by Kitty French
After a while, Lucien switched the book into his other hand and slid his arm beneath the blanket to palm her breast, closing his fingertips over her nipple and playing with it slowly without missing a beat of the story.
Sophie’s thoughts were wandering blissfully. ‘Heathcliff’s life didn’t start until he found Cathy,' she reflected poetically. 'His life was pale. Ethereal and unsubstantial, like a dream of mist on the moors until she was his.’
She hadn’t realised she spoke it aloud, lost as she was in the classical beauty of the story coupled with the sexual kick of Lucien touching her beneath the throw, until he stopped reading to glance down at her.
‘I seem to have a lot in common with poor fucking Heathcliff.’
Sophie couldn’t help laughing at the parallel Lucien had drawn in his own succinct way.
In many ways she supposed he was right. Their own story shared some of the characteristics of the famous love story in his hands. Lucien had been an isolated man, someone who kept his own counsel and lived life by his own skewed set of rules. Being with Sophie had changed him in many aspects, but not so much that he wasn’t still the unpredictable, proud man who could command a room just by being in it. And the remote, stormy setting of the Yorkshire moors… well it certainly had isolation, exposure and the wildest of beauties in common with this part of Norway.
Lucien’s large hand flattened out over the bump of her ribcage then stroked lower over the curve of her stomach, warm and assured.
'My life was so empty before you,’ he whispered, then slipped his hand over her mound and cupped her between the legs, firm and territorial. It was an action that said “mine”. Mine in every last fucking way.
'I love the heat of you in my hand like this.' He rocked his hand, the heel of his palm insistent and deliberate over her freshly waxed mound.
‘Open your legs for me, Sophie.’
She moved her head in his lap as she let her legs fall open, and the silken slide of her hair against the rough denim of his jeans sent a shiver down her spine, making her grind the back of her head against him to tease him. Lucien’s denim encased cock pressed against the side of her cheek. She blew out a breath against his stomach and felt his cock jump in response.
‘It seems to me,’ she slid down his zipper with her teeth, ‘That all being equal, you should spent the next twenty-four hours naked too.’
He freed himself from his clothes, and settled back against the sofa, his fully erect cock standing proud.
‘Trying to call the shots, Sophie?’
Air force blue eyes stared into hers. In this mood, Lucien was lethal. Deliciously lethal.
‘Don’t you think it could be distracting to have me fucking hard and ready for you all of the time?’
‘I’d climb you like a tree,’ she said, then started to laugh under her breath. ‘Like a Christmas tree.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘I’m not sure Cathy would have dared be so suggestive to Heathcliff.’
Sophie palmed the thick base of his cock.
‘I don’t think I’d have dared before you, either.’
Something close to pride warmed his gaze as he shifted a little, tilting his hips as her fingers closed around his shaft.
‘Remind me to punish you later for stepping out of line.’
She smiled, and then gasped and arched as he fucked two fingers deep into her.
‘What will you do?’ she said, when she regained the power of speech.
He watched her wank him slowly, her breath warm over his balls. Between her legs, he splayed her lips wide and gave her clitoris his attention, fast, purposeful flicks with his middle finger that pulled her close to orgasm in a few heartbeats.
‘I buried the glass dildo in the snow just outside the bedroom window,’ he said, placing the book down to give their real-life passion his undivided attention now. ‘It’s freezing out there, that thing’s going to be iced to the core.’
He stilled his finger from a flick to a slow rub.
‘Imagine it here, Sophie, ice cold and oh so fucking hard against your clit. Like being fucked with a cock carved from the ice.’
His free hand closed around hers on his shaft, masturbating them both at the same time. He moved her hand faster, matching the sudden thrusts of his fingers into her to the same tempo.
His words conjured images in Sophie’s fevered mind, thoughts of fur-clad Vikings of the past, of being taken in torch-lit caverns by huge, towering lovers, men not unlike the hot-eyed man fucking her with his fingers right now.
