The Pearl Read online

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I need to protect someone, and I’ve never met anyone who needed protecting more than you do.”

  “I don’t have any enemies.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “My own worst enemy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He only met her eyes and waited.

  “You can’t love me,” she said.

  “Try to stop me.”

  “All right. I will.” She met his eyes. “I told you the first night we slept together I couldn’t have children. That was true. I don’t mean I’m on birth control, I mean…”

  She steeled herself to say her secret out loud, the one she’d kept even from Sir Jack.

  She continued, “Both my mother and grandmother died of a rare and incredibly lethal glioma before they were thirty-five. That’s a form of brain cancer, if you’ve never heard of it. I hope you haven’t,” she said. “The thing is, Arthur...it can be hereditary.”

  His eyes widened. “Hereditary.”

  “They can test for the genes now,” she went on. “They know. I know.” She shrugged. “When the geneticist gave me my results, I asked him what he would do if he were me. Do you know what he said?”

  Arthur shook his head. His hands trembled.

  “His exact words were, ‘I would make my will.’” She gave a cold little laugh. “I did make my will. And then I…I chose to be sterilized to avoid passing it on to, you know, any children I might have had with Sir Jack. Or anyone else.”

  Arthur glanced away, looked anywhere but at her.

  She could have told him more, that as soon as she was diagnosed—likely in the next five to ten years—a clock would start, the end-of-her-life clock, and she would have fifteen months, no more, left to live. And those last fifteen months of her life would be spent in agony.

  “That’s the only reason I married Sir Jack,” she said. “So I’d never end up like my mother, begging strangers to pay for experimental medical treatments. And I don’t regret it, even now.”

  “I know you don’t want me to say I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No, don’t say you’re sorry. I know you are. I know I am.”

  He exhaled heavily. “So that’s what…” He stopped, shot his whisky. “This explains a lot,” he said.

  She knew what he meant. It explained why she drank too much and had unprotected sex with him from their first night together, why she worked twelve-hour days to avoid thinking. It explained why she’d pushed him away so viciously yesterday on the terrace. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him or anyone enough to let them fall in love with a woman condemned.

  “I’m thirty,” she said. “It’s going to happen any day now. I won’t see forty, Arthur. That…that treatment my mother wanted to try in America? Ninety percent of the participants died after two years anyway.”

  “Ninety,” he said. “Not one-hundred. And that was over two decades ago. Who knows what they can do now, what treatments—”

  “I know,” she said. “I know it all.”

  “Is this supposed to stop me from loving you? If so, it won’t work.” His voice broke and Regan had to look away from him. She couldn’t bear to see how much she was hurting him.

  “Maybe this will work,” she said. “Sir Jack was mostly impotent in the last few years of our marriage. He would use powerful vibrators on me to force me to come even when I didn’t want to. It would just…happen. I couldn’t control my own responses. I had to learn how to separate my body from my heart and mind, from my…my self. I don’t think I can put them back together.

  “They’ve been separated too long and both halves have healed, like when you set a bird’s broken wing badly… It will heal. It will live. But it won’t ever fly. What I mean is…I don’t think I can love you, Brat. And even if I could, I wouldn’t let myself.”

  He looked away from her again, at the windows, rattling softly in their frames. She’d wounded him. He wanted the possibility of love, of a life together. She didn’t have it to give.

  “But,” she said, “selfishly, I do want you to love me. Is that enough?”

  He looked at her again, and he smiled the same way he had when the dove had taken flight. “Just hearing you call me Brat again is enough.”

  “Enough for now,” she said. “I can’t love you, and I can’t have your children. And here you are, the heir to one of the last titles in the kingdom that means something. You know how it works—even if we adopted a son, he couldn’t inherit your titles.”

  “I don’t give a damn about my titles, Regan. I never have.”

  “I care about dying and leaving a child motherless,” she said. “God, Arthur, don’t you understand I am literally the last woman in London you should be falling in love with? I thought you were the smart one in the Godwick family?”

  “Maybe.” At least he admitted it. “Maybe you are the last woman I should love, but you’re the only one I want.”

  The lights flickered. And during that flash of darkness, she wiped the tears off her face. When the lights came on again, her cheeks were dry.

  “You beautiful fool,” she said, then laughed coldly at herself. “Do you want to know something? After Sir Jack died, I told myself I wouldn’t date anyone at all ever again. No dating. No remarrying. No sex even. I couldn’t bear to think of someone caring about me and then finding out the truth…except you. I liked the thought of hurting you. That’s why I made that stupid bloody offer. You were the one man in the world I hated enough to sleep with, because I didn’t care at all how badly I hurt you.”

  “I’ve never been so happy to be hated in my life.”

  She stood up and Arthur looked at her. “Are you leaving?” he asked.

  “I can’t. It’s raining, and I didn’t bring my umbrella.”

  “Then you should stay.”

  “You have a bedroom in this house, I assume,” she said.

  “I do. Do you want to sleep in it tonight?”

  “Yes,” she said. “With you.”

  Arthur rose from the sofa and just as he was coming to her, the lights flickered again and went out.

  She reached for his hand in the dark and found it. The wind gusted. The house shook. His hand was warm and steady and strong.

