by Olivia Waite
She turned suddenly to face him, palms flat on the planked wooden floor, elbows bent, head low and menacing. Droplets of water streamed through the hair at her temples while the colored netting made her skin shimmer, wraithlike and weird in the undulating radiance from the mirror. The tulle’s sequins became scales, winking treacherously in the watery light.
A jolt shook him. Had her eyes always been green or was it simply a trick of the light?
John was suddenly stretched taut as though he were tearing free of an old skin long outworn. “Don’t move,” he commanded and leapt back to his easel and the paints he’d spent so long preparing.
She disobeyed, turning slightly as he changed positions so that when he reached the easel she was still facing him. John was too enraptured to thank her and all but threw himself at the canvas.
He began with the pale colors—shoulders and arms in gleaming ivory with hints of eerie green overtones. He gave in to temptation and allowed his brush to trace the curves of her breast and even point out one delicate, dark nipple, knowing he could paint her into modesty later if she asked him to. The scale-sequins glittered, sleek and pointed, alluring to the eye but knife-edged for the unwary.
John picked up a fresh brush and loaded it with both chrome orange and Indian yellow—not so they mixed, but so they unrolled in tandem as the paint flowed onto the canvas—and traced the sinuous curls of wet hair on her brow and down the back of her neck. They hugged her arms like snakes, making her as much Medusa as nymph. He would add other layers later, glazing to make some areas darker and scumbling others lighter for highlights and contrast.
When he finally stopped for breath, a reasonable facsimile of Hecuba Jones was just emerging from the painted pond, water lapping at her waist, an alluring smile on her face and a determined light in her eyes. But the appearance of the nymph meant Hylas’ face had to change as well—James took his finest brush and made a few careful alterations. The youth was now more spellbound than shocked, wondering rather than terrified.
John glanced back at the real Hecuba just in time to see her shiver. If he hadn’t been observing her so closely for such a length of time, he’d never have caught it.
He put his brush down at once, appalled by his lack of thought. “Your patience verges on saintly, Jones,” he said, walking over to kneel beside her. “Please know that you can ask for a respite at any time.” With careful hands he removed the chilled, damp tulle from her shoulders. Her skin was cool beneath his hands and her chemise had gone nearly transparent with water from her hair. John ignored this temptation, shook the dust from the blanket on the ground and bundled her in green wool—not without a nostalgic pang. He was never going to be able to look at this blanket the same way again.
“Thank you,” said Hecuba then shivered again.
Mildly alarmed, John pulled her into his lap.
She wriggled closer and made a sound—such a sound!—in the back of her throat. It was just the sort of pleased, pleasured groan a water-veined nymph might have made when clasped by the warm-blooded arms of a living mortal man. The sound threw caution and art right out of John’s head and replaced them with memories of sweet-scented flesh and tangled limbs.
“There’s a fire downstairs,” he blurted. Hecuba’s eyes widened. “In my bedroom,” John clarified. “For you.”
Hecuba blinked—and just as John realized how gauche he’d sounded, she started to shake with helpless, wrenching laughter. “It’s a boon for humanity that you are a painter and not a poet,” she chortled.
The trembling motion of her body while she laughed proved to be the final straw for John’s perishing self-control. He plunged one hand into her still-damp hair and brushed his mouth against her cheek.
Hecuba went still. John teased his way to the hollow below her ear, flicking his tongue out occasionally to catch droplets as they passed across her skin. “It’s always water with you,” he said. “First the rain and now this.” She hummed and tilted her head to the side, offering him more. He kissed along the line of her neck and startled a gasp from her with a gentle scrape of his teeth. Meanwhile his hands spread across the width of her back, slipping beneath the blanket to rest against the steel in her spine.
“Tell me, Jones,” he murmured, “do you still mean to have me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He smiled and pulled her up. “Let me show you the way.”
Chapter 6
She retrieved her lost shirt while he extinguished all but one of the candles. It was a meager light but it guided them well enough down the main stairs. They moved softly to make certain none of the household were stirring. Her hand in his had warmed now, a bold and possessive pressure as he led her along a carpeted hallway and opened the door of his bedchamber.
He pulled the door shut with a click, extinguished the candle, walked to the hearth and stirred the waiting flames into a blaze. When he finally turned around, Hecuba was bending close to the wall to examine part of the pattern of the wallpaper, an expression of wonder on her face. The draping blanket and her leaning posture made her look like a mysterious old woman from a fairy tale, the kind who helps the virtuous and curses the cruel.
“How old were you when you did this?” she whispered.
John smiled as she scrutinized the outline of a knight-errant mounted on a white horse that his younger self had repainted with zebra stripes. “I was just turned twelve,” he said, “and I stole my sister’s paints to do it. My mother was livid but my father merely laughed and said he would find someone to give me lessons. ‘If you’re going to do the thing, you may as well do it properly,’ he said.”
Hecuba smiled at a housecat he’d turned into a tiger; the beast prowled beside a tulip that had sprouted two pink ankles to become the tumultuous upflung skirts of a tumbling lady. Her eyes briefly met John’s, warm and conspiratorial. “You do the thing very properly indeed,” she said.
