Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (14 page)

Realising she wasn’t going to let this go, Stefan said, ‘Okay, well, before I tell you this, let me just say that I was a young man when it happened.’

Luna arched an eyebrow. ‘You’re not exactly old now,
farfar.
’

With that, Stefan rolled toward her on the bed and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Look, you are going to have to stop speaking Swedish if you want me to concentrate on this.’ He pressed the evidence of his distraction into her hip and Luna immediately sat up, clasping her hands around her knees like a schoolgirl and drawing her fingers across her mouth in a zipper motion.

‘As I was saying,’ Stefan went on, ‘I was very young and it was an experimental time in my life. This is not something I would ever repeat now.’ Luna kept her mouth shut, dying, now, to hear what he was going to say.

‘My friend Astrid,’ he began. ‘Have I told you that she and I used to date?’

‘No, but it doesn’t surprise me. She’s very pretty.’

‘Yes, well, we used to date and at some point in our relationship she—’ he cleared his throat, ‘expressed an interest in exploring other aspects of her sexuality. She and Dagmar met at the party my father gave and there was a mutual attraction.’

‘Ah, right,’ Luna said. ‘And you were okay with Astrid and Dagmar…?’ She looked at him, then realised what he was getting at. ‘Oh my God, you’re not saying… you had a threesome with Astrid and Dagmar?!’

‘You make it sound very sordid,’ he said peevishly. ‘Try to look at it from my perspective.’

‘I am,’ she said, starting to laugh.

He forged on, ‘I was a young man, not as sexually experienced as I am today, and I was presented with a unique learning opportunity.’

‘Oh, is that what we’re calling it?’

‘A
learning
opportunity,’ he insisted, adding, ‘Dagmar made it clear from the start where her interests lay and they weren’t with me. And Astrid, well, to be honest our relationship had pretty much run its course by this point anyway, so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.’

‘So learning
and
dumping.’

He scowled at her, then shrugged in tacit admission. ‘Anyway, it only happened a few times before they became a couple and I walked away an enlightened man.’

‘A win-win,’ she opined drily.

‘Well, it would have been. But Astrid had second thoughts a few months later and tried to get back together with me. It was all very messy and Dagmar has never forgiven me.’ His story completed, Stefan shifted in the bed, giving her an apprehensive look. Like he was worried he’d over-shared.

‘Hmm…’ Luna wriggled her toes on the bedspread. ‘It doesn’t seem very fair,’ she ventured, ‘Dagmar blaming you.’

‘I know, right?’ Stefan complained. ‘After all, it’s not my fault if she can’t hold on to her woman, is it?’ Shrugging again, he concluded, ‘As I say, it’s not something I’d repeat…’

‘
För allt smör i Småland?
’ Luna suggested. And that did it. Clearly having had enough of her hilarity at his expense, Stefan hauled her down against him and slid his hand to her sex.

‘Shall I show you some of what I learned,
min arg flicka
?’ he said dangerously, inserting one finger into her vagina. Luna twisted away from him, laughing, but he sat up and put his free hand onto her chest, pushing her down onto the mattress. ‘I had always assumed,’ he said conversationally, inserting another finger into her, ‘that lesbian sex was mostly about external things. The clitoris, for example,’ he said, rubbing his thumb along hers, causing it to tremble in anticipation. ‘Or the breasts,’ he added, running his palm over first one, then her other breast, immediately rewarded with the sight of her nipples tightening.

‘But lesbians enjoy penetration too,’ he murmured, inserting a third finger and moving his thumb in a circular motion against her. Luna’s eyelids fluttered shut and she made a purring noise. Stefan bent down to her and placed his other hand on her mons whilst the fingers of his first moved within her. ‘They like to fuck,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘They just do it differently. Shall I fuck you, Luna?’

She nodded.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Say it.’

‘Please,’ she said obediently.

‘Please what?’

‘Please fuck me.’

In response, Stefan withdrew, then thrust back into her, pressing his other fingers hard into the flesh around her clitoris.

