A Lady's Pleasure (5 page)

A fantasy man did not drip with sweat or fall bonelessly atop a woman's body in the aftermath of passion while his breath gusted inside her ear like a bellows and his satisfaction echoed in the wind.
A fantasy man did not take away loneliness as well as give pleasure.
Abigail rubbed her hands down his slippery spine. "Thank you, Robert."

contents
Before Robert had joined the Army he had been Robbie; once in the Army he had been Coally. Private Coally; Corporal Coally; Sergeant Coally; Lieutenant Coally; Captain Coally;
sir.
After a lifetime of doing other people's killing he had become Colonel Coally. Outside of battle with the occasional whore or even during battle with the occasional camp follower, he had remained anonymous. No one save Abigail had ever used his christened name.
No woman had ever screamed for him when reaching her pleasure.
No woman had ever thanked him for fucking her.
Small, firm breasts heaved against his chest. Tiny little contractions continued to ripple about his spent manhood.
Abigail's pleasure.
She was a ladythere was no doubting her accent or her mannerisms.
She was a twenty-nine-year-old spinsterwho had willingly sacrificed her virginity.
She had accepted his pain and his passion and given him the gift of her body.
Without her he would not have survived the storm.
And he knew, just as surely as he knew that he should get up and spend the rest of the night in the privy, that he would hold her to her promise. By the end of the storm there would be nothing that he did not know about her.
Including the reason she lied about her genteel status and hid herself in an isolated cabin with nothing but erotic literature for companionship.
Carefully levering himself onto his elbows to take the brunt of his weight off her, he pressed his mouth to her ear.
A bittersweet surge of pleasure washed over him.
It was such an innocent thinga woman's ear.
He suddenly wanted to know that ear, to taste each nook and cranny, to make it a part of himself.
He wanted to make Abigail a part of himself.
Her ear was shell-shapeddeceptively cool and delicate on the outside, like Abigail herself. He mapped the interior, slowly thrust the tip of his tongue into the hot, narrow channel.
The ripples in her vagina increased.
Shifting his weight onto one elbow, he swept his right hand down the length of her side, then burrowed between her and the quilt to grasp a soft cheek. The motion pushed him deeper inside her. "Did I hurt you?"
"A little." Her voice was husky in the night, the prickly formality mellowed by passion. "I think you hurt me more with your fingers than you did with the ... other."
"That's because I used my fingers to stretch your maidenhead." He found her lips, swollen lips, sensitive lips that instinctively softened against the pressure of his. Lips that only he had kissed.
Gently he circled inside her, his tongue and his manhood.
Then, "What does your fantasy man do after he takes your virginity?"
"He ... shares his body with me."
Impossibly, Robert felt his manhood stirring to life. Deliberately he flexed inside her. "How does he share his body with you?"
Her breath escaped in a small gasp. Short nails carved half-moons into his back. "He lets me touch him. And kiss him. And taste him. Everything you did to me."
Whores had kissed Robert and whores had taken him into their mouths, all for money. No woman had ever expressed a desire to do so out of pure pleasure.
Gently he disengaged his body from hers and rolled over onto his back.
He wasn't prepared for a woman like Abigail. His fantasy woman took his passion and his body and gave him only her pleasure. She did not seek to know his body as he did hers.
The mattress dipped. Cool fingers tentatively rested on his stomach, trailed up his chest. "Do men have feelings in their ..." She lightly swept his chest in a searching motion, found him, and was instantly distracted. "You are smaller than I am."
He stared up into the darkness. "I am a man."
"But just as hard. When you touched my nipple, I felt it deep inside my womb. What does it feel like when I touch yours?"
She ran the pad of her thumb over his nipple. Again. And again. And again.
White fire shot straight to his groin. He grabbed her hand and held it flat against his chest, breathing in the scent of her body, of his body, of sex.
And wondered why a woman like Abigail, a woman who was filled with clean, innocent passion would take into herself a man like him, a man who had killed and confessed he would kill again.
"Does your fantasy woman suckle you, Robert?"
"All I need, Abigail, is a woman to give herself to me." His voice was even, remote. "I don't fantasize about giving myself to a woman."
"But you would?"
Not before tonight, he thought bleakly.
"Your fantasies, Abigail. Whatever you want."
"Then I want to suckle you, Robert."
