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𓇢𓆸
Rupert was in desperate need of two things: a cigarette and a hard, mindless fuck.
One of those he could manage easily enough with a quick dip into his pocket and the flick of his lighter, but the other required seeking out Sarah – who he’d been deliberately avoiding for the past hour, lest she drag him into some high-maintence bullshit when she was nothing more than a passing lay – and explaining to her where the fuck he’d disappeared to all night before he’d even be able to get on with what he wanted from her.
Indeed, the cigarette would suffice for now.
He’s about two drags in and finally settling into the night’s quiet when he hears the back door go. He considers making a move to the other stone corner of the Priory so as to not be disturbed, but when Taggie O’Hara slips out from the threshold, he finds himself surprisingly thinking against it.
They’d only met a few months prior, but she’d already made an impression on him as one of the less overbearing women in Rutshire. A gentle soul and a kind heart - disregarding the fact he was only slightly afraid of her after she’d shown her teeth when they first met on a tennis court.
She spots him and those wide eyes of her brighten a little. Christ, she really was sweet; but so fucking out of bounds, even for a letch like him.
“Oh, hi Rupert,” she says, almost apologetically. “I didn’t know anyone else was out here.”
Rupert smiles around his cigarette, the embers glowing bright in the dark. “Surprise.”
Instead of scurrying away, she only makes her way over and leans against the stone wall beside him. For a moment, she simply closes her eyes and breathes in the cool air, and Rupert, being the rake he is, can't help his eyes dragging across the soft swell of her breasts as they rise and fall beneath her cute little t-shirt.
Fuck, maybe the cigarette really wouldn’t suffice.
“It’s so loud in there,” she says, scrunching her nose. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”
Rupert exhales a slow stream of smoke and watches it curl, acutely aware that he’s enjoying the warmth of her from beside him when with most people he’d have told them to bugger off and leave him be by now. “A perfectly understandable reason to flee. Most of the people in there aren't saying anything worth hearing anyway.”
Taggie glances up at him, those killer eyes of hers flashing in the paling night; were these the eyes that launch’d a thousand ships? Or whatever the saying was.
“What about you? I thought you thrived at these things.”
He takes another long drag, the smoke burning his throat. “Hiding from Sarah.”
Taggie’s nose crinkles again in that unconsciously adorable way of hers. It’s a look that hits him in the same way it had when she’d burst onto his tennis court and screamed at him for being an abhorrent brute after catching him and Sarah mid-point in a game far more illicit than doubles.
“But don’t you like her? Isn’t that why you two were….?”
Rupert lets out a quiet laugh under his breath; good to know Taggie remembered her too then. “Liking has very little to do with it, darling.”
Tapping the ash from his cigarette, he watches the confusion flicker across her face and he can’t help himself from barking out another laugh. Taggie seemed to always process things so earnestly it was almost painful. He wonders what else he could say to make her tick.
“Sometimes,” he adds lazily, “a man simply prefers to handle things himself. Far less bureaucracy involved.”
Taggie trips over the syllables, the word tangling stubbornly on her tongue. "Burea.. cra–cy?"
"B-u-r-e-a-u-c-r-a-c-y. Bureaucracy, darling,” he enunciates. “It’s the mountain of tedious talk and 'where have you been's' one has to climb just to get what they’re actually after. It’s the red tape of the ego– exhausting, really."
“What do you mean?”
Rupert glances down at her. He’d expected that gorgeous blush of hers once she’d figured out what he’d been hinting at, but all he finds is genuine bewilderment.
“Well,” he adds lightly, “if a man finds himself in want of a bit of relief, shall we say, sometimes– he doesn’t want to go through all the….maintenance beforehand. So he finds other ways.”
Taggie tilts her head, “With another woman?”
Rupert snorts. Surely he wasn’t going to have to spell it out for her, adorably innocent as she may be.
“No, darling.”
He lifts his cigarette again.
“On his own. With his hands.”
Taggie frowns slightly, brow furrowing as if she’s trying to follow the logic of that statement.
And so Rupert waits. And waits.
He waits for the penny to drop, for some flicker of scandalized recognition to hit those wide, guileless eyes. He expects a blush, maybe a sharp intake of breath, or perhaps for her to turn away in a sudden fit of maidenly embarrassment. But realisation never seems to hit, and so he gets nothing from her but genuine mystification.
“…You do know what I’m referring to, right?”
Taggie shifts, looking faintly uncomfortable now. “I—” She hesitates. “I don’t… think so?”
For a moment he genuinely wonders if she’s teasing him– it would be a first he must say, he’d always been the man to tease and prod at others for a reaction instead of the other way around. But even by just looking at her now, he knows that the expression on her face is entirely sincere. It dawns on him then, that she truly has no idea what he’s talking about. The poor duck.
He takes another long drag on the cigarette, buying himself time.
Then exhaling slowly, he specifies, carefully. “Touching yourself.”
Taggie’s nose wrinkles again. “Touching yourself like… as in a massage?”
“Yes. Sort of like a massage.”
She nods thoughtfully, clearly trying to understand.
“But… not everyone is very good at massages,” she points out.
Rupert chokes on a laugh.
Good lord.
He runs a hand briefly over his mouth, then leans his head back against the wall and looks at the night sky as if it might provide him some answers on how to go about this. It was a laughable oversight on his part, thinking he’d first have to explain this to his own bloody son, Marcus, before he’d have to with anyone else– yet alone Taggie, of all people.
For Christ’s sake, he knew Declan and Maud were Irish catholic, but surely they’d given up some time to explain to their little girl what it was to touch oneself? God knew Maud had spent enough time running around indulging in the pleasures of the flesh to know all about it.
“Touching yourself between your legs, Tag.”
Her eyes widen up at him. God, this girl.
“Christ,” he mutters. “You do know what sex is, don’t you?”
Taggie looks positively scandalized, “Of course I know what that is, Rupert!”
He gestures vaguely with his cigarette, “And you know what body parts it tends to involve?”
He knows he’s being a bit of a patronising twat, but he could never be sure – especially after she’d just revealed she didn’t even know what masturbation was.
“Yes!” she says defensively.
“Well then. One can achieve… a similar sort of feeling on their own.”
Smoke curls as Taggie stares at him. He could see the meaning beginning to dawn on her face in slow increments, as if watching sunrise. Her mouth parts into a small, soft ‘o’ of pure shock. The blush creeps into her cheeks; a tidal wave of velvet crimson that seeps from the collar of her t-shirt right up to the roots of her hair.
It seemed rather strange to him how fascinated he had become with her expressions, collecting them one by one and pressing them into memory like one would with a flower between the pages of a book. When he sees the penny finally drop, it lands with the dull, unmistakable thud of lead rather than the normal gentle clink.
“You mean…” she whispers, her voice hitching. “To yourself? On purpose?”
“Ideally on purpose, yes,” Rupert murmurs, his voice dropping an octave to try cover up the inkling of dry amusement in his voice. “It’s generally considered the best way to ensure results.”
He takes another drag of his cigarette – the action now a ritualistic lifeline rather than something of enjoyment. Jarringly, he realises how she’s made it twenty years without even stumbling upon it by accident. The poor duck must be walking around with a level of internal pressure that would make a steam engine explode.
“But that’s…” Taggie fumbles for words, her hands twisting nervously in the fabric of her skirt. “Isn’t that… wrong? I mean, surely one waits for… for someone else?”
