by Lilly Pink
Neither of them paid any mind to the sharp sheets of rain that began to fall right outside of their realm. Neither thought about the fact that their families were mortal enemies and that hers was right next door. When Archer bent and took her lips with his own, neither of them cared about a damn thing except for having more of each other.
“Oh god,” Eloise gasped as Archer’s lips moved to the base of her neck, moved up the side of her neck and to the lobe of her ear. When she felt his teeth graze the skin there, she moaned low and soft in the back of her throat, a moan that sounded something like a purr coming from a very large cat.
It was a sound she would normally have been embarrassed by but in Archer’s embrace didn’t think twice about. Even if she had, even if she had tried to become embarrassed or demure or to make excuses for her unlady-like behavior, Archer wouldn’t have given her time to see it through.
His hands moved to the small of her back, then pulled her in roughly towards him, holding her so tightly to his body that it was as if the two of them had been glued together. His tongue pushed against her lips, parting them gently and slipping into her mouth. Her body exploded with the tingling of nerve endings that had never been used in quite this fashion.
Oh, but they wanted to be used by him, they wanted to be explored and to explore, and she met every movement he made with one of her own. The taste of him flooded her mouth, filling it with spice and something that might have been smoke. Her hands moved up to his thick hair, intertwining it in her fingers and tugging on it lightly. His response was a low growl in the back of his throat and to pull her in even tighter.
She could feel the length of him growing against her hip and her loins burned in return. Without even being aware that she was doing it, her hands moved from his hair down the length of his chest, where she began to pop one pearl snap button at a time. In mere moments, his chambray work shirt was off and discarded on the hay-covered floor. His skin was hot and beneath it was nothing but muscle. Her hands, continuing with their busy work, moved down to the band of his slacks, fingering the button and undoing it with clumsy but ultimately effective speed.
“Are you sure, girl? Are you sure you want this?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” she gasped, wanting to laugh at the fact that he’d called her girl but feeling too breathless to manage it. “Don’t ask questions you know the answer to.”
Archer growled again and in the next strike of lightning she saw that his eyes changed for just a fraction of a second, flashing gold before returning to their alarmingly pretty grey. She should have been afraid of him, maybe, almost any other girl on the planet would have been, but there was none of that, not even a small sliver of fear to saddle her with inhibitions.
Instead she felt enlivened, emboldened, and when Archer lifted her into the air she wrapped her legs around his waist without hesitation. He carried her deeper into the barn, neither of them really knowing where they were going and not caring either, and when he came upon several large bales of hay that had been split and spilled over the floor to form a makeshift bed, he laid her down upon it.
He bent his head forward, his haunting eyes smoldering into her own, and took one hard nipple into his mouth through her flimsy slip. The feeling of his rough, hot tongue sliding over the smooth silk and her aching nipple was exquisite and she arched her back, head rocking from side to side helplessly as she cried out with pleasure. Her knees pulled up, opening to him, ready to take him in, and her hips began to rock helplessly against his torso.
Her hands snaked down beneath the weight of him, tugging at the slacks that still stood between them, and all the while his tongue worked on her breasts with expert precision. It was tantalizing. It was torture. It was such magnificent pleasure that she could feel herself rocketing towards the edge of climax without him ever having touched her below the belt.
“What do you want, girl?” he whispered in a harsh, rasping voice into her ear, the heat of his breath making her skin prickle. His hair fell across his face, grazed along her skin, the smell of cedar wafting up to her nostrils and making her ache for him anew.
“You know what I want!” she gasped, her back arching again as her legs began to quiver and shake. “You know that.”
“I want to hear you say it. I want to hear the words on your pretty lips.”
“I want you,” she moaned, eyes opening and locking onto his. “I want to feel you moving inside of me.”
With no more words needed between them, Archer reared back and stood quickly. He made quick work of removing his trousers as well and stood above her with nothing but his naked flesh and the tension built between his thighs. She could see the length of him now and it was big, but not so big that she couldn’t handle it. She could handle everything about this man.
She knew that without having any right to know it, with perfect clarity and certainty. She knew it and she knew she didn’t want to wait for him anymore. She was not a patient girl, not even under the best of circumstances when she was concentrating on maintaining her decorum, and this was not a time for that.
She wasn’t even entirely herself at that point, not even entirely Eloise. Although she remained that young woman in physical form, her spirit existed in perfect duality in those sweaty, salty-sweet moments with Archer Grant. She was herself and she was her lion and the things she was doing were physical in nature without reprimand.
She looked up at him, teasing her with his girth, and smiled a coy, devilish smile. When his head dropped to one side in question, she slid her hand down again. Only this time it wasn’t to fumble with his clothing. This time there was nothing fumbling about her actions at all.
