She would gladly burn in his warmth.
He stoked her passion with his kisses, his hands smoothing down her sides. Seemingly he was in no hurry to remove her shift. Virginie didn’t care, as long as he continued to touch her.
He had blunt, strong fingers, his touch sure and determined, his caresses increasing in strength and reach. He encompassed her waist with his hands and without warning, lifted her to lie over him. Still in their flickering, open-mouth kiss, with one kiss moving to another, he cupped her bottom. Finally he tugged at the hem of her shift, which had ridden up to the top of her thighs. He pushed her shoulders gently, an urging rather than a command.
“Sit up, sweetheart.” Softened by his endearment, she did so, and reached to grip her shift. He batted her hands away. “I want to do it.”
Smiling, she lifted her arms so he could whisk the loose garment off over her head. Then, with her straddling his thighs, he looked at her. His eyes darkened and a flicker of heat glimmered in the depths, as if someone had lit a fire there. “You are still lovely,” he said, his voice low, “but I can see imperfections. They add to your appeal. Making love with perfection is akin to trying to fuck a marble statue.”
She widened her eyes at the comment. She’d never heard him say that before. A tingle spread through her, originating in her loins. He curved his hand, slid it up her thigh, to her most intimate parts. Then he slid his thumb and finger into her crease and opened her up to his avid gaze.
“Lovely,” he repeated, and licked his lips.
She shuddered. The tingles grew stronger.
“You’re beautifully wet.” He glanced up at her face. “Your turn.”
She leaned back and he lifted his good leg so she could lean against his powerful thigh. Her body was even more shamelessly exposed, since he didn’t move his hand. On the contrary, he slid his fingers further into her, so they nuzzled her opening, then carelessly played with her, exploring and pinching her clitoris. She tried to concentrate.
“You are handsome.” He sniggered, but she continued. “It’s the sheer power of you.” Grinning, he flexed his shoulder and chest muscles. They quivered and jumped. “You astound. I’ve seen women in London watch you and sigh. The cane only adds to what you are.”
The smile disappeared, and he watched her, his fingers slowing their movements. “Explain.”
“It means you’re not perfect. If you were, you’d be more intimidating, more daunting, but from an attraction point, the vulnerability makes you approachable.”
His caresses quickened once more and she sighed from sheer happiness. “I like that. How can you turn a disability into an asset?”
“That’s easy when it’s you.”
He laughed. That easy sound, so rarely heard before, could prove addictive. Not in the way they’d just escaped, but something quite, quite different. Hearing him laugh soothed something deep inside her, at the same time as it excited her. The sound was his alone, special. While one part of her wanted to hug it to herself, to keep it here, the other wanted to share it with the world.
But this time belonged to them alone. When he lifted his arm to her, she caressed it, stroking as far as she could and obligingly, he flexed his muscles for her. She purred as she stroked him.
Truly he was massive. His arms alone could engulf both of hers and have room to spare for another, should she have grown one. His craggy face enhanced his power, reflected it. His eyes hid nothing of his thoughts. When she first knew him, she’d never have imagined him so open. His mood of happiness and anticipation filled the room, and her mind.
His low hum complimented her. She was growing wetter. She didn’t need him to tell her.
“I think we’re ready to take our chances,” he rumbled, his body vibrating under her thighs along with her words. When he drew his hand from between her thighs she could not repress her whimper of dismay. Slowly and steadily he was bringing her to a climax, but now cool air swept along her open crease, and nothing else.
He lifted her. With one hand scooped under her, curving around her buttocks, he lifted her and shifted, so his cock came to the front of her body. Watching her face, he brought it to touch her sensitive, wet flesh. She shuddered and leaned forward, pressing her hands on his chest. He could easily support her, so she had no compunction in doing so. He slid his hand from under her, now that she could support herself, and pressed the head of his cock against her opening.
