Robin Schone

by The Lady's Tutor

  Her waist had thickened slightly after two pregnancies; her hips had rounded proportionately. The triangle of hair at the apex of her thighs was dark red.

  Had it always been so . . . lush? Or had maturity . . . enhanced her body?

  Shadow outlined her collarbones; it dimpled her knees. She raised her arms and reached behind her to release her braid from the pins that held it in a bun. The breasts in the mirror lifted, jutted out from the woman’s chest.

  Dropping the pins onto the carpet, Elizabeth loosened the braid, used both hands to shake out her hair. Warm silk slithered down her back, over her shoulders, her breasts. At the same time, she watched a waterfall of auburn fire spill over her shoulders and breasts. Sliding both hands around the nape of her neck, then, she raised her arms high, pulling her hair up and back so that it cascaded over her wrists, elbows veed on either side of her head, breasts lifting, swelling, pouting.

  Elizabeth stared at the naked woman in the mirror, entranced. She was—voluptuous. A woman who had borne and nursed two children. A woman who was worthy of love.

  She licked her lips, a flash of pale pink tongue. They seemed fuller than they normally did. Kissable.

  Touch yourself . . .

  As if they had a will of their own, her hands slid free of her neck, dropped the warm tresses of auburn silk. Tentatively, she cupped her breasts; the small, feminine hands in the mirror matched Elizabeth’s movements.

  The skin was soft, heavy, slightly damp on the underside. Elizabeth could feel the hard prod of her nipples in the palms of her hands.

  Did a man’s nipples grow hard when a woman touched them?

  Do you really like a woman to nibble on your nipples?

  Yes, Mrs. Petre.

  Liquid heat surged through her groin. She trailed her hands down her ribs, cupped the rounded swell of her stomach.

  We all want to be touched....

  She touched herself openly, watching herself touch herself. Auburn hair curled around the white hand in the mirror; underneath it was soft, wet flesh like saliva moistened lips.

  Tâchik el heub.

  Elizabeth imagined a man thrusting so deeply inside her body that their pubic hair meshed, dark auburn and bright gold. Soft, firm lips covered hers; a tongue thrust into her mouth, filling it while he filled her body with his manhood. Her tender netherlips swelled underneath her fingertips, like ripe fruit, begging to be plucked, fingered—

  The soft click of a door closing sounded over the drumming of Elizabeth’s heart and the quickening of her breathing.

  Edward. He was home.

  She froze, fingers glued to her skin, unable to move.

  He must see that her light was on.

  He would come into her room and find her, like this, naked, touching herself, wanting . . .

  Muffled sounds penetrated the closed door separating their bedrooms; a man preparing for bed, a man sliding into bed, a man leaving a woman alone.

  The Bastard Sheikh had said that she was not a coward. So why didn’t she cross her room and open the door that kept Edward and her apart?

  Why didn’t she go to her husband, naked, and show him that she could please him as well as his mistress did?

  Tears spilled down her cheeks, hated tears, a coward’s tears. She snatched her nightgown off the bed and jerked it over her head. Quickly clearing away all signs of her decadence—the pins, the underwear, her shoes—she had been so eager to touch herself that she had not even taken her shoes off—she turned the gas lamp off and burrowed underneath the bedcovers.

  The Bastard Sheikh’s voice followed her into sleep.

  A woman who has borne two children . . . will not mind that I am an Arab bastard. She will only know true satisfaction at my touch.

  Chapter 11

  Elizabeth’s nipples underneath her soft black velvet bodice were hard. As hard as the male flesh pulsating against Ramiel’s right thigh.

  He wanted to arouse her. He wanted to bind her to him so inextricably that she would never, ever think about pleasing another man. Ramiel had planned this lesson very carefully to accomplish his goal.

  “Which is the most sensitive, Mrs. Petre—your lips, your nipples, or your clitoris?”

