“What shall I do, Alice?” he somehow managed to get out.
She took his hands and drew them to the dark whorl of hair where her thighs met. Her womanhood.
“Touch me,” she said, closing her eyes.
Tentatively he ventured a finger to the cleft. He felt wetness. Delicate, soft skin. Impossibly slick, molten heat. He coated his fingers in it, in awe of how, like him, she dripped with need.
He had a vague sense of how a woman found pleasure, owing to his time in brothels, but he was unsure of the precise mechanics of it. Anytime the conversation had become too specific, he’d always left the room to pray. Now he wished he had listened to their vulgar chatter, for he might have had some hope of pleasing her.
But she seemed to know enough for both of them. She took his hand and placed it where she wanted it, “Stroke me there,” she murmured, widening her thighs apart.
It felt sacramental, to touch her in this hidden place. He let her guide his fingers, showing him how to touch her. She trembled in his arms.
His touch had made her tremble.
He felt like he was falling, sinking, dying. He wanted to bathe in her. To put his mouth to her cunt and drink her.
She reached up for his lips and kissed him. She still tasted like the apple tart. He spread his fingers through her warmth and swirled her desire all across her flesh, hoping to make her tremble again. “Is this right?” he whispered. “How does it feel?”
“It feels like you, Henry,” she whispered.
“Is that good?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, I love your hands.” Her voice was soft and breathy. She was rubbing her womanhood against his palm, rocking her hips, mewling a bit at each new brush of herself against his fingers, and it was making him so hard he thought he might die from lust.
She put one hand over his, guiding him again. “Inside me,” she whispered. His fingers met a silky, narrow passage and suddenly he understood what it might feel like to be joined with her. Why men might risk disease and ignominy and hell to sink themselves into such hot, sweet lovely places. Why they might be mad enough to do it on the street.
He knew about burning. But this was different. This was immolation.
“You feel like heaven itself,” he whispered. Her lips fell on his neck and her gasps quickened, and then she was sucking on him, biting him, thrusting her hips in frantic time as his fingers slid against her, in and out, and his thumb caressed the swollen flesh that made her cry out when he touched it. She was almost dancing, undulating against his body, using him for pleasure.
“Use me,” he whispered. “Oh, yes, please, use me.”
She threw back her head and made a sound that was half his name, half rapture. Her flesh pulsed with pleasure beneath his hand, and his groin throbbed in time with it.
She sank back, collapsing onto him as though he was a fainting couch. “Oh, your body feels so good, after all this time of wanting it.”
“You’ve wanted this?” he asked, tracing his fingers over her soft skin, marveling in the delicacy of another person’s body. He felt it must be some other, better man experiencing the beauty of her breasts in the moonlight, the impossible sweetness of her navel, the harrowing vulnerability of the little mole over her ribcage—for he did not deserve this.
She was perfect. He had never seen such a lovely sight in all his life.
She snuggled back against him, letting him hold her, explore her, kiss her. Before, she’d been taut as a spring, but now she was limpid and sultry.
“Will you undress for me?” she whispered. “I want to feel your skin.”
He pulled off his shirt and breeches and dropped them on the floor. No woman had ever looked on his nude form, and he was certain she would not like it—all that bulk from his exercise regime, the red hair along his chest that went fiery around his manhood, the rude way his cock jutted toward the ceiling, a long thread of his excited moisture dripping. It was an insult to her that this was all he had to give, when she was such a delicacy.
And yet, she smiled as her eyes raked up and down his body. She looked at him like she had the apple tart. It made him emotional, that anyone—that she—would look at him like that.
It felt like being loved.
She reached out, beckoning him closer. “You are a treasure. Get in this bed so I can feel you.”
He slid beneath the sheets and she took him in her arms and his cock began to pulse in that ungentlemanly way he had so dreaded in the mill. But now, he was not embarrassed. He wanted her to feel it. He wanted to drag it against her. He wanted her to feel the magnitude of his desire for her.
She gripped the head of his cock in her small fist. “Henry,” she uttered breathily, running her hand up and down its length.
He groaned. He loved the way it felt but he still flinched at her knowing the dimensions of it, which had earned him mockery in his school days.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s coarse.”
“Coarse?” She laughed softly. “My dear, on Charlotte Street you could command a pretty penny for such coarse stature.”
She continued running her hands over it, in a way that made him almost want to cry.
“You don’t mind?,” he asked, sucking in his breath as she increased the pressure of her wanderings.
“I am grateful to the Lord who made you,” she whispered, gripping him more firmly, and he felt his eyes might fall from the sockets from the sensation.
She ran her finger over the wet knob, smearing his lust around his cockhead. “Does it always weep so much?”
“Sometimes, Alice, I just look at you and it begins to happen. It was happening that day in the whipping house. When you gave me the tour. I was worried I might …”
He could not complete the thought, because she smeared the hot drips all around his organ with her thumb, coating him in his own desire. It felt so good he could not stop himself from moaning, from moving his hips in time with her strokes.
