To Love, Honour & Betray

Estelle thrust her hips up, trying to draw his fingers deeper inside her, but he kept on teasing her by withdrawing them each time she surged upwards, leaving her empty and aching, her frustration turning her earlier smile to an angry glower as she tried and failed to trap his fingers inside her.

Laughing at her, he stroked the hard length of his penis, holding her off as she tried to reach for him and then forcing her hands away as she made to satisfy her frustrated need by herself. He pinned down one of her arms with his knee and held the other in a painful grip, laughing tauntingly down at her, his thick red lips drawn back against his teeth so that he did look almost dangerously vulpine as he reached out and thrust into her with his fingers again, telling her softly, ‘That’s right, babe, go ahead and fuck yourself on my fingers,’ laughing when he heard the small explosive sound she made and demanding, ‘What is it you want? More …? How much more …? This much?’

She ought to have been prepared for it. After all, he had done it to her before, yet the sharp, thrilling bite of pain he was causing her made her cry out and brought as he had known it would the first frantic convulsions of her orgasm. But he didn’t let her have it, removing his hand from her body and taunting her excitedly as she reached for his erection.

‘Oh, no, not yet, you can’t have it yet. First you’ve got to stroke him a little … suck him, show him how much you want him,’ he mocked as her hand and then her mouth closed hungrily over his body and she started to rock herself rhythmically to and fro, her eyes closed as she did so, still sucking deeply on him.

He waited until he was almost ready to come before removing himself from her mouth and thrusting deeply and urgently into the eagerly open wetness of her body, automatically reaching out for a pillow to hold over her mouth to silence her screams of pleasure as she climaxed, even though the days were now long gone when he had to prevent their parents from hearing the noise she made.

Estelle had never had a flatmate because she liked her privacy, and one of the earliest lessons she had learned was to distrust her own sex.

Gloatingly, just before dawn, Blade surveyed Estelle’s naked body. The whole room smelled of sex and he breathed in the scent of it, of himself, with luxurious, satiated enjoyment. Then, after gathering up his clothes, he dressed and headed for the door.

He and Estelle never slept together. They didn’t have that kind of relationship, and besides, the two girls he had left curled up on his bed would still be there waiting for him, or rather, waiting for the money he had promised to pay them.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lovingly, Ryland reached out an arm and drew Tara closer against his body.

‘How did you know I was awake?’ she asked him, sidestepping the question.

‘I knew,’ Ryland told her and then prodded gently, ‘You’re worrying about your Mom, aren’t you?’

Tara turned her head and pressed her face into his chest.

‘She didn’t say anything to me about our going to Boston, but I could see in her face … her eyes … I know.’ She gulped back a small choking sob. ‘I feel so guilty about leaving her, Ry, but I know, I just know that I couldn’t bear not to be with you.’

‘There’s no way you are going to be without me even if I have to kidnap you and drag you bodily onto the plane with me,’ Ryland assured her, adding more seriously, ‘If there was any way I could change things, stay over here, I would, but I can’t. I’m the only male of my generation. My uncle was twelve years older than my father—if he and my aunt had had a son, perhaps things might have been different. As it is, it’s always been kinda understood that when my aunt retires, I’ll be taking over from her and running the business.’

‘Doesn’t your cousin—’ Tara began, referring to his aunt’s and late uncle’s only child, a daughter, but Ryland shook his head before she could finish explaining.

‘Margot isn’t interested in the business. She never has been. She isn’t that kind of woman.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tara asked him, wrinkling her forehead. All she knew about his cousin was that she was nearly seven years Ryland’s senior and unmarried.

‘Margot works in the business, yes,’ Ryland agreed. ‘She works in the archive department where we house all the originals of everything we’ve published. But she has no wish to take over and run the company.’

‘But she could marry and have children,’ Tara pointed out.

‘No,’ Ryland returned, shaking his head, ‘no, she won’t.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ Tara half teased him. ‘I know she’s not so young any more but …’

‘Margot will never marry because it’s impossible for her to marry the man she wants,’ Ryland told her bluntly, explaining when he saw her puzzled expression, ‘Margot loves Lloyd—her mother’s brother’s son. They’re first cousins. It’s against the law in the state of Massachusetts and a number of others for them to marry and my aunt would never have condoned their getting married even in another state. Margot fell in love with him when she was fifteen and since then … It isn’t something that’s discussed in the family.’

‘Does he … Lloyd … love her?’ Tara interrupted him, her eyes full of tender compassion.

‘I … Lloyd has been married and has two stepchildren. He doesn’t have Margot’s intense … well, she’s a very driven sort of person. Lloyd lives in California. My aunt decided to set up a branch of the business out there, printing pretty much the same sort of stuff for the campus at UCLA as we do for Yale and Harvard. She put Lloyd in charge of that end of things.’

‘She sent him away from Margot, you mean,’ Tara said in a low voice.

‘It’s impossible—illegal—for them to be together,’ Ryland reminded her quietly. ‘She did it for the best. Except when Lloyd met someone else out there and decided to get married, well, Margot had a bit of a breakdown. They meet every summer at the island. There’s an island my great-grandfather bought, just off the coast—’

‘An island, your family owns an island …?’ Tara began, but Ryland shook his head dismissively.

