Astrid was soon in the water, her skirts bunched up in one hand as she teetered about on the smooth limestone streambed. “This water feels so lovely. I wish I could dive out into the middle of the stream and turn into a mermaid.”
“And wouldn’t that make a nice mess of your pretty frock,” Andrew reminded her as he skipped a stone on the tranquil surface. Skipping stones was an attractive, elementally male activity, and yet Astrid couldn’t imagine her great sportsman of a late husband managing it.
“I would take my frock off, silly. How does one do that?” she asked as the ripples on the water spread from where the stone eventually disappeared. Andrew waded over to her and scrounged on the streambed for a small, round, flat rock.
“You want to find a rock like this.” He held it out to her. “Disk-shaped and smooth. You have to sort of flick it, but get your arm into it too, like so.”
This attempt bounced six times, which had Astrid peering about for a likely candidate. She, however, did not acquire the knack of “sort of flicking” even after a number of attempts, and was soon glaring at the stream.
Andrew, laughing at her frustration, found another perfect skipper and grabbed her hand.
“Here.” He put the rock in her hand and fitted her fingers around it. Then he stood behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. With his other hand, he cradled the back of her hand and slowly drew her arm back. “You let go when your wrist snaps.”
When he whipped her arm forward in a smooth arc, she released the stone, so it nicked the water three times before sinking in the middle of the stream.
“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed, leaning back against Andrew’s chest. She’d been hoping for seven, but three was a nice start. “Find me another!”
But when she would have turned, Andrew did not release the arm he’d tucked against her midriff. He kept her anchored against his body, and Astrid became aware, one sensation at a time, of their position.
The cool water glided gently around her calves with the softest of laps and ripples. The ripe afternoon sunshine fell across the trees, stirred by the merest suggestion of a breeze against her cheek. The scent of a clean, well-washed male teased at her nose.
And the ridge of Andrew’s erection nudged against her back.
“This is perfect,” she murmured.
Andrew didn’t want her in any special way. He wanted any willing female, of course, and he liked her well enough, but her senses confirmed what she’d known four years ago: he could desire her.
The twin demons of widowhood and impending motherhood haunted a woman sorely, and thus Andrew’s desire was doubly reassuring: he could still desire her.
“Perishing hell,” he muttered. Then he slogged his way out of the stream, leaving Astrid unbalanced and more than a little puzzled.
She tottered after him up the bank, and sat on the blanket beside him while he tried to pull his stockings on over his wet feet. “What are you doing, Andrew?”
“Getting us the hell back up to the house.”
“Why?”
He shot her an exasperated look. “Because I can’t do this.”
“Can’t do what?”
“God’s holy bones, Astrid.” He threw his stocking at his boots. “I can’t keep spending so much time with you alone, acting the perfect gentleman, stepping and fetching, and behaving as if I don’t desire you.”
The ire seemed to go out of him when his last words hung for long moments in the ensuing silence.
“I am making hash of this,” he said quietly. “Look, Astrid, we both know you are entitled to more than what I have to offer, and if I were half the man you deserve—”
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. She didn’t move otherwise, which left her sitting partly turned away from him. When she spoke, she adopted a quiet, dispassionate tone that she intended to land like so many hammer blows for all its calm.
“I was married for two years to the esteemed Herbert, Viscount Amery, an affable man much admired by his peers for his seat when riding to hounds and his ability to hold strong drink in great quantities. He never held his wife, however, but rather, visited her three Sunday evenings a month. His valet would inquire of her maid if such a thing were appropriate, women’s bodies having inconvenient tendencies at times.”
She hunched in on herself, lest she give in to the inconvenient temptation to shout, and kept speaking in the same prosaic tones because, by God’s holy ears, somebody was going to hear this from her.