  For one long second she held the cup of Turkish coffee poised near her lips, nose wreathed in curling steam. He saw shock in her hazel eyes; it was followed by arousal. Then he saw nothing but the fan of her lashes and blue-veined porcelain as she tilted the cup and took a leisurely sip. By the time she returned her cup to the saucer balanced on her lap, her face was composed. “I feel quite certain that you know where a woman is most sensitive.”

  “But my knowledge is not of you, taalibba.” Yet. “Every woman’s body is different. Some women enjoy one touch while another does not.”

  She tilted her chin. “Perhaps, Lord Safyre, some women would enjoy being touched—anywhere.”

  Ramiel did not want her to settle for just any touch, anywhere. He wanted her to demand the rights that were her due as a woman—total, utter satisfaction.

  “How long has it been since your husband came to your bed?”

  The jarring clatter of china on china chased his words. Her lips tightened. “We agreed that we would not discuss my marriage.”

  How had he thought her stoic?

  Her lips gave away everything, quivering with sensitivity, compressing to hold back her emotions. Anger, fear, pain. Passion.

  His eyes narrowed. “I agreed not to malign your husband.”

  “How long has it been since you have been with a woman, Lord Safyre?”

  “Six days.”

  “An excessive amount of time.”

  Her voice was sarcastic. But the knowledge was there. He had not been with a woman since she had blackmailed her way into his home.

  “Yes, Mrs. Petre, it is an excessive amount of time,” Ramiel said deliberately. “Before now, the longest I had ever gone without a woman is three days. How long has it been since you have had coition?”

  “Suffice it to say that it has been longer than six days,” she retorted repressively.

  Ramiel thought of Edward Petre. He thought of the damage he must have done to her over the course of sixteen years.

  “Longer than six months?” he goaded.

  She stared into her coffee cup. The shadows underneath her eyes were darker than they had been yesterday.

  Another mark against Edward Petre.

  Were Elizabeth his wife, he would bring her to orgasm so many times she would fall into exhausted sleep every night.

  He hardened his voice. “You agreed not to lie. How long, Mrs. Petre?”

  She raised her cup, sipping, hiding, trying to hold the truth at bay: she was married to a man who would never satisfy her. Carefully placing the cup on the saucer, she extended them toward Ramiel. “It has been longer than six months, Lord Safyre. It has been longer than six years. May I have more coffee, please?”

  Ramiel inhaled sharply.

  He expected her answer; he did not expect the riot of emotions it would unleash.

  Longer than six years.

  Ela’na. Damn. She would be tighter than a virgin.

  Taut anger overcame the piercing desire to find out just how tight she was.

  Anger at Edward Petre. Anger at Elizabeth.

  He had used her. She had allowed it.

  Ramiel would not.

  Today she would see what a man looked like. Very soon she would experience what a man felt like.

  The man would not be Edward Petre.

  He lifted the silver coffeepot at his right elbow and poured more coffee into her cup. Hot steam roiled between them. “In Chapter Eight the sheikh lists various names for a man’s sex organ.”

  “Thirty-nine.” She waited until he added the prerequisite splash of cold water to settle the coffee grounds before pulling back her hand. As if it were commonplace for a woman to admit that she had not had coition with her husband for more than six years, she balanced the saucer and cup on her lap. �
�An excessive number, surely.”

  “You counted them.”

  “I thought that was the intent.”

  The intent was for her to become acquainted with the various stages of arousal in a man.

  “Which names did you favor?”

  She tilted her chin. “That is difficult to say, Lord Safyre. I was rather taken with ‘the pigeon’; however, ‘the tinkler,’ the ‘one-eyed, ’ and ‘the expectorant’ ran a close second.”

  Laughter and lust. Ramiel could feel the two disparate emotions mingling deep inside of his body.

  “Do not be too harsh, Mrs. Petre. English translations of Arabic words do neither the culture nor the language justice. When a man ejaculates, his manhood shrinks and nests on his testicles, hence the ‘pigeon’ simile. When a woman is wet, suction arises when the man thrusts in and out of her body; if he should pull out of her, it will create a ‘tinkling’ sound. The one-eyed is rather obvious. As for the expectorant, it is called thus because a man secretes moisture when he is excited, just as a woman does.”

