It Stings So Sweet (6 page)

Is he talking about me or my father’s fortune? The revelations turn
my world upside down. “Then my father threatened you. He told you that you’d lose your job if you
didn’t propose marriage to his daughter.”

Jonathan laughs. It’s not a joyful laugh. It’s sour
as lemons. He rolls to the side, eyes on the canopy over the bed, one knee bent in casual disdain.
“Oh, that much is true. Your father did threaten me.” He laughs again and I don’t like it. It’s a
sound of dark despair. “He tried to run me off. But I wouldn’t go. I promised to ruin you if he wouldn’t
let me marry you.”

I’m incredulous. “
Ruin
me?”

“I wasn’t about to allow Robert Aster to
raise my child. I wasn’t going to let
him
have you. I was perfectly willing to trap you in this
marriage. So, yes, I threatened to ruin you. There it is. Now you know the truth.”

Now
I
want
to laugh. He’d threatened to
ruin
me. To mire me in scandal. I find it perversely romantic, charming
and quaint, and utterly demented. Curiosity overwhelms me. “And what were you going to do? Tell
everyone I wasn’t a virgin? Or did you plan to seduce me in such a way that I’d be caught with my skirt
up over my hips, drunkenly surrendering my virtue in the parlor on a desktop?”

His ears redden,
and I regret mocking him. He is so vulnerable to me right now. My hands go to his dark hair, and
I devour his face in kisses. The dark brows. The impossibly sharp cheekbones. The thick, brooding
lips that have given me so much pain and pleasure. “You’re a fool, Jonathan. A fool,” I say tenderly.
“Women like me aren’t trapped into marriage. My father could have sent me away into the country if
I’d have been willing to go. I’d have developed some mysterious ailment and returned some months later
and been courted by fifty men, all of whom would be more than willing to overlook the scandal in
favor of my father’s fortune.”

“But you wanted to keep the child,” Jonathan argues. “So you
had to take me in the bargain.”

This is the man who knows how to make my body vibrate with
arousal. This is the man who can make me writhe with pleasure. This man can make me abandon all sense
of shame and crave things I’ve never even known I wanted before. And yet, I worry that he doesn’t
know me at all.

“I hoped that you’d learn to love me,” Jonathan says.

“I do.”

It’s
as close as I can come to saying the words, and it startles him.

Then doubt spreads over his
features. “If that’s true, why wouldn’t you ever say it? I told you that I loved you . . . before
we were even married. But you never said it back.”

My tongue trips over the words. “B-because
I never believed you.”

He accepts this answer with equanimity, seeming to weigh it in his mind.
Sprawled on the bed, he closes his eyes. I know that he’s thinking, because I can see his fists
clench and release. Eventually he sits up, both feet on the floor, head bent over clasped hands, elbows
on his knees. “I don’t suppose I could make you believe it now . . .”

“I want to believe you
 . . . but how can I, if we keep living like this? Alienated. Apart. If we—if we love each other—there’s
no reason for it.”

“You want things, Nora. You need things . . . that I can’t give you.”

“Like what?”

“Like respectability. After last night, I doubt we’ll receive many invitations
into society again.”

His naiveté is endearing. “Oh, but we will. We gave everyone something
to talk about. The ladies will clutch at their pearls and call me names behind my back. The men will
feign disapproval, all while secretly admiring your nerve or wondering if they can seduce me. And
they’ll invite us everywhere, so that they can point at us and shake their heads with distaste when
they think we aren’t looking.”

“You shouldn’t have to endure that kind of censure,” Jonathan
says.

“It will sting, I admit. The next time I walk into a room and see any of those men from
last night, I’ll die a little in shame. But the heat of that shame will burn between my thighs, and
it’ll only make me want you more.” I’ve never spoken so brazenly to him before when his hands weren’t
on me. He looks up in surprise. “I want your approval, Jonathan. I don’t care about anyone else’s.
I don’t care about society.”

“Spoken like someone who was born into it. Like someone who has
never been on the outside of it. You say you don’t care, but you just don’t know any better.”