When her fingers landed on the slit of her sex, she found that it was slick with lust and she gave a sharp exhalation of breath. Her fingers worked over her clit expertly, the way they had thousands of times in the dark privacy of her room.
She found her rhythm and closed her eyes and then it was as if she was flying, flying towards that climax that would light up her insides like a thousand suns. Dimly she could feel Archer watching her, could feel his pleased surprise, and it only spurned her on. When she felt his hands run quickly down the inside of her thighs, spreading her legs wider apart so that he could lower himself between them, she felt no surprise. She had called him there, led him there.
Eloise’s hand moved from the steadily increasing pressure she was applying to herself and helped to guide Archer’s throbbing member inside of her. The immediate sensation was that of being split open, of being made bigger somehow to accommodate this massive man, and it was a splitting open she welcomed.
Her legs hooked around the backs of his thighs, one hand finding his back and digging her nails in while the other flew up over her head to give herself better leverage. She gasped at the new feeling of fullness and heard him sigh contentedly above her as he began to rock his hips slowly. It was a delicious slowness, a tormenting slowness, and Eloise’s hips bucked against his without any apparent ability on her part to control their movements.
It didn’t matter. She was not the one ruling this encounter; Archer had that job and he was the one who established the rhythm the two of them found together. His hips rolled languidly, almost leisurely, his eyes following her face intently as they did so. It was almost too much for her to take, that eye contact, and she felt herself sinking into him in a way that made her unsure of where her own person stopped and his began.
She had heard of that sort of thing happening before but she’d never believed it to be something that transpired outside of lewd novels. Now she found that a great many things between a man and a woman were true, she’d just never experienced the right man before.
“I want you,” he growled, his breathing speeding up as his hips began to do the same. “I want you so goddamned much.”
“You have me,” she gasped, arching her back to meet him so that her breasts grazed his chest as he pumped himself into her. He seemed to lose some of his control then, burying his
face in the crook of her neck as his body moved faster and faster, driving into her deeper and deeper so that her entire body shook and quaked.
She heard a low moaning, a crying out that happened again and again and again. She was astonished to realize that those sounds were coming out of her. They were coming out of her and Archer was the one eliciting the sounds. She wrapped her legs around him even tighter, feeling a tingling begin in her toes that quickly spread up her legs and took hold of every inch of her.
She closed her eyes tightly, knowing what was coming and knowing that she couldn’t stop it even if she wanted to. And oh God, she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to stop it, only to keep it going forever and ever. The two of them wrapped in their sweaty embrace was the only thing she had any interest in at all and she wanted it to last forever but then her body was exploding with pleasure, causing her to scream, to actually scream out her pleasure and to bite down on his shoulder to keep the noise from traveling too far.
Later, after it was all over, she would see that her teeth had drawn blood from his perfect, taut skin, and she would feel a dull embarrassment she couldn’t quite shake. In that moment, however, neither one of them noticed because Archer had joined her in her explosive orgasm and nothing else in all of the world mattered even a little bit. It was the two of them, bodies weathering wave after wave of pleasure, and nothing else mattered.
They stayed that way together for a long time, long after their orgasms had faded into quivering memory. When Archer finally rolled off of her, Eloise felt a sudden mournful loss that was so powerful she was, frankly, shocked. It wasn’t a feeling that lasted, though, because he pulled her in closer to him and they lay there that way for as long as Eloise dared, talking of things in the fashion in which only lovers could.
When she could stay no longer and it was time to send Archer on his way, Eloise felt ridiculous tears threatening to fall from her lashes and wondered that she could feel so much for a man she knew so little. She would have felt foolish for it if she hadn’t seen the same stricken expression on Archer’s face, but he appeared to be as unhappy about their parting as she was and that made it somehow better.
Only a little bit, mind you, but still better nevertheless. She rose up onto the tips of her toes and kissed him, soft, sweet, and slow. When she finally broke the kiss, she took several steps away from him, using the distance in a sorry attempt at severing the tie that now bound them securely together.
“You have to go, Archer. You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Right. I guess I know that.”
“And you can’t come back, not ever.”
“I guess I know that, too.”
“Do you know what I am? Did your Gram tell you?”
“She did. And your father told you all about me, I suppose. About me and my family.”
“He did,” she answered in a quiet, forlorn voice she hardly recognized, “and that we’re meant to be mortal enemies. That’s why we can’t see each other again.”
