It Stings So Sweet Read online

  it stings so sweet

  Stephanie Draven

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  IT STINGS SO SWEET

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Dray.

  Cover photo by Viktoriia Kulish.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® SENSATION and the B design are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / February 2013

  Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition ISBN: 978-0-425-26318-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-59880-1

  An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

  To my husband, who changed everything I thought I knew about the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to my husband and to my critique partners, Ann Arbaugh, Christi Barth, Sabrina Darby, Anna Genest, and Kate Quinn. Special thanks to Eden Bradley and Kate Pearce for talking me through the hard parts. And thank God for Jackie Barbosa, without whom this book would never have been completed, and she knows why. Last, but not least, I’m grateful to Megan Hart, as always, whose own ideas about erotic fiction permeate this work.

  This book started out as a dream starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers dressed up in 1920s garb, guzzling cocktails at a ritzy party. And he was extremely angry. I woke up wanting to know why, and that’s how Love Me or Leave Me came into existence.

  After that, I started researching the period and my reading list was the bee’s knees. I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I devoured Joshua Zeitz’s Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern. I also consulted the article “Gotham’s Daughters: Feminism in the 1920s” by Maureen Honey.

  My research on sexuality in the Roaring Twenties led me to stumble over a little snippet of a vintage stag film of uncertain date called Nudist Bar, which has been preserved in digital format and can be found on the internet today. While entirely pornographic in nature, it was also so cheeky and charming that I couldn’t help make up a story about a similar, fictional film.

  Clara and Leo’s picnic was inspired by Donald Ogden Stewart’s “Correct Behavior on a Picnic,” excerpted from the 1920s etiquette book, Perfect Behavior; A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in All Social Crises. The imagery and a few evocative phrases helped me set the stage for authenticity.

  Much of Sophie’s dialogue finds its source in the Birth Control Review, published between 1917 and 1929, just as Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control League were intensifying their fight to pass legislation that would legalize contraception in the United States.

  Credit also goes to Wikipedia for its description of an Immelmann turn, something I have not had the pleasure of witnessing firsthand. I relied heavily upon the Online Etymology Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary to wrestle my prose into period-appropriate language. I did not always succeed, as sometimes a more modern word or anachronistic idiom seemed more artful, but I am indebted to those sources and my tireless copy editor, Angelina Krahn.

  Though the characters in these stories were inspired by many different archetypical people from the era, I’d be remiss not to mention Clara Bow, specifically, whose story helped inspire mine. Quotes from her and about her are sprinkled throughout this manuscript to bring the time period alive, and wherever she is now, I think she’d be tickled by the tribute.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Love Me or Leave Me

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  When I’m Bad I’m Better

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Let’s Misbehave

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Author’s Note

  love me or leave me

  CHAPTER

  One

  Nora

  The band is playing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and tonight, its lyrics about heartbreak cut entirely too close to the bone. As the singer growls through the soulful song, Jonathan’s cool blue eyes pierce through a wreath of smoke to accuse me, and my whole body tightens, overly aware of him.

  With his lean elegance and chiseled good looks, he’s the star attraction in any social gathering, but Jonathan stands out especially at this swanky party, a glass of gin dangling so casually from one hand, at odds with the formality of his coat and tails. He wears a white vest, shirt, and tie pulled too tight, but it isn’t the tie that has stiffened Jonathan’s neck.

  He wants to leave. The way his eyes keep darting to the exits show me just how much he wants to escape the clink of glasses and the laughter of women who twist long strands of pearls between their breasts to entice him. Something green and ugly writhes in my belly at the thought that he can have his pick of the women who flirt with him; I’ve heard women whispering about him. With his dark hair slicked back and the lightest hint of a mustache over his full, brooding lips, he is the most striking man in this or any room.

  He is also my husband, or at least he will be, until morning.

  He wasn’t born to this life. His father was a man who worked with his ha
nds, and Jonathan still remembers going hungry. Even so, threading his way through the crowd, he shows no interest in the chocolate-covered cherries, caviar, or oysters on the half shell. A girl asks him to dance, but he declines in so genteel a fashion that she purses her red-painted mouth to blow him a kiss.

