Her Master's Servant (Lord and Master Book 2) (34 page)

Passing a pair of Tango-coloured women literally tearing each other’s extensions out over a ruby the size of a Cadbury’s mini-egg, Luna escaped into the garden in search of Karoline. Though what she would say to Stefan’s mother once she found her, she had no idea.

Outside, the sun was beginning to set in the almost deserted garden. In stark contrast to the mansion’s rather sterile interior, its exterior was lush with growth. A little too lush, in Luna’s opinion, accustomed as she was to Arborage’s rigorously maintained, manicured grounds. Someone had once put a lot of effort into planting perennials and roses in this garden, but now the entire place was overgrown, with rose bushes grown to the size of small trees, bristling with thorns and humming with bees and wasps. As she passed a disused fountain choked with weeds, Luna experienced another, inexplicable sense of déjà vu. She
knew
she’d never been here before, so why did this place feel so familiar?

Wandering under an arbour sagging under the weight of dense foliage, she heard partygoers spill out of the house and sighed. No respite out here.

‘Hello, Princesss.’

Florian Wellstone had been waiting for this opportunity to get her alone, judging from the eager expression on his face. Luna took a step backward and he raised an appeasing hand.

‘Please, give me a moment. I’ve wanted to talk to you for so long now, but it’s been imposssible to get to you.’

‘I can’t imagine what we have to say to each other,’ Luna said, cursing the faint tremble in her voice.

He heard it too, and smiled. ‘You know, we’re not ssso different, you and I. Both tied to Arborage, but at the mercy of forces we can’t control.’

Luna shook her head at him. ‘We are
nothing
alike.’

‘The… unpleasantness last winter. Deeply regrettable. But surely you must sssee that it is Augusta who is to blame for it. She tricked us both.’ He stepped toward her and Luna swiftly turned away, walking as fast as possible toward the opposite end of the arbour.
Why
did he have such power over her? Was it purely that his attack on her in January had taught her the hard lesson that she could be broken by a man who was stronger than her?

‘We should be working together,’ he was saying, rushing along behind her. ‘If you would just convince Stefan to meet with Viktor, he could be a valuable friend to the estate.’

A group of women were standing just outside the arbour, rooting through a plant pot. Realising belatedly how his pursuit of her might look, Florian attempted to take Luna’s arm, trying to make it appear more like a friendly stroll through the garden.

Luna felt his sweaty hand come to rest on her and froze. He was banking on her playing along, she realised. Not making a scene. He’d banked on her compliance all along, just like all the vulnerable young girls he’d abused over the years; as far as Florian was concerned, Luna was no different from them. She looked down at his hand on her arm, felt a torrent of pent-up rage coursing through her veins. And said, ‘If you don’t. Take your hand. Off my arm.’

His hand stayed where it was, so Luna quickly swivelled toward him, lifted her Swarovski crystal-clad foot, and kneed him sharply in the groin. Down Florian went like a stone, clutching his privates. Luna watched with gratified fascination as he rolled on the ground, his face going a putrid shade of green.

The women standing around the plant pot, her sisters from the Estuary, took in the scene before them and correctly diagnosed its cause. One of them, a pint-sized Kylie Minogue lookalike, marched over to Florian and gave him a kick.

‘That’s wah you get, you duh-ty ow perv!’ she cried, nodding to Luna, ‘You owight, dahlin?’

‘I’m fine, fine,’ Luna replied, a bubble of elated, hysterical laughter beginning to swell up inside her.

And then two security guards appeared in front of her.

Luna looked from one to the other. And shrugged. ‘I’ll get my coat, shall I?’

So, Luna’s star turn at her first and last Essex cocktail party ended with her being frog-marched away by the guards. Well, she thought, Stefan would understand. Hell, he’d applaud her. And his mother, who knew, maybe she’d see the humour in her gold digging future daughter-in-law being forcibly ejected from the property.

Rather than go through the house, where, Luna assumed, the sight of her unseemly expulsion might cast a pall on the party atmosphere, the guards herded her further into the garden, along an uneven gravel path punctuated by weeds and tufts of crabgrass. ‘Taking me out the back way, eh, boys?’ Luna observed drily, to complete silence from her escorts. Really, she felt quite giddy – God, she couldn’t wait to tell Caitlin she’d kneed Florian Wellstone in the goolies.

They walked for what felt like ages to the edge of what had been the garden, where it backed onto a hilly wooded area beyond. There was a gate leading to a small road, but when Luna veered toward it, one of the men grunted, ‘No, this way.’

