“Is it wrong for me to say I am glad of it?” Ester giggled, kissing the tight skin she could reach through the loose laces of the shirt.
“I was not at the time. Going to bed exhausted with muscles like water. It is a hard life.”
“Were you happy, though?” Ester asked.
“I was, I suppose,” Julian muttered. “I was free of Windermere. Free of my father's shadow. It was a haunted place and I knew he despised me.”
Ester tugged his shirt free from his waistband and laid a cool hand against Julian's abdominals. His muscles tensed under her touch, flexing and jumping. She giggled softly, caressing with her fingernails to make him react. Julian caught his breath.
“Then why go back there?”
Her hand strayed lower, fingers splaying. Julian's body responded ferociously, though her touch was a tease. She slowed before reaching the point that his body most wanted, though her fingers were mere inches away. She lowered her head to bestow soft wet kisses on his bared stomach.
“Because it will contain the curse. It contained my father's wickedness. Such evil should be imprisoned in a dark place. Should be shrouded in shadows.”
“Would you shroud me in shadows too if I asked?”
“You will not be coming...” Julian began.
But Ester had passed her hand swiftly over his rapidly responding manhood, coming to rest on his thigh. Julian shuddered at the playful, almost-touch, his entire body tensing. He gritted his teeth, keeping his gloved hands to his sides. There was something intensely pleasurable about allowing her touch without responding, simply being passive to her whims.
“I will not?” Ester whispered. “Will you tie me across the back of a horse and send me away? You will need to if you want to prevent me from following you.”
Julian could hear steel in her voice that he would have sworn was not there before. It was as though the trauma of their separation had changed something within her. Something fundamental. He remembered her words about no longer being a victim.
“Your father will not accept me,” Julian murmured.
Ester gripped his thigh. His muscles tensed beneath her hand, his breath catching as she teased him, her fingers brushing over the very part of him that throbbed for her attention. Yet, maddeningly, she let her hand wander further, sliding up his firm abdomen, tracing the ridges of his stomach, before resting on his chest, right over his heart. Her lips hovered near his cheek, the briefest graze of softness, before she nipped at his ear, a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“What will it take to break that iron will of yours?” she breathed, her words a sultry caress against his skin. “Can I do it? With nothing but my body?”
“Ester,” Julian muttered, holding onto that same supposedly iron will by the strength of his fingernails alone. “You are already bending it over the anvil of your body like a smith hammering at metal. Would you desert your family? Turn your back on them for my sake? There is a place not far from Windermere, across the Scottish border, where we could be married over a true anvil and with no questions asked or permission sought. But it would be against the wishes of your mother and father.”
Ester sighed, resting her forehead against his cheek. He tilted his head to hers until his nose brushed against her own. Their lips remained a breath apart, tantalizingly out of reach. Each word spoken brought them together in brushing touches. Each brush left a trail of searing pleasure behind.
Her hand trembled slightly against his chest, fingers splayed over the hard muscle beneath his half-open shirt. “It would break my father,” she whispered, “and my mother… the worry would age her terribly.”
Julian’s heart clenched at her honest words. “Precisely. Which is why I cannot take you to Windermere or to Gretna.”
“Then you will not go to Windermere,” Ester murmured. “I will pray for a storm to cast us up on some lonely island where we can live off the bounty of land and sea and be untroubled by others.”
Julian let out a low, breathless laugh. “A child's dream,” he chided.
He kissed her, unable to maintain the distance, the unbearable chasm between them any longer. First brushing her forehead, then her cheeks. Feather-light against smooth, soft skin. Then his kisses traveled lower, tracing her jaw, her neck. Finally, her lips, which parted slightly in anticipation before seizing upon his. Her hand slid lower, and found him finally too, settling and beginning a motion of slow, squeezing caresses that made him rise. His gloved hands rose to grasp the soft curves of her breasts but she suddenly vaulted atop him, straddling him and pinning his hands with her thighs.
He struggled in vain but she squeezed her legs and held him trapped.
“I shall not allow myself to be touched until it is by your bare hands. If that is never, then so be it. I will enjoy the feel of your body and take my pleasure from that,” she whispered between kisses that tried to draw the life from him.
Julian moaned in agony and ecstasy, as her hands plunged between their bodies. With one, she stroked him with a rising intensity. With the other, she touched herself. When their kisses allowed, he watched as she pressed inwards against her skirts, or through the material of her bodice. When her mouth was not upon his, she was biting her lips against her own pleasured sounds.
And then came the moment that shattered what little control he had left—she pressed her hips forward, grinding against him, her womanhood pressing against his hardness despite the frustrating barrier of their clothes. Every slow, deliberategyration sent a shockwave through his body, each thrust a tantalizing promise of what lay just out of reach. Now their kisses were to gag the moans that neither could completely control.
Wanton lust overcame Julian. He grabbed Ester by her curving buttocks and pulled her against his tumescence. She shuddered and shook and his body responded. There was an eruption that left him gritting his teeth, burying his face in her bronze hair, muscles clenched beyond endurance.
Then blessed relief. Their bodies became water. Ester collapsed against him, her skin damp, her breath ragged as she lay across his chest, spent.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke, their bodies entwined, still trembling from the aftershocks.
