He knew also what she would be doing. She was enjoying strawberries. In a manner guaranteed to make a saint fall. He grew hard just thinking about it.
He stared at the paper in his hand, not seeing the threats or the vile words, seeing instead the image of his wife as she had appeared the past night, curled up in his bed. He had been surprised to find her there after the scene at Countess Lieven’s, and especially after he had lectured her the entire way home about his expectations for his countess’s behavior. She had said not a word, sitting quietly as she listened to his reprimands until he began to feel he was an ogre, full of nothing but scolds and remonstrations. And yet she had sought his bed rather than her own. He had puzzled over this as he stood, candle in hand, gazing down on her for a moment that seemed to stretch into a thousand. Her hair had been loose, flowing over the white linen, flickering away from her as if she were a phoenix rising from the flames. His eyes traced a path down her satiny freckled cheek as it rested against her blue palm. She was asleep, and the sight of her so peaceful, so lovely, so very right did something deep inside him.
A tiny ray of light pierced the blackness of his soul and began to glow. He had wronged her, misjudged her. She was no Elizabeth, using his physical desire for her own gain; she was simply his Gillian, his wife, the woman who muddled her way through life with an impish smile and devilish twinkle in her eye. He sighed as he slipped into bed and curled up behind her, sharing her warmth, feeling suddenly as if a burden had shifted, lightening a little.
Why had she agreed to marry him? he wondered suddenly. Marriage to him offered security and a title, but he knew instinctively that neither mattered to her. He stroked the arm curled around her ribs and breathed in the seductive scent of sleepy woman. Why had she married him? The thought tortured him most of the night and into an indescribably lovely English summer morning.
“Mmmmmm.”
Her voice caressed him in a manner that was almost physical, and yet his reaction to it was far more profound than any mere physical reaction could be. The light inside him strengthened, casting the far edges of his soul into dark, forbidding shadows. He stared with unseeing eyes at the letter as he looked deep into the heart of the light. The light was Gillian. She had somehow managed to work her way into the deepest recesses of his being, and there she burned like a beacon. Noble waited with a sick feeling for the black thing that slithered around in his soul to find the brightness, to extinguish it, but the black thing was miraculously banished to a far corner. Noble basked in the glow of the light, feeling for the first time as if life did hold some promise, as if there was some reason for his existence.
“Mmmmm. So good.”
He sighed, unable to bear the torment any longer. He had to look. “Did you wish something, my dear?”
Gillian looked up from the pamphlet in which she was engrossed. “No, nothing, Noble. Thank you.”
He watched her reach for another strawberry and hold it before her mouth, her mind engaged in reading the literature before her. He felt his breathing stop as he watched, waiting. Slowly Gillian parted her lips, the strawberry a hairsbreadth away from that luscious mouth, the very tip of her tongue emerging to lightly stroke the fruit’s heavy round fullness.
Noble felt himself grow hard as steel at the sight. He swallowed back the tightness that threatened to choke him and tried to drag his attention from the erotic sight of his wife eating strawberries to the more important issue of who was threatening to do her bodily harm. The words swam before his eyes and he couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing. Would she have finished licking the essence from the strawberry by this time? Would her small white teeth be pulling at the succulent fruit, tugging its globular, delicate flesh with little nips until it surrendered to the lure of her sweet, hot mouth? Would her tongue make a reappearance as she licked the juices from her soft, warm lips?
He couldn’t help himself. He looked up. She was chewing, a green stem dangling between her long, delicate, albeit bluetinted, fingers.
“More strawberries, my dear?” he asked, his voice strangely hoarse. She looked into the bowl he was offering. “Well, I shouldn’t, but I do love strawberries so. Perhaps just one or two more.”
He deftly turned the bowl so she would have to take the largest one, a veritable giant among strawberries, one that had two distinct hemispheres. He felt himself harden to a degree he would have thought impossible outside the realm of marble as Gillian’s little pink tongue snaked out and caressed one side of the giant strawberry.
“Mmmm,” she murmured happily, her eyes closed in bliss as she gave herself over to the pleasure of tasting the mammoth berry. Noble thought he would either shame himself or swoon when she took one half of the strawberry into the hot, moist, silky cave of her mouth and sucked the juices from its flesh. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, aware only of his overwhelmingly intense desire to throw her down on the table and plunge himself deep into her womanly depths. Repeatedly. For a lengthy period of time, say a week or two. Maybe longer.
A small trickle of red juice escaped her lush, pink lips. Noble’s tongue swelled up at the sight of it.
“Gark,” he said, unable to tear his eyes from it as it traced a path down toward her chin.
“Pardon?” she asked, reaching for her linen napkin.
“Allow me,” he croaked, and lunged awkwardly out of his chair toward her, his own cloth held clenched in his fingers. He glanced at it quickly, calculated the amount of energy it would take to unlock his rigid fingers, and leaned down.
“You have some juice. Just there.” His voice was rustier than iron left in saltwater. “Allow me to attend to it.”
She turned her head slightly, the tempting fruit still held before her lips. Noble inhaled the sweet smell of Gillian mingled with the earthy scent of strawberry just before his tongue touched her skin. He followed the path the juice had made up to its source and paused, looking into her fathomless eyes.
“Bite?” she asked, her voice strange and rough. It reached out and struck a resonance deep within him, like a harp string quivering after it had been plucked.
Gillian’s lips parted. Her tongue pulled part of the strawberry into the sweet darkness of her mouth. Noble was sure he would die if he didn’t taste that piece of fruit. He gripped Gillian’s chair on either side of her and forced her head back as he claimed both her mouth and the strawberry.
He hardened to granite. The juice from the strawberry mingled as their tongues twined around each other, dancing, teasing, sending Noble into a blissful state. Little warning bells began to chime in the back of his head as he slid his tongue along the inside of her silken cheek, tasting strawberry, tasting Gillian, tasting paradise. He started to reach for her, needing to feel himself buried in her warmth, drawing from it, merging himself into it, into the heat that was Gillian. He needed her warmth to feed the light burning so bravely inside him. He needed her at that exact instant.
“ ’Ere be the kippers ye were wantin’—eh, take ’em back, lads. ’Is lordship isn’t ’ungry for ’em anymore.”
Noble snapped his head back from Gillian just in time to see the insolent grin on Crouch’s face before the door closed. He felt as if someone had doused him with a bucket of ice water. He looked down at Gillian, down to where his fingers were white as they clutched the sides of her chair. Her breasts were rising and falling erratically, her eyes misty with passion. He tried to swallow but couldn’t.