Chapter 68

Even after their lips parted, Lea could not steady her breathing. Her face had gone pale. She disliked being around people. Standing before nobles or the wealthy was worse still. She felt at ease in the shadows behind a beautiful wedding hall.

Owen knew that perfectly well. So his words were not an offer to treat her as a proper wife but a roundabout threat, telling her that if she wanted to grant Garrick Beverfield’s request, she had better brace herself for the thing she dreaded most. Or perhaps it was a more refined form of mockery.

Her palms were damp. Should she refuse. Lea bowed her head and wrestled with herself. Refusing was easy. Saying no felt certain to keep things exactly as they were, as though nothing had happened. Living in this vast, suffocating manor, doing only what Owen told her, and disappearing when the time came. That future promised no happiness, but it promised a twisted kind of peace. Above all, Lea genuinely had no reason to help Garrick Beverfield. Setting aside what he had done, Lea was skeptical of the very idea of herself showing goodwill to anyone.

She was not a good person. No, she could not be a good person. Having spent her whole life haunted by the fear that she, Lea Fell, would someday do something wicked, she had lived by avoiding people and running from them. What meaning was there in someone like her sacrificing her peace to help Garrick Beverfield. It seemed truly pointless.

But the urgency in Garrick’s eyes kept coming back to her. The same eyes as herself, when she could not find the money for Ben’s funeral……

‘Maybe I feel this way because he looks like Ben.’

Lea sighed, giving herself a reasonably sensible explanation for her own feelings. They looked too much alike. That was why she found it hard to turn away. She glanced at Owen, who was looking down at her as though waiting for her answer, or her surrender, and replied with a heavy heart.

“All right.”

“What?”

At the question, Lea answered slowly once more.

“I’ll do what you say…… Only I don’t know how to behave properly, so I might cause you trouble. Even so, even so I’ll try……”

It was something Lea said with her own measure of resolve. She still had no desire to go to an opera or a banquet, but she thought of the servants whispering while Owen went to the summer banquet alone.

A duchess who does nothing.

As they said, quite some time had passed since the marriage and she had nothing she did and nothing she knew. Even setting aside the question of being a noble, she understood that every married couple had duties to fulfill as a spouse. She had become Owen’s wife whether she liked it or not, but the only thing Lea did as a wife was share his bed. She did nothing else, so in the servants’ eyes she might look less like a wife and more like a kept mistress in all but name.

Of course it was Owen himself who had told her to do nothing, but perhaps something at the summer banquet had displeased him. So Lea, as she always did, answered obediently in an effort to keep Owen’s mood.

“Oh.”

But Owen’s face went cold again, as though something else had displeased him.

“You want to save that man’s father badly enough to risk putting me in a foul mood?”

“That’s not what I meant……”

“It’s fine. I suppose filth naturally feels a kinship with filth.”

At Owen’s renewed sarcasm, Lea’s face stiffened with bewilderment. She could not begin to understand why he was in a bad mood again when she had agreed to do as he asked. But seeing Lea’s stiffened expression seemed to put Owen in an even worse mood, and he continued with his characteristic sneer.

“But is that man really as much like your dead little brother as you say?”

“What?”

“Just curious. How much could they possibly look alike, for you to act this way when you’ve been as quiet as a sick dog all this time. It’s not as if I can dig up your brother’s bones and compare them to the man.”

“……”

The more Owen’s taunting continued, the more Lea lost her words. Owen would leave her tied up like a dog and then occasionally behave in ways she could not understand. Each time, she chose to stay silent and accept it, but right now, for some reason, a faint feeling that resembled irritation rose in her.

“Yes.”

Lea opened her mouth at the end of a long sigh. Her tone had a slight edge to it that was unlike her usual self.

“You’re right. Just…… you’re right about everything, Owen.”

