The Lover From an Icy Sea (31 page)

“
And dinner, darling?” Daneka rasped, though her inquiry this time clearly lacked its former urgency.

“
Precisely,” Kit answered as his mouth and tongue made their languorous way up over her calf, behind her knee, then over her kneecap. Without any prompting from him, Daneka was already reaching down to take hold of the hem of her dress. As his head slowly ascended up one leg, she began to pull the material up towards her waist, one tedious inch at a time. Kit, however, was in no rush to get through his first course. He nibbled just above her knee, then moved his head back down to the other foot. Off came the second sandal; on went his mouth. He sucked and licked even more slowly on the other five toes, then began his ascent up her second leg: the ankle; then the calf muscle; then, finally, her knee.

Daneka’s breathing was coming in short spurts. Kit noticed as his head moved up between her thighs that her fingers trembled as they bunched and pulled back the material of her dress. He nibbled gently on her thighs. Daneka pulled the material up over her panties, then dropped it and moved her hands up to her chest. Without waiting for Kit, she slipped her hands inside her dress, then pulled her bra up over her breasts and began to caress them. The caresses were at first almost motherly, but increased in urgency and roughness as Kit’s head inched up.

When he finally reached her panties and put his mouth on her, Daneka whimpered, raised her knees and spread her legs so that a foot hung on the edge of either side of the bed. Kit exhaled a long, warm breath. Her response came from deep within, the bloom of which Kit eagerly sucked on from outside her panties. He continued alternately blowing and sucking on the thin material. Her whimper turned into a groan. She was fast approaching tears of bittersweet frustration.

Kit had no desire to prolong that frustration another second. He reached up between her thighs with one hand and pushed her panties aside. What greeted his eyes was the thing that seemed to occupy almost all of his waking hours. Those same eyes, he knew, would never see enough of it. His mouth would never grow indifferent to the taste of it. His nose, with its curious memory, could conjure up the smell of it at any instant, awake or asleep, and yet he knew that that nose would welcome every opportunity to renew the memory with a fresh impression.

His fingers moved like foot-soldiers over her mons, first teasing the pubic hair, then delicately parting her outer and inner lips to allow entry to his tongue. As he pushed it in, Daneka reached in under her thighs and pulled her legs back to her chest. Kit first peeled off her panties, then grabbed both bed-pillows and pushed them in under Daneka’s hips. Her abdomen was now a good six inches off the bed, her legs splayed. He angled his chin in snugly against her perineum and pushed his tongue as far into her as he could—until, with the tip of it, he could feel her cervix. And then he began, slowly at first, but building momentum, his tongue thrusts. Daneka pulled her thighs tighter against her chest. Kit could see her strain. He adored how, in complete abandon, she attempted to meet his thrusts with her own. As he sensed that she was only seconds away from orgasm, he quickly reversed their positions and put his head on the pillow—which allowed her, in effect, to ride his face.

Another couple of seconds passed by while Daneka regained her rhythm. When they both knew she could no longer hold back, she suddenly reached down and pulled Kit’s head into her—pressing down on his mouth with as much strength as she could still muster. Her head fell to the bed and she screamed into the sheets. At the same time, her muscles began to contract, sending liquid down into Kit’s mouth and throat. Each time she contracted, Kit eagerly swallowed. The contractions and swallowing seemed to have no end. Nor did the ecstasy of Daneka’s screams.

After what seemed to both of them a small eternity, all of it finally subsided. Daneka’s screams of passion presently turned into weeping. She moved her head and body down to Kit’s and embraced him with a feverish affection that surprised both of them. It seemed to him in these post-orgasmic moments that she simply couldn’t get close enough. She kept pushing, trying harder to cover every inch of his body with hers. Tears fell furiously as she pressed her head into his neck. Her wailing was like that of an inconsolable child. Kit didn’t know whether to be happy or alarmed.

When Daneka’s breathing returned to normal several minutes later, she raised her head and looked directly into Kit’s eyes.

“
I love you more than my own life,” she said. A fresh set of tears began to fall as she contemplated the depth of the emotional abyss into which she had, with this single declaration, just hurled herself.

Chapter 40

Kit stood up from the bed and pulled Daneka up with him. He hadn’t intended to answer her declaration with one of his own; he really didn’t know what to say. Instead, he embraced her, then kissed both her eyes—now slightly puffy and lacking any evidence of the elaborate make-up she’d applied to them while he’d been at the demonstration.

“
Let me take a quick shower and then smarten myself with a bit of science, darling. I won’t be ten minutes. ‘Promise.”

“
No!” Kit was prepared to stand firm. Daneka looked at him curiously.

“
What do you mean, ‘
no
’?”

“
I mean no! No shower. No make-up. No anything but what I see right in front of me here and now.”

“
But Kit, I’m a mess!”

“
You’re nothing of the kind. I’ve never seen you more beautiful!” Daneka’s look suggested to Kit that she didn’t know whether to feel flattered or devastated. “I mean, yes. of course I have. But there’s a raw, uncluttered beauty about you at this moment that I adore—that I want to enjoy now and for the rest of my life.”

“
But my laugh-lines!” Either Daneka hadn’t heard Kit’s declaration, or she had quite intentionally passed right over and around it. “I can’t go out like this. People might think I’m your mother.”

“
Let people think what they will. You and I know you’re nothing of the kind. That’s enough for me. Isn’t it for you?” Kit suspected he should say something to disabuse her, once and for all, of this nagging discrepancy in their ages. But it was too late; he’d missed the opportunity—and Daneka’s pained expression confirmed it.

“
Please, darling. At least a little powder.”

“
Okay. A little.”

He sat back down on the bed while Daneka went into the bathroom and half-closed the door behind her. When he heard her turn on the shower, however, he jumped up and pushed the door open.