Rupert huffs out another laugh. Because she really was just an angel wasn’t she? he wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that sex was purely for making babies. “Good God, Taggie. If we all waited for someone else to do the heavy lifting every time we felt a bit of a spark, the world would be a much grumpier place. It’s a biological safety valve, darling. A bit of self-maintenance to keep the engine from seizing up.”
He leans a fraction closer, unsure as to why he’s enjoying pressing her buttons so much.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never… felt it? A sort of restless ache between your thighs? A hot flush even? Surely, you’ve explored that sort of thing?”
Taggie looks up at him like she wants the floor to open up and swallow her whole. Then, she looks down at her shoes, her eyelashes casting long, trembling shadows over her flushed skin. “I… I suppose I’ve felt… that. Sometimes. But usually I just go for a long walk with Gertrude. Or bake something.”
“Bake something,” Rupert repeats, doing little to hide the smirk playing on his lips. He imagines her furiously kneading dough to quell a libido she didn’t even recognize. It was absurd and incredibly endearing. And, he realises with a slow intake of breath, it was also becoming incredibly distracting.
In the moonlight, the curve of her throat looks impossibly pale and soft. He thinks about those small, capable hands of hers—the ones he’d seen her use to pluck thyme from their priory herb garden, or tend to everyone else’s needs—and his mind takes a traitorously vivid detour into watching them doing exactly what he’d just described.
Taggie’s cheeks were a raging scarlett now, as if she’d read his thoughts. God, he hoped not.
“And this– touching yourself feels like… sex?”
“Well,” he thinks, his gaze unhelpfully dropping to her plush lips. “It can get you to similar points that sex gets people to. Think of it like a string being pulled tighter and tighter until it finally snaps and everything goes soft.”
Jesus, he could feel the familiar pull in his own groin – the mental image of Taggie discovering that 'snap' behind closed doors was doing little to calm his own restless ache. The thought of those wide eyes glazing over, of that polite little mouth falling open in a silent ‘O’ of shock as she finally realized what all the fuss was about... it was an agonizingly erotic picture.
Christ, he was not getting a hard-on right now; he couldn’t be.
It seemed this little educational seminar had them both discovering a first.
“Does it take long?” she asks, her voice trembling.
“As long or as short as you like, angel,” he says, though his wit was feeling a bit frayed around the edges. Fuck, he really did need to find Sarah, now. “But I suspect someone as... bottled up as you might find it quite a revelation.”
Rupert watches the smoke from his cigarette drift toward the moon, his pulse thrumming faster than the nicotine should account for.
"How?"
Fucking hell, she was going to kill him with this bloody game of twenty questions.
For his own health, he doesn't look at her immediately, afraid that if he catches those searching eyes, he’ll do something ruinous and take matters into his own hands. He takes a final, steadying drag and crushes the ember out against the stone wall.
"How," he repeats, his voice dropping along with the remaining thread of his morals. "Well, darling, you first find a moment when you’re alone."
Taggie stays remarkably still, as if she were a deer frozen in the headlights of his Aston.
"You go to your room, you lock the door, and you make yourself comfortable.”
He can still feel the heat radiating off her. He looks away again, focusing on the dark silhouette of the trees, because he can't look at her mouth right now - he was already losing his cool, a rarity for him.
"And then," he continues, "you use your fingers. Two of them, usually. You find a little bud of nerves right at the top, where everything meets. It’s one of the most sensitive parts of you, Taggie. Even if you’ve never noticed it when you’re... baking."
He hears her catch her breath – a tiny, hitched sound that makes his pulse thud rhythmically in his ears. Christ, he needs to pull himself together.
"You touch it," he says, his thumb tracing the empty air where his cigarette used to be. "Gently at first. Then you find a rhythm and you keep going until you find ways that make you feel good, even when it starts to feel... a bit much. Especially when it feels like a bit much."
Taggie’s voice is a mere thimble of sound. "And then what happens?"
If he closes his eyes, he can almost see it: Taggie in her room with her hands between her legs. It’s a vision that makes his trousers feel two sizes too small; a reminder that he is, as ever, a rake of the highest order.
"Then you come.”
"What... what is that?" She looks so desperately earnest that he feels a rare pang of something that might be guilt, though he quickly dismisses it as indigestion.
"It’s the finish, darling," he explains. "But I’ll let you discover what that feels like on your own."
He risks a glance down at her. Her lips are parted, her chest heaving slightly. She looks utterly overwhelmed, and so fucking gorgeous.
"Oh," she breathes. "It sounds... exhausting."
"It’s the best kind of exhaustion there is," Rupert murmurs, finally pushing himself off the stone wall. He can’t stay here a second longer. If he does, he won’t be sending her off to her room to handle it herself; he’ll be volunteering to show her himself.
And because he can’t help himself, he reaches out, his hand hovering for a fraction of a second near her cheek before he thinks better of it and merely tucks a stray hair behind her ear. When his fingers graze her skin, he can feel the crimson flush on her skin despite the January chill.
"You should head inside, angel,” he murmurs. “Before you catch a cold, or I’m forced to explain the mechanics of a ménage à trois, which I really haven't the stamina for tonight."
“But– where are you going?”
“To find Sarah,” he says, already starting toward the door. “I’ve suddenly remembered that she has a few qualities I’ve been unfairly neglecting which may be worth the maintenance beforehand.”
𓇢
He’s a proper bastard for it, really – fucking the woman who knew exactly what she was doing while his mind remained stubbornly snagged on the girl who knew nothing at all.
He’s a bad man for wishing the golden curls threaded through his fingers are auburn; he’s a bad man for thinking about Taggie with her hand between her legs; he’s a bad man for fucking harder when he thinks of Taggie making herself come for the first time; and he’s a bad man for wishing his fingers were playing with Taggie’s clit instead of Sarah’s.
And when he comes, he’s a terrible man for nearly moaning her name. But luckily for the both of them, Sarah had always known he was a rotter.
𓇢
Winter turns into spring. And with it, the frost in the bluebell woods melts and makes way to a sprouting blue. Alongside it, the Rutshire social calendar begins to thaw, blooming into a relentless succession of hunts, charity auctions, and endless parties.
Rupert finds himself attending an absurd number of them, something he’d never had much of a fuss for before. Yes, staying at Penscombe alone makes him heavy in a way that’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. But the truth, which he still doesn’t truly understand yet, is that he’s developed a habit of scanning every room for a head of auburn curls and a white catering apron.
Taggie’s business is thriving. It seems everyone wants the O’Hara girl to provide their canapés and vol-au-vent’s – probably because her cooking is divine, but mostly, Rupert suspects, because she’s the only person in the area who hasn't yet learned how to be cynical.
He sees her at Lady Baddigham's spring fundraiser. She’s across the marquee, balancing a tray of smoked salmon blinis with a concentration that makes his heart do an irritating little flip. He makes a move toward her, his mind already sharpening a witty remark to puncture that earnest bubble of hers, but the moment her eyes catch his, she doesn't brighten like she once did – she stills.
Then with the speed of a skittish foal she pivots and vanishes into the kitchen tent.
It’s been months since their little conversation against the stone wall, yet he thinks of it so often he can recall it as if it were yesterday. Every time he catches her eye, she turns a shade of pink that would put a peony to shame and finds an urgent reason to be elsewhere. It’s infuriating, but he also thinks it’s incredibly suggestive. He can’t help but wonder if her avoidance is fueled by the memory of his voice in the dark, or perhaps by the fact that she actually took his advice and now can't look at the man who gave it.
