“Would you like a handkerchief?” he asks, holding his wrist between us.
I look at the cuff of his sleeve and see one tucked away inside. I pull it out, and it’s my handkerchief—the favor I tossed to him after he won the joust. The thought that he keeps it withhim makes something in me melt in a toe-curling way. I smile as I move the soft material through my fingers and then cover his face with it. “Did you make me cry just so you could show off your hidden hanky?”
I hear him chuckle under the fabric. “What kind of a monster do you take me for?”
I pull the handkerchief away and fold it into a semi-tidy square. “A very romantic one,” I tell him.
He smirks before sneaking the material out of my hand and tucking it back into his sleeve. “Unfortunately, you can’t keep it. It was a very special gift.”
He urges me closer with a tug, and I nestle into his chest. “You’re also a selfish monster.” I run my hand up his arm and let my fingers trace the base of his neck. “I wonder what life could have been like if things were different. If you were a farmer and I was a dairymaid.”
Simon smiles, his hand shifting to roam up and down my side. “I can’t imagine you as a dairymaid.”
“No one would have bothered us. We could have said and done as we wanted.”
He slides into the small space that’s left between us, his nose brushing mine as the closeness of his body surrounds me. “There’s no one to bother us now,” he says.
A consuming look clouds his hazy eyes. It pulls me in so deep that it’s almost hard to breathe. I lean forward to meet him in a devastatingly gentle kiss, one that’s meant to build up slowly and then ignite into a blaze. My lips play with his like we have all the time in the world—like where we are now is a permanent state of being and not a fading moment. He rolls me onto my back and settles over me. The ground is soft. He’s so warm. Leaving is incomprehensible.
Our kiss starts to intensify, and when I delve my tongue into his welcoming mouth, I’m rewarded with a low echoing moan. The muscles in my body tense at the sound of it, and I want to hear it again.
I spread my legs, and his knee nudges into the apex of my thighs. A delicious tension takes root in my abdomen, and I hitch my hips up against him. We linger in the kiss, drawn out and consuming. Time slips away until Simon’s lips fall to the underside of my jaw and down the length of my neck.
“I’ll never get enough of you,” he whispers against my oversensitive skin. “I’ll never get enough of this.”
I feel his hand on the hem of my skirt, scooping under each layer and dragging them up to my knees. His hand keeps moving, grazing over the side of my thigh and leaving goosebumps everywhere he touches. I gulp in a breath when his fingers brush along my entrance. He traces a soft lazy circle, and my back arches off the ground.
“Do you want me here?” he whispers, his fingers stroking up and down my trembling flesh. He lowers his mouth to kiss my breasts as they strain against the neckline of my gown, his hand between my legs gliding higher. His thumb strums the heated skin just below my clit, and I claw my fingers into the ground. He slides down my torso and farther still. My eyes stay glued to the sight of his chestnut hair disappearing beneath the wall of my hitched-up skirts.
If the first lick of his velvet tongue makes me twitch, then the second one causes a full-body spasm. His head turns, and I feel the press of his nose nuzzling the highest point of my inner thigh. He focuses back on my center and spreads me wider as he lifts my legs over his shoulders, pulling me down to settle more comfortably against his eager mouth.
He dips low again as his tongue laps at my warm slit. I feel his fingers between me and the grass as his hands slip under me, cupping my ass in both hands and tilting me upward for unfettered access.
I look down to watch him and can’t hold back the whimper it elicits. He pulls back to gaze up at me, appearing almost drunk.
“You have no idea how much I regretted not doing this the other night. It’s all I have thought about since.”
His words leave me feverish in the best of ways. Simon is caring, deeper than he lets on, and is arguably the most attractive person I have ever met... and he’s been thinking about eating me out all the livelong day.
I know that my being sent back in time is severely unlucky, but at least I get to have this.
He lowers his head, delving back into to my warmth. I can’t keep still. I thread my fingers into his tussled hair, and I imagine what we would look like if I was watching us from above. Me half naked and him nestled between my legs, which are splayed open on the forest floor. The image sends a coiling heat coursing through me, and his mouth drives me closer to oblivion with every unceasing drag of his decadent tongue.
I hold my eyes shut, my head thrashing from side to side. I can feel myself climbing that inner peak. My stomach dips, and a shallow breath rips from my lungs as I go higher and higher. Simon grips my thighs in a greedy hold as he laps at me with a driving need. The careening pressure sends my hips jaunting up, but he pins me back down with a forceful push from the palm of his hand. I struggle against his hold for a split second until his mouth latches around my throbbing clit. The taut pleasure inside me contracts and bursts, and I scream Simon’s name into the leaves above us as I come harder than I have in my entire life.
I’m still shaking in the aftershocks as he crawls up my body a while after, somehow seeming as satisfied as I am. He leaves my skirts as they are and my skin exposed to the open air as he pushes up on his arms to kiss me. I taste myself on his tongue, and the headiness of it makes me feel feral, even in my drowsy state. Simon soothes me with gentle pulls from his lips as he shifts to lay beside me.
“We should stay here,” he eventually says. I turn away from the arbored canopy over our heads and find him watching me.
Snuggling into his chest, I feel his leveled breathing as I listen to the strong beat of his heart under my ear.
“I wish we could,” I tell him. “But we both know that we can’t.”
He takes a defeated inhale, listlessly stroking his fingers through my grass-tangled hair. “Parting from you strikes a pain in my chest. Each time, it grows sharper.”
That makes two of us.
I push myself up a little to look at him, already losing the will to leave. “We’ll come here again,” I promise him.
