Simply Magic (15 page)

“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 naïveté 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.

Sensation stabbed like a knife up into her throat and behind her nose, down through her womb and along her inner thighs.

It was the moment at which she abandoned self-deception.

This was no ordinary, innocent friendship.

It never had been.

She could not bear the thought of tomorrow. But it was not just because she would be losing a friend. She would also be leaving behind the man with whom she had tumbled headlong and hopelessly in love.

Hopelessly
being a key word.

Hopelessly. Without all hope. Without any future.

There was only now.

He lifted his head and brought his mouth close to hers again. But instead of kissing her, he gazed deep into her eyes, his own heavy with a desire that clearly matched her own. It was not hard to interpret that look even though she had not seen it on a man's face before.

“Stop me now,” he murmured, “or heaven help us both.”

Stop?

No! Oh, no. If there was no future, if there was only now, she would not have it snatched away from her—forever. She would have the whole of it.

It was not rational thought, of course, with which she considered his words. She was past rational thought—but had no experience with anything else. Her mind did not even touch upon virtue or morality. Even less did it touch upon consequences or the very real dangers inherent in
not
stopping him.

There was only now.

Now he was here with her.

Tomorrow she would be gone, and the day after so would he.

“Susanna?” he whispered again.

“Don't stop,” she said. “Please don't stop.”

He did not stop. He turned her onto her back, kissing her, baring her other breast and fondling her with expert hands and lips while she lay beneath him, bewilderment and desire and sheer physical sensation tumbling together through every vein and bone and nerve ending in her body.

And then he lifted the hem of her dress, drawing it all the way up to her hips and disposing of undergarments until she could feel the grass against her bare flesh. He fumbled with the waist flap of his pantaloons and brought himself over between her legs, which he parted with his own before sliding his hands firmly beneath her to cushion her against the hardness of the ground.

She knew what happened. With her intellect, she knew the process—or some of it anyway. She knew about penetration and the spilling of the seed. It had always seemed to her that it must be both painful and embarrassing, though she had always wanted to experience it anyway.

There
was
pain. He came into her slowly but firmly, pressing past the barrier of her virginity until he was deeply embedded in her.

There was no embarrassment.

She had not known how large he would feel, how hard, how deep.

And she had known nothing of what happened between penetration and the spilling of the seed.

What happened was pain and pleasure and shock and satisfaction all rolled into one. Pain as he withdrew and thrust over and over again past the soreness of her newly opened womanhood. Pleasure because it was more wonderful, more exhilarating, than any other sensation she had ever experienced. Shock because she had not expected such a deep and vigorous and prolonged invasion of her body. Satisfaction because now, before it was too late, he was her lover. Because she would always be able to remember him as her lover.

Despite the pain and the shock, she wanted it never to end. She braced her feet on the ground, feeling the supple leather of his boots along the insides of her legs as she did so, wrapped her arms about him, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to feel every painful, powerful, wonderful stroke of his body into hers, to hear every labored breath they both drew, to smell his cologne and the very essence of his maleness, to understand that at last, for once in her life, she was celebrating her sexuality—with a man she loved.

She would not be sorry afterward.

Surely she would not.

She would not even think of afterward.

But it came anyway.

His rhythm quickened and his strokes deepened until he held still in her, every muscle tense, and then sighed and relaxed even as she felt the gush of a greater heat deep inside.

She swallowed against a moment's disappointment that now it was over.

Forever.

It did not matter. It
would
not matter. She would always remember.

He drew free of her and rolled off her, careful to lower her skirt over her legs and lift her bodice over her breasts as he did so. He lay on his back beside her after setting his own clothing to rights, one arm flung over his eyes, the other hand palm-down over the back of hers as it lay on the grass between them.

It seemed to her that he slept for a few minutes.

How could anyone possibly
sleep
after that? But he had, of course, expended a great deal of energy.

Deep inside her she harbored his seed.

The beginnings of rational thought niggled at the edges of her mind.

“Susanna,” he said sleepily, while she lay with closed eyes, reliving every moment of what had just happened.

She turned her head to look at him. He was tousled, slightly flushed, impossibly handsome.

“Come away with me,” he said.

“What?” An irrational hope blossomed for a moment.

“Let's go away,” he said. “Why say good-bye when neither of us wants it to happen? Let's go to North Wales. Let's see Mount Snowdon together and go walking over the hills and along the beaches. Let's do it. Let's run free.”

And the horrible thing was, she thought as she stared at him, that he meant it. And that for two pins she would have cast caution and good sense to the winds and agreed to go with him.

“And afterward?” she said.

“Afterward?” He laughed softly. “To the devil with afterward. We will think of that when the time comes. I won't ever leave you destitute, though, I promise. Come with me. Let's do it.”

Rational thought came crashing back from wherever it had been hiding and took up residence in her conscious mind again.

She would be his mistress.

They would have a wild, doubtless glorious fling together, and then he would pay her off. Because he was a basically decent and kind man, he would see to it that she did not starve after he discarded her.

She could be his mistress.

His whore.

“I like my life as it is,” she said. “I love the school and my work there and my pupils and my fellow teachers. I have to go back tomorrow.”

“You do not
have
to do anything,” he said.

“You are right.” She sat up and straightened her dress as best she could with slightly shaking hands. “I do not. I do not have to go away with you.”

He sat up too.

“I cannot bear to let you go,” he said as she reached for her bonnet and pulled it on over her disheveled curls. “Can you bear to let
me
go?”

“No,” she admitted, pausing as she tied the ribbons beneath her chin. “But there are no alternatives that I can bear even as well as saying good-bye to you.”

“Susanna—” he began.

But she had got to her feet and stood looking down at him. She had even dredged up a half-cheerful smile from somewhere.