Excerpt, Almost a Gentleman by Pam Rosenthal
© Pam Rosenthal; excerpt reprinted with permission
The door to his room rattled, opened. He wore a dark blue velvet dressing gown and slippers.
She looked up anxiously. Please, she thought, don't ask me how I like the room. He didn't. Obviously, there were more pressing issues to be dealt with at the moment. Tonight the distance between their bodies dissolved without either of them knowing how.
"Lord," he sighed, after some long, urgent kisses, "what a chaste and dutiful day we've spent."
She laughed. "You must make it up to me. Immediately."
"But not in here," he murmured. "It's too ladylike a venue for what I have in mind."
He took her hand and led her back through the door.
Yes, she thought, this is better. Dark heavy old furniture, red velvet curtains, chairs upholstered in leather with bright brass studs. The walls were covered with framed maps, architectural drawings, mechanical diagrams.
He lifted her onto a massive bed with a high, carved headboard. Somehow, both their dressing gowns had slipped to the floor since they'd entered the room. They ran their hands over one another's bodies, staring into each other's eyes, taking their signals from the gasps and moans they coaxed from one another's lips. There hardly seemed a need for all this play, she thought; his penis was hard, beautifully velvety beneath her fingertips. He could enter her right now: she could feel the heat, the wetness, the luxuriant easing between her legs.
And yet he didn't enter her. Patiently, delicately, he caressed her, his fingers so light against the slit of her quim that she thought she would expire. He wanted her to ask for what she wanted.
She wouldn't. She couldn't. She was comfortable with touch, but timid with words. Words were too ... intimate.
Oh, but he'd moved his hand: now it was only his thumb that rested along the damp line bisecting the mound of her vulva. The rest of his hand simply cupped her, there between her legs — as though she were a goblet resting in his palm — his fingertips moving softly along the bottom curve of her arse. As though he were pausing in thought before making a toast at a banquet.
"Such a beautiful bum," he murmured, "its curve, its lineaments so visible through Marston's trousers. You should have been arrested for incitement to riot."
He seemed content simply to trace the shape of her bottom, perfectly pleased by such a gentle, meditative caress. As though it didn't matter in the slightest how much time passed before his body's evident desires were finally satisfied. As though it were of no importance whatsoever what she might want, or whether she wanted anything at all.
Or course, she thought, she could always ask for what she wanted.
His touch became softer. More diffident, if possible. In a moment he might remove his hand altogether.
Ask for it? Bloody hell, she thought, she'd beg for it.
Her voice trembled. It sounded high and thin in her ears, as though she'd lost her rich lower register.
"Please, David."
"Please what?"
"P-please, David, I want you inside of me."
"Hmmm, which part of me do you want?"
"I want your ... ah, finger."
"Ah, well here it is then. Are you satisfied?"
"Yes, it's very... hmmm... nice." Damn him, it was hard to speak between gasps.
"Just nice, eh?"
"No, it's... wonderful... but..."
"But?"
"But it's not enough. Oh God, David..."
"Another finger perhaps?"
"All your fingers, add them one at a time, oh but... please, David..."
"But what?"
"But nothing, damn your eyes," she bellowed. "Yes, all of them. Now!"
She lay back upon the pillows, throwing her arms over her head to grasp the bed's headboard. Digging her toes into the velvet coverlet, she lifted her hips into the air to follow the vigorous, sweeping arcs he made with his forearm. He knelt beside her, smiling to see her so helpless and yet so greedy. He threw a leg over her, straddling her belly and then inching himself forward; his knees were around her shoulders now, though it seemed he could still reach behind him with his arm, because his fingers — his fist, his knuckles, dear lord — were still within her. She tilted her pelvis a bit, so he wouldn't have to reach so far back. Quickly he slipped a bolster behind her neck, to angle her head closer to him.
He probed at her mouth with the head of his penis. Quickly, she licked the pearl of moisture from its tip. She widened her lips to take him in, to feel him lengthen and — was it possible? — harden even more as he pushed toward her throat. She sucked, pulled at him, arching her neck and spine to allow him to enter as deeply as possible into the back of her mouth. When he pulled back, so that she might caress the tip with her tongue and lips, she felt the weight of his balls, the wiry hair beneath them tickling the tops of her breasts. His hand, though still in her, was quieter. He wanted his own pleasure first, she thought.
Well, all right then, my lord, you shall have it.
She moved down on the bolster, burrowing her face between his legs, flattening her mouth against his belly. She pulled with the muscles of her cheeks, harder and yet not so hard as to distract him from the lascivious flicking and stroking of her tongue. He moved his hips, answering her mouth's caresses with his own short, hard thrusts.
She heard him groan. She saw the muscles of his belly tighten. Tighten and tremble now as well. She breathed his dark earth smell. The salts and vapors of him seemed to seep through her pores; she feasted on his private, pungent flavors: sour, salt, bitter; yeasty, like good bread rising. She opened, loosened, lost herself; she needn't, she couldn't, caress him any longer, she had only to contain him now, to absorb him, to receive what issued from him. To drink him.
Or, as she thought a moment later, to drink as much of him as she'd been capable. Because try as she might, she simply hadn't been able to swallow it all. But there was so much of it, she told herself ruefully, what was a lady to do under the circumstances? A thin stream of his semen dribbled gracelessly from the corner of her mouth. She tried to chase it with her tongue; she didn't get all of it. There was nothing to do but wipe her cheek with her thumb, smiling wryly up at him still kneeling above her. She tried to pull him down on top of her.
Ah, but he was a man of honor, a gentleman with a debt to pay. Ceasing to straddle her now, he kneeled next to her again; his forearm had resumed its vigorous arcs, the fingers even spreading a little, rekindling the all-but-forgotten fires he'd lit earlier. For an instant she wondered how close, how high his hand was... .
But no more questions, no more thoughts — no more thinking — for now she was falling from a very high place, and drifting, drifting downward through the softest, darkest, starry velvet night.
—from Almost a Gentleman: A Novel of Erotic Romance by Pam Rosenthal(used with permission)
