Hosts to Ghosts Box Set

by Lynne Connolly

  Comforted, she murmured, “Yes,” and moved closer, straightening away from the door to press herself closer to him.

  He dragged his head up and bent to scoop her up and carry her across the room.

  Sylvie’s room was large, but it only took him three strides to cross to the bed, where he laid her reverently on the coverlet. He stood by the side of the bed and looked at her. “If I’m allowed to keep a few memories, this will be the one.” He smiled, and slid on to the bed next to her, reaching out to stroke her from shoulder to hip before urging her closer. Resisting his unspoken request, she sat up and dragged her sweater over her head. He lay back against the pillows and watched her intently.

  More than anything in the world she wanted to please this man, give him some untrammeled, pure memory to take him where he was going. She wanted to go with him, God help her, but she couldn’t. She’d committed to making a child with him, so she would do her best to carry on without him, make her life meaningful.

  Slowly she reached behind her back and unclipped her bra, glancing down as it loosened. She slid the straps down her arms, not teasing, but not hurrying, either. All this would come back to her in the lonely nights ahead, and she wanted to remember how perfect it was. How perfect they’d made it. When she raised her gaze he was watching her, the blaze in his eyes lighting a conflagration in her heart. “You are the most desirable woman I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said, but he made no effort to reach for her.

  She thought of cupping her breasts but decided he didn’t need any more arousing, and she wanted to display herself as simply as she could.

  Sylvie had never liked showing off her body. She had never considered it anything above ordinary, but with that blue fire caressing every inch of her skin, she felt like the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “To me, you are. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful before.”

  She smiled. “You’re picking up my thoughts.”

  “So I am. You can have mine for free. All of them. I have no secrets from you, Sylvie.” He sat up and divested himself of his own t-shirt, as simply as she had, then remained sitting and reached for her. “I need to touch you, sweetheart.”

  When she went into his arms, her skin met his, and she relished every second of the contact. He felt slightly cooler than she did, but his skin pulsed with life, and his arms held iron strength as he pulled her close.

  She shivered when her nipples touched his chest, and heard his “Ah!” dimly. This was right, so right!

  Lifting her head, she found him waiting for her. Just before he took her in another soul searing kiss, she spread her hands over his chest, feeling his hair caress her fingers before she buried them in the dark fuzz. He finished the kiss and laid her down with the care he might give to a delicate piece of glass. He bent his head to her breasts.

  Sylvie thought she might die. He kissed around one aureole before taking it into his mouth and caressing the very tip with his tongue. She had never considered her breasts very sensitive. She’d been wrong. He kissed his way to the other nipple, treating that in the same way, bringing one hand down to her stomach to the fastening on her jeans. The sudden relaxation of tension told her he’d undone the button, and the soft sound of the zipper came as a welcome relief. She wanted to be naked, now.

  He murmured something she couldn’t hear, but it didn’t matter because she heard it in her mind. Sweet, so sweet.

  Licking and caressing, he slowly opened her jeans and slid one hand inside, stroking her belly, curving his hand around her hips to grip the side of her bottom and roll her gently to one side. He lifted off her, and she couldn’t stop her whimper of regret. “I’ll be back,” he told her and watched the skin he revealed as he slid her pants down her legs, snagging her panties and drawing them off in the same way.

  A choking sound made her lift her head in some alarm. Nathaniel was shaking his head, staring at her in wonder. “You are everything I dreamed of. And I have dreamed.”

  “You must have seen me before.” She didn’t care, not now, but sometimes she’d felt someone watching her, or imagined she had. Only she knew now it hadn’t been her imagination.

  “Sometimes I couldn’t help myself, but I always left before—before the end. Spying on you wasn’t right.”

  “Now?”

  He turned back to her with a smile. “Now I have your permission. Now it couldn’t be more right.”

  His hands went to his own jeans, and he unsnapped and unzipped without hesitation. He knelt up to push the garment, together with his underwear, out of the way.

