Bound in Moonlight Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  FRONTISPIECE

  DEDICATION

  EXCERPT

  TUTELAGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SLAVE WEEK

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MAGIC HOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY LOUISA BURTON

  PREVIEW

  COPYRIGHT

  For my sisters, Janice, Kate, Pam, and Suze—

  with special thanks to Suze, proofreader extraordinaire

  CAROLINE AWOKE TO the creak of door hinges.

  At first, she couldn't recall where she was . . . and then she remembered. She lay on her side, trying not to breathe too loudly as she watched the tall form of a man backlit by moonlight—Viscount Rexton—opening the double glass doors. He was slow and deliberate in his movements, but clumsy nonetheless.

  He stepped out onto the balcony rather unsteadily and undressed with his back to her, leaning for support on the stone balustrade and letting his clothes lie where they fell. Nude, his silhouette put her in a mind of an engraving she'd seen of Michelangelo's David—broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, long-legged.

  He turned.

  Caroline closed her eyes, but not before catching a glimpse of his privates, which shifted heavily as he moved. She heard the faint squeak of a floorboard beneath the carpet as he approached the bed. He stood for what seemed like an eternity as Caroline feigned sleep, her heart jittering.

  Something nudged her collar very slightly, which was when she realized he'd leaned over and was touching it, manipulating something. She smelled gin on his breath. It took all her self-control to keep her breathing slow and somnolent as he unclipped the leash and carefully gathered it up.

  Take heed therefore, myne eyes, how ye doe stare

  henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net,

  in which if euer ye entrapped are,

  out of her bands ye by no meanes shall get.

  Fondnesse it were for any being free,

  to couet fetters, though they golden bee.

  From “Sonnet XXXVII” of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti

  One

  NEVER IN HER twenty-four pampered and cosseted years among New York City's privileged Upper Ten had Emmeline witnessed acts of such appalling lechery, nor supposed that people of her own class might stoop to indulging in them.

  She was determined to find Lord Hardwyck and be quit at once of this shameless château. Surely her distinguished and urbane fiancé had not suspected the nature of this bacchanalian house party when he accepted the invitation.

  Such were her thoughts as she opened the door to which she had been directed by the countess in the leather mask. Emmeline was further comforted upon entering the room within and discovering it to be lined floor to ceiling and wall to wall with bookshelves. No doubt his lordship had spent the weekend ensconced in a secluded corner with his nose in some dusty old tome.

  Imagine, dear Reader, our heroine's dismay when her gaze lit upon Archibald Dickings, Baron of Hardwyck and heir apparent to the earldom of Upswinge, atop a polished mahogany writing table with his nose, along with the rest of his face, planted snugly between the thighs of one voluptuous blonde and his turgid shaft between those of another.

  “I'm coming!” cried the latter as she strained against the silken cords that bound her hands and feet to the four legs of the table. “Oh, yes! God, yes! Oh! Oh!”

  Upon hearing Emmeline's gasp of horror, Lord Hardwyck looked up and blinked at her. “Miss Woodbridge. Fancy encountering you here. I didn't even know you were in France.”

  From Chapter One of Emmeline's Emancipation by Anonymous, first published in 1903 by Saturnalia Press and reprinted since then in innumerable editions worldwide. A rare first edition from the original eight-hundred-copy print run sold in 2003 for $158,000 at Sotheby's in New York.

  January 17, 1922

  Steamboat Springs, Colorado

  Dearest Rèmy,

  No, no, a thousand times no, I will not marry you. I will, however, ride you like a cowgirl as soon as I see you again. I mean, the moment I lay eyes on you, so I suggest you don't meet my ship when it arrives, unless you want us both to be arrested for public indecency. Or don't they care about that sort of thing in France? Probably not. God, I love the French. You most of all, naturellement.

  You can't imagine what it means to me in my present wretched situation, hearing from you (most especially when you relate one of your deliciously filthy little fantasies, like the one about you making a stag film starring moi). I reread your letters with pathetic regularity, like some moony sixteen-year-old. Thank God for Air Mail. Every morning I sit in my wheelchair in front of this enormous picture window in the front room of the inn, my poor smashed leg in its plaster cast propped up on the window seat, waiting for the mail. It arrives via the strapping, ruddy-cheeked young Nils, who delivers it on skis after picking it up in town, except of course when the weather won't permit the mail plane to land.

  Nils, who hails from Norway, is a silver-blond giant. I tend to gape at him, because you just don't see men that tall in France. You tower over most of your countrymen, and you're at least an inch or two shy of six feet. I read somewhere that the reason most Frenchmen are on the short side is that Napoleon turned all the tall ones into soldiers when he was trying to take over the world, and of course most of them didn't live to reproduce. Weren't there something like twenty-five thousand French casualties at Waterloo alone?

  This is the kind of thing I start ruminating on ad nauseam while I sit here staring out at the snow and wishing I were back in Paris with you. I know I can't stop whining about how bored I am, but you can't imagine what it's like, watching all the other guests tromp gaily away every morning with their skis over their shoulders while I languish here with my shattered leg, cracked arm, and abandoned dignity. At least it was the left arm I broke, so I can still hold a pen. I've been polishing (actually over-polishing) the article about the Steamboat Springs Winter Festival that Hearst sent me here to write. And composing epic letters to you, of course.

