The Seduction of Molly O'Flaherty

Copyright © 2015 Sierra Simone

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, places, organizations, events, and products are intended to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real.

Cover by Date Book Designs 2015

January 1880

The front door closed with a slam, and I finally allowed myself to dissolve into tears.

How had I let it come to this? Me, the girl who used to fight the dock boys in Liverpool, the girl who had not once but twice faced down the bull in my uncle’s pen back in Ireland?

It wasn’t enough that I’d been slowly goaded into this trap by the board of the shipping company I’d inherited from my father. But I’d also given the leader of the board, that
troll
of a man, the ability to make me cry. That itself was worse than the way he’d forced himself on me. If I could have endured it stoically, maybe I wouldn’t mind.

Well, I would. But it wouldn’t poison my dignity as well as my body.

I used my skirt to scrub at my tongue and the insides of my cheeks, ignoring the tears running down my face, which turned instantly cold against my skin in the chilly room.

I cried even harder as I remembered for the ten thousandth time that I had no options. I’d never known a woman to successfully report a man taking advantage of her when the man was as wealthy and powerful as the leader of my company’s board. Especially with my…unconventional…reputation, I worried it would be all too easy for Mr. Cunningham to convince a court of law that my testimony was not to be trusted. And I couldn’t fight back in any other way, verbally or physically, or he would see to it that I lost my company.

And I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. By now I’d kept the secret of Cunningham’s shadow over my life for so long that I didn’t know how to un-keep it. Just imagining the look on Helene’s face or Adela’s…and how could I tell any of the men and not have them look differently at me? Like I was Molly O’Flaherty, a victim, instead of Molly O’Flaherty, a red-headed, fiery-tempered heiress?

Besides, I wasn’t sure that Julian or Silas wouldn’t kill him, and I didn’t need that complication right now.

No, I would just have to endure. As I had since I was fourteen.

I had practically rubbed the inside of my mouth raw, but I still couldn’t un-taste what had been forced in there, and now my mouth simply tasted like silk as well as the bitter taste of Cunningham’s penis, and what was the point? He’d defiled me before and he would again, and I had no choice if I wanted to keep my company. That’s just the way it was.

I slid off my chair onto the freezing floor, finally giving in to the deep urge to actually sob, which I did. I pressed my cheek to the cold wood and cried and cried, my whole body shaking, my breathing so fast and shallow that I felt dizzy and light-headed and I didn’t care. I
wanted
to pass out, I
wanted
unconsciousness, because when I was unconscious, this didn’t exist. It wasn’t real. The only real things were dreams of steely ocean waves and rocky beaches and a dark-haired man I knew so well…

A dark-haired man I’d been avoiding.

And it was not the man everybody thought I was in love with. It was someone else. Someone I knew just as well. Someone with blue eyes and an easy grin and a big—

There was a knock at the door and I stiffened, knowing my butler would be there to answer it, which meant he would walk past the front parlor, where I was currently a puddle of rumpled silk and tears. I sat up, wiping furiously at my eyes but unable to stop the actual crying, and then the horrible thought struck me that it might be Cunningham, back for more, and he would see me crying and know how much power he had over me. I gulped in a huge breath and forced myself to hold it, scrubbing at my face with my dress and trying to stand up, and then the front door opened, even though the butler was nowhere in sight, and someone stepped through and I kept holding my breath,
be strong be strong be strong—

Silas Cecil-Coke stepped into the hallway, casually shucking his woolen coat and draping it over his arm, and he was humming under his breath as he turned and saw me.
Silas.
My heart split open with relief and also with so much shame, that he of all people should see me like this, that he of all people should bear witness to my weakness. My breath left my body in a jagged exhale and with it went my self-control; my tears returned with triple the force and I buried my face in my hands, desperate to hide all this messiness from him. All my messiness.

“Molly?” I heard him ask, voice laced with concern and surprise. Quick footsteps, and then I felt him drop to his knees next to me, his hands in their cold gloves pulling at mine.

“Sweetheart. Look at me,” he murmured.

I couldn’t stop crying, so I just shook my head, the small movement making me dizzy again, because I couldn’t get enough air and I didn’t even want to try to get enough air. What was the point?

He gently peeled back my hands and then the cool leather of his gloves pressed against my flushed cheeks and my feverish forehead. “Darling Molly,” he whispered. “My Molly. What is it?”

His words were too tender and too kind, the starkest possible contrast to what Cunningham had just done to me, and some foolish part of my mind hissed that I didn’t deserve his lovely words, that if he knew what I’d just done, then he’d drop his hands in disgust and walk away. I sobbed even harder at this thought, the truth of it curling tendrils around me, into me, into my very soul.

You don’t deserve him. And either way, he wouldn’t want you if he found out…

“No, darling, I didn’t mean to make you cry harder,” Silas shushed, gathering me close. My face was pressed against the clean-smelling fabric of his morning jacket, my body cradled between his hard thighs, and he began to rock me back and forth. “You can tell me, lovely. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

I shook my head again, the finely spun wool of his clothes abrading my cheeks as I did. I couldn’t tell Silas. I mean, I couldn’t tell anyone, but especially not him. Not after this last summer when I’d realized that the strange tightness in my chest whenever I thought of him, my preference for him and him alone when our friends played together, the surprising distance of the jealousy I felt toward Ivy Leavold—now Ivy Markham—when all these years, I’d assumed I was in love with Julian. It had all come to head when Silas and I had fucked on Julian’s parlor floor after introducing Ivy to our version of Blindman’s Bluff. I’d wanted to use him to show everybody that I didn’t care about Ivy, that I didn’t care about the obvious attachment Jules felt toward her, but in the middle of it all, I’d looked down at Silas, at his adoring blue eyes and his dimpled smile and wide shoulders, and it finally started to make sense. Somehow along the way, somewhere in our decade of friendship, I’d fallen in love with Silas. And I had no way to process that revelation; I’d thought that I’d loved Julian—everyone thought that. But what I felt for Silas was so much deeper, so much subtler, so much sweeter, and it scared me. I’d never felt that way about anyone before,
ever
.

