The Persuasion of Molly O'Flaherty (8 page)

“Besides what, doll? Besides the fact that I love you?”

She met my eyes, and her gaze was sharp, perceptive. “No, Silas. I didn’t mean that. I meant besides the fact that you fucked Mercy—and you almost did it again—and I don’t think I can forgive you for that.”

Pain lanced through my chest. “Please tell me that’s not true,” I whispered. “Please tell me there is a way I can win your forgiveness.”

She struggled to sit up, and I let her, even though what I really wanted to do was pin her to the ground and kiss her until she relented. But I knew I didn’t deserve that right, I hadn’t earned it. It didn’t matter if I fucked Molly a thousand times, it was her mind and her heart that I wanted to possess, and so it was pointless to keep her here if she didn’t want to be kept.

“The truth is that I understand why you did it,” she said, now avoiding my eyes. “And maybe it could have been me, maybe it
would
have been me, because we’re so much the same, Silas. And we weren’t made for marrying or for children or for love. We enjoy fucking, we’re good at fucking, we’re both good with money and business—that is what we must content ourselves with.”

“I don’t want to be content with that,” I told her. “I want more. I want you.”

She stood up, arranging her skirts so that they hung straight down to the ground and when I reached out to help, she took a step farther back. “What I’m saying is that even though I can trust you with my body, I know I can’t trust you with my heart.” She studied the ground, as if it held all the answers, but even from this angle, I could glimpse the shine in her eyes. “I shouldn’t have done this…this was a mistake.”

I scrambled to my feet, panic clawing at the base of my skull. I couldn’t lose her; she couldn’t walk away, not after what we had just shared.

“Molly…”

“I’m not going to say the safe word, Silas. I don’t need a safe word for a game I’m not playing.”

I drew in a ragged breath.
Please play
, I wanted to beg her.
Please let me at least try to win you back.

She extended her hand, like she wanted me to shake it, but instead I took it in my own and kissed it, letting my lips linger there. Goose bumps raced up her arms, and when I straightened, a single tear had spilled out of her eye, falling slowly down one cheek. She let me pull her closer, and I wiped the tear away. “Don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t let Hugh win…don’t let the
board
win.”

She shook her head. “
I
am going to win, Silas. You think just because I let you spank me, I’m submissive? When have I ever been anything other than the mistress of my own life and the mistress of everyone around me? I control my life, I control what happens from here on out, and you aren’t man enough to wrestle the reins from me, so just give up.”

And with that, she was out of my arms and walking away, leaving me with her tears drying on my finger and a broken heart.

Two Weeks Later

Miss Molly O’Flaherty of London and Mr. Hugh Calvert, Viscount Beaumont, request the pleasure of your company two weeks hence, August the Thirtieth, to celebrate their engagement…

I stared down at the invitation in my hand. A thick cream-colored card, bordered with gold, embossed with looping letters and bearing the seal of the Beaumont family at the bottom. I tossed it away without bothering to look at the location or the time; it did not matter where the party was to be held. Even if it was held in my own bedroom, I would not attend, I could not. For the sake of my own sanity, if not for the sake of propriety.

It had been two weeks since that terrible afternoon on the Baron’s lawn. I’d tried writing Molly, calling at her house, haunting the hallways of the Baron’s mansion…and all to no avail. She would not see me, she would not answer my letters and I knew she was deliberately abstaining from her usual parties and circles to avoid me. And of course, I had heard about her engagement, rumored to have been settled on the very evening we’d parted ways. She’d agreed to marry Hugh with my semen still dripping down her thighs, and I didn’t know if that made me furious, depressed, or hysterical with laughter.

All three, really, depending on the day.

The envelope for the invitation caught my eye, and I examined the back of it.
To Silas
, it said, in the sharply elegant handwriting that I recognized as Molly’s. And below it, several tiny dots of ink, as if she had set her pen down several times to write something else, but had stopped herself before the words could come out. Instead, it only read,
Deepest regards, Molly
, at the bottom.

Cold words. Polite words. I crumpled the paper in my fist and then went in search of a drink.

“So will you go?”

The Baron and I were atop two of his finest horses, riding around his expansive property. I suppose I must have struck him as disconsolate and listless (and frankly pathetic) when he’d walked into his library to find me slouched on a sofa with a bottle of gin, and so he’d suggested we go for a ride.

I watched a flock of birds fly up from the leafy stand of trees near the white gravel path leading out from the stables. “How can I?” I finally answered, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “It would hardly be appropriate.”

The Baron shrugged. “I don’t see how it could be
in
appropriate. Several of Molly’s ex-lovers will be there, myself included. Even Julian and his wife are coming into town for the event.” I could feel him looking at me as I turned my horse slightly to the side. “Are you sure that it’s not your jealousy preventing you from going?”

“Of course it’s my jealousy. And my broken heart. And the fact that I hate Hugh, and I hate that she’s been forced into this ridiculous marriage.”

“Hugh has been friends with us a long time, if only on the periphery. Surely if Molly wants to be with other men during their marriage, he’ll allow it, especially given that their marriage will be one of convenience.”

The Baron sounded so calm, so sure. And it was easy to believe, if only for a minute, that I could still be with Molly as a lover, even after her marriage. “But I don’t want that,” I admitted. “I want her all to myself.”

“How interesting, then, that you haven’t, in turn, given all of yourself to Molly.” The Baron raised an eyebrow and kicked his heels, urging his horse forward.

I followed, feeling a bit sullen, like a child who’d been called out on his mischief, but then the Baron turned around, so that our horses faced each other and we could look eye to eye. “Silas, you know how deeply I care about you. Like a brother. And I love Molly too. I would hate to see the beautiful friendship you’ve cultivated over the years dissolve.”