Robert's chest swelled at the feel of her hot, wet mouth rooting through the coarse mat of his hair for his nipple. He was inexplicably overcome by a surge of vulnerability.
Women gave their breasts into the care of a man that he might nurture off her gentleness.
Men who killed did not nurture.
Men who killed had nothing to offer a lady.
Closing his eyes, he curved his hands around her head.
And realized that her hair was still caught up in the ugly bun that told the world she was a staid spinster, while inside her burned the same needs and wants that burned inside him, she caught up in a society that denied her womanhood, he caught up in a career that he had chosen when he was too young to know better.
He found a hairpinpulled it out.
The wet heat nuzzling his chest was abruptly replaced by cool air. A hand reached upgrabbed his that was searching for another pin.
"What are you doing?"
"Unveiling you."
Without warning Abigail scrambled up, mattress dipping, bed creaking. She gasped with dismay.
He opened his eyes, instantly alert, a soldier prepared for action.
"What is it?" he asked sharply.
"Nothing."
He reached outfound her knee. She was kneeling on the bed.
"Our bargain, Abigail." He tightened his grip. "Talk to me."
"It is just..." He could see her, a dark silhouette, head thrown back toward the black ceiling. "Oh, for heaven's sake, it is nothing, really. When I sat up, something ...
you ...
came out of me."
Robert's manhood leapt to full life.
Sitting up, he followed the line of Abigail's knee, soft and slender, growing softer, softer ... Their fingers met on her thigh.
A cool, viscous fluid was smeared on it. Her fingertips rested on the outer parameters.
"My sperm." His voice was flat in the darkness.
"I know." Her voice sounded more like she was nine going on ten instead of twenty-nine going on thirty.
"There's still some inside you." He linked his fingers between hers and guided their hands between her legs. "Feel. Me. And you."
She gasped when he brought their joined fingers up to her hot, swollen lips.
There was more of him. And her.
The essence of a man and a woman.
He had never felt himself on a woman before. Had never felt himself inside her.
The combined sensation of the slick viscous fluids warmed by her body struck him with the force of a bullet.
When she would have jerked her hand away, he forced their fingers between her swollen, passion-slick lips, pushed upward until two fingers slid inside her flesh, one his and one hers.
"I never knew two people could be this close." Her voice was a sough of breath.
"Neither did I," he murmured hoarsely. "Why did you pull away from me when I started taking down your hair?"
"It gets tangled."
Robert recognized a lie when he heard one.
Another secret to unravel, another obstacle to overcome.
"I'll brush it for you tomorrow. Spread your legs wider."
Clumsily she acceded; her body dipped lower to the mattress, forcing their fingers further up inside her.
The muscles inside her vagina rippled. "Robert."
"What?"
"Did you really peep through the window?"
"You didn't open the door when I knocked."
She clenched her body, forcibly trapping their fingers inside her. "I was reading."
He wondered what sex act she had been reading about to put the sublime expression on her face that he had witnessed when looking through the window. "So I saw."
"What did you think I was reading?"
"Devotional literature."
He waited for her next question, could feel it trembling on the air.
When it didn't come, he answered her anyway. "I did not take you because I thought you were wanton, Abigail. I took you because I needed you. And you were right. What we shared tonight is not dirty."
The huskiness in her voice deepened. "Robert."
"What?"
"Lean forward."
"Why?"
"Because I want to kiss you."
Heart lurching inside his chesthe who killed without blinking an eyehe leaned forward, made her lean forward, too, for the pleasure of feeling her body adjust around their fingers.
Her lips missed his at first. She raised a cool hand and found his jaw, aligned her lips accordingly.
It was a virgin kiss.
A first kiss.
He let her learn his lips while inside her he could feel the myriad little convulsions the two of their fingers were causing. And then, suddenly, the wet heat that inundated his fingers covered his lips.
Abigail learned quickly. She rimmed the seam of his mouth with her tongue. Immediately he opened for her, allowed her to enter him as he entered her.
But he wanted more.
More of the storm.
More of Abigail.
He sucked her tongue more deeply inside him, then he suckled it as he had her clitoris and her nipple, suckled until the tiny ripples around their fingers became one large contraction, and with a little gasp she came into his mouth.
