by Erin Satie
She hardly noticed the time passing. When Loel knelt beside her and said, “Will you tell me what happened?” she blinked past him to the glass roof, reflecting the peach and gold of a distant sunset.
“No.”
“You don’t have to.” He helped her to stand; her knees ached from kneeling for so long. “Why don’t you lie down?”
She stretched out on Loel’s narrow bed, staring blindly ahead while her mind’s eye recalled, over and over, a child screaming, “Whore!” and a man hefting a fist-sized rock. Eventually Loel joined her, fitting his front against her back and pulling her close. He stroked her head, sifting his fingers through her hair, offering comfort.
It felt so good. So sweet and lovely. Eventually she rolled to face him. He lay with his head propped on one bicep, eyes half-closed and sleepy, mouth soft. He didn’t change what he was doing because she’d moved; just kept petting her hair. No comment, no demand.
Eventually she planted the pad of her index finger in the notch between his collarbones. He didn’t react, so she dragged her finger up along the bone. His skin was warm, ever so slightly damp. She traced the curve of his shoulder, the line of his jaw—whatever she could reach without disturbing him. She was afraid to break the spell.
The arm pinned between her body and the thin mattress went numb, and she had to shift her position. Loel’s gaze flicked up to track the movement and so revealed the desire in his eyes, burning with the banked intensity of hot coals.
Bonny gasped.
He ran his fingers through her hair again, the same soothing gesture he’d performed a hundred times now, but this time he held her gaze. Everything changed. Her whole scalp shivered deliciously.
The same thing… only different. But did the transformation work in reverse?
One way to find out. She reached for the notch between his collarbones, where his heart beat. She slid her finger up along the bone, to his shoulder. He made a soft noise in his throat and shifted restlessly. Bonny doubled back. It might have been her imagination, but she thought his heartbeat had accelerated.
She stopped there. She didn’t know what came next. She didn’t want to push.
Loel grazed the shell of her ear—she felt sparks in her throat, in her belly. He pressed the hollow behind her jaw, followed the slanting path of a tendon down her neck, and then paused.
Bonny’s fingers trembled as she hooked them under the strap of her chemise and drew it down her shoulder. Loel didn’t flinch or look away, so she tugged the strap all the way down to her elbow, exposing her naked breast.
This gesture precipitated the single most gratifying moment of her life. Because Loel looked as though… as though a thousand gas lamps had been lit right before his eyes, as though he’d been standing between two canons as a volley was fired… quite frankly, as though he’d been witness to a miracle.
She might have laughed at the absurdity, or from sheer delight, but she never got the chance. He cupped her breast in his palm. Shock sucked the humor right out of her. He thumbed her nipple, back and forth, back and forth, until she felt as though her skin were dissolving. A sugar shell that could crack and melt, leaving her nerves raw and exposed.
And then he kissed her. If he’d wanted to break her, he could have. She’d never been more vulnerable. But Loel wasn’t mean. He had never been mean, not once. He had a heart of gold, and he kissed her like she deserved to hold it in her two hands.
She could have cried. After the day she’d had, his gesture of faith meant the world. She tried to show him, opening to his explorations, returning his slow, deliberate kisses with trembling, breathless ones.
Loel traced the dip in her waist, the soft swell of her belly. When he cupped her pubis, she snapped her thighs closed. She didn’t speak a word in protest, and he didn’t move his hand—but a battle raged silently between them. She forced herself to relax, and he moved on, skimming a light touch along her legs, her calves, before wrapping his hands around her feet and kneading until she whimpered with pleasure.
Loel began to work his way back up her legs, squeezing and massaging the resistance from her limbs, leaving her malleable as clay. The desire he’d wakened swamped her, hummed along her nerves, throbbed between her legs, tingled at the tip of her breasts—all the places he’d touched wanted more.