  Something thumped on the floor close to them in the dark. The lights flickered on again.

  They turned and saw a book on the floor, fallen off the shelf. It had landed face down, the pages open.

  Both she and Arthur stared at it as if a snake had suddenly slithered into the sitting room to warm itself at the fire.

  “Leave it,” Regan said. “We’ll look at it in the morning.”

  * * *

  Arthur took her by the hand and led her into the entryway, to the stairs and up, up, up to his bedroom. As they ascended, the wind grew louder. Leaves blew past the windows and cast strange shadows on the walls like a thousand shadow birds.

  When they reached the landing, the lights flickered off again. Arthur was able to guide her to his room in the dark. Inside the doorway, he said, “Stay here. I don’t want you to trip over anything and hurt yourself. I’ll find candles.”

  He started to leave her and she grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back to her. On the threshold of his bedroom, in a house gone dark and the storm suddenly quiet, their mouths found each other in an electric kiss. It was a kiss on the edge of a knife, a kiss at the edge of the world. His mouth was hot and hungry and charged with meaning and need. She opened her lips to his tongue and tasted him, the taste that was just him, only him.

  “We don’t need candles,” she said, “if we stay here.”

  Arthur reached under her dress, lifting it to her waist to find her knickers. He hooked his thumbs under the lacy edges and pulled them down her legs and over her boots. Where they landed, she didn’t care. On his knees, he lifted her dress higher, kissed her stomach, quivering and taut, then her naked hips. His lips brushed over the sensitive skin, teasing and tickling. His hands cupped her
bottom and kneaded her there.

  His head came to rest against her stomach and she found his hair, black silk, and wound her fingers into it and held him there.

  “Last night,” he breathed, “was the longest night of my life. And today was the longest day.”

  “You shouldn’t feel this much for me. You’re only going to lose me sooner or later.”

  “I pick later, then.”

  She might have chided him for his naiveté—spoken just like a twenty-year-old half-grown man—thinking they could build something on this alone. She didn’t mock him, though. She wanted to believe it, too.

  He kissed her again, all over her thighs and sides and down her legs all the way to her knees and back up again. She reached between her thighs and found the folds of her labia, spread them and pushed her hips forward. He brought his mouth to her cunt and lapped at it, licking her clitoris as he held her against the doorframe by her waist. The heat from his tongue, the wetness warmed her to her core. Each flick of his tongue sent waves of pleasure shooting up her spine and down the backs of her legs. And this, him on his knees in front of her, his head in her hands, his heart and soul and life in her hands…

  The hollowness inside of her ached to be filled. The need to touch him grew unbearably strong. Regan tugged on his hair, pulling him off his knees. She reached for his shirt and almost tore it from him in her rush to reach his body. Finally she had his flesh under her fingers—hard chest, flat firm stomach, strong broad shoulders. She touched him everywhere front and back, and drew him against her so she could run her hands up and down the long furrow of his spine. She trailed her fingers around his sides and to the front, to his stomach, to his jeans, the button, the zipper.

  His cock was brutally hard. He inhaled sharply as she wrapped her fingers around it and stroked. He rested his head on her shoulder while she rubbed him with both hands, making slow long explorations with her fingers. She circled the head and gathered the pearls of come and massaged them into the tip so that he would be as wet as she was when he entered her.

  She brought his cock between her legs, the tip against her clitoris. He took himself in hand and stroked that aching knot.

  “No more,” she said. “Now.”

  What she said, he did. Regan was suddenly pushed hard against the doorframe, and his arms wound round her. He lifted her and brought her down, impaling her. A cry escaped her lips as she sunk down onto him. She was pinned to the frame as he pulled her legs around his waist. She locked them at the ankles, trapping him inside of her.

  She clung to his shoulders and felt his mouth at her ear. Her vagina clenched around the thick organ inside her.

  Her thighs strained to hold herself. She had to move so she put one booted foot on the floor and the other on the opposite side of the doorframe, waist high so that she could let him slide in and out of her wetness freely. Between her open thighs, Arthur fucked her, pushing into her open hole with long, rough thrusts. She moved to meet him and felt every inch as it entered her, split her, speared her.

  It became a frenzy. They panted together, mouths close but not touching. Her inner muscles clenched and released, clenched and tightened, clenched and fluttered. Arthur’s hands gripped her arse so hard she knew his fingers were leaving bruises. She wanted the bruises. She cried out as he yanked her against him, spearing her again just as her orgasm hit and exploded. She came with a lusty loud release. Even as her climax waned, he was still pumping into her.

  She whispered, “I need your come,” into his ear and it was enough to finish him.

  His head fell back and he lifted her off the floor and brought her down on him a final time as he filled her.

  It was over. Though they broke apart, they clung together.

  Arthur caught his breath before she did. She leaned back against the door and panted, her hands on his shoulders to steady herself. His come slicked her thighs.

  “I’ll get the candles,” he said and she nodded, kissed his cheek, and let him go with an order.

  “Hurry.”

  Hurry, she’d said, as if she couldn’t bear one minute, two minutes apart from him.