“You’re dying for this, aren’t you?” she asked in a tender voice.
“Yes,” he whispered, exulting in the feeling. He bucked forward, his body chasing the sensation, wanting more and more and more.
“Me too. I was imagining this in the mill,” Alice whispered. “I could feel how big you were and how much you wanted me and I was in agony. I wanted to roll over and take you in my mouth.”
“In your mouth?” he breathed. He knew that this was done but had never imagined it might be done to him. And yet now that she had said it all he could think about was the way she might look between his legs, licking the excitement from his erection.
“Would you like that?” she murmured. Her mouth was behind his ear, and her warm breath sent a shiver through him.
“Please,” he said into her shoulder. “Please.”
She shifted and knelt over him, placing her lips level with his swollen manhood. She breathed lightly on the tip, then licked away his ooze with her tongue.
He was so shocked by the heat of her mouth that he could not even pause to wonder if this was some especially grievous sin. The sensation made him think in scripture.
Draw me after you; let us run. The king has brought me into his chambers.
It felt rapturous, like prayer.
She paused. “Is that all right, Henry?”
He tried to say yes but it came out as more of a strangled, pleading cry, and at the desperation in it she returned her mouth to his erection and began to stroke his bollocks with her fingers as she sucked and swirled him with her tongue.
His hips jutted forward to get more of that wet heat, and he was horrified at his own cheek, but before he could apologize she took him deep into the back of her throat, and he couldn’t think, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe.
He began to spill.
The throes of it were so intense he could do nothing but shake as wave after wave wracked through him. He expected Alice to dodge out of the way of the streams of his emission but instead, to his shock, she kept him in her mouth and d
rank his seed.
“There now,” she said, when he’d come back to himself, and she’d wiped off her mouth and come to snuggle next to him in bed. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
“I feel like I’m floating,” he whispered. “Like I’m in heaven, and you’re there with me.”
She kissed his ear. “I’m so glad you came to me. I’ve wanted this. I’ve wanted you. I never thought you might … I’m grateful.”
He drew her against him, tucking her in the crook of his body, so he could hold her with his arms and mouth and toes. “I’m grateful too.”
And he was. He was. Utterly and without hesitation, he was grateful.
If a sin could awaken a new destiny such as this, he would gladly ask God to forgive him.
But he would ask later, because in this moment, as he held her in the moonlight, he could only repeat, in his mind, a verse he loved from the Song of Solomon:
Behold, you are beautiful, my love;
Behold, you are beautiful;
Your eyes are doves.
Chapter 30
Alice awoke to the sensation of wearing Henry Evesham like a cloak. His body was even better than an ermine.
She gazed at him, admiring the way his chest and legs were dotted with auburn freckles and coppery hair. She had never been with a man who was shaped like him. His thighs were rounded and powerful, his arms were nearly as thick as her waist.
Being near him made her feel carnal, like she was closer to a creature than to a human being. She wanted to stay here in this bed forever, until she knew his body better than she knew her own, and had had it every way she could imagine.
His hand shifted from her ribs to her belly and she heard a hitch in his breathing—he was waking up.
She didn’t want him to.
The sooner he arose, the sooner they would have to part. She doubted they would see much of each other after this day. She had read too much of his journal to be able to pretend to herself that he would not come to regret this.
But she didn’t. She wished she could have a hundred mornings just like this one.
There were so many ways to burn.
He stirred against her back, and his cock grazed against her buttocks, hard and hot to the touch. It sent a wave of pure, animal desire rippling through her. She twitched her rear against him to feel more of it. He sighed, and she felt moisture smear against her skin. She put her fingers to her pussy, because the way he oozed with lust even in his sleep was unlike any other man she’d been with.
It drove her mad to be wanted in a way that simply could not be contained—and yet was contained, and contained so gently that you would never know the force of it unless he let you.
He had let her have this. Have him.
He made a sound of pleasure and moved his hands to cup her breasts. Oh, to know the pleasure of his body one more time.
“You are so beautiful,” he whispered. “I can’t stop looking at you.”
She pressed herself back against his cock. “I love the way you feel.”
He began to thrust slowly against the shallows of her back as he ran his thumbs over her nipples, wresting little cries from her each time he squeezed them just enough to spark. His hot breath along her neck made stars light behind her eyes. He gripped her ribs possessively, sliding his hands down either side of her torso until they held her hips. He pushed her closer to him, so she was laying on his cock. His hand came and flirted with hers, asking silent permission to replace her fingers in her pussy with his own.
She opened her legs for him and he made a sound almost like a sob.
“This is the loveliest thing I’ve ever touched,” he whispered. “I want to kiss you there.”
She wanted that too. Very much.
“Lay back,” she murmured to him, “and you shall have your wish.”
He reclined on the pillow, looking nervous and eager and flushed. She climbed up the length of his body, pausing to stroke his straining cock.
He leaned his head back and hissed. “Every time you do that, I worry I will die.”
“Henry, I assure you—you’ve barely even lived.”