To bridge the gap, he’s taken to cultivating Declan. It isn’t hard, especially after they’d established a newfound respect for one another after his Valentines day attempt to crucify him on live television; Declan is a man of simple pleasures – shitting on Tony Baddigham, drink, and poetry. The first two are easy enough to keep up with.
Indeed, Rupert finds himself dropping by the Priory under the guise of "discussing what a wanker Tony is" far more often than is strictly necessary for a man who’d never paid him much mind in the first place.
"Rupert! Good to see you," Declan bellows one Tuesday afternoon, slapping him on the back. "You staying for another drink?"
"Just passing through, Dec," Rupert lies smoothly, his eyes already drifting toward the kitchen. "Thought I’d see how you are. How things are at Corinium."
He’s led inside, and there Taggie is at the scrubbed pine table, her sleeves rolled up with wrists deep in a bowl of what looks like scone mix. She looks up, sees him, and nearly knocks over a jar of clotted cream. And isn’t she just a gem?
"Oh! Hi Rupert," she squeaks. "I... I have to... the oven!"
The oven is quite clearly off, but she doesn't wait for him to point that out. She’s out the back door before he can even tell her how different (and pretty – though he’s smart enough to know what to say – and what not to – with her father standing right there) she looks with her hair down.
"She’s a bit high-strung lately, our Tag," Declan notes, oblivious, as he pours two glasses of whiskey. "Working too hard, I expect."
"I expect so," Rupert murmurs, leaning back. "Too much heat in the kitchen, perhaps."
He stays for the whiskey, and he stays for the talk of Declan’s hard time at Corinium, but he leaves without a single word from her. It’s a stalemate, he supposes.
Next time.
𓇢
(He’s taken to getting himself off more often than not with his own hands, finding the practiced grace of his usual conquests jarringly hollow compared to the ghost of her blush. In the echoing silence of Penscombe, a vivid memory of plush lips curved into an “O" makes him come more than any warm body he could summon with a phone call. He’s become a captive to his own imagination, tracing the silhouette of flour-dusted hands while cursing the internal pressure that threatens his own composure. Anything else feels like a cheap imitation of a revelation he’s yet to actually witness – a solitary penance for a man who finally found something he couldn't simply take.)
𓇢
He’s gone to London for a week for some purgatorial Parliamentary inquiry. It’s even more of a bum than it ever used to be—and it’s not just because Paul Stratton is tagging along for this particular jaunt.
Spring moves slower when she’s not around; he hasn’t grasped why yet, especially when it never used to be this much of an issue before.
And when he gets back, uncharacteristically springy in his step to pop down to the Priory to see how Dec is doing—nothing changes. Taggie still bolts or avoids his eye whenever he’s in the room.
He eventually beats a retreat with a leaden tread, the earlier buoyancy vitiated.
Hm.
𓇢
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
The irony isn’t lost on him that he’s spent the last few months actively seeking her out and failing, only for her to stumble on her own accord into his presence. He doesn't move or bother turning his head – he already knows it’s Taggie, he just continues to watch the orange ember of his cigarette burn against the gathering dusk.
“Rupert…” Her voice is a soft vibration in the quiet air.
“It’s alright – you don’t need to explain. Though, a bit of a shame, as I do quite enjoy your company.”
He tries to keep his tone light, but there’s a strange and rare sediment of sadness seeping into his words. He’d actually missed her. Not just the idea of her, or the way she looked in an apron, but the genuine, unvarnished her. He wonders, with a cynical twist of his stomach, if he’s finally hit the point in his life where the passing fancies no longer satisfy – if he’s looking for something else in a girl who seems determined to run the other way. Perhaps this was all he was destined for.
There’s a long pause filled with only the rustle of spring leaves, it’s such a long moment of silence that he thinks she may have even left without a word, but then he hears her move. She steps up beside him, leaning against the same stone wall. It’s a perfect parallel to their chilled night in January– a ghost of the moment that had haunted his sleep for months.
He takes a drag, focusing on the way the smoke curls into the cooling air, opaline and fleeting. Like him and her.
“Can I try some of that?” Her voice is so hushed it could pass as the smoke from his cigarette.
It makes him laugh; a few months pass between them and the first proper words she chooses to say to him are if she can have some of his cig. Christ, this girl.
He turns to look at her then, his eyebrows arched in genuine amusement. “I’m not a very good influence on you, am I, darling?”
Taggie blushes, the crimson tide he’d missed so thoroughly rising instantly, proving she’s caught the unspoken reference to their previous conversation. She doesn't look away, though; her chin sets with the same O'Hara stubbornness he now knows she must get from Declan.
Without a word, he holds the cigarette out, and she takes it.
“Tell me how to do it?” she asks, looking at the filtered end.
The request echoes far too many of his thoughts– thoughts of her on her knees or on her back, looking up at him as she gives him all of her. “Slowly,” he murmurs. “Draw it into your mouth first. Then take a breath of air with it. Don’t rush, or you’ll choke.”
He watches her lips – those plush, guileless lips – curve slightly around the end of his cigarette. He watches her throat move as she follows his directions, taking the smoke in. She exhales a neat, gray plume without so much as a flicker of a cough.
“Good girl,” he murmurs.
His eyes stay locked on her mouth, and his mind provides an image of those same lips wrapped around his cock, her eyes looking up at him with that same earnest focus while she learns how to take him.
He really ought to contact Sarah again, or Nathalie, or someone who wasn’t her. Maybe old age has turned him pious but he really can’t be thinking these things right next to a Priory.
Taggie hands the cigarette back, her fingers trembling slightly. “I did what you told me,” she says then, successfully shoving the last thread of his focus off the edge of the world. “Last time we were here. Y’know the thing…”
He swallows hard, unsure if knowing about her experience of “the thing” was a good idea – it would only give his mind more to torture him with. “And?”
“It was… nice.”
He can’t help the smirk that graces his lips; “nice” certainly wasn’t the word he thought she’d use.
“Just nice?”
She nods, her gaze dropping to her shoes. He inhales again, choosing not to dwell on how her lips had just been pressed against the same end of his cigarette.
“Did you come?”
He knows the question is blunt, stripping away the spring air and the pretense, but she’d been the one to bring up the topic first. He was no poet, not like Declan; he certainly wouldn’t be getting through this conversation with euphemisms.
Taggie’s blush darkens as she shakes her head slowly, the auburn in her hair catching the fading light. “I don’t think so.”
Rupert takes another drag, his heart thudding a heavy beat against his ribs. “You poor duck,” he says softly, his gaze lingering on the curve of her neck.
“I’m sorry I avoided you,” she whispers, finally looking up. Her eyes wide, swimming with a mixture of fear and a burgeoning, terrifying bravery. “I just… I wanted to ask you something, and every time I saw you, I got embarrassed for even thinking of it.”
“Well, I’m here for any questions, Tag. I'm a font of dubious wisdom.”
Taggie takes a shaky breath, her hands twisting in the fabric of her flowery skirt. She looks at him, truly looks at him, with a raw honesty that makes him feel like the biggest rotter in Rutshire.
“Would you show me?”
For a moment, he forgets how to breathe – in fact it manifests itself in the very embarrassing form of choking on his own cigarette smoke.
