Attending Physician

  The song faded into something less identifiable and Raven lifted my arms from a traditional partner dancing position to twist around the back of her neck. What that did was press my body full against her. I was tinglingly aware of my breasts covered with mere silk lace and cashmere against her chest. Her hands stroked down the sides of my ribs over the delicacy of the soft, soft cashmere and came to rest on my hips.

  “Verity, look at me,” she was unmistakable in her demand, if gentle. I complied. “Okay?” she squeezed my hips. I nodded because talking wasn’t so much available. She kept her blue eyes trained on me. “Want more, milady?”

  “Yes,” I said holding her gaze. “Please, sir.”

  Raven let out a breath of relief. She wanted more, but she was going to do this at my pace. Even if it killed her. I had a rush of gratitude mixed with admiration. Amazing control.

  I reached to tangle my hands in her hair guiding her mouth inexorably toward mine with femme intent and downright hunger. I pulled her bottom lip between my teeth and bit gently. “Yes,” I whispered against her lips. “Yes, please.” I kissed her chin. “Yes, now.” I traced her jaw with my tongue. “Yes, sir.”

  She had stood completely still and let me do what I wanted but something to do with my tongue and teeth against her jaw made her groan. The sound traveled the length of my spine and I trembled, not with fear this time, but with an ache that began to build low in my belly.

  Raven swept me into her arms, and picked me up yet again, only to lay me down on the pink sofa, then she slid over my body to lean against the back of it, and put her body over mine. She reached for the clip in my hair and released it—without asking me—I let her. “Stunning,” she said as she spread my curls around us.

  Then Raven got serious and kissed me. Kissed me like falling in love kissed me, kissed me like I want you kissed me, kissed me like she needed to kiss me to guarantee she survived kissed me.

  She pulled away after some minutes and traced the vee of the robe with her fingers, watching my eye to make sure I stayed with her. I was with her, and aching for her. I reached to pull the front of the robe open but she stopped me. “No, baby. That’s my pleasure.”

  I stopped.

  “Good girl,” she sparkled at me. “You don’t want to get caught being naughty, do you?”

  “No, no, sir, of course not.” I wondered what would constitute naughty and what that would mean.

  She kept tracing the vee of the marabou feathers until the robe loosened itself. Then she brazenly looked down at my breasts in the black lace. I said nothing but began to tremble again. She held me closer. Her fingers began to slip under the lace at my shoulders and trace slowly, ever so slowly, down toward my bosom.

  I so wanted her mouth on my nipples that they hardened without so much as a caress from her. She smiled knowingly, “Hungry, baby?”

  My femme fatale was in charge of my tongue, “Yes, milord, for you.” One large, warm surgeon’s hand cupped one breast. “Very ...,” I added.

  She questioned me with her eyes.

  “Hungry,” I clarified. “Dare I say, starving.”

  “Good, milady, because I want to take my time. “

  “You do?” I gasped as a second hand cupped the other breast.

  “Unbelievably beautiful skin, milady, so very soft.” She lowered her head and dragged her tongue along the strip of skin between my breasts, beginning to hold and squeeze them. She licked along the lace edging; first on one side, then the other as she rubbed the pads of her thumbs over my full aching nipples. “So very hard,” she said. “Both,” she agreed with herself, “soft and hard.”

  I exhaled—partially content, and partially discontent. The whole time her warm wet mouth kissed first one, then the other breast covered by the silky fabric of the nightgown, avoiding the nipples, which is where I wanted her mouth most.

  My hands remained tangled in her black curls, tugging in reaction to what her mouth was doing. I’d never had my breasts French kissed through silk and the feeling was exquisite. Hot, wet, attentive followed by the cool of the air in the room on the dampness she’d left behind.

  Chapter 36

  I finally said, “Please.”

  She met my eyes. “Please ...?” she asked.

  She was teasing me, but she was also making us conscious of what we were doing, and a surge of love rose from my heart.

