Nola Read online

  Nola had certainly vented enough to him about it, even going so far as to formulate some sort of escape plan. She railed against the idea of essentially being sold into a marriage by her parents, who, she knew, were looking at the monetary advantages for the family in this merger, as opposed to having much - if any - concern about their daughter's happiness.

  Wilde had been of a mind to help her get away, although he knew she'd never do it. As much as she'd tried to avoid her fate - and as much as her parents had indulged her - by getting involved in women's causes, she had been born to be married, essentially. It was something she was expected to do, and, as much as he knew she disliked the idea, attracting the interest of Brandon Sawyer was quite a feather in her cap, although he knew she didn't see it that way.

  They had come close to duplicating the usual bent of things, although in a much sped up timeframe. Wilde knew that others would be keeping a close eye on Nola's waistline because of the rushed nature of their courtship, such as it was - and it wasn't much.

  They were seen in the park together - properly chaperoned by her mother, of course - and attended two or so balls, although they arrived separately and departed separately. That wasn't all that unusual. But they were almost never seen together in the same spot at any given time. They might as well have been strangers - which was just what they were.

  She was invited over to the family home - Serenity - to be checked out by his father and grandfather, but Wilde had had a feeling that as long as she was female and still breathing, she would have passed their muster with no problem at all. They would both be simply overjoyed that Brandon was showing any interest in even a marginally acceptable woman. And Nola was that - her breeding wasn't as impeccable as they might have preferred, but at this point, Wilde figured that neither of them was going to be a chooser. They valued grandchildren - heirs for the family fortune - much more so than they valued a pedigree.

  But despite his own impeccable lineage, Brandon Sawyer could just as easily have been a wife beater. Wilde inspected Nola even more carefully for any signs of battery, he reached for her hands and pried them off her face, sighing loudly. "Nola. There's no way you could know this, but honestly, you're the rarest among women - one who responds to her husband in the most basic of ways. You're experiencing something that most women never find in their lives, except outside of the marriage bed."

  She raised her tear stained face to him. "I could never do that, Wilde. You know that."

  His heart breaking for her, he reached out and cupped her damp cheek. "I know, my dear. I know. But perhaps if you were to think of what happens between you two as something to revel in rather than something to be ashamed of, it would help you come to grips with it." He knew he was really dancing around the topic, but he didn't want to embarrass her any more than she already had been. "Believe me. You know I have a lot of female friends - none as special as you, of course - and I hear such tales of uncaring husbands who simply rut over them and fall asleep. They find no such pleasure as you have."

  Nola's face hadn't changed one iota. She still looked shell shocked and mortified to the bone. "I think I'd rather have the kind of husband that just..." she spit the words out as if they were acid, "did his business and left me alone."

  She tried to rescue her hands, but he wouldn't let them go. "Think about this, Nola. I beg you. You're going to be with this man for the rest of your life." Her frown at that thought said it all. "You need to try to find some sort of happiness with him, or you're going to spend the next fifty years being miserable, and I couldn't bear that."

  Nola had to give him a small smile at that. It was so like Wilde to take a situation - even one as intimate as this - and make it about himself. She snuck a grin at him. "Oh, I'll be sure to fix the situation now, knowing just how horrible it's going to be for you."

  Although he knew that nothing had really been resolved, he was glad to see that she was at least attempting to find some humor in the situation - Wilde didn't give a damn that it was at his expense. He did have a lot of female friends - and a lot of male friends and lovers - but none of them held a handle, in spunk and intelligence - to Nola, and he refused to lose her to an unhappy marriage. He'd known too many women who got unhappily married and just... gave up. Some of them even completely succumbed to their unhappiness and committed suicide.

  If he had to speak to Sawyer himself, he wasn't about to let that happen to Nola.

  As it turned out, he ended up speaking to Sawyer a lot more quickly than he'd expected, because the man himself presented himself in front of them at that moment, when he was still holding her hands and she was looking a bit moist but radiant none the less, glowering down at the two of them.

  Francois, recognizing the large, well appointed gentleman who was gracing his establishment, flittered over to ask if there was anything he could get the stranger, but as soon as he saw that face, he backed quietly, immediately, away.

  Wilde stood and held out his hand to the other man, saying, "I don't believe we've ever formally met, Sawyer. You cut in on my dance with Nola at the Vanderbilts' Ball the first night you two met, and there wasn't time for introductions."

  Prompted by his action, Nola straightened her spine and performed the introductions. "Brandon," her use of his first name sounded rusty even to her own ears. The only time she called him anything was usually in the heat of passion, much to her chagrin. "This is my good friend, Wilde Everest. Wilde, this is my - my husband," both of them noticed her hesitation, and Sawyer's face only got that much darker because of it, "Brandon Sawyer."

  Wilde's hand stayed stuck out there, though, and Sawyer made absolutely no move to accept it. Instead, he turned to his wife. "It is not acceptable for you to be here, most especially not with him."

