She looked at Daniel as he looked at her. His eyes seemed to devour her. She’d rarely felt so exposed in her life.
“I’d forgotten,” he said quietly, “how beautiful this is.”
He moved the candle to his left hand and with his right he touched her. One by one he dipped every finger into her—his thumb, his index finger…sliding one in, pulling slowly out, and then pushing in the next as if he had to experience her from every angle. With a single wet fingertip he widened her tight entrance with spiraling circles. She was so wet she could hear herself.
Again he pressed two fingers into her. She arched her hips into his hand. He probed along the front wall of her eager body. She gasped when he suddenly pushed hard into her g-spot, her inner muscles clamping down on him.
She heard his soft laughter and she blushed again, this time at her own blatant need for him.
“Responsive little thing, aren’t you?” Daniel teased as he pulled out of her once more and leaned forward to set the candle back on the table. “I wonder how you’ll respond to this.…”
Now it was his mouth on her, his tongue inside her. She balked in shock from the sheer ferocity of it. He took her clitoris between his lips and sucked. She dug her hands into the bed, desperate to hold onto something, anything to steady herself as a current of pleasure—so strong it felt as if it would drag her under—washed over her again and again. Daniel brought her once more to the sharp edge of orgasm and stopped. He crawled up her body and pressed his lips, wet with her desire, to her mouth. She tasted herself first, then him. As he kissed her with desperate hungry lips, she felt him reach for her knees. He brought her legs up, positioning them over his shoulders. He leaned in to kiss her again, a move that pushed her knees nearly to her chest.
Now it was Daniel who reached between her legs and spread her wide. She felt the wet tip of his c**k against her. She barely had time to brace herself before he thrust into her so hard, so incredibly deep that she nearly cried.
Eleanor tried to breathe as Daniel rode her with long driving thrusts. He was big but she was well-accustomed to a large size. She was shocked instead by his insistence; every thrust going deeper and deeper until it seemed he pounded into the pit of her stomach. It quickly left the realm of sex and devolved into pure f**king. And he f**ked her like a starving man ate. Three years of celibacy and sorrow had turned his body into a vessel of pure hunger. He gripped her wrists as he took her, holding her down hard. If she wanted to escape him she couldn’t. No part of her wanted to escape. Still some lingering defiant spark in her fought off the climax that was threatening to erupt from within her. He was so suddenly possessive of her and she so aware that no matter how he took her, she was not his, that she refused to give him the satisfaction of giving her satisfaction. But no amount of slow steady breathing could stop her. She came and when she came it felt as if her orgasm was wrenched from her. He took it from her body rather than giving it to her. His pace grew faster, harsher, and she held onto the bars of the headboard as he spent his pleasure in her, filling her stomach with his liquid heat.
Eleanor’s heart still raced even as her ragged breathing settled. She looked at Daniel who still lay embedded in her. His eyes were closed and his brow was furrowed in concentration as if he were trying to imprint in his memory this one moment inside her. Eleanor stared at his face. Long blond eyelashes lay on pale cheeks like sunlight on snow, and she felt an unexpected stab of tenderness toward him.
Daniel opened his eyes slowly. Eleanor tried to smile at him but the look he gave her was one of shock. He seemed to be seeing a stranger, and Eleanor realized with a sick churning in her stomach that he was.
“It was her you were f**king, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice soft and without accusation. “Your wife, right? Lucky lady.”
Daniel’s only answer was to slip out of her. He left the bed and threw on his clothes.
“Keep the bed,” he said without looking at her. “Tonight this is the warmest room in the house.”
“But where will you—” Eleanor started to ask, but he was already gone.
She groaned in frustration and collapsed back on the bed. She blew out the candles and yanked the covers to her chin. After a few minutes in the dark, she felt the presence of ghosts in the room—the ghost of Daniel’s late wife and the more fearsome ghost of the man Daniel had been before her death. Eleanor knew she lay with them in the ghost of their marriage bed. She tossed the covers aside, found her nightgown, and returned to her own bedroom. She crawled back into her freezing bed where at least she knew that the only cold body between the sheets would be her own.
Eleanor awoke the next morning and heard the faint but reassuring hum that indicated the power had been restored to the house. She showered and dressed and scrounged for breakfast in the grand but near-empty kitchen. Still…although the kitchen felt abandoned, something told her she wasn’t alone in the house. Last night’s snow had been far too thick and heavy for the roads to be safely passable yet. Once her stomach was comfortably full, she began a cursory exploration. Ears attuned to the slightest sound, she paused outside a closed door near the backside of the house and heard the unmistakable sound of books sliding across a shelf.
She let loose a wolf whistle as she entered. The library was far larger inside than the unobtrusive door had presaged and was stocked with row after row, case after case of books. Enough books to start her own bookstore.
“I knew I heard books,” she said to no one in particular.