He stretched her, pushed inside. That part was never easy, however ready she was for him, but she loved it, that it took them effort to fit his cock inside her. He would have supported her, but she didn’t want that. “Remove your hands. Let me take you.”
With raised brows and the corner of his mouth quirked in a delighted smile, he tucked his hands behind his head. “I have a beautiful view from here.”
Unabashed, she leaned on his chest and slowly lowered her body.
Instead of him ramming inside her and them going hard until they reached their separate explosive peaks, she took her time. She felt every inch of his shaft as it slid inside her. Every part of her body as she embraced him internally. He grazed the neck of her womb and pushed in further. She didn’t stop until she was sitting on him, her weight transferred to her lower body.
A week ago she would have taken him with all the ferocity she could. Perhaps they’d do that again, because shreds of enjoyment were never absent, but not tonight. Tonight she wanted to know what she had missed, the points along the way.
“Looking at the scenery,” he said, and when she jerked her head up to meet his gaze, he smiled. “Yes, I can sense some of your thoughts. But only some of them.”
“Looking at the scenery,” she repeated, but he groaned when she moved her hips sinuously from one side to the other. So did she. “I like that.”
“Do whatever you want, sweetheart. Let’s discover what we enjoy and what we don’t. For future reference, I love that.”
“I’m not sure.” She did it again. “Now I am. I love it too.”
Before, they’d only done what they needed to come. That peak was all that had mattered. She wanted more now. She was the goddess of love, so she should learn all there was about this act. She couldn’t imagine anyone better to experiment with. And she had all the time she wanted with him.
“Lesson the first?” she said, consciously echoing the words of the vicar in church last Sunday.
“Hmmm. We should concentrate. Perhaps take notes.”
Laughing, she shook her head. “I won’t forget.”
While he held himself rigid and bore back against her plays, he kept his hands behind his head and watched her. She squirmed on him, felt her inner walls move to accommodate his cock, lifted slightly and sank down again. Then she did both. That was even better. A little more, higher, and she made Harry moan again. She repeated it, quickening her moves again. He rewarded her with a slight cry. All the time she was doing this he was watching.
He scanned her body, taking a long look at her breasts, her cleft, her face. “Hold nothing back, Virginie. And neither will I. But don’t rush.”
“No. I want to enjoy this as long as possible.”
She worked him harder, lifting higher, using her knees as traction. If she lifted her hands, she could lean back against his knee and let him see—everything. All of her.
“Oh yes. That looks so good.” His low murmur inflamed her and spurred her to further action. “Your breasts bounce every time you come down onto me, and your body, so deeply pink, so wet, is more than wonderful. I can see my cock going in and out of you, and feel it too. You are holding me close, tight. Will you ever let me go?”
This talking during the act—she liked it. “I love that we can talk. More than ‘More!’ and ‘Faster!’”
He laughed, low and rich. “Yes. I can tell you what I see, and you can too. Do you like me under you, wife? Do you like riding me?”
A thrill shot through her at his words. She’d never be able to ride a horse again without thinking of
this. “I never ride astride.”
“I stand corrected.” He shook his head, and made a point of lifting his head, observing their actions. “Or perhaps not. You’re a natural, my lady. Maybe you should ride astride more often.”
“People would think me strange.”
“Not if they could see you now.” At last he brought his hands away from behind his head and touched her. He bracketed her hips, but did not alter her movements or guide her. Only caressed her, made patterns against her skin with the tips of his fingers while she concentrated on her actions, lifting and dropping.
Some of the fever returned, and fear crowded her, painted the outskirts of her joy.
He stilled his movements. “No, sweetheart, don’t. I can feel your fear, taste it. Remember, we can stop this whenever we wish.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But you can.” He pressed harder on her hip. “Stop.”
Staring at his face, she did as he asked. Her building excitement stilled, paused, and the realisation hit her. “Yes, yes, I see. I still want you, but the desperation has gone.”
“It will return at the peak,” he said. “But we can control it, us, Harry and Virginie. We are in charge.”
