Gossamer Wing (11 page)

“Charlotte.” A fraction of an inch closer every second. “If the storm hadn’t interfered, I would have kissed you. And more. I could have taken you over that table. I think you would have let me.”

She nodded, her eyes closing. Then she opened them again, trying to take it back, shaking her head violently. “No! I was only lightheaded from the implants coming out. I was about to—”

“Well now you’re just lying,” Dexter said flatly, “and I don’t have to tolerate
that
.”

He kissed her hard, because her attempt to dissemble had clearly made him impatient. If it had been softer, or he had approached more carefully, she might have had time and space to reconsider. With no time to think herself out of it, Charlotte just reacted and kissed back. And kissed, and kissed, until she wasn’t sure if she could ever do anything else. As if kissing Dexter were now her sole purpose.

It felt so good to
feel
. She realized as she raised her arms to his neck that except for the night of their engagement and their fleeting kiss at the wedding, it had been years since she’d touched another person beyond a polite clasp about the shoulders or a handshake upon greeting. She had forgotten what an embrace felt like, what a man felt like. Reginald, however, had never felt quite this substantial in her arms.

Reginald had been considerate and kind. He had been her very dear friend and he had wanted her in his bed, but not this desperately, not with this greedy urge to take and devour. Charlotte knew Dexter had that urge, because she had it herself and recognized it in him. It was something shared, created between them, and as ignoring it hadn’t exorcised it, they could only try to exhaust it.

It was Dexter who broke away first, sighing and staring. He still cupped her face in one hand. Brushing his thumb down her cheek, he traced her lips and blinked a few times before finally speaking.

“I’m trying to remind myself that you were hardly married before you were widowed. Three nights. I know this isn’t entirely new to you, but—”

“Behave as if it were.” She already suspected it would be vastly different from her short time with Reginald, in any case. “You’re new to me. This feels . . . new. Assume I know nothing. It won’t be far from the truth.”

He nodded and sat back on his heels, looking as though he were trying to solve a problem. Charlotte stared back, puzzled.

“Take off the gown.”

A simple suggestion. An unprecedented suggestion. She blushed to her toes and tried to think of a suitable response to it. Dexter’s eyes were dark, impossible to read in the inadequate light.

“You see?” Charlotte replied at last. “That’s something new.” Before she could make herself more anxious thinking it through, she reached for the hem of her night rail and tugged it up and over her head as quickly as she could. Like jumping into cold water all at once.

But this wasn’t cold. It burned, the heat of his eyes on her body. Charlotte knelt with her hands wrapped in the quilt on either side of her knees, resisting the urge to cover herself. Braving the onslaught of his attention.

“This is new?” Dexter sounded baffled. “You never took off—”

“No. Never.”

Reginald had treated her like a princess, or like his dearest friend. But he had been shy, hardly more experienced than Charlotte, and he had never seen her bare breasts. He had never bent his head to lick her uncovered nipples, as Dexter did now.

The molten heat of his mouth was almost too much to bear, and it awakened nerves throughout her body in sympathetic response until she felt almost dizzy with vitality. By the time he returned his lips to hers, Charlotte wasn’t sure whether it was the storm or her heart that raged so fiercely. She throbbed and ached, off-balance in a profound way. If she felt this horrible need for the first time now, what did that mean about who she was
before
? This felt like an expression of her very soul. So what had her soul been doing all this time?

Dexter picked her up as though she weighed nothing, scooped her down flat to the bed and covered her naked body with his still-clad one, never breaking their kiss. She felt something not completely new, the hard evidence of his masculinity pressing against her in a rough approximation of the act they would soon be performing. She thought of the pain, the blood of that first time, and the gingerly way Reginald had taken her on the second night. Apologetically, almost. If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought him shy or even squeamish. But he had clearly enjoyed the act itself once he had initiated it, and been absurdly grateful afterward. Quite endearingly so.

There was no apology in Dexter’s body, his lips, the broad shoulders that sheltered her, his hips pressing down in no uncertain terms to bring his erection firmly against her sex.

He seemed so practiced, so comfortable with his own body and with hers. He smoothed one big hand over her breast and rolled the nipple between his thumb and forefinger, chuckling when she gasped and arched up off the bed. When he kissed her neck, the sensitive skin behind her ear and the smooth muscle of her shoulder, Charlotte nearly wept with untapped desire.

She was almost angry at having never experienced this. At having never even known of it. The married women with their subtle innuendos and ribald remarks had never suggested this madness of
wanting
. Perhaps it was just she herself who was mad.

