Splendor’s joyful music filled the room almost the second Jourdian’s lips captured hers and he began to drink of the honeyed sweetness of her mouth. He kissed her endlessly, leisurely, his hands tracing every curve, hollow, and line of her body, a flawless body no man but he had ever touched.
He stroked her hair, then nibbled at her earlobe, and his breath was hot on her flesh. His tongue left wet swirls on the silk of her breasts and her pebbled nipples, and his fingers sent fire through her loins when they dipped between her thighs and toyed with the jewel of her femininity.
“I want to touch you, too,” Splendor murmured.
She didn’t have to ask twice. He rolled to his side, and nearly came up off the bed when she closed her delicate hand around his engorged manhood.
“Hard,” Splendor whispered, then moved her hand down to the dark pouch that hung beneath his pulsing arousal. She cupped his softness, weighed it in her hand, and marveled over the hard-soft contrasts of his body.
“I have heard your sensual sounds when we make love, Jourdian,” she said softly, still caressing his turgid length. “I have smelled your scent, and have felt and seen every part of you. But one thing I have not done is taste you…as you have tasted me.”
His gaze swept to her mouth. God help him when that mouth, those soft, sweet lips touched him, he thought. Already a rush of bliss raced through his frame, and she’d done naught but warn him of her intentions!
He watched her lower her head toward his hips, saw how her fiery hair fell around him in luxurious pools. Her beauty increased his anticipation, and when he finally felt her tongue flicker across the crown of his sex, he squeezed great handfuls of the bedspread in his fists, closed his eyes, and called out Splendor’s name in a voice that blazed with rising pleasure, hotter desire.
She smiled, suddenly realizing the power a woman could have over a man. Jourdian was the strongest being she’d ever known, and yet now, as she parted her lips and took him deeply into her mouth, he was a man who had completely surrendered to her will.
With her mouth, she began to imitate the motions of lovemaking, taking him well past her lips and then almost out again. Over and over again she repeated the sensual actions, relishing the feel and taste of him.
“Splendor…”
The torment she heard in his voice stopped her abruptly. Lifting her head, she cast a worried expression into his molten silver eyes. “I have given you pain!” she exclaimed, hating herself for not taking more care with his beautiful and sensitive maleness.
“Yes,” Jourdian answered huskily. “I suffer an ache that would have been quickly alleviated had I not stopped you when I did.”
"What? Oh. I am sorry, Jourdian, but I was so fascinated by my own actions that I did not realize how difficult it was for you to quell the spill of your essence.”
“I don’t care to keep it quelled, Splendor.” He lay still for a moment, thinking. “I want to watch our lovemaking,” he finally said.
“Watch? Do you mean with mirrors?”
Mirrors? he thought. A highly entertaining idea, but one he would save for another time. “Straddle my hips the way I do yours.”
She obeyed, anxious to know what he had in mind.
Jourdian reached down and took hold of his straining arousal. Lifting it upward, he positioned it between Splendor’s thighs, directly at the sweet, moist entrance to her body.
He raised his gaze to hers again. “Now sit down and take me inside you.”
Trembling with excitement, Splendor lowered herself onto him, crying out with pleasure when she felt his hardness slip into her depths. Yearning for all of him, she started to push her hips down with one strong motion.
But Jourdian caught her waist and held her so that she couldn’t move. “Careful. Go slowly, Splendor. This is going to be deeper than what we’ve done before. Much deeper, and I want you to stop if you feel any discomfort.”
Her eyes wide with wonder and bright with the light of passion, Splendor took him more slowly, feeling him sink into her inch by glorious inch. And when he was totally embedded inside her, she felt stretched to her limit, filled to her capacity.
“Sweet everlasting, Jourdian,” she whispered, her whisper a short pant. “’Tis supremely magnificent to possess you so completely!”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“Nay.”
Jourdian smiled a slow, easy smile. “Then I would have you ride me, wife.”
“Ride you?”
He didn’t explain with words. He showed her instead, moving his hips in a circular motion he knew would create tremors of pleasure deep inside her.