I’d done my absolute best to avoid him ever since that moment.

But of course, he was here now, seeing me at my most pathetic, and there was no way to undo the damage this moment was doing. Even if he never found out about Cunningham, he would still walk away from this thinking I was weak and womanish, the kind of enervated female who sobbed and fainted at the slightest provocation.

In fact, any moment now, he would let go of me and wish me a good day, and leave, grateful to get away from my chaotic emotions. I was sure of it.

He didn’t.

Instead, his arms moved around me and then I was lifted into his arms as he rose easily to his feet. His lips swept across my forehead in a chaste gesture that was so unusual for him, but so very Silas at the same time, and then he carried me upstairs, into the blue and gold sanctuary of my room, laying me on my bed. My tears started to slow somewhat as he bent down and rekindled the banked fire in the fireplace. A good fuck might make me feel better…

I started to sit up to pull off my dress, and then Silas stood up and saw me. “No, love,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you. You lay back and stay still, and I’m going to make you feel better.” His voice was sweet and attentive, but there was something deeper in it that I’d never heard before, something about the words maybe, or something about the intensity in his gaze.

Whatever it was, my body responded immediately. I lay back down and waited patiently, my tears still flowing, but quieter now, softer. Everything had a blurry sheen to it, blurry and slowed-down somehow, as if time had begun to run differently. I watched as he took off his jacket and unknotted his tie, and then tossed both into a nearby chair. His shirt collar hung open now, exposing the strong cords of his neck, the delectable curve of his Adam’s apple. He walked over to the bed and started unlacing my boots, and watching his long fingers easily manipulate the laces was so inexplicably erotic, or maybe it was the way he glanced up at me when I shifted on the bed, a stern glance as if he suspected I was about to disobey his request for me to stay still. Whatever it was, it pulled heat from my face down into my chest, deeper into my stomach, as he pulled off my shoes. As he wrung out a damp, cool cloth and began to sponge the tears off my face.

I looked up at him, at those eyes with their sweeping eyelashes, at those slightly parted lips, at those cheekbones seemingly cut from stone, and he met my stare with a sweet smile, and it was too much, this intimacy without sex, this closeness and care without agenda. I looked away, my cheeks burning.

Could he tell, I wondered, what strange, complicated feelings he inspired in me? Could he read everything in my eyes? Did he know that for the last six months, I could only come when I thought of him, did he know that I indulged in long, embarrassing fantasies about a future that could never exist?

And if he did know, could he ever feel the same way?

His fingers wrapped around my chin and rolled my face back to his. I resisted a little, but the motion was insistent, and when my eyes met his eyes, the combination of the authority and devotion there took my breath away. The cloth moved over my lips, dabbing gently, and it was as if he
knew
, knew that my mouth was the one place I needed to be cleaned right now, but also the place that his touch burned the worst, because having this man that I loved touch the place where Cunningham—

I tried to turn my face away again, but then he bent over me and replaced the cloth with his lips.

“Don’t move,” he whispered against my mouth. “Just let me have it.”

Oh God.

His kiss tasted like Silas—a clean, fresh taste with a hint of gin. And it felt so masculine—firm and warm and not too soft, determined and restrained all at once. I breathed in the breath that he breathed out, his parted lips just barely pressed to mine. No tongue, no motion, and normally if a man had his lips against mine, I’d take charge. I’d reach up and find his neck with my hand, and then I’d flip us over so that I was on top, driving the scene. But he’d immobilized me with nothing more than the firm authority in his tone and the blueness of his eyes, and so I stayed frozen as he brushed his lips against my mouth and then began nibbling on my jaw and throat, his hand sliding underneath my neck to tilt my head up and give him better access to what he wanted.

And that’s exactly what it felt like, like he was taking what he wanted—kisses and bites and licks, as if he’d laid me out here simply to taste my skin and sample the hollows of my throat and upper lip. I’d never let men take what they wanted from me;
I
was the one who took what she wanted, but for some reason, this didn’t bother me right now. It didn’t bother me that someone looking in from the outside might claim that Silas saying those words,
just let me have it
, was as degrading and violent as what Mr. Cunningham had done, because I knew it was different. For a thousand reasons: that I wanted this, that Silas cared for me, that we had ten years of trust bricked between us.

And somehow,
somehow
, this was what I needed. Because everything terrible about the day faded away, all the despair about my future fading away too, and there was just the bed soft under me and Silas with his cufflinked wrists cradling my head and the tight warmth building low in my belly.

My body relaxed, and my breathing finally slowed to normal. Silas’s lips moved with a languorous pace, lapping up my remaining tears and kissing my hair and licking the inside of my mouth, pulling away whenever I tried to kiss back, which made me relax even more. I didn’t have to think, didn’t have to decide, didn’t have to be in charge. For once I could simply lie back and
feel
. Hands moved under my back, lifting me up to tug at the laces that cinched my dress closed, and again he whispered, “Don’t move,” this time with his lips pressed to the front of my throat.

I didn’t move. Even when the dress was tugged off my shoulders, even when the skirt and petticoats vanished too, and my stockings were all that was left. After his work was done, he stood up and unfastened his cufflinks, tossing them carelessly onto the end-table, his eyes on my body like somebody appraising a bottle of wine or an elaborately prepared dessert. The appreciation of a connoisseur, objectifying and glorifying me all at once.