‘Fuck me back,’ he instructed, at which Luna’s eyes flew open. He looked like a dark god against the purple glow of the Shetland sky in the skylight, and his eyes were rapt upon her. Hesitantly, not really knowing what he expected of her, she lifted her hips up off the mattress. She saw his head nod in the demi-light.

‘That’s it,’ he said, rewarding her by rubbing her clitoris in a circular motion. Luna lowered and raised her hips again, feeling his fingers slide out of her and plunge back in. ‘Good girl, good girl. Come on, fuck me,’ he exhorted.

She raised her knees on the bed and arched her pelvis again, and again. And carried on doing it as his fingers moved on and in her, the pressure increasing each time she lifted her hips. She closed her eyes again and threw her head back on the pillow, really fucking him now, her thighs straining as the pace of her hips quickened.

‘Put your hands on me,’ he said. ‘Feel me. Feel me fucking you.’

Blindly, Luna reached her hands down, one meeting his fingers on her vulva and the other his wrist as it pumped down into her. She felt his muscles working, and a shimmer of sensitivity dancing along her clitoris, spreading and building, aching and growing.

It overtook her in a staggering climax, her stomach muscles clenching as her head rocketed off the pillow into his chest. It was… ah, too… her muscles released and she fell back on the bed, arching upwards, feeling his hands fucking her, her orgasm going on and on until she was literally crying out, helpless beneath him, begging him not to stop.

*

It was easy to assume that all was mended between them, given the sheer force of their sexual rapport. That and Stefan’s easy-going nature; the way, over the course of the following day as they took a quick hike and then went for lunch in Lerwick, he slotted right in as her wingman, charming the locals whilst allowing her to take the lead. Luna could tell he’d been paying attention the night before when she’d revealed her insecurities about her work, and was trying to respond to what he’d heard.

But all was not mended.

The next night they lay in bed together, Stefan’s hand idly twining her braid. He’d just revealed that her ass had come sixth on his list of Luna body parts he’d missed, ‘though after I discovered it had been immortalised in
Remainers
, I seriously considered moving it up the rankings.’

Lifting the tail of her braid to his mouth, he noted, ‘I admit, there is one mental picture of your bottom that has loomed large in my fantasy life. Those sandals you were wearing, when I found you in that club in Miami.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘my “fuck me” sandals.’

‘Is that what you call them?’ he chuckled. ‘Well, yes…’ He stretched against her, planting his hand on her hip bone. ‘Suffice it to say that I have thought of the way your ass looked when you were wearing them more than once over the past few months.’

Luna smiled and he said softly, almost hopefully, ‘And you, Luna? Did you ever think of me, when you touched yourself here in your bed in Shetland?’

The question took her completely by surprise. ‘I—’ She broke off as, to her horror, her eyes began to fill. She swallowed, her voice deepening to the point of vehemence. ‘I tried
never
to think of you here.’ A pained noise escaped her. ‘I didn’t have your faith that we’d get back together.’ And then her chest heaved.

‘Luna!’ he cried. He reached for her but Luna pulled away. She sat up and put her palms over her eyes, willing herself to stop crying, but the harder she tried the faster her tears flowed. Stefan knelt next to her and drew her hands away from her face, kissing her hair and her brow and her lips.

‘I am going to make you so happy,’ he promised fiercely. ‘The next time I make you cry it will be from joy, or laughter… or the incredibleness of my lovemaking.’

Luna snorted, then coughed as a stream of snot and tears clogged her throat. She drew her palms over her eyes and laughed weakly, ‘Just ignore me. I never used to cry and now I seem to do it all the time.’

In response, he pulled her over onto his lap, cuddling her to him.

She woke two hours later. Something had disturbed her, but at first she couldn’t tell what. The bedroom was silent and the skylight was still purple above her. Rolling toward Stefan, she saw that he was on his side facing her, twitching in his sleep. Another bad dream, she thought sleepily, reaching her gloved hand to his chest. As her fingers came to rest on him, suddenly his own hand shot out, grabbing her by the wrist. Startled, Luna opened her mouth to tell him off for scaring her, but then realised he was still asleep.

