Earl Power: A Modern Aristocracy Billionaire Romance (Endowed Book 2) Page 12

  “Nobody here but me and you, Seb.”

  “I wish,” he groans.

  I sigh at his beautiful face. Me too.

  “Are those candles?” He’s referring to the pair of raspberry scented tea-lights which I found in the bottom of a cupboard and have displayed proudly on my windowsill.

  “Yes.” I adopt a British accent. “My Louis the fourteenth candlesticks are being cleaned at the moment.”

  He grins. “I’ll take what’s in the foreground instead.”

  His own background is his uber-romantic four-poster and heavy drapes, cinched in place by golden velvet ropes—pretty much standard issue in Belgrave Castle. I never got to see his bedroom while I was over there. With the wonderful wisdom of hindsight, I regret not making more of our time together—you know, screwing him on the very first night and never looking back? Some people just take longer to realize what they’ve got.

  “Come on, let me see more of your foreground.” He raises his gaze to where my eyes are on his screen, but it’s not directly in my eyes. Someone should invent technology to fix this. I miss his warmth, the massive zap of energy I get when he’s near and his dark, brooding eyes connect with mine, the scent of fresh outdoors he carries around with him, and his air of sweet melancholy. Someone should invent a teleporter so I can beam him over to me instantaneously. I reach out and touch the screen, trailing my finger down the side of his neck. This is not the same.

  I finger my neck nervously. I’m naked. I had just got comfortable with the idea, sitting here in the corner of my little warm bedroom, talking to his head on the screen, pretending this was normal, but it’s not normal. I’m naked. And now he wants me to do something.

  I swallow. “So … you first. Have you ever done this before?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Fuck,” he says in a low voice. “I wish you were here, Mara.” He retreats from the camera. He’s on a chair you can wheel back, just as I am. I can see down to his navel, the taut abdominals that I love to smooth my hands down.

  “I don’t see nothin’,” I tease him.

  He grins and puts his arms behind his head. “Well, all I see is your lovely face.”

  I wheel back my chair and slowly unfold my arms so he can see my girls.

  “I dreamt about you last night. When I woke up, I needed to—I waited, waited for..” His breath hitches. He’s moving his hand below my view. “I’m imagining you doing this, that it’s your hand around me like this, and you ... you’re moaning while my fingers move between your thighs.”

  My groin tingles at his words. I slide the chair back further. My sitting position means he can’t see much, but he must be able to see the Y where my legs meet on the chair. I’m newly waxed, just for him, sucking my belly in to try and look better on camera.

  “Open your legs,” he says. “And for God’s sake, breathe.”

  I giggle and gasp in a much-needed breath. Slowly, I edge my thighs a couple of inches apart, glad I’m sitting on a towel.

  “Roll the chair back more,” he demands.

  I obey, grateful that he’s taken over.

  “Touch yourself where you most want me to touch you.” His voice is soft now, coaxing.

  I hesitate with my hand positioned flat on my lower belly, my fingertips just reaching the edge of my waxed area. I want his finger there instead, somehow materializing out of the screen.

  “Show me, Mara. Please.”

  I place a finger on my clit, just lightly, telling myself I’m doing it for his sake. If it makes him happy, I’ll get pleasure just from knowing that.

  “Let me see,” his voice rumbles over the laptop speakers. “Move back more.”

  I roll the chair back another few inches and wait for his next command.

  “Imagine my tongue there, exactly where your long finger is. Now hold it—don’t move until I tell you.”

  My finger freezes, poised over the tip of my clit. Memories flash through my mind of lying on satin sheets on a four-poster in the morning sun, his tongue pleasuring me slowly. A wave of lightheadedness washes over me.

  “Good. Now caress yourself. Imagine it’s me between your legs, holding your thighs apart as I lick you there. Show me the speed you like.” The intensity of his voice warms me all over. It’s a new kind of excitement, exposing myself in a way I never thought I could, letting him dictate my fantasy, my very thoughts.

