Annie's Song (34 page)

Taking care not to hurt her, for he guessed her breasts were probably tender, he nibbled the swollen bud of her nipple. When it grew distended and hard, he captured it between his teeth, then started to tease it mercilessly with his tongue. He knew exactly how sharply to nip that sensitive flange of hardened flesh, exactly how hard to suckle it, to drive her beyond reason. With quick relentless flicks of his tongue, he rasped the responsive tip, making it swell until it throbbed with her every pulsebeat. Then, and only then, did he deliver the killing blow to her senses, tugging hard on her with his teeth.

With the first tug, Annie shrieked. Not a little, whimpering cry. An earsplitting, rafter-shaking shriek.

Caught off-guard, Alex was so startled, he jerked back and nearly dumped her on the floor. He might have if she hadn’t grabbed him by his ears.

“Annie, hush!” Her head was thrown back and her eyes were closed, so she couldn’t see him speaking.

“Annie, don’t scream.” Alex threw a horrified glance at the door, which was unlocked. Clearly frustrated, she wrenched on his ears and arched upward, offering him her breast in a very determined way.

“Maddy’ll come barging in on us, sure as—”

Her nipple grazed his lips. At the contact, she mewled with urgency and jerked him forward by his ears.

“Ah—hhh!” she caterwauled.

“Jesus Christ.”

In one fluid motion, Alex pushed up from the chair, lay her atop the table on her back, sending paper and charcoal flying, and clamped a hand over her lips. Then, and only then, did he give her what she wanted. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been laughing when he drew a woman’s nipple into his mouth.

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With the first rasp of his tongue over her crest, Annie shrieked into his palm and twisted on his ears again. Alex decided his ears could take the punishment. In a heartbeat, he could no longer even feel his ears, anyway.

Annie was like a miracle unfolding in his arms. So incredibly sweet, so absolutely guileless. No stranger to women and ways to please them, Alex knew exactly where and how to touch her, and she responded to each new sensation with hungry eagerness and complete trust.

When she was panting and trembling with need, he ran his free hand under her skirt and up her leg.

Imagining his goal, the apex of her thighs, he groped for the slit in her bloomers, so eager to run his fingertips over her warm wetness that he was nearly mindless. So mindless that it took him several seconds to realize that Annie had gone rigid and was pushing in earnest against his shoulders. He reared back and fixed passion-glazed eyes on her fearful ones.

Looking, into her eyes, slowly registering her reaction, he froze and hauled in a deep breath, trying to get control of himself. Then, with great reluctance, he drew his hand from under her skirt. It seemed that Douglas’s ghost was going to haunt them, after all.

“It’s all right, sweetheart.” Braced on an elbow, Alex leaned a hip against the table and bent his head to kiss her swollen mouth. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”

The tension slowly eased from her body. The fear slipped from her eyes. Lying there on the table, her lovely breasts bared and only inches from his lips, she tempted Alex in a way no woman ever had, and he congratulated himself on his almost saintly forbearance. Remembering how the little minx had nearly yanked his ears off, he gave her a heavy-lidded, satisfied smile, confident that the moment would come, and soon, when she wouldn’t call a halt to their lovemaking. All he needed was patience and other opportunities to arouse her.

He started to push up. At his movement, Annie grabbed the front of his shirt and held fast. He arched a questioning brow. “What, sweet?”

She silently whispered something, but in his feverish state of unsatisfied passion, he had difficulty concentrating on her lip movements. “What?”

Her eyes darkened to a cloudy gray blue. Then she brushed her fingertips over her nipple and dimpled a cheek at him. Alex’s gaze shot to her breast. As he watched her tease her own nipple erect, he felt a certain part of himself getting painfully more erect as well.

“Annie, no,” he said hoarsely.

She tugged urgently on his shirt.

“I can’t,” he said with a ragged laugh. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

She pouted her lips and looped her arms around his neck. “Please?”