If so, Dexter shared her insanity. He seemed hungry as a beast, eager as a boy. And so knowing.
Where did he learn this?
Charlotte had to wonder, even as she told herself she didn’t want to know.

She didn’t want to know how many other women had felt his lips suckling their breasts, his bear paw hands on their hips in a fond caress, or sliding—
oh!
—between their thighs and teasing a path upward until those big, callused fingers met petal-soft slickness.

On the third night of her first marriage, Charlotte had thrilled to hot lips over the silk covering her bosom and gentle fingers teasing into her, easing a path first. Exploring her slowly, and the shy joy on Reginald’s face when she made those tentative motions against his hand was another thrill, one they had shared. It had been so sweet, and embarrassing and exciting all at once, learning each other like that. Working it all out together like a puzzle. She’d seen for the first time how a best friend could become something infinitely more precious, and she’d wanted to stay in that bunk with him forever. In a sense, of course, Reginald would be there forever. The memory tugged at her, wanting to distract, but was ultimately unable to withstand the power of the present.

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Dexter whispered, “did you . . . enjoy yourself, those few times?”

“I suppose so.” She was thinking how very odd it was, to have a conversation with a man whose finger was sliding into one’s vagina. Then she ceased thinking as his thumb brushed higher and set every nerve in her body alight.

“No,” he said, and chuckled yet again. “I mean did he make you come? Have a climax,” he clarified when she looked at him curiously.

There were feelings and memories, and then there were fairy tales. “Women don’t have climaxes.”

Laughter was wholly inappropriate to the situation, she thought. And these were no chuckles from Dexter but a deep, genuine belly laugh.

“I assure you they do,” he said at last, wiping a tear against his shoulder.

“That’s a myth, invented by whores to make men feel like gods,” she replied, echoing the words she had overheard at a soiree, uttered among three married women who thought they were safe from eavesdroppers behind the cover of a large potted palm. She’d found it comforting to hear that, as she’d been worried she and Reginald hadn’t had time to get to all the important things and an orgasm would definitely qualify as an important thing to have missed.

Dexter shook his head, bemused. He moved his hand on her sex again, causing an almost unsettling amount of pleasure. Charlotte had expected him to stroke there a few times, then enter her and proceed as usual. She wasn’t sure what to make of this . . . playing for its own sake.

“I think I may well feel like a god when I make you come.”

He sat up, hand still in her lap, and knelt between her legs. Charlotte felt exposed, revealed in more ways than physically. She didn’t like not to know things. She didn’t like to feel a fool. But she found it difficult to resist a challenge, and even more difficult to resist the idea of being touched by this imposing man in her bed. Such an unlikely husband.

“Nonsense.” She already didn’t believe herself.

“So you feel nothing when I do this? Or . . . this?” He described a circle with his thumb on that most sensitive knot of nerves, and smiled like sin incarnate when she moaned. “Then I don’t suppose you’ll be bothered in the slightest if I kiss you there?”

Suiting the action to the word, he dipped his head and went to work. Charlotte could tell, even in her feverish agony of arousal, that he was very familiar with the whole business. He never hesitated, he knew precisely where to put his tongue and lips and fingers, where to suck and nibble and lick and plunge. And he observed, Charlotte noticed. He adjusted constantly, responding to her reactions in an escalating series of moves and countermoves. A skilled negotiation of her pleasure. She knew, before she was even at the brink of the crisis, that she had never been more wrong about anything in her life than she had been about this.

Dexter lifted his mouth away when she was trembling, staring at a precipice of sensation, ready to fling herself over but not sure how to do it. At the loss of stimulation, Charlotte made a noise that was nearly a growl. He chuckled again, but not in a mean-spirited way. If anything, he sounded delighted for her.

“Please. Please, Dexter, don’t . . . please do . . . I can’t . . .” She couldn’t find her words. They had all flown straight out of her head, and the only thing she could think of was
more
.

“But women don’t climax,” he reminded her.

She wanted to kill him. The smug bastard. But first she needed him to finish what he’d started. If he didn’t, she thought she might die.

“Please!”

“Well, since you’re begging.”

It took her a moment to find it again, the keen edge of that bliss. And then he moved his lips and fingers again just so, and she found it and was sliced clean through by it, lost to everything as her body showed her what it could do.

Despite what she had told him, she had always had her suspicions that there was more to the whole thing than the first gentle, then frantic though not unpleasant prodding she had experienced with Reginald. But she had never imagined anything like this.

