ROMANCE: CLEAN ROMANCE: Summer Splash! (Sweet Inspirational Contemporary Romance) (New Adult Clean Fantasy Short Stories)

by Michelle Woodward

  It took several months of languishing in the heat for Cornelia to sink into herself. She had heard of the phenomena, the ripening, but had never expected it of herself. She thought herself too haughty, too proud to blend in with the environment that she had been thrust into when her father decided to settle a plantation himself and upended his whole family from their cozy home in gray, gray London into Assam. But it happened. She found herself doffing her silk gowns with their many layers and hoops, and climbing into the attire acquired by her ama, found it far more comfortable and far more suited to her general taste. Her mother and sister were appalled, of course, but Cornelia found she much preferred staying cool and assimilating than leaking undignified secretions into the stylings of a modiste; those habits were a whole lifetime away, one she did not know if she would ever get back to. It was after she had reduced her daily triple bath to one at night that Cornelia sent her ama away to dry her own body. She wrapped the linen about herself, but instead of allowing it to rub her dry and then tossing it aside, she wrapped the damp cloth around the sinuous lines of her body and walked over to the mirror. She lowered her body onto the stool in front of it and glanced quickly at her face, as if terrified of what she might discover there. She decided to start with something that would jar the senses, but reveal little of the truth.

  She rose from the stool, unwrapping the linen from the front of her torso rapidly, then snapping it closed, startled by the flash of dark brown nipples that stood out against the whiteness of her body. She glanced at her face again, noting the redness of her cheeks, the wild, unruly tendrils of her dark hair shining wet against her face and head. Her mother and sister refused to go outside without their parasols for fear that the sun would darken their skin and they would look, horror of horrors, “like we belong in those tea fields ourselves.” Cornelia found she liked what the sun was doing to her skin, coloring her, staining her irrevocably. It was time to look deeper.

  This time she unwrapped her body slowly, savoring the moment, as if it were not herself looking at it, but rather someone else. She took in the lean line of her hips and thighs, the bones poking out through the skin. A strong stomach, curved, and breasts that had grown heavy in her time in India. Her ama had commented on the growing curves, saying they were a sign of wealth in her village, and that surely, this was the mark of class, that Cornelia was increasing in size in a land where so many atrophied. She had a woman's body now, she knew. Raising a leg to the vanity desk, she admired the long, curved lines of it, and quite suddenly found herself dancing all about the room, flapping the edges of the linen as if it were a cape and she was flying free. Wild girl, free girl. She closed the linen and studied her face in the mirror again. There was little tangible about what she felt then, but she could feel a new adventure looming ahead of her in the very near future, one that would mark her as different forever, so that everyone could see, so that everyone could know she wasn't just another little sniveling English girl who had to live her life by all the rules.

  She would not know for several weeks yet how exactly right she was.

  It happened, as these things do, largely by chance. In the early dew of morning, Cornelia walked around the plot of land where the tea plants had been gradually growing. She fingered the tiny buds between her fingertips and brushed the morning wetness off of the leaves. The droplets of water collected at her fingers and settled slowly into her skin, absorbing the rainwater of India as if she was the soil beneath her feet. A delicate spider had woven a web in between two of the tallest plants, the silken strands of its creation glowing against the first soft rays of sun. This was the Assam Cornelia was beginning to understand, the one before the sun turned into a cruel beast intent on scorching everything in its path. She watched the fat body of the creature and its eight little legs work tidily to spin more thread and found herself lost in the creative production of such an unknowing little insect who knew exactly what it was meant to do on this Earth. She considered the restlessness that had been fast growing inside of her over the past several weeks, one for which she had no outlet, one for which there was no cure. She reached out her hand to cup it.

  “No.”

  The voice was smooth as oil, and accented. She nearly lost her balance, for she thought she was alone and had been startled. The man who stood before her was stripped down to the waist and gleamed in the morning sunlight like an apparition, a god, and for a moment, Cornelia thought she was seeing one of those Hindi gods her ama always spoke up.

  “Vishnu?” she breathed, still crouched over the spider web.

  The man stepped to the side and she was able to see past the lean row of rippling muscles to a smile that gleamed whiter than anything she had ever seen before. “Pardon, miss, but is dangerous. The spider,” he said, and she saw that he had dimples in his cheeks that were so deep they almost creased each cheek in half. He had pale green eyes and a full bottom lip that was a dusky pink against the darkness of his skin. A native, he was a native, and yet her brain refused to register this against an inexorable pull she felt towards him. He came closer and something in her shifted, reminded her that she was indeed grounded in reality, that this was no god. She straightened her spine and stepped away from him as he bent down to clear the web and the spider with a bundled up cloth, shaking it free to make sure the spider had not made its merry way into its folds. When he was done, he stepped to the side and looked at her boldly.

  “The spider,” she said hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “You said it was dangerous?”

  He smiled again and Cornelia felt dizzy against the brightness of it. “Gone now,” he told her, tucking in the shirt into the waistband of his pants.

