A Scandal in Silk

# Chapter: The Bridal Chamber

The dress was wrong.

Not the dress itself — the dress was exquisite, ivory silk with a bodice of Chantilly lace that had taken three seamstresses a fortnight to complete. What was wrong was that Wren was standing in it alone in her father's house in Berkeley Square at half past ten in the morning, and Sebastian was supposed to be at the church in Mayfair, and instead he was standing in her doorway looking like a man who had ridden through hell and arrived annoyed about the weather.

"You cannot be here," Wren said, turning from the mirror. Her copper curls were pinned up in a loose arrangement that her maid had spent an hour on and would spend another hour correcting. "It's bad luck."

"I don't believe in luck." He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch was unnecessarily precise. "I believe in evidence, and the evidence is that you sent me a note this morning that said, and I quote, *I hope you're thinking about last night, because I am*."

"That was not an invitation to break protocol."

"Everything you do is an invitation. That's the problem." He crossed the room in four strides and stood behind her, looking at her reflection in the mirror. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, and she watched his fingers press into the silk. His jaw was tight. "You look like that, and you expect me to sit in a pew for an hour pretending I'm not thinking about what's under this dress?"

"I expect you to behave like a civilized man until the vicar says the words."

"I am going to be perfectly civilized." His voice dropped. "After."

She met his eyes in the mirror. "Sebastian. My father is downstairs. My mother is downstairs. There are fourteen guests in the drawing room having sherry."

"Then you'd better be quiet."

The silence between them lasted three heartbeats. Then Wren turned to face him, and the look she gave him was the same one she'd given him across the dinner table two months ago when she'd touched Castellan's arm for the third time — a look that said *I dare you* and *I want you* in equal measure.

"On your knees," Sebastian said.

She went down. The silk pooled around her on the carpet, and she reached up and undid his trousers with fingers that were steadier than they had any right to be. His cock was already hard, straining against the fabric, and when she freed it she could see the faint pulse at the base — the evidence of his restraint, the cost of his composure.

She took him in her mouth without preamble. He tasted of salt and skin and the faintest trace of soap, and he was thick enough that she had to open her jaw wide to take him properly. She worked the head first, her tongue circling, then took him deeper — pressing forward until she felt him against the back of her throat and her eyes watered.

His hand came to the back of her head, not pushing, just resting there, his fingers threaded through the curls her maid had so carefully arranged. Several pins clattered to the floor. Neither of them acknowledged it.

"That's it," he said, his voice low and rough. "Take it."

She pulled back and licked the length of him, base to tip, then took him deep again. She could feel him tensing — the muscles in his thighs, the tightening of his abdomen — and she knew from two months of learning his body that he was close. She cupped his balls with one hand and squeezed gently, and the sound he made was barely a sound at all, just a sharp exhale through his nose.

"Stop," he said.

She didn't.

"Wren." His grip tightened in her hair. "Stop, or this ends the way I want it to, not the way you're going to want it."

She pulled back and looked up at him, her lips swollen and wet, a thin string of saliva connecting her mouth to the head of his cock. "And how do I want it to end?"

He pulled her to her feet and turned her around to face the mirror again. His hands went to the bodice of her gown, and for one terrible, magnificent moment she thought he was going to tear it — but instead he found the hidden hooks along the side and undid them with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been undressing her for two months. The bodice loosened. He pulled it down over her shoulders, then tugged the whole dress forward until her breasts were bare above the crumpled silk.

"Beautiful," he murmured, and the word sounded almost involuntary, dragged out of him against his will.

He wrapped his hand around his cock and stroked — twice, three times — and then he came. Not inside her, not in her mouth, but across her chest. The first stripe hit her collarbone, hot and thick, and the second landed across the swell of her left breast, and the third across the right. He groaned through it, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, and she watched in the mirror as his spend marked her skin in glistening white trails.

"You're going to stand in that church," he said, still breathing hard, "with my cum on your breasts under that dress, and every breath you take is going to remind you who you belong to."

Wren looked at their reflection — her ruined hair, her exposed chest, his mark on her skin — and felt a heat bloom between her legs that had nothing to do with the morning sun through the curtains.

"You're a bastard," she said, almost fondly.

"And in forty minutes, your husband." He straightened, tucked himself back into his trousers, and began re-fastening the hooks of her gown with maddening competence. "I suggest you repair your hair. You look like you've been thoroughly compromised."

"You did that on purpose."

"I did." He pressed his lips to the curve of her neck, just below her ear. "I want you wet and distracted and thinking about me when you walk down that aisle. I want you thinking about what I'm going to do to you tonight when I finally have you in a bed that's legally ours."

He left without looking back. Wren stood in front of the mirror for a full minute, her pulse hammering, the silk warm and damp against her skin. Then she rang for her maid and sat very still while the woman repinned her hair, and every breath she drew carried the faint, salt-sharp scent of Sebastian on her skin.

---

The church was full of light and white flowers and people she had known her entire life. Her father walked her down the aisle with his hand trembling slightly under hers — moved, she supposed, or perhaps just old. She held her bouquet of ivory roses and tried to look serene, and the scent rose from her chest with every breath, invisible and indecent.

Sebastian stood at the altar in a dark coat that fit him like a second skin, and his blue eyes tracked her approach with an intensity that had nothing pious about it.

Her father reached the front, performed his role — the words, the hand-off, the small tearful nod — and the vicar opened his book.

Sebastian leaned forward, just slightly, and said in a voice that was below the threshold of the congregation but above the threshold of the vicar's collar: "Eyes on me, little slut."

The vicar's hand stuttered on the page.

Wren looked at Sebastian and felt the heat of his spend on her skin like a brand, and smiled at him with the precise, devastating sweetness of a woman who had already won.

"I will," she said, and meant it in every sense the words allowed.