“Please,” Charlotte whispered when she could form words again, as she watched him unbutton his trousers with frantic speed. She wasn’t even sure what she was asking for. She felt an aching emptiness, and then Dexter filled it. Filled her, body and soul. He had to push himself into her a little at a time, letting her adjust. It didn’t quite hurt, but it was unexpected. Different. Perhaps, she thought, each man really was a wholly new experience.

“So fucking tight,” he said roughly, sounding not at all displeased. “
God
, Charlotte.”

His coarse words, his tension, communicated with that heat low in her belly, firing it again. Like a magical creature, hard to dispel once summoned, her arousal hovered where her body met his. She didn’t know what to do with it. This was nothing like those nights with Reginald, nothing at all. A different universe of experience. This would change everything. She felt it changing with every breath.

“Are you all right?”

He was still working deeper, languidly, and he raised himself to his elbows to look at her. Big hands framed her face, stroking her cheeks. Big shoulders blocked out her view of the dimly lit berth. Big body, splitting hers in two, so that she thought it should hurt and didn’t know how it could feel good. More insanity.

“Am I all right?” She wasn’t sure. Charlotte wasn’t even sure who she was in that moment, much less how that stranger felt. “Dexter, I can’t . . . I don’t know how.”

How to do this thing properly. Or how to speak, evidently.

He was driving the sense right out of her.

“You’re thinking too hard,” he reassured her. “Don’t think. Just let your body tell you what to do, sweet.”

Then he kissed her, which helped enormously. Soft and velvet, as gentle with his tongue as he was firm and determined between her legs. He finally hit her limit, somewhat before his own, and cursed softly against her lips.

“Move with me, Charlotte. Let me in. I’ll make it good for you, I promise.”

She believed him. She didn’t think. She moved, raising her legs to wrap over his hips, arching her back to get closer, and letting him in. They sighed together, stealing each other’s breath. The ship surged and so did they, until Charlotte’s senses were completely overwhelmed with Dexter. When she came again, writhing closer still to the source of the pleasure, he laughed that same delighted laugh.

“I don’t feel like a god,” he murmured into her ear. “I feel like I’m worshipping a goddess. Worshipping inside your body with mine.”

She might have wept at that, she wasn’t sure. It was too much. It did to her emotions what his touch had done to her body, changing the known universe in the blink of an eye.

When he followed her into bliss, finally collapsing exhausted and rolling her with him to keep them connected without crushing her, Charlotte clung to him like a barnacle. Unwilling to have it over, whatever this new thing was. But aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she had quite possibly made an error of such grave magnitude it could cost her everything.

Eight

THE OCEAN LINER
ALBERTA
, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO LE HAVRE

DEXTER HAD LIED.
He
had
felt like a god. Seeing Charlotte shatter, tasting her surrender, had been a moment so rare Dexter could not help but be anxious lest he never manage to repeat it. Being inside her was pleasure beyond comprehension. He had felt more than godlike.

He had felt
complete
.

Dexter had rather thought he was already complete. To find at this juncture that he had evidently been missing something so significant was extremely unsettling.

Charlotte
unsettled him. Her determination, her attempts to be solemn and businesslike when she was alone with him. She was obviously set upon the idea of mourning her late husband forever, as if she were duty bound to do so and deserved nothing else. Dexter thought Charlotte perhaps saw herself as broken. Beyond repair. Dexter didn’t think so. He wondered if she knew how much of her own clean, pure spirit shone through when she was acting out her little charade for the other passengers. Teasing and flirting and prancing about the ship as though she hadn’t a thought in her head or a care in the world. She looked as though she were rediscovering what it meant to have fun.

Now she looked like a fallen woman, gorgeously debauched and sleeping the sleep of the exhausted unrighteous in his bed. A fallen, lascivious angel.

She was an angel who would be his only for a few precious weeks or months, if all went as expected in France. Then they would complete their masquerade with a genteel separation upon returning to America. At such time as either of them wanted to marry again in the future, there would be a discreet divorce or, if they could convince the court they qualified, an annulment.

For Crown and country, Dexter reminded himself. But here in the dark it was just the two of them, and Dexter found himself wishing the storm could go on indefinitely.

“But it’s stopped,” he realized.

“Mmm?” Charlotte nestled against his chest, eyes still closed.

“The storm has passed. Shh, go back to sleep.”

She clung to him a moment, but he worked his way free of the tangled bedclothes and her enticing limbs to leave the berth. The gaslights, with their automatic pilots, were back on, and he turned them all down carefully while checking for damage about the cabin and ascertaining that it was still night.

After taking care of other needs he returned to the soft, warm cocoon of the bunk, and the woman still curled there with one hand tucked under her chin.