  He came back to her down the long narrow hall, lit candle in hand, hand shielding the flame. She followed him into the bedroom and to the bed.

  He set the candle in its brass holder on the bedside table. She watched from the foot of the bed as he pulled back the covers and made a place for her.

  “I should wash,” she said.

  “I’ll do it for you.”

  Regan let him raise her dress and pull it off her. He laid it neatly over the back of a chair. He unhooked her bra and slid the straps down her arms, laid it over her dress.

  He whispered he would be back. Regan rested against the cool smooth wood of the bedpost. Arthur returned with a warm, wet flannel. He knelt again and washed his own semen off her thighs and ran it between her legs. It was the act of a body servant, bathing his mistress. The wind was wild again outside but inside everything was calm, serene.

  Except it wasn’t. Arthur’s mouth was tight with tension. The book downstairs that had fallen off the shelf unsettled them both. They could only pretend for so long that what was happening wasn’t really happening.

  But…they could pretend a little longer.

  * * *

  Arthur unzipped her boots and tossed them onto the floor. He stood up and finished undressing as she watched, his body more beautiful than ever bathed in the candlelight.

  She laid back and settled against a pillow. Cotton sheets, with pale red stripes against white. The candle flickered and Arthur bent over it and blew it out. In that split second his face was bathed in golden light, Regan knew his was the last face she wanted to see before bed every night of her life and the face she wanted to see first thing in the morning.

  But she didn’t tell him that. She couldn’t. Gently, he lay down next to her, on his side facing her.

  “There are other rooms in the house,” he said. “If you decide you want to sleep alone. I know you said—”

  She put a finger over his lips. “Forget what I said.”

  He wrapped his hand around hers, kissed the finger that silenced him. She rested back onto the pillow, Arthur on his side pressed close. His hands found the enormous pearl drop she wore on a chain around her neck and lightly toyed with it.

  “Some masters give collars to their pets,” she said.

  He gently tugged the pearl on the chain. “Are you going to do that to me?”

  She rolled onto her side to face him. “I think you’re like a collared dove. The collar’s already a part of you, born on you.”

  His black eyes gleamed in the dark.

  She put her finger over his lips again, then moved close to kiss him, to silence him for good, at least for now. He obeyed her silent order and as he lay there, she explored his body with her hands. She rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his chest and his flat hard stomach. She cupped his testicles and held them, then wrapped her hand gently around his soft penis which began to stiffen as soon as she held it. “Mine,” she said. “All mine.”

  “Yours,” he said. “All yours.”

  He wrapped his arms around her.

  “You were right, you know,” he said. “When you said you can’t make up with someone until you’ve had the fight.”

  “Are you going to talk to Charlie? Have a good old-fashioned row with him?”

  “He barely speaks to me.”

  “Give it time.” She touched his face.

  “You know, my grandfather,” he said, “died of heart disease at only fifty-six. My father’s already sixty-one, and his cardiologist says—”

  “Stop,” she said. “You can’t save me by wishing.”

  “I can still try.”

  “Either make love to me again or go to sleep,” she said. “Just don’t make me talk about it anymore.”

  His fingers tightened around the pearl that dangled on the end of the chain.

  “Killing you, isn’t it?
That I have something you can’t fix?” she asked.

  “I could sell my soul to the devil like my great-grandfather.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Wickedly, she grinned up at him. “Your soul already belongs to me. You can’t give away what you don’t own.”

  He kissed her once and pulled back, looking down at her as if drinking in the sight of her in his bed. She drank in the sight of him drinking in the sight of her. Nothing had ever tasted better. Not whisky, not wine.

  Arthur pulled gently until the clasp of the silver chain holding the large pearl broke in his hand.

  “There, that’s better,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “You said I could either make love to you or go to sleep. I’ve chosen the first option.”

  The room was so dark she couldn’t quite see what he did to her necklace but it seemed to her like he was taking the large pearl drop off the chain.

  He held up the pearl drop in his fingers. It shimmered in the light, the size of a robin’s egg but a silvery white.

  “This is the largest pearl I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s costume jewelry,” she said.

  “It’s perfect.”

  She almost asked For what?, but there was no need.

  He moved his hand between her thighs and pressed the pearl against her vulva. Curious and curiously aroused, Regan opened her legs wider. With one finger, Arthur pushed the large round pearl through her folds and into her body, still slick from their earlier lovemaking.

  Arthur maneuvered the pearl inside of her until it was nestled under her pubic bone, into the hollow of her g-spot. It fit there snugly, as if it belonged. Regan’s heart beat harder as Arthur used the pearl to knead that hollow, rolling it against that patch of tender nerve-endings.

  “Oh, God,” Regan said, catching her breath. Her head fell back and her legs fell open even as every muscle in her thighs and back tensed. Arthur held the pearl inside her with one finger and yet with that pearl and his one finger, he was in control of her entire body. Wave after wave of pleasure passed through her belly. Her fingers tangled in the sheets. The pressure was ecstasy, the slight and tight pressure right there in that cleft just inside her…and if that wasn’t incredible enough, Arthur pushed two then three then four fingers inside of her, filling her even as he gently ground the fat smooth pearl into her.