by Merry Farmer
No, her efforts were purely research. She needed to be armed with all the facts of love the next time she faced Basil. Their walk that afternoon had been a study in awkwardness, for which she blamed her lack of experience with all the things she’d wanted to say.
But what did she want to say? She stopped the useless circle she’d been turning in and let out a breath of defeat, lowering her shoulders. What could she possibly say to Basil that would cover everything swirling through her like a flood? That she didn’t want him to think of her as just a friend anymore? That, as frustrating as it was to do exactly the thing everyone had been pushing her to do, she wanted to marry him now? Or that she didn’t want to marry him, but she wanted to be his lover?
That last thought sent heat rushing to her face. She could only imagine the shock in Basil’s eyes if she demanded he take her to bed and teach her all the things that only he could. How did one even begin to make that demand or approach that subject? Rose hadn’t had an answer to that question, only that Elaine would know when the time was right.
There had to be an answer somewhere.
“If I were a naughty book, where would I hide?” she mumbled into the darkness.
She thought back to the day she’d caught Basil unpacking those crates. He’d blushed so charmingly. He truly was a handsome man, in spite of his age. Or perhaps because of it. She couldn’t imagine him being any more handsome in youth than he was with the distinction of experience in his features. He had a confidence, a solidity that none of the men her own age had. He knew things, had done things. It was alluring. It was—
She gasped as her gaze settled on a slip of red at the very top of the bookshelf behind the shop’s counter. “No!” she laughed, jumping into motion and scrambling around the counter. “You silly man, you didn’t hide them at all. They’re exactly where I saw you put them.”
As quickly as she could in the dark, Elaine found the stepstool Andrew sometimes used to reshelve books customers had looked at. She placed it behind the counter, then climbed up to retrieve the small stack of red and maroon-bound books that Basil had whisked out of her grasp two weeks before. They were all there, The Lustful Turk, The Romance of Lust, and The Kama Sutra.
With a renewed rush of excitement, she snatched her candle from the counter and carried the books through the main part of the shop to the corner with the sofa. She was closer to the window at the front of the shop than she wanted to be, but it was the middle of the night. No one would be peering in through the windows of a bookshop when they should be tucked snugly in bed.
She stubbed her toe on one of the small tables covered with an Indian cotton scarf and piled with books on her way to the sofa, which caused her to spill the books across the sofa’s cushion. Her excitement ran far higher than it should have as she muttered a mild curse and looked for a place to set her candle. As soon as it was safe on one of the small tables, she plopped onto the sofa and gathered up the books. There was just enough light to make out the titles and to read, so she curled into a ball at the end of the sofa near her light and turned each of the books over, considering.
Right away, she rejected The Kama Sutra. It was probably in some foreign language anyhow. She tossed it to the far end of the sofa. The Lustful Turk went next. She wasn’t sure she felt like reading about swarthy men in the far away Levant, not when the man at the forefront of her mind was a tall, distinguished, British bookseller with silver-grey hair and startling, blue eyes. The Romance of Lust it was, then.
She leafed through the first few pages, but it was mostly about some young man named Charles and the governess that had come to mind him and his sisters. There didn’t seem to be much of interest in that, until—
“Oh my!” she gasped, eyes widening, then narrowing as she leaned closer, drinking in Charles’s account of his awakening, both with the governess and with a female guest in his parent’s house. “Charles, you naughty young man!”
She flipped a page and read on. “I was quite beside myself. The consciousness that I was thrusting my most private part into that of a lady’s person which is regarded with such sacred delicacy caused me to experience the most enraptured pleasure.”
“Sacred delicacy?” Elaine gasped, clutching her loose nightgown to her chest. “Enraptured pleasure?”
“Maddened by the intensity of my feeling I at length quickened my pace. My charming companion did the same, and we together yielded down a most copious and delicious discharge.”
Elaine squeaked in excitement at the words, feeling more than a little maddening intensity of feeling herself. But her squeak instantly turned into a shriek as the bell above the bookshop door rang out, scaring her out of her wits.
She clapped the open book to her chest, only barely managing to scramble to her feet, her nightgown and Basil’s robe askew on her shoulders, before Basil himself charged around the corner and saw her. He wore a fashionable pair of cotton pajamas, the dressing gown she’d knit for him, and a look of thunder…which quickly flashed to utter surprise.
“Elaine?”
Her pulse refused to calm one bit. He’d called her Elaine. Not Miss Bond. The intimacy of it—coupled with the electricity still sizzling through her blood from reading about young Charles’s adventures—made her bold.
“Basil,” she said in return. “I found the books.”
He strode toward her. “You what?”
Something about seeing him in the light of only one candle—dressed for bed, hair disheveled, chest heaving as though he’d been running—loosened whatever had been wound up so tightly within her. “I found those books you tried to keep hidden from me.” She pulled the book away from her chest, closing it and holding it up. “The Romance of Lust. Master Charles is a very naughty fellow.”
He made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh of relief and a groan of defeat, then closed the distance between them. The candlelight was just enough to make out the intensity of feeling in his eyes, just as the book had described. He plucked the book from her hands and tossed it carelessly aside. It hit the floor with a smack, and Elaine was sure he would scold her for ferreting out the forbidden books.