  She glanced down, as if she could see through the desk and ascertain the truth of his statement herself. “Does every man . . . secrete moisture . . . before he ejaculates?”

  A circle of damp warmth penetrated Ramiel’s trousers where the crown of his manhood strained against the black broadcloth. “Yes.”

  Her gaze jumped up from the desk, safely settled on the cup and saucer in front of Ramiel. “How much?”

  “Enough to lubricate a woman’s netherlips so that he can glide between them.” Ramiel dipped a long finger into his coffee and circled the rim of his cup with it. “Enough to wet his fingers so that he can caress her clitoris and bring her to climax.”

  She tore her gaze away from his cup and met his eyes. “What Arabic terms do you prefer, Lord Safyre?”

  Ramiel’s manhood thickened. He shifted in his chair, stretching out his legs to find a more comfortable position. “Keur . . . kamera . . . zeub.”

  “Virile member, penis, and verge,” she translated softly.

  Ramiel lowered his lashes, veiling his eyes. “You have an extraordinary memory, Mrs. Petre.”

  She did not look away from him. “I took notes.”

  But she wasn’t looking at her notes.

  “Then you remember that mochefi el relil, the ‘extinguisher of passion, ’ best satisfies a woman. It is large, strong, and slow to ejaculate. It will not take its leave until it thoroughly excites the woman’s womb, ‘coming and going, tilting high and low, and rummaging right to left.’ Do you want to see a man?”

  Dark rose bloomed in her pale cheeks. She gripped the saucer so tightly, he thought it would shatter. “You asked me that yesterday morning.”

  And then I sent you away, fool that I was.

  “I am asking you again.”

  Defiance glimmered in her eyes. Defiance . . . and desire.

  “Yes.” She abruptly lifted her saucer off her knee and set it down on the edge of the desk. A decisive thud echoed in the library; a black wave of liquid splashed over the rim of the cup. “Yes, I want to see a man. Are you willing to show me one, sir?”

  Ramiel leaned back and opened the top drawer in his desk. He could feel her eyes on him. His manhood pulsed in time to the rise and fall of her breasts underneath her soft velvet bodice.

  She was expecting him to display himself.

  He wanted to display himself for her. He wanted to satisfy her every curiosity.

  Ela’na, damn, let him get through the next few minutes.

  He grabbed a rectangular box and pushed it across the desk. “Take it.”

  Clearly, it was not what she expected. She leaned forward and picked up the white box. “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  She opened the box—and promptly dropped the lid. Her intake of breath was loud over the hiss of the gas lamp and the crackling of burning wood. Shocked hazel eyes leapt to meet his turquoise gaze.

  “Take it out,” he said harshly.

  A pink tongue flicked her bottom lip.

  Ramiel gripped the edge of his desk to keep himself from jumping over it and giving her her first kiss, ferame, the kiss between a man and a woman.

  More than six years.

  He wanted to give her everything Edward Petre had denied her. He wanted to give it to her now.

  Lowering her gaze, Elizabeth studied the leather object nestled in a bed of red velvet. It was so shaped that not even a woman with her limited experience could mistake what it was fashioned after.

  Sexual awareness throbbed in the seductive thrust and retreat of light and shadow. The gas lamp sucked up the oxygen inside the library. Ramiel could not breathe, waiting for her reaction, waiting for her acceptance . . .

  If she ran now . . . Allah and God help them both.

  She gingerly lifted it out of the box. “It does not have a red head.”

  “It is tooled leather.”

  “It is cold.”

  “Hold it and warm it in your hands.”

  “You are trying to embarrass me.”

  “I am trying to educate you.”

  Elizabeth refused to meet his gaze. “Lord Safyre—”

  “You wanted to see a man, Mrs. Petre; that is what a man looks like. You wanted to learn how to please a man. I am going to show you.”

