Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

Hawker was real. Nothing else. She gripped her hands on his shoulders and leaned to him. Yes. She opened her legs around him, to hold him to her, to make her warm.

Cold roughness at her back. More kisses to her breasts. She was gasping now. His hands soothed downward over breast and belly till he stroked between her thighs, then upward to the joining of her legs. Skillful and sure, he found the fold there and touched inside. She cried out.

“Just my hand, giving you pleasure. That’s all. You and me. Pour le plaisir.”

Him, touching her. Only pleasure. Dark, secret pleasure, like the night. Dark fire. She rocked against his hand.

“I want to be inside you,” he said. “I can’t hold out much longer. You ready for this?”

Anything. It did not matter, if only he would keep touching her. She nodded once, jerkily.

He slipped his hands around her. Brought her to him. At the end of the long caress of his skin against her skin, he was inside her.

They hurt me there—

He bit down hard on her earlobe, and she lost the thought. Rough bites to her lips tore every dark memory away before it took hold. He was a storm contained in a body. He swept over her. He kissed deep and she whimpered into his mouth, overwhelmed.

He thrust. The pang of it shot through the tension inside her. She was the center of a thousand sensations. Shock upon shock as he eased outward. Entered again slowly. Fully.

He was still talking to her. She didn’t try to understand the words, only heard the tone of his voice. Determined. Unrelenting. His hand found her. Was between them. Caressed, so softly, so skillfully, rhythmic, following her as she twisted and gasped.

Faster now, he thrust deep, driving against her. She tried to climb him, while her legs slipped and slid on his thigh. She throbbed and could not escape, she was so unbearably open. Did not want to escape. Offered herself and gloried in it. Heat swept through her, down every pathway of her body, sweeping decision and fear ahead of it.

She dug her fingers into his back. Opened her mouth and bit his neck. Braced her feet on the ground, arched backward, and drove herself toward what he gave her.

He was everything she needed. Unceasing. Steady. Sure of himself. He knew exactly what to do. She released the last restraints in her mind and trusted him.

She was seized and tossed by the climax. Grabbed and shaken as by a great fist. Inside, she closed around him again and again, and every time was a new beat of pleasure. She heard herself cry out in a sound like pain.

He was pleasing himself now, with rough, quick thrusts inside her. Absorbed. Drinking his own pleasure. Lost in her.

He has done so much for me.

She gave back to him, as she knew how to do. Rose to reach for him. Took his hair strongly with her fingers and pulled his mouth to hers. Licked, teased, played with his mouth. Used all her knowledge upon him. Gloried that she knew so much.

Below, she clenched herself around him, where he was within her. Squeezed him tightly. She knew the muscles to use. Had practiced and practiced. She contracted against the hardness inside her.

This, she could give him. This, she knew how to do.

But this time it was no indifferent service. This was beyond words different from anything before. She had not known, could not have imagined, how the tension twisted and exploded. Joy came from everywhere and gathered there, where she held him. She tightened and tightened and felt him move and was struck with ecstasy. Breathless with it. Dizzy.

He was no careful and controlled expert. Not any longer. He had become wild, pounding into her. He was beyond thought. Mad. Consumed. A cry rasped in and out of his throat. His body shocked and stiffened.

His last thrust withdrew. She felt him shudder in her arms and spill himself against her thigh.

They held each other. While he shook. While she trembled and her bones melted and she let her head fall to his chest. While he gasped into her hair.

His grip opened and closed on her shoulders. It was long minutes before he spoke. “Well. That was . . . That was very good.” His voice was gritty. Hoarse.

She did not want to open her eyes. She was crying. She could not imagine why she was crying. “I will not tell you . . . You are conceited enough.” Then she said, “It was good. I didn’t know it would be that good.”

“Me neither. Joke’s on us, innit?” He breathed heavily. “Let’s get inside before you catch an ague.”

“Yes. That is wise.”

“We’ll see how we do in bed.” He did not make her walk back to the cottage in her bare feet. He carried her in his arms while it rained down on them, hard, every step of the front path back to the door. She became cold, as well as filled with amazement.