But yes, he’d show her. God, he’d show her everything and more.
“Christ, Taggie.”
For the first time in a very long time he’s rendered utterly speechless. He’s spent his life orchestrated by the pursuit of pleasure; he’s rarely surprised by anything any more, yet here was a girl in a flowery skirt, offering him everything in her hands.
But it’s as if it disappears as quick as it comes, her courage begins to evaporate like the smoke from his cig. She visibly wilts––her shoulders hunching as she begins to pull back, her hands flying to her face as if to physically shove the words back into her mouth. Nonono, don’t do that– give her everything. Let me give you everything.
“I— I’m sorry,” she stammers, her voice cracking. “That was… that was a weird thing to say. I don’t know why I… please, just forget I said anything. I’m so sorry, Rupert, I’ll just go back inside and—”
His hand is out before he can even think to stop it. “Taggie, darling. Please.”
He’s clearly not above begging anymore. Not when it comes to her.
Her eyes shine with the threat of tears when she looks back at him. He searches her eyes, trying to find even a trace of the games he’s so used to playing with other women. But there’s no strategy here or hidden agenda. Just a girl who trusts him far more than any man in his position deserves; the trust is as arousing as it is daunting.
“Is that really something you’d want?” he asks. “From me?”
He emphasizes the “me” as a final warning. Because he is a rake, a rotter, a man who takes and takes and takes and crushes things in his calloused hands. He’s all wrong for the likes of her.
Taggie swallows, her throat working in a delicate line that he wants to trace with his tongue. She nods – a small, jerky movement that carries the weight of a landslide.
“Yes.”
He stubs his cig out against the stone wall, crushing the ember until it’s nothing but a black smudge. A full-stop on the end of his death sentence.
He nods his head toward the dark silhouette of the house. “Now?”
Taggie blushes, but she doesn’t shrink. “Well,” she says, her voice gaining a tiny bit in volume, “it’s a party, everyone is busy doing their own thing. They wouldn't notice if we were gone for a bit.”
She pauses, her eyelashes fluttering, “I could lock the door?”
Fucking hell, the surge of heat that floods to his cock makes his vision blur for a fraction of a second. Sweet and innocent Taggie O’Hara planning the logistics of their tryst? Christ, he’s a bad man, a terrible man, really, but he’s about three seconds away from proving it by pushing her up against this wall and fucking his way into her untouched cunt.
He pushes himself off the wall and offers her a gentle smile that he hopes covers up how hungry he feels – he doesn’t want to scare her off; not now, not when she’s already offered him such a gift.
“Okay, angel,” he murmurs, gesturing toward the door. “Lead the way.”
𓇢
It occurs to Rupert that he’s never seen anything as beautiful as Taggie O’Hara. Women like Aphrodite or Nefertiti would pale in comparison to the stunner that lies in front of him. He thinks to ring up the historians and tell them that they’ve got it all wrong – that the real beauty was here and for his eyes only.
She’s in only her knickers, a white frilly thing with a bow and as cute as she is – the rest of her lies bare in front of him. She’s all soft curves and pale, freckled flesh, and all he can think of is just how badly he wants to touch and touch and touch; like a boy in the centre of a toy store not allowed to play.
He’d made it clear on the way up that there was to be no touching Tag, understand?
Did he regret saying that with her like this in front of him now? Yes.
But was it also for his own sanity? Yes.
But it was also because he was just doing her a favour – they weren’t having sex, she hadn’t offered that part of her to him, and so he wouldn’t take it – just for her, he thinks against his usual practice of taking and taking and taking.
So he settles himself against the chair in the corner just for looking. And nothing more than that, no matter how badly his cock ached for her.
Christ, what had he gotten himself into?
“Is this what you do when you’re alone, then?” he asks. “You take off all your clothes?”
She nods at him, her fingers fluttering nervously against the cotton of her bedding. “Most of the time, yes. You said—you told me to get comfortable.”
“That I did, angel, that I did.” He’s not doing very well at this, he thinks, his hands gripping the arms of the chair hard so as to not lunge across the small space into the warmth of her. “And your knickers… you leave those on when you do this?”
Taggie hesitates, her gaze flickering to the door she just locked, then back to him. The silence stretches, taut as a piano wire.
“...No,” she whispers.
He watches the way the lamplight catches the fine, downy hair on her arms. Thinks of how beautiful she looks and how lucky he is to even be sitting here; Christ, he’d become sentimental with age.
“Are you nervous about showing yourself to me, Taggie?”
It’s a stupid question, because of course she would be; she’d never done this properly to herself – yet in front of another man. And especially in front of a man like him.
“A little.”
“I promise you, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” He means it, and she must know he means it if this is going to work between them. Nervous he could work with; but reluctant and unwilling, that is something he wouldn’t work with.
“No, I want to,” she says, her chin lifting. “I’m just—I’ve never shown anyone before.”
Lucky, lucky him.
“Darling, I promise I won’t be disappointed. I’m already anything but.”
He shifts in the chair, the movement tight and restricted by the narrow cut of his trousers. The fabric strains over his erection which Taggie’s eyes drop instinctively to. Even from here he can see her pupils dilate until her eyes are almost entirely black. She knows. Good. She sees exactly what she’s doing to him.
She thumbs the elastic of her knickers then, without warning. Just slides them down her hips and kicks them away until she’s laying entirely bare before him with a shy glint in her eye.
The word fuck doesn’t even make it past his teeth; it’s just a sharp inhale that catches in the back of his throat.
He’d expected beauty, but this is something else entirely. Between the soft curve of her hips, she is perfectly, startlingly smooth. He hadn't expected her to be shaved, but seeing her like this has him dangerously close to leaving his spot and crawling over to her just to get a closer look. She’s already wet; the pink, plush folds of her glistening, a honeyed sheen of arousal that catches the light and makes his vision swim.
A low moan breaks from his throat at the sight of her – it’s unadulterated want, and he couldn't have suppressed it even if his life depended on it.
“Is it… is it okay?” she asks softly.
Fuck yes. It’s okay. But it’s also really not fucking okay that he has to sit here and stay here when she’s looking like that. Once again, what the fuck had he gotten himself into?
“Okay?” Rupert manages to choke out, his eyes not able to take in enough of her. “Taggie, it’s… it’s– Christ you’re a marvel, angel.”
He leans forward, his elbows resting on his knees in a pitiful and desperate attempt to get a closer look at her. He wants to sink his face into her and let her take pleasure from him, in whatever way she needs it – he’d give her everything.
“Come here, angel,” he murmurs, his voice vibrating with a hunger he can no longer hide. “Come a bit closer so I can see you.”
She shifts a bit further down the bed, propping herself up on her elbows and widening her legs further apart.
“Show me,” he rasps then. “Let me see how you do it.”
𓇢
The first time Taggie comes goes like this:
Rupert watches. He watches those fingers – the ones that pluck thyme and knead bread – tremble as they finally find the slick, pink heart of her. Touching and touching and touching. It’s an agonizing torture to stay in this chair, to be the observer and not the participant. Especially when he sees the way her skin flushes, a blooming heat that starts at her chest and races toward her thighs, and he realizes he is witnessing a miracle of the most depraved sort.
He’s seen a thousand women come, but he’s never seen a woman discover herself. Not quite like this.
