“Scream for me, Anna,” he whispered against her shivering flesh. “I want to know exactly how much you like me doing this to you.”
All her concerns fell away, everything subsumed by the pleasure he was giving her. By the touch of his fingers and tongue. And then suddenly everything was drawing tight inside her and the climax hit her like an earthquake, and she did scream, his name echoing off the walls around them. He didn’t stop.
She was still shivering and half blind with the effects of her orgasm as he settled himself between her thighs. And when he pushed into her, there was only that sense of perfect rightness. Of a completion she’d only ever found in the woods, where she could be herself and be free.
His body on hers was a glory, the heat of him and the slight prickle of hair. His hardness against her soft-ness. Everything about him different and yet the hunger in his eyes was the same as the hunger in hers. She lifted her arms around him, arched against him, encouraging him. He slid deeper inside her.
“Every night,” Cedric said in a low, rough voice, the intensity of him shivering through her. “You and I just like this. Every night. Do you agree?”
Anna was lost in the pleasure, lost in him. And right in that moment she would have agreed to anything, especially when it concerned more of him.
“Yes,” she said huskily. “I do.”
It could have been triumph that flickered across his beautiful face. Or it could have been pleasure. It was certainly satisfaction. Then as he moved there was nothing but pleasure and the long fall that came after it.
________
He took her to France a week later, insisting that he wanted them to have their honeymoon, and he was thrilled when she didn’t say no this time around.
Cedric had never spent much time with a lover and so he had nothing to compare being with Anna to. He’d thought they’d probably spend the entire week having sex and sleeping, sharing meals and then more sex, with a couple of swims thrown in for good measure.
He didn’t think that there would be more.
After that first day, she wasn’t shy and she didn’t hold back. She made no secret of her hunger for his touch or that she enjoyed the pleasure he gave her. She was as passionate as he’d thought, the hot coal of that passion igniting every time he was around, which gratified him on basically every level there was.
And as the days passed and they spent them making love on every available surface, or eating delicious food that was brought in and left for them by his staff, or talking about nothing of consequence, he began to realize what he’d already suspected: that the cool, contained woman she’d been back at home was a lie. That energy he’d sensed in her, bright and fizzing yet locked down, burst to the surface like champagne bubbles in a glass. She wanted to talk to him about a great many subjects and asked questions constantly, wanting to know his opinion and why and how he formed it.
She liked to argue with him and, since he liked to argue too, they had a great many very vocal disagreements that both of them enjoyed, and which always ended the same way: with both of them naked and him inside her. Her bright energy was fascinating to him. He’d been a serious, studious child, always with his head in a book, and he’d known that if he’d met her as a boy he would have been just as fascinated with her then as he was now. She would have dragged him from his books, would have taken him off for adventures in the woods, and he would have followed, helpless to do anything else. Drawn by her effervescent spark.
A few days later they were beside the pool built into the cliffside. Anna was naked, lying on her front on the sun lounger. He’d braided her lovely hair into a long plait down her back, weaving flowers into it, because he liked it when there were flowers in her hair. Her long, golden body was divine in the lazy, liquid heat of the late afternoon, her eyes molten as she gazed at him from the pillow on the white linen sun lounger.
She was a goddess like this. His goddess. A possessive thought and one he allowed himself because she was his now. In every way.
He leaned over, running a lazy hand down her elegant back, her skin silky and hot and slick with the sunscreen he’d put on it only a couple of minutes earlier.
“You’re made for this,” he said. “For sun and good food and sex.”
She arched under his touch like a cat being stroked. It was strange how the electricity that leapt between them hadn’t decreased in any way since they’d been together. He would have thought it would, but it hadn’t. If anything it had become stronger, a deeper, more intense pull.
It had made him rethink his initial ‘separate lives’ idea. That maybe, when they returned home, they could spend more time together.
“I guess.” Her voice was husky with sex and sun. “Dad used to shut me out of the house, so I would always take off into the woods around Haerton. I made up a whole lot of friends to have adventures with.”
Cedric frowned as he stroked down her back again. “He shut you out of the house?”
She sighed. “Remember that I told you I was difficult? Well, I was. Always asking questions, always wanting his attention. I was demanding and I hated it when he ignored me. I used to throw the most terrible temper tantrums.” Her lashes had drifted closed. “So he’d shut me out of the house and wouldn’t let me back inside until I was quiet. It was good in a way. I found the woods didn’t care if I had a temper tantrum.”
There was amusement in her voice, but he didn’t find it funny. He didn’t like the sound of her as a bright, sparky little girl being locked out of the house for being ‘difficult’. Because she was curious and passionate and fiery, yes, but he liked those things about her very much. In fact, he shared some of those qualities himself.