She snaked her tongue out and licked her way up the length of his swollen cock to close her mouth over the head, and he moved his hand from over hers to stroke her hair, settling as a pleasurable pressure on the back of her neck. It was kind of lazy hot sex, and kind of crazy hot sex, lying on his lap and taking his cock into her mouth as he watched her and touched her just as intimately right back.
After a year together, Lucien and Sophie connected on every level whenever they made love, and their sex had spanned the spectrum from tear-inducingly tender to borderline illegal. That was the beautiful thing about trust. When you have it, really have it, there’s no such thing as wrong, or too much, or too illicit. They both knew that.
Lucien rubbed the back of Sophie’s neck, somewhere between a massage and a clamp, letting her know that he appreciated the way her lips felt as they slid up and down the fullness of his shaft. His low moan told her that he liked the way she circled the base of his cock with her fingers, and the way she cupped his balls when the tip of his cock hit the back of her throat. His fingers knotted in the hair at the nape of her neck, pulling it taut, something else to add to the sensory overload he’d already created between her legs.
She was soaked; she could feel his fingers sliding in her slickness, wet over her clitoris, warm and oiled as they pushed inside her. He filled her, then tipped her head back by her hair and locked eyes with her as he jammed his fingers even deeper than she thought he could go, making her moan with the shock and the pleasure. His thumb covered her clit as his little finger pressed between the cheeks of her ass, the wide span of his hand granting him access to all areas in the best kinds of way.
Two could play at that game. Still watching his face, Sophie took him deep inside her mouth, stroking her free hand down between his spread thighs to follow the crease of his firm ass. It was mutually assured destruction of their thinly held control, and they both slid to a point seconds away from orgasm.
‘I wish my mouth was between your legs right now,’ he ground out, his face almost pained by the amount of pleasure Sophie was giving him. ‘Christ, I want to suck on your sweet, sexy clit,’ he added, even as his hips started to jerk his orgasm from him. ‘To feel you come in my mouth, and oh fuck …’ he lost his coherent thread, sidetracked by the glory and release of coming hard and fast inside Sophie’s mouth.
She held her own pleasure back to enjoy the beauty of his, and in reward he flipped her around and hauled her urgently up his chest, her spread legs around his shoulders as he dipped his face between her thighs and slammed his mouth down over her sex. Sophie lay back along his body, her head on his thighs, her palms flat against her hot cheeks as Lucien sucked and licked her clitoris, his fingers knuckle deep inside her, massaging her g-spot, encouraging her with low spoken intimacies against her flesh. He touched her everywhere, holding her wide and captive until she screamed out his name and bucked against his face. Still he didn’t stop. He clamped her against his mouth, not letting her escape as every last one of the eight thousand nerve endings in her clit performed a victory dance on his tongue and hot, sudden tears of release slipped between her fingers as she covered her face.
He kissed her then. Kissed her thighs, her lips, her clitoris, barely there, tender, helping her come back down slowly rather than with a bump. His fingers traced her nipples, holding her breasts, loving her leisurely, quietly, and completely. When she opened her eyes she found him watching her, with a small, int
imate smile on his lips.
‘Okay?’ he asked, smooching her clit, the lightest trace of his tongue as his fingertips still stroked her. She knew from experience of him that he could make her come again like this, if he played her slowly, kissed her lightly, licked her gently. She nodded, catching her breath as he laid his head against her thigh and stretched out to cover her breasts with his warm hands.
She laid her hands over his bigger ones, their laced fingers brushing her stiffened nipples.
Lucien closed his eyes, and she caught her breath. In that second it didn’t feel like she was his naked Christmas angel. On the contrary. He was hers.
She watched his mouth as he tenderly kissed her, with no rush, no haste, no expectation. Just a caress, an intimate invitation to an ovation if she wanted, and Sophie found that she did. Very, very much.
