Текст книги "The Persuasion of Molly O'Flaherty"

Автор книги: Sierra Simone

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You’d never let a man since Cunningham…until Silas last year.

“Aren’t you going to say your word?” he crooned in my ear. “Are you really going to let a man you hate lay you over his lap and spank you?”

I told myself that the shudder my body gave at his words was a shudder of anger and not a shudder of lust. I looked over my shoulder at him. “It doesn’t matter how hard you spank me, Silas. You won’t win.”

Smack.

I cried out as his hand landed on my bare flesh.

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

Three blows in quick succession, and I was so unused to pain, so unused to being held down. My whole body was squirming now, my face rubbing against my wrists as I fought for the air that had been driven out of my lungs by the pain.

His hand returned to my ass, not to strike, but to rub and caress and soothe. Stupidly, I found myself sighing into his touch, even raising my hips and trying to buck into his hand.

“Greedy girl,” he murmured, his fingers dancing past the small crevice that led to my cunt. I whimpered, bucking my hips again. The hand on my back pressed harder and he laughed a low laugh. “Greed becomes you, Mary Margaret.”

And then he trailed his hand down to my knee, where he nudged it to the edge of his lap, spreading my thighs and exposing my pussy.

I gasped.

Warm summer air blew over the wet, swollen flesh, teasing and gentle, and I somehow felt more wanton than I’d ever felt. How? In a closed garden with no other people around, with a man who’d seen my cunt a hundred times before? How, when I’d been naked before scores of people, in packed ballrooms and in heated, languorous orgies? How did Silas make me feel with a few spanks and a summer breeze like I was the naughtiest—and also the sexiest—woman to ever walk this earth?

Silas groaned above me. “Fuck, you’re so wet, Molly. Please. Say your safe word. If you don’t—”

Smack.

I moaned. The pain flamed along my skin for half a second—half an unbearable second—and then dissipated, leaving to resettle deep in my core. I moaned louder as a finger teased about my wet folds.

“It starts with a c, doesn’t it, Mary?” he asked quietly. “The word?”

The finger moved lower, glancing across my clit, and I inhaled sharply. And then it went back up and, without warning, pressed hard against the pucker there. Resistance and discomfort and the memory of those times before—when he’d fucked my ass so hard that I couldn’t breathe, when I’d climaxed so long and so hard that I forgot my own name—it was muscle memory that drove my hips up against that thumb and nothing more.

It slid partway inside, and he murmured, “Did you miss this, Mary Margaret?”

“Don’t call me that,” I ground out, his pressing thumb short-circuiting my thoughts.

“Why not? It’s your real name, is it not?”

“Because not even my family used my real name. No one calls me that!”

Smack.

“I call you what I feel like calling you, are we clear on that?” he asked sternly. “You are mine to call what I want.”

“No. I’m. Not,” I managed.

“Maybe not. So use your safe word to prove it,” he goaded. “Use it and I’ll stop spanking you. I’ll even take my thumb out of your ass.”

My hips were now wriggling of their own accord, my ass begging for more punishment, my pussy begging for more pleasure. My nipples pressed hard and tight against my corset.

I didn’t want to say my safe word. I wanted him to fuck me.

There. I admitted it to myself.

“I won’t say it,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “Have it your way.”

How dare she say that I had broken her heart again? How dare she finally, finally, admit that I affected her, that she cared about me, and then act like it was nothing?

No. It was not nothing.

It was a not-nothing that tore my heart out of my chest and then brought it back to life, it was something that gave me anguished pain and even more anguished hope all at once. If I’d broken her heart again, that meant that she still loved me, which meant that there was a chance I could salvage all this. A chance I could fix everything.

Quickly, without giving her a chance to realize what was happening, I hooked an arm around her waist and picked her up as I stood, her hips on my shoulder and her head hanging down my back and her adorable feet—tiny and encased in expensive white leather—kicking madly in front. I would be lying if I said that this didn’t make my already insistent erection even more insistent.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Put me down!”

“You know what to say, love,” I told her as I carried her toward the maze exit. “You know how to get me to stop.”

She fell silent. Predictably.

I grinned, glad she couldn’t see it, since it would make her even angrier, but I couldn’t help myself. She was so fucking competitive—to the point that she would endure the unendurable from me simply so that I wouldn’t win.