“……”

“What else would I say……”

It was clearly a remark meant to end the conversation. Owen fell silent at those words, laced with exhaustion and a faint irritation, but he kept looking at her with his brow still furrowed. Lea averted her eyes with a tired expression. She had never expected understanding or sympathy from Owen. He had agreed to her request about Garrick, and that was enough. There was nothing to be gained by staying here any longer.

“Then let’s do something to put me in a good mood tonight, before my mood goes to hell.”

But before Lea could leave the room, Owen caught her by the waist and kissed her. Lea did not refuse this time either. Tongues met and the kiss continued, deep as before but rougher. When their lips parted her body turned. What had been facing the door now faced the interior of the room. Owen undressed Lea with practiced ease, the lighter indoor clothes she wore coming off quickly. The last of the fabric slipped to the floor and Lea, bare now, went rigid.

“Are we doing it h, here?”

“Were we ever a refined enough couple to care about the location.”

They had already been together in the study, so being tense about Owen’s room was rather late in the day. Lea decided to say nothing more at Owen’s answer, but she was startled when Owen laid her down not on the bed or the sofa but on the floor.

“Ah……!”

The thick carpet meant it was not painful or uncomfortable. It was changed and cleaned every day, so it was not particularly dirty either. But the embarrassment of lying on the floor for this made Lea push herself up and open her mouth to suggest moving to the bed, only for Owen to stop her lips again. The words caught in her throat and came out as a m*an against the mouth sucking at her lips. Owen kissed her and lifted her onto his thigh. It put them in a position like a couple sharing a kiss outdoors.

While kissing her, Owen’s hands moved over Lea’s body without hesitation. His tongue soon crept downward toward her throat. The position made it difficult to keep her balance, so Lea’s struggling had little effect.

“What are you doing……!”

Lea shuddered. Owen had touched her many times before, but never like this. The way he licked her neck like an animal and slowly moved his hands between her br*asts and down to her navel was too indulgent. The palm that slid between her thighs spread wide and moved slowly, pressing from fingertips to full palm against bare skin. It felt like something crawling. The large hand moved toward the space between her legs. The hand rubbing her p*ssy worked its fingertips along the l*bia, parted the folds, and circled near her cl*t. His mouth had found her n*pple.

Having the most sensitive places stimulated at once made Lea reach toward Owen’s face without thinking. His face was pushed back and the n*pple that had been in his mouth slipped free. The warm, wet sensation gone, the exposed n*pple made the feeling stranger still.

But the moment her palm touched Owen’s lips, a wet sensation dragged across it. Lea shuddered and tried to pull her hand away, but the middle finger working between her legs pushed into her entrance and she grabbed Owen’s shoulder without meaning to.

Owen withdrew the finger he had put inside and went back to slowly rubbing near her cl*t, whispering, “My wife has a taste for men who sell themselves.”

She had no such taste.

“So I thought I’d try behaving like one.”

And there was no such man who behaved like this.

Lea forgot the situation for a moment and felt a wave of absurdity. It was not only men who hungered for desire. Owen had been calling Garrick a wh*re and all manner of things, but Lea had actually seen real male pr*stitutes in her life. The slums always had plenty of them. There, not only women but men sold their looks to survive, to other men or to women alike.

Lea briefly compared the soft-featured men in her memory, who smiled with their eyes and listened pleasantly to whatever a customer said or did, with the Owen in front of her.

……If Owen were actually a pr*stitute, Lea did not think she would want to pay for someone like him. His looks were finer than any man she had seen, certainly, but considering the attitude he had shown her up to this point, Owen was not the type of man she would want to spend money to be with. Setting aside everything that had passed between them in the past, that is. She was the kind of person who valued a man’s inner nature more than his appearance.

The problem was that Lea did not keep that thought inside her head. She said it aloud.

“M, male pr*stitutes don’t act like that……”

“What?”

The movement stopped. Owen looked up at Lea. She looked back at those eyes and instinctively understood it would be better not to say the next part, but she failed, as she sometimes did, to take the words back.

“Th, they don’t act as arrogant as you……”