Perhaps she would find someone who treated her as Henry did—or at least looked at her like Henry did—except, of course, without his air of being tortured by wanting what he saw. Someone who possessed his gentleness and his desire for her, but who would come to her without guilt or regret.
She ran her hands over her breasts and down her belly imagining they were that man’s hands.
Her body, which had been nothing so much as a repository for her sorrow and worry this past week, suddenly felt alive in all its particles.
She undressed to her chemise and luxuriated in the feeling of her own touch.
Oh, she needed this.
Henry Evesham’s body against hers had made her a festival of needs.
She closed her eyes and remembered the smell of the church. Beeswax polish on old wooden pews, the faint memory of smoke in the air from the candles he’d lit.
Henry, trembling and unsure and straining towards her.
His skin still cold and damp from the rain.
His body strong and sturdy, like he was made of oak.
She imagined Henry making love to her with unchecked abandon and it made her shiver. She hiked up her skirt and ran her fingers across her hips, then lower, toward her cunt, slick against her fingertips.
Oh, Henry. Henry.
She remembered the desperate sound that had emerged from his throat when he’d finally kissed her. The bulge of his cock, and how it had felt as she’d rubbed herself against it.
She wanted that feeling again.
She glanced around the room, looking for something that might feel the way he had felt before they’d been interrupted. There were four short, knobbed posts at each corner of the bed frame. Yes, that could do. She raised herself above one, so that the curved wood hit her right at the parting of her cunny. She held herself open and steadied herself against it, bracing her hand against the wall for balance.
Oh, yes. That was it.
She closed her eyes and rocked, wishing it was him beneath her. Them, together in this small dark room, frantic once again with their desire for each other.
She gave herself over to the fantasy, adding to the friction with her fingers. She wanted to moan with the pleasure, but she did not want to alert any passersby in the hallway to her activities within. The need to be silent made her arousal sharper and she gasped as the promise of an orgasm welled up inside her. She threw back her head and put her hand over her cunt, imagining Henry’s lips curving around a fork, desperate to go over the edge.
The first tremor took her and she gasped and bucked against the bedpost. As pleasure claimed her she couldn’t help but cry out into the darkness. She clasped her hand over her mouth and opened her eyes and the dimness in the room was broken by a flash of light from the hallway.
“Alice? Are you awake—”
She froze.
Henry Evesham stared at her, agape.
“What are you—” Henry asked in a strangled whisper. But it was rather obvious, as she was mounted on the bedpost with her hand clutched to her cunt.
“Oh God,” she cried, frantically rearranging herself and her limbs and her shift. In her haste to cover up her lower half she pulled her shift askew, exposing most of her breasts.
Henry stood silent and still in the shaft of light from the corridor, half inside the room, half out, looking as if he’d had a stroke.
In desperation she grabbed his arm and pulled him inside and shut the door behind him.
Which left her topless, holding him by his cravat in a tiny room that smelled of her desire.
“I thought you would be longer,” she said, turning around and fumbling to cover up, trying to still her ragged breath. “I thought you would be longer. You usually walk for miles. You said you would be late.”
“I came back for my satchel—I … no. No.”
Something in his voice made her pause. She stopped fumbling and turned back around to look at him.
“That’s not why I came back,” he said more quietly.
Slowly he reached out to her shoulder. Gently, ever so gently, he drew up the sleeve of her shift to cover up her breasts.
In her state, the feeling of the soft lawn falling against her nipples made her gasp. He noticed. She saw his eyes fall from her face down to her chest, to the peaks of her hard nipples beneath the sheer fabric. His lips parted.
“Why did you come back?” she asked him.
His gaze rested on her collarbone.
With his hand still lingering on her shoulder, he drew nearer, and placed a kiss in the shallow of her neck.
She stood completely still, unsure of what was happening.
He finally looked into her eyes. “I came, Alice, because I needed to say this plainly, or I am false.”
Heat radiated from his skin, and he was trembling.
“I want you to be mine,” he whispered. “So much I’m sick with it.”
Chapter 29
He’d said it. Out loud.
It made him so weak with happiness that he took Alice in his arms and crushed her mouth to his and kissed her like she was all the things he’d ever given up.
“Henry,” she gasped out, pushing her palm against his sternum. “Henry, wait.”
He stopped, but he didn’t want to wait. He was starved for softness and pleasure and abandonment and all the things that were here in this small, dark room.
But mostly he was starved for Alice.
“What is it?” he gasped, wanting to consume her. Wanting to sink his teeth into her flesh, his nose into her hair, his cock into her—
“Henry, you must be certain,” she whispered, even as she lifted up his shirt and caressed his bare skin.
“Oh,” he whispered, at the lightness of her touch. “Oh.”
She melted against him like a pat of butter on hot toast. He kissed her at her beating pulse. Her fingertips dug into his hair, his scalp.
“Certain,” she gasped out, sentences as lost to her as words were lost to him.
But he had to find them, he had to say this, because the answer was yes, he was certain, so certain, no parenthetical.
“Alice, I’m sure. Be mine. Be mine.”
She lifted her shift over her head and dropped it to the floor and stood completely nude before him. Her breasts were like pale teacups capped with small, pretty nipples the color of a berry.
He leaned in and took one in his mouth, marveling at its firmness, at its heat. He was shocked at himself, but she did not seem to be. She sank back on the bed and pulled him down on top of her and he put his hands upon her breasts and found her mouth and kissed her like a starving brute.
Her hand clamped over his straining breeches and fumbled with buttons and then they were on his manhood and he hissed, for no hands save his own had ever touched that part of him.
“What shall I do, Alice?” he somehow managed to get out.
She took his hands and drew them to the dark whorl of hair where her thighs met. Her womanhood.
“Touch me,” she said, closing her eyes.
Tentatively he ventured a finger to the cleft. He felt wetness. Delicate, soft skin. Impossibly slick, molten heat. He coated his fingers in it, in awe of how, like him, she dripped with need.
He had a vague sense of how a woman found pleasure, owing to his time in brothels, but he was unsure of the precise mechanics of it. Anytime the conversation had become too specific, he’d always left the room to pray. Now he wished he had listened to their vulgar chatter, for he might have had some hope of pleasing her.