“Lie down,” he instructed, his tone low and suggestive.
She wanted to lie down, lie with him. When she nodded, he lowered her safely to the ground. She sank down gratefully.
“Rest back, I’ll hold you.”
His voice was reassuring and she gave in to it readily, resting on the bed of succulent bluebells. The fleshy stems and petals around her seemed a bed too blissful, their musk too inviting. Then he was lying alongside her and when she turned to him their gazes locked.
She reached out, touched his jaw with her hand. “Do you need to kiss me again, to make it work?”
“Aye, that I do.” The look he gave her—pleasured and brooding all at once—made her ache for more.
Moving over her, his mouth covered hers, his hard body pressing against hers, heightening her need. His kiss was hungry and Chloris answered in kind. She held tight to him, her body moving under his, her hips arching up. When she felt his hard length pressed against her thigh, she moaned with longing. At her center she clutched as if reaching for him, reaching for that part of him that could join them.
He lifted up onto his arms, looking down at her, but he did not move away.
Nor did she ask him to.
Between her thighs a riotous pulse beat, her folds growing slick and humid with desire. The need for relief was overwhelming. The sunlight was behind his head and Chloris stared up at his shadowed face, wanting more, wanting him. All she could think of was what it might feel like to have that hard length of his driving inside her.
“You are such a temptation,” he whispered.
She had to battle the urge to lift her skirts and beg him to take her. Gathering the fabric in her fisted hands, she wondered where such a wild notion had come from. His spell?
His eyes glinted. Did he know that was what she wanted to do?
“Confide in me. Tell me if you feel a change manifest.”
“A change, yes, but it is...it is desire that I feel.” Overwhelmed, she stared up at him. “It is fertility I seek, and now I begin to question this...lust.”
“Question it?” He leaned closer still, his hand on her waist. “Why would you question it? I can see the vitality in your eyes and the color in your cheeks. Your essential womanly nature is flourishing.” He shifted his hand, moving it, so that it lay over her lower belly.
Even through her skirts she felt it, as if she were being branded by his touch. She moaned aloud, for the proximity of his hand to the place she currently craved him sent her closer to madness. “I should never have come
. I was warned against you.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Were you? And yet you came anyway, putting yourself at risk of the very thing you have been warned about.”
She could not speak, because all she wanted to do was writhe beneath him and it was taking all her efforts not to do so.
He gave her a lingering glance and she saw her own hunger reflected in his eyes. Mutual desire. It struck her fiercely, for it was something she had never known before and it felt right and true and powerful.
“The arousal,” he continued, “it is part of opening the deepest secret part of you to flourish and receive your lovers freely...here.”
Chloris moaned aloud because he applied pressure through her skirts as he spoke, and his hand was directly over her intimate places. She felt herself grow damper still between her thighs. Never before had she felt this way. It was him. And she wanted him. Wanted him badly. Turning her face away, she closed her eyes tightly and tried to steady the wild beating of her heart.
“Ah, I see the true nature of your problem, Mistress Chloris.”
She turned back.
The provocative smile he wore made her ache with longing.
“Your desire is out of control, perhaps?”
Thoroughly ashamed of her predicament, she managed to nod her head.
His hand moved lower still and he applied a mite more pressure, right over her groin.
“Oh, dear God!” She stared down, her lips parting in objection. But when she saw his hand moving there, where the fabric of her gown dipped into the hollow between her legs, she was so astonished that she could not say more.