“Showing you, as I have shown you before, that I am a liar.” His hand slid upward and, through the cloth of my shift, cupped my left breast, the callus on the side of his thumb running over my nipple.
I let out a pitiful moan.
“Shh,” he reprimanded, bringing that same hand up to my mouth to cover it. But that was worse as the length of his forearm had run up over my breast, a long, rough drag that made me nearly cry out. “Don’t sing your little song tonight,” Reed went on, rocking himself against my backside. “It’s forbidden, you know. Thane’s men were told they had to abide by the army’s rules of conduct. No fornication is one of them. Can you keep quiet for me?”
His hand still clamped over my mouth, I nodded.
“What do you want from me, tonight?”
“What am I allowed?” I rasped out when he removed his hand. I gritted my teeth and tried not to whine from need when he returned it to my breast and cupped it again, his callus repeating its lazy stroke, a strum so slow it felt like a mockery of my growing helplessness.
“I’m not letting you have my prick,” he said, his words friendly, as if he were simply informing me of what the weather might be. “And you have to promise to be quiet whatever it is I do. And I’m not kissing you.”
“Not kissing me?”
“Don’t even ask.”
“You said I could choose whether I wanted your hands or your mouth.”
“I will my put my mouth anywhere you ask, just not over yours.”
“You confuse me, salt man.”
“What do you want, Robbie?” His use of my name instead of “madam” or “midwife” was like a dare, a summons for me to be true with him.
I reached down and lifted my shift above my waist.
He leaned away ever so slightly so that I could.
Though there was a cover over us, the skin on my bared rear and sex prickled from the removal of my shift. It came alive even more so when his hand lowered from my breast and caressed my hip, my cheek, and then my thigh before returning back to my waist so as to repeat the journey.
“What do you want, Robbie?” he asked again but did not allow me to answer. Reed made ahmmsound into my ear, saying, “You have two sets of hips, don’t you? One here”—and he paused to squeeze at my natural hip, then moved his hand down and squeezed the side of my thigh—“and one here. Who knew, that beneath your dress, you carried twice the power most women do. I had guessed at this shape from lying next to you all these nights. And from pressing myself into you in the alley. But I did not imagine it would be so pronounced. I did not think the outline of you could drive me any madder.”
His hand’s passage began to dip more inward, the tips of his fingers brushing a line that went down the center of me, beginning between my ribs and reaching my navel. But the curve of my hip shortened his fingers’ reach, and they skated over the line of my thigh’s connection to my sex.
“What do youwant, Robbie?” he asked a third time.
Ignoring any shame that crept in at the corners of my mind, I lifted my left foot and hooked it behind his left knee, leaving my legs parted. I prayed he did not ask me to say it out loud.
There was a rumble of approval in his throat. His hand had stilled on my hip, but he brought it back towards himself, cupping what he could of my cheek, squeezing it, grasping at it, pushing it, parting me. All of my pent-up breath finally resulted in an undignified squeak when I felt that definitive parting of my sex. I should have felt pinned, helpless, undignified. I should have felt like he was overpowering me, exposing me.
Instead, I felt free. I was unraveling him. We were undone by each other, and despite his careless demeanor, he could only just hide his undoing from me. Instead of shame at his left forefinger’s effortless slide into me, at his own helpless exhale, I felt pride. Instead of feeling trapped at the way he propped up his head with his right hand and leaned over me—his left leg bending, shifting, and parting my own, holding my right leg to the ground—I felt like I was the object of all his focus. When his middle finger joined his first, I could not help but say his name.
“I had hoped for this,” he said, his voice still somehow stable, but there was a note of thinness to it, like he spoke with effort. “I prayed you might want me half as much as I want you. I prayed I could stand out from all your suitors, men who skip to your beck and call. I worried you would not want a man who still wanted his own dignity. I worried only a man on his knees, at your mercy, could ready your sex like this. I have to assume that desperation is what arouses you. But let me ask. If I begged you, if I finally admitted to you that I was the loser and you the winner, would you become even more wet for me? Because if that is so, then damn my pride. I can sacrifice it.”
My voice was hollow, without any strength in it when I asked, “Why do you persist in my being this temptress pleased only by the abuse of her lovers?”
Ignoring me, Reed continued speaking while his left hand pumped and pulled, filling my sex and then leaving it empty and eager, only to fill it again. “Weeks ago, Thane caught you coming back from the river and walked you back to your wagon. He kept bringing his hand to your shoulder. He kissed your cheek when hebid you goodnight. He kissed the back of your hand. And you let him. I wanted to put my fistthrough his teeth, Robbie.”
My hands were both over my mouth. I had never been able to reach a release without attention to the top of my sex. But his hand, from behind me, between my legs, at the steady commitment of its push and pull, was close to giving me pleasure for the first time without that singular pressure.
As if he read my thoughts, he said, “Put one of your hands to use. If you think you can remain quiet without two over your mouth.”
My left hand reached downward, easily finding the swell there, and my hips bucked at the first swipe of my middle finger.
There was a sacredness to our hands both at the same work, his from the back of me, mine at the front, both holding my pleasure from either side. We had the same intent, the same rhythm, the same want.
“Hmm, now I know,” he mused aloud.
