The Englishman (52 page)

I couldn’t suppress the long, low moan if my life depended on it, and I arch myself toward his mouth for more. He grips me harder and leaves a trail of heat along my throat, to the top of my breast, the nipples as hard as marbles in anticipation of his mouth.

“Giles, please…”

He nestles his face against the side of mine, into my hair. Very still.

“Say that again.”

I shrug my arms out of the blouse sleeves and wrap them around his neck.

“Giles,” I whisper against his ear, because I know that he isn’t demanding my submission, he’s asking for my tenderness. “Giles, please…”

Without further ado he cups my left breast, fastens his hard, tender mouth on the tip and suckles it; his other hand is splayed across my right breast, its tip between its fingers, circling it with its thumb. His bright, silver-streaked head is in my arms, so close to my heart, and I know that I have never in my life been so comprehensively, so painfully aroused as by this man.

With one impatient movement he pulls me against himself, my thighs on either side of him. He is holding me by the waist and his fingers dig into the muscles running along my spine, but if I want more of him, I’ll have to get it myself.

“Kiss me,” I whisper.

“No.”

For the first time since he has come in, he looks at me, and in the dim light of the sky above our heads, he is beautiful. But he is not enjoying this in the same way he enjoyed sleeping with me at Notre Dame. He isn’t happy. He was so radiant with pleasure then, so frank and unguarded in his delight that I would open my legs for him and welcome his touch. What I see gleaming at the back of his deep-set eyes now is a tense wariness, coupled with a determination I can’t identify.

“It’s such a loving thing, isn’t it? A kiss. I don’t feel particularly loving toward you these days.”

“Then let me go!”

“You don’t want me to touch you?”

“No!”

To my surprise he appears to accept this. He bows his head in apparent resignation, only to reach behind me and clasp my wrists again, bend my elbows so that my lower arms are parallel with each other and he can pin them together with one hand, none too gently.

“I’ll just test that, if I may,” he murmurs, his voice hot in my ear. The fingers of his free hand find my breast, thumb pushes hard nipple into soft flesh, again none too gently. Then he bites into the side of my neck.

I shudder and cry out. But no amount of outrage can curb the blatant, voluptuous need that wells up in me like a spring tide. He is biting hard enough to startle me, his mouth slowly descends to my shoulder, leaving tingling seals of his possession, but not hard enough to frighten me. In my struggle to free my hands, I shrug my shoulders and bruise his mouth. He swallows a curse and rears up; we are both panting, both torn between lust and rage. The gray specks in his eyes glitter like polar ice, and I have to fight down an impulse to apologize, to shy away.

Well, fuck that!

A smile creeps into my eyes, I can feel it, and I know it looks like satisfaction.

“Serves you right.” My voice is hoarse, but well audible.

He doesn’t even reply. His fingers tighten around my wrists and his mouth seizes mine. Our tongues clash; he is kissing me. He said he wouldn’t, but he’s kissing me and I’m responding blindly, ravenously. His mouth, however angry he is with me, is a wonderfully sensuous mouth, demanding yet tender when he kisses me, surprisingly malicious when it returns to my shoulder. He has released my wrists, and after shrugging out of my bra, I sling my aching arms around his neck, leaving space enough between our bodies only for his hands on my breasts, and with them he is as rough as I need him to be now. He pulls me close; the wool of his jacket is rough against my hyper-sensitive skin, his stomach hard against my writhing crotch, and I try to stifle my moans in the warm, fragrant nook of his throat, in his hair, my burning face against his.

“Say that you want me!”

His voice rattles in my ear, and I can only whimper in response; my bones and my flesh are melting down into a heaving mass of sensation, melting against his fully dressed body, when I’m so naked. I know what he wants. He wants me to bare my soul to him. He wants to see me naked and defenseless, while he is safe in his tweed armor. I lean away from him so that I can reach down between us. The fabric of his jeans is stretched so tight by his erection I have difficulties even opening the top button, but feeling it, just feeling it through his pants, makes me nosedive for disaster.

I jump down from the table to pull down my underwear, but my boots take forever to unlace. Giles laughs and curses with frustration as he watches, then—“Oh, damn it all!”—he lifts me up onto the table top, crouches down and pushes himself up between my legs, as if he were the thread and my legs, held together by the pantyhose, were the eyelet.

“Very sexy, these boots, but not very—” he brushes against me, misses me “—not very practical!”

We laugh, and then we moan, because there is nothing under the sun and the moon like this fusion and this friction. No wonder the Ancients thought that the universe was made by gods and goddesses fucking.

Held fast between my legs, he doesn’t have a lot of room to maneuver, so he plunges deep into me, moves with deep, short thrusts, pulling me hard against his stomach.

“Look at me.” His voice is like the low rumble of thunder at the end of a scorching summer day.

I peel my cheek from the damp tweed of his shoulder and try to focus on his eyes. They are flickering, like those of a man determined to maintain consciousness under the influence of an overpowering drug. Even now, with my arms and legs clutching him to my body, my pubic bone grinding into his stomach, and his cock wreaking havoc inside me, the sight of his face gives me a jolt. He’s so beautiful, I want to die for him, and I’m going to die, here, right here on his cock, if he keeps on doing what he is doing.

He stops.

“Look at me!”

“I c-can’t!”

I can hardly breathe, let alone speak, and as for looking at him while he is doing this to me—he must be joking. I try to ride him, to tear my pleasure from him on my own terms, but he holds me fast by the waist, neither pressing me down nor lifting me off, he just holds me still, and I want to howl with frustration.

“Anna.”

It crunches my heart into a tight, frightened ball, he says the word so quietly, so tenderly.

“Please,” I whine. “Just fuck me! Just fuck me, please…”

“Anna. I want you to look at me.”

