AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I said,’ she responded, her voice breathless.
And it was not fair. For he was a terrible rake and he was pressing the limits of it here with her, and of his own self-control.
Were his tastes in shagging more mainstream he would be an even more incorrigible one. As it was, he had to be selective about his partners. He knew how to make a woman want him. He could make her understand. But what was the purpose of it? What was the purpose when...? This was not what he had been tasked with. Not at all.
‘I feel warm sometimes when you’re near me,’ she said.
Dammit.
‘Now?’ he asked.
‘Always,’ she whispered, as if it were a revelation.
And he tried not to think of when he’d had a handful of her buttock. How round and supple it was. How perfectly it fitted his palm.
How she’d felt leaning against him on the swing.
How that dress lovingly showed the curve of her bosom.
‘If I were to kiss you,’ he said. ‘It would increase. Quite exponentially. And you would understand. You would want to be closer to me. I to you. And it would feel the most natural thing in all the world to remove anything that stood between us.’
‘I don’t...’
‘Clothes.’ He was torturing himself, and he could not say why.
He preferred to mete out pain, not be on the receiving end of it.
‘I knew that naked nymphs had something to do with it,’ she said, looking up at him, as if in a daze.
‘Naked nymphs?’
‘I saw a book. In my father’s library. In his collection. There were...’ Her cheeks turned pink. ‘Naked women. Nymphs. Running from men.’
He bit his own tongue. To remind himself why he needed control. ‘Yes. They were running to preserve their virtue, I have a feeling. For if the men caught them, had their way with them...’
‘You speak in more veiled metaphor. Have their way with them. I wish to understand. What it means.’
‘You are familiar with the ways in which men and women are different?’
His wife had been given a basic bit of education from her own mother before they wed. He had not had to explain everything to her. Beatrice... Beatrice would have to have everything explained to
her were they to have a true wedding night. And they were not.
But he had always liked to tease flames. He didn’t know why he was suddenly taking the torture, rather than giving it.
Though, Beatrice was not untortured.
‘I have seen anatomy,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Drawings. In science books. And, of course...statuary.’
Ah, the naked limp statuary. Which would give her no real idea of men at all. At least, not of him.
She does not need an idea of you.
‘The purpose of the difference is that we fit together,’ he said. ‘And that is the way in which you create a child. But it is more than that. It can be much more than that.’
Her eyes rounded, her lips going slack. ‘What more?’
She sounded dazed, and she sounded fascinated, and he truly wished she were neither.