He was a man who knew instinctively and expertly how to play this game. Sex was his speciality, and he was all the more accomplished because he loved her so deeply and knew her body so well.
She let him lead her closer again, like slow dancing late at night, his eyes still closed as he traced patterns over her clit with the very tip of his tongue. He was sensual, where before he’d been sexual. He was gentle, where before he’d had been animal. And he loved, where before he’d been lustful.
Having a man who could flip between such beautiful extremes left Sophie reeling. Her body trembled for him and he held her safe, his open mouthed French kisses between her legs so deeply intimate and moving that she cried involuntary tears again as she came, for his tenderness, for the way this big, confident man had let her in and made her his world.
Afterwards he righted her in his lap and gathered her close, her arms wrapped around his neck as he cradled her, one arm around her back, the other over her bent knees. He was her strength, but she was his too, and as he mouthed her hair and murmured incoherent words of love, they closed their eyes and fell into a light, satisfied sleep.
Chapter Three
Sophie opened her eyes a little while later, drinking in the peace of the quiet cabin. It was then that she made a decision.
They needed a proper tree.
The artistic twig arrangement supplied by the interior designer was all well and good, but what they really needed was a big, freshly scented Christmas tree to decorate and bask in the festive glow of.
During the last couple of years of her marriage to Dan, Sophie had unboxed the plastic Christmas tree he’d bought at a car boot sale in London and slotted all the pieces together in the corner of the living room. Thinking back over it now, it had been a pretty sorry excuse for the real thing, a fair and forlorn reflection of the marriage and the home it represented. Compared to the life she now led, its energy, beauty and love, and the magical alpine vista outside the snow dusted window, the handful of Christmases she’d spent with her ex-husband seemed pedestrian, their spartan decorations portents of the disaster that lay ahead. Dan’s adultery had shattered her heart like a glass bauble falling onto a flagstone floor, but Lucien had pieced it back together and made her happier than she’d ever imagined possible. Home now was wherever Lucien was, city or country, Britain or abroad… and now here, back where he had grown up, in Norway.
Thoughts of the past reminded her of the unopened brown envelope she’d pushed into her huge shoulder bag when they’d visited her parents the weekend before. It had been waiting for her on the telephone table in their neat-as-a-pin hallway, a few forlorn pieces of mail forwarded by the new owners of her old house, a strange overlap between her old life and her new one. She wished the letters and circulars would stop coming, with their flashbacks to a past she had left behind, though she knew her careful, thoughtful parents would pass them on for as long as they continued to arrive. It was only ever junk mail and perhaps the odd postcard from someone who hadn’t heard the news, but all the same it was a final, frail thread of connection that needed to blow away on the wind. Still, she would open the envelope dutifully and check through the contents, just in case. Maybe this time there would be a Christmas card from a long-lost friend, she thought hopefully, to give a tedious task an unexpectedly festive glow. Anything seemed possible here in the magical, snowy shadow of the Lyngen Alps.
‘I have something for you,’ Lucien said, now stirring beside her.
‘I didn’t realise you were awake,’ she said, lifting her head and then resting her chin on his chest to look at him.
He leaned back over the arm of the sofa and picked up a white envelope from the side table.
‘Here,’ he said, placing it on his chest so it touched her chin. ‘It’s yours.’
Interest piqued, Sophie sat up, pulling the fur throw up beneath her armpits. She expected him to protest, but instead he just watched her steadily, his gaze moving from her face to the envelope and then back to study her features again. Reaching out, he traced his index finger down the bridge of her nose, then moved his thumb over her lips, smiling softly at her.
‘Open it, Princess.’
Sophie laughed, shaking her head as she slid her thumb into the seam of the envelope. Pausing, she caught Lucien’s eye again and kissed the still unopened seal, making him laugh and shake his head too. Their relationship had started with a lipstick kiss on the envelope of her job application, a fact he’d never let her forget. It had been a single and uncharacteristically impulsive act that would have had any professional careers advisor turning to the gin. That kiss had secured her an interview, and that interview, however scandalously unorthodox it had been, had changed the course of both of their lives forever.