  She closed her eyes in silent struggle. It was so obvious that she wanted to do as he instructed, to hold it as she would hold a man, as she would hold him, when the time came. It was equally obvious that she was still bound by thirty-three years of ingrained prudery. He fought himself not to make the choice for her, to take her hands in his and close them around the leather.

  Opening her eyes, she closed her left hand around the leather. Her fingertips brushed her thumb, meeting on the underside of the object. Its circumference was large, but not so large that it would intimidate her.

  “What is it called?” He strained to hear her over the blood thrumming in his temples.

  “There are many words. Let us call it an artificial phallus.”

  “It is circumcised.”

  Unlike Ramiel.

  The Arab women must have found you fascinating.

  “You have seen your two sons when they were younger.” His voice was labored.

  “Yes.”

  “A circumcised man and an uncircumcised man do not greatly differ when they are erect.”

  She gently ran a fingertip over the leather crown. “Erect men . . . are they plum-shaped . . . like this?”

  Ramiel gritted his teeth, feeling the caress all the way down to his testicles. “Some men.”

  “Are you?”

  He leaned forward in his chair, wood squeaking, heart hammering. “Yes.”

  “Shortly after I married I became pregnant.” She stared fixedly at the phallus. “I went to the art museum. There was a statue there, a naked statue of a man. Except that it had a leaf . . .”

  Ramiel did not have to ask what part of the statue the leaf covered.

  “I was seventeen years old and I was going to have a baby and I wanted to see what had made me that way. But the leaf would not budge.”

  The muscles inside his chest constricted. At her unexpected confidence. At the young woman she had once been, seeking illumination from an object of art that had purposefully been tempered to preserve a woman’s ignorance.

  When she had been seventeen he would have been twenty-two years old with ten years of sexual experience behind him. She had known pain and frustration; he had known only pleasure.

  Then.

  The pain had come later.

  For the first time in nine years, Ramiel almost forgave the circumstances that had exiled him to England to live out the rest of his life. While he could not change his past, he could give Elizabeth a future.

  “Your curiosity is natural, taalibba.”

  “The guard did not think so.”

  Ramiel’s lips hitched upward. The picture of Elizabeth determinedly trying to lift a marbl
e leaf that would not budge while a British guard struggled to stop her was so vivid that he almost laughed. The thought of her humiliation immediately sobered him.

  “Some men are afraid of comparison,” he said easily.

  “But you are not.”

  The words were drawn from him unwittingly. “I have my own fears.”

  Her head shot up. “What does a man like you have to fear?”

  That I am not a man. That I will never be a man again.

  But some things a man does not confess out of the sheer fear that putting it in words will make it true.

  He could not live with himself, knowing that it was true. He could not live with himself not knowing that it was true.

  How could he expect a woman to live with that which he could not?

  “What do you fear, Elizabeth Petre?”

  Her lips opened—soft pink lips; immediately, she closed her mouth in a thin, firm line and returned her attention to the phallus. “Is this a meritorious member?”

  He wondered what she was hiding now. Was she afraid that she would never find satisfaction with her husband? Or was she afraid that she would find it with a Bastard Sheikh?

  “You know the formula. Measure it.”

  He watched with bated breath as she positioned the leather across the palm of her hand.

  “One and a half handbreadths . . .” She raised her eyelids; her hazel eyes were lambent. “By my hands. You did not answer my question, Lord Safyre.”

  His mouth was dry, as if he had eaten desert sand. “It is meritorious enough.”

  “Is a man this hard when he is erect?”

  Ramiel took a deep breath. “A man is more flexible.”

  “Thursday morning you said that you liked a woman to pump and squeeze you. How else can a woman pleasure a man?”

  “She can take him into her mouth and lick and suckle him,” he said baldly.

  The words were riveting, for her as well as for him.

  “Like a nipple.”

  He did not miss a heartbeat. “Or a clitoris.”