Frankly, I didn’t want to win. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to shower her face with kisses and apologies and promises, and I wanted her to accept my proposal and let me be her husband. I would be perfectly happy if I never heard the word Clare again, especially not in that strangled, dead voice she’d used at Mercy’s house.

So why did I feel compelled to push her? Why did I need to spank her, to force her, to debase her? I’d never needed to do that to a woman. That was Julian’s style, not mine; I was the easygoing one, the happy one. But when I saw Molly, when I was with her, something else took over. This disturbing need to have her cries filling the air, her ass glowing pink, her wrists gathered in my hand. Was it because I knew that Molly wouldn’t let just any man top her? And that turned dominating her into some kind of prize?

Or was it because, somehow, I knew that she needed it? More than me, even?

We exited the maze, and I carried her to a long stretch of lawn, laying her on the springy grass and kneeling between her legs. Birds trilled around us, butterflies flapped, and in the distance, a fountain trickled a sleepy August trickle. It was the kind of day made for fucking in the grass.

Her head twisted up. “We’re too close to the house, someone will see—”

My hand clapped over her mouth, my skin slightly darker and rougher than hers, my fingers pressing into the soft skin of her cheek.

Oh, I liked the way that looked. I liked it very much.

“You let me worry about that. Or say your safe word. But if you’re not going to say your safe word, then you’d best say nothing at all.”

I let my hand fall from her mouth as I rucked up her skirt.

“And why is that?” she asked, her eyes glowing a furious blue. “I’ll talk when I damn well please, and just because I haven’t said my safe word doesn’t mean I won’t say anything else…” Her voice trailed off as the skirts reached her waist, baring her wet, swollen pussy to me.

I took a finger and rubbed her clit—once, twice, three times. Her eyes fluttered closed.

I pulled my finger away and she groaned. “I think you’ll play by my rules,” I said, “if you want to come.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, eyes still closed.

Smack.

This time I slapped the inside of her thigh, the fiery red imprints of my fingers appearing almost instantly on her milky white skin. She drew in a sharp breath through her teeth but didn’t cry out, letting her legs fall open as I returned my attention to her clit.

“I decide what’s fair right now, do you hear me?” I slapped her other thigh, and then—just once and only a little hard—I slapped her pussy, my dick surging as I did it.

God, when did I turn so diabolical?

Her back arched and she did cry out this time, and I wished I could bottle that cry and then uncork it on lonely nights. I slapped her pussy again and then immediately sealed my mouth over hers, swallowing the breath she gasped out, swallowing the soft shriek she gave.

She moaned underneath me, her legs wrapping around my waist and pulling me down so that my hips settled between her legs. Her heels dug into my back and her hands were everywhere, and now she was trying to flip us over, so that I would be on the bottom and she on top, a position we’d fucked in so many times that I’d lost count. But I wasn’t having that today, and so I reached up and found her throat with one hand, wrapping my fingers around her neck. I gave a light, experimental squeeze.

She stilled, her lips parted slightly.

I reached down with my other hand and found her cunt, slick and ready for me. “You get so wet when I wrap my fingers around your throat,” I whispered as I slowly unbuttoned my trousers. “You want me to fuck you like this, doll? You want to come with my hand on your neck?”

She stared right into my eyes. And nodded.

I took in a breath, the full force of the moment hitting me all at once—my hand strong and rough around her throat, her bared legs and bared pussy, her asking for me to screw her while I nearly choked her…

Fuck me. If I had thought that having Molly O’Flaherty riding me was the most alluring thing I’d ever seen, I now knew better. This was the most alluring, the most tempting, to the point where I was worried about coming before I even finished pulling myself out of my pants.

Finally, my trousers were undone, and I fisted my erection, giving it a few mindless pumps while I stared down into Molly’s face. She had features like a china doll, delicate and pale and feminine. And the dusting of freckles across her nose and the pink blush in her cheeks made her look like the girl I’d met ten years ago in Europe, brash and bossy and carefree.

She wasn’t carefree now—I could see the worry lines in her forehead, the exhaustion in her eyes. I vowed to myself that I would make her forget, just for a few moments, everything except us, everything except joy and pleasure and what it felt like to be loved.

“Silas,” she murmured, squirming underneath me. “Please.”

