The Lord's Scandalous Bride Read online

  “Spread your knees, Susan,” Lord Nele said. “Lovely. I don’t even have to touch you, do I? I can see how wet you’ve gotten at the thought of having your cunt exposed to William’s discerning eye. You’ll be whipped tonight.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Susan said with a little sob, not knowing in that moment how something could frighten her and arouse her in such equally balanced measures.

  “You may lower your skirts,” he said then. Susan opened her eyes as she obeyed, seeing in his face a pensive expression that approached the gravity that had affected him before but that also, in being directed at her, seemed much more conducive to communication. “I should tell you about where we are going, I think,” he said. “And then perhaps you can tell me more of the story of the man on the train and what followed. We have a great deal of time on the road before us, and it might be best to save our play for the inn where we shall stay tonight. I have fucked in carriages, to be sure, but I have never enjoyed it as much as I thought I should. I would much rather pass the time in pleasant conversation.”

  Play. The word seemed to come from Lord Nele’s mouth in a sense different to the one Susan had always known before—perhaps a sense private to him. Play for him seemed to include a great deal more than the games of childhood. She looked down at her hands in her lap. “I am a little surprised, my lord, that you wish to converse. You seemed so… far away, before—I might even say forbidding.”

  Lord Nele smiled gently. “I am sure I did. I was thinking of our destination, and of my family. I promise that no harm shall come to you, but I am concerned that our reception will perhaps have certain… complications.”

  “What sort of complications, my lord, if you do not mind my asking?”

  “I don’t mind at all, Susan. Indeed they were precisely the matter of which I thought I should tell you. Panton Castle came to my great-great-great-grandfather at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the Restoration. He had done great service to Charles II, and I should perhaps not hesitate to say that he did it in procuring pretty girls for the king to fuck, but I do.” The left side of his mouth twisted charmingly into a wry smile.

  “Truly, my lord?” Susan didn’t know why she should be astonished, given how much debauchery she had seen in all orders of society—the higher the order, the greater the lasciviousness, it always seemed to her—but she supposed perhaps she had naively thought the very highest order might prove exempt, as if it might provide a sort of compensation to heaven for all the wickedness of the rest of the kingdom.

  The twist of Lord Nele’s mouth grew even more lopsided. Susan couldn’t help imagining being kissed by those mobile lips—above and below, in the place he had just promised to uncover for the eyes of the coachman. She looked down again to cover the confusion the fancy caused her. “Truly,” he said. “And the erstwhile earl of Mercester, now also duke of Panton, possessor of the castle and a gaudy title to go with it, never failed to procure pretty girls for his own pleasure as well. Indeed, legend says that he made his choices before sending the girls he had passed over on to Windsor.”

  Susan swallowed hard, still looking down at her hands. How could she keep from imagining herself as one of those girls, destined for a duke or the king? In what fashion had the choice been made, she wondered? And how had the girls come into the duke’s power in the first place? Her own experience with Mr. Greatrex had at least given her the means to begin answering the latter question, she supposed.

  “After the king formalized his arrangement with my great-great-great-grandfather, giving him Panton and the income that went with it—as much as any such arrangement might ever be formal, you understand—the duke, in addition to renovating the castle very thoroughly, built the little house to which I am now taking you.”

  Susan felt her brow crease. The sudden advent of an unexpected relevance of the story to her own situation spun her thoughts round. She was one of the girls, then. In that moment she even wondered whether Lord Nele’s kindness and protection had only been a pretext so that he might procure Susan for the duke. Her heart quailed, but neither could she deny that her wantonness extended so very far as to feel a flash of heat between her thighs at the wicked thought.

  “When it is referred to, which is seldom, especially these days, it is called the pleasure house. Because I have told you about the first duke, my great-great-great-grandfather, you of course know to what sort of pleasure the name refers. I warrant, though, that if you had simply heard that in the park of Panton there stands a little pleasure house, you would certainly have thought not of fucking but of whist, or perhaps of cucumber sandwiches. Is it not so?”

  “It is, my lord,” Susan said, looking up and feeling a smile creep onto her own face.

  Lord Nele nodded. “Just so. It was therefore in the way of a poorly kept secret in those days—the real use of the duke’s pleasure house.”

  Chapter Nine

  Susan’s blue eyes looked steadily into his. “And what was the real use, my lord?” she asked.

  How could she possibly be so wonderfully provoking? When she had asked if she should suck his cock there in the landau with the Norfolk countryside passing by, Nele had felt angry at first. The urge to punish the girl for disturbing his meditations on the complexities of his family had vied with a compulsion to punish her for suggesting something so alluringly vulgar. When Nele fucked in a moving carriage, he did so because he wished to indulge that filthy side of him that emerged from time to time—the side that craved his own degradation in the degradation of the girl he brought low by commanding her to kneel with her cheek upon the carriage seat and her bottom raised and presented for his enjoyment while the closed conveyance passed through the streets of London’s meanest quarters.