“
No! No shower!”

“
But darling! I smell—. Oh, I don’t know. I think I smell a little—.”

“
You smell divine. You smell savage. You smell like sex. You’re pure nose-candy. No shower.”

“
May I at least—? You know.”

“
No you may not! Powder—that’s it!”

Daneka chuckled. “Well, darling, it’s your nose.” She turned to the mirror, studied her face for a couple of seconds, then reached into her make-up bag. Kit walked out of the bathroom and sat back down on the bed. Two minutes later, she re-emerged with just enough powder and rouge on her face to highlight her cheeks to bewildering effect. She went to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out another pair of panties. Kit jumped off the bed and came up behind her. He took the panties out of her hand and dropped them back into the drawer, then closed it.

“
And no panties.”

Daneka looked at him for a moment as if he’d gone perfectly mad, then chuckled. “Are you planning on a second course before we even sit down to dinner?”

“
Maybe.”

Daneka stared hard at Kit as she moved like a leopard to a position directly in front of him. She reached inside his jeans, and Kit felt himself respond immediately to her touch.

“
Well, now,” she whispered. “Let’s not forget that I, too, have an appetite.” Kit put his mouth on hers. She responded with her tongue, with a murmur, and with a squeeze. As she dropped her other hand to undo his belt buckle, he reached for it.

“
Now stop that! C’mon,” he said, taking hold of both of Daneka’s wrists. “We have to eat something. We’re going to die here if we don’t!”

“
Yes, I know, darling. But what a way to die! One little nibble before we go? Just one little nibble for this naughty nymphet?” she asked as she returned unabashedly with both hands to his belt buckle and zipper.

She had the first undone and the second down before Kit could object. Whatever his head and stomach told him, another part of him was screaming the contrary—and Daneka knew precisely how to answer the call. She dropped to her knees; freed him of his pants and underwear; took him into her mouth. Kit looked down at her—this woman he loved almost to the point of pain—and wondered at his luck. Not only was she brilliant and beautiful, clever and charismatic, seductive and occasionally even seditious; she could also give a blow-job, he imagined, like nobody else on the planet. He watched as her lips worked, crawling steadily and cautiously forward until she had taken in all of him. He knew that many men preferred oral to genital sex. He didn’t. Whatever power or dominance the act suggested was not something that moved him. He liked oral sex, but only as titillation, as foreplay, as a preamble to the real thing. And the real thing for Kit was being inside her; his mouth on her mouth; his arms around her, and hers around him.

He knew he could easily have come in that instant. He knew that Daneka would not have objected, and that she would’ve been delighted to see, once again, how easily she could bring a man to climax. But not now. Later. Tonight. In bed. Inside her—where once again, with luck, he could make her come with him.

“
Darling,” he whispered as he bent down and gently forced her to disengage. “Let’s go to dinner.”

*  *  *

They arrived by elevator at the ground floor and walked across the hotel lobby. At the sight of Daneka, the bell captain wasted no time in stepping up to open the front door for her. Having paused momentarily to pull a cigarette out of its pack, Kit trailed her with just enough space to see the bell captain’s nostrils flare as she passed by. Kit smiled to himself at the man’s unconscious gesture. This vestige, this left-over from a time when homo sapiens were not yet homo sapiens, when their bodies were still covered with hair, when they freely and spontaneously reacted with their noses not to the chemical concoctions of Revlon or Estée Lauder, but to the natural flower of estrus or the musk of a female’s unwashed hind quarters—this, Kit knew, was also human. It took someone like Daneka, however, to make the latent obvious.

They walked arm in arm like young lovers—like young, Roman lovers—across the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori and turned right into the Via dei Farnesi, then veered briefly left into the Via Giulia and up over the Tiber River onto the Ponte Sisto. Here, as she’d suggested she would, Daneka struck up a grand pose—which, Kit knew, she could only have learned from the movies—and pronounced for any who cared to hear: “
Alea iacta est!
” Then she turned to Kit with the look of a gamine. Her finishing-school English, however, belied any secret ambitions she might’ve had to suggest some mysterious origins in the backstreets of Araby.

“
How does one say that in English, darling? I knew once, but I’ve forgotten. And since almost nobody in New York knows Latin anymore, I never get a chance to refresh my early knowledges.

Kit knew this last flourish was intended for him. He loved it when she was able to poke fun at non-native speakers whose knowledge of English had as much in common with hers as a rhinestone might have with a diamond. The twinkle in her eye only confirmed it as she stood, Caesar-like, with her body facing imperiously down the Tiber, but her head and neck strained in Kit’s direction. Kit looked at the tendons in that neck. God, but it was beautiful! “The die is cast” was all he said as his eyes dined silently on the exquisite curvature. She turned her head again to look downriver and lifted her chin as if to make an historic pronouncement.

“
The die, you bastards, is cast!” she pronounced as she pretended to flutter her hand impatiently. “So now make haste to lay waste, before my reign is past!”

Traffic over the bridge did not come to a standstill. In fact, nothing in all of Rome had changed one bit of its intentions. But Kit’s heart soared. She jerked her head back around, careful not to lose one line of its expression as she looked at him to test the effect of her oratory. Apparently satisfied, she broke into gales of laughter and jumped into his arms.

“
Oh, darling, that felt so good! What do you think? Could I, too, be a Viking princess? Just a little bit of one? Maybe just for tonight?”

Kit wanted to answer with a simple but enthusiastic “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to each of her questions. But the knot in his throat stopped him. Instead, he hugged her passionately, greedily, looked out over her shoulder at this city of lights and domes, of distant laughter and even more distant cathedral bells ringing out the hour, and wondered how much longer he could keep her.