When he put his hand between her thighs for a second time, she rocked into the heel of his palm, into that pressure, desperate after mere seconds of deprivation. While his clever fingers petted and plucked, he fastened his lips around her nipple and pulled. She shuddered, moaned—she didn’t have words anymore.
He lured her into a haze of need, a world flushed blood-red as the light filtered through the veil of her eyelids. She stiffened, jerked, her body a puppet to instincts she hadn’t known she had. A scream built in her throat. She held her breath to silence it.
And then it ended. Broke. Satisfaction rocked her—first like a stormy sea and then as gently as a babe in a cradle. She felt whole again, extravagantly content.
The bed dipped as Loel shifted. He rubbed the whole length of his body against hers, chest to chest and thigh to thigh until Bonny purred. Loel fumbled between her legs, and soon something blunt and hot pressed into her. He kissed her again, but she shook free of the embrace, panting shallowly. A nervous fluttering tickled the inside of her ribs.
She had seen every inch of his body while he’d been sick with malaria, including the soft, wrinkled appendage that had lain across his thigh. She didn’t understand how it could be responsible for what she was feeling now.
Loel groaned, strands of sweat-slick hair falling forward to graze at her brow as his head drooped. Bonny tried to ease the strange discomfort in her body, but Loel kept pushing, deeper and deeper until she felt, oddly, as though she might suffocate.
“Breathe,” he murmured, sliding a hand around her neck, massaging her nape.
He pulled out and slid in again, making it impossible to obey. And, in any case, breathing soon seemed an unnecessary distraction. When Loel moved inside her she felt dizzy.
She’d felt something similar. On days when she went hungry for too long and finally sat down to a full plate, anxious moments when she counted the seconds until she could reach a chamber pot, or those nights when she’d stayed up too late and her eyes drifted shut whether she willed it or not. Times when some bodily need simply shoved her conscious, rational mind aside and took over.
Making love was exactly like that. And, simultaneously, utterly different. She didn’t want pleasure the way she’d wanted food or sleep or a chamber pot. She wanted Loel; no other man would do. She wanted him as close as possible; she wanted him inside her and on top of her. She wanted to feel his weight, hear his desire echo hers.
When it was over and they were back where they’d started—her back nestled against his front, his fingers stroking her hair—she felt like a cloud at dawn, bathed in rose and gold. She had never been so grateful to be alive nor so full of wonder at the world.
What a gift Loel had given her. What a perfect, impossible gift.
Chapter 17
It rained during the night. Loel noticed when he woke to tend the stoves, sometime around midnight, and it hadn’t let up when he roused again at dawn. He yawned and stretched, careful of his sleeping wife, but his bed (pilfered, like the rest of his furniture, from the servants’ quarters) was too narrow for courtesy. She stirred, rubbing sleep from her eyes, the most mundane gesture in the world—for everyone but Bonny. She looked like Psyche, straight from the myth… which, come to think of it, began when Cupid, an expert archer, was so stupefied by a woman’s beauty that he fumbled and scratched himself on his own arrows.
Loel had never before felt such profound sympathy for a god.
Bonny made sleep beautiful. Her limbs sprawled gracefully, the curve of her back and the bend in her knees balancing one another in a relaxed S-shape. Just looking at her was restful.
Her lashes fluttered, and her eyes opened. “It’s raining.�
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“Out of season but pray that it continues.” He dragged the thin sheet down from her shoulder to her waist, fascinated by the juxtaposition of his work-roughened hand against the smooth, supple skin of her side—her skin had a glow to it, a depth of light, like the milky translucence of polished alabaster or the dewy freshness of spring flowers. “It’s good for the orchids.”
“Is it?” She shifted—straightening her legs, twisting her hips—and in an instant she’d transformed from a sleeping Psyche to a Renaissance Venus, voluptuous and sleepy-eyed. “Why?”