“Oh,” Splendor breathed. “Oh, Jourdian.”
“Ride, wife. Ride.”
She did. Rotating her hips all the while, she rose higher on to her knees, felt Jourdian almost slip out of her, then impaled herself on him again and again and again.
“God, you are so beautiful,” Jourdian rasped. He watched avidly, hungrily, as she pumped herself with him. Her head fell back over her shoulders, her wildfire tresses licking at his thighs.
“Look,” he told her. “Look and see what it is to make love, Splendor.”
Still circling her hips, she bent over at the waist so that she, too, could see the sight that so captivated him.
She watched their lovemaking. Saw his thick manhood slide into her and out of her, almost leaving her completely. And when he surged upward again, she saw herself open and stretch to accommodate his width and length.
Never had she imagined such a wondrous and profoundly beautiful thing. The way a man loved a woman and the way she accepted his loving…
The thought had barely floated through her mind when she saw Jourdian begin to smooth his thumb over the wet, inner flesh between her moist thighs. “Sweet—”
“Everlasting,” he finished for her, his voice searing into her.
He began to arch his hips toward her, driving into her with strong, urgent thrusts, and when Splendor felt him swell inside her, she knew he was about to reach the very peak of ecstasy.
“Splendor,” Jourdian groaned, and exploded inside her.
Her passion crested wildly, and as Jourdian gave her his seed and listened to the powerful melody of her sensual joy, he watched her. The muscles in her belly and thighs rippled. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted, and from her throat came breathy moans that increased his pleasure tenfold.
Their flight around the room began in the next moment. Off the bed they rose, drifting around the room as if borne on a summer breeze.
“I like the way you ride, wife,” Jourdian whispered, losing his hands within the mass of her copper hair.
“I have an excellent mount,” she quipped in reply.
They wafted back toward the bed, and once under the sheets, Jourdian gathered Splendor in his arms and pressed soft kisses all over her cheek until he became too sleepy to do so any longer.
“Merry Christmas, milady,” he whispered groggily.
“Merry Christmas, My Grace.” Her body curled next to his, Splendor shut her eyes and waited for slumber to claim her.
But her eyes soon opened again. Wide. She couldn’t stifle a small gasp of surprise when a delicious heat flooded her lower abdomen. She felt warm inside, illuminated, as though she sheltered a tiny flame deep within her.
A tiny flame…
A tiny life.
Chapter Twenty
She had conceived Jourdian’s son. She couldn’t have been more certain of the child’s gender if she were holding him in her arms.
Only seconds before the little being had been naught but a thought, a wish, and now he was alive, real, and cradled safely inside her. Her fingers trembling, Splendor laid her hand over her belly, awed by the fact that her babe dwelled just beneath her palm. Hers and Jourdian’s son.
Quickly, she lifted her head so she could see her husband. “Jourdian,” she said softly. “Jourdian.”
He was sleeping too deeply to hear her.
She poked his
shoulder.
He didn’t move.
In the morning she would tell him, she decided. For now, throughout the night, the precious secret was hers alone.
Lowering her head to Jourdian’s chest again, she smiled, wondering what her baby would look like. Would he have eyes the silver of rain or the lavender of wood violets? Would copper crown his head or midnight black? Would he inherit the powers of Faerie, or would he be human?
Who was the little boy she carried?
Almost giggling with joy, Splendor looked up at Jourdian once more, her eyes touching each part of his magnificently sculpted face. As she watched him sleep, she called to mind their lovemaking. Their Christmas. She remembered how she’d met him, how he’d taken her here to Heathcourte, and she recalled his frequent bouts of fury, the beautiful sound of his laughter.
She pondered their night in the starlit heavens, all their verbal battles, and their rides upon his land, he on Magnus, she on a dragonfly.
She remembered everything about him. Everything she knew, everything they’d shared.
She knew his thoughts before he spoke, sensed his emotions before he demonstrated them. She missed him when she wasn’t with him. His happiness was hers, as was his sadness.
