Pleasure and Purpose (20 page)

Cillian turned his face at the last second, so her lips landed at the corner of his mouth and not full upon it. "You don't have to do this."

An odd statement from a man whose cock she'd already had down her throat. "I know."

"I don't... I haven't. . ." He shook his head and tried to move away, but Honesty stopped him with her hands on his shoulders. He wouldn't look at her.

"Shhh. You don't have to say anything." She kissed him again. His lips parted. She cupped the base of his neck. She tasted his earlier indulgences, but his mouth was sweet for all that. She stroked his tongue with hers and he shivered. He kissed with his eyes closed, she saw, and as simply as that he endeared himself to her. With the bed so close there was no need for them to stretch out on the floor, but it was no hardship to rest on thick carpets. Honesty pushed him onto his back, an arm cradled beneath him. For a moment he simply let her push him, but in the next he'd pulled her down on top of him. Chest to chest, their legs tangled. His kisses grew urgent. Harder. The sudden passion in them heated hers, and she moaned softly into his mouth. Cillian stopped at the sound and pulled back to look at her face. "I said you need not do this."

"I know." She bent to kiss him again, but he turned his face once more. This time, her kiss didn't even reach his skin. Honesty stilled, the position awkward but the tension between them worse. "Is it so difficult for you to believe I'd like to?" Gently but firmly he circled her upper arms and pushed her to the side so they could both sit. When he got up to pace, Honesty stayed on the floor to watch him. At least he no longer looked as though he were staring into the Void and thinking of jumping.

"You said yourself, you're not a whore." His voiced stayed low.

"I'm not, that's true enough." As he paced, she got to her feet, too. "But does that matter? A whore sells herself. I'm offering."

He shuddered again and went to the window to stare out. He pressed his fingertips to the glass, then the whole of his palm. At last he leaned to rest his forehead there, his eyes closed. He took in breath after breath, each deliberate and slower than the one before it. Giving comfort sprang from intuition. Sometimes, many times, from utter guesswork. It meant she'd been wrong upon occasion, though never grievously. People were people, some more damaged than others, but most the same at heart.

"Cillian," she murmured, and he twitched but looked at her.

"That's the first time you've used my name."

She'd thought of him by name since her arrival, but he was right. "We haven't had much chance for conversation."

"I've been avoiding you."

Honesty tried to tempt him with a smile he didn't return. "I noticed."

"I don't want you to want to leave." The man speaking to her now didn't sound like a prince . . . but weren't all princes men beneath the crown?

"Is that why you've been avoiding me?" She moved closer, and he didn't move away. Cillian took in another low, slow, and deep breath and turned from the window. "You said you'd give me what I need. Not what I want."

"That is my purpose, yes." She watched him carefully.

"But not your pleasure?" The hint of a smile quirked his lips but faded fast. "You can't say that and live up to your name."

"It has ever been my pleasure to serve my patrons." It was not a lie, and yet untruth clung to her tongue and stifled her from further speech.

His eyes closed again, the dark lashes in such contrast to his bright hair sweeping shadows on pale cheeks. His mouth thinned, and he swallowed hard. He put a hand over his heart. Alarmed, Honesty grabbed his arm, feverish hot beneath her fingers. He looked at her then, those green eyes swimming with a depth of emotion she couldn't refuse. But when she tried to kiss him, again he turned his head. She'd gone on tiptoe to reach his mouth and her lips hovered over his cheek. She pressed them instead to the beard-prickled roughness of his throat, warm as his arm had been. She put her arms around him, his chest hot against her through her gown. He was burning up with something inside him that didn't feel like illness.

"You don't want to help me," Cillian said.

It wasn't a matter of want, but she didn't tell him so. There were many ways to provide the comforts that led to solace, and thus far she'd failed him in most. But this, the most basic, she already knew he'd respond to. Her hand slid to the laces at the front of his trousers. "I can try."

Cillian shook his head and put a hand over hers. She kissed his throat again, then his shoulder, then his chest. When she licked his collarbone, Cillian hissed. His hand clamped, hard, on hers but he didn't pull it away. When she moved her mouth lower over his salt-sweet flavored skin to tug his nipple between her lips, his groan swept over her in a rush of heat.