  “You saved my life,” she told him and watched him turn around, the muscles of his lower back bunching as he did. Cornelia bit her bottom lip. Never in her life had she wanted to touch someone so much. His skin was like satin. He glanced back, but said not a thing. Instead, his unusual eyes raked her over in that brash way again, and Cornelia felt, for the first time in her young life, completely and fully alert. It was as if she had been sleeping this entire time and needed nothing more than the look of this man to wake her; she could do all she want to shake off the story, but she was falling into it as surely as if she had fallen into magic.

  Every moment of the next week was spent searching the plantation for him. She had to do so covertly, for asking anyone would have alerted her father and raised suspicions of the truth of her search. It was remarkable how many Indians were working picking tea leaves for the company; she had never even managed to realize it until she began searching for the man who now haunted her dreams at night. She walked the rows of tea plants day after day, searching faces that turned away in discomfort, the natives unused to such penetrating observation. She saw dastardly humanity in visages so dehumanized, intelligence in the eyes of the children, sorrow in those of their mothers. By the end of the week, she had lost hope she would ever see the man again and let herself be swept away by the truth of her fate. She would live out her life in Assam, marry some dry English lord or duke who had also come to sweaty India to see out his fortune, and her living soul would atrophy until she lost the growing sense of her sensuality before it had even the slightest chance of being born.

  She spent her nights now rumpling the sheets like never before. She was back to bathing thrice a day to wash away the stickiness on her skin when she woke, borne of nights too heated to remember. Temperatures rose, but so did the heat in her body as the memory of the man she had met permeated her dreams. In the night, she clutched out at the ropy muscles of his arms, the rounded curve of his hip and her hands reached nothing but the empty air, thick and heavy as her lust. In the mornings she woke, eyes drenched with the sleep she did not receive and felt that she never would. The days stretched endlessly, humid and dank with the promise of rains that did not come. Her father mentioned one night over the dinner she picked at that if the rains did not arrive soon, the plants might die. Cornelia felt all this was remarkab
ly symbolic, for she felt she would die soon, as well. Her ama prayed for rain, and Cornelia, to put her mind off on other things, prayed as well. She prayed that deliverance would come soon, in one form or another.

  One night as the air stood entirely still, as the sun disappeared behind the thick clouds that had lingered for days on end, Cornelia wrapped herself around the veranda posts again. Her arms were sticky, dampening her shirt, and her skirt clung to her legs in a heavy tangle. She felt something inside of her grow dark as she watched lightning crack the sky.

  And he appeared in her periphery as suddenly as the force of nature called upon her rain. He needed no sunlight to illuminate his path, he needed only the whiteness of his smile, and smile he did. She ran towards him, pounding a path on the hard-packed earth beneath her. When she finally reached him, she was gasping, swallowing great pockets of air as if she would never get enough. He held her hands as she doubled over, and hard pellets of rain began to spatter her shirt.

  “You saved my life,” she said when she was finally able to stand and look him in the eye.

  He did nothing but smile, his pulse pounding patiently against her fingers where he held her hands. He was so beautiful it hurt to look at him, and Cornelia did not want to just look anymore. She had done nothing but look at herself in the mirror, nothing but look at him the first time they met. She wanted to seize life with her bare hands and take it for her own. You only get one life to live, after all.

  As the sprinkle turned into a full raging storm, Cornelia kissed the Indian.

  He gave into her as electricity buzzed down her spine. The shock of it, this life-giving force, sent a wave all the way to her knees and they buckled. He caught her as she fell, the rain drenching her clothing, sticking it to her skin, dampening her hair until it glued itself in wet slicks to her face. He looked down and she followed the line of his sight and found that those dark brown nipples that had shocked her into maturity were sticking out against the cloth of her blouse. She looked up at him, chest rising and falling and new that tonight was the night where she would be introduced to the world.

  She cared naught for propriety, but privacy she did crave. Silently she led him into the plantation house, cautioning him with a finger to her lips as they crept past the richly decorated dining room where her ama was serving a meal to her family. Before she crept up the stairs behind him, she passed along the message that she had taken ill and would not be joining them. Her ama looked at the wet footsteps leading upstairs and then shot a razor-sharp look back at her. Cornelia silenced her with a look.

  She expected herself to be shy. Instead, she was caught on a knife's edge in between shock and that incredible pulsing feeling pumping blood to all the corners of her body. She circled around him, reaching out her fingertips to brush against him. She caught her reflection in the mirror, and saw how feminine she looked next to his strong frame. Her fingers brushed against his, and she grew bolder, pressing the full length of her digits against the skin of his hip, then the muscles of his belly, and finally, his chest. Here, he caught them, gathered her slim white hand in his brown one and brought it to his lips. The feeling of that full bottom lip against her nerve endings unhinged her.

