Andrew: Lord of Despair (6 page)

Once, at the end of a day years past, when Andrew and Astrid had faced real peril, they’d both found themselves under Gareth’s roof. She’d slipped into his room, and he’d obliged her curiosity and need for human connection, petting and stroking her to her first experience of sexual pleasure, though even then, he’d been planning his travel, and she’d known it. They’d never talked about that night, but the memory of it beat in her brain in time with the rising rhythm of her heart.

What if she’d never had that experience with Andrew? What if Herbert’s fumbling humiliation was all she’d ever been allowed to know of passion?

“Tell me what you like,” Andrew whispered in her ear.

“Everything,” she panted as she slipped her hands under his shirt. “Anything, just don’t stop touching me,
please
, and clothes off, now.”

Andrew lifted up enough to pull his shirt over his head, shucked his breeches in a few jerky maneuvers, then untied the bows of Astrid’s bodice and jumps—her breasts were too sensitive for stays—and peeled her garments from her shoulders. She shimmied up and out of her skirt, pulled her chemise over her head, and in a startlingly short time, became, like Andrew, completely unclothed.

“This is decadent,” Astrid said, her gaze sweeping the muscled expanse of Andrew’s nudity.
He
was decadent, decadently beautiful, right down to the arousal that arrowed up along his flat belly.

Andrew put a fist under her chin and raised her gaze to meet his.

“We can stop, Astrid,” he assured her gravely. “We can stop right now, because we both know this is not wise. I am not what you deserve.”

She closed her eyes and tried for patience, but the image of Andrew in all his pagan glory would not leave her mind. “You are what I
need
, right now.
Please.
”

Before she was reduced to begging—more explicit begging—Andrew again lowered his body over hers, but he changed the tenor of their coupling, his touches becoming tender, lyrical, and cherishing. His fingers brushed along her sex, and he used his mouth to bring marvelous pleasure to her nipples. When his erection probed at her delicately, she wrapped her legs around him and lifted her hips in welcome.

“Andrew,” she pleaded, “I need you inside me, for the love of
God
,
would you come inside me now.” For years she had needed him, and that need threatened to consume her very reason.

He answered her by threading himself into her body and slowly gliding his hips forward, then retreating.

After four years without passion, without pleasure, without emotional intimacy in any identifiable form, Astrid wanted to savor the
relief
of this coupling. Later, she would grapple with guilt, shame, or consternation, but for now she wanted to savor the intimacy of it, the passion, the joy. Her body did not oblige these intentions, for she was coming in great, clutching contractions before Andrew had withdrawn for the third thrust.

He apparently understood, because he drove into her with measured force, prolonging and intensifying her pleasure, drawing out each contraction, and anchoring her as all sense of bodily orientation—up, down, prone, on earth—escaped her. When she lay quietly beneath him, he began moving once more, thrusting more deeply, setting up a rhythm that soon had her arching and groaning in his arms again.

“Let go, love,” he urged. “Take all you want, and I’ll still have more for you.”

She could plunder his patience for
years
, and yet she came apart again all too soon, and this time Andrew echoed the rhythms of her contractions with answering pressure on her nipple. Pleasure cascaded through her with brilliant, nigh-unbearable intensity, but true to his word, Andrew offered her still more.

She recovered enough to meet his gaze, the tenderness in his eyes registering deep in her body. Where had he been? Where had he needed to go so badly four years ago that they’d denied themselves even one more taste of such pleasure?

She could not ask him. He’d leave her naked and alone on the blanket if she tried.

“I have missed you,” Astrid said, a small truth that ought to be safe, for all that missing him filled her heart even as he still filled her body. She brushed her fingers through the silky dark hair falling over his forehead.

He did not echo her sentiment, not in words. He smiled down at her crookedly, and set to kissing her, using his tongue in synchrony with his hips.

“Hold me,” he whispered as he again built a rhythm with his thrusting.

She obliged willingly, joyously. Oh, how right it felt to make love with Andrew, how beautiful, and right, and loving. Tension that had built for years unfurled, as Astrid realized that not only would he shower her with pleasure, Andrew would delight in receiving it from her as well.

