Lucy leaned back into the caress. “More,” she breathed. “Please, Catherine—more, and harder.”
“Good girl,” Catherine murmured. “I didn’t even have to prompt you that time.”
She pinched Lucy’s ready nipples between her fingers.
Lucy keened out, startlingly loud, and clapped a hand over her mouth in alarm.
Catherine pressed an openmouthed kiss to the nape of Lucy’s neck, and pinched again. Lucy writhed in agonized pleasure.
“Careful,” Catherine warned, laughter hot in her voice. “You’ll have to be quieter than that.”
For long minutes, under Lucy’s increasingly begging direction, Catherine’s hands roamed Lucy’s whole sleek, supple body. The soft length of her thighs, the tender skin of her belly, the slick curls that hid her folds. Catherine’s other hand pinched and plucked at her nipple every so often, uninstructed—just to keep the younger woman remembering who was in control.
But eventually, Catherine got greedy. She breathed in the hot, sweat-slicked velvet of Lucy’s skin and said: “Tell me how you want me to make you come.”
Lucy dipped slightly as her knees buckled—but Catherine’s weight steadied her. The astronomer’s fingers opened and closed helplessly around Catherine’s forearm, which had banded tight across the taller woman’s waist to hold her upright.
Catherine smiled against a shoulder blade, and waited.
“Put me on my knees,” Lucy said, at last. Her voice was a ruin, husky and tremulous. “Stay behind me—close, just like this—but put me on my knees.”
The heat that rushed through Catherine at this image sucked every atom of air from her lungs. She licked lips gone parched with lust and love and spoke from a throat dry as tinder: “Kneel, then.”
Lucy dropped at once. Not helplessly: obediently, a swift, sweet fold of limbs and muscle.
It shook Catherine to her core. She stared at the curve of Lucy’s bent neck, dewy in the candlelight. It tasted like salt and honey beneath her lips when she kissed it, feeling suddenly reverent. “A little wider,” she bid Lucy, just to have one last command to give.
Lucy moved her knees farther apart. She was panting now, and still trembling, but there was a peacefulness to the tension that thrummed through her—as though she were perfectly content to stay poised on the edge forever, if that’s what Catherine asked of her.
Catherine wasn’t going to make her wait any longer.
One of Catherine’s arms wrapped tight around Lucy’s shoulders, holding her in place. The other hand moved down, and down—then Catherine slipped two firm fingers into Lucy’s folds and began working her. She wasn’t gentle about it, either: those fingers plunged in and out in a punishing rhythm. No longer teasing, Catherine was determined to possess.
Lucy shattered on the fifth stroke.
A ragged cry was torn from her throat and she bowed forward, channel clenching tight around Catherine’s fingers. Catherine’s heart soared and she clung to Lucy, pressing hot kisses to whatever skin she could reach, murmuring words of encouragement as the other woman’s body shook and trembled in the aftermath.
Lucy relaxed, palms on the floor, chest heaving.
Catherine leaned back, smug and smiling. “Next?”
Lucy whirled around and stared. Catherine had one moment to savor the stunned, semiferal look in her eyes before her expression sharpened. Her tongue swept across her reddened lips and her eyes narrowed with carnal purpose. “Now you let me do the same to you.”
Catherine’s delighted laugh turned into a gasp, as Lucy pounced and rolled on top of her.
Much later, spent and sweaty and delightfully sore, Lucy fell back onto the pillow, while Catherine settled her cozy self close against her side. The countess’s fingers traced Lucy’s skin from freckle to freckle, making constellations out of the tiniest marks. “So you did sweeps with the telescope every night, with your father?” she asked. “Did it grow less tedious once you came to know the stars?”
“Every night, and yes, it was tedious, but it was a tedium I didn’t mind too much. I like looking at stars. So I’d look at a star. Then I’d look at the next. And so on and so on, until the work was done.”
Catherine’s smile was everything fond. “So you became an astronomer one piece of sky at a time?”
Lucy pursed her lips, turning this over. “I don’t know that there was one clear moment when Ibecamean astronomer. I know I fell in love with Saturn when I was seven. I know I was calling myself an astronomer before I came home from Cramlington for the last time.” She toyed with Catherine’s hair, combing lazy fingers through the tousled locks.
Catherine leaned into the caress, sighing with happiness.
Lucy breathed in the scent of warm, pleasured bodies and continued: “Maybe after so many years doing an astronomer’s work, it just seemed silly to avoid using the term.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”
Catherine chewed on her lip, something shy coming into her expression. “I’ve been thinking about what felt wrong about calling myself an artist,” she admitted. “It was because I didn’t feel that I’d earned the right to the title. I’d as soon have claimed to be Empress of Rome.” She traced another constellation crown on Lucy’s shoulder. “People—well, men, really—talk about art and science as though they are so noble. And they are! They’re important and worthy and vital to the progress of mankind! But... aside from all the talk, they look quite a lot like work. Tedious, never-ending, unforgiving, excruciatingly demanding work.”
