Chapter 21 #3
“I know, my love, I know,” she heard him answer in her passionate delirium.
Through half-closed eyes she saw him rise.
He climbed swiftly onto the bed and hauled her on top of him.
In the next dazed instant she was facing the headboard and straddling him, her body sinking onto his glorious erection until he filled her completely.
“Kiss me,” he demanded hoarsely, pulling her to him and seizing her lips as he thrust powerfully inside her, burying himself to the hilt, only to withdraw and plunge into her again and again.
Each time, she felt that coiled spring compress ever tighter…
tighter…until finally her fingers splayed spasmodically upon his sweat-slickened chest and she could only whimper for the incredible rapture exploding within her.
“Kiss me!” Adam whispered against her softly parted lips, feeling his release come upon him so suddenly that he grimaced as if in excruciating pain.
Yet it wasn’t pain that gripped him and caused him to stiffen, his shaft throbbing in rhythm with his racing heartbeat within the hot, wondrous tightness of her body, his breath tearing in great gasps from his throat. It was ecstasy, pure, unbounded, and radiantly blinding…
How long Susanna had lain collapsed upon his chest he could not say, but when Adam finally found it within himself to speak, he thought she must have fallen asleep.
“Camille?”
She was so quiet, so still, only her breath stirring the glistening hair that covered her face, that he began to believe she had lost consciousness from the sheer intensity of her passion. Wiping her hair from her flushed cheeks, he shook her gently.
“Camille?”
She lifted her head then, slowly, and looked at him with an expression he could not fathom, although her eyes gazed almost pleadingly into his.
“That’s not my name, Adam.”
His throat tightened, his heart brimming with so many things he wanted to say to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to utter a word. If he declared his love for her again and she scorned him for it, he didn’t know what he would do.
“It is your name. It must be.” He almost added that he was truly sorry, but he remained silent, enfolding her in his arms and bringing her with him as he rolled onto his side. As his relaxed body slid from hers, he felt strangely bereft, as if he wished they could remain joined as one forever.
Passion was so damned fleeting. When it was over, love should come into play, sustaining them until the next time desire overwhelmed them.
But between himself and this endlessly captivating woman there was only passion, all-encompassing as it was, and he wondered with acute regret if things would ever change and she would also come to accept his love.
Vain hope! On their wedding night she had said that she detested him. Such were the things that he possessed: her desire, which he truly wanted; her pity, which was the last emotion he wanted from her; and her hatred, which he had earned by forcing her into marriage.
Wholly frustrated, Adam willed himself not to dwell upon their seemingly insurmountable impasse. Especially not now, when she lay snuggled so warm and satiated against him, her slim hand resting over his heart and his cheek pressed against her soft, jasmine-scented hair.
Instead he would enjoy this moment, however fleeting. When they were together like this, savoring the sweet harmony after their impassioned lovemaking, it was so easy to imagine that things could be different between them.
“Adam?”
She wasn’t looking at him, but at some distant point.
“Yes?”
“Tell me about your life…before you came to Virginia, I mean.”
Startled by her request, he nonetheless didn’t see any harm in answering her. They were married, after all. It seemed that they held few secrets from each other now, other than the one he kept locked so securely in his heart.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“There isn’t much, really,” he replied, raising himself on one elbow, while keeping the other arm securely around her. “My father was a miner on the Newcastle coalfield and my mother a seamstress. I worked in the mines, too, starting when I was seven, so I never had much chance to go to school.”
“You taught yourself to read and write here at Briarwood, didn’t you?” she asked, obviously having surmised that he had been offered no formal education at Raven’s Point.
“Mostly,” Adam said, recalling his consuming struggle to master those skills within his first year under James Cary’s employ, and how when he finally had, he had used most of the wages he had saved to begin his own library. “Cleo managed to teach me a little—”
“Yes, Dominick told me that he’d had her tutored,” she broke in softly. “He said so she might help him run his household.”
“Whatever his reasons, it was an unusual thing for a white master to do for a slave,” Adam replied, finding the topic unpleasant and wishing he hadn’t brought it up.
“But Dominick always had a soft spot for Cleo, however twisted. When he found out about our lessons together, we both got a beating, but that didn’t stop her from writing a letter for me to my uncle in England.
She risked a lot to see that it got aboard a ship in Yorktown, doing so practically under Dominick’s nose when he took her with him to meet another ship carrying goods he had ordered from London. ”
“Did you ever receive an answer from your uncle?”
“No. Maybe he never got the letter. More likely he didn’t have the money I asked him to loan me so I could buy my way out of my indenture, and was too embarrassed to write and tell me. He was a miner, too, with five children to feed…” Adam sighed. “It was a good try, but I didn’t bother again.”
“I’m sorry, Adam. We won’t talk about this anymore. I only asked because I saw your books on grammar and the art of writing when I went to your office. Remember? You started to undress in front of me…”
He smiled at his memory of how prettily flustered she had become, but his lighter mood faded when he recalled the lateness of the hour.
If they kept talking all night, neither of them would want to get up in the morning for the Byrds’ summer ball.
“Enough reminiscing. I think we should go to sleep now—”
“No, Adam, I’d like to hear the rest of your story,” she insisted. “I won’t interrupt again. I promise. Please go on.”
He couldn’t refuse her when she looked at him so expectantly.
“You said your father was a miner?” she prompted him.