Instead, he reached for her, clasping one arm around her waist and tugging her firmly against him. “Enough. I surrender.”
His mouth closed over hers with such a demanding force that Elaine gasped. He used her surprise to mold his lips to hers, sliding his tongue along hers in an invasion that left her senses reeling. The moan of pleasure that followed from him was that of a man who had been waiting for far too long and whose control had finally broken.
It took her all of three seconds to know how to react. With a giggle that could best be described as hysterical, she threw her arms around his shoulders, kissing him back with a passion that burned like a forest fire. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing with her lips or tongue, or any part of her body. All she knew was that she wanted to taste him and feel him, breathe him in and become one with him. The heat of his body infused her as he held her close, and when he scooped his free hand around her backside and down her thigh, lifting her leg up over his hip, she felt the hard press of his member against her belly.
“To hell with it,” he muttered, kissing her lips, her cheeks, her chin. “I’m through with cowardice.”
“Oh yes, me too,” she sighed, flailing slightly as she worked out how best to hold him so that their bodies would touch as much as possible.
“If tonight is all we have, then I intend to make the most of it.”
“All we ha—” Her question shifted to a sharp intake of breath as his hand raked up her side under his robe to cup her breast through the thin cotton of her nightgown. She arched into his touch, thrilled by the way he handled her as no man ever had.
“I adore you, Elaine,” he said, then captured her mouth in another kiss before she could dream of thinking of an answer. “I’ve loved you from the moment I met you, and I’ve wanted you from the moment after that.”
She managed
a sound that might have made sense, but she doubted it. Thought had abandoned her, unless it was the thought of how powerful she suddenly realized he was. Her arms had settled around his torso, which was lean and muscular, and her leg was still clasped around his hip. Heat and need radiated from him, but it was the size and stiffness of that male part of him that demanded most of her attention. She was seized by the wild need to rub against it, to act out everything Rose had told her and lustful Charles had written about.
“I want you too,” she managed to say at last. “Now.”
“Thank God,” he groaned.
A second later, he swept her off her feet, and before she could get her bearings, they tumbled onto the sofa. He reached for the hem of her nightgown and tugged it up her leg. With a frantic burst of energy, she fumbled with his dressing gown, trying to push it off his shoulders so she could get to the buttons of his pajama shirt. Neither of them got very far, since the bulk of the fabric keeping their bodies apart was caught between them. Neither did it help that their mouths kept meeting and melding in clumsy, passionate kisses that interfered with the efforts of their arms more than they helped.
“Wait, wait,” Elaine panted at last.
“No,” he said, slanting down for another kiss.
She laughed, pushing back against his chest. “We’re not going to get anywhere like this.”
“We’ll get where we need to be,” he said, then swept his tongue and teeth along the soft flesh on the side of her neck.
She yelped at the surprising pleasure his actions brought, but continued to writhe beneath him. “I want to see you naked,” she gasped, tearing at the front of his pajama shirt as if she had the strength to rip the buttons out. “And I want to be naked too.”
He jerked back so fast that the top two buttons of his shirt did pop off before she could let go. “I will never deny you anything,” he said, making quick work of the two remaining buttons. He shrugged out of his shirt and dressing gown together, tossing them aside.
“Oh, my.” Elaine gaped at the sight of his bare chest, or what she could see of it in the flickering candlelight. A light dusting of hair covered well-formed muscles. His arms were stronger than they seemed when he was clothed. His torso narrowed to a slender waist, where his hands were busy tugging loose the drawstring of his pajama bottoms. She blinked and held her breath as she made out a patch of scarred and pinched flesh in his side.
That was all the warning she had before he pushed the pajama bottoms down over his masculine hips, setting his manly bits free. They sprung up with more force than Elaine expected, sending a shiver of excitement through her. She only had the briefest of glimpses of his long, thick length and the dark shapes beneath it before he wriggled the pajama bottoms off all the way.
Before she could regret not getting a better look, or even a feel, he grabbed the hem of her nightgown with both hands and swept it up her sides. Her arms flew up over her head with the force of his efforts, and the whole thing, robe and all, came off in one rush of fabric and cool air. She was too giddy with excitement at the whole thing to do anything more than lay there, arms extended, her hair flowing wildly around her, as he stared at her.
“Dear God,” he whispered with wild intensity. “You’re every bit as beautiful as I dreamed you to be.”
The compliment filled her with a surprising burst of pride. She was naked, splayed in the most vulnerable of positions, one leg wedged up against the back of the sofa and the other slipping off the seat, her breasts free, nipples tight…in short, she lay in the most absurd pose she could imagine with Basil looking at her, and she’d never felt more sublime. Better still, Basil had never been more enticing. His scar was a thrilling reminder that he had been a soldier and adventurer. The size of his male organ that close to her, coupled with the lust in Basil’s eyes, should have terrified her, but instead, it left her shivering and feeling as though she couldn’t wait to be devoured.
