Work Text:
“Fill me up, my love. Make me yours forever.”
The words, uttered in a breathless familiar sweetness, stopped Colin Bridgerton dead in the dim hallway of his Bloomsbury home. He knew that voice, that desperate, wanton tone he’d dreamed of for three interminable years.
Penelope.
He had returned an hour ago, his soul scraped raw from travel and regret, his chest a hollow cavity where his pride and heart had once warred.
Three years.
Three years he’d been seeking a peace that his travels never granted him, a solace he’d convinced himself was needed after their wedding. He’d left, believing he was protecting himself from a wife who, in his mind, chose her secret identity as Lady Whistledown over his love and, more dangerously, over the safety of the family. The Queen had threatened them, and his terror for her well-being had curdled into a bitter resentment that felt suspiciously close to rage.
He’d begged her to stop writing, to give up the venomous pen that gave her power but also put her in peril, yet she wouldn't. He’d felt that she was choosing her success over the man who loved her. A man who also felt a searing, shameful jealousy over that very same success.
So when her courses arrived, confirming she was not with his child, he did what he always did when faced with fear and failure: he ran away to find clarity.
But he never did. All he found was a gnawing longing and sorrow that was a far worse torment than their arguments. He never got over his hurt, but more crushing still, he never got over his love for her.
The house had been still when he arrived. He’d called her name with an apology for his absence, for his pride, and for everything else, already forming on his tongue, only to be met with a profound quiet that echoed his own emptiness.
Then, the sounds had begun. A rhythmic creaking, soft at first, then turning into the unmistakable pounding of the headboard in the master suite tapping a frantic, obscene rhythm against the wall.
At first a foolish and arrogant spark of hope had ignited in his chest. She was thinking of him. She was pleasuring herself to the memory of him. He had actually smiled believing this was a sign or an open door that he could step through to reclaim her and his life again.
He had pushed the heavy oak door open on its silent hinges, with the scene unfolding before him not being the hopeful fantasy he’d conjured, but as a hellish nightmare instead.
The room which was bathed in the glow of late afternoon sun illuminated two figures entwined upon the bed. Penelope, his wife, was on her back, with her glorious red hair fanned out across the pillows, and her skin shimmering with a fine sheen of sweat. Her legs were hooked over the hips of a man whose back was to Colin, a man whose broad shoulders and tresses touched by Apollo himself, he recognized with a sickening jolt.
Lord Debling.
Colin’s voice was a cracked and feeble thing, swallowed by the echoes of mewling pleasure that vibrated through the room when he called out her name.
“Pen?”
Nothing. They remained a single, blissful entity on the rumpled sheets, deaf to his presence. Debling murmured something into her neck, a low murmur of contentment, and Penelope’s answering sigh was one of pure, unadulterated satisfaction. It was the sound Colin had spent the last three years dreaming of eliciting from her. Now, it was a blade twisting in his gut.
The initial shock began to thaw, replaced by a devastating agony. This was his wife. His. The woman who had vowed before his family and before God to love and cherish him.
The woman he had abandoned.
His eyes, against his will, were dragged back to the bed where Debling’s hips moved with a powerful, penetrating rhythm, each thrust sinking his substantial cock deep into the obscenely wet and clutching heat of Penelope’s cunt.
A bitter taste flooded his mouth. He should be storming forward, dragging the bastard off her and calling for pistols at dawn. Every fiber of his breeding and honor screamed for it. But his feet were rooted to the floorboards, nailed there by a horrifying, burgeoning heat that had no right to exist within him. It started as a traitorous throbbing pulse deep in his groin. No. He mentally recoiled, disgusted with himself. This was anguish, not arousal. This was the death of his marriage.
Yet, his cock strained against the confines of his breeches in a heavy, aching betrayal. He tried to command his body to turn, to leave, to flee this nightmare as he had fled every time before. But his body, it seemed, had a will of its own, drunk on the graphic scene before him.
“God, you feel incredible,” Debling groaned into her neck, suckling at the sensitive skin there. “Every time. It’s like coming home.”
Penelope’s head tossed side to side, with a pleading cry escaping her lips. “Then stay here. Please, don’t ever leave.”
“It was fate, my darling,” Debling murmured against her skin, his pace never faltering. “That conspired to keep me from going on that expedition, then to find you here, alone in this mausoleum he left you in. It was the universe correcting his mistake. We were always meant for this.”
“Yes,” she moaned, her hands scrambling down his back to grab his muscular ass, pulling him impossibly deeper into her with a desperate need that Colin had never inspired. “The universe knew better than I did. It sent me a boy once, and I learned to survive him…but you, Alfred, you are no boy. You are the man I should have had all along.”
The words were a physical blow, each one landing on Colin’s spirit with the force of a hammer. He watched, mesmerized and eviscerated, as Debling shifted, lifting her hips to change the angle. Penelope’s eyes flew open and a sharp, surprised gasp tore from her throat as he hit a place inside her that made her entire body clench and tremble.