“When he came to my bed, he would creep into my room in complete darkness and raise the hem of my nightgown only so far. At least I assume it was he—I never saw his face when he attended to his conjugal duties. He would arrive fully aroused, and insert only the tip of his member into my body, expel his seed with something like a grunt, kiss my forehead, and take himself very considerately off to his room. He never attempted to arouse me, and when, early in the marriage, I tried to encourage a more participative approach to our relations, he had his mother—his mother—discreetly explain that passion in a gently bred lady was a vulgar and unappealing trait.”
This recitation made her feel smaller, like a seed ready to drift aloft on the autumn breeze, light and insubstantial. Because Andrew hadn’t tromped away on his wet, bare, horrified feet, she took a steadying breath and went on. “A proper husband would never be so gauche as to inflict passion on his wife, but would limit such behaviors to the base vessels toward whom it was appropriate. My failure to grasp this fundamental truth could be attributed to the absence of a mother to guide me. My dear husband was willing to overlook my unfortunate behavior.”
She was shaking, and not with cold. “Amery was being considerate, you see, by keeping a mistress, whom he visited several times a week, and for whom he paid every expense, while my pin money barely covered necessities for our household. He was being considerate by never once touching my breasts, by never kissing my mouth, by never allowing me the pleasure you gave me once long ago.”
She was brittle with anger, nigh fracturing with it, and yet her voice remained calm. Maybe her marriage had taught her something of value after all. Another steadying breath, and she hefted her verbal hammer again.
“With equal consideration, his efforts were apparently adequate to get me with child, which situation curtails most of my options and a good deal of my health as well.”
A taut silence stretched when Astrid finished speaking, and she wondered if she’d destroyed the friendship Andrew had extended to her. A husband’s loss she was learning to bear, but to lose Andrew…
“That miserable, arrogant, ignorant, inexcusably inept little prick,” Andrew expostulated, seizing her by the shoulders and pressing her down to the blanket. “At least I won’t get you pregnant.”
To her immense, profound, immeasurable relief, he was all over her, his tongue tracing her lips and thrusting inside with lazy eroticism. He blanketed her with his body, letting the ridge of his erection rest along her belly. His fingers brushed at her face, her hair, her neck, and then his hand wandered up along her ribs, to settle—finally, finally—over one ripe, sensitive breast.
Once, at the end of a day years past, when Andrew and Astrid had faced real peril, they’d both found themselves under Gareth’s roof. She’d slipped into his room, and he’d obliged her curiosity and need for human connection, petting and stroking her to her first experience of sexual pleasure, though even then, he’d been planning his travel, and she’d known it. They’d never talked about that night, but the memory of it beat in her brain in time with the rising rhythm of her heart.
What if she’d never had that experience with Andrew? What if Herbert’s fumbling humiliation was all she’d ever been allowed to know of passion?
“Tell me what you like,” Andrew whispered in her ear.
“Everything,” she panted as she slipped her hands under his shirt. “Anything, just don’t
stop touching me, please, and clothes off, now.”
Andrew lifted up enough to pull his shirt over his head, shucked his breeches in a few jerky maneuvers, then untied the bows of Astrid’s bodice and jumps—her breasts were too sensitive for stays—and peeled her garments from her shoulders. She shimmied up and out of her skirt, pulled her chemise over her head, and in a startlingly short time, became, like Andrew, completely unclothed.
“This is decadent,” Astrid said, her gaze sweeping the muscled expanse of Andrew’s nudity. He was decadent, decadently beautiful, right down to the arousal that arrowed up along his flat belly.
Andrew put a fist under her chin and raised her gaze to meet his.
“We can stop, Astrid,” he assured her gravely. “We can stop right now, because we both know this is not wise. I am not what you deserve.”
She closed her eyes and tried for patience, but the image of Andrew in all his pagan glory would not leave her mind. “You are what I need, right now. Please.”