  “Don’t stop until I tell you to.” When I open my eyes again, he’s studying me. I shut my eyes tight again, losing myself to sensation, pressing harder on my swollen nub to keep the momentum. My legs open wider, my pussy yearning for his thick cock to fill me. I’m coming undone. I don’t care how I look anymore. This is all for him. I’d do anything to make him happy. I’ve been lusting after his body all freaking day, all week.

  “Mara,” he says in a strained voice. Our gazes meet in united frustration. His chest muscles quiver as he works his hands up and down his cock. I see the glint of pre-cum on his tip. He’s so close, and I am too. If we can’t be together, then at least we can be simultaneous.

  Veins strain along his neck and arms as he loses himself to the build-up of tension. Seeing him like this—vulnerable, exposed, and yet completely in command of my heart and mind—gives me goosebumps down my neck and across my shoulders. It’s more powerful than I could have imagined.

  “Mara,” he says, between breaths. “Tell me how it feels. Are you near?”

  “It feels… I wish you were here.” And then I’m gone beyond the point of talking. I can’t wait. I’m greedily seeking release. As my fingers vibrate wildly, my breath comes in desperate short puffs and my entire focus closes in on a single dark spot of release.

  I imagine his arms crooked around my thighs as I buck my body towards his face, arching up, my pussy seeking his mouth, his tongue lashing at me. Then it comes, and in the flashing whiteness of release, I cry out in a surge of almost angry release.

  Seb groans a second later. His posture slackens, head bent, eyes still shut as if in pain. My heart thrums as I watch him quiver, riding out his orgasm. His hair’s all mussed, a deep flush on his cheeks, eyes wild.

  He blinks, as if waking from a trance, and smiles. I return his smile with a goofy one of my own. I’m only starting to come down from the orgasm but already I know this isn’t enough. Tension ripples through my muscles. My mind is fuzzy with lust and desire for him. Seb needs to be here in person to give me what I really need.

  “I miss you, goddammit,” I say. I feel so empty I’m not even sure this was a good idea.

  “I want to make you scream my name,” he says. “For that, I need to be there with you.” He leans into the camera as he reaches for something. He’s wiping himself. I reach for the box of Kleenex on my table, but the towel I’m sitting on has absorbed most of my wetness.

  I reach for the sweater lying on the floor.

  “Who said you could put that on?” Seb grumbles.

  “Oh.” I put the sweater on my lap. “Can’t I?”

  His eyelids are heavy. “Maybe I want to see you touching yourself again.”

  “Well … it’s going to make it even more tortuous.”

  “Tell me about it.” He sighs. “All right, let’s just get dressed together then.”

  He pulls on a dressing gown—black terrycloth—ties the belt, and is ready in two seconds flat. I struggle with my sweater, which feels too tight all of a sudden, and my panties, which are coiled into a sausage shape. He’s grinning at my efforts to get dressed on camera in an elegant manner.

  “Laugh all you like, smug face.”

  “Don’t you have an easy-wrap dressing gown?” he teases.

  “Maybe I’ll invest in one.”

  “I’ll bring one over for you,” he says. “When I get there. Something pretty. I’ll buy the whole shop.”

  “You’re coming here?”

  He cocks his head and gives me his trademark half-mocking look. “What do you think? This Skype s
tuff is not going to cut it.”

  I grin in relief and joy. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  ◊◊◊

  You’d think it would be easy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to get one fabulously rich man from country A to country B, but no, it’s not.

  The problem is, Seb’s schedule is horrendously busy. While my commitments are limited to work-sleep-repeat, his calendar includes sparkling things, like meeting His Royal Highness Prince Charles at a horticulture convention run by the National Farmers’ Association. “Not something you can exactly blow off just because you want to screw your girlfriend.” These were Seb’s words and I like them, especially the “girlfriend” part. I can’t wait to tell Hayley when she’s back from her honeymoon. She said she would spend some time here in Laxby.

  One morning, a week after the naked Skype session, Mike finds me crashed over my desk. I don’t even know where I am as he opens the blinds and lets the morning sunshine wash over my face.

  “Uuuurgnh.” I grapple for my phone.

  “Rise and shine, it’s seven thirty.”