She crawled up over his long, beautifully muscled torso, enjoying how he watched her, like he was witnessing a miracle. She knelt above him, so that her quim was just above his lips. His eyes darted up to hers, like he could not believe that this was happening, and had to check that she was real.
“I can …?” he breathed. “That, is you don’t mind, if I …?”
She gave him a beatific smile. “Please. Take all the time you like.”
He looked at her quim in something like astonishment. Tentatively, he began by exploring her, using his fingers to touch her gently, like he might break her. He glanced nervously at her face every time he ventured somewhere new, to see whether she liked it.
She definitely liked it.
It felt lovely, but even more than the sensation, she liked the wondrous way he looked at her. His absolute pleasure every time she sucked in her breath, or widened her thighs, or let out a little cry. He became more sure of himself with each shiver of her enjoyment.
And then, when she was so wet, and so frustrated, that she was about to lower herself over his mouth and beg him to use his tongue, he put his hands over her thighs and lifted her up and kissed her, very, very delicately, exactly where she wanted him to.
She put her hands flat against the wall and moaned. He drew her closer, holding her like she weighed no more than a pillow, and nuzzled her pussy with his lips. And then his tongue began to roam and swirl, and then he discovered that she enjoyed a gentle suckle, and then he realized that if he lifted her up and down against his clever mouth in a rhythm, it made her shake and mewl.
And that was the end of Alice Hull. It was not Henry who would die in this bed, it was her.
She bore down against his lovely, lovely tongue and became a beam of sunlight, and then shattered into stars. The peaks kept building, each one stronger than the last. With every tremble that coursed through her Henry moaned, like he could feel her pleasure, like he exulted in it.
She had not imagined he might be capable of such freedom with himself.
It made her so happy.
It made her think they were not so different after all.
She closed her eyes and released herself to this moment. To being swathed in sunlight and his mouth, consumed in his desire, melting with her own. To panting and writhing and moaning like animals with no thoughts of anything beside the way they made each other burn.
She collapsed, slid down him, put her head onto his sweaty chest. His belly was sticky, and she realized he’d come already, from nothing more than his excitement at making her lose her bloody mind. The sweetness of it, the purity of his desire and his newness with it, made her heart ache.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve made a mess.”
“Oh, Henry. After that, you need never apologize to me again.”
She reached for his discarded shirt from the floor and used it to clean his seed, nibbling at his nipples as she did so. “There you are. All better.”
He turned her around to face him and smiled sweetly into her eyes. “Good morning.”
She smiled back, and her heart ached worse and worse.
He straightened her hair, running his fingers down her head as gently as if she were a child, and she saw how he would make some woman a devoted husband. The kind who, in the most private hours, would funnel his passion into the bedchamber, sharing this secret part of himself generously.
It made her so sad that she would not be the one he shared it with that she had to look away.
Don’t mourn. Be grateful that you got to have a little of him.
“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t think of a lovelier way to say goodbye.”
His hands paused in her hair. “What do you mean,” he said slowly, “‘by ‘goodbye?’”
She smiled sadly, not wanting to hurt him by seeming eager to part ways, but refusing to live in the
delusion that this morning was more than anything but a lovely interlude before a permanent farewell.
“Well, I have to catch the mail coach, and I doubt we’ll see much of each other in London, since you’ll have filed your report.”
“Alice,” he said, drawing up on one arm. He smiled into her eyes. “We’ll marry, of course.”
She laughed. Not only was he sensuous, he was amusing, delivering the joke with such sincerity that for a moment she wondered if he was not joking at all.
“Wouldn’t that be an irony? But not likely, unless I have converted you to a life of sin and you wish for a position at the whipping house.”
He did not laugh. His face contorted. First into bemusement, and then to surprise, and then to hurt.
“I’m not jesting, Alice,” he said quietly. “I’m proposing.”
Proposing?
No, surely not.
If he meant this as a kind of game, she didn’t want to play. If it was some guilty attempt to undo the sin—she could not encourage it.
She kissed his cheek and shimmied out of bed. “You are a sweet, lovely, silly man. Here, get dressed.”
He ignored the shirt she held out. “I am not being silly in the slightest. We must marry. Surely you see that.”
“That’s not possible, and you know it,” she murmured. She kept her tone light, but her pulse was beginning to speed up with the growing understanding that he was entirely seriously, and had been all along.
“It is,” he said immediately, his face becoming flushed. “Of course it is. Besides, we must. We coupled.”
He said this flatly, like what he suggested was not at all impossible or absurd.
“Henry, coupling does not obviate matrimony. Besides, you did not join with me. There is no risk of a baby.”
“I’m not talking about risk,” he said roughly. He inhaled deeply, like he was trying to remain composed. “Alice, I want you to be mine. I told you that.”
“I thought you meant for the night,” she answered honestly.
“I meant for the rest of our lives.”
Her heart began to pound. She knew that he cared for her, but that did not change the reality of their circumstances. This was far too rash and ill-considered.
The Lord I Left Page 20