She didn’t, but she nodded her head because he seemed to expect her agreement.
He gritted his teeth. “Can you not be still? You might have simply said ‘yes.’”
“Yes.”
“Better.” His jaw relaxed, but only a fraction. “Sweet Jesus, I do not know if I can do this.” Grunting softly, he pushed at her hips and withdrew. He ignored her sharp intake of breath and brought her buttocks solid against him again, as close to her as he could be without being inside her, and held her like that until he felt he’d gained a modicum of control.
He found the bunched hem of her shift and began raising it. She didn’t help him, but neither did she resist. Once he had it over her head, he tossed it to the floor, then slipped his hands under the blankets and laid them flat against her skin, splaying his fingers on either side of her waist. He lowered his head and pressed his mouth to the bare curve of her shoulder. His lips slid along her collarbone as he turned her, and when she came to rest on her back, he suckled at her throat.
She seemed to have no difficulty keeping still now.
Griffin raised himself up and looked down into her face. Her modest smile might not have seemed forced if any part of it had touched her eyes. Shaking his head slowly, he placed his fingertips on her cheek and traced the fine-boned arch all the way to her hairline.
Curious, he asked, “What has been your experience here?”
“Here?”
“With a man.”
“I’m not a virgin.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
No, he thought, she probably didn’t. “What did he want from you?” he asked.
“He?”
Griffin did not like to think what that meant, but he persevered. “They, then. What didtheywant from you?”
“They did not want to talk.”
“I’m sure they did not,” he said, “but it is not quite an answer to my question, is it?”
“They liked me to be quiet,” she told him. “That is mostly what they wanted. It was becoming, they said, that I should be quiet.”
“Christ.”
She simply stared at him, waiting for him to continue in whatever manner he chose. She remembered clearly that it was what he required from her.
“What else?” he asked.
“They liked me to undress before I came to bed.” She shrugged a bit uneasily. “Sometimes they helped me. Sometimes they watched.”
That, at least, he could understand. “Was there nothing else?”
“No.” She did not, would not, speak of the hot, labored breathing or the heavy hand that was sometimes clamped over her mouth when she was unable to be becomingly quiet. Of her own volition she did not tell him these things. What shecouldnot speak of was the agony of waiting to be called forward, to be held for examination, the perfect dread of failure to please and its consequences. “No,” she repeated on a thread of sound. “There was nothing else.”
Griffin remained silent for a long moment, weighing what she’d said against what he’d already learned at her hands. “Were you willing?” he asked.
It was true that she’d gone easily that first time, led by her greed as blindly, even eagerly, as a beggar in want of a few coppers. That was what he was asking, she thought, and how she would answer him. He did not want to know that she’d never gone without a struggle after that, even if she was the only one to observe it. So often the struggle happened only inside her.
“I was willing,” she said.
“And now?”
“I came to your bed, did I not? That speaks to willingness.”