  “Oh.” I sit up, digging my fingers into the back of my neck to ease the muscle stiffness. I feel scummy, having slept in these clothes. The stale coffee in my cup reaches my nostrils and I shove it further away. It’s not the first time I’ve slept in the office but it’s the first time Mike’s caught me doing it. A new low for Mara Myers, aspiring architect.

  “I told you it would be the death of you.”

  “Uh.” I blink sleep out of my eyes. “What?”

  “College assignments, my assignments. His assignments.” Mike points at the screen which has burst into life with a 3D image of the Millhouse. It’s now more or less as perfect as I’m going to get it.

  “Yeah.” I switch screen to another window. “Don’t worry about it. Just get me some coffee, please?” One of the hidden perks of my job is that my relationship with Mike is such that I can ask him this, when the mood is right.

  “I do worry. Look at yourself. You’re a wreck.”

  “Like you’re the poster child for Health Awareness Week.”

  “I’ve got an excuse—I’m old.”

  “Mike, you’re only sixty,” I call to his retreating back. “That’s supposed to be the new forty.”

  “Here,” he says ten minutes later, sliding the mug of coffee in front of my keyboard. “And you can have one of my doughnuts if you promise to lay off the extracurricular activity and take off early tonight.”

  “Okay, promise,” I say reluctantly. I was going to put the final touches on it this morning and send then to Seb as a little surprise when he came back from his overnight convention in Leeds. But now that Mike’ll be watching like a hawk, that’ll be impossible.

  “You gotta stop thinking you’re a machine,” Mike says. “Look where that got me.”

  I look up into his pasty, haggard, unhealthy-looking sixty-something face, wondering where his sudden concern for my health is coming from.

  “Yeah. You’ve never been good at looking after yourself, have you?”

  Coming from Mike, this strikes a chord. I’m glad when he shuffles off and gets lost in his own work. I know what I’m doing is not sustainable. Even Hayley lectured me on “balance” on our last call, like she’s some om-chanting new-age guru. But how can I get my life on track when half of me is in a different country?

  17

  SEB

  MY FIRST PRIORITY after returning home from the conference in Leeds is to call in on Mother. It’s better she hear it firsthand from me rather than through the grapevine—which is inevitable, now that construction and surveyor vehicles are trundling down Miller's Lane.

  I know where to find her. She always tends the plants in her greenhouse after Sunday dinner. Today, she’s tending some new type of artisanal tomato plants and the flies are having a field day. I have my doubts this plant is going to thrive, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “How was dear Charles?” she asks, as she snips away errant stalks with her shears. “I haven’t seen him for ages.”

  “I didn’t talk to him long, Mother, just the pleasantries. He sat at another table.”

  “What a pity Alex had to get married with such haste and we couldn’t invite them to a proper ceremony.”

  I suspect Mother will have this bone to pick with Alex until her dying day—the lack of prominent British royalty at his wedding. “I spoke at length to Lord Corley though.”

  “Mm,” she says, sounding vaguely disappointed. “Poor old James.”

  We pick our way through the list of the attendees, from the dukes downwards, some of whom she remembers, others who are “nobodies” and hence not worth remembering.

  “The wheat harvest is starting to look pretty good,” I say, changing the topic, eager to keep my preamble uber-positive. “Ken’s been a great with the administrative tasks. Alex may find he doesn’t have a lot to do when he returns.”

  “Alex is a married man and will soon have other concerns, no doubt,” she says.

  I have no comeback to that.

  “It will be nice to have them back,” she continues, snipping. “I dare say I did miss them both, in between worrying for their lives there in the jungles of Peru. You know he landed a water plane on Lake Titicaca?”

  “No, I did not know that.” I clear my throat. “So … I was thinking, assuming he’s on for it, Alex could run the Southwell tenants like he did before. And with Ken fully on board, I may really only be needed for high-level planning and negotiations with the trust.”

  She pauses and scrutinizes me with her penetrating eyes. “Were you planning on doing something else?”

  “Mother, it looks like there may be tenants in the Millhouse before the year’s out.”

  “Tenants? Who’d want to live there?”

