Page 38 of Loving Mister Stratford
Chapter Fourteen
Odette’s hands instantly flew to Simon’s mussed hair, her fingers knotting in the short locks as she squealed in shock and then quickly began to melt. What began as a push quickly morphed into a pull as she instinctively fought to bring his lips and tongue closer. She wanted to take more and give him more at the same time. Simon, determined to make his feast last as long as possible, resisted against her frantic tugs and the undulations of her hips. He focused all of his attention on the delicious, dewey folds of her sex; nuzzling and licking and tasting and nipping, inhaling deeply of her delicate, freshly-washed scent. His lips and tongue were everywhere except for where he knew she needed him most. He never wanted to come up for air. He could bury himself in this glorious place surrounded by Odette’s petal-soft thighs and breathy sighs and gasps, and die a content man.
She leaned back onto her elbows atop the stacks of parchment and books laid out on his desk, one hand still burrowed in his hair, its nails flexing against his scalp. Nudging himself closer still, Simon tugged her legs to his shoulders to hook her knees just there and wrapped his hands around her hips. The vibration of his moan of delight echoed through her sensitive flesh, eliciting an open-mouthed gasp of delight. Finally, he rolled her pearl between his lips, flicking it in a relentless rhythm and then laving it was the flat of his tongue. Her hips jerked against him, her breathing morphed into sobs of delight. His grip on her hips tightened as her movements became more desperate.
He needed to taste her when she came.
He needed this more than he needed food or drink.
She would sustain him.
Odette was his harbor in this world and she was all he required to survive.
“Simon!” she cried to the ceiling as he looked up the hills and valleys of her body spread out before him. Only him. The pink flush of her throat, the tantalizing glimpse of her teeth biting her full lower lip.
It was all for him.
His tongue stroked her in long, firm glides, exploring every fold and secret place. When his tongue speared into her entrance, invading her and tasting her in the most scandalous of ways, she shattered.
Her body went rigid, her other hand flying once more to his head as her thighs clenched around his skull to muffle his ears as she rode wave after wave of her climax and he drank deeply of her passion.
Gradually, Odette’s sobs melted into gentle tremors. Simon slowed his ministrations, gentling them in increments until he finally placed open-mouthed kisses on her inner thighs and sat back to pull his wife’s sated, pliant body into his lap.
She purred and nuzzled herself against his throat.“I wanted only to bring you supper,” she finally said sleepily.
“But you brought me something so much better,” he replied and stroked her virginal plait, wrapping the end around his fingers.
Odette’s palm found his cheek and turned his head so his lips met hers. He kissed her deeply; the thought of her tasting herself on his tongue was more erotic than he would have thought possible. Another wave of desire shot straight to his groin, pressing insistently against Odette’s bottom. The glazed look in her crystalline eyes and the pink cresting her cheeks nearly shattered his resolve.
“Simon, um, don’t you need to…?”
He shook his head and pressed his forehead to hers, content just to breathe in her nearness. This hadn’t been about slaking his lust, but about giving his patient wife the pleasure she so rightly deserved. Tasting her glorious release had been reward enough for him.
“Well,” Odette daintily cleared her throat;“in that case…” She leaned to the side and plucked something off the desk.“You still need to eat.” There was simply no resisting the charming curve of her lips as she held a cube of cheese to his mouth. He blew an amused sound from his nose and obligingly parted his lips to accept her offering and he chewed the salty, creamy morsel. His stomach clenched and released a pitiful growl. Maybe ithadbeen too long since he’d paused for a meal.
The only evidence that she’d heard it was the confident arch of her brow as she selected a thin slice of apple from the plate and slid it past his lips. He couldn’t resist nipping the pad of her thumb as she fed him the next bite of cheese.
“Have you always been like this?” she asked softly, uncertainty coloring her words.
“How?”
“So busy with your work that you forget to eat for days at a time?” A small line of worry knit her brow.
“Sometimes,” he answered and accepted a bite of crusty bread.“When I’m lost in my work, the rest of the world falls away.” He didn’t know how to describe the all-consuming obsession he experienced when there was a particularly promising development; how the sounds and distractions of the outside world amounted to little more than the falling of sand in an hourglass. He felt no hunger or thirst. When his mind was occupied thusly, there existed nothing else except the numbers before him.
That was, until he’d met Odette.
Even shut away in his office, he’d occasionally hear her slippers pad past the door and he’d freeze, a puddle of ink accumulating unnoticed in the middle of a sentence he’d been penning. He’d catch a hint of her laughter or the lilt of her voice in another room and he’d be yanked from his reverie, so attuned was he to her that he couldn’t help but latch onto the sound. Nothing had occupied him or consumed him as fully as his work until he’d met her. And it still terrified him.
“You feel no hunger?” she tilted her head in question and he shook his head in reply.
“Nothing else matters but the problem before me.”And you, he added silently, more than a little unnerved with how quickly that sprang to his mind.
She selected another bite of food from the plate and frowned in consideration of his words.“I can’t say that I’ve ever been so absorbed with something that I forget to eat for days at a time,” she finally said and he caught the proffered cheese between his teeth.
“I cannot explain it,” he replied after chewing and swallowing.“I simply don’t.” His mind had always been obsessive in that way. When something intrigued or fascinated him, there was no letting go of it. His brain simply would not allow it. He knew it had caused his mother no small amount of worry, just as it had earned him quite a bit of ridicule back at Eaton and University.
Where the other boys and young men had simply viewed school as a means to an end—they were getting their compulsory education so their parents would leave them alone to pursue more interesting pastimes—Simon had seen it as a new world of opportunity. He could expand his starving mind and explore whatever topics caught his fancy. He hadn’t anticipated his classmates to take such an interest in his odd behavior, nor had he expected to earn so much contempt for his single minded desire to succeed. Thank god for Blackwood. As a lad, the young lord had taken more than his fair share of pummelings (and subsequent punishments) in his inexplicable efforts to save Simon from his tormentors.