The rose bushes here had completely outgrown their beds, encroaching on the path to the point where it was necessary to walk single file, the two men leading and Luna following. They reached a clearing where stood a small stucco outbuilding with a set of steps leading to it. The guards moved to either side of the steps, one of them motioning up them with a quick jerk of his head.

This… this didn’t feel right. Luna stopped in her tracks. ‘Look,’ she said, pulling her mobile out of her bag, ‘I’ll just phone my boyfriend, he’ll come get me, and I’ll be out of your—’

Suddenly, one of the men lunged for her, grasping her arm and twisting it, removing the phone from her hand. The other reached for her elbow, propelling her up the steps.

‘What the—!’ she cried, struggling against him. ‘Take your bloody hands off me!’

She stumbled slightly when they got to the top and the man hauled her up, then shoved her forward. To where Viktor Putinov was waiting for her inside the building, arms crossed over his broad chest.

‘You avoid me, Luna,’ he said in heavily accented English. ‘So I ask my men to bring you here, where we can speak alone.’

Luna opened her mouth to protest, but felt the stolid presence of his guards behind her, quickly scanned the woods outside and calculated that, even if she made a break for it, she was well out of screaming distance of anyone who might come to her aid. She looked into Viktor’s cold, emotionless eyes.

‘
Qu’est-ce que vous voulez
,’ she said icily.

Viktor nodded his approval of her choice of language, and henceforward the conversation took place entirely in French, in which he was fluent.

‘I would like you to deliver a message to your master,’ he said.

‘Master?’ Luna said sharply. ‘I have no master.’

‘Do you not?’ Viktor replied, walking toward her. ‘And yet, before you answered to Florian, and now you answer to the new lord of Arborage.’

‘I
answer
to
no one.
’

‘Or, do you just come with the house?’ A brief, cavernous rumble emanated from within him, the approximation of a laugh. He was within a few feet of her now, close enough for her to see the five o’clock shadow on his skull where his hair was shaved.

‘That morning last winter,’ he recalled, ‘when my friends and I were thrown out of the estate like so much garbage, I remember you, sitting outside the house, watching us drive away. Staring at me as if to say, “Get out. This is not your place.”’

Luna said nothing. She wasn’t going to argue with him.

‘I thought to myself, she reminds me of something, this one. It took me a while to realise. You’re like a dog I had when I was a boy. She had eyes just like yours. And the same… proprietary nature.’ He paused, smiling with relish at the comparison. ‘Half-wolf, this dog was. My father found her when she was a puppy and brought her home to our dacha. I remember my mother saying he was mad, that this bitch could never be trained, and sure enough, a few weeks after he brought her home she bit me in the ankle. She was guarding the house, you see, just like you, and she didn’t want me to go in.

‘So my father,’ Viktor went on, ‘who was a very smart man, he caught that bitch and put a chain around her neck, and tied her to the house. For ten days, he left her on the chain with no food. Until she learned what she was. And she did learn. Oh, she was still half wild – she’d rip the throat out of a stranger on command. But she knew who was master.’

He paused again, letting that sink in. Turning his head slightly, he seemed to notice his two guards for the first time. He barked a brief command to them in Russian and they retreated outside onto the steps. Catching the expression on Luna’s face, he nodded and confirmed, ‘Yes, they are
good
dogs.’

Eyes still resting upon her, he gestured toward the garden. ‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me, Luna, what do you think of my house?’

‘Not much,’ she replied honestly, to which he laughed, a full, hearty belly laugh this time.

‘I agree,’ he chuckled. ‘It is ugly. I accept no blame for that. My former wife chose the design, oversaw the building work herself. She had a passion for English things, my wife. At the time, I didn’t see the attraction. You English are so weak, dissolute… why worship the remnants of a dead empire? But she came over for a holiday fifteen years ago and while she was here she visited a historic home, fell in love with it, and decided she wanted to build one just like it.’

Luna’s eyes widened.

‘Yes,’ he congratulated her, ‘you see now, don’t you.’

She did see. Now she knew where her recurring sense of déjà vu that evening sprang from. This house, this Essex monstrosity, had taken its inspiration from Arborage. The rose garden, the lion statues, the grinning cherubs on the ceiling of the hall, all of it bastardised out of recognition from Arborage’s transcendent beauty.

‘Years later,’ Viktor recalled, ‘after I’d rid myself of my wife and the opportunity presented itself to see her favourite mansion, I was predisposed to dislike it. You can imagine my surprise when I found it to be everything she’d said it was, and more…’

‘And you think somehow that by duping Stefan’s mother into becoming involved with you,’ Luna enquired haughtily, ‘you will be welcome at Arborage?’

Another brief, unpleasant laugh. ‘No. I am a simple man. Too simple to play your complicated English games. I want to
buy
Arborage. That is the message I would like you to take to your master.’