She was awake, and watching him.

“I don’t suppose I could convince you it was a very bad idea, and we must never repeat it?”

Dexter grinned. “Never in a million years. Do you really not want to repeat it?”

Charlotte sat up, taking his breath away. She was still gloriously naked, and seemed to have overcome her shyness. Knowing her even a little Dexter suspected it was a brave front, a point of pride with her not to seem ashamed of herself or her actions. He admired that, and admired her. He already wanted her again.

“It doesn’t matter whether I
want
it. Animals
want
. Human beings
reason
. I can forgive myself a momentary lapse, but I have a job to do and mustn’t lose sight of my mission.”

Which Dexter knew was absolutely true. But for at least the next week, it was a moot point and they both knew it.

He drew his legs in and pulled the curtain closed, not bothering to fasten it but hoping to recreate the earlier mood. Charlotte reached out and batted the curtain open again, seeming to relax a bit once her view of the cabin was restored. The storm had brought warmer air, it seemed, and the small enclosure was humid now. Dexter could feel the linen of his shirt sticking to his back. Funny, how little things could be magnified when one was aroused. As though all the nerves were suddenly operating at higher capacity.

“Human beings are animals,” he reminded her, peeling the shirt off, “and though we can reason, we also have needs. We deny that part of our nature at our peril. People are also, I think, a bit like temperamental machines. We need to run at full speed sometimes, and stretch to our capacity. It clears the works, helps the settings keep their calibration. A steam car that’s never throttled all the way up wears out faster than one that gets used at top speed on occasion, did you know that?”

“I am not a steam car, Lord Hardison.”

Oh, but it was arch, her expression and the words she spoke. He felt a hint of something devilish and raw. Not only desire. She made him want to
play
.

“You’re a very fine machine indeed,
Lady
Hardison. If you were my steam car, I’d run you at full throttle nightly.”

She couldn’t resist answering in kind, but her question was more pointed than he had expected.

“The sort of steam car you purchase outright? Or the kind you lease on holiday and return after a fortnight when the thrill of driving something new has worn off?”

He felt the smile play around his lips, a grace note of admiration rising above the symphony already filling his mind. “I suspect it would take a good deal longer than a fortnight.”

She bit her lower lip, worrying it for a moment, and then repeated quietly, “I am
not
a steam car.”

Mere hours earlier, he had asked her a question in much the same tone of voice.
Must we pretend
? They both wanted something more straightforward, apparently. The pretense had ended. Earlier it had seemed easier because lust was motivating them both. Reasoning her into doing it again, Dexter realized, would take more work.

“Give me this week,” he suggested, not sure where the inspiration had come from. “While we’re still on the ship. Once we’re in France . . . we’ll reevaluate.”

Silence. Stillness. And then a small, quick nod, so subtle he almost missed it in the dark.

* * *

DEXTER HAD FOUND
it easy enough before, if frustrating, to pretend he was a love-struck buffoon. He had enjoyed Charlotte’s company, her quick mind and sly wit. It was especially amusing to see her fool people into thinking she was a blithe, vapid bit of society fluff.

Now he had a new element to contend with, something novel to him and quite unexpected.
Jealousy
. Dexter found himself following his young bride about the ship all day, bristling whenever she encountered another man who seemed to appreciate what he saw in her.

That was practically every man, of course. Even the ones who assumed her head was empty couldn’t help but take the measure of her body with their eyes. She was tiny but perfect, a pocket Venus as Matthew Pence had once described her, and Dexter knew only too well the temptation presented by those dainty curves. A creature so delicate made any man feel larger and stronger, more protective. He had to constantly repress the urge to lift her, to carry her. If he could have, he would have stowed her in his pocket for safekeeping.

Days became insubstantial and too long, a purgatory of waiting for darkness. Nights were almost painfully real, fierce and sweet and desperate. He found Charlotte’s passion astonishing, her occasional reticence a delightful challenge. He pushed, even as he knew she was still holding back some part of herself. He told himself each day that he would stop that night, talk with her, find the root of her fears and concerns so he could vanquish them.

But each night she was there in the berth. So vital, so much more present than anybody he had ever known. Though Dexter took, he knew Charlotte was taking too, using him to exorcise some personal demon of hers. How could he mind, when the process took him to Heaven again and again? But how could he ignore her obvious emotional pain? When he asked, she never would say what was wrong.

Later, we can sort it out later. We’ll reevaluate after we get to Honfleur
.