‘Do I have to open it for you?’ he asked drily, and she shook her head and pulled up the flap of the envelope to peep inside. From what she could see, there was a letter and as she tipped the envelope up, a small golden key tumbled into her palm.
Turning it over, she looked at it and then up at Lucien.
‘The key to the front door,’ he said, nodding towards the broad cabin door in the hallway. ‘I want you to have this place.’
Sophie studied the solid little key. They’d talked about the cabin on and off over the course of the year, mostly because he’d asked her to take control of the designers to reinvent his childhood holiday home into a place fit for the man he’d become to inhabit. The memories he’d shared of the cabin had been relatively brief, but she knew enough to recognise that sentimental attachment had been the driving force behind the renovation.
‘But this place… Lucien, it’s special. It belongs in your family.’
He folded her fingers over the key and then covered her hand with his own.
‘That’s why I’m giving it to you.’
And there he went again, the guy who claimed to not believe in romance knocking her sideways with a few heartfelt, uncensored words. Family. She couldn’t even begin to follow that thought through. Instead, she turned her face and kissed him, long and deep, trying to convey all that she felt for him and about this gift, because she really wasn’t equal to finding the words. He responded tenderly, squeezing her hand with the key pressed into it as their mouths met.
Drawing back, Sophie swallowed, clearing her throat of the hovering tearfulness. How many times was he planning on making her cry today?
‘Well, if it’s really to be mine, then there’s something missing,’ she said. ‘Any chance you could throw your snow boots on and go and chop us down a Christmas tree?’
Sophie fashioned herself a sarong from a crisp white bed sheet she found in the bedroom cupboard, once Lucien had wrapped himself up and braved the elements in search of the perfect Christmas tree. Sophie had tried to give him ‘so high and so wide’ instructions, gesturing with her hands until he’d rolled his eyes and told her to leave it to him.
Standing at the window, she watched him emerge from the shed a few paces from the cabin with a large, heavy torch in one hand and a lethal-looking axe in the other. His huge boots left tracks in the deep, pristine snow, and a thrill of excitement rippled down Sophie’s spine at
the idea of him swinging that axe. If only it were summer and she could go outside and watch him… in her mind he was shirtless, a gleam of sweat covering his broad, golden shoulders… she gave herself a little shake and then turned from the window to consider where to put the tree.
Her gaze fell on the key, now gleaming in the firelight on the arm of the sofa, and the letter that accompanied it. Perching on the sofa, she pulled it from the envelope and began to read.
Dear Mr Knight,
Please find enclosed the key to Sophie's cabin, I hope the finished project is as she had envisioned it.
Any original personal items from the cabin have been stored in the wooden trunk in the living room.
Best wishes for the season, may I take this opportunity to once more thank you for your business and wish you and your family a healthy and prosperous new year.
Yours sincerely,
Roberta Delaney,
Delaney Associates
Sophie read the brief letter again thoughtfully and then slipped it back inside the envelope. It was obvious from the letter that it had been his intention to give her the cabin all along rather than an afterthought. Walking slowly from room to room, she touched her fingers lightly over the beautiful fitments, getting to know it, starting to love it. It wasn't huge; just two bedrooms, but every space had been exquisitely finished, all of the furniture pieces hand-selected to be simple, understated and opulent, in keeping with Lucien’s excellent taste.
Back in the living room, she eyed the space critically and concluded that the best place for the tree would be in the corner currently inhabited by a large wooden chest. Tugging experimentally on the rope handle, Sophie soon realised that the chest wasn’t going to budge, at least not unless its contents were removed to make it lighter. Lifting the lid, she gazed inside, one hand on her hip, chewing on her bottom lip. Four boxes, all neatly labelled. Books and paperwork. Ornaments and knick-knacks. Christmas decorations. Personal effects.