  Not about to take such an insult sitting down, Wilde bolted to his feet. "Now you see here, Sawyer - "

  The other man didn't so much as spare him a glance. He was too busy laying hands on his wife, having extended his great paw to her imperiously and not gotten any sort of response from her beyond a glare that more than matched his own. So he'd decided to take matters into his own hands, reaching into the booth and bodily lifting her out of it, throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her out of the disreputable establishment like a sack of potatoes.

  If he hadn't been so angry at the blatant insult he'd been dealt, Wilde would have laughed himself sick at the sight of his high and mighty friend - one woman in a thousand who was almost disgustingly independent and strong minded - draped over her husband's broad shoulder, but, of course, not taking it in stride in the least, but rather beating on his back for all she was worth.

  But then she stopped, mid beating, and tried to look up at him, calling out, "I'm sorry, Wilde. I'll get in touch with you soon." Then he heard her direct a nasty comment towards her husband, "The least you could have done was pay the bill, if you were going to drag me out of there so ignominiously. Wilde isn't made of money like you are."

  "Like we are," he heard her husband correct in the expected growl. It surprised and amazed Wilde, that once he got her packed into his carriage, he did sent the driver back in to throw a twenty on the table, even thought the entire bill couldn't have been more than a dollar or so.

  He stayed behind, making a mental note to call Nola later and check up on her. That behemoth of a man of hers looked hell bent on some sort of revenge, obviously believing that they were having some sort of tryst, which, for anyone who knew Wilde in the least, was an entirely ridiculous idea.

  He took a sip of his now lukewarm tea, his brow furrowing anxiously as he wondered if he was ever going to see his friend again. Judging by her husband's almost violent reaction, the answer was most definitely in doubt.

  Chapter Four

  Nola, who was none to happy to have been so unceremoniously plucked from her comfy seat to be bumped out to the carriage and then manhandled into it, glared at her husband from as close to the corner of the seat as she could get, even going so far as to gather h
er skirts up around herself, so that they didn't touch him where he sat in the opposite corner. If he thought he was going to keep her from seeing one of her dearest of friends, then he had another thing coming, and that was exactly what she told him.

  He rounded on her, grabbing her close to his side whether she wanted to be there or not. "I'm not asking you, Nola, I'm telling you. I do not want you hanging around another man. It doesn't look good for the family to have you having some tete a tete with a bounder like Everest."

  Nola's eyebrow rose. "A bounder? Surely you don't mean that Wilde has any interest in me - or even women in general? Obviously, you don't know the slightest thing about him, or you wouldn't have made a remark like that."

  How his naive little wife could have any knowledge of Everest's predilection for boys, he was sure he wouldn't know. He would have bet his life that she had no idea that that kind of choice existed. He was nearly struck speechless, probably for the first time in his life. "How would you know about Everest's preferences?" he asked cautiously.

  Nola gave him a speculative look. "I only know that which I see. He has never courted any woman that I know of, although he has quite a few female friends, and at least as many male friends. When he goes out, it's never to see a woman, it's with a male friend. Since he's an artiste, and has no family around him, he has no impetus to get married and have children, and I think that's a good thing for him. And I would prefer never to speculate any further than that, thank you very much."

  She wasn't quite sure, because she didn't know him that well, but Nola sensed some sort of softening in him. "Really, Brandon. I'm safer with Wilde than I would be with another woman. He'd defend me with his life." She hadn't added that he'd been called on to do just that several times, when she'd been caught up in an angry mob of men who most definitely didn't want women to get the right to vote.

  He hated to admit that she was probably right, but he didn't at all like how it looked when his newlywed wife was out with another man, even in the light of day. And that man had her hand in his - which was more than he had done, beyond the most perfunctory.

  Somehow, it had hit him hard when he'd seen the two of them together like that. They obviously cared for each other, and that was more than he and his wife shared. That fact taunted him, as if they were lovers, even though he knew how ridiculous that idea was.

  The problem was that he and his wife weren't lovers, either.

  Oh, they'd had plenty of sex - thanks to him and his irrepressible appetite for her. Hell, just looking at her all bunched up across the carriage seat from him had made him want to calculate how long they had before they reached Serenity and if it was long enough for him to bury himself deep inside her to feel those incredible, womanly contractions around his manhood...

  But he'd settled for hauling her close to him - where he darned well knew she didn't want to go - even though she was spitting fire up at him because of the way he'd dragged her out of the cafe.

  As annoying as it was, it was one of the things he'd liked about her from the first few moments after he'd commandeered her on the dance floor. She hadn't acquiesced because of who he was - if she'd even known exactly who he was. He'd had a good notion that if they hadn't been in public, she would have shown him the back of her hand in a heartbeat for his audacity, and the more he'd gotten to know her - such as their whirlwind courtship had been - the more he'd liked the fact that she wasn't a shrinking violet. He was too dominant to enjoy being around a woman who barely said a word or had no gumption. Granted, he thought with quirking lips, he could sometimes due without his outspoken wife being quite as forthright as she was.