“I tell you, I don’t care.” Then I stop and stare at the man who has had to claw his way to the
top. Who has worked tirelessly, under constant scrutiny. “Oh, but
you
care, don’t you? You care,
Jonathan.”

“You’re damned right I do,” he breathes.

I want to rail at him for his materialism,
for his shallow desire for acceptance. But he’s the son of a field hand. He’s a man who has
come from nothing. And I want him to have everything. “I can behave myself in public, you know. If
you care so much about society—”

“Not more than I care about you,” he says. “Let’s be clear
on that. If society was the only problem between us, Nora, I’d let them all go hang.”

“Then
what keeps us apart? Is there something else you don’t think you can give me?”

“A child,” he
says. “After the miscarriage, I swore to myself that I’d become a better man. That I wouldn’t touch
you again until I was worthy of you. Well, I’m not. And after last night, I don’t know that I ever
will be. I
hit
you, Nora. And I
enjoyed
it. So we can’t simply return to the way things were, pretending
that I’m not going to crack one day and do it all again. Because I will. I don’t know how to
love you gently.”

How is it that he won’t hear me? That he won’t understand. “I never asked
you to treat me gently!”

“Listen to me. If we stay together as other men and women do, I’ll
look for excuses to yank at your clothes, to bite at the back of your neck and turn you over my knee.
What I want is wrong and it’s sinful. I am a depraved monster inside, Nora.”

If there were
anything near enough, I would throw it at him. “Stop saying that!”

“Oh, for the love of God,
I don’t need your pity. I’m not one of the poor orphans at your charity house.”

“It isn’t
pity
, you horse’s ass. I’m insulted. When I went with you that first time, when I let you put your
hands up my skirt, let you bed me, I thought that I wasn’t a virgin. But I was. Because you were the
first man to ever touch me. Truly touch me. Or at least, the first man to touch what was really inside
of me. Everything about myself that I’d been afraid of came awake in a moment, and it wasn’t ugly.
I’m not twisted and ugly inside, Jonathan.”

He stands up, rounding the bedpost to face me.
“I never said you were.”

“You say it every time you call yourself a monster. Because if you’re
a sick and sinful and depraved man for what you want to do to me . . . what does that make me for
wanting you to do it?”

His eyes narrow. He exhales sharply from his nose. He looks away.

“
Oh
,” I whisper, both hands to my face in despair. “Oh. You
do
think there’s something wrong
with me.”

He takes my hands, pulls them gently from my horrified face, and clasps them in his.
“It’s just . . . I used to see men beat on their women on the farm. Drunken sots, big fists, lots
of tears. I’d see those same women go back to those men. Make excuses for them. Just like you’re doing
for me.”

“We’re not like that,” I say, wishing there were words for it. “If I’d asked you to
stop last night, would you have?”

“Of course.”

“Then it’s play. It’s a game.”

“Games
have rules,” Jonathan says.

“Then we’ll make some.”

He hesitates, as if tempted. “People
don’t . . .
do
this, Nora.”

“How do you know? Maybe they do. Just not, perhaps, in the middle
of a party. And maybe they don’t. Maybe no one in the world plays these games. Maybe that’s why we
were drawn together out of anybody else in the whole world. We’re perfect for each other.”

“We can’t just do anything that feels right to us.”

“Why not?” I stare at him, hard, waiting
for an answer that doesn’t come. “Why not, Jonathan?”

The more we argue, the more sure of myself
I become. The certainty spreads through me, limb by limb, transcendent. I know myself as I’ve
never known myself before. And I can say all the things that have been caged inside my head. “Our whole
marriage, I’ve done nothing but try to hold on to you, Jonathan. I’ve done so very many things I’m
not proud of, not the least of which was withholding from you the truth of my own feelings.
I love
you
.”

