Page 59 of Private Arrangements
She closed her eyes and turned her face away from him.
His fingers felt ridiculously comforting against her skull. They moved with reassuring gentleness, coming to rest for a moment next to her temple, then sliding lower along her ear, her jaw, and finally her lips. The pad of his thumb skimmed over her bottom lip, rolled it down slightly so that he touched the moist membrane just inside her mouth.
His reaction confused her. She wanted to ask him, loudly, whether he'd heard anything she'd said—that she hadn't changed, hadn't learned her lesson at all, and had tried to deceive him again. But his touch hypnotized her. It was warm, curious, and utterly without rancor. She could not speak. She was all awareness—all deprived, hungry, unbearably keen awareness.
He kissed the lobe of her ear, the bone that hinged her jaw, the tip of her chin. He kissed her neck, her shoulder, and the indentation of her clavicle. She kept her eyes tightly shut. In that absolute darkness, he was all heat and sensation to her, his lips a source of cool fire that burned everything they touched, spawning jolts of desire that spiked through her body, leaving her mindless and weak.
Suddenly his mouth closed around her nipple. She gasped, a flabbergasted sound of pleasure. He licked her. She wanted to thrash and gyrate and beg for more. Her nails dug into the counterpane. His hand found her other nipple and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, with just enough force to make her abandon all efforts at quietness. She moaned out loud.
His hand moved lower, down her side, coming to rest a fraction of a second against her hip and then on to pry her legs apart. She made a feeble attempt to keep them together, but he only had to swirl his tongue slowly once around her nipple for her to forget everything.
He found her, probably the easiest thing in the world—he but had to go to the source of her wetness. And then his finger, no, fingers were inside her.
“Tell me to stop, and I will,” he said, just before he took her other nipple into his mouth.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized what he was doing: dislodging and removing the Dutch cap. She might have objected had she been capable of coherent speech. But she wasn't, and the only sounds she emitted were choked whimpers of arousal.
He easily extracted the Dutch cap from her and tossed it to the side of the bed. She shivered.
“Now there's nothing between us,” he said.
A sudden flash of terror paralyzed her. She was utterly exposed to him—her womb, her future, her entire life. And just as suddenly, an overwhelming swell of desire inundated her. She wanted him inside her, to possess her, to shatter her, to fill every emptiness and destroy every defense.
With a moan of despair she grabbed hold of him and pulled him down to her, kissing him so hard that their teeth banged and ground together. He pulled away slightly, restrained her face between his hands, and kissed her his way, slower, more gently, and much more thoroughly.
She opened her legs wide and he came into her, thick and hot, as he kissed her. She wrapped her legs about him, urging him, wanting something fast, furious, and utterly obliterating. But in that he refused to oblige her.
He tormented her with long, slow strokes, teasing her nipples as he drove into her at a leisurely pace. He made her beg for each delicious thrust. He made her thrash and gyrate and wail and whimper. And only when she was wholly vanquished, desperate, convinced that she would exist forever in this state of trembling, feverish arousal, only then did he give in and pummel her to her incoherent, wild, joyous, and vocal satisfaction.
* * *
If only she could make time stay still. If only she need never depart the warmth of his embrace and the euphoria of their lovemaking. If only her world consisted of just this one dark room drenched in the sweet muskiness of sex, protected from tomorrow and the day after tomorrow by impregnable walls of forever-night.
Were she to have a guinea for every if-only of her life, she could pave a highway of gold from Liverpool to Newfoundland.
His breath still quick and erratic, her husband pulled away from her to lie on his back, not quite touching her. She bit her lower lip, the cold, clammy tentacles of reality already creeping up her limbs toward her heart.
He would not say anything unkind. But his silence was enough to remind her of everything she'd vowed never to do when he first returned. And all her declarations of love for Freddie, were they no more than words, and empty words at that?
“I called on you at your hotel in Copenhagen,” he said.
It took her an entire minute to decipher what he'd said. And even then she didn't understand. “You . . . you didn't leave a card?”
“You'd already left, for theMargrethe.”
A blaze of elation swallowed her, only to be replaced by a bleak disbelief, an impotent amazement at Fate's capriciousness. “I didn't catch theMargrethe,”she said, dazed. “It'd already sailed when I arrived at the harbor.”
“What?”
She'd never heard him say “What?” before. He was too perfect for that; he'd never failed to use the more correct and more polite “Pardon?” Up until this moment.
“Where did you go, then?”
“Back to the same hotel. I left only the next day.”
He laughed, with bitter incredulity. “Did the hotel clerk not tell you that a fool came for you, with flowers?”
It was like finding out she was with child, then bleeding all over the place three weeks later. Only it was happening all in one searing moment. “The day clerk must have been gone by the time I decided I needed a place to stay for the night.”
