He knew now—tasting her was both condemnation and cure. She had damned him and saved him all at once. He would never, never be free of her. And still more oddly, he never wanted to be. This was not the same wild lust of his younger days, glazed with too much wine and bad decisions. This—a woman in his arms who looked at him as though he were not some kind of monster, whose unpracticed lips were soft and warm against his—was an entirely new kind of pleasure. And wholly more welcome.
How could he ever have thought her plain? Her face had character; there were pieces of her personality in every feature. Her sweetness in the curve of her mouth when she smiled; her stubbornness in the set of her jaw; her fierce intelligence in the downy gray of her eyes.
And she was kissing him.
He offered her everything as he kissed her back.
Christiana felt asthough she drifted in a dream.
Any moment now, she would wake up, and reality would splash cold across her body. She would surface with a gasp, and this wonderful, beautiful moment would be at an end.
She prayed for more time.
Ifthiswas how it felt to be kissed, she understood why Laura had risked so much sneaking out to meet with her various beaus. Hugh’s mouth was soft and warm; his tongue was wet and hot. When Laura had described the sensation, Christiana had been certain it would be unpleasant.
Yet it wasn’t.
Her body was awash with sensation. Her breasts peaked underneath her dress; she had never given her nipples much heed until now, when they were almost painfully sensitive. Heat swept through her with every measured brush of his tongue.
His tongue. Was in her mouth. And she wasenjoyingit.
More than that, she never wanted it to end. She wanted to bathe in this sensation for the remainder of her days.
How had she neverknownthis before?
Before her father had sold his books, he’d had several on anatomy, and she, as a child, had read them all. She knew there were two hundred and six bones and over six hundred muscles in the human body. Knew, too, that men possessed a penis—from the Latinpenismeaning ‘tail’—and women had breasts and a vagina—from the Latin meaning ‘sheath.’
She knew that the largest muscle in the human body was the gluteus maximus. And that the tongue was itself a muscle.
She knew this. And yet none of that could account for how this muscle made her feel. There was no precedent for the enjoyment of these two wet muscles dancing together—yet she could not deny the prompting of her own nervous system. Every sensation she had was one of pleasure.
Hugh groaned low under his breath, more a rumble at the back of his throat, and she wondered if she was doing this right. It seemed so.
Without her glasses, the world was blurry; she could only make out the details of his face at these close quarters. It was, indeed, as though nothing else existed in the world at all, and she preferred it this way. Ordinarily, she liked to feel as though she were aware of everything, but now, with Hugh’s hands on her, his mouth on hers, she was content only knowing this, only knowing him.
Without a mother to instruct her as to what occurred between a man and wife, she was powerless to know more than the approximate mechanics of the act. But before she could get carried away, she banished the thought. If he were fully functional, surely he would have suggested a need for children.
The fire had not taken his desire, but that didn’t mean he had the means to follow through.
She would demand no more of him.
His hands came to clasp her face, holding her in place, and in turn, she sent her exploratory fingers across his shoulders and chest. Over his clothes, she could not detect any difference between his right and left sides, and she had an odd hungering for more than just this. Skin to skin. Her palm against his chest.
How soon after resolving to ask for nothing more, she wished she could break that promise.
“Chris,” he said against her mouth, and he drew her to a sofa, the stuffing of which poked through a hole in the side. In need of repair, it had instead been shoved here and forgotten. She had noted it upon first entry to the room but had been more occupied with her father’s letter and what Hugh might say about Laura.
She could never have predicted this.
As he sat, he guided her to perch on his lap, her knees straddling his thighs, her dress rising up her legs. When she resisted, he urged her to rest her entire weight on him.
“Is that not uncomfortable?” she asked.
“Even if it were, it would be worth it,” he said, taking her mouth again.
Christiana lost herself, once more, to the insistent pressure of his lips. She allowed him to raise her skirts still higher, exposing her thighs to his exploratory hands. He clutched her hips as though she could save him from drowning. For the first time in her life, her body did not feel like her own.
It felt far, far better.