His expression lightens and I see that he believes me. He reaches for my face and I let
him kiss me. It feels so right that I cannot bear to deny it anymore. My palms skid down his bare
chest, stopping to lace my fingers through his. And then I say the most difficult thing I’ve ever said
in my life. “These hands have never hurt me. But
you
hurt me. You’ve hurt my heart and you’ve hurt
 . . . something deeper. Something uniquely me. And if you’re going to keep doing it, keep denying
what we both want, then I want you to leave. Right now. This afternoon.”

He draws back, obviously shaken, trying to gather his composure. Silhouetted against the fireplace
with its carved rosettes, he rubs his face in thought. He’s withdrawing into himself, which
only makes me feel more raw and exposed. Desperate now, I go to my knees in the p
ile of clothes
that I’ve knocked to the floor, digging into the back of the suitcase. I don’t stop until the touch
of a metal buckle bites at my fingertips and I pull out a brown leather belt.

Stumbling over
the suitcase, I get back to my feet and hold it out to him. “Use it on me.”

He recoils. “For
Christ’s sake, Nora!”

I plead with him. “Hit me with it. Just like you did that night. I’ll
make you see that you didn’t hurt our baby.”

A wordless shake of his head.

“What’s the
matter, Jonathan? Can’t you do it unless I provoke you? Do I need to kiss someone else? Do I need to
go to bed with another man this time? What is it that you need me to do to make it alright?”

He swallows as if there is something caught in his throat that keeps him from speaking.

“I’m
strong, Jonathan,” I say, hoarsely, finding my own courage. “And you can’t break me. I thought you
could. I thought you
did
. But you can’t.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he says, dropping his gaze.
“But what you don’t seem to realize, Nora, is that
you
can break
me
.”

His words reverberate
through me. The lump that rises in my throat threatens to strangle me. It hurts, a painful throb at
my center. Tears roll down my cheeks. So here it is, then. All this time, he thought he needed to protect
me from his own worst instincts. Now he realizes that he needs to be protected from me.

I am
the monster.

“Then it’s up to you, isn’t it?” I ask quietly. “My father used to say I was a
spoiled and willful child. I was. Because I always knew that I didn’t belong to my father. I knew I
didn’t belong to Robert Aster. I don’t belong to you, either—not unless I want to. I’m mine to give,
Jonathan. And no one can decide, but you, whether or not to give yourself to me in return.”

I twist the gold wedding band from my finger. It’s a perilous journey to the carved marble mantelpiece,
where I gently set the ring down. I’m too near to him, overwhelmed by his scent and his warmth.
He hasn’t changed posture. Hasn’t moved a muscle. Rigid in tormented thought.

“But you’re going
to choose me, Jonathan. You’re going to choose us. I have faith in you.”

When I lean close
to kiss him, he flinches.

“I’m going down to breakfast,” I say, my voice as flat and emotionless
as I can make it.

“Of course,” he says, almost absently. “You must be wanting breakfast . .
 . why it’s almost afternoon . . .”

“Will you join me?” It’s the only fissure I allow in my
newfound self-possession.

“I don’t know.” A mask has descended over that impossibly handsome
face and I cannot read him.

“Shall I have a tray sent up to you, then?”

His eyes are blank.
“Whatever is most convenient.”

CHAPTER

Six

In the dining room, Dolly is stiff-lipped as she pours
my tea. It is lukewarm. The biscuits on the sideboard are cold now, but I take three of them and
smother them with butter and strawberry preserves. As I pile my plate with food, I notice that since
I went upstairs to confront Jonathan, someone has set the table with the best china, as if we were
expecting
guests.

Then Dolly reminds me. “Your father, ma’am. He’s expected this afternoon,
remember?”

Most of me dreads the idea of seeing him. Especially now. But some tiny, infuriated
part of me eagerly readies for a fight. I’ve faced almost all my demons today—what is one more?
That my father should have lied to Jonathan and made him suffer for so long . . . I can’t begin to guess
how my father might have known the exact words to crush my husband’s spirit, but I want to make
him sorry.

I’m hungry. Hungrier than I think I’ve ever been. And while this morning, the pear
tasted quite nearly like ash, now it bursts in my mouth, juicy and fresh. My taste buds are as oversensitive
as the rest of me. The flake of the biscuit against my tongue melts swiftly in a pool of
butter and I want more.

