Chapter 19
The drive up the hill takes five minutes. I’m awake for all of them, which I would like on the record, because I’ve been told twice tonight that I might be woozy.
“You’re very quiet,” Julian says.
“I’m conserving.”
“Conserving what.”
“You’ll see.”
He doesn’t answer that, but the corner of his mouth moves, and he takes the switchbacks considerably faster than he strictly needs to.
The road comes up through the spruce and wet rock and levels out.
Blackthorn House is sitting there with every window on the ground floor lit, which is more than I’ve ever seen from this house in my entire life.
He opens my door and offers me his hand, then frowns when his fingers close around it.
“You’re cold.”
“I’ve been on the Atlantic in December.”
“You’re cold because you gave me a quantity of blood roughly equivalent to a small glass of wine. And then refused the second cookie.”
“I ate a cookie.”
“You ate one cookie.”
“There’s a cookie in my coat.”
“There is a cookie in my coat,” he says, “because you put it there and told me it was for later, in a tone I decided not to examine.”
The smell of the sea follows us in as he takes off the coat he loaned me, then takes off my own coat and hangs it on the hook by the door. My coat, on his hook. Then he stands in the middle of the front hall and doesn’t move. At first I think he’s stalling, then I decide he doesn’t know what to do.
“Julian,” I say softly.
“Yes?”
“Take me to bed.”
He looks at me for two full seconds before he moves. This time he doesn’t sweep me up in his arms. Instead he takes my hand and leads me carefully up the magnificent staircase and down the long corridor to the room at the north end. At the door he stops again.
“May I ask you something?”
“You may ask me anything. I want it noted that we’ve already established the permission issue.”
“Does your throat hurt?”
It isn’t the question I expect. I put my fingers on my neck and find two small places above my collarbone, already closed, which I am going to have to explain to Lucy by Monday.
“No.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes. It aches a bit. Like a bruise, not like a wound.” I let my hand drop. “Why?”
“Because I’ve never done that and then stayed,” he says.
The hall goes very quiet, suddenly, the way old houses do. Below us the sea crashes against the rocks, the same way it’s been doing for two hundred and thirty years.
“Not once?”
“Not once.”
“What did you do instead?”
“I left,” he says simply. “It’s the thing I am best at, and I’ve been extremely good at it since before this house existed. I have never once been in the room afterwards, and I don’t know what is supposed to happen now.”
Oh, I think. Then I stop thinking, because I have spent eleven weeks watching this man compress himself into what he believes he is allowed to be. Not tonight.
I open the bedroom door and walk inside, then turn and beckon to him.
“Come here,” I say.
He comes. I get his coat off and drop it on the floor of the bedroom. He makes a small sound that is probably an objection, but he doesn’t pick it up. Instead, his hands come to my waist, carefully, the way they always are.
“Penny—”
“You keep asking me things,” I say. “Ask me this one.”
His hands tighten, just a fraction, and when he speaks, his voice has gone somewhere lower.
“May I take this dress off you?”
“Yes.”
“May I—”
“Yes, Julian.”
He doesn’t go fast. He never goes fast. But he stops going carefully, which is an enormous difference, and I feel it the exact second it happens. The dress goes, unceremoniously, somewhere behind him, his clothes follow, and then we’re on the good bed.
His mouth finds my throat. Not the marks, but the sensitive skin beside them. He stops there with his lips against my pulse, careful again, and stays absolutely still for long enough that I tug lightly on his hair.
“Julian.”
“I can hear it,” he says, against my skin. “And now I’ve tasted it.”
“What does that mean?”
He pulls back enough to look at me. The red is so strong in his eyes that it makes the rest of his face look sharper and stranger.
His mouth is very close to mine, but he doesn’t kiss me.
Instead, he puts his thumb over my lower lip and waits.
When my mouth opens, he slides his thumb gently inside.
He has never done that before. The feel of his cool skin against my tongue is almost more than I can stand.
He watches my face as his thumb moves slowly in and out of my mouth, and I’ve never been so aware of anyone in my life.
Then his mouth moves to my jaw, and my collarbone, and then down over my breasts.