Before she was reduced to begging—more explicit begging—Andrew again lowered his body over hers, but he changed the tenor of their coupling, his touches becoming tender, lyrical, and cherishing. His fingers brushed along her sex, and he used his mouth to bring marvelous pleasure to her nipples. When his erection probed at her delicately, she wrapped her legs around him and lifted her hips in welcome.
“Andrew,” she pleaded, “I need you inside me, for the love of God, would you come inside me now.” For years she had needed him, and that need threatened to consume her very reason.
He answered her by threading himself into her body and slowly gliding his hips forward, then retreating.
After four years without passion, without pleasure, without emotional intimacy in any identifiable form, Astrid wanted to savor the relief of this coupling. Later, she would grapple with guilt, shame, or consternation, but for now she wanted to savor the intimacy of it, the passion, the joy. Her body did not oblige these intentions, for she was coming in great, clutching contractions before Andrew had withdrawn for the third thrust.
He apparently understood, because he drove into her with measured force, prolonging and intensifying her pleasure, drawing out each contraction, and anchoring her as all sense of bodily orientation—up, down, prone, on earth—escaped her. When she lay quietly beneath him, he began moving once more, thrusting more deeply, setting up a rhythm that soon had her arching and groaning in his arms again.
“Let go, love,” he urged. “Take all you want, and I’ll still have more for you.”
She could plunder his patience for years, and yet she came apart again all too soon, and this time Andrew echoed the rhythms of her contractions with answering pressure on her nipple. Pleasure cascaded through her with brilliant, nigh-unbearable intensity, but true to his word, Andrew offered her still more.
She recovered enough to meet his gaze, the tenderness in his eyes registering deep in her body. Where had he been? Where had he needed to go so badly four years ago that they’d denied themselves even one more taste of such pleasure?
She could not ask him. He’d leave her naked and alone on the blanket if she tried.
“I have missed you,” Astrid said, a small truth that ought to be safe, for all that missing him filled her heart even as he still filled her body. She brushed her fingers through the silky dark hair falling over his forehead.
He did not echo her sentiment, not in words. He smiled down at her crookedly, and set to kissing her, using his tongue in synchrony with his hips.
“Hold me,” he whispered as he again built a rhythm with his thrusting.
She obliged willingly, joyously. Oh, how right it felt to make love with Andrew, how beautiful, and right, and loving. Tension that had built for years unfurled, as Astrid realized that not only would he shower her with pleasure, Andrew would delight in receiving it from her as well.
He moved in her with measured strokes, minutely changing the angle of his hips to effect an ever more gratifying penetration. She bowed up, trying to be closer, feeling pleasure bearing down on her again. Andrew braced himself on his forearms, but reached both hands to cover hers where they rested beside her head on the blanket.
“Come with me, Astrid. Come with me now.”
She recognized all his previous attention as so much generous teasing, because now he was moving in pursuit of mutual pleasure. He drove into her more deeply, kissed her more carnally, and laced his fingers through hers more tenderly, until she was helpless in the throes of gratification so intense she lost the sense of being in a body separate from her lover’s.
Andrew groaned softly into her mouth, a sweet sound of intimacy and relief, and Astrid felt a wet heat where their bodies joined.
They lay naked in the sunshine, serenaded by the stream and the breeze for long minutes. When Andrew shifted as if to spare her his weight, Astrid stopped him with a firm hand on his lower back.
“Where are you going?” For she never wanted to let him out of her sight, never wanted this moment of intimacy and pleasure to end.
“Not far.” He eased his body from hers, leaving Astrid on her back, feeling again the sunshine on her naked breasts, and a pervasive lassitude of both mind and body. Her eyes flew open, however, when she felt Andrew swabbing gently at her with a damp cloth.
“For goodness’ sake, Andrew,” she hissed, scrambling up to her elbows and reaching for the cloth. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He regarded her curiously for a few heartbeats, a linen serviette in his hand.
“If your husband were not dead,” he said quite seriously, “I would have to kill him for his neglect of you. Lie back and let me care for you.”