She’s clumsy at first, her touch light and fumbling, but the longer he goes on watching, the more confident she gets – her hands translating into a desperate, seeking friction finally taking what she needs from herself. He also realises as her confidence grows that he’d been speaking out loud; murmurs of perfect girl and so pretty like this, falling from his lips the way broken moans fall from hers.
“That’s it,” he rasps, his voice a serrated edge. “Find that little bud, angel. Whatever makes you feel good, hm?”
Taggie’s eyes are wide, locked on his as she follows his command. She’s wet—sopping—and the sight of her own fingers working against those plush folds is the lewdest thing he’s ever seen. Her breath is coming in short hitches – her chest heaving as she finally finds the rhythm he’d described all that time ago by the stone wall. She’s no longer looking at the door or the lamp; she’s only looking at himhimhim – And God only knows how he’s a glutton for her gaze.
“Is that it?” he asks, leaning so far forward his elbows dig into his knees, his heart thudding against his ribs like a trapped bird. “Is that where it feels nice, darling?”
“Yes,” she gasps, her strokes getting faster, more desperate as the friction takes hold. Her hips begin to hitch and her head falls back against the pillow as her face contorts in a beautiful, pained sort of ecstasy. “It—it feels... more than nice now.”
“Christ, Tag,” he groans, his own hand twitching toward his fly. He’s the teacher, the guide, the rotter who brought her here—and he’s never been more jealous of a pair of hands in his life.
He’d once wondered how an apple could be worth the fall of man, but looking at her like this, he finally understands why Eve would trade paradise for a single, ruinous bite.
“It… it didn’t feel like this last time,” she confesses, her voice small and breathy.
“Maybe you like to be watched, Tag,” he says, his head cocking slightly. “Do you? Do you like me seeing you do this? Seeing how beautiful and wet you are?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I like it because it’s you.”
“And do you like seeing what that does to me?” He lets his hand slide down, gripping himself through the fabric of his trousers and squeezing slowly so she can see the way he winces with the need of it. “Do you like seeing how hard my cock gets just because you’re touching yourself, huh?”
Her eyes fix on him; whimpers turn to moans and her movements become borderline frantic, more desperate.
“Close your eyes for a moment, darling,” he instructs softly. “Imagine things that make you feel good. Don’t think about the room or the party downstairs. Just imagine someone is doing this for you. Imagine someone’s hands are on you, someone’s mouth…”
He watches her eyelids flutter shut, her chest heaving as she follows his voice.
“Can I know?” he asks, his voice barely a thread of sound. “What is it you’re imagining, angel?”
“You,” she gasps, her eyes remaining closed. “I– I’m imagining you.”
His head thumps back against the headrest of the chair with a heavy thud, his eyes squeezing shut as he grapples with the sheer idea of what she’s just said. He’s never felt like this for anyone before.
And because her eyes are closed, she misses how his fingers tremble when fumbling with the buttons of his fly, finallyfinally slipping his hand inside his trousers and groaning in sheer relief as his skin finally meets his cock.
“I’m going to touch myself too, darling,” he rasps then, his voice thick with a need he can no longer mask. “Is that okay? If I touch myself while I watch you?”
“Yes,” she cries out, her pace increasing and body trembling as if she were on the verge of a landslide. “Please, Rupert.”
“Jesus the mouth on you, Tag.”
Her eyes flutter open to take him in then– the hand worrying at his cock and the state he must be in; his gaze burns into hers through heavy-lids.
Taggie’s back stiffens, her toes curling into the floral fabric of the bed; a high, thin moan breaking from her throat in a sound of need that cuts right through him.
“Are you going to come, darling?” Rupert coos, his own pace desperate with it. “Are you? Is it happening now, Taggie?”
She can only nod, her head tossing back, her eyes glazing over as she loses the battle with her own body. Fucking hell.
“Good,” he moans. “Good fucking girl. I want you to. I want to see it so bad, baby. Please, Tag.”
He watches, mesmerized and completely undone, as she comes for the first time. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and not for the first time that night, he finds himself jealous of the hands that dealt it.
“That’s it, Taggie...Chri– Christ,” he murmurs, his own release hitting him only a second later. He jerks in the chair, his eyes snapping shut as he spills over his own hand.
When he opens his eyes again, and finds the gentle smile on her face directed at him, he knows he will return to this well till it runs dry; he will have her like this again and again – and both of them will be able to do little to resist it.
He’ll drink from her until there’s nothing left, but he knows the truth: a man like him doesn’t get to keep a girl like her.
This is all they’ll ever have.
𓇢
(The study is thick with cigar smoke and the loose thread of an idea; they’d chosen a name, Venturer—a new franchise ambition, the gamble of a new pitch and a plan to throw Tony out on his ass once and for all. Taggie enters at some point carrying a tray of drinks and small bites to keep them satiated. Rupert tracks the line of her throat as she sets the tray down, the silver rattling ever so slightly against the mahogany. He’s supposed to be looking at the sheets on the table, at the death warrant they’re signing for Tony’s career, but his eyes are fixed on the way her skirt brushes against her knees, and the way her lashes flit over eyes, her lips….
She smiles at him at one point, and it’s the same one from the bedroom; the one that says she knows exactly what he’s thinking and isn't shy of the hunger behind his teeth. It’s all he needs.)
𓇢
“Will you let me watch again, angel?”
It’s murmured in the quiet moment after the glasses have been cleared and he’d followed her to the kitchen, Declan and Freddie already outside having another smoke without him after they’d realised his head had been too busy in another place to be of any use.
(Rupert, what'd you reckon? d’you think we’ll be a good enough showing for Mother Goose by December?
Well, I can’t speak for the two of you, but I’m told I always put on a rather spectacular showing.)
She doesn’t look up from her place at the counter when he asks, but he sees the way her shoulders rise and fall and the little breath she lets out when he steps a bit closer.
“Go to your room,” he tells her then. “I’ll be up there in a minute. They’re busy having a smoke; they won’t notice we’ve gone.”
She leaves not a moment later with the ghost of a smile on her lips. He lasts about sixty seconds before he’s following her up the stairs too.
𓇢
It goes on like this.
A cycle of public masks and private undoings. At parties, he stands in corners with a scotch, counting the seconds she spends talking to other men, waiting for the moment they can finally be alone again and he can keep her for himself. At meetings, while the future of television is decided in clouds of smoke, he thinks of the cotton of her knickers and how killer she looks when she’s staring right at him. They revolve around one another like this, never truly together in the eyes of the world, but never truly apart either.
Sometimes she’s the needy one, tipsy at a party where she’s finally not the one catering and sliding up beside him to murmur in his ear that she misses his eyes on her; the way he looks when he’s coming - for her.
“I like it when you’re there. Please?”
“It’s been ages and it’s not the same when I'm on my own.”
“I like it when you see me come. I like seeing what it does to you.”
The time between each request grows shorter, the line between her public life and her life in bed laid bare for him blurring until it’s a translucent smudge. Every encounter is a frantic reset - moans of I missed you, darling and I want you like this all the time spilling from his lips as he spills over his hand watching her take what she’s been wanting—what she needs to fully and finally relax.
Each time is a desperate attempt to stitch each other back together again before he has to return her to the cold reality of being everyone else’s; something which gets harder and harder with time.
𓇢
The vernal bloom of Spring eventually surrenders to the honeyed weight of Summer. Rupert drinks more, sweats more, and fucks more, and he still sees Taggie whenever he can. As the days grow longer, her skirt hemlines grow shorter, teasing him through the humid and sticky evenings of a late Priory Venturer meeting.
