Simply Magic

easy thing to hold the future at bay. She concentrated her mind again upon the distant sound of the waterfall.

“Do you ever wish,” he asked after a couple of minutes, “that you were totally free?”

“I dream of it all the time,” she said.

“So do I.”

Two weeks ago-less-she would have assumed that such a man had all the freedom he could possibly want or need. Indeed, it had seemed to her that most men were essentially free.

“What ungrateful wretches we are,” he said with a low chuckle.

“But it is not freedom from school or from relative poverty or from anything else in my circumstances that I yearn for,” she said. “It is…Oh, I once heard it described as the yearning for God, though that is not quite it either. It is just-mmm…”

“The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh.

“Are we talking philosophy again?” he asked, and he removed his hand from his eyes, turned his head, and grinned up at her. “Twice in one afternoon? I think I must be sickening for something.”

She laughed and looked back at him.

And something happened.

Suddenly the moment was very present indeed, as if past and future had faded to nothingness or else collapsed into the present. And the moment was simply magic.

And unbearably tense.

Their eyes held, and neither spoke as their smiles faded-until he lifted his hand and set the knuckles lightly against her cheek.

“Susanna,” he said softly.

She could have said or done any number of things to cause time to tick back into motion. But she did none of them-did not even consider any of them, in fact. She was suspended in the wonder of the moment.

She turned her head so that her lips were against his knuckles. And she gazed down into his eyes, violet and smoky and as deep as the ocean.

He slid the hand down and pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. He brushed it backward and it fell to the grass behind her. She felt the air warm against her face and cool in her slightly damp hair. He cupped her face in both hands and drew it downward. She released her tight hold on her legs and turned so that she was kneeling beside him.

And then their lips met-again.

It was a kiss as brief-and as earth-shattering-as the last one. He lifted her face away from his and gazed up into her eyes, his thumbs circling her cheeks.

“Let me kiss you,” he said.

It was something of an absurd request, perhaps, in light of the fact that he had just done exactly that without asking permission. But despite her almost total lack of experience with kisses, she possessed enough woman’s intuition to know exactly what he meant.

“Yes,” she whispered.

She continued to kneel over him, one hand spread over his chest, the other bracing herself on the grass on the far side of him, while he kissed her again.

But this time the kiss did not end after a brief moment. It did not end at all for a long, long time. And this time it was not a mere touching or brushing of lips.

This time his lips were parted and warm and moist, and he nibbled at her lower lip with his teeth and touched both her lips with his tongue and with its tip traced the seam between them from one corner to the other and back again but pressing a little more firmly this time until it curled up behind her top lip to caress the soft, sensitive flesh inside. And then he feathered little kisses across her mouth and down to her chin before kissing her fully again, his mouth pressed harder, more urgently to hers. His tongue pushed past her lips, past her teeth deep into her mouth. And then finally the kiss softened, and he lifted her head away from his again.

His eyes were heavy-lidded as they gazed into hers.

“Lie down beside me,” he suggested. “You look uncomfortable.”

She was still crouched over him, her hands clutching one lapel of his coat and a clump of coarse grass.

She stretched out beside him, lying on her side, his arm beneath her head. She rested her hand over his heart and closed her eyes. She did not want him to speak. She did not want to think. She was too busy feeling.

Did people-men and women-really kiss like that? She had had no idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naivete she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body other than just her lips. All parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places.

Neither had it ever occurred to her that a kiss might involve the mouth as well as just the lips.

She could feel his heart beating heavily beneath her hand.

And then, before she had even begun to recover her wits, he turned onto his side to face her, and his free hand touched her cheek again and his fingers feathered through her hair, moving it away from her face.

She both saw and heard him swallow.

“The trouble with kisses,” he said softly, “is that inevitably they make one want more.”

“Yes.”

More?

Kisses as a prelude to…

He kissed her again, softly and lazily, and they lay with their arms about each other while she responded with moves of her own. She moved her lips over his, touched them with her tongue, stroked his tongue with her own when it came into her mouth again, sucked on it. When he made a low sound in his throat, she spread her hand over the back of his head, twining her fingers in his sun-warm hair.

That was when he brought the rest of her body against his and she felt all the unfamiliar thrill of being flush against the hard-muscled body of a man from the lips to the toes. One of his Hessian boots hooked about her legs to hug her closer.

“Susanna,” he whispered into her mouth.

“Yes.”

“Say my name,” he murmured.

“Peter.”

It was so much more personal, so much more intimate, than his title. She had never even thought of him as Peter before now. But it was his name, his most personal possession. It was how she would remember him.

The ache of-of wanting became almost unbearable.

His hand was at her breast, exploring it lightly, caressing it, his palm lifting it, his thumb rubbing over her nipple, which was taut and tender. He hooked the same thumb beneath the fabric of her dress at the shoulder and eased it down her arm until her breast was exposed. His hand covered it again, warm and dark-skinned against its paleness. And then he lowered his head and, before she could guess his intent, took her nipple into his mouth and suckled her.