Grabbing her above the elbows, Alex hauled her up to a sitting position, pretending he didn’t understand. It was a lie, of course. But the way he saw it, all sin was relative, and it was better that he lie to her by omission than risk becoming so aroused that he lost control. To force himself on her would be unforgivable and cause irreparable damage. She was only just now starting to trust him.

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With trembling hands, Alex groped for her chemise ribbons, which was no easy task with Annie’s slender fingers running interference. He glanced down to see what she was doing and nearly groaned when he realized she was lightly tweaking the swollen peaks of her breasts. Jerking his gaze back to her face, he took measure of her expression, which was drawn taut with desire, her eyes heavy-lidded and dark with need.

“Christ!”

He caught her wrists and drew her hands away. He had clearly opened a Pandora’s box, he decided, and set himself to the task of putting his treasures back where he had found them. As he tightened the drawstring of her chemise and drew a bow, she sighed resignedly.

“You liked that, did you?” he couldn’t resist asking.

She smiled an angelic little smile and nodded. Alex drew her bodice together and began fastening buttons as though his life hung in the balance. “Well, we’ll have to do it again sometime,” he said in an oddly twangy voice.

She nodded again. He grinned and met her gaze as he worked the last button into its hole. “Next time, don’t ask me to stop, and I’ll show you how nice the other things can feel.”

A troubled frown drew her delicate brows together. Alex bent to kiss the wrinkles away. When he straightened, he rasped the back of his knuckle across her lower lip. “Trust me, Annie. What I would have done if you hadn’t stopped me would have felt a hundred times nicer.” When she looked unconvinced, he said, “Maybe even a thousand times nicer.” She still looked dubious. He studied her for a long moment, and then he said in a monotone, “You can’t count.”

She whispered, “I can so.’“ Then she promptly held up a fist and began unfurling her fingers, one at a time. “One—two—three—’’

Alex closed a hand over hers, laughing in spite of himself. “Never mind, you’ve convinced me. How high can you go?”

“Forty,” she informed him proudly. “No mistakes.”

“Forty? As high as that?” He considered that for a moment. Then, determined to explain things in terms she could grasp, he said, “What we just did? It was”—he held up a finger—”one nice feeling. But what we could have done?” He held up all ten fingers, then folded and unfolded them three times in quick succession. “What we could have done if you hadn’t made me stop would have been forty nice feelings.”

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

“Seriously. Lots and lots of very nice feelings,” he assured her. Bracing the heels of his hands against the table on either side of her, he brought his face within inches of hers. “And let me tell you, sweetheart, if the time comes when you want more of that, I’ll oblige you, anyplace, any time.”

She wrinkled her nose, which set him to laughing again. Then he caught her chin on the edge of his finger and tipped her face up. “As for your going home, forget it. I love you, Annie. It doesn’t matter to me that you can’t hear. Not a whit. Understand? And as for your not being able to talk, you’ll learn because I’m going to teach you.”

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She looked troubled by that pronouncement.

“Until you can talk,” he whispered, “you have a beautiful mouth, and I can think of dozens of nice uses for it besides talking.”

With that, he settled his lips over hers to prove his point.

For Alex, the word courtship took on new meaning over the next few weeks. Instead of wooing Annie with softly spoken words of love, he made cacophonous music. Instead of writing her romantic poems, he drew letters for her and painstakingly tried to teach her the manual alphabet. Instead of entertaining her with brilliant conversation, he stuck a horn in her ear and yelled, or he fixed one eye on a book and, as he read, awkwardly tried to execute signs according to the instructions.

In the beginning, Annie was an unreceptive pupil. While he was in a sweat, trying to make a sign perfectly, he would glance up and discover that her attention had drifted to the window behind him or that she was eyeing one of her noisemakers with abject yearning. On occasion, he even caught her looking at him with the same longing, which played havoc with his nerves. Since that day in the nursery, he had initiated no more embraces, not because he didn’t want to hold her in his arms, but because he feared he might lose control if he became too highly aroused.