‘It isn’t for sale!’

He made a guttural noise and flung his arms wide. ‘
Everything
in your country is for sale, Luna. It’s simply a matter of price.’

‘You are wasting your time,’ Luna said scornfully. ‘And mine.’

For just a second, his face betrayed a fleeting glimpse of the sulphuric rage underlying his bullying façade. Then he said derisively, ‘I don’t bargain with the master’s bitch. You just carry my message to him. While you’re at it, tell him I would like to buy the furnishings and… other things that go with the house too.’ His eyes ran over her with naked, acquisitive lust.

He began to move toward her and Luna backed away, straight into the two guards, who had magically reappeared at their master’s unspoken command. He issued a harsh order and they grabbed her arms, holding her in place.

‘You have much to learn, Luna. Let me show you what it means to be
my
bitch.’

Viktor Putinov moved implacably toward her, hands reaching for her. And Luna began to scream.

‘I’ve been so happy, Stefan. Happier than I thought it was possible to be.’

‘But I’ve felt that way too. It’s been the same for me.’

The dream was always the same. Luna was in danger, and he couldn’t get to her. The only thing that varied was how great the feeling of peril was. Sometimes it was just a series of tormented images – him searching for her, knowing that she needed him, but unable to find her. And sometimes it was worse; the very worst ones ended with him jolting awake, gasping and sweating.

At first he assumed it was his subconscious way of coping with her loss during those dark weeks after she left him in January. But the dreams didn’t stop when he carried her to his bed on the night of the
Remainers
party, or when he reunited with her on Shetland, or even when they became engaged.

Later, following their bleak audience with Luna’s grandmother, when his poor
flicka
revealed a glimpse of the hell her life descended into in the wake of her father’s death, Stefan began to fear that his dreams were manifestations of his own insecurity. The full truth of Luna’s past lay somewhere in the gaps between the words she said, he knew it, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that some critical occurrence, some vital clue about her, continued to elude him. That Luna
herself
eluded him.

But the night she stood before him in their bedroom at Arborage, her face adorably vexed, stamping her foot whilst proclaiming, ‘You’re
stuck
with me, right?’ he’d been certain his nightmares would stop, that the curse had finally been lifted. Only to wake drenched in sweat in the middle of the night, limbs thrashing, heart pounding, the sound of Luna’s screams echoing in his ears.

Turning in bed, he’d found her beside him, tucked up on her side with her fist pressed into her chin, her usual sleeping position. And smiled in spite of himself. She could sleep through Armageddon, his Luna; she devoted herself to it like one for whom slumber had once been an escape from grim reality. Oddly, in all the many, many nights he’d lain awake watching her, not once had he witnessed
her
dreaming. He’d been completely blindsided by the rush of pure, undiluted jealousy that consumed him when he watched Mika’s footage from the cliffside in Shetland; that Mika, not him, had lain inches away from the magical sight of Luna’s eyelids fluttering, her lips unconsciously pouting…

He’d lied to her, that January night when he stood with her in the Rose Temple, snow falling around them.

Luna told him what loving him was like for her, how it had changed her entire world. And in response he lied, said it was the same for him, when the truth was that he was doing everything he could to prevent that from happening, to stop his overwhelming love for her from taking over his life, turning him from the ambitious, driven man he was into… what? A happy man? A contented one?

Of course, now that he had given himself over to loving her, he frankly wondered why he had ever been so stupid as to resist. Loving Luna Gregory made every single facet of his existence better. It was just like she’d said, this love: it made colours look brighter, bad things seem less important and good things feel even better. It also made him outrageously happy. He caught himself smiling idiotically at random points in the day, thinking of something she’d said or done. Or tapping his foot impatiently in the lift to his apartment, willing it to move faster, get him home to her sooner. Or staring at her in the dead of night, watching her still, sleeping, serious face, thanking God that she was his.

Life was just…
easier
, now that he could pass all his major decisions through the lens of
what’s best for Luna? What’s best for us?
And as for her somehow making him less driven, less focused on work, nothing could be further from the truth. To the contrary, something about interacting with her day to day, some kind of chemical reaction he couldn’t explain, made him feel like an engine running at maximum efficiency. Like he was capable of anything he put his mind to
.

He wasn’t alone in this experience. Or at least, this was what he concluded during his final conversation with Augusta before she left Arborage, when it became clear to him that her feelings for Luna were deeper, more complicated than what an employer might feel for an employee. ‘She’s a powerful tool, Stefan,’ she said gravely. ‘Use her wisely.’