“Yes, we are.” Not Venus, not Vulcan, but the parts of them that belonged to humanity.
She began again and this time he didn’t prevent her. Only slid his hand over her body. “I love your skin. The first time I saw you I marked it. How I could see it at that distance I’m not sure, but I knew it was silky. I didn’t know how perfect it felt.” He cupped her breast, stroked her nipple with his thumb. “I do now.”
With a sigh, she leaned forward. She pressed her breast against his palm. He rotated it, pushed it, his touch firmer, inciting her to move more decisively. Up and down, higher with every stroke, bringing her body hard against his groin, her clitoris nudging his balls. Until she felt his thumb there, creating a harder pressure when she came down. The first touch made her gasp and then she wanted it, anticipated that touch every time she came down on him.
Inside, he filled her, every tiny fraction of an inch, completing her. Every time she sank down, taking him in, she ensured he touched that most sensitive spot inside. With each graze the thrills rioting inside her grew, taking her ever closer to where she needed to be.
Her peak came upon her as he marked it, each increase shocking her. But then a point where she poised delectably at the top of the precipice, before she plunged into the void. A sense of freedom came from letting herself soar free, releasing every thought.
When she opened her eyes, he was watching her. “To think I’ve been missing that,” he said, his voice hushed. “Seeing you come. I’ve seen it now and it’s the most glorious thing. I want to see that again and again. But now, my lady, I believe it’s your turn.”
Without any further warning, he seized her hips and swung her around. Yelping, still in the throes of her orgasm, she went with him, let him move her as if she was a cloth doll. She clung to his waist and abdomen with her knees, and he remained inside her. His expression had turned to fierce intent, but the light of intelligence still shone there and his mind remained open. It took effort to open the mind to someone else, so he was doing it to reassure her. And to fill her with his need.
“Now watch me,” he said. For the last few weeks they had entered their own worlds when they—fucked. She wasn’t used to using that word, but it had accurately described how their actions in the bedroom had deteriorated recently, as their addiction to the act rather than each other had grown.
His happiness was as important to Virginie as hers. “Yes, yes,” he whispered. “I could stop now. I truly could. But I won’t because I don’t have to prove it to you, do I?”
“No. No, you don’t.”
He drove hard into her, and she moaned, the remnants of her orgasm fluttering around him. No, she was wrong; he was driving her straight into another. She let it happen, instead of chasing it, and he watched her, his mouth open as he panted for breath and thrust into her relentlessly.
She cried his name, then he came with a mighty roar. She arched her back, rubbed her breasts against his chest as all his muscles tightened and his cock pulsed inside her heated body.
Half laughing, he slumped over her, causing her to lose her breath.
She had to push his shoulders, but he was already moving away, wrapping his arms around her to take her with him. They lay, close together, and he snagged a corner of the sheet and pulled it over them.
“We don’t need that,” she said, laughing.
“It’s instinctive.” He paused. “Virginie, I love you. The woman, the lovely, vibrant, clever woman that you are.”
“I love you too.” She didn’t have to hesitate. The emotion rose, as natural as breathing. It spread over her, the perfect enhancement to their lovemaking, a feeling that would last long beyond the bedroom. Encompassing everything he was, she was sure.
“Then we must strive to keep this.” He kissed her, cupping her cheek with one hand. She held him tightly and spread her palm over his back, tickling his shoulder blade. “We will keep it.” He smiled into her eyes and she smiled back. “Love is something that dies if it isn’t nurtured.”
“Then we will nurture it. Is it like an addiction, then?”
“Not at all. Nothing like it. I want what we just did. The last time I can remember being so affected was when you went on your knees and taught me that my leg does not define me. It is part of me, but not all of me, and you showed me how to live with that.”
“It just is.” She snuggled closer. His side of the bed was always the right, so he could lie comfortably on his side. She draped her leg over the thigh of his left leg, resting her heel on his calf. The hard, twisted muscle felt like Harry. Felt like him. “It exists because you do, so I cannot be sorry for it.”
