He had seen her naked before, years earlier. Then, it had been a furtive, forbidden union, no less pleasurable for its risk but infinitely less stirring than this moment when they stood together in the room they shared as man and wife. Lenore fought down a blush and raised one leg, her stockinged toes caressing his shin. “Don’t you want to finish?”
Nathaniel’s voice was guttural. “I suspect I’ll be finished before we’ve truly started.” He gestured to her stockings. “Leave those on and loosen your hair for me.”
She did as he requested, sauntering to the dressing table to seat herself naked before the mirror. Nathaniel didn’t follow, but he turned to watch her, his eyes bright in the room’s dim light. Lenore took her time removing the pins, setting each one carefully on the vanity. With each pin out, a curl unfurled to fall down her shoulders and back until her hair cascaded over the chair and pooled in her lap.
Her husband’s breathing panted harsh and loud in the room. She met his eyes in the mirror’s reflection, noting the flare of his nostrils, the silvery shadows that smudged his cheekbones and the way his chest rose and fell as if he’d run across London Bridge a dozen times without stopping.
“My God,” he said in a choked voice. “You’re even more beautiful than I remembered.”
She smiled, warmed to her toes by his fervent compliment. Desire unspooled in her belly, sending liquid heat through every part of her before settling into a throb between her thighs. “Your turn,” she said softly.
Her startled bleat nearly ruined the sensual atmosphere when Nathaniel closed his eyes and went from being garbed in black from neck to feet to bare, pale nudity in an instant. His expression had sobered, a touch tentative as he watched her leave her seat at the vanity to stand before him.
She once likened him to a marble statue. How unknowingly accurate she’d been in that comparison, and he was garbed then with only his hands and face hinting at his overall paleness. The Nathaniel she’d first fallen in love with had been a man of average height with broad shoulders, muscular arms and a powerful, easy stride. The Nathaniel who claimed a droll’s body as his was muscular in his own right, taller and leaner with the long, wiry body of an acrobat.
Looking at him was like looking at the living representation of a Greek myth gone awry, in which a mad Pygmalion begged an even more perverse Aphrodite to bring a male Galatea to life. The goddess had done it with torture and lightning. The sculptor scientist perished, but his creations lived on. One of them married Lenore.
“You are truly lovely,” she said, breathless at the sight of him. The silvery color shadowing his cheekbones spread down his throat and across his chest. Lenore’s gaze dropped, and her lips parted. “Oh my.” He might share the same milky skin tones and muscular physique of any of the Greek and Roman statues but God, or the mercurial Aphrodite, had been far more generous than the sculptors when endowing the living man.
Nathaniel followed Lenore’s wide-eyed gaze to his erection, swollen and stiff. His hands fluttered at his side as if to cover himself and went still at Lenore’s abrupt “Don’t.”
Lenore wet her lips with her tongue, smiling faintly at Nathaniel’s sudden focus on her face. “It must have been a...challenging task, flipping and tumbling about with such a...” She frowned, searching for the right word.
“Weapon?” Nathaniel offered. They shared a chuckle.
“Just so,” she said.
He glanced down a second time. “Believe me, I was just as surprised as you when I first saw it.”
“Impressed too, I’ll wager.” Her short time aboard the Terebellum had been an education in many ways, not the least an observance that men in general possessed an obsessive interest in the size and potency of their own genitalia, along with an insatiable need to brag about it to each other.
Nathaniel confirmed that belief when he shrugged and said “Hard not to be.”
Lenore grinned and shook her head. She padded to him, the floor cold under her feet, her nipples drawn tight in the room’s cool air, despite the heat from the hearth lit in one corner of the room. “Make me warm, husband. I’m freezing here.”
He leapt to do her bidding, lifting her in his arms to carry her to the bed. They burrowed under the covers, wrapped around each other in a tangle of limbs.
Lenore learned every angle and sweep of Nathaniel’s body, its taste and scent, the way his narrow hips angled so that he seated himself firmly between her thighs. She carded his soft, white hair and mapped the length of his back with her lips. She followed the path of silvery veins just under his skin with her fingers, tickling and teasing in a way that made him laugh and moan by turns.
Unlike her, he knew her body, remembered how to make her back arch as he sucked the tips of her breasts and played his tongue over her nipples. He recalled just how to make her mew his name when he slid down, propped her legs over his shoulders and tipped the velvet until her hips bucked hard enough to make the bed bounce and her heels dug into his back. She was sheened with sweat and gasping when he slithered up her body and pounced, his tongue sliding into her mouth even as he spread her thighs with his and thrust deep.
Nathaniel paused, his chest heaving like hard-worked bellows. He rested his forehead against Lenore’s, and she heard the strain in his voice as he fought for control. “I remember this,” he whispered. “I remember, and it is paradise.”
