his ministrations diffused through her blood, and then seemed to be called back to her core by a tightening low in her belly. A harbinger of happening. A pulsing, pounding, throbbing thing that rushed at her from a great distance.
Something she was afraid to miss and equally frightened of being run over by. Like a train or a stampede of wild horses.
“Oh,” she fretted breathlessly. “Oh, dear. I—I think I—”
He lifted his lips from her… stealing the sensation away to her utter consternation and relief.
“Don’t think,” he ordered in the voice of a man quite used to giving orders.
“Don’t stop,” she begged, her hand blindly reaching for the head hidden beneath her skirts.
He made a low sound of amusement, breathing a cool stream of air against her overheated flesh. He whispered something she didn’t quite catch and was too overwrought to clarify.
But she thought she heard the word “forever” before his tongue returned to flicker against the little button of pure sensation.
His touch was eternally light. Barely there, even, but it infused her with such an electric pulse her entire body tightened and jerked with it, as if he’d plugged her into one of Edison’s own machines.
She arched and bent with such strength she feared she might snap her spine in two, and he rewarded her by sucking that little bead of flesh into his warm mouth, rolling it gently with his tongue.
A raw sound escaped her, and she returned her hand over her mouth, leaving the other to support her against the stone ledge, all she had keeping her from diving backward into the water.
The wave crashed over her before she even realized it had formed upon the horizon. A crest of such unimaginable, inconceivable euphoria dismantled everything she knew about herself.
She came apart in his hands, against his mouth, and hoped to never again be found.
This was bliss. Rapture. Heaven. And a bit of the other place, too. Because once she’d begun to tumble into the grips of ecstasy, she already understood it was fleeting. That it would inevitably end, lest she die from the intensity of it.
For surely nothing like this could last.
Inevitably his mouth softened, gentled, and returned her back to herself. A self she wasn’t certain what to do with. She was a weak, trembling, overwrought mess, and she couldn’t seem to remember her own name let alone consider what to do next.
So she sat and breathed, because such was the extent of her functional capacity.
She’d expected pleasure… but not that.
Not her unaccountable unraveling.
He left her, sliding from beneath her skirts, and used one of the many ruffles of her petticoats to wipe his mouth before he rested back on his haunches so that they might take the measure of one another.
She couldn’t see much of his body, as he was dressed in all black and the night was a moonless one. The lamps filtered through the fountain and cast the shadows of water against his skin. Like a mirage of tears. An entire ocean of them.
They bled down his stark cheekbones creating hollows beneath, and the effect somehow caused her heart to swell in her chest.
“You look… as if you are in pain,” she ventured, doing her best to lift her boneless arms to reach for him.
“I’m hard as fucking marble.” A crass, almost cruel admission, one that brought her body back to astonishing life.
“Bloody hell,” he panted, running the back of his hand over his mouth again as if to rid it of her flavor. Stopping in the middle of the motion, he curled his fingers into a fist and bit down on his knuckle. Composing himself just long enough to command, “Stop looking at me like that, woman, or I won’t be responsible for what I do next.”
Little trills of danger thrummed through her veins. Something primitive and ancient in this garden of delights. Something as old as the first stories, when a man found a woman who tempted him to sin.
The stories had always offended Prudence as she’d obediently sat in church, listening to holy men blame Eve for everything. For the knowledge of good and evil and the ability to bear fruit. For life, itself.
And for temptation.
Why would God, in all his infinite wisdom imbue them with these forces of nature so powerful, there was barely the sentience to deny them? Didn’t it make sense that a more pagan deity was responsible? Perhaps one with golden hair and electric eyes. With savagely beautiful features and an expression of half hunger,