Joanna Bourne - The Forbidden Rose

He pulled his shirt over his head and loosed his arms from the sleeves and shook it out, casually, to toss over the bedstead. He was half naked before her, wholly masculine. She knew men like him from marble statues. From pictures of heroes in books.

Jean-Paul had been fifteen when she’d been with him. A boy, rather than a man. He had been smooth and beautiful as Endymion.

Guillaume LeBreton was the Minotaur. Man and beast. Human and wild. He had never deceived her about his nature. She had known he was powerful and dangerous from the first moment she saw him. It was her choice whether she would run away or come to him.

It seemed she would approach.

He drew her closer to him so that she stood between his thighs as he sat on the bed. His hands were heavy and warm, resting at her waist. She would lean into the strength and let him take her where he would. Already, she was breathing sharp and deep. Her skin tightened in odd places. At her breasts. Up and down her arms. It felt like being afraid, this excitement. But it was not. She desired him.

They had very little time together. She must not waste it.

She helped him undress her. Ties untangled. Clothing fell away to the floorboards. Her cap was tossed aside. Guillaume pulled down her braid and separated it into long strands with his fingers. She felt it all the way down her whole length. When he stroked her hair back from her face, the caress shuddered in the intimate core of her. Tingled at her breasts.

Then she was standing in her shift. Only her shift. She could not quite continue. It was too much. Too sudden. Her skin was too sensitive. It would sting like a shock when he touched her. She felt the imprint of his hand through the soft linen, gliding up her body, bringing the shift with it. Her breath edged raggedly, in and out. She did not try to hide what she was feeling.

This hour is mine. He is mine. Later I will—

He reached her breasts. Slipped soft linen across her, up and then down, stroking her with it. The folds caught, snagging her and tugging and stroking over her. He kissed gently at her nipples, through the fabric, back and forth from one to the other.

She gasped and arched toward him.

“Let’s get rid of this.” He lifted the shift up and over her head in one sudden unpeeling. Her hair fell back and swept down her skin and hid her. Then his hands discovered her breasts within the curtain of her hair. Shaped her breasts. His thumbs were eloquent on her nipples.

“You have pretty tits,” he said. “Just absolutely perfect tits.”

“And you are crude beyond measurement.”

“Just saying the truth.”

He was earthy and forthright and he did not choose to speak like a gentleman. He could, but he chooses not to.

I do not want a gentleman.

They shared one breath and then another, face-to-face. She was taller than he was, this way, when he sat upon the bed and she stood. He did not overwhelm her with his strength. Every moment was her choice. Her decision. His hands slid slowly up and down her body, rasping lightly because they were the hands of a warrior. Not soft. Not pampered. He pulled her body into fascination. Enthralled her.

When she held his upper arm, her fingers didn’t circle half the distance around.

I am not like my friends, who take many lovers and walk away unscathed. There will be a price for this. It will cost me dearly. “This is a mistake. But I do not care.”

“A mistake. We can regret it later,” he said.

“That is my intention.” She had not expected the hair of his chest to be soft to the touch. Had not thought she would feel such strength beneath his skin. He held amazement within him, everywhere she laid her hands.

She bent toward his mouth. He stretched upward to her, to meet her. It was as if she attached a string to a mountain and it came to her when she pulled. His lips were smooth and hot. The trembling she felt was all her own. The doubt and the nervousness, all hers. He had no doubts at all.

A small kiss. Not hesitant, but a slow beginning of something he would not hurry. More kisses. Intense. Absorbed. Each different. He urged her head toward him the tiniest notch. Took her mouth. It was feeling and feeling again and only feeling until he was the world, and she was gasping for breath.

She could become lost in this man, as one did in the winds of a storm.

She put her hand to his cheek, studying the textures of his face. He had shaved by candlelight this morning, at the stream that ran through the field they’d slept in. Already he wore scratchy strong bristles again. He must fight continually with them.

Then, exploring, she went to touch his scar. To know what it felt like.

