Still he pressed in deeper and deeper. She urgently tried to wriggle up into the curve of his body, but she was trapped and only able to follow where he was leading. The sensation rendered her even more wild with need.
The torrential outpouring of desire was even more remarkable than their previous joining. She was certain if he hadn’t covered her mouth with his own she would have screamed like a wild thing.
The ecstasy rolled through her, wave after wave of rapture, and still he kept moving. Finally she grabbed both his buttocks and pushed down hard, ramming her hips upwards with all her might.
They both blazed together, sparks flaring ever higher, their need white hot as they flailed helplessly in the tide of tempestuous bliss. A groan was torn from his lips as he surrounded her, his arms wrapped around her so tightly, Gabrielle was sure he would never let her go.
“Oh, thank you,” she wept, when she could speak at last.
“Thank you. I’ve never— You’re so beautiful,” he panted, smoothing the damp auburn tendrils back from her brow.
“So are you," she said, stroking back his own ebony locks in turn. "I love you, Simon.”
“I know, I can feel it. Your heart beating, embracing me, making me one with you forever. I love you too, Gabrielle, oh, how I love you.” He blew out a shaky breath and laughed. He kissed her more gently now, careful not to rasp her with his bristing beard.
When he broke it off some time later, he sighed. “I must be crushing you.”
“No, you’re fine. Please stay.”
“I daren’t. I’m going to get worse soon,” he warned, withdrawing from her gently and carefully with one final loving kiss.
She nearly cried out in frustration as they separated. For it was as though she could never be truly whole again without the indescribable melding into one which only her beloved could give.
“Can you do something for me, darling?” he asked softly.
“Anything,” Gabrielle replied.
“Roll over so I can kiss your back?”
“Certainly.”
She moved to her belly on the narrow cot and then his hands were upon her, kneading all her most sensitive flesh like a master baker. Her already limp limbs ceased to work at all. His beard and mouth stroking down her spine tautened her nipples and dewed her thighs. He licked down her back and kissed each ivory globe worshipfully. Sitting back on his heels he raised her hips slightly. With a gasp from them both he was inside her.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I need you so. Want to thrill you.” His hand had moved from her bottom up to one breast and the other slid around to her velvet tracery.
She lay prostrate, powerless to move, or even touch him fully. Now he set up a mind-shattering rhythm which had her biting the pillow to keep from crying out.
“Simon! Please, oh please,” she sobbed.
“What is it, love?” he asked in alarm.
“No, don’t stop, just kiss me, please!”
He scooped her tightly to his groin and turned them onto their sides, the better to tease her nipples and whorl as he spread her legs. She turned her head around as he twined his neck with hers, and their lips met at last. She panted her passion into his mouth, his name like a prayer and benediction as he filled her over and over again inexorably.
One last arching of her hips drove him too deeply to resist her any longer, and they saw a comet blaze across the indigo darkness and explode into a million stars.
He was almost weeping as he pulled her so tightly to him that she was sure there was no part of their bodies that didn’t touch. He kissed her neck and shoulders and nibbled her nape with his warm open mouth until her skin shimmered with desire.
“What is it, darling?” she asked softly, as she heard him try to choke back a sob.
“I never imagined, never knew such joy could exist. Loving and being loved. And it’s not just physical. It’s like being reunited with something I thought I’d lost. Something that had been taken from me. Amputated even. Severed.
“I wasn’t whole, I was fragmented. Just little scattered pieces. Now you’ve integrated me back into some semblance of a human being. And back into the world of the living.”
“Not yet, but soon, I promise,” she declared.
She turned over to face him and caressed his damp cheeks. “I don’t care who they say you are or what they claim you’ve done. I love you, Simon, and I’m never going to leave you. Never going to let you go, no matter what.”
He kissed her softly on both eyelids. “I know you say that now, my treasure, but circumstances may alter radically, for one or the other of us. It’s good of you to offer, but we may be dragged or driven apart. They will come. I can sense it. We have some time remaining. But they will come for me, and will probably kill us both if they ever find you here.”
"What harm can a mere prostitute do to them if they're as powerful as you say they are?"
He heaved a huge sigh. “The mere hint of being found out will be enough. But we do have some time. So if my life is going to end soon, selfish though it is, I’d like to make the most of the time we have left.” He showered her with kisses and she sighed happily.
“It’s all wonderful. I adore you. But is there, well, is there anything you can teach me about what pleases you?”
He flashed her a a wide grin. “There are a couple of things a complete innocent like you might not be aware of which I shall be happy to teach you one day if I ever find my interest flagging or need variety. But for the moment, I think I’ll just lie back and let you discover it all for yourself.”