Confused at his irritable tone, Astrid did as he told her.
“He wasn’t a bad man, Andrew, just starchy about certain things.” Or thoughtless. Exceedingly, exasperatingly selfish too.
And hypocritical.
Andrew huffed—a disgruntled version of a sigh—and splashed more water onto the cloth. He surprised her by tossing it onto her stomach and lying back with an arm across his brow.
“My turn, sweetheart. You can’t lie about all day when your lover needs attention.” Astrid sat up and shot him a confused glance. He smiled back at her, looked pointedly at the damp cloth, and then at his own wet, softening member. “Don’t tell me you’re horrified at the very sight of the goods.”
“The goods,” she said. “Yes, well…” Horrified, she was not. “The goods,” she repeated, running one finger gently over his length. She was horrified to think of two years of marriage wasted on the wrong man. What had she been thinking?
She was fascinated and appallingly grateful Andrew could be this way with her: sensual, frank, relaxed, and arousing as perdition. She indulged her curiosity, slipping his foreskin over his glans, combing her fingers through the down at the base of his shaft, and shaping him in her fingers. To her consternation, her touch was effecting changes.
“Andrew?” she asked, holding his growing erection straight up from his body, as if to show it to him.
“Astrid?” he replied from behind closed eyes.
“Whatever are you about?” She gave his erection a wiggle to emphasize her point.
“I am enjoying your touch, sweetheart, and thinking of swiving you again, though I shouldn’t, God knows.” His tone held regret, almost bitterness, which Astrid registered through a haze of curiosity.
“You mean you can swive more than once?” she asked, sleeving his length with the circle of her thumb and forefinger. Had she uttered the word “swive” to her late husband, the poor man would likely have swooned with shock.
“We can,” he said, looking like some Roman faun on a midsummer’s afternoon, “when you arouse me so, but only if you’re willing.”
“Why on earth would I not be willing?”
“Because what we are doing, Astrid, i
s wrong,” he said with something approaching anger. “It isn’t wrong for you to want to be pleasured, appreciated, and cherished; it is wrong for me to be the one to afford you those things, though I have to admit, I’ve never enjoyed sinning more.”
How could he sermonize and incite her to argument like this? When they were naked? When she was touching him?
“I do not sin with you, Andrew. I understand you feel pity for me, or perhaps compassion, nothing more. I am grateful to you, and a woman grown. And”—she let go of him, when what she wanted was to wrap her fingers around him more tightly—“I believe—I have always believed—we are friends. Friends are kind to one another.”
“We are friends,” he agreed, sitting up and looping his arms around his drawn-up knees. “But before we go back to that house, Astrid, we need to reach some kind of understanding regarding this… lapse of propriety. You, my dearest goose, refuse to see me for the scoundrel and blackguard I am.”
Why must he carp on this? “You are neither, Andrew. You are a kind, honest, if somewhat troubled man.”
And you do not want me to love you. You hardly allow anybody to love you. The irony, that she’d married a man who’d also been uncomfortable with certain varieties of demonstrative emotion, was not lost on her. Was she doomed to choose only troubled men?
“You,” Andrew said, brushing a finger down her nose, “would canonize Beelzebub.”
Astrid pushed him onto his back and swung her leg over to straddle him.
“I would marry him, Andrew,” she said, glaring down at him, “if he made me feel the way you do.”
These were the wrong words to say, though she didn’t know why. Such bleakness passed through Andrew’s blue eyes that she curled down onto his chest to hide her face.
“I won’t be marrying you, Astrid,” he said, his hands slipping around her back in slow sweeps down her spine. “If you weren’t expecting, I wouldn’t risk what we’ve done so far. You know this?”
“I do now, you awful man.” Though in fact, she appreciated he was gentleman enough to spare her the fate that had befallen Cousin Gwen. “And I most assuredly do not want to be marrying again myself, thank you very much.”
Andrew Page 6