“Well, since you asked so nicely, Mary Margaret…”

I brushed the flared tip of my cock against her, loving the way she shivered as I did, loving how hot her flesh was, how wet. I leaned over to get a better angle, shifting some of my weight onto the hand around her throat. The skin there was thin and smooth, and underneath, I could feel the tiny, butterfly-like beats of her pulse. Her life, her entire life, was under my hand. For the first time, I really understood how much stronger I was than her, how much bigger. Even if she tried to fight me off, even if she wanted me to stop, I could hold her down and do whatever I liked, use her however I wanted.

Perversely, that realization made me even more intent on loving her, on protecting her. The rest of the world saw Molly as strong and capable, but I knew that deep down, she needed to be taken care of and cherished and worshipped and petted—not left alone to suffer and endure. She needed someone she could let down her guard with, someone who could help her find peace and calm in the middle of her chaotic world.

I wanted to be that someone, even if for only for a few moments.

My cock pressed against her entrance, her flesh parting as I pushed, until the head of my dick was buried. I braced my weight on my other hand and let up on the pressure on her throat, and then slowly slid in farther, hissing out a low breath as she took me in.

“So tight,” I groaned quietly. “So fucking tight.”

And then I slid in the rest of the way, buried to the root. I paused. Not because I wanted to draw out the moment for effect or because I wanted to give her time to adjust, but because I wanted to savor it. Savor her. I hadn’t been inside her for so many months.

“You feel perfect,” I told her. “You feel so fucking perfect. Your pussy was made for me, you know that? It was made for me to fuck.” I pulled out and thrust back in, and her back arched off the ground again. “Doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t that feel so good?”

“So good,” she echoed, her hips wriggling in an effort to rub her clit against me. “So…oh.” I changed my angle and buried myself deeper, making sure that the base of my cock ground against her as I did.

“You like that?” I asked, leaning down so that my mouth was at her ear. I continued to thrust and grind, deep and hard and slow, the way women like it, pressing on her throat just enough that she was reminded of my hand there, of my strength and power over her. “You like it when I fuck you like this? How about when I fuck your ass? Do you remember how hard you’d come then?”

She nodded, her eyes closing, a flush creeping up her neck. She was getting close. And as much as I wanted to go over the edge with her, I wanted to watch her. I wanted to watch her come undone under my body, I wanted to watch her unravel and fall apart and drop her steely-strong mask, just for me. Only for me.

I pushed in and pressed down and squeezed, grinding and rubbing, and her mouth was open in a breathless moan and her eyes were pinned to mine, and then I released my grip on her throat. Her climax took her, seized her, tossing her about like a rag doll as the convulsions wracked through her. I could tell that she couldn’t breathe, hadn’t been able to catch her breath after I let go and her orgasm snatched her up, and so I watched her carefully as she finally came down, gulping in deep, desperate breaths.

“Oh my God,” she finally wheezed. “Oh my God, that was so good. That was…” She reached up and pressed a palm against my cheek. Her gaze was open and vulnerable. “Only you,” she finished, in a voice that was somehow both less and more than a whisper. “Only you make me feel like this.”

“I know,” I growled. “Because you’re mine.”

Something in her expression shuttered, and I frowned, but she wrapped her hands around my neck and pulled me close. “Come inside me, Silas,” she murmured. “I want to feel it.”

So I obeyed, my arms sliding around her back to cradle her as I thrust into her, burying my face into her neck and smelling the sweet, cinnamon smell of her skin. She was so beautiful and so perfect and I wanted to be like this forever, smelling her and feeling that tight silk grip around my cock forever. I wanted her to be my wife.

She said my name again, and that, along with the thought of her as my wife, did me in. It sent heat curling down my spine and into my cock, tightening and tensing until I was rutting mindlessly, groaning as it finally crashed over me, through me. I pulsed long jets of cum deep into her, so deep that that I could feel my hips digging into her inner thighs and my balls pressed against her ass. I dropped my head beside hers, my forehead resting on the grass, loving the feel of her body so slender and soft under mine, wishing I could keep her gathered in my arms forever.

After a minute or two, I withdrew and raised up onto my knees to look at her. Tousled red hair and rumpled silk skirts and her cunt still open to me. I used my thumb to open her to my gaze, wanting to beat my chest like a fucking caveman when I saw the glistening traces of my semen.

I bent forward and kissed her clit, gently and reverently, and then I layered worshipful kisses on the insides of her thighs, above the lines of her stockings.

“Marry me,” I said in between kisses. “Have my children. Be mine.”