  “Please, Raven,” I said again.

  “Please ... what?” she asked.

  I lifted my head to meet her eyes. “Please, sir,” I begged, “I need you to suck.”

  Triumph lit her eyes for a split second. She’d wanted to make me ask. Her hot mouth descended on my left nipple, tongue first, swirling around it, laving, tasting, until finally, she tugged the hardness into her mouth through the fabric and sucked as I’d requested. It went direct to my belly.

  Her hand pulled on the other nipple and I gasped with the pleasure of it. “Raven!”

  “Milady?” she stopped.

  “No, don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t ...?”

  “Stop. Please, it’s ... too good ... please.”

  She laughed low and deep in her chest. “As you wish,” she murmured, and reverted her attentions to my left nipple. My breath hitched and I began to breathe faster, with more need of her. She moved to take the other nipple into her mouth and kept a steady rhythm on the left one, wet and hard as could be.

  I put my arm under her neck and moaned with the sensation of it.

  After what seemed like hours, although it couldn’t have been, Raven lifted her head. “Baby, would you come for me?”

  I thought the sofa had dropped out from under me. “Like this?” I asked. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “I know,” she replied confidently. “You can.”

  She bent her head and began to suckle harder, and my womb contracted. Oh Goddess help me, I thought.

  Then she weaned her mouth away, and began to pull both nipples as if I had a mouth at both of them. “Verity, come for me now,” she demanded.

  And I did. Immediately. Intensely. Immensely.

  Raven watched my face and faithfully kept her rhythm, and I kept coming, and thought I would until she stopped. Gently, she slowed her hands until she was simply holding my breasts, and reached to kiss a panting femme. “Thank you, milady,” she spoke into my mouth.

  “Thank you, milord,” I responded barely able to catch the breath required for speech.

  “So beautiful,” she kept kissing me lightly. Then she vaulted off the sofa and carried me. “Bedtime, ma’am,” she said between kisses.

  “Best to stay on your left side for tonight I think, baby,” she said, as she placed me gently into our bed. “I’ll be right back.”

  I was sleepy and sated so I simply held still till she cradled me with her body. Then, with her arms around me and her long legs tangled in mine, I fell soundly and safely asleep.

  It’s always a sweet picture to see one’s butch suckling at one’s breast not to mention how it feels but I could never have anticipated what that image would do in my dreamtime. I wakened feeling like she’d been at it the entire night. Hot. Bothered. Turned on, and wanting. Snuggled tight and relatively certain that I sensed a hard cock against my backside.

  I shifted my hips slightly for confirmation.

  “Milady,” came a sleepy baritone over my shoulder, “you have a dead sexy ass.” Hands slipped deliberately across my belly and around my waist only to be drawn slowly down over that dead sexy bit of my anatomy. The flowing skirt of my nightie had inched up around my hips during the night and those warm hands landed palms against my inner thighs framing, but not touching, my very naked sex.

  My breath caught in my throat. My back arched without thought. My breasts swelled taut with desire. “Darling,” I exhaled.

  “Gently, sweetheart,” she said as her cock shifted to lie innocently against my most intimate self nowhere near attempting to enter me. “Breathe, baby, and rock with me. Slowly.”r />
  I snuggled my bottom closer to her, and caught the quiet rhythm of her hips. One hand grasped a breast, the other held tight to my hip. We rocked gently together in the very early morning sunshine as my desire for Raven bloomed.

  I began to breathe with sound, gentle exhales that fueled our building rhythm. It didn’t get faster but it did get more intense.

  “Easy, sweetheart,” she said directly into the wet shell of my ear where her tongue had been tracing lazy circles. “Stay with me, baby.”

  I did, but what I wanted was for her to take her pleasure this way so I shifted my hips and tightened my thigh muscles to create more friction for her, and she moaned. “Baby.”

  “Darling,” I arched my breasts into her moving hands.

