Page 53 of Time for You
Three months, then. That was all they would have. “Thank you for staying,” she said, taking his hand. “And for what you said in your letter.”
“I felt so foolish leaving it,” he admitted, and tugged her close for a hug. She rested her temple against his cheek. “Part of me worried I’d misread you.”
“But you stayed anyway?”
She felt, rather than saw, him smile. “I judged it would be worse to miss this time with you no matter what. I’d rather have been wrong and be stuck here for a few more very awkward months than risk losing you entirely.”
Daphne kissed him, and slowly the kiss started to shift, from jubilant to needy, from gentle to something deeper, hungrier. Henry walked her backward to her bedroom door, his lips never leaving hers. She tugged at his shirt while he kicked the door shut. He breathed out shakily, and she took a half step back. “Sorry, I—there’s a part of me that feels I’m ruining you,” he said with a wry smile.
“Does it help if I say I’ve already been ruined?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Not really, no,” he said, but he tenderly tucked a lock of hair back behind her ear. “I just—I needed a moment, that’s all. Your world takes some adjusting.” Henry pulled her back to him, finding her lips with his.
“Are you sure?” she gasped.
Henry dragged his lips down the curve of her jaw, finding the soft hollow behind her ear. “Aye,” he growled. “Never been more sure in my life.”
She softly cursed his nineteenth-century clothes—the buttons did not slide as easily as she was used to—and he chuckled, placing his hands over hers. “Like this,” he said, and together they undid his shirt buttons so she could shove the shirt back over his shoulders. Henry pulled the T-shirt she had on up over her head with much less fanfare.
Slowly, piece by piece, they shed their clothes. They stumbled together in the direction of her mattress, ending up with Daphne on top when Henry fell backward onto the bed. She giggled and he silenced her with a kiss that went on so long she stopped thinking, stopped breathing, stopped being anything other than a bundle of nerves and urges, desire overriding all higher-level thought.
Henry wasn’t gone. He loved her, and he was staying.Only for a little while,a nasty voice whispered deep in the recesses of her brain, but she silenced it.
He pulled her down, her chest on top of his, and curled his hand gently around the back of her neck to keep her close. Leisurely they explored each other’s mouths, taking time she had thought they’d never have. He dipped his chin down to trace the swell of her breast with the tip of his tongue and she arched against him, grinding her core against his pelvis. She was slick already, swollen with need, and Henry made a strangled noise deep in his throat.
“You’ll be the death of me,” he panted, and Daphne couldn’t help it. She smirked and started walking on her knees higher, pausing to arch her brow down at him.
Henry hesitated, but ran his palms up the outsides of her thighs, never breaking their gaze. He nodded and she began moving again, settling herself above him with a knee on either side of his head.
“Fuck,” he growled. “The twenty-first century really is an age of miracles.”
Daphne giggled again, but then he wrapped his palms around her hips and pulled her onto his mouth, and the laugh died in her throat. Instead she keened, bracing herself on the headboard. Henry licked from her entrance to her clit, and she buried her face in her biceps, trying in vain to stifle the groan he wrenched from her. She felt his lips curl into a smile even as he teased her clit, lashing it mercilessly back and forth while heat coiled in her belly and sparks flew along her nerve endings. Daphne ground herself against his chin andfelthis groan in her core. Her thighs were trembling and his fingertips dug in, steadying her against his mouth. Henry licked at her entrance and she almost bent in half, gasping for air that refused to fill her lungs, and then one more flick of his tongue against her clit had her falling, shivering and unraveling while just his hands on her thighs held her up.
She fell, boneless, to the bed, and Henry helped her arrange her now-useless limbs with a grin that reminded her of how irritating she used to find him. He was arrogant, that was for sure, but she could let it slide because,damn, he knew what he was doing. Henry kissed her, softly brushing her hair back while he let her taste herself on his lips. She turned and stretched languidly to dig a condom out of her bedside stand but then paused when she had it open, realizing she knew next to nothing about contraception in the 1880s. “Do you ... know what this is?” she asked, way too shyly for someone who had just been sitting on his face.
Henry peered at it. “Is that a french letter?”
Daphne shrugged and laughed. “No idea. How about I explain what it does, and we go from there?”
Henry laughed too, leaning over for one more kiss between their smiles. “By all means. Explain.”
Daphne did her best two-minute-sex-ed explanation of condoms, and he agreed that it was, in fact, a french letter, and thus he was aware of what it did. She helped him roll it on, and he urged her shoulders back down to the mattress, covering her with his bulk.
When Henry slid inside her, she had to close her eyes. It was too perfect, too much. He nipped gently at her chin and nuzzled her cheek until she opened them, and then he punished her by pulling almost all the way out and gliding back in, the stretch achingly, shiveringly perfect.
Daphne wrapped her arms around his neck to hold him close and let him tilt her hips up, his rhythm at once too slow and too much, turning her muscles to liquid and her thoughts to mere fragments. She didn’t think it was possible after coming so recently, but soon she was climbing the peak again, the pressure building and ratcheting higher and higher with each thrust of his hips.
And then, suddenly, the wave crested and she came, biting his shoulder to keep from screaming herself hoarse. Henry’s hips stuttered, the rhythm faltering, and then a few strokes later, he came too, spilling into the condom with a hoarse groan.
“I love you, Dr. Daphne Griffin,” he murmured into her ear, both of them still panting, desperate for air.
“I love you too, Henry MacDonald,” she whispered back.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Daphne stood in the kitchen, teaching Henry the joys of eating peanut butter straight from the jar, when there was a knock at the door. “Can I come home now?” Ellie called plaintively.
“It’s safe.” Daphne giggled and hid her face in Henry’s shoulder.
