Nola (6 page)

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 her 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
thought 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.

Now she felt
herself completely helpless against his superior strength - as she knew she was
- and she knew that if she resisted too much her bottom would only become just
that much sorer. She was on her back, facing him - for which she was eternally
grateful, she supposed - with her legs spread, receiving her husband in what
she was certain was a completely unacceptable fashion or position... Her beautiful
blue and gray brocade skirt was in a heap around her waist, and she knew that
everyone at the dinner table would know beyond a shadow of a doubt exactly what
her husband had been doing to her moments before they went downstairs.

Yet, somehow,
the blasted man made her love everything about every single thing he did to her
- even the punishments, damn him! She looked forward, all day, to his return,
partly because he made her feel so alive. He rarely censured her anywhere but
their bedroom, and they - and her father in law - had indulged in some very
lively discussions on wide and varied topics, and he didn't seem to discount
her opinion because of her sex - or because of their fleshly relationship. He
met her points with counterpoints, or nodded his head sagely when he agreed
with her.

She was
beginning to like him, and that was the last thing she wanted. Nola wanted to
nurse a healthy resentment against the man because of the things he made her do
in private, and yet he was managing to worm his way into her affections as
easily as if he treated her with every deference in their marital bed, which
had never been true, even from the beginning.

She longed for
something that she feared would never be hers - love, and true affection for
and from her husband.

He was saying
something about how she should behave this evening, since the Reverend was
coming to dinner, and Nola knew she should have been listening, but she just
couldn't. He was doing it to her again, as always, not letting her resist him
as a proper wife should have resisted her baser responses, lying quietly
beneath him while he did... whatever it was that he needed to do, enduring it
and surviving it, but most certainly not enjoying it as she did, in the wild,
irrepressible manner he encouraged.

Tears - which
she hadn't shed in their marriage bed, unless she was being spanked - came
unbidden and slid, seemingly unnoticed, into her hair. She closed her eyes and
several more escaped, even as her body began to gather and tighten.