More of everything.

It’s only after I open the soft-boiled egg
in its cup, scooping out the tender insides and washing them down with tea, that I begin to feel better.
Jonathan won’t leave. He can’t leave. Not after everything we’ve said to each other today. If
he’s the man I’ve come to love, he’ll find the strength within him to stay. To make something with me
that’s new . . . and unbreakable.

The pendulum sways in the grandfather clock on the far wall.
I eat slower, my bites getting tinier until finally, I hear Jonathan’s footsteps on the stairs.
The servants wisely scatter; Dolly disappears behind the pocket door that separates the dining room
from the kitchen, and draws it shut.

Please, God, let him choose to be himself
, I pray.
Let
him choose me
.

So sure am I that my wish will be granted that I look up at him with a beatific
smile. I want him to see me like this, sitting at his table, confident and happy. Open, body and
soul, to every kind of pleasure.

But then I see the brown leather suitcase in his hand.

He might have had a servant carry it down for him, but the square luggage looks to weigh nothing from
the way the handle settles in his calloused palm. He’s dressed now. Cuffed trousers, shirt and tie.
Slim-fitting jacket, cut high at the waist. A gray fedora hat, perched upon his head at an angle
that shadows his eyes.

I set down the butter knife at the edge of my plate, letting my hands
fall to my lap, where I clasp them so hard that the nails dig into my palms.

“Is there anything
else you want to say to me?” Jonathan asks.

Lifting my chin, I fight back the tears, shaking
my head in disbelief.

“Then stand up,” he says, setting the suitcase down by his ankle.

What can he want from me? A hug good-bye? A tender kiss? I won’t begrudge him. Even if he isn’t the
man that I hoped he was, I loved him. I love him still. Folding my napkin on the table, I rise to
my feet.

I wait for him to come closer, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he removes his hat, crushing
it with his fist. “Turn around and put your hands on the table, Nora.”

I understand each of
the words but can’t decipher what they mean all run together. I stand there, stupefied, until he grabs
hold of one of my wrists and spins me towards the table. His grip is like iron, merciless in its
intention. He dips his head, his hot breath sweeping down the back of my neck. “Put your hands on the
table, palms down.”

Before I can think to do anything else, my fingers splay on the table,
next to the silver salt and pepper shakers. Warm dappled sunlight filters through the window, making
the hair on my arms look golden. He runs a warm palm down my shoulders, resting it on the small of
my back. A broad arm reaches over me to deposit my wedding ring on the table in front of me, where it
winks in mockery.

My mind swirls with confusion, and I start to stand up, but he holds one
hand pinned to the table. “Nora, do you have any idea how sexy you are, bent over for me?”

I remain bent like that, paralyzed, letting him touch me. Letting him toy with the garter suspenders
that hold up my stockings. Then I hear the jingling of his belt as he moves behind me. “I don’t understand,
Jonathan. What are you doing?”

“I’m taking off my belt,” he says, very calmly. “And I’m going
to hit you with it.”

A tremor goes through me, leaving my knees soft and spongy. A thousand
questions fly through my mind but the only one I ask is, “Here?”

“Right here,” he says. “Unless
you’re not as brave as you claim to be.”

He won’t find me lacking in resolve, if it’s a demonstration
that he needs. Though my arms shake, I don’t move, not even when I hear the sound of the
leather slipping through the loops of his trousers. He’ll fold it, I think, imagining the leather looped
over his fist. He must, because his arm swings in only a tight arc, the crack of the belt on the
backs of my legs more weighty than sharp. The next blow forces me to hiss with the impact, and everything
on the table jiggles. Glasses and plates tinkle together, but it doesn’t stop him. He hits me
with the belt again, and I glance over my shoulder at him in . . . what? Disbelief? Anger? Pain? Arousal?
Admiration? Adoration?

All of those things and more.

“I’m not nearly done,” he says. “Unless
you tell me to stop. Are you going to tell me to stop?”

“No.”

