, August.
I hate you!
I hate that you won’t love me.”
“Minette. Please.” He struggled to contain her attack. “I love you. I do.”
“You don’t.” She turned away from him, sobbing as if her heart had broken into more pieces than the swan. “You don’t love me. You don’t
want
me, and I can’t
bear
it.”
“Minette.” He bore her down against the floor, covering her with his body to make her be still. She twisted away, looking over at the pieces of her broken swan.
“I’ve loved you forever,” she shouted, crying through her anger. “But it hurts too much to be the only one in love, so if you won’t love me, then I’m going to leave you, and then you’ll wish that you’d loved me, because no one else will ever love you as much as I do.”
It was the truth. It was the raw and brutal truth, every word of it. He let her beat on his chest a moment longer before he captured her wrists and pinned them over her head. With his other hand he took her chin and held her face still, and gazed down at her. “No one will ever love you as much as I do, either,” he said. She struggled as he pressed his lips to hers. They half kissed and half fought as he nudged her farther away from the glass. There were tears in her mouth, on her lips, on her cheeks. He licked them away between gentling kisses and nips with his teeth.
“I love you,” he said against her lips. “Listen to me, darling. I love you, and you’re not leaving.”
“Yes, I am. I will.” She arched beneath him and kicked, narrowly missing his balls.
“I love you,” he insisted. “Until recently I never understood why, but now I do. There’s a secret person inside me who’s dark and hurting, who hides away because...” His throat closed up. He had hurt her so badly, when she’d understood everything exactly right. “My God, I need you.” He gazed into her eyes and forced the words out past fear, past desperation, past suffocating dread. “Please don’t leave me. I need you to light the darkness inside me.”
She shook her head at him. “I can’t be a child anymore. I won’t be your little sister.”
“No. You’re too wise and strong to be mistaken for a child.” He realized now it was never her innocence that had confounded his passion, but the fact that she knew so much about him, more than he had ever wanted to admit.
And she had always loved him, darkness and all.
His hands tightened on her wrists, as desire raced through his veins.
She knows me. She loves me. She’s mine.
He kissed away a stray tear, and another. He pressed his cheek against hers, then raised his head to tease the corners of her mouth, wondering whether she was going to kiss him back, or kick him again.
She did neither, only gave a little moan and arched her hips. Just like that, his need for her overflowed his control. He took her mouth hard, with all the aching, lustful abandon he’d held so rigidly in check. If she understood his darkness, he prayed she would understand this too.
She opened to him with a sigh as he bit her lip and groaned into her mouth. He had bunches of fabric in his hand, bunches of her black gown that he was practically ripping off in his efforts to get at her body.
“I need you,” he said. “God forgive me. I need you right now.”
*** *** ***
Minette sighed and clung to her husband’s shoulders as he roughly pushed up her skirts. It was surprising, of course, to be passionately accosted in the middle of the parlor floor after so many weeks of avoidance, but she preferred this to some gentle and solicitous bedding that had nothing to do with his true self. He scrabbled at her laces in the back. She could feel him hard and ready against the front of her, and wondered why he bothered to undress her further.
“Oh, my,” she said as he yanked her bodice downward and buried his face between her exposed breasts. That would be why. He kissed and suckled her nipples, creating a hot, wanting feeling even more intense than the first time they’d been together. As he kissed her, his fingers worked at her gown and petticoats, and stays and shift and stockings, pulling all of it away until she lay naked beneath him. When she pressed herself against his chest, he reared back and began to disrobe with frightening alacrity. He shed his coat, waistcoat, and shirt, tossing them into a pile on the floor. She hungrily drank in the sight of his strong, muscled body.
Finally.
Thank God she hadn’t given up. His shoulders were so fine, his chest so sculpted, like a Roman statue. He worked at his breeches next, releasing his shaft. She had forgotten how outrageously large his male part was.
He looked down at her with a hungry look, the exact impassioned look she had dreamed of. She wanted to appreciate it, at long last, but she felt nervous and exposed as his gaze raked over her. She was afraid to show any shyness or cover herself, for fear he would snap out of this fit and tell her to go to bed or something, so instead she pretended to be fearless. When he lay back over her, she pulled him closer and pressed her lips to his.
“Minette,” he sighed against her mouth. It was precisely the way she had wished him to say her name, all trembling and full of emotion. In the midst of their kiss, she felt his hand between them, positioning his rigid member against her quim. “No matter what I do, no matter how I try to control myself, I want to be inside you.”