Gently he released her tongue and her hand. And found the remaining hairpins in her hair. They fell to the plank floor like a rain of firing pins. Carefully searching for more, but finding none, he plunged both hands into her hair and worked it loose until it hung wild and free down her back, a curtain of living silk.
He felt his penis grow another inch.
"Lie down."
"Why?"
"So I can crawl over your body."
"Not into it?"
"Later." Robert's lips twitchedhis prim and proper lady was game to the end. "First we need to get you cleaned up."
"I am quite capable of washing myself, Robert."
"That's not the bargain, Abigail. You agreed to
everything."
He ended the conflict by the simple expediency of scooping her up and lying her down. And ruefully wished that skirmishes were as easily won on the battlefield.
"If you wash me, I will wash you." Abigail's dignified threat was meant as a warning.
Robert grinned. In the next second it felt as if the wind had been knocked out of his lungs.
He had not been washed since he was a childa lifetime ago, before the killing had started and overnight he had grown into a man. "I'll hold you to that, Abigail."
The bucket was underneath the sinkhe primed the pump. Icy water splashed into the worn metal. He pumped twice more before grabbing the washcloth on the rack beside the sink.
Setting the bucket onto the floor by the bed, he dipped the washcloth into the water and wrung it dry before easing down onto the edge of the bed. He warmed the cloth inside his hands. "Doesn't your fantasy man ever do this for you, Abigail?"
"There is no need to wash after a fantasy man," she replied tartly.
Robert found himself smiling in the darkness.
He had smiled and laughed more with Abigail in the last few hours than he had in the last twenty-two years.
The two should not go togetherlaughter and passion. Then again, a man like him and a lady like her should not fit together, either.
But they did.
He was not going to let a belated sense of modesty interfere with their union.
She held perfectly still for his ministrations, as if she derived as much enjoyment from being touched by him as he did in touching her. He memorized her face through the rough, damp cloth, discovered a high, smooth forehead, a slender nose, a rounded jawand regretted only that he had not thought to light the candle so that he could see her as well as feel her.
She had brown eyes, he suddenly remembered. They had widened in outrage when he had opened the trunk and revealed her erotica. Then they had flamed with amber when she had glimpsed his unchecked passion.
Abigail arched her neck. She had a fragile neck, long and slender like those of the Egyptian busts he had seen when stationed in Egypt . Her right breast filled the palm of his handher nipple was hard. Slowly, so slowly, he eased the cloth over her stomach, a soft little mound that had rippled beneath his hand when he had suckled her, and then there was slick wetness that owed nothing to water.
With single-minded intensity he explored the changes he had wrought in her body. With heart-stopping trust, she allowed him.
Her flesh was swollen where he had entered her, the opening stretched, so that now he could easily penetrate her with one finger, two, not as easily with three, hampered by the cloth. Gently he swirled away the evidence of their passion.
Working down to her thighs, he cleansed away the stickiness there, unerringly returned to the mystery between her legs.
He washed Abigail slowly, thoroughly, lost in her heat and softness, here the skin crinkly with hair, there plump and smooth. Reaching further back, he found the top of the soft crevice and swirled the washcloth round and round, down and down, in tight little circular motions.
The washcloth was plucked out of his hand.
Robert's muscles coiled. "I said
everything,
Abigail."
"You said
my
fantasies, Robert." The mattress dipped, then the bed was empty. "Lie down."
Robert found himself smilingagain. She knew him for what he was, yet she dared give him orders as if he was a normal man who had never experienced the horrors of war. He lay down.
Abigail rinsed and rinsed the cloth out.
He wondered what thoughts were going through her head. If she thought about what he had done to her. If she thought about what she was going to do to him. Or if she thought about what she had been reading before he had barged into the cottage.
Erotic acts she wanted to engage in but didn't dare.
Sexual acts her fantasy lover dared.
Sexual acts perhaps Robert was unaware of, steeped in war and death instead of erotica.
Sexual acts he would dare ... before the storm was over.
Suddenly the cloth was on his face, cold, with the heat of her fingers penetrating underneath. Robert could feel the anger and despair of his past draining out of him, as if underneath his skin there still existed the innocent youth he had once been.
"Kiss me." His voice grated in the dark.
"Only if you tell me what you do to your fantasy woman."
He stared up at the dark silhouette hovering over him. And closed his eyes to the truth.
Abigail