“We are getting philosophical. Surely we should sleep, or perhaps just rest before we make love again.”
“Are we doing it again?”
“Do you doubt it?”
Chapter Twenty-One
He proved it again and then once more as dawn broke. They elected to stay in bed that morning, risking the opprobrium of the household. “Rich folks, lying abed,” he murmured to her, chuckling as he twined a lock of her disordered hair around his forefinger. Her hair was as silky as her skin, but a different texture. Fascinating. Everything about her fascinated him. Today felt as if he was learning her from the beginning. He’d never known her when she wasn’t enchanted.
He stilled, her curl still twined around his finger like silk on a skein.
Her eyes widened. “When we married, the urge to mate subsided and became desire. I thought it would die naturally, but instead, you joined me in the contagion.”
After gently untangling his fingers from her hair, to prevent himself hurting her, he rose on one elbow and gazed down into her face. “If it was still Eros’s enchantment, it should have died. His enchantment did not affect me. Does that not seem odd to you?”
“Yes. Very odd. It felt the same, but—not quite.” She frowned, but he kissed the lines away. “It commuted, changed, as if it was adapting to new circumstances. Eros infected me with temporary lust and I assumed it would die once I allowed it to. But it didn’t, did it?”
He shook his head. “It spread to me, like an illness. I wanted you anyway, so I assumed what I felt for you was simple desire. Like someone who denies an addiction, I refused to allow it to be anything else.”
He loved the way her hair clung to the pillow in long curls. Even more that she cared so little about it. The notion distracted him momentarily, something that never happened in the usual way of things. He accepted that it was happening now and moved on with this thoughts.
Their wedding night should have signalled the beginning of the end of the enchantment. Instead, it became the start of a new one, more virulent and feverish. Perhaps because he was already in love with her.
He could admit it now. Free of the contagio
n now, his love had remained, pushed aside only temporarily. “We can agree, then, that it was not Eros’s spell that captured us.”
“Yes.”
“It was like a net,” he said, remembering the thrall. “A golden net, bedecked with jewels, and we could see no further than its confines.”
She touched him, spread her hand over the right side of his chest, his nipple beading at the contact. “So who wanted us to see no further? Someone who wanted to drive us into madness? Or someone who wanted to confine us?”
He followed her thought. “Or someone who wanted us not to see what they were doing?”
She nodded. “So we have to discover who that person is. It has to be someone capable of wielding such power. To trap two immortals, especially two such as us, would take a great deal of power. Even if he or she took us by surprise.”
Because he wanted to, he bent his head and kissed her. She responded sweetly, her lips clinging to his, but when he moved away, they were not taken with an animal urge to couple. He desired her, but he could think. For the first time since his marriage he could reason and rationalise without the ever-present spectre of lust getting in the way.
“Or they,” said his wife.
“Yes.” He gazed at her thoughtfully. “Or they. What do we do?”
He waited for her to speak. “We should pretend we are still in thrall to the enchantment,” she said. “Let whoever it is think we are still under their control.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t like the idea. His preference was always to head straight for a problem and eliminate it. Subterfuge went against the straight grain he lived by. But someone had used it on him. More unforgiveable, they had used it against his wife. He would see them punished for that.
If he had to call on Bacchus to drive the person insane, use his special skills to lock the person inside themselves, he would do it. Before, he’d considered that punishment too cruel, but accepted the sense in it. Because once dead, an immortal essence would pass to the next persons, the nearest unborn child. So killing an immortal was of no use unless they had someone they could trust, and the immortal entered the body. Sometimes immortals passed by and nobody was sure why. Boscobel had tried to control all the immortals he had killed, but some had eluded even him and the house full of pregnant women he’d amassed.
Forged by Love: Even Gods Fall in Love, Book 4 Page 21