She tried to pull her arm away, then to gently prise his fingers off her wrist, but his grip only tightened on her, to the point of pain. Half-remembering some dire injunction she’d heard about sleepwalkers, she was reluctant to wake him. So she took the counterintuitive approach, shifting closer to him and kissing his chest, relaxing her wrist.

It worked. After some seconds, Stefan’s eyelids stopped flickering and he sighed, loosening her hand. Luna stayed where she was, however, wide awake now. Awake and troubled.

*

Late on Monday night, Luna had a text from Stefan reading simply:
Check your email.
Grabbing her tablet from the bedside table, she found an email from him waiting for her – from a personal account she’d never seen before, all their previous communications having been via work email.

Dear God. He’d written her an email entirely in Swedish! Laughing, Luna ran downstairs to retrieve her Swedish–English dictionary from the living room. She spent a laborious half-hour painstakingly translating his message, coming up with:

Sweetnose (hmm, this must be a Swedish thing, Luna thought),

I have been happy all day, thinking of you learning to speak my language. By coincidence, my Uncle Karl has just sent me an invitation to his annual Crayfish Party in August. The Crayfish Party is a big thing in Sweden. Lots of hat rolling, and singing and drinking. Uncle Karl, who is very funny and doesn’t spit in the glass, plans his party all year. All my family attends. Would you like to come with me this year?

My family has a summer house in Visby on Gotland, and Uncle Karl hosts the party on the beach there. It is very beautiful, Visby. I would like to show you it, take you coffee breaking in the town, and hiking in the cliffs and swimming in the ocean (Be warned: the water is very cold! But being Swedish we have a sauna you can run to).

I am smiling now, picturing you there with me. You are the finest thing I know, Stellaluna.

To the bottom of his email, he had pasted his uncle’s invitation, headed by a child’s drawing of a crayfish and a bottle of schnapps on its side with a little puddle beside it. Luna liked Stefan’s Uncle Karl already.

Luna had absolutely no faith in her ability to write a coherent response in Swedish, so she kept her response short and sweet, limiting it to the very first question that popped into her head as she was translating Stefan’s email.

But your dad?

Her phone rang seconds later.

‘You mustn’t worry about my father,’ Stefan said, before she could think of an appropriate greeting in Swedish. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that he forbade me to see you. He will understand. I will make him understand.’

‘You haven’t said anything to him yet, though,’ Luna enquired hastily.

‘And have him accuse me of distracting you from your work?’ Stefan laughed. ‘Or worse,
you
accusing me?’

‘Well, then, in that case, I accept your invitation,’ she said in a mildly astringent tone, adding softly, ‘
Mellan fyra ögon.
’ Between four eyes: just between us.

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, followed by a sigh. ‘I am going to have to get used to hearing you speak Swedish without becoming aroused.’

Smiling widely, Luna said, ‘Would it help if I told you Dagmar taught me that one?’

‘It does,
absolute
it does, Miss Gregory.’

Luna was squatting in a straw-filled enclosure, where a tiny black lamb lay prone on the ground next to its mother. As instructed, she quickly inserted her fingers into its nostrils, clearing them of fluid.

‘That’s right,’ said Malcolm, standing above her. ‘Now give it a bit of a rub, like I showed you.’

Picking up some straw, Luna rubbed it into the lamb’s sides, also covered in amniotic fluid. She was just starting to worry when its little ribs heaved into action. Its mother nudged her head down to the new arrival and began licking it. Luna looked up at Malcolm and smiled broadly.

Her cheeks were starting to ache from how much she’d been smiling over the past seventy-two hours, since the first of Malcolm’s ewes gave birth. From then on it had been like popcorn in a pan; a few lambs the first day followed by a sudden rush of births.