She’s got a boyfriend now—Sebastian, he thinks his name is. She assures him it’s just for appearances – a way to keep daddy’s prying eyes off her frequent disappearances. Rupert plays the same game, keeping a new woman called Cameron on his arm – a shield to stave off Declan’s suspicion the closer he gets to Taggie (a black eye well deserved for an entirely different reason, if not for a misunderstood pap-shot, had already presented his opinions on them as a pair loud and clear); but it’s all white noise. No one else matters. No one else makes him feel – makes him come, the way Taggie does.
They’ve started doing their thing, far more often than they really should be. There isn’t a name for what they do behind closed doors, all he knows is they’re always craving it. Desperate to see one another get off when the day has been long and the looks between them even longer. He still doesn’t touch her – afraid that if he does he won’t stop – just keeps to the same chair and watches her find release.
Still, he can’t help the frequent visits from the green eyed monster when Seb’s got his fucking hands on her waist; or his lips pressed against her cheek. He tells her as much when he has her laid in front of him again – he punishes her for it, unfair as it is; tells her she can’t come till he says so. Till she’s weeping up at him begging him to let her come pretty pleasepleaseplease, Rupert, let me come – I’m only yours, really–
The days are longer now, and he’s not sure how much longer he can keep to this.
𓇢
She’s a tease this girl of his. Gone was the shy girl who once hadn’t known how to use her hands, as he watches the same ones trail a deliberate line up her thigh from her seat beside him in the car. Christ, he was tired, so tired, but never for this – never for her.
“Tag.”
“Hm?” She doesn’t look at him, her gaze fixed out the window at the blurred hedgerows as they get closer and closer to the Priory and further away from a long day of campaigning.
“Stop.”
“Stop, what?”
“That,” he snaps, gesturing blindly toward her lap. “We’re not in a locked room for fucks sake.”
“I’m tired of locked rooms, Rupert,” she sighs, swinging her legs up and planting her heels firmly on the dashboard. The movement sends her skirt retreating toward her hips, revealing a dizzying expanse of pale thigh and the soft, shadowed promise of what he knew laid underneath.
“Christ, you’re a fucking tease. I thought you understood our situation.”
“I do.” And before he can protest, she leans across the center console, her hands landing heavy and warm on his lap. This fucking girl.
He feels the air leave his lungs in a pained huff. “Tag, please. You know what I said about this. Hands off.”
She doesn’t pull away immediately much to both his dismay and delight. Instead, fingers curling slightly into the fabric of his trousers – her gentle touches a brand through the wool. Then, with a theatrical and adorable little pout, she retreats, sinking back into the passenger seat but keeping her legs defiantly high.
“I just don’t understand it,” she mutters, looking like a disgruntled angel. “Why won’t you touch me? Or let me touch you? You’ve seen it all anyway. You’ve watched me... y’know.”
“You know why,” he says, as tries to keep his focus on maneuvering the car instead of her fucking legs.
“Not really.”
“Because it’ll be harder for us to stop if we go further,” he says. “If we start that, Taggie, I won’t be able to just... sit in a chair and watch anymore. Mind you sit across from you at a bloody Venturer meeting and not go nuts; it’s hard enough as it is.”
“And what?” she challenges, her voice small but sharp. “Are you planning on stopping this any time soon?”
Well she’d caught him there, hadn’t she? He doesn’t really have an answer—because the truth is a terrifying no, which he can’t tell her right now. He’s an addict, and she’s the only fix he wants; but it was going to kill him by overdose at some point.
Silently, he steers the car into a narrow, overgrown lay-by, the engine cutting out and leaving the cabin ringing with a heavy silence. He turns in his seat to find her still pouting, staring out at the darkening trees and he can’t help feeling just a little guilty.
“Tag, will you look at me?”
“Why should I look at you,” she murmurs to the glass, “if you won’t even touch me?”
So he reaches out, his self-imposed exile crumbling as he hooks a finger under her chin and turns her head, his thumb finding the plush, trembling curve of her lower lip. It’s the first time he’s touched her like this, unhumaning him and only proving his point as to why he cannot let it get any further.
“These lips are killer, y’know,” he murmurs, gaze fixed on her mouth. “I think of them all the time. When I’m supposed to be concentrating in Parliament…. or during meetings, when I’m listening to some bore go on about whatever – all I can see is you and these pretty lips.”
She doesn't say anything, but he spots it when her breath hitches and her pupils swallow the hazel of her eyes.
“If I touch you,” he asks then, his thumb tracing the seam of her lips, “will you stop sulking?”
A small, triumphant smile tugs at the corners of her mouth; maybe he’ll be damned if he touches her, but he for sure as hell knows he’d be damned to a living hellfire without her smile. “I might.”
“Hm.”
He leans across the gearstick not a moment later, his hand sliding from her chin to cup the back of her neck, pressing his lips to hers in what will be both the biggest damnation and mercy of his life. The reality of her is a tectonic shift; her lips tasting of cheap chapstick and a lingering sweetness of the tea she’d had earlier, but beneath it all, and certainly his favourite flavour, was something uniquely Taggie.
He feels the low hum start in his chest before he can stop it, his tongue tracing the seam he’d just been admiring until she opens for him with a breathless sound of surprise.
If Rupert was a man drowning, Taggie was the tide pulling him further out. She reaches for him, her arms winding around his neck and pulling him toward the other—her side of the car—the cramped space of his Aston a minefield of leather and chrome which she doesn’t seem to mind, her fingers only diving into the hair at the nape of his neck and tugging him closer until his chest crushes against the soft swell of her breasts he’d seen so many times.
“Taggie, darling,” he manages against her lips, the words thick and clumsy.
She begins peppering light, dizzying kisses along the corner of his mouth, trailing them across his cheek, along his jaw, around his ear…“Hm?” she murmurs against his skin.
He snaps his eyes shut; Christ, she made it difficult to think. “No sex,” he murmurs out, before he’s chasing her lips again, desperate to kiss her once more.
“Okay,” she breathes against his lips. “No sex.”
𓇢
They’d failed at no sex. Because that was definitely where it was headed. Light kisses had turned to neck kisses, neck kisses had turned to hands trailing further than they needed, touchiness had led to some heavy petting and pawing, which had then promptly led to him losing his patience and lowering her car seat, crawling over the console and settling between the cramped space of the dashboard and her thighs as she laid against the leather.
He’d followed her down till his large frame crowded her own small one – until the air between them was nothing but shared heat and messy kisses.
Christ, she’s so soft, he thinks as he trails his hands over the warmed skin under her t-shirt, skin he’d only ever seen from his chair in the corner and now got to touch.
“You’re so soft, darling,” he repeats, only this time out loud for her.
“I’m softer under my skirt,” she breathes through needy kisses. Hitching her hips up further against his cock and making him groan louder.
“Yeah?” he murmurs, sliding his hand down past her waist and fiddling with the hem of her skirt, finally losing the battle of wills with himself (it was never a fair fight anyway) and moving his hand further beneath the fabric; what he gets there instead of the cotton knickers he’d expected, is just heat and wet.
Christ, she was going to give him an early death. Or, perhaps more suitably, a petite morte.
“Fucking hell, Tag,” he groans. “No knickers?”
Taggie’s head bumps back against the reclined leather seat. “I couldn’t—S’too hot, I didn’t want them on. Please, Rupert… I need—I need more of you.”
