Page 28 of A Tryst By the Sea
Gill stripped off his stockings and draped them over his boots. “A daunting thought, but of course the creditors will expect me to cover my brother’s debts.”
“Cover them once if you must, then put the trades on notice that Tommie has been cut off. I will do the same with the modistes and so forth, because Bella won’t allow a little thing like an annulment to interfere with her larceny.”
“You sound very determined.” While Penelope looked quite fetching, sitting on the bed steps, her slippers in her hand.
“I will no longer have the threat of your intervention to hold Bella or the trades or anybody in check. I must learn to be ruthless, too, and I suppose that is another fear I have about living on my own.”
“Let me undo your hooks,” Gill said, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it over the back of the wing chair. “And for your information, you are already quite formidable. Ask anybody who has ever tried to bring you a bit of tattle, anybody on your charitable committees. You are a force to be reckoned with, do you but know it.”
This time, he did kiss Penelope’s nape and had the satisfaction of knowing he’d earned her attention.
“I’ve always enjoyed that particular preliminary,” she said, making no move to march off to the wardrobe and hang up her dress.
Gill was out of practice, but he wasn’t stupid. He lavished kisses on his wife’s nape and on her shoulders while he eased the dress down to her waist. Penelope wore no stays, bless her foresight, and thus he could gently cup the lovely shape and weight of her breasts through her chemise.
He would have been content to go slowly, to let desire build gradually, but Penelope wasn’t having any of that. She rounded on him, lashed her arms around his waist, and fused her mouth to his. The shock of her passion rocked through Gill, stirring his own ardor from embers to flames in moments.
“Penelope… There’s no…”
“Nine years, Gill. Nine years I’ve waited to taste you again, and they have been long years.”
The gleam in her eye did not bode well for Gill’s buttons. He fumbled out of his waistcoat and shirt, but kept his breeches on lest he disgrace himself.
“We have all night,” he said as Penelope wiggled out of her dress and tossed it—tossed it—atop the vanity stool. “We need not—”
“I need,” Penelope said. “I need and I want and yearn, Vergilius. For you.”
A tempest blew through the bedroom in the next quarter hour. Penelope had Gill on his back atop the covers, his breeches unbuttoned, and his hands pinned to the pillow. She sank onto his erect cock with the confidence of a woman who knew absolutely who and what she wanted.
As a new wife, Penelope had been sweet, playful, ardent, funny… but nine years had taught her how totakewhat she needed, how to demand her lover’s cooperation.
Gill gloried in her newfound wisdom. Nine years had taught him a thing or two as well, about strategy and patience. When Penelope was riding him hard, satisfaction eluding her by the smallest, most frustrating increment, he wrapped his arms around her, rolled with her on the bed, and drove into her with all the passion in him.
The tempest became a one-woman gale, a silent, thrashing force of nature determined to seize her pleasure and hold it fast. By some miracle of marital devotion, Gill managed not to spend—perhaps the shock of Penelope’s loving had done that for him—but they remained joined as her hips slowed, and her arms eased from about his neck.
“Good God, Vergilius. Almighty, everlasting, mercifulGod.”
“Catch your breath,” he whispered, resting his cheek against hers. “We’re just getting started.”
He caughthisbreath, and the second loving was gentler but no less passionate. Gill managed to hold out once more, though the third time capsized his self-restraint as effectively as it sank Penelope’s.
He was vaguely aware of hunger as his wife drowsed against his side and also of a creeping sadness. In the coming weeks and years, he’d stay busy, he’d maintain decorum when anybody was watching, and he’d find ways to distract himself from this new version of his ongoing marital sorrow.
He’d learned all of those skills years ago.
But as he held Penelope in the shadowy bedroom where they’d first fallen in love, his grief was as vast as the ocean. They had both tried so hard for so long. He could not ask Penelope to keep trying now.
“It wasn’t like this before,” Penelope murmured.
“It wasn’t,” Gill replied, kissing her brow and needing desperately to avoid a discussion of the differences between honeymoon lovemaking and farewell lovemaking. “Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
Penelope was allowing him to change the subject, to call an intermission to the pleasure and the pain. They ate companionably in the kitchen, Penelope wearing nothing but Gill’s old dressing gown. He decided that this would be his favorite memory of her, eating sandwiches by candlelight, looking well loved and tired.
“You will wake me before you go?” Penelope asked.
“I will love you before I go,” Gill replied, offering her a smile and a wink.