Archer opened his mouth, started to speak, then turned and strode away from her as quickly as he could manage. Eloise stood and watched, the tears no longer able to be contained, and only moved when he was completely gone. It was only when he was so gone it was as if he’d never come to see her at all that Eloise allowed herself to move listlessly towards the great house that held no joy for her now.
She felt weighed down by a preoccupying sadness and it was this sadness that made her forget. It made her forget all about the father she loved but who had become something of an adversary over the last week. It made her forget the way she’d known to shimmy down the drainpipe instead of using the stairs for fear that he would once again be waiting for her in the dark.
She forgot these things so completely that they did not occur to her until it was too late. She opened the front door, the door that was never locked, and shut it behind her without really knowing what it was that she did. She hardly even knew where she was. It wasn’t until she heard her father’s menacing voice coming out of the dark that she remembered, and by that time it was too late.
CHAPTER TEN
“Not real. None of it was real, that’s all. Not a single part of it.”
Eloise was muttering those things to herself in a sort of chant before she even opened her eyes, rolling away from the window in her soft bed and turning away from the sun. Even with the heavy curtains drawn together tightly, the miniscule amount of sun that made its way into her bedroom was too much. It not only hurt her eyes, it hurt every part of her, made her ache all over. Or was it just that she hurt all over anyway and the sunlight forced her to wake up enough to recognize it? Even worse than recognizing it, to remember why she hurt?
“No,” she moaned to herself, burying her face into her pillow and shaking it back and forth in feeble protest. “No, it wasn’t real so there’s nothing to remember.”
Instead of turning to the bad thing, her mind slipped still further backwards, back to her tangled embrace with Archer and the way they had lain together afterwards. She thought about the things the two of them had discussed and it made her heart both full and heavy at the same time. She had known that he knew what she was even before she asked, just as she knew he was well aware of her knowledge of his true nature.
It had made her feel ferociously free knowing those things, far freer than she had ever felt before, and she had spoken to Archer of things she’d never said to anyone. They were things she hadn’t even known she felt, and yet she had found herself pouring her heart out to Archer Grant about her heart’s secret desires. Her desire to get away, to extricate herself from the loving and overbearing protection of her father and everything her family name stood for.
She spoke of the life she wished she could lead, a life full of wild wanderings and uninhibited actions. Archer had responded by telling her that nobody was going to give her what she wanted and so she had better take it for herself. A different woman might have thought his words too harsh but Eloise understood his intent perfectly.
She understood that he was trying to help her, but also knew that she had no idea how she could ever do what he was suggesting. She wanted to, but she couldn’t and when she had said goodbye to him she had meant it to be forever. She would only have that one night with him and that would have to be enough. She knew that, had decided it, and fully intended to keep separate from him for the rest of her life when she walked through her front door.
“We have a problem now, little girl. We have a real by God problem and we’re going to find a way to solve it, one way or another.”
The sound of her father’s voice had scared her badly and she’d let out a little scream. She wondered briefly if her mother might hear and come running, but then she remembered the palm reader’s words and knew she could rely on no such thing. Even if her mother could hear her all the way from the top of the vast house, she would not be coming to her rescue.
No, she would leave her daughter and husband to duke it out on their own, letting the chips fall where they may. When Eloise saw her father emerge from the shadows, she let out a strangled gasp and backed up towards the front door. She had a half a mind to turn the handle and make a run for it but she couldn’t seem to get it open. In her shock and fear, her hands felt like nothing more than fumbling things with no feeling or direction. She was stuck, trapped, and her father was coming for her.
He had held no glass of liquor this time but the stink of alcohol hung around him like a cloud. When she was able to see his eyes, she could see that they were bloodshot, threaded with shard streaks of red that made him look to her like a stranger. He looked much angrier than he had been the first time, angrier than she had ever seen him in her life, and his fists were hovering in the air in front of him, clenching and unclenching with a rhythm that reminded her uneasily of a beating heart.
“Father.”
“No, Eloise. I don’t think you get to talk. You don’t get to talk this time, no more lies or excuses from you, dear.”
“Enough!” he roared in a voice so loud it rivaled the thunder of the storm still raging outside. “When I tell you to be quiet, you stop talking! I am still your father! I am still the master of this house!”
Dripping wet and shivering, practically naked in her soaked slip, Eloise nodded and folded her arms in front of her. Never in her life had she felt truly endangered by her father but she felt that way standing there trapped in the foyer. She had no idea what he intended to do, but she could see that it would not go well for her.
When he closed the gap between the two of them in one graceful lunge and struck her with a fist across her cheekbone, she had known she was correct. He’d never hit her before, never laid a hand on her, but he had made up for it that night, pummeling her as if she was a punching bag and not his only daughter.