  I shouldn't complain so much about being bored. Kitty is wonderful company, as always, and at least I'm not being held hostage in that ghastly hospital anymore. Dr. Horney (God, what a miserable boyhood he must have suffered) will not change his tune no matter how much I plead and cajole. He insists I must wait until both casts are off before I can travel. Kitty says she won't go with me if I try to leave before he saws off all this plaster, and I couldn't possibly travel solo in this condition, so it looks as if I'm stuck here for at least another four weeks.

  Your last letter was a delight, mon amour, except for that rather tedious harangue about me being a reckless thrillseeker who got what she asked for. You know damn well that I can handle myself on a pair of skis, or you should, after Montgenèvre. You told me I was the most accomplished female skier you'd ever seen—or is that the kind of applesauce you sell to every fresh new skirt you meet? In any event, you know I've been keen to try my hand at ski jumping. Pretty much the only reason I took this assignment was so that I could learn to jump from Carl Howelsen himself—and, of course, to watch the best jumpers in the world compete against
one another. For your information, I completed over a dozen successful jumps before that nasty landing, which only happened because I was exhausted.

  On a serious note, about your campaign to make me Mme. Rèmy Binet:

  Touched as I am by your heartwarming observation that I “look and fuck” like a woman ten years my junior (ah, you romantic frogs), a subtraction of a decade would put me at thirty-four, which is, need I remind you, STILL TWO YEARS OLDER THAN YOU. But that's not the only reason I won't marry you. We've only known each other for a year, and although I can't argue with you about our “extraordinary rapport” and “the deep communion of our souls,” there is still much you don't know about me, such as the reason I'm so sour on the institution of marriage.

  Suffice it to say that Emmeline's Emancipation is something of a roman à clef. Which is to say, the events I described in that book actually happened, more or less. I changed the names of everyone involved, of course, and altered some details to make it more entertaining and more difficult to identify me as the author. The most major change was the setting. It didn't take place in Scotland. It was a castle in France called Château de la Grotte Cachée.

  I did, however, show up to find my betrothed giving it to two women, although it was in the dining room, not the library. The women weren't both blond, though, just the one he was banging (who really was tied to the table, but with ordinary hemp rope, not silken cords). He was holding himself over her with his arms braced, eating out a dark-haired woman in a black corset, black opera gloves, and tall boots, who was kneeling in front of him. She had a riding crop, and she was whacking him on the ass, really putting her arm into it, barking instructions as to how he should fuck the blonde. “Pound her! Ram it in! Harder, you miserable weakling. Put your back into it! Squeeze that ass! Squeeze it!” In the book, both women are tasty young tomatoes, but in real life, although the dark-haired one was pretty, the blonde was a little more . . . real. She sported quite the chunky chassis even by the standard of the times, and I remember she had a really ugly bruise on her thigh.

  The faithless fiancé was Randolph Lytton, Baron of Hickley and now the eighth Earl of Kilbury, his old man having turned up his toes between then and now. I must admit, he wasn't quite as unruffled when I walked in on him as was his fictional counterpart, Archie, but neither did he seem particularly distressed. He honestly did seem more perplexed than anything else.

  The rest played out much as it does in the book, and yes, there really was a charming young satyr with a rolling pin between his legs who took me in hand, as it were, but his name wasn't Tobias. It was Inigo. And when I say he was a satyr, I don't mean he was a lothario. I mean he very well may have been a satyr.

  I can't believe I just committed those words to paper.

  It goes without saying that this letter mustn't fall into the hands of anyone other than yourself. The only people in the world who know that I wrote E.E. are you, Kitty, and my agent. Can you imagine the damage to my career if it became public knowledge that novelist-cum-journalist cum-reckless thrillseeker Emily Townsend is, or once was, a secret pornographer? The French would brush it off, but the Americans? These are the people who passed a constitutional amendment making it illegal to wash down your porterhouse with a lovely old cabernet. This country has never managed to rise beyond its Puritan roots, and I fear it never will.

  Speaking of which, although I dearly appreciate your offer to ship me a case of Château Montrose to keep me warm through the rest of my sentence here in the frozen American West, Kitty has managed to find a source for a local hooch that comes in big, crude stoneware jugs and tastes, so help me God, better than anything I've ever had in my mouth.

  Except for your thing, of course.

  I remain, de tout mon coeur,

  Your devoted,

  And pitiful,

  Em

  Two

  EMMELINE STARED IN bewilderment through the side window of the brougham parked next to her little green Benz in the château's carriage house. In the throes of some delirium fever—for what other explanation could there be for his violent tremors and mad rantings?—the young man cried out, “Yes! Oh, yes! Lick the tip. Squeeze the balls. Now suck it hard . . . harder . . . Here it comes. It's coming!”

  He roared like a lion, convulsing in spasms that filled Emmeline with unspeakable dread. She must do something,and quickly, lest this poor young man succumb to whatever ghastly ailment held him in its grip.