He was as good as his word, folding his arms behind his head and stretching his magnificent bareness full-length upon the bed.
Gabrielle smiled back. “That sounds like fun. Only I’m giving you fair warning right now. Everyone at the clinic complains that I’m far too curious about human anatomy.”
Simon chuckled happily. “There’s nothing like a bit of hands-on experience to satisfy yours.”
“And me yours, I hope.”
“Oh, certainement.”
She ran her hands down the full length of him, and he encouraged her happily. “Oh, lovely. Mmm, just there, and if you feel that, oh, my lovely Gabrielle...”
Chapter Fifteen
But the cold light of day intruded all too soon, and with it a new set of problems. Gabrielle managed to hide when the food was shoved through the hatch in the door at eight that morning, and they availed themselves happily of the supplies of soap and warm water Clarissa had brought.
But Simon started to feel the affects of the withdrawal all too soon, and she had to coax him like a small child to consume the porridge and beef tea her friend had brought while it was still warm. Then she sluiced them both down over the open drain, soaped them, and rinsed.
“Bend over and I’ll do your hair.”
“I’m a bit dizzy,” he complained.
She sat him on the edge of the bed with his head between his knees over the small basin, and accomplished the task quickly.
She dried him with a towel and helped him put on a clean shirt, then changed into the fresh and slightly more respectable and less tight gown she had been given by Clarissa. She put an apron over her prostitute's garb to cover her bosom, and set about cleaning the floor and walls as best she could until the room was as sweet smelling as could be, while he slumbered on the cot.
They spent a quiet day with Simon seeming very tired. While he explained it away as being the result of male exertions, which he told her often led to sleep whether the man willed it or no, she could see he was worried about something.
“It’s just, well, even as I adore having you here, I can’t help thinking how much longer we have. I just want to hold you like this,” he said, drawing her against his body in the cot and wrapping himself around her like a quilt.
“You can do more than just hold me,” she said with a smile, caressing his shoulder.
“It’s not fair. You’ve not said, but you must be sore after
your first night moving from girlhood to womanhood. I’m not a small man, and you’re a tiny delicate blossom.”
She waved his worries away with one hand. “It’s nothing, a mere twinge to two. I’m fine.”
“Can you let us sleep for a time? There’s a hammering in my head at the moment, and I don’t want a seizure.”
She cradled his head against her breast and closed her eyes, drifting off to a warm tropical island where they were both naked on the sand and made love in the tides...
She awakened drowsily some time later as she heard footsteps, and evaded the orderly coming for the tray of food, which they had washed down the drain, by pressing herself into the far corner. There was no sign of Spence, and a new batch of girls came to relieve Angela, tapping their signal on the door as they went past to let Gabrielle know that all was still well.
Clarissa came again shortly after six in the evening, bearing more fresh supplies.
“Thanks, Clarissa, you’re an angel,” she said through the hole in the brickwork.
“Hmph. Don’t know nuttin’ ‘bout it. But glad to help you, lass. How is he?”
“It’s starting,” she said simply.
“Well, you hang on. And I got to the locksmith to make the copy of the key just like you asked. Angela's slipped them back in his pockets, with him none the wiser. So any time you want out of there you tell me. There’s no shame in admitting you’re not up to it, or that you need help.”
“I love him. I’m staying until the bitter end. How’s Lucinda?”
“Not too bad today. I think she seems better, and is responding to my voice. She’s looking around. She might even be looking for you. She can hear your voice anyroad.”
“Do you really think so?” Gabrielle asked hopefully. "She’s been so still since the assault.”
“These things take time. I don’t know what that husband of hers did to her b ut—”
“Deceived her like our brother Chauncey did, at the very least. She was always such a lovely, affectionate little thing. Despite her being the eldest, I was always protecting her. It must have broken her heart to discover he only wanted her for her money.”
“If she’s anything like you, the man is a damned fool,” Simon muttered from the bed.
Gabrielle started and smiled at the compliment. “Simon needs me.”
“Fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Clarissa said.
Gabrielle gathered up the supplies and moved over to Simon’s side. She alternated hot and cold compresses until the water cooled and the ice melted. He had more cold beef tea and struggled to keep it down, and began to sweat and shiver.
Gabrielle put blanket after blanket over him, and changed his sopping shirt three times.
Finally he said, "J-j-j-ust leave it. After all, darling, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.“
“And am always glad to see,” she said with a long sultry look despite her worry. “You’re magnificent. All over.” She hung up the shirt on a makeshift line of knitting wool stretched between two metal brackets on the wall, then moved over to look at him more closely.