I do, like a girl awaiting a particularly insidious kind of punishment.

“I will fuck you. I am fucking you. But I want you to look at me while I’m doing it.”

And he rocks against me, slowly, so deeply, and when I whimper, he leans forward and kisses me as slowly, as deeply and as thoroughly as he is fucking me. It’s not enough for him to make me drown in my desire for him, the sheer, voluptuous pleasure of feeling him with every square inch of my body, inside as well as outside. He wants to make me drown in
him
.

“Come for me, Anna.”

I’m close, so close, my feet are halfway over the ledge of the cliff, but I’m afraid to jump, frightened of the fall, frightened that he won’t catch me.

I feel him hunch his shoulders, then he pushes his hand down the front of our bodies, the large palm of his hand lies flat against my hot, sweaty stomach, then his fingers reach my clitoris and press it, just press against it, his mouth is on my breast, and he sucks me into an orgasm as keen and hard-edged as a swig of whisky straight from the bottle—sharp, almost painful. My cry of release echoes in the firmament like a cry of pain, and I claw at his shoulders, at his back, to pull him still deeper into me. The still center of the turning world.

I clench my pelvic muscles around him, deliberately now, and we both catch our breaths.

“You’re still h-hard!” I gasp, and if I weren’t still so far gone, this statement of the obvious would make me laugh.

He leans back a little, in the circles of my arms and legs, to see my face. The angry light at the back of his eyes has gone, but he is still fierce with unspent sexual energy.

“Say that you want me!”

I pull myself against him and tilt my hips up against his stomach so that the tip of his cock slides firmly along the sheath of muscle that holds it.

“I want you,” I whisper into his ear as if it were a secret.

He grabs my butt and lifts me off the tabletop—a welcome move, because the hardwood edge is beginning to bruise my flesh—and turns to look for a surface more conducive to physical pleasure. I look for the sofa and scream.

“
What?”
Giles cries, alarmed at my shocked reaction.

The dome is dusky now, and full of shades and half-light, but it is light enough to see that there is someone sitting on the sofa. A bulky figure, his legs crossed, watching.

Nick Hornberger is watching us as we stagger and yelp in our entanglement of limbs and clothes, a beast with two backs. Giles stumbles against the pedestal of one of the smaller telescopes, and in our career across the room he slips out of me. He can’t free himself of me, caught as he is between my legs, and I guess I understand why Hornberger is laughing out loud. That doesn’t make me less protective of my man, though.

“Listen, asshole!” I steady myself against Giles’s body as he leans against one of the bookshelves, heaving. “You have been extremely voluble about your right to fuck who you want whenever you want and where you want! So why don’t you grant the same privilege to other people, and fuck off out of here!”

“My word, this one has spunk!” Hornberger pretends to be impressed. “A feisty little bitch, but I see she’s more game than that frigid wife of yours, Cleveland.”

I look at Giles, and now I am really scared. His face is a sneer of humiliation, and I truly think that if he had his arms and legs free, he would fling himself on Hornberger and start a brawl. But we are not in a saloon in Ardrossan Gulch, and Giles has his arms full of naked woman. How am I going to restore the dignity of a man with his pants around his knees and pantyhose around his back?

“Giles?” I don’t think he can hear me. He is heaving with emotion, and his seething panic makes me panic, too. If I let go of him now, he will fall into an abyss of shame and self-loathing, screaming, his arms and legs flapping ineffectually. With my arms and legs I draw him harder against me.

“Giles!”

He inhales, and his face relaxes. He even looks at me.

“He isn’t important,” I say with as much conviction as I can. “
I am
.”

He gazes into my eyes, and I see his pupils flicker, perhaps in recognition; he blinks. Slowly his eyes narrow in a smile, and he pulls me closer so as to cover my nakedness from view.

“You heard what the lady said, Hornberger. Fuck off, do.”

Hornberger rises from the sofa, and I feel another lurch of fear. We
are
very naked, Giles and I.

“Do you think I will? Just like that? I hear things aren’t going so well for you, Anna. I heard about the stench bomb on Family Weekend. And your students drop out like flies because your class discussions are too prurient? What will the Provost think when he hears about your trysts with a tenured colleague on college premises?”

“All right.” Giles grabs me and walks back to the big table. “Hold on!” He ducks and slips out from between my legs, pulls up his pants and takes off his jacket. “Cover up.”

I draw my knees up to my chest and huddle under the warm tweed without pushing my arms into the sleeves.

“Now. You will not drag Anna’s name through the mud, nor mine. And I’ll tell you why. It all hangs on a slim file that I have in my possession, and have had, for weeks.”

“
You
have it!” Hornberger’s shoulders stiffen, then he deflates like a brawny balloon. “How did you get it off him? And—when?”

“Found it in Anna’s office when we cleared out Corvin’s hoard. Call it chance. Call it fate. That was in the first week of the semester, actually, so you could have saved yourself the bother of prowling around in people’s offices and just molested a few more of our students in the meantime.”

Hornberger is making a good show of keeping his countenance, but he is completely bowled over. “Can we talk about this? Perhaps we can—”

“Oh, shut up, Nick!”

“What will you do with it? Hand it over to the papers so they can run another article about me?”

“You
are
paying rather dearly for free sex with young women.” Giles hesitates. “Was it worth it?”

“Depends on the finale of this little farce,” Hornberger jeers, showing his teeth. “Fucking a woman like you just fucked that one makes you feel like a god, doesn’t it? That’s got to be worth some risk.”

Giles gazes at him.

“Yeah,” he says after a long pause.

Hornberger returns to the subject closer to his heart than student totty. “What are you going to do with the file?”

“If you refrain from bandying a lady’s name about the place, I will make sure it does not reach the hands of university admin, nor of the police. I would ask you for your word, if I thought it was worth anything.”