Page 38 of A Night of Secret Surrender
‘Realistic.’
She said this without even a whisper of doubt.
‘I remember you told me once that you wanted to be a writer.’
She breathed out and stood, moving towards the window and looking across the city rooftops.
‘You are probably the only person in the world who knows this about me.’
‘I kept the story you wrote. The one you gifted me for my eighteenth birthday.’
‘A tale of two sisters. One good and one evil. I used to imagine myself as the commendable sister, the one whose life ran along the path of righteousness, but now...’ She stopped and placed her palm on the glass. When she took it off, the frosted warmth of skin left a mark into which she wrote her initials. C.V.F. Celeste Victoria Fournier. Another thing he remembered about her, the two sides of her heritage.
‘I panicked today. I have never done that before and it worries me, because if it happens again it will be too dangerous for the both of us and I would not want...’
He stood and took her hand and the same sense of shock he had felt last night seared through him again.
‘The dangers are there anyway, Celeste, crouching and close, no matter what we try to do to lessen them.’
She was soft and unresisting as he drew her in, the smell of her familiar as he found her upturned mouth and claimed the warmth. Elemental and uncomplicated. Everything was peripheral and far away save for the longing welling up inside.
Slanting the kiss, he came in harder, demanding things she had not surrendered yesterday, the breath of her mixing with his own, a woman who was an enigma and a chameleon.
It was not love he could call on after all these years of separation, he understood that, but what was left was enough.
‘Lie with me, Celeste. Please.’ Whispered under his breath, the saying of it caressed the skin at her throat.
She did not pull away, but neither did she help him. Today she was compliant, with a quiet sense of consent. He stripped off her jacket and it tumbled to the ground, leaving the wispy lawn in its place, the darker tones of her areolas easily seen through the loose weave of the fabric. His mouth closed over the left one, wetting the cloth, feeling his way as her head tipped back, the veins in her throat almost transparent under her pale skin.
One finger came up to measure the beat, the rhythm tripping fast along the slender and fragile column, though bruising was also visible there. He shook the reality of it away and concentrated instead upon the demands of his body.
He’d always been so very careful and correct, but now he was neither. This was undeniable, the roar of something in his blood that he hadn’t felt there before, unguarded and heedless.
He wanted to be inside, in her centre, where they could be joined under another law, a different edict that negated all he had thought proper. The craving in him burnt caution into ashes, argument into acquiescence, and he stripped the bodice from her, firm breasts in the moonlight waiting to be taken.
It was he who did the work tonight, he who covered each nipple and sucked the sweetness from it. He wasn’t gentle or tender or quiet, the need in him urging her response, and when he felt her fingers lift his shirt and scrape across the bare flesh on his back, he simply lifted her and took her to bed.
She did lay there, looking up, the colour in her eyes paled by darkness and moonlight, her hair ragged hanks of mismatched lengths, her lips full and ripe.
He had his trousers and boots off and then he tended to hers, the ties knotted fast. Reaching for his knife by the bedside table, he sliced through the tangle, releasing cloth, finding flesh beneath that was hot and ready, one finger slipping into her warmth before reaching deeper.
She did not glance away, but challenged him for more, her legs opening, the movement of their bodies the only thing audible in the silence of the night.
‘Lord,’ he muttered and closed his eyes, undone with passion. ‘Lord knows how I want you.’
Her hand came around him then, around the engorged flesh of his sex, claiming him as her triumph and directing him home.
He positioned himself at the entrance to her womanhood and plunged in.
* * *
Afterwards he didn’t speak as they lay there cocooned into silence. The great want had been replaced by pleasure, the tangle of her limbs arranged in all the lines of ardour.
He turned inwards to try to find comfort and normality again. He wished she might sleep so that he could slip off without explanation, but he knew she watched him. He could feel the scratches in his flesh where she had risen to his need and let him understand that her own were important, too.
This was no game of unequals.
He had never felt so formless. And neither had he wanted a woman so desperately straight away afterwards that his manhood rose unbidden, throbbing, and when she kneeled and took him in her mouth he leaned back and let her have her way. The groans he stifled with one hand, but he could not dampen the reaction of his body as he spilled himself upon her.