“Then this time tomorrow
you won’t be able to sit down. Do you know why?”

Truly, this time, I don’t. And I’m hypnotized
by his lips, utterly captivated by whatever he might say next.

“Because it excites me,” he
says, pressing the length of his erection against my sore ass cheek. My muscles go limp with desire.
He must know it, because he loops his arm around my waist to steady me against the table. “I’m not
hitting you because you kissed another man. Not because you’ve done anything to anger me. I’m doing
it because I want to . . . and because you want it, too.”

His voice is throaty, strained with
emotion, as if he needs to hear it as much as he needs to say it to me. And by god, as much as the
pain bites through my skin with each blow, I don’t want him to stop. Another blow jolts me forward
into the table so hard that breakfast cream sloshes out of the decanter, spilling into the saucer beneath.

Jonathan bends over me, covering his body with mine, and I take several desperate breaths as
he smoothly unzips my gown in the back, easing it over my shoulders. “Step out of it,” he says, and
I let the fabric skim down my arms and over my belly. There’s something outrageously erotic about the
way it slips down over my legs to puddle around my ankles on the floor. Standing in nothing but my
corset and girdle, I feel exposed. It’s our dining room—not a dance floor, not a desk in someone else’s
parlor, not the back of a car. And yet, I bring my hands up over my breasts, suddenly shy.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” Jonathan asks.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“We’re not going to,” he
says, staring at me, his eyes burning over the curves of my body as if he’s never seen them before.
“You are a choice dish, Nora. You’re built like you were born for a burlesque house. But there’s one
thing I don’t enjoy about burlesque. I don’t like being taunted with fans and peeks of flesh. I don’t
want to be teased. Are you going to tease me?”

I shake my head, lowering my hands, leaving
myself open to his hot gaze.

He rewards me with a kiss on my shoulder, then says. “Hands back
on the table.”

He waits until my palms are flat on the table to strike me again, and this time,
the sugar bowl crashes to the floor. I start to protest, but whatever I’m going to say is cut off
by a shriek when the belt lashes me.

“Too much already? I haven’t even hit your bare ass.”

He yanks at my undergarments, and the cool air is almost a respite against the burning stripes
of heat he’s laid on me. Then he cracks the belt across my bottom again, so hard that he grunts with
the effort. His arm swings down again, and the blow makes me keel forward. A plate crashes to the
ground. “Jonathan!”

“Had enough?” he asks, nuzzling the back of my neck.

Though tears
blind me and shrieks of pain have become tiny sobs, I shake my head.

“These are going to leave
welts,” Jonathan says, the flat of his palm pressing down warmly between my shoulder blades until
I have no choice but to bend forward, my cheek on the tablecloth. “I’ve marked you.”

I wilt
against the table, grateful beyond measure. Too overcome to choose words that might express how wonderful
I feel. I let my body do the talking, rubbing back against him like a cat.

“I’m going to put
down the belt,” he says. “But I’m not done hitting you.”

He sets the belt where I can see it,
coiled on the table next to my cheek. Then he presses tight up against those stripes of pain and
I feel his erection throbbing against the cleft of my ass. I yelp at the drag of rough trouser fabric
against my bare, sensitive skin, wanting more.

“You’re mine,” he says, fingers pushing between
my legs where I’m softest and most vulnerable. One dexterous finger swims through the damp curls
of my sex and thrusts up inside me, forcing me to cry out. I’m sore from last night, swollen and tight.
Still, not too tight for him to push inside.

“Do you feel that, Nora? How wet you are? I love
that you get wet so easily. The way you arch your back for me, like you’re in heat. I think I could
just look at you from across a room and you’d be clenching your thighs and squirming in your chair
and ready for me. Are you ever
not
ready to be fucked by me?”

“No,” I groan, because everything
he says is true, and on the rare occasion he’s caught me by surprise, I’m wet enough by the time
he’s inside me.

“That’s proof that you belong to me.”

“Jonathan . . . I . . . I don’t
understand. The suitcase . . .”