He moved in her with measured strokes, minutely changing the angle of his hips to effect an ever more gratifying penetration. She bowed up, trying to be closer, feeling pleasure bearing down on her again. Andrew braced himself on his forearms, but reached both hands to cover hers where they rested beside her head on the blanket.

“Come with me, Astrid. Come with me now.”

She recognized all his previous attention as so much generous teasing, because now he was moving in pursuit of mutual pleasure. He drove into her more deeply, kissed her more carnally, and laced his fingers through hers more tenderly, until she was helpless in the throes of gratification so intense she lost the sense of being in a body separate from her lover’s.

Andrew groaned softly into her mouth, a sweet sound of intimacy and relief, and Astrid felt a wet heat where their bodies joined.

They lay naked in the sunshine, serenaded by the stream and the breeze for long minutes. When Andrew shifted as if to spare her his weight, Astrid stopped him with a firm hand on his lower back.

“Where are you going?” For she never wanted to let him out of her sight, never wanted this moment of intimacy and pleasure to end.

“Not far.” He eased his body from hers, leaving Astrid on her back, feeling again the sunshine on her naked breasts, and a pervasive lassitude of both mind and body. Her eyes flew open, however, when she felt Andrew swabbing gently at her with a damp cloth.

“For goodness’ sake, Andrew,” she hissed, scrambling up to her elbows and reaching for the cloth. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He regarded her curiously for a few heartbeats, a linen serviette in his hand.

“If your husband were not dead,” he said quite seriously, “I would have to kill him for his neglect of you. Lie back and let me care for you.”

Confused at his irritable tone, Astrid did as he told her.

“He wasn’t a bad man, Andrew, just starchy about certain things.” Or thoughtless. Exceedingly, exasperatingly selfish too.

And hypocritical.

Andrew huffed—a disgruntled version of a sigh—and splashed more water onto the cloth. He surprised her by tossing it onto her stomach and lying back with an arm across his brow.

“My turn, sweetheart. You can’t lie about all day when your lover needs attention.” Astrid sat up and shot him a confused glance. He smiled back at her, looked pointedly at the damp cloth, and then at his own wet, softening member. “Don’t tell me you’re horrified at the very sight of the goods.”

“The goods,” she said. “Yes, well…” Horrified, she was not. “The goods,” she repeated, running one finger gently over his length. She was horrified to think of two years of marriage wasted on the wrong man. What had she been thinking?

She was fascinated and appallingly grateful Andrew could be this way with her: sensual, frank, relaxed, and arousing as perdition. She indulged her curiosity, slipping his foreskin over his glans, combing her fingers through the down at the base of his shaft, and shaping him in her fingers. To her consternation, her touch was effecting
changes
.

“Andrew?” she asked, holding his growing erection straight up from his body, as if to show it to him.

“Astrid?” he replied from behind closed eyes.

“Whatever are you about?” She gave his erection a wiggle to emphasize her point.

“I am enjoying your touch, sweetheart, and thinking of swiving you again, though I shouldn’t, God knows.” His tone held regret, almost bitterness, which Astrid registered through a haze of curiosity.

“You mean you can
swive
more than once?” she asked, sleeving his length with the circle of her thumb and forefinger. Had she uttered the word “swive” to her late husband, the poor man would likely have swooned with shock.

“
We
can,” he said, looking like some Roman faun on a midsummer’s afternoon, “when you arouse me so, but only if you’re willing.”

“Why on earth would I not be willing?”

“Because what we are doing, Astrid, is wrong,” he said with something approaching anger. “It isn’t wrong for you to want to be pleasured, appreciated, and cherished; it is wrong for me to be the one to afford you those things, though I have to admit, I’ve never enjoyed sinning more.”

How could he sermonize and incite her to argument like this? When they were naked? When she was touching him?

“I do not sin with you, Andrew. I understand you feel pity for me, or perhaps compassion, nothing more. I am grateful to you, and a woman grown. And”—she let go of him, when what she wanted was to wrap her fingers around him more tightly—“I believe—I have always believed—we are friends. Friends are kind to one another.”

