Douglas: Lord of Heartache (19 page)

This disrobing by stages, unveiling themselves by turns, struck Douglas as a sartorial exchange of further vows.

He held out a hand. Guinevere was so lovely, his breath caught simply to behold her like this, naked, proud, and for tonight at least,
his
. “Come to me—please.”

And he was proud of her, too, for Guinevere walked into his arms, bringing her body flush up against him, breasts to chest, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. She was no longer that nineteen-year-old innocent, nor was she a woman held captive by that innocent’s experiences.

Douglas’s erection lay snug between them, the feel of her warm flesh against him a completion of some journey for him as well.

Were he given to poetry, he’d have the words. Instead, he treasured the sensations.

Guinevere’s hands sliding down his back.

Her fingers sinking into the muscles of his buttocks as she pulled him closer to her still.

Her hair brushing his arms as he anchored her against his body.

Guinevere was strong—physically strong. Why had he not realized this? She raised one long leg and wrapped it around his hip.

She managed this while Douglas focused on a kiss that burned into near violence within moments. His mouth over hers was ravening, his tongue plundering, arousing, and more wicked in its forays than he’d known he could be.

“I want my hands on you,” Douglas whispered. “I want to be inside you. Bed. We need to get on the bed.”

Douglas unwrapped Guinevere’s leg from his hip and walked her back until she bumped into the bed and sat abruptly. He sat beside her, naked, aroused, and breathing heavily. It was not too great an exaggeration to allow he was a trifle dizzy as well.

“I want to go slowly.” He honestly did. Slowly and often.

“I just want to
go
,” Guinevere replied, her breathing ragged. God bless the woman, she looked like years of sexual deprivation were riding her to the limit. While he still could, Douglas sorted through their options.

He climbed onto the bed and stretched out on his back. “Straddle me. We’ll go at whatever pace you set.”

“I want you on top of me. I like your weight.”

She
would
argue about this, and he loved her for it. “I am endeavoring to be considerate, Guinevere. Can we try it this way, and if it’s not to your liking, we can move on to something else?”

She frowned, but thank a merciful Deity, relented. “We can.” She crawled onto the bed then swung a leg over his body. “Shall I touch you?”

God, yes.

“Soon.” Douglas brushed her hair back from her shoulders, resisting the urge to lash his arms around her and drive up into her feminine heat. “For now, kiss me.”

She brushed her lips against his in a languorous caress, one that helped Douglas dampen the loudest of his body’s clamorings. He liked it when she gave him her tongue, he liked it even more when she took his hand and fitted it around her breast, and he liked it nigh unbearably when she settled her hips firmly over him and slid her sex across the ridge of his erection. Just a few minutes of that was enough to leave them both slick and undulating against each other.

“I want to be inside you,” Douglas managed, arching up off the bed to get his mouth on a succulent nipple.

“Want you inside,” Guinevere panted.

“Guide me. Take me slowly.”

He fitted Gwen’s fingers around his shaft and let his hand fall away, leaving control of the moment entirely with her. She went still, and so did he, subsiding onto the bed and letting his hands rest on her hips when what he wanted was to be anything but passive.

To take control of the moment from her would be easy, and she might even thank him for it. It would also be wrong in a way that had to do with respect and caring rather than mindless swiving. Douglas waited, stroking his thumbs over the crests of her hips and praying for patience.

Guinevere took a steadying breath then brush-stroked the head of his cock along her sex, using him to paint herself with her own lubrication. She did this several more times, while Douglas fought not to grind his teeth.

When he thought he’d explode with frustration, she leaned up a little, used her free hand to brace herself against Douglas’s chest, and positioned the tip of his cock against the opening of her body.

“Easy,” he warned. “Go easy.”

Her expression said she didn’t want to go easy. She was anxious, aroused, and uncertain. He suspected in some way the dear lady even wanted this over with, but an abrupt invasion would not serve her well.

“Shall I move?” he asked when Guinevere seemed unable to manage it.

“Please.”

Lovely, useful word—particularly when whispered as a desperate plea.