  Sylvie watched him as he’d watched her, with love and growing desire. She’d thought she couldn’t want him more, but as she saw his erection, hard and strong for her, her breath quickened and she reached for him. He groaned when she wrapped her hands around him, but didn’t stop her until she leaned closer. Then he drew her hands away. “I want the first time to be in you,” he whispered. “If you do that any more, it won’t be. Have mercy, my love.”

  Smiling, she slid her hands around his hips to the curves of his backside. The muscles flexed when she pressed, and he drew closer, bringing his delicious male scent and his warmth to her. When he settled between her thighs she gave a sigh of satisfaction. “This is where you should be.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” His lips came closer to her, and his erection nudged her clit, making her knees draw up in reaction to the contact. “Oh God, you’re so wet!”

  Somehow, she found the strength to tease. “I thought you Puritans didn’t blaspheme.”

  “I was never a Puritan.” He kissed the tip of her nose and took his weight on one elbow, freeing the other hand to slide between them. She caught his hand when it reached her stomach.

  “I’m ready, Nathaniel. Like you, I want the first time to be when you’re inside me.”

  He pulled his hand out and leaned on both elbows once more. Watching her all the time, he lowered his body and entered her.

  Slowly at first, he moved inside until she said, “I won’t break.”

  He drove hard inside her.

  She came immediately, her body arching up helplessly into his, the contractions beyond her control, stronger than anything she’d ever felt before. His mouth came down hard on hers, gentleness forgotten and he began to drive ruthlessly into her, each stroke harder and deeper than the last, trying to reach the very heart of her. One arm slipped under her body to pull her up, keep them close and closer still, as he forced another orgasm on the heels of the first, leaving her crying his name, aloud and in her mind.

  He responded with a kiss, pushing his tongue into her, an reminder and an echo of his movements below.

  There was no reality except this, nothing outside this room, this bed.

  She had no way of knowing how long it lasted, but she guessed not much time had passed before he tore his mouth away to gasp her name once more before heat gushed into her. His orgasm sparked another from her, and when the last spasm finally died away she opened her eyes to find him waiting for her, his eyes warm with love.

  He rolled to one side, taking her with him, keeping his body in hers. “I’m not likely to leave here, now. I want to stay here—right here—as long as I can. They’ll have to drag me away now.”

  She smiled. At least she’d made him fight the idea of leaving her, though she wasn’t certain if that was a good thing or not. Before, he’d been tranquil, content with the idea of moving out of this life, but now he didn’t want to leave her. She knew it for sure, she felt it in her, too.

  “We should try to stay together.”

  “I’ll be here for you. Always. I’ll do everything in my power to stay.”

  A shadow of concern crossed her happiness. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry, Nathaniel. I don’t want to make you sorry to leave. You’ve accepted it with a tranquility I can’t pretend to have, but I was glad, for your sake.”

  He met her gaze and she saw the trouble in his eyes. “The moment I opened my eyes in
that hospital bed I knew leaving you would be harder than I’d imagined. If I seemed tranquil it was for your sake.” He kissed her, gentleness back in his bodily vocabulary. “I love you, Sylvie.”

  “I love you too, Nathaniel.”

  For a while there was no need for words. Touch and comfort drew them together, and they held each other, contentment filling them both. She drew her fingers through the light fuzz of hair on his chest. “I know this body, but you use it differently.”

  “Better?”

  “Better because I love you.” She studied his body, remembering the small scars even the luckiest of people accumulated during a lifetime, wondering how something so familiar could be so different. “Is this like your—your previous body?”

  “Very much.” He growled softly, stroking her back in long, slow sweeps of his big hands. “But Nev is—was—a relative, in a way.”

  “Are you—are you his sometime great grandfather?”

  He chuckled. “No, I never had any children, and I never married.”

  “Why not?” She had often asked the question to herself when reading his letters, never dreaming she would have the chance to ask him in person. Especially in these circumstances. “You were well off, and your brother was childless. Didn’t you get any encouragement to marry?”

