“No, only a few, but I excel at those.”
How very, very fortunate she was to finally call this man hers. The joy welling up inside her threatened to burst free in an embarrassing barrage of tears guaranteed to alarm Nathaniel and turn her face into a splotchy, hideous visage. Instead, she clutched the safety of lighthearted innuendo and teasing. “Prove it,” she said.
His eyebrows shot up, and the wicked grin spreading across his face made her laugh. “I could never resist a challenge.”
True to his boast, he made short work of her wedding dress and corset with its miles of lacing. They made a growing pile on the floor, along with her petticoats and crinoline, shift and small clothes. He paused when she stood before him wearing only a pair of garters and filmy stockings that did nothing to warm her legs. His spectral gaze blazed, burning hotter as it touched on her shoulders and bare breasts, the curve of her waist and flat expanse of her belly, the slope of her hips and length of her legs.
He had seen her naked before, years earlier. Then, it had been a furtive, forbidden union, no less pleasurable for its risk but infinitely less stirring than this moment when they stood together in the room they shared as man and wife. Lenore fought down a blush and raised one leg, her stockinged toes caressing his shin. “Don’t you want to finish?”
Nathaniel’s voice was guttural. “I suspect I’ll be finished before we’ve truly started.” He gestured to her stockings. “Leave those on and loosen your hair for me.”
She did as he requested, sauntering to the dressing table to seat herself naked before the mirror. Nathaniel didn’t follow, but he turned to watch her, his eyes bright in the room’s dim light. Lenore took her time removing the pins, setting each one carefully on the vanity. With each pin out, a curl unfurled to fall down her shoulders and back until her hair cascaded over the chair and pooled in her lap.
Her husband’s breathing panted harsh and loud in the room. She met his eyes in the mirror’s reflection, noting the flare of his nostrils, the silvery shadows that smudged his cheekbones and the way his chest rose and fell as if he’d run across London Bridge a dozen times without stopping.
“My God,” he said in a choked voice. “You’re even more beautiful than I remembered.”
She smiled, warmed to her toes by his fervent compliment. Desire unspooled in her belly, sending liquid heat through every part of her before settling into a throb between her thighs. “Your turn,” she said softly.
Her startled bleat nearly ruined the sensual atmosphere when Nathaniel closed his eyes and went from being garbed in black from neck to feet to bare, pale nudity in an instant. His expression had sobered, a touch tentative as he watched her leave her seat at the vanity to stand before him.
She once likened him to a marble statue. How unknowingly accurate she’d been in that comparison, and he was garbed then with only his hands and face hinting at his overall paleness. The Nathaniel she’d first fallen in love with had been a man of average height with broad shoulders, muscular arms and a powerful, easy stride. The Nathaniel who claimed a droll’s body as his was muscular in his own right, taller and leaner with the long, wiry body of an acrobat.
Looking at him was like looking at the living representation of a Greek myth gone awry, in which a mad Pygmalion begged an even more perverse Aphrodite to bring a male Galatea to life. The goddess had done it with torture and lightning. The sculptor scientist perished, but his creations lived on. One of them married Lenore.
“You are truly lovely,” she said, breathless at the sight of him. The silvery color shadowing his cheekbones spread down his throat and across his chest. Lenore’s gaze dropped, and her lips parted. “Oh my.” He might share the same milky skin tones and muscular physique of any of the Greek and Roman statues but God, or the mercurial Aphrodite, had been far more generous than the sculptors when endowing the living man.
Nathaniel followed Lenore’s wide-eyed gaze to his erection, swollen and stiff. His hands fluttered at his side as if to cover himself and went still at Lenore’s abrupt “Don’t.”
Lenore wet her lips with her tongue, smiling faintly at Nathaniel’s sudden focus on her face. “It must have been a...challenging task, flipping and tumbling about with such a...” She frowned, searching for the right word.
“Weapon?” Nathaniel offered. They shared a chuckle.
“Just so,” she said.
He glanced down a second time. “Believe me, I was just as surprised as you when I first saw it.”
“Impressed too, I’ll wager.” Her short time aboard the Terebellum had been an education in many ways, not the least an observance that men in general possessed an obsessive interest in the size and potency of their own genitalia, along with an insatiable need to brag about it to each other.
Nathaniel confirmed that belief when he shrugged and said “Hard not to be.”
Lenore grinned and shook her head. She padded to him, the floor cold under her feet, her nipples drawn tight in the room’s cool air, despite the heat from the hearth lit in one corner of the room. “Make me warm, husband. I’m freezing here.”
He leapt to do her bidding, lifting her in his arms to carry her to the bed. They burrowed under the covers, wrapped around each other in a tangle of limbs.
Lenore learned every angle and sweep of Nathaniel’s body, its taste and scent, the way his narrow hips angled so that he seated himself firmly between her thighs. She carded his soft, white hair and mapped the length of his back with her lips. She followed the path of silvery veins just under his skin with her fingers, tickling and teasing in a way that made him laugh and moan by turns.
He rediscovered her body, remembered how to make her back arch as he sucked the tips of her breasts and played his tongue over her nipples. He recalled just how to make her mew his name when he slid down, propped her legs over his shoulders and tipped the velvet until her hips bucked hard enough to make the bed bounce and her heels dug into his back. She was sheened with sweat and gasping when he slithered up her torso and pounced, his tongue sliding into her mouth even as he spread her thighs with his and thrust deep.
Nathaniel paused, his chest heaving like hard-worked bellows. He rested his forehead against Lenore’s, and she heard the strain in his voice as he fought for control. “I remember this,” he whispered. “I remember, and it is paradise.”
Lenore, half dizzy with the exquisite feel of Nathaniel buried deep inside her, stole his breath with a slow hungry kiss. “I never forgot,” she said when they broke for air. “I dreamed about you all the time.”