Page 58 of My Darling Mr. Darling
A fine sheen of sweat had broken out upon his skin—or perhaps it was simply a spray of mist from the summer storm breaking outside the window. It cooled the fires of his lust just enough to allow him to truly appreciate what he had at hand—his hedonistic wife stretched out like an offering upon an altar, at the mercy of her own desire. He rubbed his cheek against the inside of her thigh, relished the shocked little sound she made at the scratch of his stubble.
She could come just like this, impaled on his fingers. It was spiraling up inside her already, her heels digging into the mattress, her knees canted inward, her thighs tense and trembling. His thumb sifted through those tight, intimate curls, found the little bud of flesh hidden there, and rubbed lightly until her breath came in quick, needy pants and her inner muscles clutched at his fingers.
A little cry of frustration broke from her throat when he slowed, placing a tender kiss at the juncture of her thigh. “You’re so soft, so wet for me,” he said, letting her feel the heat of his breath on her most sensitive skin. “Just imagine, Vi, if I kissed you…just here.” He circled his thumb.
Her hips rolled, and she mumbled something unintelligible behind the cover of her hands.
“Hmm,” he murmured, teasing her with a slow stroke of his thumb. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
She tore her hands from her face, her voice shearing across the room. “Yes.Yes,” she snapped, and then crumpled behind her hands once more and her voice dropped to a pitiful squeak. “It’s shameful.”
“No,” he crooned, bussing a kiss along her thigh. “Just a little bit…wicked.” He slid his hands beneath her bottom, lifting the bowl of her hips to his mouth, let his tongue search through delicate petals to lap gently at that tiny bit of flesh. “You don’t mind a bit of wickedness, do you, Vi?” Her shaking hands landed on his shoulder, in his hair; her head was thrown back. Her toes had curled into the blankets beneath her. He traced the lips of her sex, tasted the sweetness of her arousal, and dipped his tongue into the entrance of her body. Learned what made her whimper, what made her writhe. How her hand clutched his hair when he sucked that small bead of flesh between his lips; how her back arched when he thrust his fingers inside her.
He groaned against her flesh when she came apart with a soft cry she smothered in one hand, felt her contracting around his fingers. Still he nursed her through her climax, until she was limp and shuddering and gasping for breath, placidly accepting the kisses he lavished upon her as he crawled up the bed to take her into his arms.
“Vi,” he said, sliding his hips into the lee of hers, letting her feel the evidence of his arousal, gratified when she curled her legs around him, arching her hips to his with a soft murmur of assent. It took just a minor adjustment, and then he was sliding through soft, swollen tissues still rippling in the aftermath of her climax. “I need you to come again for me. I need to feel you.”
It was easier this time, slower, softer—she opened to him, accepted the insistent downward plunge of his hips between her parted thighs, arched her back when at last he planted himself. Her fingers kneaded his shoulders, her body pliant beneath the weight of his own. “I don’t think I can,” she whispered, her lips brushing his. Her cheeks were flushed, her body nearly boneless with a blissful lassitude.
“You can.” He slid one palm down her smooth thigh, pulled it higher, and watched her eyes widen as the changed angle let him move deeper, harder. “You can. I’ll help you.” His finger slipped between them, found her over-sensitized flesh, rubbed gently.
She stifled a cry against his shoulder, and pulsed around him.
“Yes,” he murmured against her ear, driving deep and feeling her intimate flesh squeeze him tightly. “You’re mine, Vi.”
“No.” She shook her head, her dark curls flying. “No, I—”
He swallowed her protest with a fierce kiss, strove to drive the thought from her mind with clever strokes of his fingers, and whispered, “Yes. For tonight—in this moment—youaremine. My wife. My Vi.” Her legs squeezed tight around his hips, her cry of release echoing in his ears. She came in long, languid contractions, and he seized her hips and held deep as they dragged out his own climax. “And I’m yours.”
He didn’t know if she’d heard the words he’d mumbled into the curve of her breast, couldn’t say whether she would have acknowledged them if she had. But she held him, even though he had all but collapsed upon her, crushing her beneath his formidable bulk. And when he had regained his breath and the strength in his limbs, she stayed tucked against his side as he shifted his weight off of her, and let him draw the covers up around her shoulders, pillowing her cheek upon his chest.
“I can close the window,” he murmured, tightening his arm around her, conscious of the crack of thunder outside, the pounding of the rain upon the eaves.
She shook her head, her lashes fluttering with exhaustion. “I like storms.” Her toes edged between his calves, and she shifted closer, her breath sighing out against his chin. “Would you…leave the candles lit?” He felt her swallow, felt her shoulders move in a small shrug. “Sometimes I have nightmares.”
She said it as if she had confessed some guilty secret, some hidden shame—but it had never been her shame to bear. It had beenhis.
“Of course,” he murmured into her tousled hair, his heart twisting in his chest. “Of course.” He had to force his arms not to clutch her too closely, too tightly. Instead he rubbed one hand up and down her back in soothing strokes. “Go to sleep, Vi. I’ll watch over you tonight.”
∞∞∞
Violet woke once in the night, after the storm had passed and the world had grown too quiet and still, with the phantom stench of moldering turnips in her nose, suffocating in the darkness that surrounded her. Her heart raced, the pounding of her blood through her veins echoing in her ears.
The scream that had been trapped within her throat emerged as only a stifled whimper, every muscle locked rigid with the certainty that if she stretched out her fingers, she would touch only stone walls, the rough wood of the door locking her within the tight confines of the cellar closet. Perhaps shehaddied down there—perhaps she was dying even now, one choked breath at a time, and everything she had experienced had been only the last, futile figments of imagination that her brain had conjured up to pretend it was not dying here in the yawning darkness—into the silence that would swallow her up within it, lost forever.
“Shh.” The whisper pierced the quiet, and for a moment her sleep-addled mind could only reel in gratitude that she would not die alone, that there was someonehereto share the darkness with her.
A gentle hand touched her back, heedless of the cold sweat that coated her skin, and like magic, the tension in her muscles evaporated as that hand slid slowly up and down her spine, until her breath didn’t feel clogged in her throat, until she became aware of a strong heartbeat beneath her ear, and that the constriction that had bound her wasn’t the borders of the narrow cellar closet but the soft blankets drawn up around her, the weight of an arm slung over her waist.
“There.” It was a soothing murmur, rumbling in his chest, imbued with a sleep-roughened burr. His fingers slid beneath the heavy drape of her hair and curled around the nape of her neck. “You’re safe, Vi. No more nightmares, now.”
Her eyes squeezed shut against the burn of tears, because for once she trulyfeltsafe. As if that simple pronouncement could really force the shadows of the past from her mind, could keep the nightmares at bay simply because he had willed it to be so.
His hand groped for hers, and the moment their fingers brushed, he laced them together, drawing her hand up to his mouth to brush a kiss across her knuckles, and then let their joined hands rest between them, cradled safely in the valley of her breasts.
For years she had faced the choking darkness alone. Forgotten. Lost to that great seething chasm, tearing up tiny pieces of her until she was unsure how much of her remained, how much of her had been lost to its impenetrable depths.
Finally,finally—someonehad remembered her. Finally, someone had taken her hand and shielded her from that horrible darkness.