Deprivation- The Feast and the Famine

Chapter 26- Departure

Philomela descended from the carriage with a look of pure disdain. “What you are doing, Claudia, is against God and you will be punished.”

Ignoring the other woman, Claudia stepped up on the carriage steps and looked inside. Bennett reclined within the carriage, and she could see nothing in his eyes. He was not dressed to attend a wedding. Where had he been going then? It didn’t matter because he was here now. She had found him.

“You will both be hell-bound if I have to see to it myself. You disgust me brother. I am done with you and your whores!” Philomela said.

“Bennett,” Claudia said his name like a spell to bind him to her.

“Get in,” Bennett said. She didn’t like the look in his eyes, but she got in anyway. There was nothing he could do to her that was worse than not being with him. She sat down next to him and slid her arm through his. She lay her head against his hard bicep and took a breath of him in. “What are you doing, Claudia?”

For a moment, she didn’t even understand the question. It was quite evident to her what she was doing. She was running away with him. It was that or dying on the streets at this juncture. “I’m yours. I always was. I just got a little lost.”

“And if I don’t want you now?”

“You do,” Claudia said. She slid her hand up his leg.

He gripped her hand in a grasp so tight it hurt her fingers. “Everything we do together, Claudia, I could do with a whore.”

Perhaps this should have stung, but having briefly spent time thinking, Claudia still retained the skill. She fully believed he was lashing out because she had hurt him, and it was his right to do so. “Then I am your whore, but I am yours. Will you send me away? You promised that if I came, you would not let me down.”

Bennett was silent, but his grip on her fingers loosened, and her hand fell back to his lap. His fingers were still rough when they lifted her chin, and his mouth was still unkind when it kissed hers. She kissed him in return.

Slowly, his embrace softened, and he allowed her to curl against him. When their lips parted, she draped herself across his lap.

“We can’t stay here,” Bennett said. “Maybe if you’d just told them, but you’ve gone and run off…I don’t think you understand the situation you are in.”

“As long as I’m with you, it doesn’t matter.”

“I have a country estate,” Bennett said. His voice was wrong in a way she couldn’t identify. The emotions underneath weren’t what she expected. It was too stern and serious.

“Take me,” Claudia said. She meant it in more ways than one, and that was a language he understood. Perhaps that was what he needed to drive the distance in his eyes away. She would go willingly to his estate. In fact, she could not understand why she had ever resisted. First, she needed to remind him she was the same woman he’d offered to take away in the first place.

“Not in here,” he said, and roughly he pushed her up. She followed him from the carriage into Philomela’s stables. The last time she was there…Claudia unconsciously rubbed her shoulder. Bennett still didn’t seem happy, but she could make him happy.

Once they were inside, he didn’t wait, and she didn’t ask him to. This was not a moment of love, and she hadn’t expected it to be. If he believed his claim to her diminished, she needed to allow him to renew it. By the time they left, her hair and her dress had hay in them, and both of them smelled of horses.

This time, he helped her into the carriage, and she was able to watch her dark prince blot out the light as he entered after her. The carriage began to move. Claudia, not yet fully recovered from her brief belief that she had lost him, twined her arms around his neck.

Moving away from the life she always expected was exhilarating. For now, she still knew the physical streets she drove on but in her heart, she was on a new road filled with unknown terrors and joys. It might be the same city, but it was a new dimension. Though she understood none of its rules, the mere fact it was not the same as the stiff voiceless existence of before was all she required.

Within a few minutes, Claudia had crept onto his lap and was attempting once again to show him how accommodating his whore could be.

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