“There!” she cried out, her voice breaking with sensation. “Right there, my love! Oh, God…”
“My name,” Debling commanded, his own control fraying. “Say my name when you come apart for me.”
“Alfred!” she screamed, her body bowing off the bed as a powerful orgasm seized her. Colin saw her inner muscles fluttering around the base of his cock. Debling’s body stiffened and a guttural, almost animalistic roar was torn from the man’s throat as he drove his cock as deep as it would go, his release pumping into the woman who was legally, though no longer in any other sense, Colin’s wife. Penelope cried out again, with a second, smaller climax triggered by the hot, spurting sensation of Debling’s potent virile seed flooding her depths.
As the last tremors subsided, Debling collapsed upon her, but only for a moment. He pushed himself up on his arms, looking down at her with a possessiveness that made Colin’s blood run cold. “We will find a way to annul this farce of a marriage. A husband who abandons his wife for three years? It will be the simplest thing to arrange,” Debling assured her, leaning down to kiss her with a tender passion that was more intimate than the fucking had been. “I will make you my wife in truth. In every way.”
Penelope pressed her forehead to his. “Nothing could make me happier than to be yours, completely and truly, as I should have been all along.” Then she traced a finger along his neatly bearded jaw with a mischievous smile curling her lips. “Do you think it took?” she asked hopefully.
Debling lifted his head and smiled, a possessive, proud thing that made Colin’s fists clench. “I felt you milking me, darling. Pulling every last drop so deep. How could it not?” His hand slid down, over the curve of her hip, and dipped between her thighs. Colin watched, hypnotized, as Debling’s fingers gathered the pearlescent trickle that had begun to seep from her and pushed it back inside with a deep, deliberate push of two fingers.
The evidence of it, was the visceral and undeniable proof of his utter displacement.
Penelope’s back arched off the bed, a wanton gasp escaping her. “Yes…keep it in there. Make it stay.”
“It will,” Debling assured her, his voice dropping to that intimate rumble. “My seed belongs inside you. It’s making a home in your womb right now. Filling you up. Making you mine in a way that useless husband of yours never could.”
Useless. The word made Colin flinch. But the heat in his loins intensified, a sickening throb that imitated the movement of Debling’s fingers. He could almost feel the thick, claiming pressure of another man’s release being worked back into his wife’s depths. His breath came in short, sharp pants as shame washed over him in a hot wave, but it did nothing to douse the unwelcome fire.
“He never wanted me, not truly.” Penelope moaned, her eyes closed as Debling continued his filthy, intimate task. “He wanted the idea of a wife who was sweet and compliant. One who was neat. He could not endure the messy reality of a woman with a mind, with strength, and with a life of her own.”
“I want every part of you,” Debling growled, leaning down to capture her nipple in his mouth, suckling hard enough to make her cry out. “All your flaws and all your fire. I want to spend the rest of my life loving you as you should have been loved from the beginning. I want to learn every sound you make, every way you clench around my cock when you peak. I’ll fill this cunt with my children, Penelope. I’ll watch your belly swell with my heir until you can think of nothing but the life we created together.”
The imagery was so carnal and final that Colin saw it vividly. Her body, rounded and lush, glowing with a pregnancy that was not his doing. The ownership in Debling’s voice was absolute. And to his horror, a strangled, pathetic wounded sound escaped his own throat. His hand moved of its own volition, pressing against the painful bulge in his breeches in a silent plea for relief from this torment.
This time, they heard him.
Debling’s head snapped up, his eyes, dark and predatory, locking directly onto Colin’s. There was no surprise there. Only a cold, challenging gleam. Penelope’s eyes fluttered open, following Debling’s gaze. She saw Colin standing there, pale and sweating with his hand pressed against himself. Her expression didn’t shift to one of guilt or alarm. Instead a satisfied unapologetic smile touched her lips. It was the most devastating look she had ever given him.
“Oh,” she said, her voice dripping with a sweetness that felt like acid. “You’re home.”
Debling didn’t move from his position atop her, nor did he remove his fingers that were still buried inside her. He simply looked at Colin like a lord surveying an intruder on his land. “Bridgerton. We weren’t expecting you.” His tone was casually dismissive, as if commenting on the weather.
Colin’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. He was trapped in their combined gaze like a specimen pinned for examination.
Penelope’s smile widened. She shifted her hips in a subtle, rolling motion that made Debling’s fingers slide deeper. Her eyes never left Colin’s. “It seems you’ve caught us in a rather private moment. But since you’re here…perhaps you’d like to watch?”
All he could do was watch. Nothing remained of the life he had abandoned or the man he thought himself to be. And now, with her daring words all that was left was shame and the unbearable ache of watching what could never be his.