  Such as the time they'd had their minister and several of the higher ranked people in their church to dinner. The seriousness of his father's illness had necessitated that they move into the family home, and that had only promoted the closeness between his father and his wife. But his father had been on the mend by that point, and had grown ever more enamored of his new daughter in law, so much so that Brandon was thinking that he was going to have to separate the two of them - they were thick as thieves, and he knew that he was suffering in his wife's eyes when she compared him to his paragon of a father, who didn't spank her when she needed it and didn't bring her nightly to a towering crescendo of moans and screams and dastardly pleasure

  Their minister - the Reverend Mr. Playfair was definitely of the old school, and Brandon had suggested, perhaps more gently than he should have, that considering his new wife's outlooks on women's rights, that putting the two of them in the same county might not be such a good idea, but Father wouldn't hear of it. Brandon had a sneaking suspicion that the old man was looking forward to the clash of ideas at the dinner table, but Brandon had had a strict talk with his wife before they'd descended the huge mahogany staircase.

  And he'd done it as he had her tugged to the edge of their big bed, her legs splayed wide and back, pounding himself into her, watching her breasts bob with every motion, her panting breath coming loudly in the quiet room. She was thrashing her head back and forth uncontrollably, and he knew he was the cause of her complete loss of will. Brandon loved bending her to his own purposes - that was why he'd wanted a strong woman. Making someone who was as completely passive as most of the women he'd met before Nola bend to him didn't mean much. But this woman - she had a head on her shoulders, and an ego and will that were extremely strong.

  That made it all the sweeter for him when he drove her past her natural reticence about exploring the pleasures of the flesh and made her come with his mouth or his fingers or his cock.

  He'd also deliberately caught her after she'd gotten dressed for dinner, not letting her put him off because she was fully dressed and ready to meet the Revered. Hell, he never let her put him off about anything, especially those things that involved sinking himself into her so deep she nearly convulsed around him with his first thrust.

  So she was lying there in what he knew was an incredibly expensive dress - as a part of their engagement, she'd been given free reign to purchase clothing for their honeymoon, and he remembered the bill for this particular dress as being considerably high. Brandon liked to get his money's worth, and she looked particularly fetching with the skirt of the dress hiked up and crumbled over her waist to nearly her heaving bosom. The thought that she was going to be sitting next to the right good Reverend while he was seeping out of her, while her body was still coming down from the screaming orgasm he fully intended to drive her to added an extra element to his already nearly bursting excitement.

  She did this to him, every single time he got within a mile of her, and it made him crazy. It seemed no amount of indulging himself with her was going to rid him of this constant need for her - but he still intended to try.

  He'd kept his head - which wasn't the easiest thing to do in that position since she incited him to the absolute heights of passion at least as much as he incited her - long enough to lecture her as he'd straightened, holding her in position with just a look by now, admiring the angry red stripes on her bottom left there from her thrashing this morning when she'd tried to get off their bed when he wasn't quite through with her. In fact, he was still wearing the belt with which he'd delivered those angry looking welts.

  Brandon reached beneath her and lifted her hips to him, clutching and gripping her bottom, getting his answer about whether or not she was still hurting at his first grasp when she tried unsuccessfully to arch angrily away from him while still thoroughly impaled on his rock hard staff. "Ah ahh ahhhh, little wife. You're not going anywhere."

  Nola knew the absolute truth of what he said. She knew from experience that he wasn't going to let her go until he'd wrung every last ounce of ecstasy from her body, regardless of what she wanted - or perhaps in spite of it. The bald faced truth was that he could make her want him - hell, he'd already accomplished it this evening. She'd been wet and ready for him well before he'd tipped her onto the bed when she was nearly finished dressing.

  She had always tho
ught that he'd introduced her to the most humiliating - and incredibly, unhappily satisfying - experiences of her life, forcing her to climax in his arms again and again and again with absolutely no care for what she might prefer. But lately he'd added an even more atrocious element: he'd begun pleasuring her directly after and sometimes during a punishment, when he was still wielding some God awful implement he'd come up with - his belt, or her hairbrush - making her scream and cry and weep and wail for very mixed reasons.

  Sex wasn't as novel an experience as it had been - especially considering how much of it they had - but he was consciously injecting another element to it - considerable pain in her bottom coupled with absolutely violent pleasure - that had her questioning her sanity.

  She couldn't really like what he did to her, could she? She was a strong, intelligent woman with a good head on her shoulders. Lovemaking with her husband - if that was what they did could really be called, she wasn't at all sure - shouldn't make her feel like this, should it? All hot and sweaty and throbbing and yet with distinct undertones of shame and not a small amount of fear, of herself and of him, every single time. All he had to do was enter a room - hell, enter the house and her body went on full alert from stem to stern, her scalp tingling from remembrances of the way he would clench his fingers in her hair or use it to control her, especially from behind - her toes curling within her soft kid boots the moment she heard his voice or smelled his particular cologne.