pretend to myself that he is just a man, just a cock, I will have to close my eyes, because we can see each other now, in the silvery darkness. I can see his gleaming eyes and tousled hair and the slim, angular outline of his shoulders that feel solid under my palms as I am holding on to him. He feels so solid and strong, strands of muscle and sinew under warm, smooth skin, but he looks almost fragile, like a specter, like a phantasma. Like a boy. I remember watching the side of his neck in the car this morning, and how on the plane he made a little nook for us with his body, and the pleading expression in his eyes when he turned to me in the restaurant and said I don’t want them! I want you!
“No,” I murmur against his lips and set to work.
I am neither surprised nor disappointed that he comes about three minutes later. I meant him to. I made him. What does surprise me is how close I was to coming myself. I don’t, usually, with a new man, not right away, not the first few times, not if it’s someone I care about. Surely not with Giles Cleveland!
Almost. I am seconds away from an orgasm, but also seconds away from falling asleep; it is the most bizarre feeling. If I roused myself just a little more, just stretched that little bit further, I would crash on the other side of a huge climax and then…I don’t know what then. Sleep for a hundred years.
I fall asleep. The last thing I remember is wrapping my arms around his neck and resting my cheek on his naked shoulder. No, the last thing I remember is the insidious bite of doubt whether he would want me to stay or to leave.
“Don’t leave…” The bedclothes rustle; his fingers touch my thigh and close around my knee as I scramble onto my haunches. “In the fairy tales the princess always has to stay with the ogre till the morning.”
“Ogre?” I can hear the smile in my own voice.
“To break the spell.”
I am amazed at how well he understands what this is about, and yet I have to ask, “Is that what we’ve been doing here?”
“I thought that was the idea.” Warm, gentle fingers are inching their way up my thigh. “I’ll feel horribly lonely when you leave.”
His hand slips round my waist, the flat of his hand against the small of my back; the mattress sags, and he pulls himself toward me. I only realize what he is about when I hear him groan and feel his cheek on my thigh and his face nestling against my naked belly.
Never in a million years had I expected Giles Cleveland would be so open, so trusting as a lover. It disarms me completely, and at the same time it exasperates me. What on earth was the trouble between him and Amanda? He is lovely. Just lovely.
Curled around me like a lanky dog, he offers me access to all parts of his body, and it is only because I am tenuously holding on to the resolution to go back to my room that I do not avail myself of this opportunity. One hand in his hair, the other on his neck, I try not to think of the long strands of muscle along his spine, and how easily I could run my hand down to the smooth, taut globes of his buttocks…and the demesnes that there adjacent lie. I drop a kiss onto the temple that is facing up, hoping that this will help me preserve a state of maternal tenderness.
“And there’s another thing,” he murmurs against my skin.
“What other thing?”
“In the fairy tales the magic number is always three.”
The sensation of his lips between my breasts clarifies the meaning of this remark more efficiently than my addled brain can decode it.
“Giles—don’t!” I clutch his hair roughly, but of course I cannot push away a man who has both his arms wrapped around my waist.
“Have you already had enough of me, after that pathetic little performance? Don’t I get a chance at a make-up exam?”
“I haven’t had enough of you.” Saying it out loud sends a shiver of anxiety over my skin, but it is dark, and so I say it like it is. “But I know I will be lonely tomorrow, and I want to go back now. To find out how bad the loneliness will be.”