Bound To You: Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

John

We arrive at Holyroodhouse just after midnight.

            Shadows blanket the empty corridors and sparse moonlight stretches across the walls, elongating the silhouette of my frame hulking up the stairs like a devil-eyed monster stealing away with a treasure that doesn’t belong to him. Only, as of this morning, Blanche is mine. Mine to crave, mine to fuck, mine to hold whenever the hell I want. And so, I cradle her sleeping body to my chest, one arm wrapped securely around her back and the other hooked under her knees.

            Awake, she’s all fire and brimstone.

            Asleep, she’s ethereal. Blond lashes fan over her cheeks and her rose-bud lips part with soft, indrawn breaths. Those lips have tasted my skin. They’ve collided with my own and brought me to my knees with a kiss that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Lowering my chin, I note the way she clutches my shirt as if she’s loath to let me go. Her burgeoning trust in me sparks a wave of possessiveness in my blood, and I would be a liar if I said otherwise.

            I want to lay her down and crawl over her, naked skin on naked skin.

            I want to push her legs wide, drag my mouth down over her slender neck to her breasts, and then feast on her sweet cunt until her knees quiver under my palms and she shatters like broken glass under my tongue.

            Simply put, I bloody want.

            And I’ve never felt guiltier.

            Reaching my suite, I push the door open with my shoe. The curtains are drawn closed, probably by one of the staffers, but this apartment has been mine since childhood and there’s not a single corner of the space that I don’t know by heart. Mum preferred Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to Buckingham Palace in London, and my father was never one to tell her no.

            Scotland has always felt more like home.

            Quietly, I settle Blanche on the four-poster bed. A feminine groan tugs from her lips when I tug off her shoes, then try to wrestle her out of her trousers. She bats at my hands, lost to whatever dreams haunt her sleep, before gasping my name when my thumbs graze the outside of her thighs.

            “Let me help you, little wolf,” I murmur softly.

            With a sleepy noise reverberating in the back of her throat, my wife lifts her hips and helps shove her trousers down the length of her legs. I’ve barely tossed them onto a nearby chair before she’s hauling her lithe frame fully onto the mattress, crawling toward the outrageous display of pillows, and sprawling out her limbs like a starfish.

            Fucking hell, she looks good there.

            Beautiful. Mine, always, from this day forward until—

            Good men don’t wield power like arrogant, godless bastards.

            I slam my eyes shut.

            Flexing my fingers over the heavy duvet on the bed, I let my head hang forward and drag a deep, steadying breath into my lungs. The exhaustion clings to me like a second skin and the guilt . . . Well, it doesn’t go anywhere. I’m beginning to suspect that it never will.

            I’ll be fifty years old, thrusting deep inside my wife, and still hear the pain in his voice.

            I’ll be seventy, bouncing a grandchild on one knee, and still see the heartbreak in his unearthly green eyes.

            And I’ll be on my death bed, years from now, and still know that in turning Henry Godwin away, I broke off a piece of my soul and watched it wither away to dust. Those scattered pieces have already been swept away by nature’s breath, an exhalation that’s taken them far, far away, never to be regathered. I feel solidly off-kilter. Satisfied in body and mind, but somehow still lacking in every way that matters.

            I can’t breathe.

            I can’t . . . Christ, I can’t—

            Lurching away from the bed, I stumble from the room and try to shelve the riot of emotions that have tangled in my gut. I should climb into bed beside my wife. I should wrap an arm around her waist, palm the slight weight of her breast, and tug her backward until her arse is nestled against my groin and Hypnos pulls me deep into slumber. But no god of sleep will be able to do anything with me in this agitated state.

            I enter my study like a bull charging toward a bloody, grisly end.

            Allowing the door to shut behind me, I pick my way to the mammoth-sized desk I use when in residence. There, resting innocently in the corner, is a touch-tone telephone. I bite down on the inside of my cheek. Waver for only a second before I’m circling the desk, pulling out the chair, and lowering myself down.

            I reach forward.

            Drag the handset off the base.

            With my heart beating in my throat, I dial the only telephone number that I’ve ever bothered to memorize. The buttons cede under the pressure of my sweaty fingers, the metal clacking loudly in the otherwise silent room. Then I press the handset to my ear, curl my shoulders forward, and listen for the dial tone.

            It rings.

            And it rings.

            And it rings some more.

            Until, finally, just when I’m prepared to give up, a deep voice answers with a curt, “Godwin.”

            Every word, every apology, dies on the tip of my tongue.

            What the hell am I doing? Upstairs, my new wife is sleeping and here I am, on our wedding night, ringing my best mate—my ex-lover—because the thought of our ruined friendship is like swallowing a thousand sharp knives. Blanche doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve this. But my heart . . . goddamn it all, my heart won’t let me disconnect the call.

            “Hello?” comes that roughened baritone, and my entire body jolts at the sound like I’ve stuck a finger in an electrical outlet. “Who’s there?”

            I lick my lips. “It’s me.”

            Silence permeates the line, followed shortly by a heavy sigh that I feel like an icy breeze against the back of my neck. Goose flesh erupts over my skin. “Hang up the phone, Your Highness.”

            “I can’t.”

            “John,” he growls tightly. “Don’t do this.”