He took her hand and kissed it, then laid it on his straining flesh under the covers. “Every touch from you is sheer heaven amid this hell.”
“I’m glad.” Her desire and longing to make him happy emboldened her. Despite his feeble protest, her hand slipped under the blankets, and her head soon followed.
It was a little more complicated to deal with his response than he with hers, she realised, but once she relaxed and he stopped struggling to pull her head up, the magic flooded through them and he fell into a profound slumber which mercifully lasted several hours.
While he slept, she organised the tiny cell as best she could. She hung another line from one corner of the door to the far corner of the room, and threw a spare sheet over it, curtaining off the drain. She then put the chamberpot behind it.
She set a second basin and pitcher of water at the ready, and all of the medicines which her friend Eswara the healer had suggested. Then she sat down to read.
She was just congratulating herself on having got through the first day without too much turmoil when Simon began to thrash about, shouting in both English and French.
The few words she could understand amid the babble told her he was seeing dead comrades, people blown to shreds by the war. Then there were garbled words and phrases about his family, which she did her best to try to follow, eager for any clues that would help her solve the mystery of his identity. He spoke mostly of roses and numbers, and the beauty of the places they had lived.
He spoke of England, Dorset so far as she could tell, the Undercliff near at Lyme Regis that she recalled so well from when she had been growing up.
Once again, she wondered at his identity as he raved. He was too old to be a friend of her brother's, too young to be a friend of her father's. He had to be an older generation of Rakehell, but the thought of them allowing any friend of theirs to get into such a horrendous state was unthinkable.
Which meant there could only be two explanations for it. One was that he had done something so dreadful, that even those most compassionate and powerful of men had abandoned him to his fate.
Or the second, much more likely possibility, that they had no idea. That the Rakehells didn't even know he was still alive….
She bathed his brow, and determined that she would find out the truth, and bring him back to his old life, if it was the last thing she ever did. Randall would help her, she was sure. He was an earl, after all. And his elder brother Michael a war hero, and a most determined man. He would never let a fellow veteran suffer so cruelly.
At last Gabrielle got Simon awake and calm only, but no sooner had she done so than he began retching violently into the basin, which he nearly filled, he was so ill.
By the time Clarissa came with more food and hot water at six the next morning, he was reasonably calm but absolutely exhausted. The night was a sad contrast to the romantic and loving previous one, but Gabrielle had tried to stay positive throughout, keeping him clean and tidy as best she could, reading to him, even getting him to try a game of draughts during one of his more settled moments.
They sat side by side on the bed, and played from left to right and back again, savoring every minute of their intimate contact.
He had to admit he enjoyed the company despite being rather ashamed of having become so ill.
Gabrielle waved away his sheepish apologies. “The marriage vows don’t state in sickness and in health for nothing. You have no reason to be sorry. This is your illness, not you. Please don’t worry what I think. You were turned into an opium addict through no fault of your own. I admire your choice in trying to combat the addiction.”
“I only wish I could do something for you.”
She smiled at him encouragingly. “I love the way you touch me. Just hold my hand or stroke my shoulder. That’s thanks enough.”
“You have no idea how hard it was alone,” he said quietly at another point during the second day.
She shook her head. “I don’t even want to think about it. Comfortless and alone, starving, with no water, it must have been a nightmare.”
He nestled against her more closely, as if he wished for every inch of their bodies to touch. “It was. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, or even what my own name was. All I knew was I shouldn’t touch the food. But I would just get so weak and hungry.
"I have to confess, I really did try to starve myself at one point. I just wanted to end it. But I always gave in. It was tempting to not simply eat the whole plate and kill myself that way. But I just kept hoping and praying. I was determined to see my brothers one day. Then they told me, one by one, that they were gone, and I swore I would get out of here one day, if only for revenge.”
"And now? Do you still want to kill yourself the way you did that first night we met, when you took the laudanum bottle from me?"
He looked at her with such heat that she blushed. "No, defini
tely not. I have so much to live for now, it's like I've been given a reprieve, a chance of redemption. Now I want to get out of here to be the man who loves you above all else night and day. You're very alone in the world too, my love. I want to be your hero in every sense. I want to take your cares away, Gabrielle, and see you live a life with your sister which is filled with nothing but joy."
She snuggled against him with a winsome smile. "Amen to that."
She remained silent for a time, and he continued on as they played, “I always did have a good memory. I could see things in my head. Where I had last left my book, the page of it once I’d read it. I read very fast too, and could recall it all.”
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