  “By Jove, Lavinia, but you are an artiste with your mouth,”he said as a woman's head rose into view.

  Dear God, no, thought Emmeline. She couldn't have actually put her mouth on his . . . his . . .

  Emmeline recoiled in disgust as the depravity of what she had just witnessed sank in. Her vision went gray, and she collapsed in a swoon of horror and disbelief.

  January 26, 1922

  Steamboat Springs, Colorado

  Mon chéri Rèmy,

  No, no, a thousand times no, etc. etc. etc.

  I'm forty-four. You're thirty-two. Why do we even have to discuss this? Rèmy, you know how I feel about you. You're the most perfect man I've ever known, the best lover, the warmest companion. And, oh, the contrast of those big, muscular peasant shoulders with the eyeglasses and the brain . . . it still makes me weak in the knees.

  If there were any real reason for us to tie the knot, I might consider it, but I honestly just don't see the point. Everything's copacetic, is it not? What are we lacking that marriage can provide? We sleep together, we travel together, we share the same friends and the same interests. Yet we have our own homes, so we're not on top of each other constantly, and we have an understanding about sleeping with other people that would be unworkable if we were bound together in holy matrimony. Really, it's the perfect arrangement. I can't imagine why you want to go and ruin it.

  Speaking of sleeping with other people, I must tell you about the dream I had last night about Nils, the Viking. Well, first I should tell you what inspired the dream.

  Every morning after he brings in the mail, Nils sits in the dining room and drinks a cup of hot cocoa before setting out again. Yesterday, Kitty, who's got quite the crush on him, asked if she could join him. He was delighted, of course. She's quite the doll. Afterward, she told me he'd asked her if the pretty brunette with the broken bones was her sister. She said he was astounded when she told him I was her aunt, and twenty-three years older than she.

  Well, the compliment must have really taken root in my subconscious, because I awoke in the middle of the night from the most exciting wet dream (yes, women have them, too). In the dream, it was I, not Kitty, having cocoa with Nils in the dining room. He was so shy and nervous, and clearly sweet on me. And he was a virgin who had never so much as touched a woman.

  I said, “You can touch me, if you like,” and I lifted my skirt just an inch or so to show him what I meant.

  He pulled his chair close and very tentatively slid his hand up my leg—not the one in the cast, the good one. I was wearing my peach silk camiknickers, and of course those are so loose that he had no trouble at all reaching the bull's-eye. He touched me very carefully, teasing apart the hair over the slit with his big gentle fingers and exploring the little folds and furrows between them until I was panting and clutching at the arms of my wheelchair.

  He said, “It's getting slippery.”

  All I could do was nod.

  A fingertip grazed my clit, and I sucked in a breath. He thought he'd hurt me, and started pulling his hand away, but I told him it felt good. He told me it felt good for him, too, and I could see that he had a hard-on like a broom handle.

  He pushed a finger inside me, and I instantly came. It galvanized him. He started frantically undoing his trousers, but I pushed him away, saying we couldn't go any further, that he was too young for me. (I know, I know.) He tried to talk me into it. My refusals grew more and more halfhearted. At this point, my casts had disappeared, and my clothes, too (dreams are very convenient that way). He threw me to the f
loor, pinned my arms down, and fucked me like a pile driver.

  I woke up climaxing, even though I was lying on my back, with nothing to push against. Usually when I come in my sleep, I'm lying on my stomach and thrusting against the bed. I brought myself off by hand a couple more times just to get it out of my system, and then I drifted back off to sleep.

  At breakfast, Kitty asked me why I was smiling that way, so I told her about the dream.

  “Do you think he's really a virgin?” she asked.

  “You're in a better position to find that out than I.”

  So this morning she joined him again for cocoa, steered the conversation around to women, and asked him outright if he'd ever gotten any. You know Kitty, she's not much for subtlety.

  Well, guess what? He hasn't! Twenty years old, a Norse god with the face of an angel, and he's a virgin. Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever heard? She asked him if he'd ever touched a woman . . . down there. He hadn't. She asked him if he'd like to. He was hesitant, something about some girl at church he's been pining over but can't work up the nerve to ask out. Eventually, though, he took her up on it, and she said it was very similar to my dream, Nils gently fondling, the two of them getting hotter by the second. But just as she was about to go off, he tore himself away with an obvious effort, said he liked her too much to treat her like an alley cat, and left. That was eight hours ago, and she's still grumpy.

  Yes, darling, I know you're chafing at the bit, wondering when I'm going to get around to “spilling it all” about the château, as you so emphatically demanded in your letter. Your rabid curiosity slays me, as does your outrage that I'd never told you about Hickley or any of the rest of it until now. I'm not the type to live in the past—you know that. Once I wrote “The End” on the last page of Emmeline's Emancipation, I was done with that chapter of my life and ready to start fresh.

  That said, I can certainly appreciate your point about my “cockteasing” you with that little dining room ménage à trois and the satyr comment. I understand your wanting to hear the whole story, and your point about my having nothing but time on my hands for the next three weeks is well taken. It will require more than one letter to relate it all, but I'll give it the old college try.