They were in Malcolm’s lambing shed, a new wooden barn set apart from the house. Although Shetland sheep were hardy and, according to Malcolm, ‘the easiest lambers in the world’, he didn’t want to take any chances with his flock lambing out in the fields. Having them in the lambing shed made it easier to segregate new mothers and their babies from those yet to give birth. Apparently the mothering instinct was so strong in this breed that pregnant ewes were known to try to steal lambs from their birth mothers.

Even now, a ewe on the other side of the wooden enclosure they were in was pushing her nose through the slats, sniffing eagerly at the new arrival, who was already trying to stand on what appeared to be impossibly long, spindly black legs. Its mother gave it another little nudge and it collapsed, letting out a high pitched ‘baaa’.

It was around 1am on a mid-May night, more than a month since she and Stefan had reunited. Luna knew that similar scenes were playing out in farms up and down the coast. Ruth texted her on Sunday to say her first lambs had been born overnight. Because Shetland sheep were so adept at giving birth, they didn’t require much intervention, but between them, Malcolm, Liv, Luna and Dagmar had been taking turns checking on them through the night. Sometimes a helping human hand was needed.

Now, for example, as Luna continued to marvel at the tiny, quivering black lamb in front of her, Malcolm moved quickly to the ‘orphan’ pen, where they were bottle feeding four lambs he’d removed from their mothers; triplets all, one more than their mothers could easily feed. Picking up one of them, he swiftly carried it back to the enclosure and handed it to Luna, who, used to this drill by now, scooped up the afterbirth from the recently born lamb and smeared it over the orphan. A trick, to fool the new mother into thinking this baby was her own.

Sure enough, when the orphan lamb butted its head into the ewe’s udder, she gave it a cursory sniff and continued licking her new arrival.

Luna pointed to the orphan’s tail, wiggling furiously, and laughed, lifting up her bloody, mucky hands. ‘If you’d have told me a year ago that I’d be standing here doing this…’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You have the best job in the world, Malcolm.’

‘Aye,’ the plump-cheeked farmer said, looking across the shed at the scores of mothers and new babies. ‘You’re not wrong there, lass.’ Then yawned.

‘Why don’t you go get some sleep?’ Luna suggested. ‘I’ll take the next shift.’ Truth be told, it had been mostly him and Luna sharing night duties, Dagmar having been preoccupied with final preparations for her marketing guru friend and his crew, who would arrive the following week to start work on the ad campaign, and Liv having been happy to cede animal husbandry duties to Luna in preference for a good night’s sleep.

Luna didn’t mind. Standing alone in the lambing shed a few minutes later, surrounded by all this new life, she felt uniquely privileged. Maybe a little itchy – she’d had to be extra vigilant about washing thoroughly and applying steroid cream, and yesterday she’d given in and bought an inhaler when after several hours in the shed she found herself starting to wheeze. But still. These had been some of the most magical days of her entire life.

And that was another reason she’d been happy to send Malcolm off to bed. After quickly scanning the shed to reassure herself that no more births were imminent, Luna retrieved her mobile from her jeans pocket and video phoned Stefan, rewarded with the sight of him turning on his bedside light and sitting up in bed in his London apartment.

‘Luna,’ he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

‘I have something to show you,’ Luna said excitedly. She lifted up the phone to frame the three orphan lambs, fast asleep, huddled together in a warm jumble in the corner of their stall.

She heard Stefan’s voice on the phone, a half-octave higher than usual, exclaiming delightedly, ‘Oh ho ho, they are so
cute
!’

‘I know, I know!’ Luna said, raising the phone to give him a view of the entire shed. ‘Can you hear that?’ There was a little lamb baaing for its mother on the opposite side of the shed, and then another.

‘Aahhh!’ came Stefan’s voice. Small, cute animals were Stefan Lundgren’s kryptonite; he was helpless in their thrall. And they didn’t come any cuter than Shetland lambs.

‘And look at this little fellow over here,’ Luna said, walking to the pen where she and Malcolm had stood a few minutes previously. ‘I helped to birth him.’ She pointed the phone toward where he and the orphan lamb were contentedly suckling, adding proudly, ‘
Me
. I did that.’

