She lifted her head to look at him.
“Well, it’s in the top five,” she allowed. His body shook with silent laughter and she smiled at him, happier still that she could make him laugh and again tilting her head. “Maybe the top ten.”
He took his hands from behind his head and slid them around her waist, tightening there.
She abruptly pulled herself up and reached around to take his hands from her waist and gently forced them across her belly, up her midriff and then over her br**sts. With her hands on his, she positioned them there, gently squeezing and using a finger on her right hand to move a finger on his left to scrape across her nipple.
As the sensations shot from her nipple on a heady bee-line straight between her legs, she emitted a low moan, her back arching slightly.
“Jesus,” he muttered and heaved quickly upward, pulling his hands from her br**sts to slide them down the backs of her thighs and position her legs so they were wrapped around him.
“Douglas!” she cried, feeling his hardness beneath her and his hands moved again, one to her bottom to lift her up and the other between their bodies. “Douglas!” she exclaimed again, this time in surprise as his hands came to her h*ps and swiftly, forcefully, he impaled her. She uttered a half-gasp, half-groan and immediately wiggled her hips, grinding further into him as he buried his face in her neck.
“I love it that you’re always ready for me. So damned wet.” His voice rumbled against her neck, vibrating with arousal and she shivered as it slid across her skin and, even though it most likely meant nothing, Julia loved it that Douglas had used the word “love” when mentioning something about her.
“You’re being very bad. I’m supposed to do whatever I want with you,” she scolded him with a breathy tease.
“You were taking too damn long,” he grumbled even though she’d been in control maybe less than a minute.
Then Douglas kissed her, long and hot.
When he moved his mouth to slide down her cheek to her jaw she shakily said, “I’ll see what I can do to speed things up.”
And she did.
* * * * *
While the lovers moved on the bed, across the floor an arctic draught slid slowly, with melancholy, exiting the room.
It took its journey, a journey it knew well, a journey it took day-after-day, week-after-week, for over a hundred years.
In the study, which had been his favourite room, Lady Ruby shifted and formed, becoming the ghostly vision of herself, a vision, until just recently, she only let him see. She hovered at the window where, outside, her husband was.
“Is it love?” Archie asked and Ruby nodded, but sadly.
He shook his head, knowing she meant it was there but it was not expressed. “Why?”
“Too much pain, they won’t admit it.”
Ruby and Archie spoke without words, communicating telepathically, their mouths not moving and no ethereal sounds came out.
The only sound either of them could make was the hideous scream she cried whenever she was forced to endure, because of the curse, because of the jealous spurned suitor she had angered and his malevolent mother who knew the ways of magic, to relive her violent demise over and over again. Every few months, sometimes if she was lucky, every few years, it would happen to her again, against her will, at the base of the stairs. The unseen hands closing around her neck and squeezing… squeezing… squeezing the life out of her.
“I had hoped…” Lord Archibald Ashton said to his wife, lifting his hand to rest it against the window, a hand he could not force through no matter the millions of times he had tried. Her hand joined his there, separated forever by the glass, separated forever by Sommersgate – a cruel irony for it was the house he built out of love for her.
For his part, he could always see her from the French doors to the entry, see her ghostly form strangled again and again, just like that night. She was always fighting violently against an unseen attacker and he could hear her scream, like he had that terrible night, but he had been held back, now by invisible hands but then, by the men, four of them, and he couldn’t save her.
Once left alone, he clawed at the doors, tried to break the glass, did everything he could to get to her lifeless body that lay at the foot of the magnificent stairwell he ordered made for her. He wanted to hold her one more time but it was as if Sommersgate was protected by an impenetrable magical shroud. For hours, chilled through to the bone, his body becoming exhausted, the freezing cold permeated him, making him sluggish, until, he too, felt his life ebb away. Over the years, as it happened time and again, he could see her, no matter how hard he fought, and he was forced to live through it again and again, never succeeding in saving her, never succeeding in getting to his beloved to hold her one last time.
“He does not understand his love for her, she’s too proud and stubborn to admit hers and open her heart for what she thinks will only result in pain,” Lady Ruby replied and then swiftly moved to reassure her love. “We have hope, the boy, William. He’s like his father. Darling, we just need to wait a few years and he’ll bring love to this house. He will free us.”
Archie leaned his forehead against the pane of glass and his beautiful ghost of a wife did the same. “I did want love for Douglas, he –”
“And I wanted it for Julia, but you know the curse, they have to admit it, they have to say it aloud to each other, or we will –”
“I know.” Even without sound, there was an ache in Archie’s words.
“We’ve done all we can do.” Lady Ruby, always placating, always trying to instil hope in him, did it again.
“I miss you,” Archie whispered, even though he could see her and speak to her, he could never be with her.
Lady Ruby didn’t reply, but misty-white, ghostly tears slid down her cheeks which said all that needed to be said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Unheeded Warnings
The press release announcing Lord Ashton, Baron Blackbourne would (very shortly) marry Ms. Julia Fairfax, an American and his sister-in-law, was met with shocked surprise.
A photograph was issued with the release, it depicted the couple standing side-by-side, his arm casually (but somehow possessively) wrapped around her waist. She was wearing a stunning (and many men thought, rather sultry) green-black dress and he was wearing a dinner jacket (and many women thought he wore it rather rakishly).
The men of Douglas’s set were not surprised that Blackbourne had fallen for the American. They made a handsome couple. If the many photos were anything to go by, she had style and an innate elegance, and, of course, a very nice set of legs. Ashton was known as a man of refined tastes and this choice for a bride further demonstrated that fact. Those few who had actually met her thought she was rather lovely indeed, for an American.