She felt attached to him, as if she were sewn to him with unbreakable threads. And she was so happy with him. Happier than she’d ever realized she could be.
Only two months had passed since she’d met him in the meadow, but she knew that those two months were worth more than all the years she’d lived without him.
Deep and powerful emotion streamed through her. It stemmed from her soul and twined through her heart like a tender vine bursting from the ground and twisting around its surroundings.
Jourdian’s heartbeat pulsed beneath her ear, rhythmically, the sweetest sound in the world. Splendor sighed deeply…
And knew with every fiber of her being that she loved him.
She flew out of the bed and hung in the air above Jourdian’s sleeping form, her body glowing so brightly that the room appeared filled with afternoon sunshine.
She loved Jourdian. She truly loved him! Somehow, some way, the magic of the human emotion had worked its wonderful enchantment on her.
She thought her heart would literally burst with joy.
“First our son,” she whispered down to her husband, “and now love. Has there ever been a happier night in all the history of the world, Jourdian?”
Completely unable to contain her elation, she began to fly around the room with all the speed and grace of an eagle. Brilliant stars rained down from the ceiling, and the very walls began to shine like polished silver.
And then, abruptly, the stars vanished and the walls ceased to shine. Splendor’s flight slowed, stopped. She floated down to the floor, her face ashen, her frame shaking.
Her joy killed by a stabbing realization.
She loved Jourdian. But in a month’s time she would have to leave him. She couldn’t stay here in the human world. If she tried, she would die.
“Die,” she whispered, the word wafting toward the bed where Jourdian lay sleeping. “Aye, and with me would perish our unborn child.”
Their child. The babe was Jourdian’s as well as hers, and she would have to take the child away from him, away to Pillywiggin.
Diamonds slipped from her eyes and poured to the floor. The betrothal, she thought. The long-ago bargain with Virgil Trinity had been a callous one on her great-grandfather’s part.
She understood that he had sought desperate measures to save his race, but he had not considered the emotions of the Trinity descendant who would sire the special child. Had not given thought to how the chosen human man would feel over the loss of his babe.
But she hadn’t either, Splendor realized. In her desire to conceive, she’d been as insensitive and heartless as her great-grandfather, never pondering the fact that Pillywiggin’s gain would be Jourdian’s loss.
That she hadn’t understood love when she’d first come to Jourdian ceased to matter. She knew what love was now, and so she was able to understand that the spiriting away of his son was going devastate Jourdian.
She couldn’t tell him about the babe. He had every right to know he’d sired a son, and she couldn’t tell him.
Deep, silent sobs brought her to her knees. Her father’s description of love was only half right, she realized miserably. It was true that the emotion bestowed deep and indescribable joy. But there was another side to love. A dark side, and that side rendered anguish.
Splendor dissolved into her glistening mist.
But for the first time in her life, the soothing haze brought her no comfort.
Sitting at the dining-room table with Splendor by his side, Jourdian watched his wife carefully. When he’d awakened, he’d found her standing in front of one of the bedroom windows, gazing through the pane of glass. She’d professed to have slept little. After that she hadn’t said much at all and, much to his confusion, she’d been avoiding looking at him.
He laid his hand over hers. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong, sprite? You’re unusually quiet this morning.”
She stared at her plate as if the fine piece of china were the most interesting thing in the world to look at. “Nay,” she whispered. “All is well.”
All is well. The lie made her eyes sting with tears. She quickly blinked the diamonds away before Jourdian could see them.
“Reverend Shrewsbury has arrived, Your Grace,” a servant announced as he came into the room. “The reverend requests a very brief meeting.”
Jourdian felt a flash of hostility. The vicar had more than likely come to do bit of spying on him and Splendor. Of course, he would use the excuse of having come for a Christmas contribution.
Christmas, Jourdian thought. He could not send Reverend Shrewsbury away on this holy day. “Show him in.”
Moments later, the vicar walked into the dining room. “Your Gr-Graces. Merry Ch-Christmas t-to you.”