  Jonathan is nothing if not mannerly. Distant, unknowable, but unfailingly polite.

  Even now, as furious as he is with me, he gives me a gentlemanly bow of his head. “Are you enjoying the party, Mrs. Richardson?”

  I grimace with bitter amusement that this might be the last night we share a name. At home, his bags are packed. By morning he’ll be gone. Unless I do something about it.

  Pressing my hands against the wood-paneled wall to steady myself, I lean in, trying to be heard over the tinkling piano. “Jonathan, please let me explain—”

  “I’ve got a bit of an edge,” he interrupts, affably saluting me with his glass so that I can see that he’s drained it. “Perhaps we should make the rounds and get going.”

  His ability to remain so even-tempered makes me angry, and for a moment I’m inclined to agree that we should leave, even if leaving this party is the last thing we’ll ever do together. But I’ve let myself draw too near to him. I’ve caught a whiff of his scent, something musky and male that combines with the alcohol on his breath to make my knees weak. “I’d like to stay a little longer, if you don’t mind.”

  “Whatever you like,” he says, agreeably.

  He’s always agreeable. He’s never complained about my overprotective father. Nor the distance that has separated his bed from mine for the past year. Nor the silent breakfasts or awkward good-nights. As far as I know, my mild-mannered husband has never been bothered by anything until this morning, when I confessed my sins.

  He listened to everything I had to say, then laid his butter knife carefully at the edge of his breakfast plate and calmly announced his intention to divorce me. Now, I reach for his hand, trying to make him listen. “Jonathan, can’t we talk about this?”

  “This doesn’t seem like the time nor the place,” he says with a tight smile, deftly avoiding the closer intimacy of tangled fingers by tucking my arm in the crook of his elbow. The heat of his body through my clothes is electric and forces my eyes closed. I’ve wanted him from the first time I saw him—and I had him. All of him. Not the bottled-up bluenose he’s become. Not the man who transformed himself to fit in with this crowd. Once I had all of him. The wild, savage beast of him.

  We met at a party like this one, but he was a crasher then. I was drowning in liquor, too zozzled to dance with the flappers in my set, too drunk to stand up straight. His face was thinner, chin sharply angled, lips curled with the insolent snarl of a workingman, but his eyes were the same. Such intense blue.

  I’ve always been a girl too much inside her own head, or so my father tells me, though it’s the way he taught me to be. “Look at a thing from every angle, my little bunny,” he used to say. “Always go with what you know.”

  But the moment I met Jonathan, a mad, instant lust took hold of me. I didn’t know anything about him except that I wanted to be underneath his body. He could’ve undressed me in front of all the guests and I wouldn’t have stopped him. To get his attention, I’d tickled him with a feather from my headdress. He let me take a puff off his cigarette. Somehow, we ended up in the buggy seat, my knees over his shoulders, my father’s car bouncing on its wheels as Jonathan fucked me raw.

  I remember that he ripped the front of my dress, catching the beads around my neck by accident, snapping the string, and sending them spilling everywhere. I still occasionally find one of those beads in my handbag or in the driveway, and it makes me wilt with the scorching heat of the memory every time. You see, I loved him that night. I loved all the filthy things he said to me. I loved all the ungentlemanly things he did to me. I loved the way it felt to have my dress wadded up around my waist, to feel him inside me, not even knowing his name. Not knowing that he worked for my father or that he would be the kind of man to return with flowers and a marriage proposal when he found out I was knocked up.

  I’m jarred from my memories by the voice of Paul Kendrick. “Jonathan, old sport!” The moneyed banker slaps my husband on the back. “Saw your Bentley outside. A gift from the father-in-law? Nice racket if you can get it—” Paul Kendrick suddenly realizes I’m standing there. Quickly clearing his throat, he laughs too loud. “Ah, Mrs. Richardson. Pardon me. I didn’t see you through the haze of smoke.”

  I show him a flash of teeth. I hate men like Paul Kendrick, who belittle Jonathan under the guise of friendship. Men who ignore the fact that in the time he’s worked for my father, Jonathan has already earned enough money to buy his own Bentley. “I do fade into the woodwork …”

  Kendrick snorts at my sarcasm. “You must not be paying your wife the attention she’s due, Jonathan. She seems not to know how attractive she is.”

