Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

More quickly now: she arched and curled her back, stroking herself against the length of his cock and molding herself around its thickness. Gasping, she watched the lines his features took, mirroring what her own must look like, eyes black and opaque, pupils distended as though drugged, mouth loose and slightly open. Thoughtful, almost meditative.

He moved slowly beneath her, just the smallest arching of his hips keeping time with hers.

Dance for me.

In Constantinople, she’d watched a pasha being entertained by a suave-hipped dancing girl. Behind the curve of smoke from his hookah, he’d seemed almost bored by the painted eyes, veiled face, exquisite bare feet below ankle cuffs tinkling with tiny silver bells. But Mary had caught a slantwise view of his hand-the one not holding the hookah-compulsively opening and closing upon itself, in perfect rhythm with the drums.

She’d pled a megrim and hurried back to her hotel. Her companions had supposed her offended by the spectacle, and Matthew Bakewell had begged her pardon the next morning, for exposing her to it.

Kit would have known better than to beg her pardon.

She raised her arms, stared down as though over a gossamer face veil, wiggled her shoulder blades, and felt her breasts raise and bounce in rhythm. He couldn’t look completely serious; well, it was a bit ridiculous that he and she could take such delight in their shared, crude, dancing girl fancy-ridiculous and absurd, childish and really rather marvelous.

He touched her nipples with cold fingertips. She gasped, moaned, and would have made a botch of the rhythm if he hadn’t taken it up for her, moving his hips and thrusting his cock up higher within her, with vehemence and perhaps a little more heat.

But suddenly, there wasn’t a rhythm anymore. Nor a dance. There was only flesh and breath, muscle and movement and blood coursing beneath the skin. The oriental fancy had dissolved. There were only- they were simply-Mary and Kit once more. The notion that they could have imagined themselves anyone else was quaint and utterly nonsensical.

Nothing more than what it was, and everything quite good enough. His hands, his mouth on her breasts: stroke and squeeze, tease and tongue and pull and suckle. His arms around her now, drawing her downward to grasp and hold him, beneath and within her, drenched and clinging, no music but their ragged breath.

She didn’t want to get out of bed. “Once I do,” she whispered, “I shall begin making troublesome inquiries about what you’ve been doing and whether it’s something I should approve of.”

“By what right,” he asked, “will you be inquiring?” He said it curiously, rather lazily, his arms still tight around her.

“None,” she said, “except I find I can’t separate out what you do in bed from what you do the rest of the time. Well, perhaps I can today. Make today a special, privileged day.”

“I’m glad,” he said.

“But next time…”

“Do you want there to be a next time?” he asked.

How odd, to be measuring time so stingily. In Curzon Street, they’d had nothing but time.

She kissed him.

“Yes, tomorrow afternoon. For in the morning Jessie and I will be writing out invitations to some local ladies, to discuss a cistern for the village.”

“Cistern?”

“There, you see, you’re curious about what I do as well. It’s natural for a couple…”

Except that they weren’t one anymore. They drew their clothes on silently.

“We dine at half past four today,” she said. “The young people will be returning from the ruins on Rook Hill. I must hurry.”

He tied her stays just a bit too tightly for perfect comfort. She found that she didn’t mind. The pressure would be rather like an extension of his touch.

She turned her neck to kiss him.

He helped her pull the dress down over her head and did up the buttons.

“Saturday, then. And we’ll tell each other a few things then. Unless I can contrive to make you forget what you want to know.”

She laughed. “By all means, contrive away. I shan’t forget. Do your contriving first, though, won’t you. If we argue later, we’ll still be ahead of the game.”

Stopping to dip her hands in clear rushing water, she drank deeply before hurrying away from the cottage. Climbing over the stile that pretended to be broken, hurrying down a footpath, leaving the outskirts of Rowen and entering the precincts of Beechwood Knolls, she felt her other selves joining with her.

Aunt Mary.

Provisional Treasurer of the newly organized Grefford Village Ladies’ Cistern Committee.

Matthew Bakewell’s mistress (however did you manage it, Mary, to be unfaithful to your lover, with your husband of all people? Too complicated. She wouldn’t think of that particular self right now).

The path had turned away from the river; the woods had thinned. The hill was a bit steep, but she managed it all right. Stepping over another stile, she made her way across the meadow to encounter a lonely Lord Ayres gazing poetically out toward the vista, his horse cropping the grass behind him.

“Ah, good afternoon, your lordship,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

And not even very annoyed, on this privileged day, by his callow, violet-eyed presence. It was time, after all, to be Aunt Mary again. Even with her hair in elf locks and sleeves sopping water from the brook. While he was-as she’d come to expect him-all foppish elegance.

“And the expedition? I trust you were properly moved by the spectacle of the Rook Hill ruins?”

He shrugged-trying not to show the boyish pouts and sulks beneath his carefully cultivated demeanor. “The young ladies made very accomplished sketches. When they weren’t surveying the horizon for chance intruders, Miss Elizabeth Grandin in particular.”

Too bad, she thought, that the girls were so pretty-it must make him feel awfully rejected. And she could guess whom Elizabeth had been scanning the horizon for-to show off to Fannie, as a marvel of the neighborhood, and a much better one than a stupid set of fake ruins.

Poor boy, she wanted to be generous to him. “It must have been a bore for you,” she said-adult to adult, which seemed to cheer him a bit.

“A walk in the forest like you’ve had,” he said now, “a simple, contemplative ramble, among the bluebells and butterflies, nightingales, dog roses, and wood anemones, would have suited me far better, and rested my unquiet spirit, don’t you know.”

She might not have been able to keep from laughing were it not for the double infelicity of his phrasing-his own peevishness elevated to unquiet spirit rather canceling out the absurdity of her afternoon recast as a simple, contemplative ramble .

The problem was what she might possibly offer in reply, if Unquiet spirit, my arse was forbidden to her. A simple nod was best, a wistful, respectful softening of her eyes, in deference to his unquiet spirit and the demands it made upon him.

Yes, he liked that. “My father has a similar set of ruins at home,” he told her, “not far from the Chinese bridge the landscape gardener erected when I was a boy.”

She laughed (for he really wasn’t so bad in his way), and he smiled his eagerness to share his contempt for his father’s boorishness. For it seemed he’d decided she was a kindred spirit, or at least a sympathetic one-especially after a wearing day of being ignored by two pretty girls.