  “Plenty.” He turned on to his back and drew her close, then looked down at her. “Why do you ask that about Nev’s heritage? You’ve studied the family history, you must know the current branch is descended from my younger brother.”

  “I wondered.” Lying together like this, she could hide nothing from him. “As you say, I’ve read your letters. I know you had feelings for your sister in law.”

  He pulled away from her, lifting up on one elbow, his brows drawn in a hard, dark line. “How? What letters have you seen?”

  “There’s nothing incriminating in them.”

  Swinging his legs off the bed, Nathaniel strode restlessly to the window and stared outside.

  Tension tightened her chest. “But I know you, Nathaniel. I knew you from the moment I stepped over the threshold here. I read between the lines, my dear. You wrote to her often, even when you were fighting on the other side to her husband, your brother. You asked about the estate when you wanted to ask about her. She wrote back, asking you if you’d found a special friend yet, and mentioning women you might like to meet. Did she know?”

  He spoke without looking at her. “She knew. I thought if I stayed, she and Vernon would never make a success of their marriage. They weren’t in love, he didn’t love her as I did, but she was lost to me the moment she married my brother.”

  “Was that why you dueled?”

  “Indirectly. I arrived here with a force of men. Cromwell wanted to confiscate the Abbey, and if he’d done that, it would have been completely lost to us. I was sick of war by then, as Vernon was, and I petitioned to keep the house in the family. That was granted to me.” He turned away and looked at her, hiding nothing. His eyes were bleak with despair, his powerful body tense with grief. “I didn’t explain myself properly. As always, I was tongue tied in her presence, and Vernon thought I would take it all and give it to the Parliamentary forces. I didn’t want to take it for my own, only to safeguard it. The estate would have been in my name, but once the affairs of the nation had settled down, I could quietly give it back to him. Or his children. I would never have asserted my authority, or done anything he wouldn’t have liked. I loved him too, you see.”

  “I know.” When she lifted her hand to him, he came to her. She dragged back the covers and they climbed between the sheets. He drew the covers back over them, holding her in the shelter of his body. “So you killed each other.”

  “I couldn’t think properly by then. I thought we might fight and wear each other out. We’d fought enough as children, pummeled each other into oblivion, but this time we were both trained soldiers. We didn’t fence, we fought with swords, our every instinct honed to kill. We succeeded.”

  “Did Vernon ever know how you felt about his wife?”

  He curled his arm around her, threading his fingers into her hair. “No. You know we both haunted the Abbey for a while?”

  Wonder filled her thoughts. “No. I thought you and the monk were the only ghosts.”

  “It’s been a long time since Vernon left us. He found his destiny and his redemption. But before he left, we were able to reconcile. What good would it have done for him to know I was hopelessly in love with his wife? It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  Her heart went out to him, and she moved closer, trying to comfort him with the warmth of her body. Nathaniel wasn’t a man to confess his secrets freely; it had been hard for him to tell her, even after the passage of three and a half centuries. He hadn’t closed his mind to her, and his feelings were as keen as her own were. She felt his bleakness, his despair at what he felt was the betrayal of his brother. He must know it.

  Sylvie lifted up and slid over him, lying on his body, her knees and elbows supporting her weight. She met his eyes, and longed to ease his pain, any way she could. He gazed at her, and slowly, warmth entered his gaze. “I don’t love her any more,” he whispered before he cupped the back of her head and brought her down to kiss him. As their mouths met, their minds merged and became one. No more separations, not in the searing soul to soul contact they shared.

  Slowly they kissed, savoring and memorizing until Sylvie gently pulled away, kissing his jaw and setting her own trail of kisses down his body. She lingered at his nipples, teasing and tweaking, but the luxurious desire infusing them both was different to the frantic lovemaking they had shared earlier. This was less physical, more loving. She tried to infuse every kiss with meaning, memorizing the feel of his skin under her mouth, beneath her hands. She wanted him so much, but they had to part. If she didn’t accept it, she might drive herself mad with wanting.