He lifted his hips minutely, and Guinevere flinched away. Her gaze was focused on the place where their bodies would join, her eyes holding equal parts worry and passion.

“Guinevere, I need you to kiss me.”

She leaned down obligingly and treated him to another languorous, sanity-robbing assault on his mouth. As her tongue traced his lips, Douglas shifted his hips up again, the merest fraction of what his body sought. She didn’t flinch, and it was enough that—thank all the gods—he was threaded into her body. He added to this a soft caress to her breast and felt her relax above him.

Her breasts, he finally recalled, were exquisitely sensitive. He kept his cock shallowly embedded in her slick warmth and brought both hands up to her breasts.

“Move on me, love,” he coaxed. “Pleasure yourself.” She broke the kiss momentarily and flexed her hips slowly. “That’s it, but give me more.”

He experimented with adding his own flexion to Guinevere’s undulations, and when she arched her breasts into his hands, he concluded she was pleased with his efforts.

As, by God, was he.
And beyond pleased with her.

Sliding one hand to the small of her back, Douglas anchored himself and settled in to penetrate his way to her depths with slow, steady strokes.

“Douglas Allen, you feel
sublime
.” She curled down to his chest, her breathing deep and a trifle unsteady. They left off kissing, both apparently more interested in this other, newer pleasure, the overwhelming pleasure of intimately joining. Douglas’s free hand cupped her breast, and Guinevere arched into his hand, her hips writhing in counterpoint to the pleasure of his thrusts.

Seeing her face suffused with arousal and feeling her body succumb to passion, Douglas allowed himself to escalate the speed, force, and depth of his thrusts.

“I want you to have your pleasure of me.” Longed for it, and desperately hoped he could manage it for her.

“Douglas…” Her voice held wonder and yearning. Also some bewilderment.

“I want to be inside you when you come,” he whispered, closing his fingers in firm rhythmic pressure around her nipple. He let himself thrust harder, then harder still, watching all the while for any sign from Guinevere that she was unreceptive to his efforts.

“Douglas…” The longing in her voice had become more intense as her hips began to meet his with strength and purpose. “I want… so much.”

“I know.” He nipped at her breast. “Let go for me, love, just let go…” He took her nipple in his mouth, inspiring Guinevere to a soft, keening moan. Driven by his mouth, his hands, and his cock, her body began to spasm around him in great clutching shudders of pleasure that tested Douglas’s resolve to its limits. When she would have flinched away from the intensity of the sensation, he drove her forward into its depths, thrusting relentlessly, slowing his hips only when he felt her pleasure subside.

In the aftermath, Guinevere lay sprawled on his chest, her fingers tracing his features.

Douglas kissed her temple. “My love, tell me you are all right.”
Tell
me
I
am
your
love, too.

She flicked her tongue over his nipple.

“Ah, love…”

Guinevere repeated the gesture then traced his sternum with her nose.

While she drowsed on his chest, Douglas barely moved inside her, minutely gliding in, and then partly withdrawing, but the pleasure of it was exquisite. He’d not shared erotic intimacies this way before, not ever, and the sheer glory of Guinevere cast away with passion soon had him lost to restraint. He thrust hard and deep, and she met him exuberantly.

“Come for me.” He heard her whispered exhortation just before she opened her mouth on the meat of his shoulder. And then… “Dear God, Douglas…”

Her pleasure sent him hurtling over the edge, tossed headlong into endless moments of profound bliss. Before it was over, Douglas’s vision wavered, his ears roared, and even lying twined tightly in Guinevere’s arms, he felt a sense of breathless vertigo. So he held on, and in that moment, could not have let her go to save his own life.

“You are all right?” Douglas whispered some moments later.

“Better than all right. You?”

“Lovely.” The word felt strange on his lips, strange and… well, lovely. “Beyond lovely—though becoming a bit untidy.” He was, in fact, slipping from her body. “Flannel, sweetheart. Sooner rather than later.”

She reached over to the nightstand and slapped a cloth into his hand.

“Lift up and forward.”