“We are friends,” he agreed, sitting up and looping his arms around his drawn-up knees. “But before we go back to that house, Astrid, we need to reach some kind of understanding regarding this… lapse of propriety. You, my dearest goose, refuse to see me for the scoundrel and blackguard I am.”

Why must he carp on this? “You are neither, Andrew. You are a kind, honest, if somewhat troubled man.”

And you do not want me to love you.
You
hardly
allow
anybody
to
love
you.
The irony, that she’d married a man who’d also been uncomfortable with certain varieties of demonstrative emotion, was not lost on her. Was she doomed to choose only troubled men?

“You,” Andrew said, brushing a finger down her nose, “would canonize Beelzebub.”

Astrid pushed him onto his back and swung her leg over to straddle him.

“I would marry him, Andrew,” she said, glaring down at him, “if he made me feel the way you do.”

These were the wrong words to say, though she didn’t know why. Such bleakness passed through Andrew’s blue eyes that she curled down onto his chest to hide her face.

“I won’t be marrying you, Astrid,” he said, his hands slipping around her back in slow sweeps down her spine. “If you weren’t expecting, I wouldn’t risk what we’ve done so far. You know this?”

“I do now, you awful man.” Though in fact, she appreciated he was gentleman enough to spare her the fate that had befallen Cousin Gwen. “And I most assuredly do not want to be marrying again myself, thank you very much.”

She would have to get into the habit of lying to him, because he physically relaxed at that pronouncement and let his hands trail down to knead her buttocks. Were she not wrapped in his arms, she’d likely find that worth crying over.

Instead, she kissed his chest. “I see now why wicked men are in such demand. You know things.”

Andrew’s hand on her backside paused. “It isn’t wickedness to pay attention to what pleasures a lady. It’s consideration and a bit of patience. These are courtesies your husband, more than anyone else, should have shown you. On his late and benighted behalf, I apologize, Astrid.”

He meant the apology, she thought in amazement. The idea that Herbert could not have even comprehended what Andrew was apologizing for showed Astrid in glaring relief what a mistake her marriage had been—as if she hadn’t suspected she was in trouble before the wedding night was over.

“And I should apologize to Herbert’s memory for not being the wife he hoped he was marrying,” she said, realizing—
admitting
—Herbert had probably sensed their mutual mistake too.

“On his late behalf, I accept your apology. Now, my
friend
, where do you see matters going from here? What are your terms, Astrid?”

The exchange, simple and odd as it was, settled something in Astrid that had needed settling. She and Herbert had meant well by each other when they’d agreed to marry, and maybe, in time, they would have been a better match. It helped, though, to realize they hadn’t intended to disappoint each other.

“Terms of what?” she asked, nuzzling Andrew’s ear.

He heaved a sigh that had her rising and falling on his chest like flotsam in the surf.

“Astrid, please do not fence with me. I ought not to be here with you at all, and yet, as usual, my better judgment is overtaken by lust. The decision to be made is what to do about that now.”

He did not sound disgruntled, he sounded martyred, and yet his hands were the embodiment of heaven on her naked flesh.

“I would not see you unhappy, Andrew. We can consider this afternoon a stolen pleasure, a moment out of time between friends, something not to be repeated.”

“Is that what you want?” he asked, toying with a lock of her hair.

He
was
brave. “No. I do not want one stolen moment. I want time with you, however much you are willing to give me. Perhaps you are a distraction from my grief and my worries. Perhaps you are reassurance after a marriage that hadn’t much promise when Herbert died. Possibly you are the best friend I will ever have or something in between all the foregoing. I know I do not want only one stolen moment with you.”

This virtuosic display of understatement had the intended effect of banishing more of the tension from Andrew’s body.

“I suppose we shall have a small affair then.” He reached his conclusion with his lips pressed to her temple. “For the duration of my enforced visit here, you may expect me to importune you for your favors, to bother you constantly with my base appetites, to jump out at you from odd corners, intent on seduction. And then we will consider our stolen moment to have run its course. Will that suit?”