“Isn’t that lovely?” she replied brightly. “Because I want you to be inside me. This will all work out perfectly well—”
Her voice cut off as his thick shaft poked against her center, a hot, hard reminder of his outsized virility. His lips fastened over hers as his hands roved over her body. “You’re so beautiful,” he growled as he pulled away. “So lush. God, how I’ve wanted you.”
She was afraid—she was terrified—but she wouldn’t have stopped him for the world. How long had she wished for this hungry sort of passion? This went somewhere beyond his love play with Mary the servant girl. There was a heightened intensity between them, a pressure as if a wave was cresting. His mouth mauled hers. His teeth nipped at her lips, then bit the lower one until she squirmed.
She did not feel like a child anymore. She did not feel innocent. She felt as if she might devour him alive. She bit his lower lip too when she could catch hold of it, and he gave a low chuckle and pressed his shaft harder against her quim. She moved her hips, trying to assuage the pulsing point of need just at the apex of her sex. She touched herself in that place sometimes when she thought of August. He made a hoarse sound and suckled her nipples again, then pinched them so her whole body moved and strained for his possession.
“Do you want me inside you?” The words were so terse, so low, she might have missed them if she were not attuned to his every breath.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
He spread her thighs wider, right there on the floor, pressing them apart with his hips. She craved for him to come inside her, and he didn’t keep her waiting. He cradled her shoulders and drove forward with a commanding thrust. It was an invasion, truly, but her body was so wet she took him easily. He slid deeper and deeper until she was absolutely full of him.
“Ohhh,” she sighed. She tried to reach for him but he was back to holding her down, which she found even more exciting. As he held her arms against the parlor floor, he pumped inside her, hard thrusts that made her feel helpless and taken and ardently desired.
“You feel so big inside me,” she said. “Oh, you are making me feel very, very...”
She didn’t know the words. She only knew that each time he pushed within her, it stroked some agonizing need. He ravaged her mouth, a rough, invasive kiss to go along with his rough, invasive strokes, and she struggled so he would kiss her harder. The truth was, he controlled her completely only by being inside her and stretching her open with his girth.
As she lay beneath him feeling held down and possessed, a surging sensation grew in her middle. She didn’t think proper wives were supposed to enjoy this sort of unbridled lovemaking, but she couldn’t get enough.
Tempt and tease.
That was what Esme had taught her, but Minette didn’t want to tease him. She wanted to give him everything because he was giving her everything.
I need you. Dear husband, dear love, we needed each other all along.
If his time with Mary the servant had been a romp in the meadow, this was a raging storm, a bursting dam. A river overflowing its boundaries. She felt full and wild, enervated with erotic energy. She needed completion. She wanted the contraction, the pleasure, the rush.
“Please,” she cried. “It feels so good. Please, help me...”
He reached between their bodies where they pressed together, and parted her with his fingers, stroking her most sensitive bud until she thought she must go mad. His shaft filled her, and her whole middle trembled as she tried to press on his questing fingers. He found the perfect spot to caress...oh, the
perfect spot
. She screamed “Yes! Oh, yes!” but then his hand came over her mouth so all she could do was moan behind his fingers.
“You like that?” he asked in a coarse murmur.
She tried to dislodge his hand, to say
Yes, yes, yes
, but he only stifled her harder as his other hand worked magic between her legs.
“Let go,” he said. “Give me everything, now.”
She arched her spine and lifted her hips, trying to press herself closer, although they were already closer than she’d ever been to anyone in her life. She supposed she looked like the very definition of a wanton woman, but she didn’t care. Her climax came upon her like a lumbering thing, a hard, grasping contraction of such intensity that tears squeezed from her eyes. It was as if her tears, her heart, her blood, every part of her was connected to August and this violent closeness between them.
His hand left her mouth and settled around her neck as he shuddered atop her. His fingers tightened, choking her, thrilling her, drawing a few last pulses from her prolonged release. Was he feeling the same ecstasy she felt? She closed her eyes as his hand slid down to rest against her breasts. She didn’t care if she was pressed against the hard, cold parlor floor. She didn’t want him to leave her, not ever. His breath came in gasps as he rested his cheek beside hers.
“Minette. Dear love. Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Well, only in the most exciting way,” she amended, since she must still have his fingerprints about her throat.
He stroked her face and kissed her eyes, and trailed his tongue down the column of her neck. As he leaned to tease her still-sensitive nipples, he moved a bit off her.
“Don’t leave me,” she said, clutching his shoulders.