  He did not do it at the invitation of the girl, and he did not do it above all when she had disturbed his reverie upon the subject of his father, his lineage, and the estate that must pass to his older brother, leaving Nele with hardly a sufficiency for the finding of an heiress—a thing, incidentally, to whose description Susan Grant by no means answered. Nor did he take kindly to the suggestion: a libertine, Dr. Brown’s natural man, chose the time for fucking. He might require a girl in a landau to fall to her knees before him and take him deep within her pretty mouth, but he did not entertain requests to do so.

  But then, in Susan’s face, Nele saw that the expression he had first observed upon her face in Bertram’s dining room, before Bertram had asked whether Nele liked her, had returned: not the lively, abashed visage he had seen when he raised her skirts and fondled her cunny at the dinner table, but the jaded mien that had appeared just before—before she had understood that Nele had the notion of having her sent to his chamber for fucking and before the little scene of display and humiliation at the table. Even now Nele felt his prick beginning a stand as the memory unfolded of Susan’s red cheeks, Bertram’s words, Mrs. Porter’s lewdness, Susan’s eyes fixed on the crown molding.

  He understood, then, what lay behind her lewd offer to suck him in the carriage, and it made his heart light. She had grown anxious because of his distance, as he thought about his family. She had returned, in her mind, to the facade she had built over the two years of wickedness that had led her to the earl’s castle. She had perhaps chosen a highly unusual way to guard her heart, but Nele could see now that the expression of her willingness to receive his cock in her mouth represented no less than her best defense, as she conceived it.

  It had required an uncomfortable moment to understand what it all meant, but when he did Nele felt more capable of casting off his worries than he thought he ever had felt before. Susan’s flaxen-haired, blue-eyed provocation seemed to dissolve all care for a moment, and he found himself entering eagerly into the little dialogue that—perhaps rather recklessly—he had escalated into the promise of a viewing for William the coachman of Susan’s bare cunt.

  Now she had asked about the real use of the pleasure house. It might seem an innocent question, but for the look in her eye
s. The magical quality of the previous night—whatever glamour had lain upon him to make him promise her his protection; to make him say, with his cock still deep in her bottom, that he would take her to Panton; to make him disturb Bertram in his strict caning of Cynthia Heathers and ask if he might borrow the landau in order to spirit one of his maids away—had returned. Somehow Susan could ask such a question both innocently and lasciviously.

  In turn her refined yet wanton nature challenged Nele to heights of elegant lewdness he had never imagined scaling. He must answer so as to do justice to himself and to her—and indeed to the dukes of Panton and earls of Mercester who had sired him. “When I was eighteen,” he said slowly, “my father showed the house to me. It’s in a remote corner of the park, surrounded by a high wall. A road, now nearly overgrown through disuse leads from the rear gate of the wall to the castle’s main drive. Unless you know exactly where to look you would miss that road—indeed, you would miss even the wall, set in the deep forest of that vast park.”

  As he told the tale to Susan, trying hard to weave an air of mystery, Nele remembered his first sight of the pleasure house, once his father had found the door in the wall and opened it, creaking, to reveal the place. The little cottage, covered in ivy, had seemed to Nele something out of a fairy story, and he had said so to the duke.

  His father had chuckled at that. “More than one of the girls I fucked here said the same, lad. And for them, in some sense, it was a place out of one of the more forbidding tales, for like my fathers before me, when I take a girl for fucking I treat her as a nobleman has always claimed the right to treat a pretty girl who has fallen into his power.”

  Nele felt his cheeks grow hot at the unexpected turn of the conversation. He desperately wanted to hear more, and he desperately wanted not to have heard even his father’s last words. They had come to the door of the pleasure house now, and in the dappled sunlight his father looked at him with an intent gaze that seemed to seek out his reaction to what Nele had just heard.

  “That is why I’ve brought you here, Nele,” he said, in a much less offhand air than that which he had used in speaking his first remark about fucking. “To speak of such matters, though I know you may find what I have to say uncomfortable to hear. Your brother, I believe, has the same inclinations you and I do, but I imagine he will never admit to himself that he has them, and he will end up practicing his lusts in secret, which is something I have always deplored.”

  “I don’t understand, father,” Nele said. “What inclinations?”

  With another key his father opened the cottage door. Inside, under gray dust covers, the furniture of the house’s main room loomed in the dim light. His father went to the mantelpiece and lit a lamp that stood there, and Nele saw that the room was richly appointed: thick rugs, now rolled up to keep them from the dust, lay against the walls and lovely paintings of… Nele’s face grew hot again, for the paintings were of the Greek gods engaged in what sometimes seemed to him their favorite sport of fucking young women, in every possible setting and position: over tables, in caves, upon seashores.

  Those paintings covered one wall. Upon the opposite wall were paintings of a different nature: genre scenes of family life, in every one of which a young woman—a housemaid, or a daughter, or a wife—received bare-bottom discipline from the head of her household. The housemaid, bound to a block in the farmyard, received the visitation of the punishment strap. The daughter had a spanking over her father’s knee, and her teary expression, combined with her blushing bottom, made Nele’s cock grow hard.