  She reacted instinctively grasping the mounds of succulent flesh. Her breathing sounded harsh to my ears.

  “Come for me, Raven, please,” I coaxed her, “come for me.”

  Her cry told me I’d taken her over the edge, and I allowed myself a secret Femme Smile before I held her close as she recovered. My own orgasm notwithstanding, I was extremely satisfied as we drifted gently into sleep once again.

  I wakened the second time that morning to teeth against the nape of my neck. Biting.

  “Baby,” she was in the grip of something primal, “I ... I ....”

  “It’s fine, darling,” I murmured, “do what you have to do.”

  There is a ritual part of mating called marking, and something had sorted in her brain since we’d both had an orgasm with each other. She needed to mark me. I wondered if she knew.

  Her teeth didn’t break my skin but there would be a bruise. Furthermore, I always wore my hair up in public so someone would be bound to spot it. What she didn’t know was that she had chosen my favorite place to be marked. I don’t know why but the back of my neck is extremely sensitive and extraordinarily vulnerable.

  She kissed the spot with a hot, open mouth using her tongue to soothe the soreness that I guessed she knew she’d have left with me. From there, she continued to kiss around my neck as she rotated me to face her.

  She placed her fingers on the bruise, and attended my eyes directly. “I had to mark you, baby,” she explained.

  “I know,” I encouraged her.

  “You know what it says, right?”

  “I do, but I’d rather you said it.”

  “Mine.” Full stop. My belly had a whoosh of delight.

  “Yes,” I said.

  How I understood that in a week’s time, I couldn’t begin to tell you but I did. We had to live into the reality of the claim, but I thoroughly appreciated that she needed to claim me for her own. It was only partially due to the Butch Brigade, partially the ... incident, as we called it, and much more, she wanted me. She also wanted me to know that she would do what she needed to do to protect me because I was precious to her.

  In addition, that claiming let me know—without having to say the words—that I was indeed precious to her. It made me warm all over, and then I realized I was seeing her with two eyes, and that the swelling had diminished. I was on the mend.

  I spoke to her heart, “That pleases me, darling.”

  “Good,” she growled. “It should, wench.”

  “Oh, so I’m a wench again, sir?”

  “Any woman is a wench who wakens with a naked bottom against a butch’s morning wood.”

  I laughed. “I concede your point, sir.”

  “Such a good girl,” she lifted my chin so I met her eyes.

  “You don’t know how good I can be, milord.”

  “No, I probably don’t.” She rolled her eyes. “But you’re planning on showing me, aren’t you?”

  “As you wish, milord,” I tossed at her saucily.

  “I do, milady, oh, I do.” She got out of bed and stretched upward. “I’m starved.”

  “Well, such a lot of work, sir,” I acknowledged. “Of course you are.” I scooted to the edge of the mattress in a flutter of black silk and long white legs. “Do you know what my perhaps favorite breakfast comprises?”

  “No, ma’am,” she responded curiously, holding out my cashmere robe.

  “Follow me, good sir,” I beckoned.

  Chapter 37

  We sat together at the kitchen table, Raven with her coffee and me with my tea, eating the cold pizza I’d stashed before the boys had taken down the trash last night.

  “That’s hilarious. I thought I was the only person in the world who liked cold pizza, let alone for breakfast.”

  “I lived on it when I first moved to the City after college,” I said.

  Raven was on her second piece. I’d barely eaten half my first.

  “I think we ought to do an experiment this morning, sweetheart.”

  “What kind?”

  “How will you arrange for this emergency meeting?”

  “I thought I’d send an email.”

  “Good. I’m going for a run, baby.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the experiment?”

  “Oh,” she said rinsing her coffee mug in the sink, “I’m going out and you’ll be on your own at home.”

  “That’s an experiment?”

  “Baby, have you been alone since the incident?”

  I thought. “No.”

  “We need to be confident you’re cool here by yourself tomorrow,” she said softly.

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Jeez.” My heart sped up. “Damn.”

