“I don’t have children.” Rubber banded the base of his cock and trapped pubic hair, a sharp pang. A soft finger immediately freed the sensitive hair. “And I don’t need my husband to support me.”
The heat of Rose’s hand was replaced by chill air, cock clothed in rubber while Jack stood naked.
“I know what you are, Jack.”
Jack had once thought he knew what he was: He had proven himself wrong.
Ten heartbeats imprinted his chest.
Her right hand. Her left hand that still bore the mark of matrimony.
A sharp nail scraped his nipple.
Jack fisted his fingers in Rose’s hair and pulled back her head.
He stared at the dark valley between her breasts. He stared at her lips that did not smile.
He met her gaze, black orbs ringed by cornflower blue. “What am I, Rose?”
“You’re my lover, and you’re in pain.” Her fingers tightened in his chest hair, taking the pain he gave her, but giving pain in return. “I want to give you comfort.”
“What if you find,” Jack asked, glans crying for the solace she offered, “that fucking my cock is no different than fucking a dildo?”
Chapter 17
“Then at least I’ll know.”
Jack did not know which would hurt Rose the most, fucking without passion or finding passion with a man she did not love.
“And when you do?” Jack asked. An ember popped, small explosion skidding down his spine. “Will you return to your husband?”
Light defined a golden eyebrow; shadow fingered an oval cheek.
“No,” Rose said finally, with finality. “I will not go back to Jonathon.”
Jack remembered the silence inside his town house each time Cynthia had returned to James Whitcox.
But Rose was not Cynthia.
Lowering his head, he grazed her lips with his.
She smelled differently, of roses rather than bergamot.
Jack opened his mouth, tongue probing.
She tasted differently, of need rather than desire.
Rose opened her mouth.
She kissed differently, sharing the price of pleasure.
Jack had taught Cynthia Whitcox how to kiss. How to fuck. He now knew a man could not teach a woman how to love.
A moist tongue touched his tongue.
Breath rasping his throat, Jack closed his eyes and explored Rose.
The sharpness of hard enamel. The softness of slick muscle.
The sensitivity of a textured palette.
Rose sucked in his breath, unused to a man kissing her with his tongue.
Jack didn’t want to tutor another woman.
He sucked in her tongue.
Smelling Rose. Tasting Rose.
Willing Rose to take him, as he would take her.
Tentatively she explored his mouth.
The muscles underneath his tongue. The ridged slope of his palette.
Jack had the curious sensation of drowning in Rose.
A finger flicked his nipple.
Jack’s cock jerked, reaching for Rose.
“Jack,” filled his mouth.
He tasted her lips that were slick with his saliva. “What?”
“Do you ever lie awake”—hot, moist breath expanded his lungs—“aching to be touched?”
Every night he lay awake, aching.
Jack pressed his lips into the bridge of flesh formed by cheek and nose; underneath the softness of skin he found a steady thrum: It matched his heartbeat. “Yes.”
“When you lie there, alone”—Rose experimentally pinched his nipple between her thumb and forefinger—“do you touch your breasts?”
Jack inhaled the scent of springtime roses. “No.”
“I do,” seared his chin.
The image of Rose poised on the brink of orgasm—small hand grasping her breast—flickered behind his closed eyelids.
“I roll my nipples like this”—the twisting motion of a thumb and forefinger knotted his testicles—“and pretend my fingers are a mouth.”
Jack’s lips independently sought fluttering eyelashes . . . the feathery protrusion of an eyebrow . . . the warm indentation of a temple.
“But they’re not a mouth, Jack.”
Her solitude pulsed against his lips.
“Fingers don’t kiss,” Rose whispered.
Shoulders stooping, head bending—resisting his hand that clenched in her hair to hold her close—Rose brushed his nipple with her lips.
Jack’s heart constricted.
“Fingers don’t taste.”
Liquid heat licked him.
Jack cradled the back of her head, flyaway hair clinging to his skin.
“Fingers don’t love.”
A wet furnace enveloped him.
Jack’s body curved over Rose.
“I know you don’t love me,” Rose said, mouth a wet kiss over his drumming heart, “but I would rather lose everything I have than endure one more night of loneliness.”
Jack opened his eyes and stared down at a knitted blond brow and a straight nose, all that he could see of Rose’s face.
