Page 10 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Delphine stirs, rubbing her face into my breast and arching in a big, toe-pointing stretch like a pampered kitten in a sunbeam.
“What time is it?” she mumbles, not opening her eyes.
“Near noon,” I say, feeling a little guilty. I rarely sleep past six, even on weekends, and even though last night was Beltane and we were awake until near dawn, I still have the unpleasant suspicion that I’ve wasted time. I should have been working—I should have been catching up on emails or finishing the Severn riverfront proposal or planning a site visit to that boarding school in Wiltshire. I could have even gone down to the maze and made sure everything was ready for the hedge removal tomorrow. But I didn’t.
Work is a privilege. Work is a gift. My father has told me that almost every day of my life; it’s one of the unwritten rules of being a Quartey. We work. We will be the best.
And yet even the best is still not enough.
“Mmm,” Delphine murmurs, still rubbing her nose and jaw into me. She stops stretching and slides her leg over mine again, making more contented purring noises. She’s naked, and so I feel the brush of her intimate curls against my thigh as she snuggles close. I can feel the soft curve of her breast, and the plush give of her belly against my hip. Her mouth is so close to my nipple now that I can feel the warmth of her breath through my silk nightgown. “Let’s go back to sleep.”
“I have a better idea,” I growl, finally doing what I wanted to do earlier and rolling her back so I can climb between her legs and push her thighs as far apart as I want them. They’re soft and sweet and pinchable, and her cunt is a little heaven made just for me—a bewitching furrow that opens up to reveal a blushing hole the color of sweetness. It already glistens for me, and I’m reminded of being a child in a sweet shop, reaching for the shiniest, pinkest lolly I could find.
I fight off a shudder of delight the minute I feel her against my fingertips, tender and so very, absolutely wet.
Delphine hasn’t wanted penetration, so I keep my fingers outside, petting her and stroking her until she’s writhing below me, a flush crawling up her chest.
“I would have thought after last night, you would have had enough,” I tease, finally pressing against her swollen clit and enjoying the whine I get in return. “You’re turning into an insatiable little slut, aren’t you? My own little whore.”
God, even saying it feels so right. How much more right would it feel to have her with me always? To take her to the club and show her off? To be the woman whose task it was to keep her so flush in orgasms that she could barely walk without remembering what her Mistress was capable of?
I’ve been holding back, I know that. I’ve been keeping this at a distance, because the moment I let myself think about it—the moment I let myself recognize that this spoiled kitten is actually Delphine Elizabeth Dansey, who has millions of Instagram followers and a trust fund the size of a small nation’s GDP—the moment I acknowledge she’s somehow become my friend and I care about her and the idea of being without her someday makes me want to scratch and kick and scream—panic swells inside of me like a balloon, squeezing everything inside of me until I can’t breathe.
Girls like Delphine aren’t for people like me. They’re for people like Auden or Becket, for minor celebrities or business tycoons. They’re for lovers who are as famous or wealthy or pedigreed. Not for emotionless landscape architects.
And anyway, even if an emotionless landscape architect could be suitable for an heiress-turned-internet-star, Delphine is all wrong for me. She’s flighty and vain and so very, very coquettish and contradictory and dryly witty and secretly brilliant—and shit.
She’s dangerous.
God, so dangerous. She could break my heart. If I stopped being strong, if
I unbricked walls just for her that took years to brick up . . . If I let her into a place where no other person has ever, ever been, then she will step on my huge, quavering heart and she will leave bloody designer-shoe footprints on the floor as she walks away.
I will get hurt. She will hurt me.
But what if she doesn’t? the voice tempts again. What if you take her as a submissive, what if you trust her and then you’re happy?
That’s the thing they don’t tell you about strength, about guarding your heart and keeping yourself safe from being hurt: it’s fucking exhausting. I don’t want to be exhausted anymore.
I just don’t want to be hurt either.
What if this is a gift?
“Delph,” I say, still rubbing the juncture at the top of her thighs. “I want you to be mine.” The words come out so easily, so clearly, that I suddenly feel foolish for waiting so long to say them.
I hate feeling foolish.
Her gathering climax has her voice breathless when she answers. “Aren’t I already?”
“We’ve been playing,” I tell her, “but I want you to be mine. My submissive. I want to take you to my club. I want to do everything I want to you, wherever I want and whenever I want.”
She shudders at my last sentence, biting her lip and staring at me with huge eyes. “What would we have to do?” she asks.
“You’d stay with me when we were in London. You’d come to the club with me. We’d go on dates and anything else you wanted. We’d decide what rules we wanted to share, and we’d decide what our limits were. And then I’d fuck you constantly. Everywhere I could. Anytime I wanted.”
Her already-parted mouth parts a little bit more. “Oh,” she breathes. “Oh.”
She comes suddenly, and I press a hand on her thigh and clamp it tight to the mattress so that she can’t hide my favorite bonbon-pink toy from me.