  “I know, baby,” she wrapped me in her arms, “so I’ll go for a thirty-minute run and then I’ll be back.”

  “No longer please,” I said, scared.

  “Promise,” she said.

  “Raven, if you have to break a promise, I’ll be okay, but I’d rather you never did.”

  “I have no intention of breaking my promise, sweetheart.”

  “I know but, you know, pages happen,” I said, referring to her breaking our first date.

  “They do,” she agreed. “I’ll only break a promise to you under duress.”

  “Good,” I moved toward the hallway. “I’ll wait to shower till you’re home in case my knees get wonky.”

  “Oh, dang,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were waiting for an entirely different reason.” A true butch lament.

  “Raven,” I said conciliatory, “we haven’t even been completely naked together.”

  “I know,” she said enthusiastically, “I was thinkin’ the shower was the perfect place!”

  I laughed. No other choice. “The first time, I’d prefer to be on dry land,” I said with asperity.

  “Yes, milady,” she hung her head.

  “Oh, you suffer so, good sir,” I teased.

  “I do,” she claimed as she tied her sneakers, and rose to kiss me. “I’ll be back, baby.”

  “Raven.” She turned. “Give me a sec,” I said.

  She waited as I went toward the kitchen returning with a dangling set of keys. “Here, darling.”

  She blinked down at the keys.

  “Yours, remember?” I said reaching to place a soft kiss on her mouth.

  “Right,” she reminded herself. “Mine.” She grasped the keys and grinned, thoroughly pleased. “Thanks, babe. Thirty minutes.” Then she was gone.

  I stood in the hallway in the exact place where I’d been hurt and began to shake as the front door slammed. “Shit,” I whispered to myself, “she was right.”

  Then I went to my private office, the room I’d had painted a tad darker than bubblegum pink to claim it as my own after Shelby left, to compose the email to my colleagues. I’d thought over what Raven had said and agreed with her. The whole team needed to know what had happened and we needed to have emergency plans. Truth was, I’d never had one, never thinking that what had happened on Friday could happen to me. This, despite the fact that I worked with some of the toughest cases in Boston.

  Focusing on the email helped, as did sending it. Any one of the supervisors of the training program was
entitled to call an emergency meeting. I called this one as mandatory. My phone pinged with Terry sending me the pictures. That made me realize how much better I had already healed, which made me feel better as well.

  - I had not mustered the courage to go into my therapy room. Instead, I brought my laptop into the living room and curled up with the Sunday Times. Raven made her thirty-minute deadline with a minute to spare. Yes, I checked.

  “Hey, baby,” she called.

  “In the living room,” I raised my voice.

  “Hi, beautiful,” she said letting her eyes roam boldly over my person.

  “Hi, yourself,” I smiled at her sweaty self. “About the shower, milady ... I didn’t mean to ....”

  “I know, darling. It’s fine,” I reassured her.

  “Good.” She sounded like she’d been worried. “How’d you do, baby?”

  “Not great. I shook for a while after you left.”

  “Did you get the email sent?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t make myself go into my therapy room,” I confessed.

  “We’ll do it together after I get out of the shower. No worries.”

  “Thanks, darling. Come kiss me.”

  “I’m sweaty.”

  “I know,” I said. “Bona fide butch.”

  “Real butches are sweaty?”

  “Sometimes, sir,” I offered her innocent eyes.

  “Oh, don’t you look at me like that if you’re gonna wear that nightgown and peignoir.”

  I batted my eyelashes then. “Like what, sir?” I asked.

  “Demon femme,” she ground out.

  “Haunting you already, darling?” I asked, raising my face for her kiss.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to have to learn to sleep all over again if you’re going to wear things like that to bed.”

  “Well, I am,” I promised, “so it’s sleep training for you, darling.”

  “I’m willing to learn, milady, I assure you, ma’am.”

  “I’m so very glad,” I whispered before I yanked on her curls to make her mouth meet mine.