He didn’t want to repair Charlotte, because she wasn’t broken, even if she thought she was. He wanted to recondition her, body and soul, restoring ease and flexibility where stiffness and wear had taken over. If she were a steam car, or any other type of mechanism imaginable, he could have fixed her up by now and had her running like the finest Swiss clockwork. But with a person, Dexter didn’t even know what tools to use.

It was a long week, but not nearly long enough. The charming, bubbly patter from Lady Hardison began to sound strained and forced to Dexter’s ears by the last few days of the voyage. His own attempts at manly bonhomie were exhausting him, and only partly due to the lack of sleep. Nobody else seemed to notice anything amiss. Perhaps they assumed the newlyweds had overdone it, a safe enough assumption, especially given how sick Lady Hardison had been during the first half of the voyage.

They were in the bunk, overdoing it for perhaps the last time when the captain’s voice on the intercom announced the French coast had been spotted. They would be landing in Le Havre in a few hours’ time.

Charlotte startled at the announcement, looking for all the world like a deer about to bound away at the crackling of a twig. Dexter stroked her sides and haunches, shifting under her, settling her and reclaiming her attention.

“We still have time, love.”

She nodded, but her fair hair was tumbling over her face. He smoothed it up out of the way to see her expression, then wished he hadn’t. She looked raw, exposed. He didn’t like to see her uncertain.

“We don’t have much time,” she corrected him, as though she felt duty bound to be the voice of restraint. “And when we get to Honfleur we won’t have any. A week at the most, for you to evaluate things at the station and me to prove the
Gossamer Wing
’s suitability to Murcheson. We must be in Paris within nine days of our arrival here, if I’m to make this window of opportunity to try for the documents while there’s no moon. Otherwise we’ll be stuck in France another month at least before I can try again.”

“So let’s not waste this time.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, relieved when she smiled. And then he gasped when she squeezed herself around him quite deliberately.

“I want to do something new,” Charlotte said, shy but not quite whispering, “make the most of it.”

With the limited amount of cognition available to him, Dexter ran through the past few nights in his mind. Mentally, he ticked off things they had already done, a surprisingly impressive list of accomplishments for such a short time. He realized he had quite thoroughly corrupted the girl.

Not a complete corruption, perhaps. Charlotte was still shy in front of him, and that was one area in which he hadn’t pushed very hard. Now, seeing her so vulnerable, he was struck with a perverse desire to break her down even further. See just how far she would allow herself to be pushed . . . and perhaps create one last fond memory to tuck away in the album of his mind, depending on how things went in Honfleur. He tried not to think further ahead than that. He told himself it was just sex. Just sex with the most extraordinary women he’d ever met. Not lovemaking, and certainly not love, because that would never do. Charlotte would have none of that.

“Ride me,” he ordered, pulling her hips into his.

“We’ve done this,” she breathed, even as she complied.

“And touch yourself.”

Her hips gave a little hitch, then kept moving. Her hair slipped forward again, hiding one eye. It swayed with each breath she took. After a moment, Dexter pulled one of her hands from his chest and put it where he wanted it, daring her with his eyes. Then, because he was anxious about what would happen once they disembarked, and because he felt like a petulant child about to be forced to give up a favorite new toy, he raised the stakes.

“You’ve never done that for yourself, have you?” He didn’t expect an answer, but he knew she hadn’t. She couldn’t have, if she’d reached the age of twenty-seven still believing women couldn’t have orgasms. “You wanted something new. This would be two new things in one go. Doing it in the first place, and also doing it in front of somebody else.”

It was getting harder to control his urge to thrust, harder to resist the sweet pull of desire that swelled his cock and made him want to rush to a conclusion. But just as he had decided to let it go, decided she wasn’t ready for that particular challenge, he saw her fingers start to move.

She was hesitant at first, finding the right spot. He ran one fingertip lightly over the back of her hand, feeling each tendon and muscle as she worked out the tempo and pressure. Her pace picked up as she grew more assured, as she found her own way down that path for the first time. It was coarse and fascinating, the storm of activity taking place at the spot where their bodies were joined. Dexter couldn’t tear his eyes away, even though the sight made him ache for release.

Charlotte gasped, and Dexter looked up at her face as she began to tremble and clench around him. Her fingers flew, and their bodies collided again and again with noisy, wet enthusiasm that would have been enough by itself to send Dexter to oblivion. But the lewd sight of her pleasuring herself was nothing compared to the sight of her face, her eyes on his, the joy and embarrassment and need and relief. All shared in a single glance. She had never truly been naked before him, but she was now. She had pulled out her soul for him to see, and it was so beautiful it nearly blinded him.