squirming with heated pleasure under his exploratory touch, shocked by her own verbal boldness and yet at the same time acknowledging how much it meant to her to be able to be so open and natural with him about her sexual responsiveness.
How tame her imaginings in the shop as she had bought the new underwear seemed now, compared to the reality of what Silas’s touch was actually doing to her. And as for her not touching him. How could she not when her need to do so was growing by the heartbeat? When she ached so badly to stroke her fingertips along the full length of his erection? She wanted to know every single nuance of the texture of its flesh. She wanted to explore the inviting slick suppleness of its pulse-racing male rhythm beneath her caress. She wanted…
She shuddered wildly under the erotic influence of her own thoughts, and then more wildly still when Silas stroked slowly all the way up her spine. His tongue-tip prised her lips apart and she admitted it eagerly, giving herself over completely to the thrusting passion of his kiss. His hand cupped her breast, and the heat inside her exploded in a firework display of shimmering pleasure. She caught his hand and pressed it fiercely against her breast as she moved rhythmically against him, every single part of her gripped by and focused on her longing for him.
Somehow, at some deep level, he had known it would be like this between them, Silas admitted as he lost the battle to control his response to Tilly’s arousal. What she was doing to him was causing what felt like a huge unstoppable wave of aching intensity and need to power through him. He knew that he was helplessly unable to stop himself from succumbing to it and to her. He knew that he didn’t even want to stop himself. And he knew that both of them were going to be overwhelmed by it, swept along together with only each other to cling to as the full power of what was happening to them possessed them. It was too late to stop it now, even if he wanted to. The openly urgent rhythmic movement of Tilly’s body against his own was driving him over the edge of his self control.
‘I want you,’ he cried out in a raw voice. ‘I want you more than I have ever wanted any other woman or will ever want any other woman ever again.’ He heard the words, thick and half-crazed with emotion, being dragged from his throat, and he knew that they were true. He could see shock, delight and yearning in Tilly’s eyes. He took her mouth in a kiss of fierce, consuming possession, picking her up and carrying her over to the bed.
Tilly moaned when Silas put her down, unable to bear even for a handful of seconds not to have him touching her or to be touching him.
She could see him kneeling over her, and she watched as he bent his head and traced a line of kisses down her body. His hands cupped and held her hips, and she shuddered when he anointed her hipbones in turn with slow, tender kisses and then moved lower. She could feel his fingers sliding through her ready wetness as he deliberately parted the outer lips of her sex. She could see him looking at her as he touched her.
Her flesh was flushed and swollen with arousal, making Silas ache to taste her, to feel the sharp shudders of her orgasm against his mouth. He wanted to slide his fingers through the wetness of her sex, between the fullness of the labia, and then part them so that he could stroke his tongue along the path made by his fingertip. He wanted to take the small responsive bead of her clitoris and caress it until he had brought her to the edge he had already reached, and then he wanted to slide slowly and deeply the full length of her, so that he was filling her, and she was holding him, and her flesh was taking him and using him for its pleasure, making that pleasure his own.
What he wanted, he recognised, was a degree of intimacy with her, a connection with her, a completeness with her that was outside any sexual experience he had ever had previously, or imagined he could want. Because what was happening for him wasn’t something he only wanted to experience on a sexual level. What he wanted from her went way beyond that into a realm he had always thought more akin to make-believe and fiction than reality.
Tilly gave a small aching moan. Silas bent his head and parted her labia, stroking his tongue-tip the full length of her sex.
It was more than Tilly could stand. She cried out and dug her nails into his shoulders, clinging desperately to the edge of her own self-control.
‘No,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Not yet. Not until you’re inside me. That’s how I want it to be, Silas.’ Determined tears sprang into her eyes as she looked at him. ‘It has to be both of us. I want you, Silas,’ she insisted. ‘I want you inside me. I want that so much.’
She felt him move, heard the brief rustle of a wrapper being opened and then discarded, and then blissfully he was holding her, kissing her, sliding his hands down to her hips and lifting her. Hungrily Tilly wrapped her legs around him, arching up eagerly to meet his first slow, sweet thrust into her.
Silas shuddered as he felt her muscles grip and hold him. Even this was a new kind of pleasure. Where he had previously known experience, with Tilly there was freshness, an untutored naturalness that was so much more erotic. Her body welcomed him joyfully and eagerly, offering all its pleasures to him, wanting him to take them, wanting him to thrust deeper and harder until he fitted her so well that they might almost have been one flesh.
Was this what love was? Silas wondered. Was this why he had always refused to believe in it before? Because he had been waiting for Tilly?
She cried out his name, her flesh gripping him, pulsing fiercely.
Through the fierce contractions of her orgasm Tilly felt Silas’s final deep thrust as he joined her in the soaring ecstasy that was binding them both together and taking them to infinity.
Silas moved away from the window and looked towards the bed. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning, but he hadn’t been able to sleep. He hadn’t been able to do anything since they had made love except go over and over inside his head the now familiar journey that had led from his first meeting with Tilly to this. He felt as though his whole life had suddenly veered off course and gone out of his control. How was it possible for him to have changed so much so quickly? How was it possible for him to feel so differently?
He made his way back to the bed. Not being within touching distance of Tilly made him feel as though a part of him was missing, that he was somehow incomplete.
As he slid back the duvet he realised that she was awake.
‘You know what’s going on, don’t you?’
‘I think so, and it isn’t something I wanted to happen,’ Tilly answered, trying to make her voice sound light and careless but hearing it crack as easily as he’d cracked apart the protective casing she had put around her heart.
‘Falling in love wasn’t exactly on my agenda either,’ Silas told her dryly.
‘Perhaps if we try really hard we can stop it.’
There was enough light from the moon for her to see the cynically amused look Silas was giving her. ‘Like we’ve already tried once tonight, you mean?’ he derided, causing Tilly to give a small shiver.
‘Silas, I don’t want to love you. I don’t want to love anyone. Loving someone means being hurt when they stop loving you.’
‘I won’t stop loving you, Tilly. I couldn’t.’ It was, Silas recognised, the truth.
‘This is crazy,’Tilly whispered, but she knew that her protests meant nothing and that her own emotions were overwhelming her.
‘Love is crazy. It’s well known that it’s a form of madness.’
‘Maybe it’s just the sex?’ she suggested. ‘I mean…’
Silas shook his head.
‘No, it isn’t just the sex,’ he assured her. ‘You can trust me on that.’
‘There can’t be love without trust. And honesty,’Tilly whispered solemnly.
This was all so new to her, and so very precious and vulnerable. Acknowledging her feelings felt like holding a new baby. Her heart did a slow high-dive. A baby. Silas’s baby.
Trust and honesty. Silas reached for Tilly.