To which Stefan’s voice jumped a full octave as he crooned, ‘Oh, look, look at his little tail!’

He found a way, after that, to clear his diary so he could come up the next day. And she loved him, loved him so much it hurt, as she watched him sit in the orphan pen, patiently bottle-feeding them, ignoring the formula dripping down onto his jacket and the sheep shit smeared across his jeans.

‘I think I could have been a farmer,’ he said happily, looking up at Luna, who was standing resting her elbows on the side of the pen, chin on palms.

On the downside, Stefan arriving early meant he overlapped with Dagmar, who wasn’t flying out till the following morning. Between Dagmar’s work and the demands of the lambing shed, they managed to avoid each other for most of the day, but Luna insisted that the three of them sit down for dinner together that evening.

The mood was slightly stilted in the kitchen as she served up a meal of Moroccan chicken and couscous. As Stefan and Dagmar faced off against each other across the table, Luna found herself straining to come up with topics to keep the conversation going, until it came to talking about the planned filming for the following week.

After some gentle prodding from Luna, Dagmar outlined the general plan for the shoot, which would involve both a male and a female model, in addition to Malcolm’s new lambs. Dagmar lapsed into Swedish as she was explaining the logistics of the shoot, and Luna’s comprehension was limited enough that much of what she was saying went over her head till Dagmar uttered the name Mika Salonen, her creative marketing friend. Stefan clearly knew him too.

He asked Dagmar something in Swedish – it sounded like he thought this Salonen was working in the US – to which Dagmar simply said he was coming back for this.

Luna looked between the two of them and Stefan explained, ‘Mika is an old friend of mine. Finnish. A, hmm, there’s an English term… is it jack of all trades? In the time I’ve known him, he’s been a rally driver, an ice hockey player. That’s how we met, but marketing is how he makes a living.’

‘You played hockey?’ Luna asked.

Stefan nodded. ‘Not as well as Mika, of course. Rally driving, on the other hand, there I give him a run for money.’ Dagmar rolled her eyes and Luna sensed there was a history there, but Stefan gave little more away. Not at the dinner table or later as he scrubbed her back in the tub.

‘So, when you say jack of all trades,’ Luna said, ‘do you mean and master of none?’

‘No,’ Stefan replied, squeezing water from the washcloth onto her neck. ‘He is well respected in his field. My father rates him, for sure.’

‘And Dagmar.’

Stefan grunted, whether from a lack of regard for Dagmar’s opinion or something else, Luna couldn’t tell. ‘But what’s he like, on a personal basis?’ she tried again shortly thereafter as she stood in the bath and Stefan wrapped her in a towel.

‘Very Finnish. He’s one of five brothers, each crazier than the last. Very competitive, very driven. Work hard, play hard, that sort of thing.’

‘Sounds like someone else I know,’ Luna smiled.

‘Oh no, the Salonens put me in the shade,’ Stefan demurred. ‘Well, maybe not Mika. He’s the baby of the family, so I have a chance against him.’ Rubbing the towel along her back and arms, he inhaled next to her damp nape. ‘Enough talk of Finns,’ he said, throwing the towel on the floor and pushing her down onto the bed. As Stefan crawled on top of her, Luna tensed, listening to the coils in the box spring squealing. How had she never noticed before how noisy this bed was?

Stefan positioned himself between her legs and pulled her to him, the bed creaking under their combined weight. Luna looked up at him in panic, widening her eyes, then motioning with them toward the floor beneath them. Dagmar’s bedroom.

‘We can’t,’ she whispered fiercely, watching as Stefan’s expression shifted from quizzical to exasperated. Rolling off her, he quickly stood and motioned for her to do the same, then pulled the mattress off the bed onto the floor.

‘Better?’ he enquired.

In response, Luna lifted her index finger to her lips, shaking her head slightly. There was no more than the floorboards and some joists separating them from the room below.

‘Is that a challenge, Miss Gregory?’ Stefan enquired silkily as he lay down on the mattress and held out his hands to her. ‘Because I can be very quiet. Can you, I wonder, when I make you come a few minutes from now?’

