Free Frayed Bonds by Diana Thorn

Chapter One
     
    “I haven’t the slightest idea what to do about it, Peter.
She just lies there staring up at the ceiling while I fuck her. I’m at my wit’s
end,” said John Tregarth, pouring out his frustration and a double brandy at
the same time. He took a seat beside the fire and drank in morose silence.
    Peter Mainwaring, Viscount Herridon, looked out the window
at the young woman in question, frolicking in the garden with a floppy-eared
puppy, her sprigged muslin gown fetchingly disheveled, her chignon coming
seductively undone. “She’s nineteen,” he replied at last to his oldest and
closest friend. “She just needs warming up.”
    “She turned twenty last week,” said Tregarth. “I’ve spent
hours warming her with every trick in the book. Fingered her ‘til my skin
pruned, licked her ‘til my tongue was worn out. I’m afraid she’s frigid.”
    Peter turned his attention from the young woman outside to
the unhappy man beside the fire. John Tregarth had been his schoolmate, his
brother in arms in the Peninsular War, and most recently, his rival for the
affections of the lovely young woman in the garden, Miss Amy Graham, now Mrs.
John Tregarth.
    Peter hesitated to offer advice. He suspected he had played
a part in the unhappiness of his friend’s marriage. They’d both spotted Amy at
the same time, in the Bath Assembly Rooms, a sparkling jewel in a perfect
setting. Her classical proportions, ripe breasts, wide hips and gently curved
belly made her look like some Greek sculpture of Aphrodite. Her presence
transformed the pillared hall in to an ancient temple to carnal delights.
    Both men had known, from the second they laid eyes on her
lavish, untried curves, that the other must be a rival for her affections.
    With most women, the outcome would have been a foregone
conclusion. Tregarth had a fine farm and a comfortable house, with a
respectable fortune. But Peter had a title, an estate, political office, more
money than he knew what to do with and an unlimited choice in women. A sensible
woman, asked to choose between two equally handsome suitors, would always take
the wealthier one.
    Everyone believed she would choose Peter Mainwaring.
    The conventions of the ton , or course, dictated that
Peter select a wife with rank equal to, or only slightly beneath, that of his
own.
    But the same money that ensured his place in society gave him
license to do as he pleased. And it would please him, he had thought in Bath,
to do Amy in as many ways as she might stand before exhaustion took her.
Particularly with her skin flushed, her pretty mouth gagged and her wrists
bound tight in leather traces. Tregarth, no doubt, felt the same. As young men
before the army, and then during the war, they had discovered a shared taste
for helplessness, a wicked delight in inflicting pleasure, and in the sweetest
way possible, pain, on the only nominally unwilling. The truly unwilling were a
different matter. Neither Peter nor John had any taste for rape. They had
shared a great deal together, including some decidedly unconventional women.
    Amy was different. They could not share Amy.
    That night in Bath the contest was joined.
    John Tregarth pursued Amy as the rules of society dictated,
calling on her in daylight, properly chaperoned, with the approval of her
family and friends. He wooed her with tales of country life, of the quiet
pleasures of the field and dairy, of long rambling walks and soft, moonlit
nights. He told Peter that he was determined to treat Amy differently, to put
aside forever his crooked proclivities and worship her as the goddess she was.
Pure, tender, innocent, the mother he hoped of his children and a matriarch
someday to his sprawling family.
    Peter, in complete confidence of his own success, chose a
different road. He had no desire to call on her family, make small talk with
her mother or discuss religion with her father. He wanted no partner in life
who would not taste its sweetest pleasures with him.