He couldn’t share Luna’s sadness that Augusta was gone, privately wishing that he could rid himself of the rest of her kin. Cousins or no, he was sick of the sight of the Wellstone family. Not just that sick monster Florian, but Helen and Isabelle too, with their completely unjustified sense of entitlement. He wanted to build something new and unfettered by the past at Arborage, now that it was his. Perversely, however, what his interactions with the Wellstones made him feel like doing most was locking the gates, barring them all, then dragging Luna up the stairs to their bedroom and ploughing her belly with his seed. Freaky, medieval stuff, primal instincts an enlightened Swede such as himself was embarrassed to admit to.

The fact that she’d have let him do it, that she’d happily wear his rope around her neck and submit herself to his tender abuses, well… all the more reason to rid himself of these ancestral encumbrances and devote himself to fucking his bride-to-be into submission.

How galling, then, that the Swedish side of his family was proving just as bloody difficult as the English side. First Christian and now his mother. His mother, who was frankly too old to be carrying on like a schoolgirl about this ‘boyfriend’ of hers, and who, if she wanted to preserve any kind of relationship with her son, had damned well better learn to treat Luna with respect.

He was driving along at a crawl on the M25, mentally calculating how long they’d have to stay at this party before they could leave, when Luna rang him. He put it on loudspeaker, but the connection was so bad he could hardly hear her.

‘Stefan, please hurry…’ he heard, followed by a garbled crackle.

‘Luna?’ he said. ‘Luna, what’s wrong?’

He was just about to hang up and dial her back when the line surged back to life just long enough for him to catch four words.

‘I need you
here
.’

Three times he punched her details into his phone after that. Three times the call failed to go through. Her voice, there was something in it. Not just Luna trapped at the party from hell without him. She sounded
scared
.

Stefan looked out at the sea of traffic in front of him, and down at his phone. And pulled the Land Rover onto the hard shoulder.

Ten white-knuckle minutes later, having broken every traffic code known to man in a high speed race through Essex, Stefan arrived at the party and knew immediately that his instincts were correct – something was seriously wrong. How else to interpret the fact that the house he’d come to was a bizarre, amusement park parody of Arborage?

He stalked through strangely deserted hallways, occasionally confronted by gangs of revellers lurching through the property, drunkenly clutching what appeared to be treasure maps. And security guards
everywhere
, doing little or nothing to contain the hoards. Eventually, he found his mother sitting in a glass conservatory with a coterie of acquaintances he recognised as her Swedish hangers-on. ‘
Liten prince
!’ she cried, a chorus of accompanying greetings rising up from her sycophants.

‘Where is Luna?’ Stefan demanded, ignoring the fleeting expression of annoyance that passed over his mother’s face and abruptly grasping her arm to drag her out of the conservatory.

Standing outside with her, he conducted a brief, unyielding interrogation, finally learning who their host for the evening was. Stefan silently cursed himself for not having asked more questions earlier, for assuming his mother’s paramour was some cockney spiv rather than the Russian degenerate who had dared to stage an orgy at Arborage last winter. Who’d sat in a chair in the library there, staring covetously into Luna’s eyes while a prostitute performed fellatio on him.

‘What have you done, Mother?’ he said, voice thick with reproof. And turned away from her speechless, outraged face to continue his search for Luna.

The man sitting on the path in the garden, still recovering from a knee to his groin, cowered in fear when he saw Stefan bearing down on him. ‘Please, no!’ Florian begged as Stefan grasped him by the lapels and dragged him up from the ground.

‘Where is she?’ Stefan gritted out. ‘You tell me where Luna is or so help me I’ll—’

‘They took ’er that way, luv,’ came a voice near his elbow. Stefan glanced down to see a tiny, very orange woman gesturing toward the far reaches of the garden. ‘Two fackin bouncahs took ’er that way.’

Stefan nodded his thanks to her, then returned his attention to Florian, lifting him up till his toes dangled above the gravel. ‘The next time I see you,’ he promised, ‘here, at Arborage, anywhere within fifty feet of Luna… I’ll kill you.’

With that, he gave Florian a final, vicious shake, and pitched him into the adjacent rose bed. Glancing toward the house, he saw a quartet of heavyset guards moving in his direction and immediately turned his back on them, heading off at pace into the overgrowth.

Now he knew: his recurring dreams hadn’t been just nightmares, projections of a troubled subconscious. They were premonitions. Luna was in danger, and he had put her there.

He heard two sounds, then. The first of the four security guards crashing through the garden, shoving startled partygoers out of their way in pursuit of him. And then, off ahead of him, of a woman screaming.
Luna
screaming.

He began to sprint, running as fast as he could, praying that somehow she could hear the single, silent thought he was sending her way.

Hold on, Luna. Hold on. I’m coming for you.

THE END