She sighed, her body twitching with a suppressed giggle when I reached the back of her knee. I showed her no mercy then, nibbling and licking through the thin silk of her stockings, and fending off her arms as she sat up and tried to push me away from the ticklish skin. I tackled her back down, transferring all those nibbles and licks to her ear and her jaw and her lips, until her giggles turned into quiet moans, happy sounding inhales of surprise whenever I found a particularly sensitive spot.

“What do you say?” I asked, pausing my work to look down at her. “To marrying me?”

“Silas…” she said, trailing off. “We can’t. Besides…”

“Besides what, doll? Besides the fact that I love you?”

She met my eyes, and her gaze was sharp, perceptive. “No, Silas. I didn’t mean that. I meant besides the fact that you fucked Mercy—and you almost did it again—and I don’t think I can forgive you for that.”

Pain lanced through my chest. “Please tell me that’s not true,” I whispered. “Please tell me there is a way I can win your forgiveness.”

She struggled to sit up, and I let her, even though what I really wanted to do was pin her to the ground and kiss her until she relented. But I knew I didn’t deserve that right, I hadn’t earned it. It didn’t matter if I fucked Molly a thousand times, it was her mind and her heart that I wanted to possess, and so it was pointless to keep her here if she didn’t want to be kept.

“The truth is that I understand why you did it,” she said, now avoiding my eyes. “And maybe it could have been me, maybe it would have been me, because we’re so much the same, Silas. And we weren’t made for marrying or for children or for love. We enjoy fucking, we’re good at fucking, we’re both good with money and business—that is what we must content ourselves with.”

“I don’t want to be content with that,” I told her. “I want more. I want you.”

She stood up, arranging her skirts so that they hung straight down to the ground and when I reached out to help, she took a step farther back. “What I’m saying is that even though I can trust you with my body, I know I can’t trust you with my heart.” She studied the ground, as if it held all the answers, but even from this angle, I could glimpse the shine in her eyes. “I shouldn’t have done this…this was a mistake.”

I scrambled to my feet, panic clawing at the base of my skull. I couldn’t lose her; she couldn’t walk away, not after what we had just shared.

“Molly…”

“I’m not going to say the safe word, Silas. I don’t need a safe word for a game I’m not playing.”

I drew in a ragged breath. Please play, I wanted to beg her. Please let me at least try to win you back.

She extended her hand, like she wanted me to shake it, but instead I took it in my own and kissed it, letting my lips linger there. Goose bumps raced up her arms, and when I straightened, a single tear had spilled out of her eye, falling slowly down one cheek. She let me pull her closer, and I wiped the tear away. “Don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t let Hugh win…don’t let the board win.”

She shook her head. “I am going to win, Silas. You think just because I let you spank me, I’m submissive? When have I ever been anything other than the mistress of my own life and the mistress of everyone around me? I control my life, I control what happens from here on out, and you aren’t man enough to wrestle the reins from me, so just give up.”

And with that, she was out of my arms and walking away, leaving me with her tears drying on my finger and a broken heart.

Two Weeks Later

Miss Molly O’Flaherty of London and Mr. Hugh Calvert, Viscount Beaumont, request the pleasure of your company two weeks hence, August the Thirtieth, to celebrate their engagement…

I stared down at the invitation in my hand. A thick cream-colored card, bordered with gold, embossed with looping letters and bearing the seal of the Beaumont family at the bottom. I tossed it away without bothering to look at the location or the time; it did not matter where the party was to be held. Even if it was held in my own bedroom, I would not attend, I could not. For the sake of my own sanity, if not for the sake of propriety.

It had been two weeks since that terrible afternoon on the Baron’s lawn. I’d tried writing Molly, calling at her house, haunting the hallways of the Baron’s mansion…and all to no avail. She would not see me, she would not answer my letters and I knew she was deliberately abstaining from her usual parties and circles to avoid me. And of course, I had heard about her engagement, rumored to have been settled on the very evening we’d parted ways. She’d agreed to marry Hugh with my semen still dripping down her thighs, and I didn’t know if that made me furious, depressed, or hysterical with laughter.

All three, really, depending on the day.

The envelope for the invitation caught my eye, and I examined the back of it. To Silas, it said, in the sharply elegant handwriting that I recognized as Molly’s. And below it, several tiny dots of ink, as if she had set her pen down several times to write something else, but had stopped herself before the words could come out. Instead, it only read, Deepest regards, Molly, at the bottom.

