Epilogue #2
“Come,” she said, pulling away from him and taking his hand. “Let us go in through the kitchens.”
She practically ran to the kitchens on the west side of the manse, and he happily followed.
The kitchens were working at full capacity this night as they passed through the cramped, steamy rooms. Gustave, the cook, noticed them, wondering why the bride and groom were in the kitchens, but neither Desdra nor Jareth stopped to explain.
They just kept going.
The spiral staircase that went to the upper floors was narrow and steep.
Jareth, with his broad shoulders, kept getting stuck, so he laughed and struggled all the way up to the top floor where the master’s chambers were.
In fact, nearly the entire top floor of Redcliffe was the master’s chamber, a complex of four chambers connected, including a smaller chamber with a hearth and an enormous iron pot used to heat bathwater. It was Desdra’s favorite room.
Without any interference, they made it.
Anosia and Melaina had spent two days making the bedchamber the most luxurious space they could.
There were furs on the floor and luxurious linens on the bed, courtesy of Marston.
Heavy curtains hung from the canopy as well as a gossamer fabric that one could see through.
A fire burned in the hearth, tended by the servants, and there was already wine, cheese, bread, and fruit on the table.
“Look,” Desdra said as she picked up a diaphanous garment from the mattress. “My friends must have left this for me. How beautiful it is!”
She held it up for him to see, a transparent garment with the neckline and long sleeves lined with rabbit fur.
The fur was heavy for the lightness of the garment, but once worn, it was a beautiful presentation.
She held it against her to see how well it would fit, all the while exclaiming how lovely it was.
Jareth simply watched her.
All he could do was watch her. Over the past six months, he’d come close to bedding her, but her injuries had prevented him from truly doing the deed.
That was why they’d waited until she was almost fully recovered to be married.
He knew that, physically, it would be difficult for them to consummate the marriage, given her injuries, and he wasn’t lusting after her so desperately that he wouldn’t be considerate of her recovery.
That was the most important thing to him.
He wanted to touch his wife when she would feel pleasure, not pain because he forced her into his bed before she was properly healed.
But here she was, healthy and beautiful, and he simply didn’t want to wait.
He wanted to touch her, and be touched. He wanted her to feel his love and he wanted to feel hers.
It was time.
As she fussed over the night shift, the linens, and even the curtains that hung from the canopy, Jareth began to undress.
She didn’t even notice because she was so busy marveling over everything else.
Off came his fine silk tunic, the boots, the breeches.
Everything came off until he was as naked as the day he was born.
As she marveled at the curtains because they were a very new fabric that Marston had brought over from Rome, something called velvet, Jareth silently went around the bed and motioned for her to turn around.
Desdra obeyed, only noticing he was nude from the waist up because she was still focused on the curtains.
Jareth unfastened the ties at the back of the dress and helped her slide it off her body.
He did most of the work so she wouldn’t strain her left arm or her torso, which tended to still be sore.
The ribs were healed, but the trauma her body remembered remained.
Once the dress was off and she was left in her shift, he pushed aside her splendid hair and began to kiss the back of her neck, very gently.
That was when Desdra forgot all about the velvet. His touch erased everything from her mind except him. Turning in his arms, she slanted her lips over his.
The magic began.
Jareth laid his wife, still dressed in her shift, back down on the mattress, very carefully, the thin layer of linen the only barrier between their bare skin.
He could feel her taut nipples brushing through the material, rubbing against his chest, and it nearly drove him mad.
He lay mostly on her right side so that he wasn’t hurting her, but also because one hand could move freely.
When his lips latched on to her soft earlobe, his left hand went to work.
His fingers snaked underneath her shift, lifting it up as he went. Her skin was like silk to his rough fingers, and he felt that divine deliciousness as his hand trailed up her thighs to her buttocks, moving further to her hip. They’d gone this far before at times, but her garments had stayed on.
This time, there was no such restraint.
He moved her shift higher, and when it came up as high as her groin, he felt her hesitate.
They were going further than ever before and her natural modesty was kicking in.
His lips left her earlobe and went to her mouth, kissing her until she could hardly breathe.
It distracted her enough that he was able to lift the shift to her waist. His mouth still on hers, he put both hands underneath the garment and lifted it over her head in one clean motion.
In the same action, he pulled the curtains closed, sealing her off from the room and giving her a sense of privacy.
It was a considerate thing to do, but Jareth had always been intuitively considerate.
Pulling back the coverlet, they climbed beneath the linens.
Covered up and with the curtains drawn, they continued their intimate exploration.
Jareth’s mouth began to explore the skin beneath her chin.
Her shoulders, the swell of her breasts, and her arms were the target for his seeking lips.
Desdra lay there, half covered by his big body, feeling great anticipation that this moment had finally come to them.
Having never been intimate with a man, the excited tremors in her arms and legs were something she’d never experienced, and every time he suckled her skin, it made her gasp in delight.