Lenore, half dizzy with the exquisite feel of Nathaniel buried deep inside her, stole his breath with a slow hungry kiss. “I never forgot,” she said when they broke for air. “I dreamed about you all the time.”
She didn’t know if her words or the involuntary flex of slippery muscles sent him over the edge, but he gasped and shuddered, eyes rolling back as his back arched. He angled his hips so that his pelvis rubbed just the right way in just the right spot. Lenore climaxed a second time, and Nathaniel groaned her name into her neck as he came.
They lay together in a knot of limbs and twisted bedclothes. Lenore longer felt the chill and played idly with idea of opening the bedroom’s single window to cool them. She lay under Nathaniel, whose long body was draped over hers and most of the bed. His head rested between her breasts, a most convenient spot for him to press a kiss to a plump curve or a rosy nipple.
Lenore jumped and tugged a lock of his hair when his tongue flicked out to tease the tip. “Stop that,” she ordered and giggled. “I’m ticklish now.”
He raised his head to stare at her. She liked his half smiles very much. “I remember that too,” he said before returning to his favored spot with the promise to behave himself.
Silent laughter made his shoulders shake. Lenore tucked her chin and stared down at him. “Why are you laughing?”
He rose, bracing himself on his forearms where they rested on either side of Lenore’s shoulders. His fingers traced the contours of her ears and played in her hair. “Your mother must be beside herself. Her only child married to a bone keeper.”
Lenore harrumphed, not at all liking her mother’s intrusion, even in casual conversation, into the bedroom. “I think she’ll secretly be glad I finally married. Maybe with enough time, and a few glasses of sherry to help her along, she might even refer to you as the Honorable Mr. Gordon, protector of the dignified deceased instead of ‘that creature’.”
Nathaniel’s expression brightened. “You truly think so?”
“No.”
He grinned. “Ah well, it’s a rare man who gains the affections of his mother-in-law.”
Lenore grimaced. “In this case, please consider it a blessing if Mama withholds hers.”
The grimace melted, and she sighed her pleasure when he feathered kisses down her nose, to her sensitive philtrum and finally to her lips, still swollen from his earlier attentions. “It’s of no importance to me, as long as I keep the affections of her daughter.”
Lenore cupped the sides of his head and lifted his face so she could look deep into his strange, ethereal gaze. “You will bring me great happiness,” she said in to
nes that demanded he believe her. “You already do.”
His lids dropped for a moment, hiding the expression in his eyes. She gasped when he opened them again, revealing the fires of devotion and hope. “You will bring spring and white roses to the graveyard,” he said, and his voice echoed back and back as if all eternity rose inside him to spill from his lips in a declaration of his faith in her.
Humbled and stunned, Lenore blinked back tears. She stroked his hair, his elegant face. “I will be content to bring you joy,” she said, her words thick in her mouth.
Nathaniel kissed her deeply before pressing his lips to her ear. “You do that simply by breathing. My Lenore.”
—END—
☾ ✥ ☽
ELIZABETH HUNTER and GRACE DRAVEN are both writers of paranormal and fantasy romance with over twenty works of fiction between them. Both love writing complicated characters who fall in love. They really like each other's work and thought it would fun to do some creepy, creepy Gothic romance stories together.
They also both like hummus and large dogs, red wine and traveling. They spend too much time talking about books and probably not enough time doing the laundry. Their readers are grateful they live very far apart, because if they lived closer, they probably wouldn't get as much work done.
You can find out more about Grace Draven’s work at: GraceDraven.com
You can find out more about Elizabeth Hunter’s work at ElizabethHunterWrites.com
They are also both on Facebook and Twitter more than they should be.
Also by Grace Draven
Master of Crows
Entreat Me
All the Stars Look Down
The Lightening God’s Wife
Drago Illuminare
Draconus
Wyvern
Arena
Courting Bathsheba
Also By Elizabeth Hunter
The Irin Chronicles
The Scribe
The Singer
The Secret
The Elemental Mysteries Series
A Hidden Fire
This Same Earth
The Force of Wind
A Fall of Water
Lost Letters & Christmas Lights
The Elemental World Series
Building From Ashes
Waterlocked
Blood and Sand
The Bronze Blade
The Scarlet Deep
The Elemental Legacy Series
Shadows and Gold
The Cambio Springs Series
Shifting Dreams
Desert Bound
Waking Hearts
Contemporary Romance
The Genius and the Muse
BENEATH A WANING MOON
Copyright © 2015
ISBN: 9781310447679
A Very Proper Monster
Copyright © 2015
Elizabeth Hunter
Gaslight Hades
Copyright © 2011
Grace Draven
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Editors: Mel Sterling, Lora Gasway, Anne Victory
Formatted: Elizabeth Hunter
Cover art: Grace Draven/Elizabeth Hunter
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please delete it and purchase your own copy from an authorized retailer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Beneath a Waning Moon: A Duo of Gothic Romances Page 23
