When Bede left home, she naturally gave his room a thorough cleaning and discovered a plethora of books. Novels, memoirs, collections of the most graphic content, including illustrations of equal lewdness. She should have been appalled. She should have burned all of them like a proper lady would have done.
Instead she had pored over them, practically memorizing the erotic stories and illustrations of fornicating couples.
She kept them still, all these years later. In her bed at night, by candlelight, she read those pages and studied those images until she knew all there was to know about copulation. All the various positions . . . all the places that mouths and tongues could be placed. To say nothing of hands.
Her hands had mimicked and learned from the books, fondling herself, bringing herself to gasping, writhing pleasure in the privacy of her chamber.
She would close her eyes and imagine her hands belonging to someone else. It was always a faceless stranger. A man with big, solid hands and a hard cock.
A man, she realized, not unlike the one standing before her.
She moistened her lips. He was terribly exciting. Strong and beautiful to behold. It would be no sacrifice on her part to join him on that bed. She could finally satisfy her desires and rampant curiosities with a partner.
It would no longer be her solitary hands wringing pleasure from her body. She could use him for that. When would she ever get another such opportunity? A chance to escape the shackles and responsibilities of home and engage in a wild romp where she could exercise all her lustful fantasies and bone-deep longings.
If he was willing, of course . . . and it sounded like he just might be.
Perhaps, he had said.
With her heart in her throat, she lifted her hand from her side and placed it on his chest, palm down over his heart. The beating thump rose up to kiss the pocket of her palm. “Do you want me to stay after all then?”
Breathe, Mercy. Breathe. Do not behave as though this were so out of the ordinary.
Even if it was.
She gazed at Silas Masters’s face, at his shadowy features, waiting for what the final verdict would be.
“Why don’t you show me what you would like to do?”
“What I would like to do?” she echoed uncertainly. She did not want to mistake his meaning.
“To me. Yes. You said you felt heat between us. Then show me.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “What do you do with this heat?”
What do I do with this heat?
As though this was a normal occurrence for her.
As though seducing a man outside the realm of her fantasies was a regular event.
She supposed it was a good thing that she had convinced him of that. He believed her capable of seduction.
She quickly fortified herself with the assurance that she was not incapable. She had ideas. Plenty of them. Her imagination was ripe and she had years of reading and practice—if only with herself. She had been warming up for this for a long time even though she never realized it.
She was ready.
As ready as she would ever be. And if she wasn’t, she had to press on. She had to put aside any reservations and do this. She flexed her fingers against his chest, the joints bending as though she were preparing to play an instrument. And in a manner, she was.
She enjoyed the sensation of his chest. She could only imagine she would enjoy it more if there were no barriers of clothing between them. If she could see him, feel him, a real flesh and bone body.
She licked her lips and added a second hand to his chest. But this time she did not demurely hold her hands in place. No, they moved. Emboldened, she went at him like he was a present to be unwrapped, peeling off his jacket, his vest. His garments hit the floor with force. Her greedy hands kept going in a feverish flurry.
She seized his shirt, grasping twin fistfuls of fabric and pulling it over his head. He neither helped nor hindered. Simply stood and allowed her to undress him like the great present he was.
And he was undeniably a present.
She did not harbor unreasonable expectations. Granted, the male figures in Bede’s books were all magnificently proportioned with mythical godlike physiques. But she knew the reality of man skewed more toward pudding paunches. At least that was what was prevalent in Shropshire.
Except this man and his figure looked promising. There was no hint of a pudding paunch on him. Indeed not.
Her eyes widened as she assessed him, her gaze skimming, sliding over the hollows and curves of his taut skin. He had muscles under all that lovely flesh. Even as he stood before her that skin rippled and moved over muscle and sinew and bone and she wanted to explore all of him with her hands, her lips, her tongue. He was a powerfully built man. The sight of him was much more gratifying than all those exaggerated illustrations. This man was real and he was hers to have. Her belly tightened.
Her hands dove for the front of his trousers. Her fingers dipped and curled inside, sliding down against his lower stomach, her nails lightly scoring the smooth skin. There was the barest sound of his breath catching. She felt it more than she heard it. Just as she felt his gaze drilling into her. He watched her with intense eyes and it was too much.
That face, those eyes, his body.
She could take no more.
She eagerly yanked on his trousers and the motion caught him off balance. He stumbled forward a step, bringing them almost flush. His eyes flared wide as her hands worked feverishly between them, tearing open his trousers and shoving them down. Down to his knees. Down to his ankles.
She was squatting now, awkward perhaps with her gown puddling around her and his feet.
Her mouth sagged open on a silent gasp. There, at her eye level, was his cock. It was big and getting bigger before her very eyes.
She had seen a naked man before. Naturally. She had grown up in a household with a father and a brother. It was she at the end who nursed her father in his final year. And she and her brother had been brought up together.
There were also the illustrations in her brother’s books—though they bordered on the absurd. When she pored over those erotic books she thought that the depictions of the male member were more like something that might belong to an elephant. Thankfully, Silas Masters did not have one of those. Although he was impressive.
“Why do you look so . . . relieved?” he asked in that voice that would forever remind her of a growly wolf.
She wet her lips. “You’re just—” She stopped herself from blurting out what she was truly thinking. You don’t have an elephant cock. “Better than I imagined.”
All of him really. Truly. He was better.
More beautiful than anything that existed in her fantasies. Goodness, she had kept her fantasy lovers faceless for a reason—because she did not even have a partner in mind. No one around Shropshire had ever struck her fancy to such a degree that she fantasized about a specific individual.
That would no longer be a future dilemma for her. She would have plenty of fodder for the imagination. This man would fuel her for years to come.
“I would be interested to hear about these . . . imaginings of yours. Are they specific to me? Hmm. I think not. We just met. I gather these are long-standing.”
“Well,” she began rather breathlessly. “Now they are specific to you.”
He smiled then, slowly and beguilingly, and her stomach pitched. The sight of it on his handsome face was a mysterious thing. Those unfurling lips were like a forest on a moonless night, with all kinds of magic humming below the surface, out of sight, but real and present. As real as the nose on her face.