The need to give her the love her husband did not was a visceral pang.
“When I lie alone at night, aching”—he curved his fingers, shaping fragile bone, there a vertebra. Reaching down, he fisted his hands into soft cotton—“I touch my cock.”
“Last night . . .” Rose straightened, chill air biting his wet nipple. “Did you pretend it was I who touched you?”
As she had earlier pretended it was his cock that stretched her.
Jack jerked up the cotton he fisted, forcing up Rose’s arms.
“I didn’t want you to touch me,” he said, brutally honest, chemise fluttering to the floor.
He still didn’t.
Rose did not hide her body, nipples hard, shadow-caressed hair tumbling to her shoulders.
The pain his words caused twisted his stomach.
Jack clasped soft skin that would bruise so easily—all he need do was sink his fingers into her waist a little more deeply—and lifted. Simultaneously he turned.
A startled cry was answered by a popping ember.
Her legs flailed: a hard knee . . . stubbing toes. Sharp fingernails carved his biceps.
Jack sat her down. Flesh slapped wood.
The chest of drawers gave her height, aligning her sex with his sex.
Her breasts—small, perfect breasts that she had milked to replicate the love of a man—rapidly rose and fell.
Holding her gaze—watching her startled surprise transform into sexual awareness—Jack stepped between her thighs.
The crown of his cock notched the opening to her vagina. The admission of her loneliness continued to burn his chest.
“I wanted you to fuck me”—Jack slid his hands down over her hips . . . between her thighs . . . in between the hard wood of the chest, a cushion of wool trousers and the softness of feminine buttocks—“like you fucked the dildo.”
Rose gripped his shoulders, fingers blistering his skin; her flesh . . . stretched from his likeness . . . swallowed his glans.
The thin ring of blue surrounding her pupils disappeared.
Purposefully Jack fed her images of raw sexuality to overcome the pain of his occupation.
“Your sex is a dusky pink, like your lips.” Bending, Jack tasted the flush that stained her cheek. Rose jerked her head back from the unfamiliar caress. He breathed against her skin, drying the wetness of his saliva. “When you fucked yourself, it ate the leather.” Pretty pink swallowing base brown. “Last night . . . in my thoughts . . . it was my cock that made a mouth of your vagina.”
Rose turned her face into his; moist heat serrated the bridge of his nose.
The simple intimacy—a woman’s breath, a woman’s touch—clenched his groin.
“Do you want to know what you did, Rose”—an electric lick seared his cheek; Rose tasted him, as he had tasted her—“while I fucked you?”
Slick lips moved against his skin, as hot and wet as the lips that embraced his cock. “What did I do, Jack?”
“You took me like you took the dildo. Hard. Deep. All the way inside until I kissed your womb.” Lifting his head—holding her gaze—Jack dug his fingers into the softness of her buttocks and fed her his cock. “Like this.”
He watched Rose take the reality of a man instead of the image of a man.
He watched her pain, becoming an adulteress. He watched her pleasure, taking a lover.
He filled her until his pubic hair meshed with her pubic hair and the wetness of her desire leaked onto his testicles.
The ragged hitch of her breath sounded over a wafting chime.
“You breathed . . .” Leaning down, Jack licked the dusky pink rose that blossomed inside her cheek. Eyelashes shielding the hurt he caused, Rose turned her face upward for his caress. “. . . my breath.”
The breath that belonged to another woman.
Lips sliding across rose-scented flesh, Jack kissed Rose, his tongue filling her mouth as his cock filled her vagina.
Her flesh fluttered around him.
“You ached from me, and for me,” he whispered inside the wet heat of her mouth, “and you fought to take more of me.”
Holding her buttocks, Jack fucked Rose until the chest of drawers rocked underneath them and he felt her hurt, tender still from the dildo with which she had stretched herself.
“Jack.” Fingernails stabbed his shoulders; inside her eyes blue uncertainty diluted black need, teetering between pleasure and pain. “Jack.”
But he could not stop the pain their actions this night had catalyzed.
“You cried out for me to fuck you deeper . . . and harder . . . and deeper until my cock was a part of you,” Jack whispered raggedly. “And I did, Rose.” Jack fought for air. “I fucked you until my cock became you. And you cried.” Jack’s cock cried for the hurt he caused. “You cried for me.”
