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And each time, he dug holes that destroyed more and more of what she’d left behind. Hating himself for it, as I hated him for it.
Yet still unable to help himself.
But I will not awaken in her garden on the morning after this next full moon. If she cannot accept us, I will not awaken at all. And the beast will never destroy anything of hers again.
Those icy, bitter fingers wrap around my heart. I try to warm it with a swallow of burgundy, but wine is still not what I want on my tongue. “You’ve made progress in your garden.”
“You watched that from your tower, too?” The same cold bitterness clutching at my heart fills her reply. “You should have come down and helped me.”
After she had avoided me for days? “Do you truly want me so near to you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she challenges. “Will you hurt me?”
“It is not hurt you have to fear.” Not with me. Though the beast wants exactly what I want, and dreams of what I do.
Of Cora on her knees. Of mounting her, burying our thick cock in the burning depths of her cunt, and listening to her cries echo through every chamber in the house as we fuck her relentlessly. With me, those cries would be of need and pleasure.
With him, she would likely be screaming in pain and fear.
Her mouth set in a stubborn line, she reaches for her wine. “Then why should I worry if you are near to me?”
“Because every time I come near to you, your body readies to take me,” I tell her harshly. “Because the sweet petals of your pussy open and perfume the very air with your nectar. Because the tight buds of your nipples seek my touch as a flower seeks the touch of the sun. And you have said again and again that you have no wish to give yourself to me with love in your heart, or to allow me the use of your cunt for my pleasure. But if I was so near to you throughout the day, Cora, how long would it be before you were on your hands and knees in the dirt of that garden, begging me to plow my cock deep?”
Cheeks flushed, she draws a trembling breath. “I would not.”
No, she would probably not. Not my stubborn Cora. No matter how much she wants, not matter how wet she is, not matter how deep the ache.
It would be I—and the beast—who would end up begging…or taking. Even now he tries to tear his way through, my fingernails lengthening, my eyeteeth sharpening. But the painful hardness of my cock is all mine, my hunger and need for her endless.
Yet still he fights to the surface, and my voice is a low, growling rumble as I command, “Marry me.”
Her steady blue gaze locks with mine and she makes a demand of her own. “Free me.”
Not yet, I would have said, but instead the beast roars, “NEVER!”
Cora rears back in her chair, eyes flying wide. Afraid.
I grip the edge of the heavy oak table, claws gouging the surface, fighting for control. She’s afraid. That is all the beast sees, and he rips at my skin, trying to emerge and protect her.
He doesn’t understand she needs protecting from this.
With all of my will, I battle the overwhelming urge to let him take over, to let him shield her, my hands tightening on the table’s edge as I silently wage war against the beast within.
Then the silence is broken with a great, splintering crack. Cora gasps as the table splits down the center. Her hands fly to her mouth to muffle a disbelieving cry.
Disbelief and surprise. Not fear.
The beast begins to recede.
Cora stares at me over her fingers. “Well,” she whispers shakily, “now I know what happened to all of the furniture.”
Perhaps because if there was anything left, I would bend her over it and drive the full length of my cock into her sweet silky heat, making her scream in pleasure as I ease this agonizing need—as I fill her womb with my hot seed.
The beast and I are not always so different.
And this time I am the first to get up and leave.
With the beast’s acute senses attuned to Cora’s every movement, I’m always aware of where she is and what she is doing, even if she’s in another wing of the house or at the edge of the estate.
This morning it rained, so instead of working in the garden, she had retreated to the library and spent several quiet hours. I was aware of her soft tread leaving that chamber and heading toward the southeast wing, but I expected that she would veer toward the family kitchen. Instead she paused at the bottom of the tower stairs and began to climb, her steps steadily rising and the slithering jingle of the chain following.
Cora has almost reached the tower chamber before I accept that she truly is coming to see me. Not hesitating, not retreating. Hurriedly I drag on my jeans, and the beast is so excited by her approach that he does not even protest the confining cloth.
The heavy wooden door to the tower chamber is always open, so I see her the moment she ascends to the top of the spiraling staircase. She’s dressed in her own beauty, her pale blond hair in a loose braid over her shoulder, her full lips pink, her narrow feet bare. The skirt she wore the day she arrived conceals the long, taut muscles of her thighs, the hem kissing her knees with every step. A sleeveless shirt hugs her ribs and full breasts.
I do not bother with my own shirt. I barely bother with the zip of my jeans. Instead I quickly comb my fingers through my hair, and greet her with a smile that cannot hope to tell her how much pleasure this unexpected visit has given me.
The sky blue of her gaze does not lift to my face, however. With warm color staining her cheeks, she glances at my abdomen before quickly turning away, indicating the stairs with a sweep of her hand. “I’d forgotten how many steps there were! Do you remember when we used to race up to this chamber?”
I remember everything about her. “Yes.”
Her gaze is unfocused and her smile is sweet, lost to those memories—then abruptly it sharpens.
“Did you let me win?”
“Sometimes.” And sometimes jostling against her in the narrow confines of the stairwell aroused my teenaged body so much that running had seemed an agony.
My teenaged body knew nothing of agony. For nothing I felt then could compare to now.
“Until the day I tripped and twisted my ankle.”
“And I carried you down to the solarium.” Feeling like a hero…and hating myself for letting her be hurt in the first place.
“Then refused to race me again,” she says with her eyes narrowing on me—then she abruptly stops at the entrance to the chamber, wonder filling her expression.
For an endless time she does nothing but look, her bare feet carrying her farther into the chamber, slowly turning so that she can see the canvases hanging from every wall.
“Gideon,” she breathes in awe. “Did you paint these?”
“I did.”
In disbelief she shakes her head. “You were never this good before.”
“I’ve had more opportunity to practice.”
She pauses in front of a landscape—the gatehouse, as it had looked when she and her father had lived there. Before the gates were closed and chained. “So this is where you spend most of your time?”
“Yes.” This chamber soothes me…and soothes the beast. For he is often content to be surrounded by reminders of the love I’d known instead of searching for what is no longer here.
Not content today, though. Not with Cora here. Instead our need for her rages hotter than ever, the scent of her filling this chamber, the sound of her soft breaths in our ears, the taste of her skin only a step and a lick away.
She smiles over a portrait of herself, looking fierce and determined, a cricket bat at ready in her grip. And another of her bulging cheeks full of Mrs. Collins’s stolen scones, wide-eyed and tight-lipped from the effort of trying not to laugh, and with crumbs clinging to her shirt.
“Was that the day we received The Great Lecture?” she says it in the same manner the lecture had been delivered, as if state secrets were hidden in the scones we’d stolen.
“It was.”
“Oh,” she exclaims quietly, standing in front of another painting. “Your dad and mum.”
As I remember them best—walking hand-in-hand through Cora’s garden, with the sun upon their faces.
She glances back at me, at my face and lower, then quickly away—and abruptly stills with her gaze arrested by the large painting on the east wall. As if in a trance, she moves closer, whispering, “What is this?”
“A dream,” I tell her.
Unlike all of the others, not something from my past. Simply Cora, lying upon a bed in a room filled with sunshine, her body soft and supple…and waiting for me.
“This is in your bedchamber—as it used to be?”
“Yes.”
Puzzlement creases her brow and she glances back. “Why was your bed not destroyed? Everything else was.”
