Quentin II and Daphne -- 8
From: DSRules
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 23:46:39

My dh, who has studied both Judo and Tai Chi Chuan, as well as reading up on other martial arts, helped me with a concept for the move that Laura uses.

For the next two weeks, Quentin's life consisted of two things - making love to Laura and waiting for a chance to make love to her. He hadn't regained the passion that he had found their first night together, where his very molecules felt like they were on fire with need for her, but making love to her still had an effect on him that his time with the local prostitutes could never have matched.

He lay in wait for her at the top of the second floor stairs, dragging her off to an unused bedroom for a tryst. He seduced her over dinner, making eye contact with her right in front of her husband, a heavily-suggestive look that had Laura taking him in a storage room in the East Wing. They made love in the gazebo at night, on the beach during the day, and still found time to sneak away to his bedroom for a round or two in between.

At the end of those two weeks, Laura knew for certain that she was pregnant and that she needed to return to Edward's bed, to pass the baby off as her husband's. {It'll be difficult giving Quentin up.} She realized. {He's the best lover I've had since my first husband. Well, my first two husbands,}she thought, remembering the devotion and skill of the man she married after she'd been widowed the first time.

After a few failed attempts, she finally cornered him in the upstairs hallway, launching into her prepared speech. "You know that Edward and I have been estranged for some time, but we're attempting a reconciliation. For Jamison's sake. And it would violate that reconciliation for me to keep seeing you."

Quentin was crushed by her pronouncement. He had come to need Laura like he needed the air he breathed. He'd had fourteen blissful days without the memory of Daphne's taunting note haunting him. And it couldn't end now.

"I can't. . ." He choked out. "I can't go on without you."

"You must. Edward needs me. Jamison needs his mother and father together. Please." She had never been one to beg - commanding was more her style - but the simple desperation in Quentin's eyes cut her to the core.

"I must," he quoted back to her, laughing bitterly. "I. CAN'T." He threw those two words at her with such force that she felt he was shouting, even though his voice never rose above a whisper. "I can't." He repeated more softly as he moved in closer to her, pinning her against the wall with his body.

"I need you." He whispered, kissing her. "And I know that you need me."

She nearly returned his kiss, but she shored up her resolve to end their affair. "No. Quentin, please let me go."

She brushed past him, but he grabbed her roughly. "You can't leave me like this." He reached a hand up to cup her chin and began kissing her painfully.

She broke his grasp and stepped away from him again. He leaned forward to stop her and she grabbed his arm and pulled him off-balance, pushing the heel of her hand into his throat as he fell the floor, cutting off his air. The landing knocked the wind out of him, making him lose consciousness for a few seconds.

The next thing he knew, she was halfway down the stairs. In a few long strides, he caught up to her again.

"Stay away from me." She said, not even looking at him.

"I'm sorry." He said, sincerely. "I don't know what got into me back there. But whatever it was, it seemed to pass when you knocked me out."

She looked up at him and saw admiration, but no lust, in his eyes. "Where'd you learn that move?" He smiled at her.

She smiled back. "I did have a life before Edward, you know. And I've picked up a few things in my time."

At the base of the stairs, Quentin headed off to the study to break into Edward's hidden stash of the "good" brandy and Laura went into the drawing room, where Millie, the nanny, sat watching Jamison.

After he'd drained half of one of Edward's hidden brandy bottles, Quentin began feeling some of the hunger for Laura building up. But after his last confrontation with her, he thought better of approaching her again. So, he put his hat and overcoat on and headed off to Collinsport to pay a visit to one of the better brothels in town.

* * *

Although Laura knew that she was pregnant with Quentin's child, she needed to convince Edward, and the rest of the family, that Quentin's baby actually belonged to Edward. Through the pregnancy, Laura tweaked the amount of time she said that she'd been pregnant, so that when Quentin's child -- a daughter, whom Laura and Edward named Nora - was born, no one in the family was even aware of the two-week discrepancy between Nora's actual conception and Laura's reconciliation with Edward.

As they had done with Jamison, they invited Daphne to Nora's christening. When they received her regrets, the rest of the family was surprised, but not Laura. She knew that Daphne was still stinging from Quentin's apparent rejection of her the previous year. But Laura had her baby, and that was all that counted.

Meanwhile, Quentin descended into a haze of self-indulgence. He drank himself into a stupor every night (which took a prodigious amount of alcohol) and ended up nearly every morning in a different prostitute's bed with a raging headache, which only laudanum would cure.

Then, after a quick trip back to Collinwood for a change of clothes and a meal, under the disapproving eye of his sister Judith, he'd head back to town for a few hands of poker, which he used to raise the money for his next night's binge. Then he'd have dinner and begin the whole process again.

The only variation from his routine was when the mood struck him to attempt writing again. It was then that he indulged in a glass, or two, of absinthe with an old friend from college, Evan Handley. Evan had just finished reading the law with a judge in Bangor, and, seeking the companionship of his old partner in crime, Quentin, he had hung up his shingle in Collinsport.

This routine kept Quentin amused, it kept him occupied, and most of all, it kept his emotions under lock and key in his subconscious.

Until the day Daphne's health required her to leave her house in Boston and move in with her grandchildren.