“Yeah—fuck—okay, angel,” he rasps, the last of his noble intentions incinerating in the heat radiating off her. “I’ll give you more of me. Christ.”
He’s never trembled like this before – not for something like sex which he’d always found as effortless as breathing. The thought flickers unbidden through his mind as he fumbles with the buckle of his belt, dragging both trousers and pants down just far enough to free his cock. Taggie makes him feel utterly unrecognizable to himself. The carefully curated veneer of Rupert Campbell-Black, a constructed man of cool indifference which he’d perfected over decades being stripped away to nothing but the simple, starving man that he was for her.
She loops her arms around his neck again, drawing him back down and peppering his face with wandering, messy kisses as he tries to reclaim her mouth.
“You’ll go slow?” she breathes against his mouth, her voice still as soft as it was by the stone wall all those months ago.
“Of course, angel. Any speed you want.”
He meant it, too. He wanted nothing more than to make her happy – a sentiment too terrifyingly saccharine to pair the way his hips rutted uselessly and feverishly against the silk of her thigh.
Impatience finally won out – a frail thing anyway – he shifts, hastily bunching her skirt out of the way to clear his view, needing to see the way they fit together. And Christ, what a sight they make like this - it’s almost as pretty as she is.
He sinks into her with agonizing slowness, trying his very best to ignore the urge to just take. Fuck, he was already terrified and feeling like an utter beast ripping her in two with just how devastatingly tight she was. Her pained, tiny whimpers, didn’t make him feel any better either – his heart only doing slow, painful rolls in his chest each time.
“S’big—Rupert.”
She lets out another sharp, wounded little whine so he leans forward, pressing a tender kiss to the bridge of her nose that he hopes tells her he’s sorry and it’ll be better soon as he nudges a fraction deeper.
“I know, sweetheart. I know,” he coos. “But you can take it. Can’t you, darling? My girl, fuck—my brave girl.”
The word mine sits heavy on his tongue – nearly as heavy as his heart feels whenever he realises how doomed they really were for anything more than cars in overgrown laybys and locked doors in an ancient Priory.
He bites it back, though, swallowing how he really feels back for fear of overwhelming her. For taking this too far.
Christ, he’d already done that though hadn’t he?
He’s not sure how long he spends pressing gentle kisses around her face and along her neck, he just knows that one moment she’s tensed and still and the next her hands are at his back and pulling him further to her. Pained whines turn into whimpers and gasps, hands trailing his back get needier, and soon she’s telling to please, move.
“Better then, angel?” he murmurs, the word catching in a throat constricted by pure, unadulterated lus— love?
Fuck, when had it become love?
He’s never been in love before.
Taggie tilts her pelvis up against him, a subtle, searching movement that drags her heat further along his cock and in doing so, shatters the very last of his composure. A low sound escapes him—something far more affected than the man he pretends to be in the light of day.
He starts slow – only shallow and tentative thrusts and hands gripping the leather of the seat on either side of her head so hard the material groans. He’s trying to be the gentleman, trying to remember she’s precious and she’s only a virgin, but the way she’s arching beneath him – the way her fingers are digging into his shoulders, urging him closer – is making it impossible. The cramped car gets hotter, the windows already fogging up and sealing them away from the rest of the world.
He wishes he could keep her. Oh, what he’d do to keep her.
“Rupert… please,” she whimpers, her voice a sweet friction against his nerves.
“Please what, darling, hm?” He pulls back, almost entirely before sliding home again, harder this time. The sensation is everything already and he still needs to be closer. “Tell me what you need.”
“More?” her legs hook around his waist, urging him to go faster.
“Whatever you want, angel.”
He reaches down, hand sliding between their heat-flushed bodies to find her, his thumb beginning to worry at her clit. He doesn’t—can’t—take his eyes off her face as she arches off the leather, a broken, high-pitched moan spilling from her lips.
He’s ruined for anyone else; he knows it now with a terrifying certainty as her eyes roll back and her mouth falls open, her hazel gaze disappearing as she begins to unravel under the weight of him. The Aston shifts on its springs with every desperate thrust and kiss he tries to reach, the gearstick a forgotten niggle in his side as he focuses entirely on the sensation of being buried deep inside her.
“That’s it, Tag,” he rasps, his voice a jagged wreck. “Christ, you’re everything y’know?”
He buries his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling her deeply—scents of her, soft skin, and sex. His teeth graze her shoulder, biting back the words he can't afford to say, the truths that would surely, and unfairly, tether her to him forever.
When she comes with a moan of his name, he follows her not long after, unable to keep the oh fuck, Taggie trapped behind his teeth as he spills inside of her for the first time.
Later when he’s still lying on top of her chest and she’s got her hands in his hair – he’ll revel in the selfish triumph of it. He is the first; he’s the only one who has her like this. And hopefully the only one who ever will.
𓇢
Rupert drops Taggie off at the Priory when it’s fully dark outside. Parts from her with a gentle kiss which he half-hopes gets through all the things he isn’t saying - see you later, I’ll miss you, I think I’m in love with you and I don’t know what to do
He gives the dogs an extra-long pat when he returns to Penscombe only ten minutes later, sitting down with them on their favourite rug in the sitting room, and accidentally falling asleep beside Beaver and Blue in a way that makes the house feel only a little less large – a little less lonely.
𓇢
The next Venturer meeting, and it’s a big one, is held at Penscombe, and because it’s his house, his rules – he bans Taggie from touching a single kitchen utensil, including the kettle. For once, anyone who wants something to eat or drink, can go up and get it themselves - he’s given them his full permission.
Of course, Taggie protests at first, says she doesn’t mind and oh, but you’re all working so hard, it’s not a problem, Rupert, really.
But he sits her down before the rest of the bunch file in and settle down. Reminds her no touching anything unless it was for herself only, or there would be consequences; she listens this time but he’s unsure if it’s really his doing or just the fact that Beaver, the bloody flirt, jumps up on her lap and gives her a few fat cheek licks; utterly besotted with each other in the way he’s utterly besotted with her. A win is a win if she’s sat down, he supposes.
It all goes very well for a while, till at some point in the midst of Cameron highlighting Tony’s increase of surveillance and Bas letting everyone know that Bar Sinister was always a place they could start hosting at, he realises Taggie’s left the room; he seeks her out in the kitchen and catches her red handed with a tray full of different cups of tea. She offers him a sheepish smile, explaining that Daddy had asked for a quick brew and it felt churlish not to make a round for everyone else.
𓇢
(He eats her out against the counter of the kitchen, tells her between mouthfuls of her delicious cunt to stay quiet or that they’d all hear what he was doing to her. It’s only when she’s pushing his head down with two fingers full of him and he’s brought her to the brink of orgasm three times that he then pulls away and tells her only good girls get to come, not girls who didn’t listen. He leaves her trembling against the side, letting her know she’ll have to wait until next time to get what she wants. He feels only slightly iniquitous when he re-enters the sitting room and returns Declan’s smile with the taste of his daughter’s cunt still resting on his lips.)
𓇢
He makes it up to Taggie after the meeting, far too desperate for her to deny the way she paws at him any longer. He fucks her in his bed not too much later, he isn’t gentle with her, but the aftermath leaves them both so breathless and sleepy that they cuddle up and enjoy the warmth of the each other for a bit; it’s enough to nearly make him forget that she doesn’t live at Penscombe, and that she has to go home.
