She pulled him up and led him inside and up to her room, doing that thing with her hips he’d noticed the night before. Magnificent hips, this woman. So magnificent he reached out, put his hands on them, and stopped her. “Come here.”
He pinned her against the wall and kissed her long and hard. She gasped lustily and wrapped her leg around his. Her hand went to his buttocks, pressing him against her.
“You’re so hard.”
“Looking at you makes me hard. You’re a hazard to decency.”
“It’s true,” she said, lifting up her skirts. She propped her foot up on the banister behind him. She was wearing nothing beneath her gown.
He did not need to ask to understand the meaning of this invitation. He put a hand across her slit. She was wet for him. He dragged his fingers over the seam, then to the bobbin that made her squirm. He pressed his prick into her thigh, wondering if he might come just from the heat of her wet cunt on his fingers.
“Bed,” he rasped out. “Now.”
As soon as they were in her room, she was taking off her gown. He kicked off his boots and worked at his breeches. She turned around, watching him, a hand to her cunny.
“Christ, that cock. I love it.”
She stepped forward and took it in her hand, squeezing at the base. “Fat and hungry and upset,” she said. She ran a finger over the ooze at the head, which was indeed an angry shade of purple. “So upset,” she murmured. “I know just the treatment.”
She reached across to her night table to a jar of oil and produced a condom.
He squinted, trying to see the contraption. It looked like hollowed innards, with a red string attached to the opening. “Sera, we talked about this.”
“I know, but I want you inside me. Don’t you?” Her eyes were on his penis, and her voice was throaty, hungry.
He wanted to throw her on the bed and take her without another word.
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s what can happen afterward.”
“Nothing will happen,” she laughed. “Here, I’ll show you how it works, and you can decide for yourself.” She bent down and rolled the thing over his appendage. He did enjoy that, her fitting the tube around him, tying it snugly with string.
“See,” she said, admiring her handiwork.
Christ on the cross, with her hands on his prick, adjusting the ties to her satisfaction, he wanted to believe her.
“Be careful to withdraw before you spend. Afterward I’ll drink an herb that helps to clear the womb. The combination has never failed me. I would not do it if I felt there was a risk.”
He believed her. Or perhaps he just wanted to be inside her so badly he would believe anything.
One time, he reasoned.
Just to remember what it felt like.
Just to have this, once, with her.
“On the bed,” he ordered. She smiled and obeyed him.
He lay down beside her and pulled her on top of him. “Last night, you said you wanted to ride me. This morning I spent in my sheets thinking of it.”
Her thighs opened at the tip of his cock. He cried out as slowly, slowly, she sank down around him. She paused, arched her back, and let out a ravaged moan.
For a moment, he held her by her waist as she writhed up and down his cock, each time dragging herself lower to take more of him.
When he couldn’t stand it, he guided her off of him. “On your hands and knees,” he ground out, so aroused he was nearly past the point of sentient speech. She did as he instructed and he held her thighs as he sank into her from behind, slow and hard. She threw back her head and arched her back. He put his hand over her folds and rubbed her swollen wetness as his body remembered why this act had once been his favorite thing on earth.
He drove in and out and she met his rhythm, squeezing his prick with her muscles in a way that made his vision wobble. He felt her building to a peak and abandoned himself to the rhythm of her pleasure, stroking her as he fucked her, listening to her fill the room with the sound of his name. She began to shiver under his hands and he knew his own time was not far off and braced himself for a few good strokes before he would slide out and then it was happening, already, too soon, and he reared back and out of her but he was already spilling by the time his full length was free. Seed dripped down his hand.
“Fuck,” he murmured.
“What?” she gasped, still shaking.
“It came off.”
She cursed.
Before he’d even gathered his wits enough to find a cloth on which to clean his hands, she was off the bed and walking nude across the room.
“Maria, bring up tubs of water,” she called out the door. “I need a bath.”
She pulled a dressing gown from a hook beside the door, wrapped it around herself, and went barefoot to her dressing table, where she began to pull glass bottles from the drawers and measure out bits of herbs into a mortar, skilled as an apothecary.
Lecherous bloody bastard. What were you doing inside a woman when you know what you’re like? Why don’t you ever learn?
“I’m sorry, Seraphina,” he said.
He was.
More than she could know.
His gut clenched with guilt, for he had succumbed to that old weakness knowing he lacked the strength. Had always lacked the strength. Had always given in to it, let desire occlude his senses, his knowledge of what was right.
She breathed in through her nose. “Never mind. A bath in warm vinegar and a pennyroyal tea will reduce the chances. It is no great crisis.”
Damn him for trusting their fates to some innards tied around his prick with twine. Damn him for letting his desire for a woman convince him of something he knew better than to do.
Damn. Just damn.
“You can go, Adam. Maria will be up soon and I’d just as soon she not encounter you undressed.”
She said it flatly, the voice that had trembled with passion a minute before now devoid of feeling. He had not bathed himself in glory, but could they not at least discuss the particulars of this unfortunate circumstance with the basic cordiality of neighbors, if not the intimacy of lovers?
He dressed as she busied herself with her potions, fingers nimble as a sorceress brewing the fixings for a spell.
He wondered if beneath this silent ritual, she was as distressed as he was.
He came behind her and pressed his fingers over the bony protrusion of her shoulder blade. “Sera, were anything to happen, I will do the honorable thing.”
She whirled around and barked out a laugh. “Adam. Please. Don’t be absurd.” She shook her head and turned back to her herbs.
He’d had enough brittleness from her. They’d just bloody made love. “What is absurd about my desire to do the right thing by you?”
She let out a sound that implied the answer, as far as she was concerned, was everything. “Adam, how can I make it clearer that what is between us is not the kind of thing that ends in a march to the altar?”
“You needn’t speak so snidely. I’m only saying that I wish to be a decent man. We needn’t be friends if you find it so distasteful but I don’t deserve to be treated like your enemy.”
“Oh, I have plenty of enemies,” she said quietly. “I know the difference. Did you not see the dead birds they left as gifts?”
The memory of it still made him want to retch. “I did, and you didn’t bloody deserve that.”