He dried them both in front of the fire. They made love in bed, very slowly, and it worked there too. He had the most skillful and amazing mouth.

SHE WAS IN HAWKER’S ARMS. SHE KNEW THAT before she knew where she was. It was rare and important, being with him.

Even now, after so many years, she dreamed of him. Sometimes, when she first woke up, she’d think he was with her. She’d feel his arm under her head, his body naked beside her. Then the day would come and wash dreams away. Then it was not his arm under her. It was a pillow. It was not his body. It was the rolled and tumbled blanket. Time after time, she slid out of a dream and she was alone, but for an instant, the bed smelled of him.

This time, it wasn’t a dream.

She lay awake for a time before she opened her eyes, hurting and vaguely angry about it.

She was in bed, in a quiet room, under a soft blanket, held by Hawker. She glided back to consciousness, riding the currents of that certainty. She was with Hawker, so she was safe. In all the world, there was no flesh, no bone, no sound of breathing she would mistake for Hawker’s.

“I can tell when you’re awake,” he said.

Her mouth was dry. “You always could.”

“A matter of being cautious.” He unwound from her and tucked the blanket into the space he’d emptied. The bed moved. He sat up to lean over and look down at her. “I never quite trusted you, you know, not even when we were closest. I just thought it was worth the risk. You were always worth the risk.”

I was stabbed because I came to warn you. “You do not trust me. Wise.”

“We did well enough, for enemies.” His smile pulled down at the side and didn’t reach his eyes. He shifted his weight, careful not to joggle her. “You’re harmless for the moment. You were about half dead for a while.”

“How long?”

“It’s been three days. A little more.”

So long? She thought of days frittered away, like small coins out of a pocket. Pouring from her mind, like grains of silver. “I don’t remember.”

“Just as well.”

Someone had put her in a night shift. Her left arm was an ache from shoulder to fingers. Under the bandage, she itched. She held her hands up. So heavy. Her joints felt like old iron wheels and gears that had lain abandoned for a long time and were now set moving again, creakily.

Bruises circled her wrists and ran in regimented lines, forearm to elbow. Blue finger marks showed where someone had held her.

“I am bruised.” Events took shape in her mind like shadows in fog. She had been in Braddy Square, trying to get to Hawker, to warn him. She remembered being stabbed. Staggering toward Meeks Street. “Who did I fight?”

“I held you down when you were being sewed up. You objected to that for some reason. And later, when you were out of your head with fever.” He rolled smoothly off the bed and stood over her. “I hurt you doing it. No choice.”

His voice said how little he had liked hurting her.

Oh, Hawker. We have hurt each other so much.

He was unshaven, which always made a ruffian of him. He wore trousers and a loose shirt, open halfway down his chest. She had felt it next to her as she slept, cradling the edge of her dreams—the warmth of him, the creases of the linen of his shirt, the old, familiar comfort of his skin.

He poured from a pitcher to a small cup. “Everybody wants you to drink this. I have seldom encountered such unanimity of opinion. I’m going to slip in next to you and hold it up. You sip out of the side here.”

It was not water, but lemonade. Exactly right. She was very thirsty.

They looked at each other while she drank. He was deeply tired. His face was pared to the bone, to sarcasm and deadliness. He had watched her come very close to death, she thought.

“That’s better.” He eased her down to the pillow again. “You almost slipped away from me. There was one time there, you stopped fighting. I thought it was over.”

“It was not. Not this time.” When she lay still, the pain was not great. There was much to be said for holding still. “Lie beside me, if you would. For comfort. I am in pain and I’m cold.”

“My pleasure, anyway.”

She started to laugh and took the warning her body gave and did not. “The papers? You have them. Important.”

“I have them.” He lifted the blanket and crawled in beside her. So many times, he had done that.

“I will tell you what I saw . . . when I wake up.” One more thing to say. “Do not send for Séverine.” She would come all this long distance and worry about her. “It is unnecessary.”

“Go to sleep, Owl.”

“Do you know? You are the only one in the world . . . who still calls me Owl.”