Simply Unforgettable

Now, at this precise moment, she was naked and eager in his arms, and now was all that mattered.

Now they were together.

And she had admitted that she loved him. He had known it—in his heart he had known. But she had spoken the words.

Of course I love you. Of course I do.

“Lucius,” she said against his mouth, “make love to me.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.” He drew back his head to grin down at her in the faint light being cast through the window by the lamps burning in the stable yard below. “Am I not doing well enough?”

Her whole body trembled with her laughter. He loved it when she did that.

“Of course,” he said, turning her onto her back and looming over her, one arm beneath her head, one knee pressed between her thighs, “you are rather hot to handle, Frances. Red hot. I might burn myself with touching you. You are not coming down with some fever by any chance, are you?”

She laughed again and reached for the back of his head. She drew his mouth down to hers once more and thrust her breasts up against his chest.

“I think I am,” she said. “And I think it is going to get worse before it gets better. But there is only one cure I can think of. Make me better, Lucius.”

She spoke in a low, throaty voice that raised goose bumps along his arms and down his spine.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” he said, his lips feathering kisses down over her chin and throat. “Shall we dispense with the foreplay this time?”

“This time?” she said, twining her fingers in his hair. “Is there to be another time, then?”

“How many hours are left in the night?” he asked.

“Eight?” she suggested.

“Then there will be other times,” he said. “One hour for play, one for rest between times. Three other times, then? Perhaps four since this is likely to be brief.”

“Then let us dispense with the foreplay this time,” she said, and laughed softly again.

He came down on top of her, slid his hands beneath her, positioned himself between her thighs, and thrust hard and deep into her wet heat.

He had known almost from the start that she was a passionate woman. But tonight she had abandoned all her inhibitions to it. He had not lied when he had told her that she was almost too hot to handle. What followed his mount was pure, mindless, glorious carnality. She met him thrust for thrust, and they mated with vigor and panting breath and mingled heat and sweat—and ultimately with a shared and shattering climax.

Aware at the last possible moment that they were at a public inn and the walls might not be as thick and soundproof as they ought, he opened his mouth over hers to absorb her final cry.

Then he turned his head to one side, relaxed his weight down onto her, and sighed.

“The secret when one intends to spend a whole night at play,” he said, “is to save some energy, to conduct the first bout in a restrained manner and build to a lusty climax with the final bout sometime after dawn.”

“But that is exactly what we are doing, is it not?” she said softly, her breath warm against his ear. “Wait until that final bout, Lucius. It will shatter the globe, and we will find ourselves shooting through space.”

“Heaven help me,” he said. “And heaven help the world.”

And he promptly fell asleep without first bothering to move off her.

Was it possible, Frances wondered during one of the drowsy times in the course of that night when she was not either making love or dozing, that some people lived life this vividly day after day, week after week, even year after year? Giving joy and taking it with reckless disregard for the consequences or the future or anything, in fact, except the precious moment as it was being lived.

The cautious part of her mind told her she was being foolish, even immoral. But something in her soul knew that if she never reached for joy she would never find it and at the end of her life she would know that she had deliberately turned away from the most precious opportunities her life had offered as a gift.

She could not marry Lucius. Or rather she would not because she knew that without his family’s blessing he would never be quite happy. And how could they give that blessing if his bride was the daughter of an Italian singer and some unknown Italian man?

She could not marry him, but she could love him now tonight.

And so she did, giving herself up to all the passion she felt for him. They made love over and over again, sometimes with swift vigor as they had done at the start of the night, sometimes with prolonged, tantalizing, almost agonizing foreplay and long, rhythmic couplings, which were so excruciatingly sensual and beautiful that they both, by unspoken consent, held back from the moment when excitement would be unleashed to hurl them over a precipice into satiety and peace and sleep.

His hands, his body, his powerful legs and arms, his mouth, his hair, his smell—all became as familiar to her in the course of the night as her own body. And as dear. She came to understand the idea that man and woman could become one flesh. When he was inside her, it was hard to know where she ended and he began. Their bodies seemed made to fit together, to mate together, to relax together.

“Happy?” he murmured against her ear when dawn was graying the room. He had one arm beneath her neck, his fingers twined with hers, while his other hand described lazy circles over her stomach and one of his legs was draped over both of hers.

“Mmm,” she said.

But daylight inevitably followed dawn, she knew.