  “Rachel Sawyer.”

  Her eyes dart to and fro in something like alarm. “Rachel Sawyer?”

  I nod.

  “But—she lives in Australia.” Mother’s shrill voice still holds a note of hope.

  “She’s moving back here. With Orla.” The daughter you forgot to tell me about?

  Mother lets her shears drop to the earth, her face deathly pale. “What does she want, coming back here? Your father’s dead a year now, doesn’t she know that? She can’t get her clutches on him now unless she’s thinking of exhuming the grave.”

  “She’s just looking for a place to live, Mother.”

  “Well, she’s not welcome here. She’s had enough money from us.”

  “Things haven’t worked out so well for them in Melbourne.”

  Her laugh is hollow. “Why am I not surprised? And you’ve known this for how long? Oh, wait a minute, you planned it, didn’t you? You contacted her and told her to come here. You begged her.”

  “Mother, I—no!”

  “Please.” She holds up her hands as if to ward off my treachery. Her rubber gloves catch at her hair, undoing strands from her bun. “Don’t say another word.”

  “Mother, it wasn’t like that. She contacted me out of the blue. Orla’s pregnant.”

  Her lips are thin with fury as she swats away greenflies. “Am I supposed to care about that?”

  I didn’t expect her not to care about it. My anger rises, a steady bubbling of lava rising from the pit of my stomach. “Well, someone needs to.”

  “That someone doesn’t have to be you, dear. Goodness gracious. Is this what I raised you for? To turn against me like this? I forbid you to speak to that woman again .”

  “That’s not for you to decide, Mother.”

  Ignoring her aghast expression, I back away between the rows of flower pots to the door.

  “I’m serious, Sebastian,” she says as I stomp out the door. Through the glass, the hurt in her eyes is plain to see. I’m glad I removed myself before she could make some terrible ultimatum she’d later regret.

  I vowed never let her see my anger again after I was beaten at age eighteen for doing exactly that when it
was revealed she wasn’t my “real mother.” It was the one and only time Father lost it, but I was a fast learner and only needed one lesson. Ever since then, my relationship with Mother has been predicated on the assumption that I wouldn’t even think that thought again. And for the sake of the family, I didn’t.

  But with my “real” mother forcing her way into my life and needing my help, I have to accept my birth circumstances for what they are. I can’t deny Rachel this and still call myself her son, even if Mother takes it as a personal affront.

  Two wrongs don’t make a right. Isn’t that what she always taught me?

  ◊◊◊

  Later, on my evening walk with Meriadoc and Samwise, I’m still angry about the situation. I’m angry that it’s okay for me to be head of the family and to work the business into profitability as long as all benefits flow back into the Duchy of Fernborough—in a word, Alex’s bloodline.

  I won’t lie, I’ve enjoyed commandeering the show, nobody challenging what I say or do, everybody following my orders. But lately, I want something more than just a smoothly-running operation. Something that’s actually mine to hold on to.

  And Rachel and Orla are part of my responsibility now, whether Mother likes it or not. I know it can’t have been easy for her, accepting a bastard child from another woman who’d slept with her husband-to-be behind her back. I’m immeasurably grateful that she did take me in and raise me with all the love and care she gave her own children. As oldest, I probably got even more attention than my younger siblings. They still tease me about being the favorite. And I was. Until today anyway.

  I never have heard the story from Mother, only from others—like Mrs. B and Old George—and always told in snippets, in disapproving tones, through pursed lips. It’s not a topic I’d feel comfortable ever discussing with Mother herself. But I did get the impression from Mrs. B that Rachel wasn’t a complete villainess in this story. She hadn’t known my father was intended for somebody else.

  The past aside, if I’m to create a home for two families, the Millhouse needs to be expanded. I won’t burden Mara with this—she has enough on her plate, I can see she’s exhausted. I’ll get a local firm to expand on her ideas. With an extra floor on top and extensions that join up the outhouses with the main building, it can be made hospitable and still, I think, retain its character, for the most part. Each wing could have the basics plus a library, a study, a function room, work studio, and a recreation room.