  “Oh, she knows,” Jonathan says, and an awkward silence follows.

  “I love Hollywood parties, don’t you?” Kendrick asks, surveying the bootlegged bottles on the bar behind us. But Prohibition doesn’t apply to people with money. People like us. Sometimes I think the temperance movement only concerns itself with the poor. “Not a bad outlay of alcohol tonight.”

  Jonathan doesn’t say anything and I don’t, either. Paul Kendrick’s glance darts from me to Jonathan and back again, finally sensing the tension. He makes some excuse to go, hastily retreating across the polished wood floor to join a cadre of men debating the merits of the Scopes Monkey Trial from a few years back. I have my own beliefs when it comes to that, for I have very good reason to believe that we’re really all just animals inside.

  From the nearby sideboard, Jonathan chooses a decanter and fills his glass. “Is he the one?”

  The words are spoken so softly, I wonder if I’ve imagined them. I follow his gaze to where Paul Kendrick stands and feel myself flush, but I have no right to be offended. “No. Not him. Of course not.”

  Jonathan adds something dark to his drink, then drops two cubes of ice into the mixture. “Who was it then? I deserve to know his name.”

  Nothing good can come of this, but I find myself strangely gratified that Jonathan has finally asked. That a hint of agitation has finally touched his expression. “It makes no difference who it was. It was only a kiss. I’ve been trying to tell you, it was a drunken …” I struggle for the right word. I cannot call my infidelity a lark, for it was nothing that innocent. “It was a drunken nothing. It meant nothing at all.”

  My husband’s tone is light, but his eyes are anything but. “It was just the hooch, then. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes. He was tanked.”

  “What about you? Were you tanked, too?”

  “Yes,” I admit, taking a deep, relieved breath of air. As long as my husband is asking questions, perhaps he can find a way to forgive me. “I had too much. Sometimes I lose count.”

  “I see.” Jonathan lets my hand drop. The break in contact between us is like an arctic wind. “Kind of like the night we met. Was that a drunken nothing, too?”

  When he lifts his overflowing glass to his lips, I clutch at his arm. “No. Jonathan.” I know that he wants me to tell him that I love him, but I can’t make myself say the words. Not even now. Especially not now, because I’ve never found the courage to say it before. If I let those words fall from my lips now only to watch him walk away, it will kill me. “You’re my husband. What’s between us isn’t nothing.”

  “You’re spilling my drink,” he says mildly, as if he can’t hear the desperation in my voice. He sets the glass down, brushing my hands, and the spilled liquid, from his jacket. Then I watch him take another glass and fill it as well, adding a splash of cherry. He hands that one to me. I take it only because I’m desperate for the brush of his fingers over mine, even if they are wet and cold.

  “Drink,” he says, eyes pale as ice.

  My hand shakes and the cherry in my g
lass bobs up and down. “Jonathan, I’m sorrier than you know.”

  “Are you going to drink?”

  I stare at the glass in my hand, the carved crystalline ridges scraping my palm, and regard it as if it holds poison. “No. Spirits have done enough damage between us.”

  “Then I’m leaving,” he says, emptying his glass. “I’ll send a driver back to fetch you.”

  He whirls and I catch him, heedless of the stares we draw. I can’t let him go.

  “What?” he snaps, savagely. His first real show of temper.

  He stares, waiting for me to speak, watching as I wrestle with my tongue. “What can I do to show you how sorry I am? How can I make it up to you?”

  His shoulders actually shake with anger. I worry he will say that nothing I can ever say or do will ever make up for allowing another man to kiss me. Instead, he says, “You can drink.”

  It’s too small a request to refuse him, so I lift the cool rim of the glass he’s given me, taking a swallow of something that stings sweet. This seems to satisfy him. He tugs at his tie and no longer seems like himself. No longer mild-mannered, polite, or distant. He stares at me as if he might tilt my head back and pour a drink down my throat. I wish he would. I love the feel of his strong hands tangled in my hair. “Drink it all, Nora.”

  I take two more gulps. “You want me to tell you who the man was? Is that what you want?”

  He gives a bark of bitter laughter. “What I want is to punish you … and I want you to drink.”