"You taste good," she whispered and looked up at him.

He opened his eyes, ablaze with desire. Under her hand his cock filled and pressed against his trousers. His heart thundered beneath her mouth and when she bared her teeth to press his skin, it humped at once into gooseflesh as he shivered.

"This won't solve anything," he gritted out.

She licked him again, this time moving over his ribs. "Shhh." When she got on her knees and unlaced his trousers, Cillian stopped protesting. When she pulled the material over his thighs and down his strong, muscled calves, he stepped out of them to stand naked before her. When Honesty cupped his testicles in her palm and nuzzled his cock before licking it from base to crown, he curled his fingers into her hair. She took him in her mouth, but only for a few strokes of her tongue before she moved up his body again with her mouth. She didn't try to kiss his lips again, but stepped back to undo the buttons on her gown and shrug out of it.

His gaze flickered, then dropped to caress her body. He licked his mouth when she pulled the shift over her head and tossed it to join the gown. His prick lifted, and Honesty's breath quickened at the sight of his response. He might not believe she took as much pleasure in this as he would, but she had no doubts.

She cupped her breasts, offering them, but though the heat in his eyes flared, he didn't move. His cock spoke for him, thickening further, but he stayed still as stone even when she licked her fingertips and tweaked her nipples tight. Nor did he move when she again sucked a fingertip and slid it down her belly to part her curls and circle her clitoris. His chest heaved and his tongue swept over his lips again, his fists clenched at his sides, but Cillian wouldn't move.

Honesty stepped backward to the bed and lay back with a crook of her finger. "Cillian. Come here."

He took a step and stopped. Then another. One more. Two more would bring him to her, but he stopped, and she was reminded again of the effort it took to gentle a horse. Honesty didn't push. She ran her hands over her body, finding all the places that felt good. She lifted her hips off the bed to give herself better access to her cunt, now slick with desire. She slid a finger inside herself and drew it up to rub her clit again. The sigh slipped out of her and she did nothing to hold it back.

"Cillian," Honesty murmured, and watched how his gaze flared at the sound of his name on her tongue. She said no more, gave him no words to resist. Only the sight of her. Cillian watched her, and at last his hand went to his cock to squeeze just behind the head. His lips thinned, but his throat worked to hold back the moan she heard anyway. It urged one in response from her, and Honesty made no pretense at holding it back.

"I might believe you want me," he said.

"Come and let me show you that I do."

It was a courtship as coy and stifled as any she'd ever witnessed, made ridiculous by the fact they were both naked. Yet if either of them felt the fool, Honesty couldn't tell it. They might have been sitting in a garden full of roses, her invitation made from behind a fan and his love-gift to her a posy, not his prick.

And at last he moved toward her, step by step, until the bed dipped under his weight. Behind the blaze of lust, Honesty glimpsed a slew of other emotions, fleeting, in his eyes. Cillian licked his mouth again and ran a hand along her calf. He stopped at her knee, fingers curled lightly over her skin.

He kissed it.

She twitched at the soft, unexpected press of his lips to flesh unused to caresses. His name slipped out of her unbidden this time. Cillian nuzzled the fine hairs on her thigh and moved higher as Honesty's legs opened wider to accept him.

On hands and knees he crouched between her legs, his mouth a scant breath from touching her. She tensed, waiting for him to kiss her again. Or to lick her. Even to touch her with more than the gust of air seeping from his lips.

Her last lover had been a worker from the fields outside the Motherhouse. She'd seen him from her window, bare-backed and sweating in the last summer sunshine as he pulled the weeds from a crop of joba melons. He'd worn his hair too short for fashion, and it had stuck up crazily when he swept dirty hands through it. She'd gone down to watch him work, and he'd handed her a melon fresh off the vine, tart enough to pucker her mouth. He'd taken her hand and gone behind the toolshed where they'd lain on a bed of seed sacks. He'd been the last man to put his mouth on her cunt, and he'd tongued her only long enough to make her wet enough to fuck.

Cillian took his time. His hands slid beneath her bottom to hold her to his mouth when at last he touched his lips to her clit. She cried out at the flicker of his tongue. He smoothed the flat of it over her, and her hips bucked until he held her still.