  He lay back, accepting her ministrations, soft groans only encouraging her to do more, letting her know his most sensitive places. She kissed the dark line of hair leading downwards from his navel, felt him tense with pleasure when she caressed the dip inside his narrow hips with her tongue, tracing a path she would never forget down to his cock.

  When she touched the tip with her tongue, she felt his balls contract under her hands. Making a small sound of pleasure, she slid her mouth slowly over him, the silky skin caressing her tongue with its delicious texture. He made a soft noise, and she felt his pleasure in every pore of her body, infusing her with the yearning to give him everything she had, in return for the precious gift he was bestowing on her. Not just the child she longed for, but his love. She knew which meant most to her. She wanted the child as a living reminder, but she would have given it all up for his love.

  Here and now, she had it. Caressing him with her hands and mouth, Sylvie knew life had nothing better to offer her. She would gladly die with him, if it meant they could be together.

  The sheets swirled about her as he sat up and grabbed her under her arms, dragging her off him and up the bed. Blue eyes blazed into hers. “No! You will not ask for such a thing! Do you know what comforts me now? The thought that you will not die, that you will have a happy and fulfilled life after I’m gone! Don’t do this, Sylvie. You promised. Love me in the few days we have, and then go on. If you renege on this I’ll leave this room now, and I won’t come back!”

  Tears blurred her view of him. He was right. She shouldn’t ask for death. “I’ll keep my promise, Nathaniel. I swear it. And not because I’m afraid you’ll leave now, but because I want to make you happy. I won’t ask for the things I can’t have.”

  The fury melted into something else as he looked at her. His eyes still blazed, but with something other than the sudden anger that had melted like snow in summertime. “It’s hard, that’s all,” she whispered. “That’s why I’ll do it. I won’t be a martyr, I’ll make something of my life. When we meet again, at last, I’ll have some things to tell you!”

  “That’s my gir
l!” Slowly, he lowered her and Sylvie marveled at the latent strength giving him so much control over his muscles. Although she was reasonably slender, she was tall, and no lightweight. When she felt his cock touch the amazingly sensitive skin between her legs her whole body shuddered, weeping for him. He slid down and they both let out a sigh of relief.

  “It seems the only way I’m whole is when I’m with you,” he murmured. His hands grasped her waist, strongly controlling her movements and she felt the angle he used to drive her down on his body, until their hair meshed and their flesh joined, all the way down to his balls. Sylvie felt the thrill all the way through her body, rippling up her spine, electricity calling every cell to answer his need, to accomplish her own. No longer sure where her sensations ended and his began, she glided up and then down, using her knees as leverage.

  He groaned and his head fell back against the pillows. When she lifted her body off his again, he caught his breath.

  Controlling him and herself she rode him slowly at first. He opened his eyes, frankly enjoying the sight of her body above his, and when he looked down, he smiled, a deliciously carnal smile. He raised his hands and caressed her breasts, taking the nipples between his fingers and rolling them to hard points, before giving each a little flick that made her howl, the sensations thrilling down her body, to meet with the glorious effects from below. When she tensed, he slid his hands down to her hips, holding her firmly down and driving up.

  She hadn’t known a man could go so deeply inside her, so deep that his body ground against her clit. When he twisted slowly under her, he massaged her with his body, his pubic hair stimulating her to a sudden, violent explosion.

  Sylvie lost all sense of time and place, whirling with this other being, lost in space, her only reality the waves coursing through her body. Dimly, she heard his voice, words of encouragement and wonder, merging with her own wordless cries.

  Gasping, she fell forward, feeling his arms holding her tightly. He still worked in her, hard, powerful jerks of his lower body that brought her to a sharper, spikier orgasm. She felt helpless, but she reveled in the feeling, knowing she was safer here than anywhere else, sure he would protect her with his life. As she would protect him.