She was the daughter of a painter—a genius—and with a nasty jolt John realized that he didn’t know whether she was attracted to him more for his work or for himself. He’d put so much of himself into his art that he had never really thought to make the distinction before. Not until Hecuba Jones had come along and split him in two. Now the gentle movement of her fingers over that tin-plate hero made jealousy bubble up within his heart, a slimy, tentacled monster in the deep.
But judging by how she’d stared at Hylas, he had certain aesthetic advantages, if he were brave enough to employ them.
With deliberate, unhurried hands, John unbuttoned his cuffs and pulled the charcoal- and paint-stained shirt over his head.
As he cast the garment to the floor, he noticed that he’d succeeded in diverting her from the wallpaper. Hecuba Jones had straightened to her full height again and was watching him with an avid gleam in her eyes.
John held out one hand.
“Oh no,” said Hecuba with a shake of her head. “You’ve already seen me naked. I’m going to insist that you finish disrobing before I get any nearer.”
It only took a single step for John to reach her. “Indeed?” he said, grasping the edge of the blanket and pulling her closer.
She stopped him with a hand on his chest. He savored the feel of her fingers spread out against him. “Indeed,” she said. Her voice softened. “I want to look at you. All of you.”
John took a deep breath and stepped back, but kept his hold on the blanket. Hecuba was compelled to follow him.
One more step back and John was able to sit down on the bed. Hecuba stood before him, candlelight dancing in her eyes, half-dry hair tumbling around her shoulders. He let go of the blanket and lifted one foot onto the bed, sliding the white sock down from beneath his trouser hem.
Hecuba licked her lips and John had to catch his breath. From just removing a shirt and a sock! What would happen once every scrap of cloth was gone between them?
John removed the other sock and put his feet back on the floor. The carpet felt impossibly soft against his bare soles.
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br /> He’d had women tease him this way before but he’d never taken such time with the removal of his own garb. He was far more comfortable observing than being observed—but somehow the strangeness now was exhilarating. Beneath her gaze, the hair on his naked skin prickled with awareness. He watched her watching him and desire curled low and hot in his belly.
John put his hands to the fall of his trousers, undoing them in as leisurely a manner as he could stand. He rose as he pushed them down his hips. They rustled and fell to the floor along with his smallclothes, and finally he stood in all his glory before the scrutiny of Hecuba Jones. The crackle of the fire in the grate made a mockery of how cool the air felt, an invisible caress on his overheated skin and jutting cock.
She took her time looking him up and down before raising her eyes to meet his again. “That was a very accurate self-portrait upstairs,” Hecuba murmured.
John bowed his head at the double compliment, more embarrassed to be blushing than to be naked.
Hecuba slipped the blanket from her shoulders and it fell to the floor. She removed nothing else, merely stepped closer and—finally—began to touch him.
It was everything he’d wanted and more, her fingers like tongues of flame against his flesh. She smoothed her palms along lines of muscle and dragged her fingertips over his nipples, which hardened at once for her. It required every ounce of John’s restraint to keep still and not reach out to touch her in return, but he bit his tongue and reminded himself that she was untried and it was best to let her take things at whatever speed she willed. Later, he hoped, there would be nights when she would allow him to do the same. Tonight he was entirely hers.
She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to the base of his neck.
It was precisely the same kiss that had once made him beg her to wait. It had the opposite effect now. John felt as though every vein in his body lit up, drawing heat from her mouth like signal fires along a series of mountain peaks. His cock, already hard, stiffened nearly to the point of pain—and still his hands remained at his sides, though now they shook with the effort of holding back.
One of Hecuba’s hands trailed down his hip, over bone and tendon, to the sensitive skin of his thigh. She lingered there, either teasing or timid—John didn’t much care which—until a definitive motion brought her hand into contact with his shaft.
John’s eyes twisted shut and he shivered.
At first she merely caressed him with the same slow tempo she’d used on every other part of him. But then her hand closed tight and hot around him, and a single bold stroke tore a groan from his throat.
“You’re far more patient than I had anticipated,” said Hecuba.
John opened his eyes to the mind-melting sight of Hecuba Jones with his cock in her hand and an impudent grin on her face.
He let out such a filthy curse that even Hecuba gasped, a shocked rush of air that curled over his lips as he claimed her mouth. She slid her tongue against his as he pulled her tight against him, the cloth of her trousers a delicious friction against his aching cock. She twined her arms around his waist and he fisted his hands in her hair as the kiss turned dark, almost feral—the wet curl of tongues, the velvet yield of lips, the bright, sharp notes of teeth.
Then Hecuba Jones took his lower lip between her teeth and bit down—not hard, but not gently either.
One moment they were standing, straining together. The next they were tangled in the bedclothes, sprawled at an angle across the expanse of the bed, still entwined, still kissing. John had no idea how they’d gotten there. He had a vague memory that he had thrown her down and himself along with her. There was no time now to sort out what had happened, because his fingers were already slipping beneath the hem of that provocative chemise and pulling it up to bare her breasts. He left the linen gathered around her shoulders, bent his head and sucked one sweet nipple into his mouth.
