Pleasure For Pleasure (28 page)

I
don't know what comes next,” Josie said, laughing a bit. “My novels always stop at the bedchamber.”

He walked over until he stood just before her.

She kept talking because she felt nervous, and that made her want to chatter. “Of course, you would make a prime hero.”

“Really,” he drawled. “Do you think you could write me?”

“After reading so many novels, I could write
anyone,
” she said with conviction.

He laughed. “Then write me. Go ahead. Describe me in the lush prose of one of those novels you love so much.”

She reached out a hand and touched his eyebrow. Mayne felt a little shudder, as if he were a mere youngster again, faced by his first woman. But somehow in this particular night, it felt like that, as if they were the only man and woman in the world.

“Two eyebrows, midnight black,” Josie said, her finger lightly stroking him. “Eyelashes that are too long for a man, and oh! Eyes dreadfully tired…exhausted by the debauchery of centuries.”

“Centuries?”
Mayne said, laughing. “I'm not really a Greek, you know.”

“Centuries,” Josie said, nodding. “A nose, quite noble really, in its original. One cannot but look at it mournfully, to see the gothic greatness with which it was once endowed, but now—dear reader, alas—faded to a mere nose.”

“A mere nose!” Mayne was starting to feel slightly insulted. “What should it be, pray? And what do you mean faded? It's the same nose I've had for years.”

“Lips of a melancholy dark cherry tint,” she said, her eyes laughing at him. “Even with the beams of the moon falling on them, they retain a hint of wildness…a bacchanalian hint that speaks to the—to the—”

He was leaning forward now. He felt as if every inch of his body was alive, every cell urging him toward her. “Those lips,” he said, “are indeed bacchanalian. But what do nice young ladies know of Bacchus? My turn to paint your face. You'll have to help me, though, for I haven't read many novels.”

“No,” she said, grinning. “I expect you'll describe me like one of those horses you're always reading about.”

“And what a lovely filly that would be.” He felt like Bacchus himself, drunk on the moonlight and his beautiful
young wife. “There are horses with as long lashes as yours, Josie. Did you know that?”

She nodded.

“And horses with a mane of black silk, like your hair.”

“It isn't black,” she pointed out. “You appear not to know the color of my hair.”

“When we were in the coach on the way to Scotland,” he said, “it would take on a deep ruby glow if the sun was shining in the window. But in moonlight it looks as deep and mysterious as the night sky.” He wrapped a lock around his finger.

“Your lips,” he continued conversationally, “have not the faded glory you give my nose, but a deep red. The kind of red that makes a man feel weak with desire. Do you know why, Josie?”

She shook her head, not taking her eyes from his.

“Because they are plump and luscious,” he said, very close to her now. “Because to look at them is to want to taste them. To look at them is to want to taste you.”

She almost said something about being plump all over, but the words died in her throat. Somehow her disdain for her own body seemed ridiculous in light of the way he looked at her. When he looked at her…

“You look like a fairy queen, Titania from Shakespeare's play,” Mayne said.

She laughed at that. “A queen!”

“Titania is no ordinary fairy, after all. And you are no ordinary woman.”

“Honesty compels me to admit that I am a terribly ordinary woman,” Josie said. “I'm plump, addicted to novels, and afraid of riding horses.”

“Dear me,” Mayne said, enjoying himself hugely. “Have you
no
redeeming qualities to offer a spouse? Perhaps I should rethink this.”

“I am fairly cheerful,” Josie told him. “I can be funny if I have a clever moment. I'm very honest, and I'm told that's a virtue, although it sometimes works to my disadvantage.”

“No beauty?” he said mournfully.

She shook her head. “Not in comparison to other women.”

“Shall I tell you how I see you?”

“Not if you're going to tell me lies. I really dislike lies, Garret.”

“I won't bother with your lips, or your hair, your eyes or your skin—though it is the most beautiful skin I've ever had the pleasure to be near, Josie. Let's just start here, shall we?” He pulled her closer. Then he said: “Feel what I'm thinking with my hands.”

She frowned at him.

“You don't need words for everything,” he told her. “I'll tell you with my hands.”

He put his fingers on her cheeks, a touch as sweet as a baby's kiss. His hands slid down her cheeks with deliberate slowness. She shivered a little. A thumb traced the plump curve of her lower lip and then she knew, she knew what he was doing. It was as though his thumb told her everything. It paused on her lip for a moment and she closed her lips around him. He tasted strange and male. Heat flooded her body.

“Do that again,” he said, his voice rough, “and—”

Her lips closed around his thumb again, teasing him with a little bite. He made a sound in his throat and then continued downward. Over her throat, hands leaving trails of fire.

“Watch me,” he said. She was watching his face, of course, his beautiful eyes. But she looked down, obediently.

There in the moonlight his hands looked huge and male. The edge of her nightgown was wide and lined with Belgium lace. His spread fingers came warm down her neckline and then just to the neckline, the open buttons.

Josie held her breath. What would he do? His hands slid
down her arms, arms that under his fingers felt perfectly curved, soft and beautiful. “Have you ever seen Raphael's paintings of his mistress?”

She looked up, knowing her cheeks were flushed, telling herself it didn't matter. He was circling her wrists now, his hands twice the size of her bones.

“No,” she whispered.

“She has your figure,” he whispered back. “The kind of curves a man could drown in, could never leave.”

Those fingers were moving back up her arms, and Josie almost didn't hear him in the fever dream caused by his caress. She was holding her breath again, but he was slow and sweet in his time, smiling a little. He hooked his thumbs under the neckline of her gown and rubbed a circle.

