The Lady's Tutor (21 page)

She
did not look away from him. “I took notes.”

But
she wasn’t looking at her notes.

“Then you remember that
mochefi el relil,
the ‘extinguisher
of passion,’ best satisfies a woman. It is large, strong, and slow to
ejaculate. It will not take its leave until it thoroughly excites the woman’s
womb, ‘coming and going, tilting high and low, and rummaging right to left.’ Do
you want to see a man?”

Dark rose bloomed in her pale cheeks. She gripped the saucer so
tightly, he thought it would shatter. “You asked me that yesterday morning.”

And then I sent you away, fool that I was.

“I
am asking you again.”

Defiance
glimmered in her eyes. Defiance . . . and desire.

“Yes.” She abruptly lifted her saucer off her knee and set it down
on the edge of the desk. A decisive thud echoed in the library; a black wave of
liquid splashed over the rim of the cup. “Yes, I want to see a man. Are you
willing to show me one, sir?”

Ramiel leaned back and opened the top drawer in his desk. He could
feel her eyes on him. His manhood pulsed in time to the rise and fall of her
breasts underneath her soft velvet bodice.

She
was expecting him to display himself.

He wanted to display himself for her. He wanted to satisfy her
every curiosity.

Ela’na, damn,
let
him get through the next few minutes.

He grabbed a rectangular box and pushed it across the desk. “Take
it.”

Clearly, it was not what she expected. She leaned forward and
picked up the white box. “What is it?”

“Open
it.”

She opened the box—and promptly dropped the lid. Her intake of
breath was loud over the hiss of the gas lamp and the crackling of burning
wood. Shocked hazel eyes leapt to meet his turquoise gaze.

“Take
it out,” he said harshly.

A
pink tongue flicked her bottom lip.

Ramiel gripped the edge of his desk to keep himself from jumping
over it and giving her her first kiss,
ferame,
the kiss between a man
and a woman.

More than six years.

He wanted to give her everything Edward Petre had denied her. He
wanted to give it to her
now.

Lowering her gaze, Elizabeth studied the leather object nestled in
a bed of red velvet. It was so shaped that not even a woman with her limited
experience could mistake what it was fashioned after.

Sexual awareness throbbed in the seductive thrust and retreat of
light and shadow. The gas lamp sucked up the oxygen inside the library. Ramiel
could not breathe, waiting for her reaction, waiting for her acceptance ...

If she ran now . . .
Allah and God help them both.

She
gingerly lifted it out of the box. “It does not have a red head.”

“It
is tooled leather.”

“It
is cold.”

“Hold
it and warm it in your hands.”

“You
are trying to embarrass me.”

“I
am trying to educate you.”

Elizabeth
refused to meet his gaze. “Lord Safyre—”

“You wanted to see a man, Mrs. Petre; that is what a man looks
like. You wanted to learn how to please a man. I am going to show you.”

She closed her eyes in silent struggle. It was so obvious that she
wanted to do as he instructed, to hold it as she would hold a man,
as she
would hold him, when the time came.
It was equally obvious that she was
still bound by thirty-three years of ingrained prudery. He fought himself not
to make the choice for her, to take her hands in his and close them around the
leather.

Opening her eyes, she closed her left hand around the leather. Her
fingertips brushed her thumb, meeting on the underside of the object. Its
circumference was large, but not so large that it would intimidate her.

“What is it called?” He strained to hear her over the blood
thrumming in his temples.

“There
are many words. Let us call it an artificial phallus.”

“It
is circumcised.”

Unlike
Ramiel.

The Arab women must have found you fascinating.

“You have seen your two sons when they were younger.” His voice
was labored.

“Yes.”

“A
circumcised man and an uncircumcised man do not greatly differ when they are
erect.”

She gently ran a fingertip over the leather crown. “Erect men . ..
are they plum-shaped .. . like this?”

Ramiel gritted his teeth, feeling the caress all the way down to
his testicles. “Some men.”

“Are
you?”

He leaned forward in his chair, wood squeaking, heart hammering. “Yes.”

“Shortly after I married I became pregnant.” She stared fixedly at
the phallus. “I went to the art museum. There was a statue there, a naked
statue of a man. Except that it had a leaf. ..”

Ramiel did not have to ask what part of the statue the leaf
covered.

“I was seventeen years old and I was going to have a baby and I
wanted to see what had made me that way. But the leaf would not budge.”

The muscles inside his chest constricted. At her unexpected
confidence. At the young woman she had once been, seeking illumination from an
object of art that had purposefully been tempered to preserve a woman’s
ignorance.

When she had been seventeen he would have been twenty-two years
old with ten years of sexual experience behind him. She had known pain and
frustration; he had known only pleasure.

Then.

The
pain had come later.

For the first time in nine years, Ramiel almost forgave the
circumstances that had exiled him to England to live out the rest of his life.
While he could not change his past, he could give Elizabeth a future.

“Your
curiosity is natural,
taalibba.”

“The
guard did not think so.”

Ramiel’s lips hitched upward. The picture of Elizabeth
determinedly trying to lift a marble leaf that would not budge while a British
guard struggled to stop her was so vivid that he almost laughed. The thought of
her humiliation immediately sobered him.

“Some
men are afraid of comparison,” he said easily.