I hung my head. “I know. I should be the bigger man here and gracefully accept my defeat. Hugh won. Mr. Cunningham won. I lost.”

“Cunningham?” the Baron asked. “Who’s that?”

I reached for the flask of gin inside my jacket pocket and helped myself to a healthy drink before answering. “Frederick Cunningham is the informal leader of her company’s board. He is the one who insisted that Hugh be Molly’s husband and refused to accept any bribe I could give him.”

“Interesting,” the Baron mused. We started riding again as the Baron pondered…whatever it was that he was pondering. After a few minutes, he said, “I’m sorry for my silence. I just didn’t realize Hugh’s cousin was involved in this.”

Hugh’s cousin.

Cunningham.

I stopped my horse. “What?”

“Yes,” the Baron said, stopping as well, and there was a small frown on his lips. “There was a scandal a few years back—a girl was appallingly abused at The Corinthian. A man had paid an exceptionally high price to take her virginity, and when the madam had found the girl the next morning, she’d been beaten and sodomized.” The Baron’s hands tightened on his reins. “She was thirteen.”

“Christ,” I muttered.

“The man was Frederick Cunningham.”

I suspected as much, but the confirmation infuriated me. That stupid mustache and the ridiculous mincing way he drank his wine…all that time, I’d been sitting across the table from a rapist and I’d had no idea. I wanted to ride to wherever he was right now and beat his face in. I wanted to watch his body bob in the Thames.

The Baron looked equally furious as he recalled the incident, and a furious Castor Gravendon was a terrifying thing, an avenging god straight from Roman myth, muscled and hulking and implacable. Castor may have been a dominant man, but he had no tolerance for cruelty.

We nudged our horses forward in silence, each of us wrapped up in our individual fantasies of retribution.

“As you might know, The Corinthian leases its property from me,” the Baron continued after we turned a corner near the woods, calmer now. “The madam approached me for help—she had no recourse to seek justice for this girl, but she wanted to make sure that this man couldn’t hurt another in this manner again. My circle is wide and varied and well-connected to many high-end establishments like The Corinthian, so I spread the word about him. Mr. Cunningham was barred from the best of the London brothels and has since had to travel overseas to find what he craves.”

“What an abominable pile of shit.”

The Baron nodded in agreement. “And when, in the course of spreading this word, I discovered through mutual friends that Frederick Cunningham was actually Frederick Beaumont Cunningham, Hugh came to me and asked that I keep their relation quiet. I granted his request, since I could understand why Hugh wouldn’t want to be associated with such reprehensible behavior.”

I thought of my suspicions in the Cafe Royal. “So that must be why Cunningham was so set on Hugh marrying Molly. They’re family.”

“Possibly. And as I understand it, Hugh has been living off loans from Cunningham for quite some time.”

“But Hugh’s a viscount,” I protested. “I thought surely he must have plenty of money…”

“There are many peers of the realm who aren’t more than paupers, Silas. Hugh is one of them.”

I sat back in my saddle and thought. I had at least believed that Hugh was marrying Molly out of some misguided affection or love, that he wasn’t using her for money, but that didn’t seem to be the case. And for Cunningham, using Hugh to marry Molly must have been a convenient way to infuse his relative with cash, while also solidifying his control over Molly. Any children she bore would be Beaumonts and related to him.

The realization made me so miserably angry that I had to close my eyes for a minute and concentrate on breathing normally.

“I’ll see if I can find anything more,” the Baron said. “I hate the idea of Molly being tied to that man, in whatever way.”

“Me too,” I agreed.

Me too.

“Does Molly know?” I asked. “About Hugh and Cunningham?”

“Surely she must,” the Baron said.

But I worried that she didn’t. And she deserved to know. But how did one tell somebody something this crucial when they refused to see you? “She won’t believe me if I tell her,” I said with a sigh. “Because she’ll think I’m interfering out of jealousy, not concern.”

“Which you are,” the Baron pointed out.

“Both. It’s both.”

He accepted that and we rode back to the stables, dismounting the horses and passing the gin back and forth for a few minutes. From here, I could see the lawn where we’d made love, where I’d parted her folds to see my seed inside of her. My cock twitched at the same time my heart twisted.

I don’t need a safe word for a game I’m not playing.

“Do you think Molly is really a dominant?” I asked, knowing the question probably seemed abrupt and irrelevant to Castor and also not caring.

He looked taken aback. “Our Molly? Certainly not.”

That surprised me. “You don’t think so?” But then I remembered that, even though it had been years ago, Molly and Castor had played together. “Was she submissive for you?”

Castor took another deep draught of the gin. “Yes and no. Yes, she submitted physically, which for her is a tremendous step, but she never submitted to me mentally or emotionally. She never found the submission fulfilling, but it wasn’t because of the submission itself, I think. I believe Molly needs to have complete trust and love in the person she’s submitting to, and while she trusted me, she didn’t love me. Which is why we never played together more than two or three times—it wasn’t rewarding for either of us.”

I thought about this.

“Just because a person refuses to be topped by unworthy men doesn’t necessarily make her dominant,” Castor added. “No more than your allowing a woman to take charge in bed out of politeness or laziness makes you a submissive.” He gave me a pointed look. “For her, she’s never found a man worth that surrender. And you’ve never found a woman worth exerting that level of effort for.”

“I want to believe that. I want to believe that I can be the kind of man who can take care of her, but…”

“But it feels like she won’t let you?” the Baron finished for me.

“Right.”

“Silas,” the Baron said, screwing the cap back on the flask and handing it to me, “spanking her in a maze once isn’t enough to make her forget the ways that you’ve hurt her. If you want her to surrender to you, if you want her to allow herself to be brought under your care so you can love and protect her in all the ways she needs and deserves it…then you are going to have to surrender yourself to her first.”