Hecuba moaned and closed her eyes even as her hands went to work on the buttons of her trousers. John moved to her other nipple, cupping her breast in the heat of his palm and blowing gently across the wetness left by his mouth.
Hecuba opened her eyes when she failed to open her trousers quickly enough. “Damn buttons,” she muttered, still working to undo them. John laughed and put his hands down to help. Together, gracelessly, they wrestled the bulky garment down to her ankles and away. Her pantalets, however, were still tied around her waist.
Hecuba was left in nothing but white linen and black stockings.
John froze at this vision. Not of innocence—her red hair was too wild, her breasts still naked, her stockings black as night. But there was some quality in her that insisted on shining through and amplifying the effect of whatever she happened to be wearing. Or not wearing. It was that same quality that drew him to try to replicate her likeness on the page over and over again, the same thing that he sensed would constantly bewitch him, whether five or fifty or a hundred years went by.
In his bed, she lounged on her elbows like a goddess of classical antiquity, a creature of light and flame and shadow all at once. Purely and completely herself.
When he was still wordless and wondering, she put a hand to his cheek. “Second thoughts?” she asked, not quite hiding her anxiety.
It was a fair question and one he’d answered differently two nights earlier. Everything had changed since then. He turned and pressed a kiss to her palm, reveling in the gentle pressure of her hand.
Hecuba smiled, relaxed and stroked her thumb against his lips. He tilted his head and bit the end of her thumb. She sucked in a harsh breath and her eyes went dark.
John leaned down to kiss her again, his body bearing hers down into the mattress. White linen shifted against his burning skin like gossamer, an incitement to lust rather than a barrier. Hecuba lifted one leg and wrapped it around his hip. John took advantage of the motion and settled the shaft of his cock against her cleft, blazingly aware of her heat even through the linen. He rocked himself against her, first slowly and then with more force as she writhed and arched beneath him.
Finally it was too much for him. He raised himself away from her, though his senses screamed at the loss, then tugged at the ties to her pantalets.
She took his meaning at once and pulled the rumpled chemise off over her head while he untied the strings and slid the pantalets down from her hips. Hecuba was left wearing nothing but a pair of knee-high black stockings—with matching garters—that only made the rest of her look more profoundly naked by comparison.
John leaned on one elbow looking down at her, torn between the need to take her and the urge to stare. Though he’d had other lovers before—some of them in this very bed—John knew that there was something about this night that was going to mark him even as it marked her. It wasn’t simply her first time—it was their first time.
She quirked an eyebrow at him and bent one knee. John’s mouth went dry. “Does it always take so long to get oneself deflowered?” she asked pointedly.
John laughed. “If you’re lucky,” he replied, but his smile faded into something more tender. He traced a hand down her side, relishing the curve of her waist, the softness of her. “It’s not a thing that happens every day, Jones.”
“I’m still wearing my stockings.” She reached out.
He stopped her with a hand on her wrist. “Leave them,” he said. She looked at him, flushing, while he savored the perfect curves of her silk-clad calves.
He could have stayed that way forever, just looking, but Hecuba had other plans. She framed his face with her hands and kissed him—a sweet, soft kiss that shook him down to his bones.
He stole one hand between her legs and into the springy red curls there. She was already wet—oh God, his cock throbbed at that—but he wanted her more than ready, so he began sliding one thick finger along the cleft of her lower lips, a light rasping friction along her clitoris.
Hecuba spread her legs a little wider and hummed low in her throat, her eyes heavy lidded and glittering in the firelight.
John skimmed his lips over her shoulder as he played with her, attuned to even the tiniest intake of her breath. After a little while he leaned over and whispered, “I’m going to use one finger to start.”
Eyes closed, Hecuba nodded.
John turned his hand and slowly slid his middle finger into the eager heat of her. Hecuba let out a breathy cry that made him shake, but he pushed his own arousal aside and kept his focus on her.
He began to thrust.
“Oh God.” Hecuba groaned. By the third stroke she was already arching her hips up from the bed so John took the hint and increased his pace. She welcomed this, inner walls clasping around him, a flush spreading over her skin. Her breath came faster and faster and she began to tremble. John reached up with his thumb and began stroking her clitoris in time with the movements of his finger.
Hecuba came, one hand fisted in the bedclothes, the other clasped tight against her mouth to muffle her cries. John nearly spent himself at the sight.
And then...a tear slipped down her cheek.
John went dizzy with shock. He forgot his pleasure in her pleasure and his own still-unsatisfied desire. His finger slipped free of her body and he pulled her into his arms. “What’s wrong?” he whispered as she wrapped her arms around him and held tight.
“I couldn’t hold back,” she said, the dark weight of regret in her voice.
John rubbed soothing circles between her shoulder blades. “Oh, Jones,” he sighed, relief and realization mingled. “You don’t have to hold back.”
“I didn’t want it to be over,” she continued, her voice muffled against his chest.
“It isn’t over,” John said. “Far from it.” She pulled her head away to stare up at him and he couldn’t help the knowing smile that lifted his lips. “Jones,” he said, “don’t you know you can do it again?”
She looked startled—then intrigued. “Prove it,” she demanded.