His tongue flicks out over one nipple, and I make a sound that has no dignity in it at all.
He doesn’t smile, but I feel him pause, and then do it again, and again, and then he pulls back.
“I will take my time with that,” he says, “when we are not in a hurry.”
“I’m not in a hurry,” I gasp. He shakes his head and moves down, mouth trailing over my stomach until he reaches the edge of my underwear.
He looks up the length of me, his eyes so dark that the glow is almost invisible, and I think he’s going to ask again.
Instead he slides them off, watching my face the whole time.
And then he puts his mouth on me.
I have never been so glad I’m not standing up. His tongue makes slow, cool circles, his lips close around the places that are most sensitive, and the entire time, his eyes don’t leave my face. The pressure of that is what finally pushes me over, and I come saying his name.
I’m still catching my breath when he moves up to lie beside me, and I see the question in his eyes.
“Yes, Julian.”
His eyes close again, and I put my hand on his jaw. His eyelashes are very long and very dark.
“Tell me what you want to do to me,” I whisper, and his eyes open. The red in them is so hot now that it’s like sparks of light.
“I want to be inside you,” he says, in a low voice I have never heard before. “I want to feel you around me when I move.”
“Yes.”
“I want to be under you.” His fingers trace my collarbone. “I want you on top, so I can look up at you and see how good I make you feel.”
My heart speeds up, which I know he can hear.
“Anything you want.”
His hand slides down over my hip and pulls me closer. “I am very strong,” he says quietly. “I want you to use it.”
There’s no warning. One moment I’m beside him, and the next I’m straddling his hips, and his hands are on my thighs.
He looks at me like a man who has been given a gift he didn’t dare ask for.
I want to give him anything he wants, and I want to spend the rest of my life doing it.
That’s another dangerous thought, but I don’t care. I bend down and kiss him.
His hands close over my breasts, cool thumbs feathering across my nipples and making me gasp. One hand leaves my breast and slides between my legs, and he makes that sound, deep in his throat. I pull my mouth from his.
“Julian, please.”
He doesn’t hesitate. He lifts me as if I weigh nothing at all, then brings me down over him. I am so wet and ready for him that he slides all the way up in one long thrust. I cry out and dig my fingers into his shoulders.
“Am I hurting you?”
I shake my head. “No. I’m perfect.”
He holds still a moment longer, letting me adjust to his size, while his hand moves between us to touch me again.
He waits until I begin to move, rocking my hips against him.
Then he begins pushing up into me in long, slow strokes that drive every bit of air out of me.
I move with him, and he watches me with an intensity that makes my heart stutter.
It’s good. It’s so good. And then he leans up and puts his mouth on my throat again. The place he bit me is right there, and when his tongue flicks out over it, I come. I come so hard that I can feel it squeeze him, and then he’s coming too, groaning my name against my neck.
Afterwards, I sink onto his chest. He wraps his arms around me and holds me there, one hand stroking my hair. I want to stay like this forever, listening to the sea and feeling him quiet beneath me.
But eventually I do move, because I want to see his face. He lets me push myself up so I can see him, and I see that he is perfectly satisfied, in a way that he doesn’t bother to hide.
“You’re very smug right now.”
“Yes,” he says.
“That’s good, though. You can be as smug as you like.”
“I intend to be.”
I kiss him, long and slow, and he pulls me down against his chest again.
“You said no one has ever stayed,” I say quietly.
“I said I have never stayed.”
“Different statements.”
“Yes.”
I turn my head. He is looking up at the ceiling of his bedroom like a man doing arithmetic.
“Was it all right? The staying.”
Julian is quiet for a moment.
“I would like to do it again,” he says. “Tonight, if that is available.”
“It’s Sunday. I’ve got sixty-two covers.”
“After the sixty-two covers.”
“Then yes.”
“Good.” A pause. “There is a cookie in my coat.”
“Julian—”
“You will want it within the hour,” he says. “And my coat is on the bedroom floor where you threw it. I would like that on the record.”
Then I laugh and he gets the cookie and I don’t even care that I’m getting crumbs in the very good bed.