While the memory of another woman’s cries chased his ejaculation.
Holding Rose’s gaze that was suddenly devoid of color, Jack angled his hips so that the thickest part of his penis pushed against the most sensitive part of her vagina. Giving her pleasure to counteract the coming pain.
He tunneled in, pushing apart the flesh that he stole from her husband. He tunneled out, leaving behind the tears of the woman he had betrayed.
The wooden chest legs tap-tap-tapped with each thrust. A wooden rail dug into his knuckles with each withdrawal.
He fucked her deeper . . . and harder . . . and deeper until all that stood between them was a thin sheath of rubber.
Jack saw her pending orgasm, black pupils shrinking to tiny pinpricks. And then Jack felt her orgasm, ballooning flesh swallowing him.
No cry of pleasure filled the void of illicit sex.
Rose closed her eyes and shut him out, fisting fingers and vagina hurting him.
Jack buried his face in the rose-scented hollow of her neck and shoulder and thrust so deeply he kissed her womb and came, hot sperm shooting into a rubber casing.
A pulse frantically beat against his lips; it did not slow with the ebbing of her contractions.
Lungs laboring, sweat stinging his cheeks—afraid of what he would see when he gazed at her face—Jack slid his hands out from underneath her buttocks and lifted her onto his still-ejaculating cock.
Her legs limply embraced his thighs.
Jack wanted to comfort her: He knew he could not.
Shrinking cock plugging her vagina, Jack carried her to bed, each breath she exhaled scorching his skin.
Planting a knee on the mattress—metal coils squealing, her sex nipping his—he let her go.
Gold hair threaded with brown shadow spilled across cotton that would never again be innocent white: She had taken pleasure in a man who was not her husband.
Crystalline liquid glinted in the shadow of her temple.
Rose did not open her eyes when he left the bed, mattress lurching upward.
Tugging off the condom that flaccidly dangled like a foreskin, Jack padded down the barren hallway and flushed the sheath down the toilet.
Rose lay where he had positioned her, flushed breasts rising and falling, nipples beaded, eyes closed.
She was not asleep.
He could feel her breath as if it were his own. He could feel the emotions coursing through her body.
Betrayal. Grief.
Need that did not die.
They were his emotions.
Jack stood beside the bed, cock wet from his sperm.
Cold.
Aching.
Alone.
Abruptly her eyes opened. They were a clear cornflower blue. “I’m not a doll, Jack.”
He thought of the men in her life—husband, brothers and father—who had shielded her from the dangers of a man’s sexuality.
“I know what you are, Rose,” Jack returned flatly.
“A whore?” she suggested, voice equally flat.
“A woman in pain.”
The cornflower blue shrank. “Can you take away the pain?”
He would not lie.
“No.”
Five bongs permeated wood, glass and sorrow.
“I ache,” Rose said on a sixth bong, dark eyes filling with tears.
A seventh bong closed his lids against the dull throb that inched up from his cock and swelled his chest.
“I ache from you, Jack,” reverberated over an eighth bong. A ninth bong carried: “And I ache for you.”
A final tenth bong sounded over a combusting ember, Parliament still in session.
Slowly Jack opened his eyes.
Rose slid her right knee upward, left leg fanning outward. Sharing with him her ache for intimacy.
The inverted arrow of gold hair that framed her vulva glistened with the wetness he had created. The dark fissure between the swollen, dusky pink lips was an open portal.
Stretched for him. And then by him.
The tears her vagina leaked burned his eyes.
She still wanted him. Knowing the price she would pay.
Jack lay on cool, crisp cotton—mattress and springs sharply dipping with his weight—and cupped her soft hips that had never been stretched by a child.
He could see her: Her swollen glans peeped out of a fleshy prepuce. He could smell her: The sweetness of roses blended with the spice of sexual arousal.
Rose had said he didn’t love her—and he did not love her as he had loved Cynthia Whitcox—but Jack could no longer deny the need she evoked.
He kissed her portal that he had rubbed raw with friction and licked away her pain.
Small hands cradled his head.
Jack licked a wet line between dusky pink lips and kissed her hard little glans, dark red like his glans.
Her fingers fisted inside his hair.