  The pretty young wife, though, depicted in a series of three paintings, captured even more of his attention: in the first painting, she knelt before her husband, as if asking forgiveness, while he, angry, pointed to a door through which it was clear she must go for her chastisement. In the second painting, she had had to take off all her clothes. Her husband birched her, bent over the foot of their big farmhouse bed; the wife’s bottom already bore many pretty red stripes. The third painting made Nele draw a little gasping breath: the wife’s backside, now a glowing picture of thorough discipline, received her husband’s massive cock where nature had fashioned her for a different purpose. The painter’s skill had made the punished bottom look like the viewer might reach out and take it in one’s own hands, or run one’s finger along the red welts the birch had left. The wife’s face was buried in the bedclothes, and that seemed fitting to Nele, because through her misdeed, whatever it was, she had earned this stern lesson that concerned only her bare backside.

  “The inclinations I mean are the ones you see depicted in the paintings your great-great-great-grandfather the first duke commissioned for this house, the scenes of which I hear he was very fond of enacting here in this room,” said the duke behind him. “I see that your favorite ones are mine as well. There are more, in the bedroom, from this same sequence: the wife as a pretty young bride, learning to please her husband on her wedding night; the spanking he must give her when she refuses to suck his cock as she ought; the very first time he rogers her in her cunt and in her bottom-hole. The series is called Conjugal Discipline.”

  The duke had come to stand beside Nele with the lamp, and he saw that his father now scrutinized his face. “Would you like to see the ones in the bedroom, my boy?”

  Nele had the very strong feeling that the question meant much more than its mere words conveyed. To say that he wanted—as he did indeed desperately want—to see those lewd scenes his father had just described would be to admit that he truly did have the inclination to whip and to fuck the way the gods and men in the paintings did. It would mean that he belonged to his father, and the libertine world his elder brother had told him in exceedingly clear terms he must not think of entering.

  In his father’s shrewd eyes Nele saw an amused understanding of precisely the struggles Nele went through in trying to answer the simple question. Nele found that he could not maintain that gaze, and he looked at the painting instead. At the sight of the farmer’s massive cock filling his wife’s prim, birched rump, though, and at the lewd arousal that made his cock leap to see it, he looked down at his shoes almost angrily.

  “I will not make you admit that you want to see the bedroom, Nele,” the duke finally said. “I know you do want to see it, for I have noted how close to my school your wanderings have brought you over the past few weeks. I do not know of course what you have managed to gather about the nature of the place, but I imagine that if you have not secured a glimpse over the wall you have probably heard—perhaps from your brother—what sort of institution it is.”

  Now Nele found he could not keep silent. “But I haven’t, father. I’ve… yes, I saw over the wall once, and once I heard a girl and a man, out a window, but… I don’t understand it.”

  “The school is my way of satisfying my inclinations and in the process of helping girls who have fallen from grace, in society’s eyes, to find husbands. To put it more simply, the school is a place for the enjoyment of a gentleman’s natural right to punish and fuck wanton girls. As such it continues the tradition of this little house, which we call the pleasure house. In my youth, I whipped and deflowered many a girl here, as my sires had done before me, back to the time of King Charles—and truly even before that, for the men of our family have a long history of rakish behavior. Indeed, they tell stories about the earl for whom you were named, Nele, that might make you blush, despite your inclinations being along the same lines as his and mine.”

  “But you don’t use this house now?” To his surprise, Nele found that the thought made him wistful.

  “No,” said the duke, shaking his head. “Clarissa Halton was the last girl brought here in the old style, by the steward’s closed coach, to await the duke’s coming and his pleasure.”

  “Miss Halton!” Nele said. He knew her only as a distant, beautifully attired figure, whom his mother had absolutely forbidden he should ever meet.

  “She had the idea of the school,” his father said with a smile, “
and a very good idea it was.” His tone turned solemn then. “I do not ask, Nele, that you choose me over your brother and your mother. Though I think your masculine nature might give me a chance of winning you over to my way of thinking—among other things, now that you have come of age you are welcome to come to Panton when you like, and to meet Miss Halton and her girls, and to enjoy their charms as you please—I would rather think that I have not treated you as cruelly as your mother has in this regard. My only hope is that you will remember this place, and know that your sires felt the same lusts you feel, and took their cocks’ contentment with girls they knew craved their mastery. I worry that your brother, in pretending he does not feel those lusts, will practice his seductions and chastisements to the harm of many a girl who might otherwise not have fallen.”

  Chapter Ten

  “And has he?” Susan asked, utterly engrossed by Lord Nele’s tale. “Has your brother ruined girls that way? The way I was ruined?”

  The sun had begun to set, and William the coachman, at whom Susan could not bear to look, recalling the lewdness Lord Nele had planned for that evening, had raised the carriage’s roof at the horses’ last watering stop. Lord Nele’s face was nearly lost in the shadows of the little cabin, where he sat only a foot or two away but somehow, Susan thought, also a world, a cosmos away.

  His gravity had not returned, nor, truly, she thought, his distance. Somehow he could be a cosmos away without being distant from her, as if the burden he bore as the second son of his father made him something she could reach out and touch but which actually existed in some other world. From that other world, he smiled sadly. In that moment Susan knew she loved him, and she knew that he would fulfill his promise to protect her. She simply had no idea what either of those things would truly mean, in the world of dukes and trollops.