  Cornelia flew at him like one wild. She pressed her mouth against his and felt his hands come up into her hair, massaging the pins out of it, heard them clatter to the floor, and suddenly his hands were full of her wet locks. She skimmed his waist with her palm, felt a solidity against her palm pressing up from between his legs, and knew this was a sensuality she would never gain from a dry little gentleman. They were not like this, not like the satin brown skin beneath her. When he stripped her bare, undoing her blouse carefully, as if the ruined material was precious—or was that the woman beneath?--she felt no shame, for how could she feel shame in this union? She knelt to strip him of his pants, enjoying the subservience to one who had formerly been subservient to her. The feeling of her head, her mouth, her eyes being so close to the essence of his maleness ignited her, and when she lowered his pants to free his member, she almost let out a hiss of a sigh in reverence.

  She kissed the head of his penis, felt the soft skin laid over a collection of blood and nerves and steel against her lips, and felt him lower a hand to her head. She looked up at him, and there was that blinding smile again, mouth forming no words, transferring them instead to his eyes. She took his hand and rose, pressing her naked white body against him, relishing the feeling of skin against skin. This was to be no fumbling; this was to be a continued awakening of a spirit she had in her all along.

  What she felt that night was something many do not feel their entire lives. The tenderness with which he lowered her to the bed, the passion with which he covered her with his own body would sear themselves onto her memory for the rest of her life. She wrapped her naked legs around him as he kissed her breasts and stomach, lavished attention on those brown nipples. She pressed her palms against him, wrapped her arms around him as he pushed inside of her willing invitation. She lost herself in the ocean of sensation, feeling animal gasps rise from her body and throat. She cared not a whit what anyone thought of her as she raked her fingernails down his back. She welcomed everything, the sting of pain upon first entrance, and the feeling of fullness as she grew accustomed to his girth inside of her. What a marvelous feeling, this flesh enclosed in flesh! She moaned long and loud as he rocked inside of her, on the edge of in and out on a particularly delicate spot, drowned in his smile as he swallowed her sounds. She erupted first, in a hoarse cry he covered with his hand to escape censure, and kept rising and falling above her until she felt the hot spurt of him inside of her.

  They lay cradled together with his hands holding her breasts for hours. She looked down to see the sight and recalled the term chiaroscuro, light against dark, from her art lessons. His hands, finely boned and beautifully scarred and callused from hard work, held the creamy mounds of her breasts as if they were fine jewels, her nipples peeking out with deliciously jarring wantonness from between his fingers. She moved her backside against him, felt him rise once more to the occasion, and rubbed harder in a motion that would have been unknown to her even days before. She felt his warm breath on her neck, felt the press of his lips against the sensitive hairs there, and reached behind her head to wind her arms around him. Cornelia entwined her hands in his thick and luxurious hair and felt his hands slide down her bare waist. When he turned her to face him, she felt safe and small, and bound.

  “We are each other’s,” she told him, whispering the secret into his neck.

  “Each other’s,” he agreed, and quite suddenly, his body went completely rigid and he let out a loud cry.

  It appeared as though Cornelia's Indian ama had risen hours before the sun to ensure that her blooming young charge did not wake up in a scandalous situation that would expose the three of them to her employers. She chose to make her presence known by whacking Cornelia's lover over the head with a broom and dragging him out of bed by his ear. She jabbered on something in their native tongue, clearly angry, and it was all Cornelia's lover could do to escape her oncoming blows. She pushed him out of the door without giving him a chance to put his clothes on, throwing them out after him like so much trash.

  “What will your parents think of me?” she wailed, pushing Cornelia out of the bed so she could change the sheets immediately.

  And although in that moment, Cornelia told herself she did not care, she did seconds later when her father burst through the door of her room, holding the Indian boy by his ear.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he roared. Cornelia's visitor looked quite overwhelmed by the double beating he had received that morning and quite irate at being so manhandled so early in the morning.

  Despite her pleas and protestations, it appeared that the native boy was fired immediately. Her father proclaimed he was lucky he did not have him dragged before the plantation magistrate to be publicly flogged for so defiling an English girl. Although Cornelia insisted that their un
ion had been more than consensual, her father claimed she knew no better since she was a child. He arranged her passage back to London, far away from “these heathens,” and upended his family once more. Cornelia's mother and sister were more than overjoyed to be returning to their fashionable hometown, but Cornelia was distraught at the thought of never seeing her lover again. What was to be her fate now?

  Her fate, ironically, was sealed by the action of her own hands. Several weeks after they had returned to England, they were to attend a rather important party of one of her father's duke friends. The modiste had been ordered to create the finest attire for the ladies of the house, and was doing her fastest and finest work until she ran into a snag in the plans. It appeared as though the measurements she had taken for Cornelia had experienced a rapid change for the larger in a very brief window of time. While her sister and mother praised the English diet for returning health and sanity back to their ponderous family member, Cornelia's Indian ama, who had been transported back with them, as was often the style, cast a suspicious eye on her charge. Cornelia still had the power to silence her with a look, but she did not seem to have power over her own body, as the ama's suspicions were confirmed three days later when Cornelia upchucked her entire breakfast into a porcelain washing bowl by her bedside.

  “Oh ama,” wailed Cornelia miserably, hugging her porcelain receptacle. “What did I eat?”

  “You eat nothing,” replied the ama briskly. “This happen sometime when you lay with man.”

  “You don't mean—no,” gasped Cornelia, paling even further. “What am I to do?”