Cold words. Polite words. I crumpled the paper in my fist and then went in search of a drink.

“So will you go?”

The Baron and I were atop two of his finest horses, riding around his expansive property. I suppose I must have struck him as disconsolate and listless (and frankly pathetic) when he’d walked into his library to find me slouched on a sofa with a bottle of gin, and so he’d suggested we go for a ride.

I watched a flock of birds fly up from the leafy stand of trees near the white gravel path leading out from the stables. “How can I?” I finally answered, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “It would hardly be appropriate.”

The Baron shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be inappropriate. Several of Molly’s ex-lovers will be there, myself included. Even Julian and his wife are coming into town for the event.” I could feel him looking at me as I turned my horse slightly to the side. “Are you sure that it’s not your jealousy preventing you from going?”

“Of course it’s my jealousy. And my broken heart. And the fact that I hate Hugh, and I hate that she’s been forced into this ridiculous marriage.”

“Hugh has been friends with us a long time, if only on the periphery. Surely if Molly wants to be with other men during their marriage, he’ll allow it, especially given that their marriage will be one of convenience.”

The Baron sounded so calm, so sure. And it was easy to believe, if only for a minute, that I could still be with Molly as a lover, even after her marriage. “But I don’t want that,” I admitted. “I want her all to myself.”

“How interesting, then, that you haven’t, in turn, given all of yourself to Molly.” The Baron raised an eyebrow and kicked his heels, urging his horse forward.

I followed, feeling a bit sullen, like a child who’d been called out on his mischief, but then the Baron turned around, so that our horses faced each other and we could look eye to eye. “Silas, you know how deeply I care about you. Like a brother. And I love Molly too. I would hate to see the beautiful friendship you’ve cultivated over the years dissolve.”

I hung my head. “I know. I should be the bigger man here and gracefully accept my defeat. Hugh won. Mr. Cunningham won. I lost.”

“Cunningham?” the Baron asked. “Who’s that?”

I reached for the flask of gin inside my jacket pocket and helped myself to a healthy drink before answering. “Frederick Cunningham is the informal leader of her company’s board. He is the one who insisted that Hugh be Molly’s husband and refused to accept any bribe I could give him.”

“Interesting,” the Baron mused. We started riding again as the Baron pondered…whatever it was that he was pondering. After a few minutes, he said, “I’m sorry for my silence. I just didn’t realize Hugh’s cousin was involved in this.”

Hugh’s cousin.

Cunningham.

I stopped my horse. “What?”

“Yes,” the Baron said, stopping as well, and there was a small frown on his lips. “There was a scandal a few years back—a girl was appallingly abused at The Corinthian. A man had paid an exceptionally high price to take her virginity, and when the madam had found the girl the next morning, she’d been beaten and sodomized.” The Baron’s hands tightened on his reins. “She was thirteen.”

“Christ,” I muttered.

“The man was Frederick Cunningham.”

I suspected as much, but the confirmation infuriated me. That stupid mustache and the ridiculous mincing way he drank his wine…all that time, I’d been sitting across the table from a rapist and I’d had no idea. I wanted to ride to wherever he was right now and beat his face in. I wanted to watch his body bob in the Thames.

The Baron looked equally furious as he recalled the incident, and a furious Castor Gravendon was a terrifying thing, an avenging god straight from Roman myth, muscled and hulking and implacable. Castor may have been a dominant man, but he had no tolerance for cruelty.

We nudged our horses forward in silence, each of us wrapped up in our individual fantasies of retribution.

“As you might know, The Corinthian leases its property from me,” the Baron continued after we turned a corner near the woods, calmer now. “The madam approached me for help—she had no recourse to seek justice for this girl, but she wanted to make sure that this man couldn’t hurt another in this manner again. My circle is wide and varied and well-connected to many high-end establishments like The Corinthian, so I spread the word about him. Mr. Cunningham was barred from the best of the London brothels and has since had to travel overseas to find what he craves.”

“What an abominable pile of shit.”

The Baron nodded in agreement. “And when, in the course of spreading this word, I discovered through mutual friends that Frederick Cunningham was actually Frederick Beaumont Cunningham, Hugh came to me and asked that I keep their relation quiet. I granted his request, since I could understand why Hugh wouldn’t want to be associated with such reprehensible behavior.”