“But I’ll…” How could she argue? How could she be Guinevere and not?

“Yes, you will,” he said, “onto me. Better me than the sheets.” He patted her bottom—why had he never patted her lovely bum before?—and she eased forward. Douglas swiped at her gently with the flannel and blotted it against her sex before guiding her off of him altogether. He tidied himself up as well, then wrapped an arm around Guinevere’s shoulders.

“You want to talk?” he asked, drawing her head to his shoulder. Quite possibly,
he
needed
her
to talk to him, if even a little.

“I don’t know what to say. The sensations are indescribably intense, the pleasure overwhelming, the emotions beyond description. I am in awe, bewildered, and completely incapable of comprehending this.”

Were he asked, Douglas might have admitted to the same list, though he might also have been carried away enough to have gone a step further.
I
love
you
too.
“Do you have any physical discomfort?”

“No. None.”

Douglas relaxed fractionally at that assurance, but as she heaved a sigh he waited, prepared to hear any criticism, any demurrer.

“Is it always like this?”

Ah. A brilliant question—and something he could work with. He kissed her temple, and if he’d been able, he might have kissed her very thoughts. “No. I have never, Guinevere, not
ever
, enjoyed a sexual experience as much as this. I think between us, it would always be wonderful, though not always in the same way.”

“This is what my cousins have, isn’t it?” She sounded puzzled and wistful. “Their wives
thrive
on their affections.”

“I suspect this is a substantial part of their marital joy.” For which his envy was without limit.

She snuggled closer, the fit of their bodies nothing short of marvelous. “And this is why you want to marry me, because you knew it would be like this?”

“One can’t know how matters will progress with a prospective lover, but yes, this is part of why I want to marry you.”
Want
desperately
to
marry
you.
This time he kissed her brow.

“I wish you could.” The wistfulness shaded closer to misery, or perhaps closer to sleep.

“I wish we could too.” Wished, prayed, importuned the Almighty without ceasing… the yearning Douglas felt to spend the rest of his life with this woman beggared description.

He stayed with her until her breathing was even and her body relaxed in slumber. As much as he wanted to remain with her through the night—through every night—Douglas dared not. He sensed she would not marry him, even if they were found scandalously entwined in the morning, but regard for her reputation alone wasn’t what sent him back to the cold comfort of his solitary bed.

He left Guinevere’s bed because he feared if he allowed himself to spend the entire night in her arms, he would never be able to let her go.

***

Douglas poured a fresh cup of breakfast tea for his lady and for himself, having shooed the footman off and suggested that worthy fellow shoo the maids off as well. “How are you this glorious morning, Guinevere?”

“Glorious?”

The tiniest hint of uncertainty in Guinevere’s eyes only warmed Douglas’s heart. “For me, it is glorious.
You
are glorious.”

She found her tea fascinating at that remark, and Douglas felt a surge of affection for her that made him want to scoop her into his lap and… by God, he wanted to
tickle
her.

He settled for laying a hand on her arm, but wondered if he could tickle her out of her shyness—and if she might tickle him back.

Which thoughts suggested he had misplaced his sanity the previous night, and happily so.

His lady was shy this morning and, he suspected, vulnerable. “Is something amiss, Guinevere?”

“You left me,” she murmured.

Without penning her a note, without plucking a rose from some hothouse bouquet for her pillow, without a whispered farewell. He had much to learn about being her lover, and hoped she’d allow him the time to learn it.

“I did not want to drift off in your bed and be discovered there come morning.”

“Douglas, you needn’t be concerned with the servants’ opinions of me. Your discretion is appreciated, though I’m already quite the fallen woman and hardly—”

He stopped her with a finger to her lips.

“You are fallen—into my arms, and while you are there, I will protect you with every resource I possess, including my very life.”

She declined to argue, thank the Deity.

“You haven’t answered my question, Guinevere.” Douglas added cream and sugar to her tea, for the small indulgences were what she permitted him to give her.

“I am… well,” she said, as Douglas stirred her tea, passed it to her, and wrapped her fingers around the warmth of the teacup.