‘Shh,’ she hissed, descending into his arms and placing a hand over his mouth, struggling not to laugh. And when he moved against it, opening his mouth to speak again, she placed her other hand on his shaft, hard and waiting for her touch. ‘Can you?’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Even if I do this?’ She ran her fingertips lightly along the rim of his glans. ‘Or this?’ she added, manipulating the velveteen skin beneath it.

In response, Stefan arched his hips and emitted a soft ‘Mmm…’ till he caught Luna smiling down at him as if to say, not so quiet after all, eh? But any protest died on his lips as she continued stroking his penis, and began to rhythmically press her pubis against his thigh. He shuddered beneath her and she slid her other hand from his mouth to his jaw, bending down to kiss him, sucking his lower lip between her teeth.

Stefan rolled her onto her side and their kiss deepened, tongues circling each other, mouths angling for better access. As so often with him, it felt to Luna as if the outside world receded till all there was was his mouth against hers. And his rock hard thigh, moving against her sex even as his arms encircled her. And his cock, so stiff its skin felt tight under her fingers.

Stefan disengaged his mouth from hers, gasping with pleasure. ‘God, you are so good,’ he whispered ardently. And suddenly all she wanted was him in her, to show him just how good she was, how wet and swollen and
ready
for him. She wrapped her legs around him, lifting her knees till they were up and under his arms. So slick was her interior that he met almost no resistance as he slid into her. He inhaled sharply, struggling for control, his hips poised on the verge of slamming into hers.

Reaching his hand up to her nape, he grabbed her hair and pulled it, hard. ‘Tell me you love me,’ he demanded.

‘I love you.’

He was unsatisfied. ‘Tell me you belong to me.’

‘I belong to you,’ she repeated as he slid his other hand between them, seeking and finding her clitoris, capturing it between his fore and middle fingers, pressing down hard against her. Exposing her most sensitive place and shifting the angle of his thrust so his pubis rubbed directly against it. Luna arched her hips, feeling his hair and his skin brushing her clitoris, teasing it till the muscles around it tightened and released in anticipation.

Stefan pulled the hair at her nape again, forcing her head backward. Even in the darkness, she could see his mouth drawing back, his eyes widening. His fingers hard against her, his cock moving within her, her clitoris, just touching him. Close, so close…

They came together, at the exact same moment, shaking and arching and convulsing against each other. Luna whimpering and Stefan groaning, thin floorboards be damned. It had never happened quite this way before, the two of them climaxing simultaneously, and for some time afterward they lay and stared at each other in mutual amazement and satiety.

Stefan’s hand, however, remained twined in her nape, holding it tight. Sensing that he needed more from her, Luna reached her hand to his cheek and stroked it. ‘I belong to you,’ she reiterated, with feeling. And with that he drew her into his arms.

*

Luna lasted till mid-afternoon in the lambing shed the following day before her wheezing got the best of her. Heading back to the house to retrieve her inhaler, she entered the front door as silently as possible; the quid pro quo for Stefan coming up early that week was that he’d have to do some work.

She was surprised to hear his raised voice coming from the kitchen. ‘Let me be completely clear on this, Helen. I don’t support it and I will
not
recommend it to the Arborage board.’ Luna stopped in her tracks. He could only be talking to Helen Wellstone-Waverley, the Marchioness’s eldest daughter.

Hovering outside the kitchen door, which was slightly ajar, Luna could hear Helen’s distinctive, booming voice on the other end of the phone. She couldn’t make out the words, but the elder Wellstone sister was shouting, practically shrieking, at Stefan. She could just see his shoulders and the back of his neck, corded with tension. Uncomfortable with continuing to eavesdrop on their argument, Luna was about to go upstairs to the bedroom when Stefan cut Helen off.

‘Fine,’ he said curtly. ‘You do that.’ And pressed the disconnect button on his mobile, throwing it with a clatter onto the kitchen table.