“They like the humidity.” He tugged the sheet lower, past her hip, his mouth going dry. Her bottom had the most perfect heart shape—plump, deeply cleft and utterly devastating. “Rain draws out heat too, making it possible to control the temperature inside the orchid house with much greater precision.”
“It’s a shame you can’t make it rain on demand.”
Loel nodded absently. The urge to fill his palm and squeeze was almost overwhelming.
“Or could you?”
“Could I what?”
“Make it rain,” she said. “You could build another fountain and put the spout on the roof!”
“Build a…” He blinked. God, he was hard. “What?”
“Fountain.”
He dragged his gaze up to her face—which, he was reminded, could be quite distracting all on its own—and scrambled desperately for some semblance of rational thought. Would it be rude if he kissed her?
“I suppose it would require a great deal of water to cover the whole roof.” A little furrow appeared between her brows. “You couldn’t just dig a well.”
He kissed her. She made a muffled, startled noise, and he jerked back, sat straight, met thick-lashed eyes gone wide as saucers. He was a brute. An absolute brute. He ought to listen when she spoke instead of ogling her—
She tugged his wrist, rising as he bent to her will, and kissed him back.
So… not a brute? He wasn’t entirely sure. He’d think about it later. Right now her lips were soft and pillowy. Her breasts overflowed his palms, and her nipples crinkled against his tongue when he sucked. He’d been right to fear this. Touching her made his doubts about the marriage seem like petty quibbles with the persuasive force of a crumpled newspaper.
She gasped, shivered, moaned. If he’d had feathers, he would have preened like a cock. Instead, he kissed his way down her belly and nuzzled between her thighs. Her musky scent bypassed his brain and went straight to his blood. He breathed deep, and then again, clutching her tighter, spreading her legs wider. She squirmed, but her protests didn’t last past the first lick. She tasted tangy and savory—human—her secret flesh slick and hot.
He groaned. He wanted to be inside her. He licked and suckled and remembered, with mounting impatience, how it felt to penetrate her. How tight she’d been at first, how by the end she’d clutched and keened and scrabbled her heels up the backs of his thighs, trying to pull him deeper.
Soon, he told himself, soon. The effort to restrain himself drove him a little mad. When she came apart against his mouth, pulsing around the two fingers he pumped into her, drenching him down to the knuckles, he froze. Like a stopped clock. And might have remained that way for who knows how long if Bonny hadn’t wriggled and kicked and reached between them to take his cock in her hand.
She didn’t have much of a grip, but that didn’t matter. Her hand was small and soft and utterly unlike his own. It drove him wild. He let his head fall—it landed between her breasts, and he rolled his brow to either side, to feel the plump flesh. If anything could match the glories of heaven, he thought, it must be a man’s last moments outside of it, when the gates have opened and the way lies clear.
“Do that again,” he said.
Bonny hesitated. “This?” she asked, giving him a stroke.
He shuddered. Yes, that.
She did it again, squeezing feebly, and he couldn’t take any more. He crawled up her body, met her eyes—hers were curious, ever so slightly calculating—and buried himself to the hilt.
She cried out. Her expression went vague and dreamy, eyes falling shut as she tipped her head back, exposing her throat. He touched his lips to it, tonguing her pulse, wallowing in satisfaction. Two days ago he would not have believed that anything on earth could feel this good. Today he wasn’t sure how he’d survive without it.
Her thighs tightened around his hips. He took his cue, quickly losing himself in her body—because she made it possible. Because she met desire with desire and moved like she’d been made to fit him or he’d been made to fit her.
He came hard, pleasure like a crash or a fall, shock followed by a fuzzy expanse of lost time. He returned to the present on his back, with Bonny glued to his side, tracing shapes on his chest with her fingertip.
“Did you say something about my fountain?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
He paused. “Would you, ah, mind repeating it?”
He felt more than heard her answering laugh, a few puffs of breath against his chest. “I said you should build a fountain with a spout on the roof,” she said. “It would be like you’d made it rain on command.”