‘It’s nothing,’ he told her, ‘just an exposed piece of rocky headland, really, but …’ He paused. ‘It’s there Margot and Lloyd see each other. Not that it’s ever mentioned.’

Tara shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around her body, trying to imagine how it must feel to love a man you could never really be with, to want a man you could never truly have.

In their early days together when he had been telling her about his family background, Ryland had played down the role he knew he was ultimately going to have in the family business.

He had told Tara he had come to England to study British publishing and he had then gone on to explain to her the nature of his family’s business, telling her that his great-grandfather had started a small company to publish textbooks and papers written by his friends at Yale and Harvard.

The business had grown and become extremely profitable, still maintaining its close links with the university.

After his uncle’s untimely death in a sailing accident—his hobby had been racing ocean-going yachts—his wife, Ryland’s aunt, had stepped into his shoes and run the business as its chief executive. Ryland’s father continued with his own work, bringing in new manuscripts for them to publish and sell. Under his aunt’s aegis, the company had gone from strength to strength. She had an extremely sharp financial brain and Boston’s money men had a great deal of respect for her—as did Ryland himself.

Any one of Boston’s first families would have been highly delighted to see their daughter marrying Martha Adams’s nephew, Ryland suspected, but marriage hadn’t been something he had been remotely interested in—until he had seen Tara. Within days, within hours of meeting her, he had known that she was the one—the only one.

Perhaps he was more like his cousin Margot than he had previously imagined, he acknowledged ruefully.

There was something in Tara’s make-up, a streak of idealism, the result perhaps of having always and only ever known the loving, tender protection of those around her and of having known, as well, just how much she was cherished and valued, that somehow set her apart and made her special, made him love her.

‘I do understand you have to return,’ Tara assured him, adding, ‘I just wish that Boston wasn’t so far away.’

‘It isn’t,’ Ryland murmured, tilting her face up towards his own so that he could look down into her eyes as he whispered softly a second time, ‘It isn’t.’

As he bent to kiss her, Tara shook her head. ‘Not to us, perhaps, but it is to Ma. I could see it in her eyes. She looked almost … almost frightened … as though … I’ve never seen her look like that before. Not even when she and Dad … I hated it when they divorced. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen to us, Ry.’

‘It won’t,’ he reassured her gently. ‘It won’t. Your mother probably just needs a little time to get used to the idea of our living in Boston,’ he added comfortingly. ‘After all, she’s got her own life. She’s still a very active and attractive woman … a very, very attractive woman,’ he noted appreciatively, causing Tara to give him an indignant pinch. ‘Perhaps we could give ourselves a week or so to settle in and then get her to come over for a visit,’ Ryland suggested as he removed Tara’s fingers from his arm and then bent his head to slowly suck them one by one.

‘Mmm …’ Tara moaned responsively.

‘Mmm …’ Ryland agreed as he eased her down against the bed and transferred the moist heat of his mouth from her fingers to her nipple.

Tara closed her eyes and gave herself up voluptuously to the pleasure of his lovemaking.

Ryland had teased her shortly after they had revealed their love for one another and celebrated that revelation with a romantic and very sensual weekend away at a discreet country hotel in a bedroom complete with a four-poster, a huge open fire and, even better, a bed-sized open space in front of it that there was a delicious wantonness, a wildness almost, about the way she lost herself in their lovemaking that was intriguingly at odds with the mild-mannered and restrained day-to-day image she presented to the outside world.

‘That’s because I’m in love with you,’ Tara had told him seriously and meant it, because it was true.

Her emotions had always been close to the surface, easily stirred and fired, and it had taken the gentle influence of her mother to help her learn how to harness the impetuous, impulsive side of her nature and to look beyond its immediacy to the eventual consequences. Tara felt privileged that in her the passionate intensity she felt, an inheritance from her father’s side of the family, was tempered and strengthened by the quiet wisdom that was her mother’s. Passion and sensitivity—they could, for someone without the loving parenting she had received, have been uncomfortable bedfellows, but Tara loved and valued both sides of her personality because they were her emotional inheritance from her parents.

She liked knowing that in her individuality she was still a part of them, just as the children she and Ryland produced would be a part of them. Like her, she hoped that they, too, would one day listen with the same rapt attention as she had while their grandparents told them stories of their own youth and that they, as she had done, would absorb from those stories a sense of family and continuity, a sense of security and safety, of warmth and belonging.

It still sometimes brought quick emotional tears to her eyes to visit her grandparents and to see the love and pride in their eyes, to see and touch the familiar things that she had known from babyhood: the S?vres dinner service that a member of her mother’s mother’s family had brought back from France; the medals her maternal grandfather had received on the death of his uncle, a veteran of the Somme; the linen sheets both of her grandmothers had been presented with on their respective marriages and that both of them had ruefully admitted they never used, much preferring the easier laundering of modern bedclothes.

Despite her totally modern outlook on life, Tara was a girl who was very much in touch with, very much in tune with, her family’s past. Ryland, who had already recognised that about her, hoped it might incline his aunt to look favourably on Tara and approve of their marriage.

He might neither need nor particularly want that approval and the inheritance that would ultimately go with it, but as he had already told Tara, he felt it was his duty to accept the role in the family business for which he had been groomed. There were certain things about his family and that role that he had not as yet told Tara, but they did not affect his love for her, and who knew, if his cousin Margot changed her mind about remaining single …