Page 20 of What the Lady Wants
‘I find I need your weight on me again. Come back and take me that way; I’ll wrap my legs around your waist.’
He was inside her in a moment. It was utterly glorious to slip into her wetness at last, and she locked her legs around him, her heels in his buttocks urging him on as he thrust into her and they moved together in an escalating rhythm. They couldn’t kiss as they coupled this way, the height difference was too great, but it didn’t seem to matter. She had her face buried in his neck and was kissing him there and nipping him with her teeth. Their bodies were sweat-slicked and in utter harmony, he could have cried at the sheer rightness of it, when she began to clench on him, and her release triggered his, so that they came together in a moment of mutual ecstasy that was the most intense and perfect sensation he’d ever experienced in his life. He could not know how it was for her.
They rolled over together, panting, and he slipped out of her. She laid her head on his chest and he put his arms about her and held her as their breathing slowed and their hearts settled to a normal rhythm. She rubbed her face in the mat of hair that covered the muscles of his chest, and said, a little muffled, ‘I am a loose woman. I probably was before, but I definitely am now.’
‘Are you?’ He almost added ‘my love’ – he had to bite his tongue to prevent himself from saying it.My love, my love, my dearest love…
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am. I’m shameless.’
‘I was thinking that, so far as I was thinking anything, while you rubbed yourself against me.’
‘I told you, shameless,’ she repeated happily. ‘A hussy. A jezebel. A fallen woman. You’re my lover; I’m your mistress.’
He took her hand and kissed it, turned it over and pressed kisses into her palm. How he adored her. ‘You are. In every possible sense, Christ knows.’
She sat up and looked at him. Her hair was wildly disordered, her lips swollen from kissing, and her face and neck and breasts and thighs were flushed with arousal and the friction of his rough body hair upon her delicate skin. She looked like a woman who had been thoroughly fucked in exactly the way she liked; she looked like all the things she’d said she was, he supposed. His mistress, if that was all he could have of her. Oddly, he thought, his friend, too. And then she said, devastatingly, ‘That’s what you like, isn’t it? That’s why we’re really doing this, or why you are, at least. Because you like me to be in charge.’
He shouldn’t be ashamed. Wouldn’t. Didn’t it suit both of them? ‘Yes,’ he said steadily. ‘That’s why I said, “you are my mistress in every possible sense”. You are always in control. And I must admit I love it.’
21
NUMBER SIXTEEN, BRIEFLY, AND NUMBER SEVEN
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I mean, I wasn’t sure, I’ve not…’
‘Nor me.’
‘Really? You didn’t know?’
‘How could I? I could have gone my whole life without knowing, if I hadn’t met you, Isabella. Men generally take charge. I always have. It’s expected.’
‘Exactly, Bear,’ she said eagerly, shaking back her hair, which did absolutely nothing for his fragile composure. ‘You know… We said we wouldn’t talk about before, I know we did, but I think I have to. I was a virgin when I married, obviously, and Ash, my husband, he was not, and so naturally he took charge, as you said. He was wonderful – don’t worry, I won’t say any more, it wouldn’t be right, but he was, it was. We were very happy. I won’t have you thinking we weren’t. But he was in control always. I mean, I could initiate things, in bed. I did, often. I could speak entirely frankly with him, and he with me. But I don’t think I ever commanded him, “Do this, do that, pleasure me!” I’m sure I didn’t, actually. I was young, and it would never have occurred to me that a woman might do such a thing.’
‘But now it has. And…?’ It was a struggle to speak. He didn’t enjoy hearing about her husband, her lost love. But he would swallow it, in order to have this extraordinary conversation with her and to know her thoughts on this above all topics.
‘I love it. I really do. I love being your mistress. I love commanding you. I love knowing that you will do exactly what I tell you to do. I thought you liked it excessively too; I knew somehow that you did.’
‘I remember when I realised,’ he said slowly as he absorbed the impact of her words. ‘I was obeying you, making love to you as you ordered, and suddenly I knew that half the pleasure was in the obeying – that’s not quite right, but you understand me, I hope. I might have come in that moment, just from the knowing. It was… freeing. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced.’
‘Freeing,’ she mused. ‘Yes, that’s precisely what it is. For both of us. So,’ she said, a mischievous light in her brown eyes, ‘we’ve established that you like the rules. My rules. Which means that you wouldn’t want to see the list, which is in that little inlaid box over there, by the way, even if I offered to show it to you?’
‘I’d have to read it, if you ordered me to,’ he replied humbly. He was going to embrace this fully, it seemed. Whatever this curious thing was that they had found they shared. Even though it was like being offered the knowledge of how long you were going to live, of precisely when you were going to die. Imagine if he discovered that there were only twelve items on the list. Only ten. His heart was racing.
‘I suppose you would,’ she mused. She’d pulled back her hair completely to fall down her back now, leaving her lush, naked body entirely exposed to him once more, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘But I don’t think I should do that. I think the anticipation, the not being sure what’s next but knowing that I know, is part of your pleasure too.’
‘It is.’ His pleasure, and his torture. They were the same.
‘Oh Bear, my Bear,’ she said. ‘I won’t be cruel to you and make you read it. I think, though, that I should tell you that I’ve added some items to the list recently. I wasn’t sure of them, but now that we’ve spoken about this so frankly, I am.’
‘I was contemplating… asking you to do that.’ It was a reprieve of a kind. At least he knew there would be more precious nights together.
‘I think I’ve shown that I’m prepared to be flexible,’ she said seriously. ‘I added eight (a) for you. I could add other things. If you’re good.’
‘I do plan to be,’ he said fervently.
‘And I should tell you,’ she went on, ‘that you probably think that that was eight (b), but it wasn’t. I changed my mind. It was nine.’
‘What’s eight (b), mistress?’
