Chapter 17
Seventeen
. . . and once more, the concubine and her king joined their bodies in the most ancient of unions . . .
— The Concubine and Her King. Unpublished MS.
Susannah straddled Henry’s thighs and set to work unbuttoning his fall. He lay back, and she could feel his eyes on her.
Henry loved her. He had not turned from her. He wanted her.
And she wanted him. All of him. She wanted his probity, his sense of duty, his honor. Henry could not, would not love someone who had done wrong, who deserved shame.
And she wanted his body, this miraculous cuirass that had carried him through the world until he had landed in her churchyard.
She was going to love this body, its skin and hair and smell.
The hidden places where softness had replaced muscle and sinew.
Its wear and tear from all the years, its admirable shoulders, and its less-than-reliable knees.
And its cock.
Oh, what a beautiful cock Henry had. Hard and upright and thick and proud and monumental. It was a living, blood-hot monument to his desire for her.
The ache in her quim overtook the ache in her heart. Her mouth watered, and she lowered her head and licked over the top of that proud cock.
He gasped and grasped the tops of her arms. She looked up, and his eyes were ablaze.
Keeping her own eyes on his face, she licked his cock again. She wanted him undone. She wanted him on fire. She wanted a conflagration that would consume them both.
His forehead creased.
“Susannah,” he said. Stern, a warning.
But she was naughty. She wanted to be naughty and free with him, and she could be because he loved her.
A third lick, a swirl of tongue around the edge of the crown. “Mmmm.”
“There will be consequences,” he said.
She felt a shiver of delight, and her thighs tightened. He was so forbidding with his threat of consequences. Such a lord, even on his back and in the mud.
But he was still far too capable of speech.
Yet another lick to the head, an open-mouthed kiss to the side of his shaft.
“Oh, but I want your consequences.”
She took the head of his cock into her mouth. It was perfect, smooth and firm and what she needed. What she craved. She sucked lightly.
He lurched, his fingers tightened. Good.
She stroked the underside of the tip with her tongue once, twice, thrice, and all the lines went out of his face, and his eyes took on a kind of madness.
She released his cock. “I want all the consequences you can give me, my lord.”
“I . . . you . . .”
She took his cock again into her mouth and showed her devotion with her tongue.
“Arrrrgh.”
It was him making that sound, not her.
He lifted her, took her off his cock, hauled her up his body. She came gladly, breathless already, laughing both at herself and at him and his wildness. He set her down on top of him and pulled at her sodden skirts with such roughness and force that she was surprised not to hear them rip.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The word made her even hungrier for that, for him, for fucking him, her earl.
He pushed her skirts up around her thighs, and she felt him fumble under her petticoat, seize her buttocks. His hands spread them, clutched them, owned them.
“Kiss me,” he said.
They kissed in the rain. Their mouths warred, both of them desperate for what was to come. His tongue plunged, filled her mouth, withdrew as she battled back with her own. Then his tongue overtook hers and promised her the consummation she needed.
She began to lose purchase on his lips because she had to move, she had to grind her bare cleft against his cock.
Ungh.
She writhed and moved, and he pulled with his hands on her buttocks, lifted his hips, and thrust at her aching folds. He slid over her pulsing need with his tip and then his shaft and back again. He was on the outside of her, but she needed him inside.
She needed him, she needed his cock.
He grabbed her breast through her dress, and her nipples hardened. He lifted and kneaded, but it wasn’t enough. She had to have her bosom bare to him.
Her hands went to her ties at the front of her dress. He helped her, both of them tugging, eager to free her breasts. She lifted the left breast out of her stays, and he lifted the right and fed it into his mouth, sucking and biting at her breast through her shift.
The muslin was old but had always been coarse, and the slide of the weave and his lips over her nipple drove her need higher and higher, and when he bit down, holding the nipple between his teeth, worrying it with his tongue, his lips sucking, she flailed in the most delicious agony.
“Ahhhhh!”
Now the other breast, and he was ravenous there, too. He burrowed into her teats, savagely taking her flesh. He was a beast, ripping at her.
His knuckles came against her maidenhair, his cock pushed at her opening.
“You want this cock,” he said, and the beast’s voice was a deep rumble.
“I want your cock,” she moaned. “Want.”
She pushed down, and his cock went inside her.
Oh. Oh, oh.
He stretched her, filled her, and the ache of her quim became a flaming arrow, cutting through her center and forcing her up and off his chest.
She rose above him, his cock spearing her, holding her to him.
They both held still, and she saw more than wildness in his face. She saw worship. She was a mighty goddess, accepting the tribute of his hard cock.
And she was Susannah, his love, and she would burn the world for him.
She lifted her hips, her thighs quivering already, but she was strong, and she would take his tribute, the glide of his cock against her walls as she moved upwards and forwards and then back down again.
The rightness of it overwhelmed her. His cock, her quim, her rising up and coming back down again, sliding onto the meat of him.
Their meats meeting, moving away and then together again, but not parting. Never parting.
He reached for her breasts, clutched them.
“Fuck.” His hands were suddenly claws, and there was a ripping sound, and her wet shift was torn open, and his hot hands were on her skin and lifting her breasts as she rode his cock.
“Susannah,” he said. His eyes had gone dark, the pupils vast and open to the rain, to her. “My love.”
His hands dragged down her body and clutched her hips, his fingers sank into her flesh. He lifted his own hips, thrust into her.
They both grunted as skin slapped together, as they collided with the force of their mutual desire.
His hand went under her petticoat, touched her nub. Her back arched as ecstasy spiked through her from that touch.
“Susannah,” he said.
His finger drummed against that most exquisitely sensitive place. The whole of her sex was alive and on fire from being filled and stroked at the same time. She was goddess and beast, in one, and she was fucking him, fucking him, driven to ride him harder, to drive him into the ground.
“You will come,” he said.
She was mindless. He had made her so.
And he had her. He was the one on his back, but he had her. He had her on the edge of something steep and high and narrow and dangerous as the fire rose higher.
His finger went faster. The flames licked, climbed, and her precipice was on fire, and she could not go forward or back.
She had no choice but to fly. She took wing and soared into the sky.
And exploded.
She fell, fell, fell, shedding a thousand pieces of light like the fireworks he had told her of.
And he thrust into those flying embers, spinning them off into the void. But it was only to make room for another explosion, another burst of mystical incandescence with even more color than the last.
And he thrust and thrust and thrust, and his eyes were full of rain and her. He tightened underneath her and shouted his release, his hosanna to her, his Susannah.
What was left of her came down onto his chest. She was in pieces, torn apart by him. But her ear was pressed to him, and the throb of his heart was hers. His ribs rose and fell under her head as his lungs filled with air and then emptied again, and her lungs did the same.
His arms came around her, and the pieces of her slowly came back together again.
They were the same pieces in the same places as before but lined up better than before. Smooth and even and complete.
She was whole.