Jourdian had never heard the talkative man stumble over his own words before. After many years of hours-long sermons in church and continuous gossiping throughout the vicinity, the vicar had developed a strong and skillful tongue. “I take it you have come to collect a contribution, Reverend?”
The reverend shook his head. “I’ve c-come to t-tell you that I will no longer b-be ab-able to c-continue with my p-position as vicar of Heathc-courte. I… For some st-strange and unfortunate reason, I seem t-to have lost my ab-ability to sp-speak pr-properly. As vicar, I am t-to g-give a sermon every Sunday, b-but I c-cannot pr-preach with the st-stutter I have ac-acquired.”
Listening to the man stutter, Jourdian felt a shred of pity for him. But only a shred. The man’s speech impairment would effectively slow his rapid-fire gossiping. Jourdian was glad for that since more than a few people had suffered the results of Reverend Shrewsbury’s sowing of slander.
“I will see to it that you receive an ample retirement fund, Reverend.”
“Thank you, Your Gr-Grace. Farewell and once again, Merry Chr-Christmas.”
“What do you think of that, Splendor?” Jourdian asked when the vicar was gone. “One of England’s sharpest tongues has lost its cutting edge.”
“Aye,” she murmured, avoiding his gaze again.
Deciding to leave her with her thoughts for a bit, Jourdian looked up and saw Ulmstead standing by the sideboard. The butler held a tiny sand crab in one hand, and with his other hand he was rubbing his head.
Jourdian wondered if the man had some sort of itchy head rash. “Ulmstead, what are you doing?”
Thrilled to have the duke’s attention at last, Ulmstead smiled. “I am smoothing my hair, Your Grace,” he announced proudly, then winced slightly when the sand crab pinched his thumb.
“Your hair. I see.” But Jourdian didn’t “see” at all. What in God’s name was wrong with everyone? Splendor wouldn’t talk, and Ulmstead was smoothing nonexistent hair!
“Yes, my hair, your lordship,” Ulmstead sa
id. He left his spot by the heavily laden sideboard, approached the table, and bent over so the duke could see his head.
Jourdian couldn’t believe what he was finally seeing. There, on Ulmstead’s head, was a layer of deep brown fuzz. It certainly wasn’t long enough for the man to brush, but it was hair all the same.
“It truly is hair, Lord Amberville!” Ulmstead exclaimed. Beaming, he reached up to pat the fine dark fluff again. “I noticed it at the stroke of midnight last night, and I… Oh, forgive me, your lordship. I don’t mean to go on so.”
“Please continue.”
“I really am terribly excited,” Ulmstead blurted out. “Your Grace cannot imagine how I have missed my hair. I began to lose it when I was but a young man. Seeing it grow back is like a wish come true! And I’ve not a single strand of gray. One would think a man my age would have gray hair, wouldn’t one? And yet, my new hair is the same color as it was when I was young!”
A wish come true, Jourdian repeated silently. His gaze slid to Splendor. One look at her face told him exactly what she’d done.
“’Tis Christmas Day, Ulmstead,” she said, evading Jourdian’s eyes and looking instead at the grinning butler. “Truly an enchanted time”—she paused while a footman scooped fruit onto her plate—“so why would your wish nay come true? And I am supremely certain that your new hair will continue to grow and thicken.”
Ulmstead slipped the sand crab into his pocket and continued to rub his fuzzy head. “I—”
“He is well, Lady Amberville!” Mrs. Frawley shouted as she burst into the room. “Mr. Frawley is well at last!” She arrived at the table, her large frame quaking with happiness.
“Mrs. Frawley,” Jourdian said, a tad displeased with her loud and unseemly behavior.
She bit her bottom lip. “Pardon my outburst, Your Grace, but my husband has been unwell for over a month. His heart was so weak that the doctor was sure he would soon pass away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jourdian said, leaning back in his chair as another servant filled his plate with thin slices of rare beefsteak and eggs topped with rich, melted cheese and glistening sautéed onions.
A Basket of Wishes Page 31