“I should tell you now,” he said, his voice strange and deep and delicious as he studied every intimate part of her, “I’ve had more than a few lovers.”
Again, what should have shocked or intimidated her made her pulse speed up and the sensitive cavern between her legs ache. “A man like you?” she murmured. “I’m not surprised.” He’d had an entire life before arriving in Brynthwaite, after all.
He inched forward, positioning himself above her without touching her, which instantly drove her to distraction. “I had a reputation in my younger days,” he went on, bracing himself with one hand while sweeping his fingertips only up her side and across her stomach to circle her breast, spiraling every closer to her taut nipple.
“A reputation?” she squeaked, breathing faster, hips flexing restlessly.
“For being insatiable,” he said in a low growl, his lips inches from her. “You do know what insatiable means, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, voice and body trembling. “It means you can’t get enough.”
“I could never get enough of you,” he went on, coming within a hair’s breadth of kissing her lips before dropping to her ear. He pressed the softest of kisses on the tender flesh below her earlobe and began working his way languorously across her jaw and cheek. Elaine whimpered as her body reacted from head to toe, and particularly a few parts in the middle. “And while age takes some things away,” he went on, “it gives others.” He shifted to her other ear, repeating the passionate teasing that had her writhing in an attempt to bring their bodies into fuller contact. “Stamina, for example,” he said, the vibrations of his voice rippling through her. “It may take me quite some time to become aroused enough for completion.”
“Oh?” she asked, or rather sighed.
“It may take quite a bit of stimulation.” His fingers raked across her nipple.
“Ah,” she moaned, arching into his touch.
He ended his teasing and closed his mouth over hers, cutting off the sound of her pleasure with a deep groan of his own. He relaxed, sinking to cover her, their bodies touching everywhere. It was magical and maddening. He felt so perfect molded to her. Even the weight of him was dazzling. She slipped her arms around his back, brushing her fingertips across his tantalizing scar, and spread her hands across the flexed muscles of his back as he kissed her. He was so much bigger than her, but that only excited her. She wriggled her legs farther apart, lifting them over his hips in an effort to embrace him with all of her.
He must have liked what she was doing. His breath came in increasingly ragged pants. He rocked against her, rubbing his hot, hard staff against her belly. She wished he would rub a little lower, low enough to push inside of her. That was the goal of the whole thing, after all, or so she’d been led to believe. But when he did shift his body down hers, instead of penetrating her, he lowered his head to the level of her breasts.
She started to say, “You missed,” but before she could manage the first syllable, he closed his hand around her breast, bringing it up to meet his mouth.
Her eyes shot wide as he sucked on her nipple, raking his tongue across its rigid point. She let out an uncontrollable cry and arched into him. The power of the sensations that jolted through her went beyond anything she’d ever felt. The ache in her center was almost too much to bear. The harder he licked and sucked and teased her breast, the more desperate she felt. Something within her was going to explode, and it was going to do so soon and spectacularly.
He seemed to sense it. His mouth stayed attentively on her nipple, but his hand drifted lower, across her belly and into the tuft of curls between her legs. Then it moved lower still, brushing over her clitoris and making her gasp before his fingers delved into the wet folds of her womanhood.
He groaned as if he were the one feeling the pleasure his touch had aroused right along with her. “So wet,” he murmured.
His fingers pressed deeper, two of them, teasing and testing. It was even more amazing than what his mouth had done to her breast, if that was possible. She felt as though she were an inst
rument and he was a virtuoso. The way he touched her—boldly, possessively, ardently—made her feel as though she were his to play with and his alone. She felt only the slightest hint of resistance as he plunged a third finger inside of her, stroking deep and making her feel as though she would come apart at any second.
“You want it,” he said in the same powerful tone that had vibrated through her before. “I intend to make you come as many times as possible tonight.”
She could only answer with a wordless sound of pleasure at first, but as soon as he reached deep within her, grinding the heel of his hand against her clitoris, she answered in an entirely different way. The tension that had been building inside of her broke with thunderous power. Her muscles squeezed around his fingers, throbbing with pleasure, sending shockwaves of the most beautiful sensations she’d ever experienced through her. And though she was innocent, she knew enough to know that he’d drawn something primal and intimate from her. She wanted to give it to him with all her heart.
The intensity of her orgasm was so great that, even as it began to subside, she was still aroused, ready for more. The buzz of pressure was already building again as he withdrew his hand and slid his way up her sweating body to close his mouth over hers in a kiss more passionate than anything before.
And when they paused for air, she sighed, “More.”
He froze, tension rippling through his body. “More?”
She opened her eyes, looking straight into his and feeling as though she was burning from the inside out. “Make me feel that way with your thing inside of me.”
She was an idiot for not knowing the right word, but it didn’t seem to matter. Basil groaned, a new level of urgency surging through his body as he repositioned himself yet again. He lifted her leg over his hip once more and nestled between her thighs. She felt the heat of his staff poke against her as he guided himself to her entrance.
“Are you sure you want this,” he growled, breathless. “There’s no going back.”
“Yes, I want you,” she said, writhing against him, the desperate feeling within her intensifying.