He caught her hand. “Leave it be.” A whisper. He turned her palm over and kissed inside it. That was shivery. A wonderful distraction, as he meant it to be. “Pretend it’s not there.”

She had not dreamed the scar would matter to him. It did not matter to her. “I do not mind it.”

“I don’t either. But that’s not what we’re sharing today.”

He stood up from the bed. They were so close his skin touched her everywhere as he rose and rose to his full height and took her against him. She felt, rather than saw, that he was undoing the buttons of his trouser band. That he was slipping his clothes off.

His cock was erect and proud and triumphant against the skin of her belly, full and heavy and male.

I was not prepared for this . . . largeness. I should have paid more attention to rude stories and jokes that dealt with this.

He was warm in all of his body, but his cock was particularly warm. She imagined it inside her, as it would soon be. We will solve this problem of his largeness. His size cannot be . . . unmanageable. Someone would have said this to him. And I am ingenious. She molded herself close to him and turned her cheek to be flat on his chest. There would be no space between them. She shivered everywhere, but she was not cold.

She would open to him. That was the gateway to pleasure. She would travel this country that was Guillaume.

He brought their mouths together and it was wonder and heat. Wonder that spun and buzzed and throbbed between her legs. She was lifted somehow. All unreal. All magical. She was on the bed, on blankets. The pillows scattered. He was beside her, massive as mountains. Deep beyond deep, in the cavern of his chest, Guillaume said, “This is . . . yes. This is yes.”

She was a hollow of expectation, filled only with need. No trace of thought. Nothing but breath and the feeling of his skin. She could do nothing clever, only hold on to him.

He knelt between her knees. He lifted her hips in his hands. He was huge within her, entering slowly. His fingers were soft between her parted legs. There was lightning in the touch of him. She heard him saying she was beautiful. Every breath of her was lovely. This. And this. Perfect. She was a flower. He stroked and she pulsed upward toward him. Curled to him, desperate.

Pleasure gripped her, as if it were a hand that closed around her and shook her. She thrashed with it and cried out and shuddered.

She felt him inside her. Felt wild force, barely held in check. Felt him withdraw. Felt his whole body stiffen. He thrust onto her belly and threw back his head and groaned. She was held, fiercely, by all the huge strength.

Bit by bit, he collapsed upon her, breathing hard. Very heavy. Very comforting. Right and natural in her arms. She opened her eyes and she was enclosed in a warm landscape of the muscle and flesh and bone of his chest.

“I’m crushing you.” He rolled to the side and settled next to her. They lay on the narrow bed together. She was tucked close to his body. One arm lay across her. The other cradled her head.

He did not take the chance of making a child. He was careful with me. That is one more truth I know about Guillaume.

He said, “Let me hold you. We have a minute for that.” His breath tickled her face.

She pressed her ear against him. I have this minute. Her mind drifted in the sound of his heartbeat, in the stream of his life.

I have fallen in love. It does not change anything.

“STREET’S EMPTY.” GUILLAUME SLOUCHED UP TO her. “Let’s go.”

Marguerite could not say how this slouching he did down the Rue Palmier was different from what he had performed in the countryside, but it was. There, he had been a shrewd peasant, a man with fields and, most probably, a local feud or two. Now he was a city man, knowledgeably sly in a way that had to do with narrow alleys and cafés on the boulevards.

He took her arm, something he had not done in the countryside. Thinking about it, she realized this, too, was a difference between the city man and the country man.

It did not disturb her that Guillaume LeBreton should change in this subtle way. She did not know all of what he was. Probably she did not want to know. But he was also the man who had made love to her an hour ago. It was that man she would say good-bye to.

“That’s where they’d put somebody to watch for us. See?” Guillaume slowed.

Adrian glanced into the passageway between houses, narrow and not too clean. “Obvious. No art to that.”

“Most folks are not what you’d call artistic. A better spot . . .” Guillaume looked up to the very highest attics under the roof where poor men rented cheap rooms. “Up there, up with the pigeons, in one of those windows. That’s where I’d put my man. Nobody ever looks up.”