"Please," she said.

He looked up at her, even the lust in his eyes dimmed behind a veil of inscrutability. Slowly, deliberately, he slid his tongue over her heated flesh and down to press inside. Then again, the same motion in reverse, while Honesty arched and writhed as best she could against the bonds of his grip.

Time slowed for her beneath his touch, and Honesty gave herself up to it, utterly. Pleasure washed over her in slow, rolling waves. She found the softness of his hair with her fingers and twined them deep in the silken depths as her climax burst through her. Trembling, she fell back onto the pillows with a low cry. It took her some moments to realize he'd moved away from her, but when she opened her eyes to find him, Cillian was staring at her. He didn't move away from her when she sat and drew him close for a kiss. She was the one who hesitated this time, and he the one who captured her mouth. The taste of her pleasure on his tongue sent another surge of desire through her. Still kissing him, Honesty lay back again and Cillian followed. He braced himself to keep from putting all his weight down, but Honesty would have none of that. One orgasm was not enough to sate her. She needed more, and one from him, as well. Somewhere along the way she'd lost sight of her reasons for this, whether her selfish heart thought only of itself or if woman she began and ended. All she knew was that his mouth was too sweet to deny, and the heat of his prick on her belly parted her legs. She wanted him on top of her, inside her, no matter if it was for her comfort or for his.

"Make love to me," she murmured into his ear, and Cillian shuddered against her neck. His cock nudged her gate and she opened for him. She wrapped her legs around his waist to draw him closer. Her fingernails raked his back when he thrust deep with a groan. When he nipped at her neck, she cried out and lifted her hips.

Cillian was as skilled with lovemaking as he'd been with cunnilingus. In moments she surged to the edge again. Honesty cried out her ecstasy and drove him harder with her heels and fingernails. Her body convulsed around him and Cillian thrust again, voicing his ecstasy in a hoarse shout.

They clung to each other for the span of a heartbeat or two, a few breaths, and then he rolled off her. His hair spilled out over her shoulder, his head on the same pillow. Still languid in the aftermath, Honesty turned on her side to face him and stroked a hand over it.

"You have such lovely hair."

He laughed, a sound as unexpected as the kiss to her knee had been. He didn't look at her, but he laughed. Then he covered his eyes with a hand and his laugh faded into something more like a sob.

Words were not always the best choice. Honesty reached to draw the blankets over both of them, for although touching him earlier had been like caressing flames, now they were both chilled. Yawning, she tucked herself up beside him and waited for him to push her away and get out of bed. Moment by moment, he softened beneath her until the hushed sound of his breathing told her he slept.

It took her a very long time to join him.

"This fountain is lovely." Honesty pointed with the hand not nestled in Cillian's. She'd taken his hand as they walked and noted how he'd tensed at the touch before relaxing.

"What is the statuary representing?"

"I don't know. I never asked."

Though he wasn't much taller, his stride was longer. He'd shortened it to accommodate her. In the sunshine, his hair shone like flames. She'd tied it down his back with a dark green ribbon interwoven in the braid, but the sedate hairstyle couldn't hide its beauty. She wanted to touch his hair, and so she did.

Cillian shot her a glance at the touch. "I could find out for you.

"It's not important." She didn't really care. Once she was gone she'd never come back here to marvel at the carved stone angels with water shooting from their mouths. "Let's go into the hedge maze."

Cillian grimaced. "That place? Why?"

How much had changed since she'd taken him to bed, she mused with a small smile and a tug of his hand. He was still not the smoothest tempered of men, but seemed less inclined to instant rage or contempt. If modesty had been one of the five principles she'd surely have failed at maintaining it, because Honesty took no small amount of pride in how he'd changed in just the past few days because of her.

For a moment, unease twitched in her gut. She'd made a marked difference in him without even trying. She could ease him into great changes, should she make an effort. . . but no. It didn't matter that his hands and mouth brought her such fierce pleasure. She ought to have told him the truth. She was no longer of a heart sufficient to serve. She might bring him some small comfort, but solace would be out of reach if he relied upon her to lead him to it. She ought to have left already, except she still hadn't gathered the courage to make that choice.