“I’m leaving, Nora. But I’m taking you with me.”

“I—I
 . . . but I thought . . .”

“We’re going to a summer house once we get a few things straight
between us.” I want to turn to look at his face. To know that he means it. But the rude thrusts of
his finger inside me keep me pinned to the table. Then the pleasure and joy are so intense that I squeeze
my eyes shut and concentrate on his voice.

“The first thing we’re going to get straight is
that I love you,” he says. “And I’ll tan your hide every day of the week if that’s what it takes for
you to believe me. And I need to know that you love me, too.”

“Oh god, I
do
love you, Jonathan,”
I say, frantic to twist from his grasp so that I can kiss his mouth.

But he won’t let me up.
“Hands back on the table.” He waits for me to obey, then says, “The second thing we’re going to get
straight is that you’re not going to kiss other men.”

“No, I won’t, of course I won’t.”

“You’re not going to kiss anyone, fuck anyone, dance with anyone, or even shimmy for them, Nora .
 . .”

At this moment, Jonathan fills all my senses. I cannot even fathom a world with other
men in it. “I won’t!”

“Unless I tell you to.” It’s those last words that force me to glance
over my shoulder at him, this time, gape-mouthed. And when I catch sight of his devastatingly handsome
face, his eyes are lit with blue mischief and a tiny smile creeps into the corners of his mouth.
He looks utterly devilish. “Do you understand?”

I should be saying no, but his finger is banging
into me, making me moan my consent.

“I need you to say it, Nora. Do you understand? Unless
I tell you to.”

“Yes,” I whisper, through lips parted in ecstasy. “I won’t do any of those
things . . . unless you tell me to.”

“And when you put that wedding ring back on, you’re never
going to take it off again.”

“Yes, yes, Jonathan, yes,” I cry, reaching for the golden wedding
band.

He stops me. “Not yet. Because you need to know what you’re getting into. Do you remember
how I made you touch yourself last night?” I nod in wordless surrender, my whole world seeming
to narrow to his hand between my legs and his voice on my ear. “You’re going to do it again, Nora. You’re
going to do it for me. You’re going to do it in front of a mirror. You’re going to do it anytime
I want you to do it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You’re also going to spend more time
on your knees, because I loved your mouth on my cock.”

“Yes.” Now that I’ve started saying
it, I can’t stop. “Yes, yes . . .”

A second finger pushes inside, and as it sinks into my body,
I sigh.

“
Christ
,” Jonathan says, his breath catching. “Do that again?”

“Do what?”

“Sigh like you do when I’m touching you. Like you’re going to swoon away if I stop.”

There is
no difficulty, no hesitation, no artifice when I sigh again, and I’m rewarded with a third finger
slipping inside me, spreading me to the point of aching. Then, all at once, he pulls those fingers out,
one of them drifting between my upturned ass cheeks. The sticky feel of his finger at the puckered
entrance makes me stiffen and thrash, which only makes him laugh. “Oho, have we found the one place
my wife is still a virgin?”

An incoherent protest bubbles up as he eases his finger in to the
first knuckle. “Jonathan!” I gasp, hating every moment of it, but loving the way it turns me to clay
to mold in his hands.

“I’ll always stop when you say to stop,” Jonathan tells me. “But I don’t
think you will. I think there’s nothing you’re not going to let me do. Starting with all the ways
I plan to take you on this table.”

Jonathan’s free hand reaches around in front of me and slips
over my corset, nails raking the swell of my breasts. I know that I won’t have any mastery over
what happens to me next. He reaches into my corset, finding the swollen nipple there, torturing it
between his fingers until I can’t stand it anymore. Then he finds my other breast and tortures it with
equal malice. Both nipples ache so much so that I beg him to undo the corset. I can’t bear the fabric
scraping the stiff peaks, but he’s merciless, rolling them like hard pebbles in his hand until
some invisible cord of arousal is pulled taught between my breasts and my womb. When I’m so needy that
I think I’ll scream, he withdraws his finger from between my tight, forbidden passage, and takes
the time to remove his jacket and tie.