She just stopped herself from moving with him. Then he was pulling, pulling the neckline down.

She whimpered and her mind flared with embarrassment, and then rational thought skittered away again. He was inching the gown down over her arms and her breasts. His palms were warm against her evening-cooled skin. Warm and possessive. One wrench, and the gown fell to her hips and clung there.

“Look down,” he said, his voice a siren's call. So she did. But then every rational thought fled.

His hands were golden, dark against her skin, which gleamed with the same pearl of the moon. He slid his hands down her front as if he were discovering a new land, and she looked up, saw him swallow hard, and understood.

He was holding her breasts as if they were gifts from the gods. Looking down, she saw them through his eyes: pure desire, soft, unsteady, overflowing from his hands, her nipple peaked where his thumb rubbed it. She was biting her lip to stop herself from rolling her hips toward him, when his hands started moving down again, silkily tracing the way her waist curved in and then out into the generosity of her hips.

He paused and met her eyes, but he must have seen what he wanted there because with a flick of his fingers the nightgown slid down her thighs and fell to the ground. Then his hands were everywhere. Running over the curve of her bottom, and suddenly she felt the deliciousness of its roundness, felt it as if she were the one comparing it to a bony behind. Felt the curve of her waist out to her hips, and understood for the first time how a man might want to sink into softness.

“But,” Josie gasped. “All your women, those women—”

“
Not
my women,” he growled.

But she stood her ground. “All those women with whom you—you had trysts with—were slim. Very slim. And you fell in love—” But she stopped.

His fingers were curving around her thighs, perilously close to the heart of her. She reached out and he gathered her in with one arm so she was leaning against him, her skin startlingly white against his clothing, but his other hand didn't move.

She could feel her heart beating, beating faster and faster. And then she felt a soft touch between her thighs.

He started talking just when her mind blurred and heat was licking at her stomach in a way guaranteed to make her light-headed. “They were skinny,” he said into her ear.
“Out of these woods do not desire to go.”

“Humph,” she said. She was the one who was the reader; it was rather disconcerting to find herself with someone who apparently knew his way between the pages of a play.
“Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no,”
she told him, leaning against his shoulder so that he could do as he wished with her body.

“
I am a spirit of no common rate, the summer still doth tend upon my state.
Mmm, Josie, you're so soft there. Do you like that?”

She gasped a bit.

“What's the matter?” he teased. “Can't you remember the next line?”

She was
not
going to utter the next line.

His eyes were laughing at her, and then he said it instead, but of course he was just joking.
“And I do love thee: therefore, go with me.”

“Oh, piffle,” she said, with another little gasp at something he did with his thumb. “There have been so many you've loved.”

“Not true,” he said. “I'm not sure that I'm capable of the emotion.”

Josie leaned against him, and let him continue touching her, playing her as if she were a delicate instrument whose every note he was learning.

“Neither of the women I thought I loved ever looked at me the way you do,” Mayne said into her ear.

Josie knew without question that she looked desperate. Sylvie, for one, never looked that way. She was too beautiful to be desperate.

“It's shameful to admit it,” Mayne said, “but when you look at me I feel beautiful.”

She should stop him; she should really stop him. Except she couldn't. She was gasping now.

“When I look at you,” he said, “I feel out of control. Which is likely why I never, ever approached any woman who made me feel the way you do, and since I'm still not exactly sure how we got married—”

“We aren't married, not really.”

“We will be in about ten minutes.”

“Oh,” Josie whispered.

Then he had her in his arms and he was putting her on the sofa.

“You want to be here, or you wouldn't have gone along with this marriage in the first place,” he said. He stood beside her, pulling off his clothes, and Josie didn't even bother
to arrange her limbs in such a way to minimize her curves, because she couldn't breathe. Not when she saw all those muscles, and the way his chest tapered to his hips, and then…below that…

Mayne followed her eyes. “I've never slept with a virgin,” he said, a little pucker between his brows.

“Neither have I,” Josie said, reaching out for him. “But I'm willing to give it a try.”

But he didn't fall onto her directly. Instead he lay beside her and kissed her eyes and her cheek, while she shivered. Until finally she slowly came to realize that making love—with Mayne at any rate—was a sensual feast that would likely take hours.

It took time, and kisses, and little whispers, and a giggle or two, but finally Josie found herself no longer lying beside him, but touching him greedily. It was all, she thought groggily, a matter of imitation. He kissed her cheek, and then the curve of her neck, and then her shoulders…

So she kissed his lip, and felt the roughness of a coming beard, and then kissed him lower, on his shoulders and chest.

And all the time, he was whispering to her, and his hands were wandering over her body, making her tremble and even cry out until—until she said, rather desperately, “Garret, it's not that this is unenjoyable, but do you think that you—that we could—that you could stop kissing my shoulder now?”

A little laugh broke from his chest and he came over her, on his knees, looking down. “What would you like to do next?”

Josie was shivering all over with excitement, and trying in vain to think of something witty to say.

“I'm no virgin, Josie,” he said. He had a hand in the patch of curly hair between her legs, and now she was finding it hard to hear, let alone think.

“I guess not,” she mumbled.

“But damned if I don't feel like one at this moment,” he
said, lowering his head to her breast so she couldn't see his eyes. Which she would have liked to do. He sounded rather bewildered.

“You do?” she managed.

But whatever response he might have thought to make was muffled because he was kissing her breast. She had trouble understanding words when he was worshipping her with his mouth. Even more so when he kissed down over her tummy, and left little nip marks on her hips, and then…

By then nothing he said was making much sense anyway, although she was dimly aware that he had kept talking. About how he felt like a virgin, and as if she was different.