“How about we take the dogs out for a walk tomorrow? I can swing by the Priory first thing in the morning if you’d like?”
“I’d love that. Gertie’s missed you a bit too much, I think— but only come by if it’s not too much of a burden!”
How could she ever be a burden?
𓇢
Summer feels like the shortest season of the year; he’s stopped seeing Cameron, though she still remains fully loyal to the Venturer consortium - he’d dropped the facade not long after Taggie met his children for the first time.
His secret, Taggie, has become a breathing thing that follows him through his everyday life, a gilded cage he’s built for himself and happily locked the door upon.
They’ve fallen into a feverish rhythm that defies the logic of their public distance; there are humid afternoons where he’s got her in his kitchen and she patiently tries to teach him the structural integrity of a jam roly-poly, her own creation a perfect specimen of comfort while his is a fucking mangled disaster of dough that earns him a peal of her bells-and-silver laughter – a sound he’d trade his best stallion to hear on loop; there are the later nights where Venturer hosts at the Priory and he escapes to the back stone wall for a cigarette, the tip glowing like a lone star in the dark, only for her to materialise beside him just as she used to, though now the shared silences broken by the hungry press of his lips to hers and the way she tastes; there is the bone-deep exhaustion of being two people at once, playing the rake in the light and the devotee in the dark, alternating between the rough, territorial fucks where he needs to remind himself she’s real and the slow, tender lovemaking that leaves him feeling peeled raw and utterly defenceless; it’s a relentless and suffocating tide of emotion that catches in his throat every time she looks at him, a realisation that he is no longer his own man but hers entirely, drowning in love so terrifying that he’s forgotten how to breathe without her; yet he continues to reach for her, over and over, because the thought of a life without her at all is the only thing that scares him more.
𓇢
“You really ought to be taking a break from all this at some point, Tag,” he says, his voice cutting through the relentless thwack-thwack of her wooden spoon.
She would make a lovely photo, honestly. So much so he finds himself wishing for his camera, wanting to keep this moment alongside the picture of her with his children and those dried good-luck leaves he still keeps from their day out. Taggie is elbow-deep in some sort of pale, sticky mixture (he doesn’t dare ask what), her apron a lost cause against the drifts of flour coating her clothes – it’s even dusted across her face! If they weren't at the Priory with the whole of Venturer in the next room, he’d lean in and lick every white speck off her skin
Taggie doesn't stop what she’s doing, a tank engine through and through. “I like baking, though!”
“For twenty people or more each time?” he asks as he moves further into the room.
“Well, okay, it gets a bit tiring sometimes,” she admits, finally pausing to push a stray lock of hair back with her elbow, only succeeding in adding a fresh smudge of white to her temple which has him holding back a laugh. “But you all work so hard in there all the time. I feel I ought to help some way, too.”
He thinks he could shout at all the people who ever made her feel as if she weren’t doing enough. For fuck’s sake, she was the entire reason they were even this far into the bloody franchise race in the first place!
But instead of starting civil wars in the next room over, he settles on closing the distance between him and Taggie; close enough now to see the dusting of flour that had somehow made it onto her eyelashes?
“You do help,” he murmurs. “More than enough, darling. The only reason we’ve got any recognition at all is because you went out and bagged us those signatures. No one is as sweet and as patient as you are, we’d have never gotten that many signatures, probably not even about three, without you.”
He doesn't think about the Venturer team in the next room, or the impropriety of it - he just leans in and presses a kiss to her cheek simply because he wants to kiss her.
“Rupert,” she whispers, a smile in her voice. “You’ll get us caught one day.”
He spots a stripe of flour right near her ear and he knows he could wipe it away, but the impulse to be a nuisance is stronger. So he darts his tongue out, licking a clean line through the flour on her cheek.
Taggie lets out a startled, angelic giggle, shrinking her shoulders toward her ears and making his day– his week even. “Rupert! Honestly!”
She turns back to her bowl, her face flushed a deep, pretty pink, and resumes her stirring with renewed, slightly manic energy. He stands there, entirely sure he prefers being in her orbit more than the company of all the others; Christ, he really fucking loves her.
“Tag,” he says. “I think I really love you.”
Her wooden spoon stops mid-rotation and he thinks his heart stops too when he realises he’s said it outloud. The kitchen goes very still, and damn damn damn is all he feels when Taggie looks up at him, her eyes wide, and almost worried? Was that what it was? Maybe it isn’t that and she’s just shocked and entirely disgusted. And oh Christ, he’d really fucked it up this time.
“What?” she breathes.
What the fuck has he done?
“Well, doesn't this look cosy?”
Bloody Bas.
Rupert thinks he could quite happily punch the man, a good friend once but right now a bloody irritation – straight through the kitchen wall and into the next country would do.
“Don’t mind me, just picking up a bottle for the team,” Bas says, his eyes darting between him and Taggie, and quite clearly taking the fucking piss. He doesn't wait for an answer from them though, instead snatching a bottle from the counter and whistling an irritating tune as he saunters back out.
Already even more stressed from being interrupted, Rupert turns back back to Taggie, his apology already formed and ready, but the words die in his throat when he sees she’s got shimmering tear tracks. It's a clean line through the flour on her cheek, and Rupert feels like the biggest wretch in the world for making her cry.
He’s miscalculated. He’s pushed too hard, and too fast, and he’s terrified he’s just broken the only thing in the world worth keeping. Why did he ever think he stood a chance at love with someone like her? He should've just kept his bloody mouth shut at the stone wall all those months ago and this would have never fucking happened. He would’ve never hurt her.
“Oh, Tag—fuck, I’m sorry,” he blurts out, stepping toward her, wanting nothing more than to take her in his arms and take it back - but he’s sure he’ll just make it worse if he does. “I didn’t mean to make you— I’m a fool, I’m sorry—”
“No, Rupert,” she interrupts, her voice small and wet. She wipes at her eyes with the back of a floury hand, leaving a fresh white streak. “I’m happy. I—I love you too. I’ve just been so confused and overwhelmed. I didn't know if I was feeling things too fast, or if I’d just imagined you felt the same.”
Christ, he might be sick with how quickly the air rushes back into his lungs, it’s like the sheer opposite of being winded. He thinks the grin that then comes out must make him look like a complete twat too, but he doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy, he can’t help it; his face actually hurts from the sudden stretch of his muscles.
“Truly?” he asks, his voice sounding ridiculously hopeful even to his own ears.
“Mhm.” She offers a wet smile back, then presses herself forward and kisses him.
He doesn’t even care about the sodding franchise, or Declan, or anything or anyone else for that matter, how could he when she loves him back—when he really has her in his life?
It’s just his luck that Declan marches in a second later, catching them while Rupert’s hands are still settled on Taggie’s waist. A panicking Bas trailing close behind, waving and flailing a warning that comes a tad too late.
Rupert doesn’t care, though. Not when Declan makes a beeline for him, looking murderous; not when he hears a frantic daddy, don’t!— just as a fist flies hard into the right side of his eye. He doesn’t even care as he’s sent reeling back, or later, when the bruise fully develops into a nasty, spectacular black eye and the paper’s write all about how he could've gotten it.
He doesn’t give a damn about any of it because Taggie gives him two kisses on both eyes. One, on the bruised, to say sorry for her daddy, and another, on the unharmed, just because she loves him.
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