He stared up at the glass roof, equally frustrated and exhilarated. It was a good idea. If it worked as intended—and he thought it might—his nursery would gain a real edge over its competitors. But he couldn’t construct the sort of fountain she was describing himself. It would require cutting-edge hydraulic machinery, the sort of thing only a few specialists knew how to manufacture and install.
“Loel?”
He shook his head. Most of his profits for the year had disappeared while he was sick. “I’d like to try it—but I just lost half my stock. We can’t afford an experiment on that scale right now.”
Her only response was a sigh. Silent, not meant as a reproach, but he felt her lungs deflate against his side.
“We should get up.” He wished he had a better answer. He didn’t. “The sun won’t wait.”
Bonny found her chemise, drew it over her head, and began groping about on the floor for the rest of her things.
“I picked up your clothes and put them with the laundry,” he told her, rising to his feet and stretching. “A laundress sends a girl every week to take away soiled clothes and return the clean.”
“Oh.” She stood but wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Thank you.”
He hesitated. He’d seen—and smelled—the mud spatters. “Will you tell me what happened?”
She shook her head.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You can—you have. That’s part of the problem. I’m happy here.” A smile curved her lips and then fell away. “But my family… Cordelia. She founded the circulating library, the one I spoke to you about when I first visited. She devoted herself completely to it. And now, because I helped her, it’s over.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I wish there were something I could do,” said Bonny. “For Cordelia, for my family, for you… for anyone, really, so long as it helped…”
Loel had a sudden, stomach-turning memory of eight men lined up on wobbly three-legged stools, hands bound behind their backs. Of watching, hand shading his eyes from the blistering equatorial sun, as the stools were kicked away one by one and each fell to dance on the end of a noose.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
But she wasn’t listening, least of all to warnings. Her eyes went wide, and she cried out, “Maybe there is!”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how we could afford the fountain!” Bonny skipped close, setting her loose hair asway, and blinked up at him with her sweet full lips ever so slightly parted.
She had a siren’s instinct for persuasion, matched with a puppy’s talent for dissembling. Loel could only be grateful for the latter. He steeled himself against whatever request was forthcoming.
“I have something—a painting—we could sell it. Running a fountain over the roof was my id
ea, it’s only right that I put something of mine at risk to try it.”
“A painting?” He’d been under the impression the Reeds had sold all their valuables after their warehouses burned. “I don’t mean to be rude, but… how?”
“We didn’t sell everything.” Her gaze skittered away from his. “We kept the house, didn’t we? And I have a painting. It’s valuable.”
His stomach sank. He didn’t know why she wanted this so badly, all of a sudden, and he doubted she’d give an honest answer if he asked.
“Wait for next year or the year after,” he suggested. “A good idea will keep.”
“Why wait? It isn’t doing us any good right now, hanging from a wall.”
“Why hurry?” he snapped. “What are you trying to hide?”
Bonny rocked back on her heels. She wavered, breath coming in short pants, then curled her soft hands into fists and said, “I had lewd thoughts about you while you were sick.”
Loel froze. “What?”
“I continued to nurse you—to touch you, even intimately—after I knew it was wrong.” She spat out each word as though it tasted foul on her tongue, making them as ugly as possible. “That’s why I lied when you asked me if you were dreaming. Because I couldn’t bear for you to know.”
He snagged on that, as he was meant to. He hated being helpless. Hated losing hours and days of his life, hated being dependent. His illness had left him vulnerable, and discovering that she’d taken advantage of that vulnerability filled him with raw, bone-deep anger.
Bonny trembled like a leaf, but she kept talking. “I ought to have stopped or found someone else or insisted on a chaperone. But I was too ashamed to ask for help. I ought to have warned you before the wedding, but I was too selfish.”
“Stop!” He paced away. The closer she stood, the more intensely he wanted to do exactly as she wished, no matter how impossible. To soothe her or spoil her or rage at her.