“But
you are not.”

The
words were drawn from him unwittingly. “I have my own fears.”

Her
head shot up. “What does a man like you have to fear?”
That I am not a man.
That I will never be a man
again
.

But
some things a man does not confess out of the sheer fear that putting it in
words will make it true.

He could not live with himself, knowing that it was true.
He
could not live with himself
not knowing
that it was true.

How could he expect a woman to live with that which he could not?

“What
do you fear, Elizabeth Petre?”

Her lips opened—soft pink lips; immediately, she closed her mouth
in a thin, firm line and returned her attention to the phallus. “Is this a
meritorious member?”

He wondered what she was hiding now. Was she afraid that she would
never find satisfaction with her husband? Or was she afraid that she would find
it with a Bastard Sheikh?

“You
know the formula. Measure it.”

He watched with bated breath as she positioned the leather across
the palm of her hand.

“One and a half handbreadths . ..” She raised her eyelids; her
hazel eyes were lambent. “By my hands. You did not answer my question, Lord
Safyre.”

His mouth was dry, as if he had eaten desert sand. “It is
meritorious enough.”

“Is
a man this hard when he is erect?”

Ramiel
took a deep breath. “A man is more flexible.”

“Thursday morning you said that you liked a woman to pump and
squeeze you. How else can a woman pleasure a man?”

“She can take him into her mouth and lick and suckle him,” he said
baldly.

The
words were riveting, for her as well as for him.

“Like
a nipple.”

He
did not miss a heartbeat. “Or a clitoris.”

“Women . . .” Her voice was husky.
She would sound like that,
he
thought,
when he was buried deep inside of her.
“They take a man into
their mouths?”

Ramiel
closed his eyes in acute physical pain, imagining Elizabeth’s mouth, Elizabeth’s
hair, Elizabeth’s pleasure. “Yes, Mrs. Petre. Women do that.”

“What
does it taste like?”

Ela‘na. Damn. She could not know.

He opened his eyes, stared at her rapt curiosity.
No, she did
not know.
He briefly mourned the innocence that he would be instrumental in
destroying. “I am afraid that is something you will have to test for yourself,”
he said impassively.

“What
does a woman taste like?”

What would Elizabeth taste like?

“Sweet. Salty. Like ... a woman. Soft and hot and wet and
passionate.”

The gas flame in the lamp pulsed with heat, luring, warning.
Passion could burn, badly.

How far would she go before her Western propriety pulled her back?
How far could
he
go without losing control?

“What
did you think when you saw a woman for the first time?”

What had he thought, at the age of thirteen, when the experienced
concubine his father had provided him with had laid down on her back and spread
her legs?

“I thought.. . that a woman’s vulva was the most fascinating thing
I had ever seen. Like a pink iris. When touched, it grew moist. When excited,
its petals unfurled to reveal a secret little bud. It was the ultimate toy.”

Elizabeth’s gaze skidded away from his. She bowed her head. “It is
impossible, surely, for a woman to fully take a man into her mouth.”

But she would try. When the time came, she would give him
everything and more that he had ever wanted.

“A woman does not have to swallow all of him, just the crown and
the first couple of inches. She may squeeze and fondle his shaft while she
kisses and suckles him.”

Kisses and suckles
vibrated in the air between.

Like a nipple.

Like a clitoris.

“Has
a woman ever taken you fully into her mouth?”

Ramiel
remembered the pleasure of a woman’s lips and tongue.

The
memories were fueled by her manifest interest in performing fellatio. Sexual
heat flooded his cheeks. “No.”

“Would
you like that?”

Only if you can do it without injury to yourself, taalibba,
he thought.

“I
would rather that a woman take me fully inside of her vagina.”

An ember popped inside the fireplace. Ramiel tensed, preparing for
her next question. He had given her the reins; would she run with them?

“Have you been with women who could not. . . fully take you inside
their vagina?”

“Yes.”
The word was dragged out of his chest.

“Virgins.”

“Yes.”

“Women
who have long been abstinent.”

“Yes.”

“But
not women who have borne two children.”

“No,” he agreed softly, emphatically. “A woman who has borne two
children will fully accept me.”

He would not be able to live if she did not take all of him.

Ramiel stared at her bent head, waiting, watching the dark play of
auburn lights in her hair.

“What things can a man do with a full-breasted woman that he
cannot do with a less generously endowed one?”

Ramiel sucked in oxygen, not enough; the need for more burned
inside of his chest. He stared at her breasts, covered by black velvet,
remembered how white and soft and deliciously full they had been, spilling over
the modestly cut green silk ball gown when they danced.

“He can position his manhood between her breasts and press them
together... so that he is buried between them ... as if they were a vulva.”

She instinctively hunched her shoulders, pressing her breasts
together as if to protect them from his sight... or to facsimile the pressure
of his hands.

“What
is this?”

Ramiel
glanced down at the phallus cradled in her hand.

A shaft of pure heat raced along the length of his manhood, as if
she wrapped her fingers around him and not the unfeeling leather. He forced
himself to concentrate on her stroking finger and not his own body. “That is
called the glans. It and the crown—the plum-shaped head—are the most sensitive
parts of a man’s body.”

Her head snapped up. “More
sensitive than a man’s lips?”