When Jareth’s mouth finally latched on to a nipple, she was thrown into a new world of sensations.
His hot, wet mouth nearly brought her off the bed.
He put his hands on her arms, holding her down to the mattress as he suckled.
First one breast and then the other. Desdra’s head was spinning with delight.
Jareth’s attentions were becoming more insistent as he held her down, ravaging her with his mouth.
Soon enough, his hands joined in the exploration and Desdra lay beneath him, too upswept with the new experience to be of much use.
But when his hand moved to the fluff of soft curls between her legs, she instinctively flinched.
“Easy, love,” he murmured. “I will be gentle, I swear it. Have I not been gentle before?”
He had. They’d never quite gotten this far, but Desdra nodded unsteadily.
She trusted him implicitly. He shifted his body so that he could wedge himself in between her legs, acquainting her with the feel of his body against her.
Her scent filled his nostrils and it was like food to a dying man.
There was nothing about her that wasn’t beautiful and delicious and desirable.
He had to remind himself that this was a new experience for her and he didn’t want to frighten her, but it was difficult to restrain himself.
He wanted to feel himself inside of her.
Hand on her breast, he fondled her gently as he kissed her, easing his manhood into her and feeling her wet heat against him.
He eased in a little, withdrawing, and then doing it again to make the way easier for her.
When he finally coiled his buttocks and thrust deep, the only thing it drew from Desdra was a low, pleasurable groan. That was all he needed to hear.
He began to move.
It had been a long time since Jareth had been with a woman.
He could not even remember when last he touched female flesh.
But as he gazed down at Desdra’s face, he realized that no other woman had existed before her.
There was no one before; there would be no one after.
This was the woman he was meant to have, the one meant to conceive his children.
Even as he thrust into her, he thought on the children that would take root in her womb, a son with his strength and her intelligence, or a daughter with her beauty and his resourcefulness.
Children from the woman he loved.
His thrusting became faster.
Desdra was simply taking it all in, one arm on his shoulder while the other was stretched over her head.
She was gripping the headboard as he pounded into her, her legs open wide, her body receiving him as it was always meant to.
When she finally had her first release, her legs trembled uncontrollably and her gasps filled the warm air of the chamber.
She began to rub her pelvis against his, the innate reaction to wanting to make the sensation last. Unable to hold back any longer, Jareth joined her in her climax, spilling deep into her warm and waiting body.
Even when it was over, he held her buttocks to him, still buried in her, loving the feel of his body in hers.
From the angle he was lying, her full breasts were by his mouth and he began to kiss them gently, finally shifting enough so that he could suckle a tender nipple.
That brought a powerful shudder through Desdra, and she let him suckle as she slowly ground her woman’s center against his groin, his manhood still in her, still mostly hard.
It was the most erotic thing Jareth had ever experienced.
He was so overly stimulated that, at some point soon, he grew hard again and resumed thrusting into her.
Desdra threw abandonment to the wind, one arm over her head as she held fast to the head of the bed, her legs open wide for her husband as he did as he pleased.
All Jareth wanted to do was make love to her, and he did, all night, at least four times that he could count.
By the time morning came, neither one of them noticed the noise from the bailey nor the birds as they gathered overhead.
Dead asleep in each other’s arms, they slept until the sun was high overhead.
It was the best sleep either of them had ever had.
“My darling?” Jareth muttered. “Are you awake?”
Desdra sighed. “I think so,” she murmured into her pillow. “Unless I am dreaming. Are we in heaven?”
“I think so,” he said, his hands drifting to her buttocks and pulling her against his morning erection. “How do you feel?”
She rolled her face out of her pillow. “Marvelous,” she said, grinning sleepily. “And you?”
She was lying on her right side, facing him, so his answer was to pull her left leg up and over his hip.
A little angling of his pelvis and he was able to thrust into her again, listening to her groan with pleasure as the gulls cried outside and people went about their business in the ward.
Jareth made love to Desdra as she lay there, finally rolling her onto her back and dominating her body with his.
It went on the rest of the day.
Therefore, it was no surprise that exactly nine months to the day, a fat, healthy boy was born after a day of rather easy labor.
Desdra didn’t have a terrible time of it, thankfully, though Jareth had suffered probably more than she had as he waited for his son to be born.
No amount of comfort from Zeus or The Guardians could ease him.
When he was presented with the dark-haired lad who screamed loudly, the man sat in a chair and wept.
It was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
You are the keeper of my legacy, Chester had once told Desdra. Little had she known what, exactly, that had meant. At the time, she only thought to be the guardian of it.
Never the mother of it.
But for Jareth, it was far more. A legacy he had never imagined, a destiny he could have never hoped for. An inheritance he’d almost refused.
He regularly thanked God that he had the sense not to.
And so did Desdra.
Theirs was the legacy, and a love, of a lifetime.
* THE END *