I thought of my suspicions in the Cafe Royal. “So that must be why Cunningham was so set on Hugh marrying Molly. They’re family.”

“Possibly. And as I understand it, Hugh has been living off loans from Cunningham for quite some time.”

“But Hugh’s a viscount,” I protested. “I thought surely he must have plenty of money…”

“There are many peers of the realm who aren’t more than paupers, Silas. Hugh is one of them.”

I sat back in my saddle and thought. I had at least believed that Hugh was marrying Molly out of some misguided affection or love, that he wasn’t using her for money, but that didn’t seem to be the case. And for Cunningham, using Hugh to marry Molly must have been a convenient way to infuse his relative with cash, while also solidifying his control over Molly. Any children she bore would be Beaumonts and related to him.

The realization made me so miserably angry that I had to close my eyes for a minute and concentrate on breathing normally.

“I’ll see if I can find anything more,” the Baron said. “I hate the idea of Molly being tied to that man, in whatever way.”

“Me too,” I agreed.

Me too.

“Does Molly know?” I asked. “About Hugh and Cunningham?”

“Surely she must,” the Baron said.

But I worried that she didn’t. And she deserved to know. But how did one tell somebody something this crucial when they refused to see you? “She won’t believe me if I tell her,” I said with a sigh. “Because she’ll think I’m interfering out of jealousy, not concern.”

“Which you are,” the Baron pointed out.

“Both. It’s both.”

He accepted that and we rode back to the stables, dismounting the horses and passing the gin back and forth for a few minutes. From here, I could see the lawn where we’d made love, where I’d parted her folds to see my seed inside of her. My cock twitched at the same time my heart twisted.

I don’t need a safe word for a game I’m not playing.

“Do you think Molly is really a dominant?” I asked, knowing the question probably seemed abrupt and irrelevant to Castor and also not caring.

He looked taken aback. “Our Molly? Certainly not.”

That surprised me. “You don’t think so?” But then I remembered that, even though it had been years ago, Molly and Castor had played together. “Was she submissive for you?”

Castor took another deep draught of the gin. “Yes and no. Yes, she submitted physically, which for her is a tremendous step, but she never submitted to me mentally or emotionally. She never found the submission fulfilling, but it wasn’t because of the submission itself, I think. I believe Molly needs to have complete trust and love in the person she’s submitting to, and while she trusted me, she didn’t love me. Which is why we never played together more than two or three times—it wasn’t rewarding for either of us.”

I thought about this.

“Just because a person refuses to be topped by unworthy men doesn’t necessarily make her dominant,” Castor added. “No more than your allowing a woman to take charge in bed out of politeness or laziness makes you a submissive.” He gave me a pointed look. “For her, she’s never found a man worth that surrender. And you’ve never found a woman worth exerting that level of effort for.”

“I want to believe that. I want to believe that I can be the kind of man who can take care of her, but…”

“But it feels like she won’t let you?” the Baron finished for me.

“Right.”

“Silas,” the Baron said, screwing the cap back on the flask and handing it to me, “spanking her in a maze once isn’t enough to make her forget the ways that you’ve hurt her. If you want her to surrender to you, if you want her to allow herself to be brought under your care so you can love and protect her in all the ways she needs and deserves it…then you are going to have to surrender yourself to her first.”

Hugh wanted to honeymoon in Paris.

I didn’t want to honeymoon at all.

After all, a honeymoon was a celebration, and what was there to celebrate? Certainly not our marriage, which would be a sham. Certainly not our happy future, because there wouldn’t be one. And certainly not the possibility of a family, which I mulled over as I drank my morning tea in bed—the same tea I drank every morning, a brew I’d learned from my auntie in Ellis before we’d moved to Liverpool.

“What the Pope doesn’t know…” she’d said with a wink, as she’d showed me the dried bundles of herbs hanging from her ceiling. I’d been ten when she’d taught me how to brew the tea, and I didn’t really understand until I was older what a gift she had given me. I’d been able to live my life as freely as I wanted, and even now that I was being chained to a man I didn’t love, I still wouldn’t have to bear him any children if I didn’t want to.

But I could have happily had children with Silas…

I finished the tea, refusing to let that thought settle. No, it was done and over. I would save my company now and worry about the rest later, and so what if my chest felt as if someone had cracked it open and scorched the inside? So much the better. Hope couldn’t grow on scorched ground, and hope was for the foolish.