            “Don’t do what?” Plowing my fingers through my hair, I tug on the strands and then drop my hand to the desk, where I wind the telephone cord around my forefinger. If only it were as easy to unwind the chaos flickering through my head. Maybe then I wouldn’t open my big mouth and let the chaos fly free: “You left. You left and I feel like I’ve downed too much fucking whisky when I’m all too aware that I’m stone-cold sober. I’m spiraling, don’t you get it? I’m fucking losing my mind without—”

            “Where’s your wife?”

            The cord springs loose. “What?”

            “Where. Is. Your. Wife?”

            Shadows circle me like a parade of shameful onlookers, hackles raised, sharp teeth bared. “She’s . . .” Releasing the telephone cord, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “She’s asleep.”

            “Right.” A mocking noise catches in Henry’s throat. “She’s asleep while you sit on the telephone with me. And here I remember you explicitly saying that there would be no sharing you once you said your vows.” A small pause, and then, “You haven’t even lasted fifteen hours.”

            Pressure builds in my chest.

            I don’t know the emotion, don’t even recognize its shape or texture.

            But I feel myself abruptly tilting forward, the handset shoved so close to my ear, it’s as if I’m desperate to jump into the telephone and crawl through the line to him, back to where I know he’s leaning against his kitchen counter in his London flat. No doubt he’s wishing he could do anything but rehash this conversation with me in the middle of the night. “Henry, you’re my best mate—”

            “Stop.”

            “—the other half of me. And I know you said that—”

            “John, stop.”

            “—you can’t stand by my side when I’m married to someone else, but, fucking hell, I need you. Don’t you see? I need—”

            “I said, stop!”

            At Henry’s outburst, air comes thin and shallow. The shadows dance ever closer, slinking across the desk to spread over a stack of papers tucked away to the left and the lamp set directly before me. In my ear, the harsh grate of masculine breathing would be hypnotically sensual if it weren’t for the fact that we’re on the verge of breaking altogether. Thirty seconds pass in awkward silence. Slowly, it registers that Henry has never yelled at me.

            Not like this.

            “We can never go back to what we were,” he says, his voice pitched so low that I need to strain to hear every word. “We’ll never be brothers again, John, and we’ll never again be friends. You can threaten to take away Holyrood from me all you want, but it won’t change my decision. And it won’t change how I feel.”

            Head pounding ruthlessly, I demand, “And how do you feel?”

            The trembling silence solidifies the knot in my stomach. When he finally speaks, his answer threatens to cut me down at the knees: “I fucked her.”

            “You fucked . . .” I blink, slowly. Then try again. “You fucked who?”

            “Phillipa Lancaster.”

            The raven-haired beauty from the British Museum.

            The same woman who’s kept him out of my bed for a month now.

            “This isn’t news,” I manage through gritted teeth. “You’ve been sniffing at her heels for weeks now, and I know that you’ve already shagged—”

            “You’re wrong.”

            “What do you mean, I’m wrong?”

            “Do you really think I’d sleep with someone else when I finally had you in my arms?” The words come at me hard and fast, like rounds from a fully loaded machine gun. “Do you really think that I’d put my hands on anyone after ten fucking years of wishing you’d look at me and see a man and not your bodyguard?”

            “I don’t . . . What are you saying—”

            “You saw what you wanted to believe, Your Highness. You saw an out and you leapt at it with both hands.” A pained noise hits me over the line, guttural and primal, and I’m assaulted with a visceral image of Henry’s broad shoulders curling inward while his green eyes glitter with angry tears. Of his hand coming down hard on the countertop because he needs the outlet, a way to drain the fury. “So, I took what was presented to me today. I put my hands all over her, John. I put my cock inside her pussy and my fingers around her throat, and do you know what I felt?”

            He doesn’t wait for me to respond.

            Doesn’t even wait for me to ease my labored breathing before he growls, “Nothing. I felt absolutely nothing. But I would take it—being empty and hollow—over feeling passed over and used by you any day of the bloody week. So, you’re going to end this call, do you hear me? You’re going to end this call and go back upstairs to your sleeping wife where you’re going to proceed to forget all about me. Live your goddamn fairy tale life with your princess and your heirs and leave me the hell out of it.”

            “Henry,” I whisper, my entire body shaking.

            “Goodbye, John.”

            “Henry,” I say again, my voice cracking with barely leashed emotion. “Please don’t—”

            The line goes dead.

            And the pressure . . . that pressure that was growing inside my chest finally implodes. The shadows slip back, out of sight, as the rage decimates everything in my immediate reach. The telephone slams against the wall. The lamp shatters into a million little pieces as it crashes to the floor at my feet. Books fly from shelves and a scream lodges in my throat, stuck beneath a knot of panic as I turn in a small circle, minutes later, and access the damage.

            The study is chaos personified.

            I sink to the carpet in a bed of broken glass.

            Eagerly, I welcome the pain under my knees. It’s better, I think, than accepting the wretched truth—

            The other half of my soul has severed the rope that tethers us together, and we are bound no more.

_____________

The angst, friends. The ANGST. I’m living for every moment of this and I am not ashamed to admit it out loud.

I can’t wait to share Chapter Fifteen with you because ALL of the things are going to happen. Until then, feel free to leave a comment below or drop a line in BBA with spoiler alert added. I am here for you!