Annie had no such concern, apparently. To her, the foreplay they had engaged in had been a highly pleasurable experience, and she obviously made no connection between their doing that and Alex longing to do more. Unfortunately, there was a connection, a rather strong one, and Alex was determined not to engage in activities that might get out of hand. Not until he felt certain Annie was ready to consummate their marriage.

One morning in the middle of a lesson on the manual alphabet, Alex glanced up from the instructional guide to find Annie leaning across his desk, her weight resting in equal part upon her elbows and her swollen stomach. Her mischievous grin and the sultry gray cast to her eyes set his heart to thudding.

“Annie, we’re supposed to be working,” he said sternly.

The dimple in her cheek deepened, and as she gazed at his mouth, he got the distinct impression she was thinking about other things besides lipreading. Lifting one hand to her bodice, she toyed with her buttons, then lifted her darkened gaze to his, her smile filled with unmistakable invitation. Jerking his eyes from hers, Alex started leafing almost frantically through the pages of the book. The little minx scooted closer.

“Annie ...” He glanced up. “Please get off my desk. You’re going to scatter my papers everywh—” His gaze dropped like a rock to her slender fingers, which had moved from the line of small buttons on her bodice to the crest of her breast. Through the layers of her clothing, she was lightly stroking herself. Alex could see her nipple thrusting against the material, a sharp little peak that beckoned to him irresistibly.

“Annie, don’t. That isn’t—”

She smiled and caught her bottom lip in her teeth.

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Alex shoved up from his chair and took a turn before the window. “You mustn’t—” He couldn’t keep his eyes off her hand and what she was doing. His guts knotted painfully. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that such behavior was unladylike, but in truth, as long as she only did such things when they were alone, he didn’t find it objectionable. Far from it. “Don’t ever do that in front of other people,” he amended hoarsely. “Not in front of Maddy or anyone. You understand?”

She nodded. Alex dragged in a shaky breath. “As for doing it in front of me,” he went on, “you have to understand that if I should take you up on your offer, I’ll want to do the other things we talked about.

Last time, when I tried, you grew frightened. Unless you’ve had a change of heart, then I’d suggest you stop”—he swallowed, hard—”issuing me the invitation.”

She stood up so suddenly that he felt sure it made her head spin. Watching her sultry expression change to one of wariness, he gave a halfhearted smile. “Somehow, I was afraid that would be your reaction.”

He glanced at her bodice. “Which is a shame. Making love to you is one of the few activities I’d deem worthy of interrupting our lessons. As I explained before, it’s extremely pleasurable.”

She promptly sat down and looked pointedly at the lesson book. Alex chuckled and resumed his seat as well. Ignoring her resigned expression, he relocated his place in the manual. Five minutes later, Annie was yawning and gazing out the window again.

Alex began to despair that he would ever be able to impart to her the importance of what he was trying to teach her, that if she would only pay attention, a whole new world could be opened up to her. Then one morning, quite by accident, he hit upon the strategy of teaching her signs that were meaningful to her.

Midway through their lesson, which had thus far inspired Annie to do nothing but fidget, Alex glanced over and saw her gazing with longing at her organ.

Capturing her attention with a wave of his hand, he said, “Would you like to play the organ, Annie?”

“Yes!” she said, and pushed eagerly up from her chair.

“Not so fast,” Alex said, feeling more than a little out of sorts with her. “First you must ask permission.”

“Please?”

He shook his head and tapped the book. “In sign.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know the sign.”

Nearly as accomplished at lipreading now as she, Alex hooked an arm over the back of his chair and fixed a challenging gaze on her. “Then you’ll just have to learn it, won’t you? It’s either that or give up playing the instruments. From now on, unless you ask permission in sign, you can’t play them.”

Her eyes widened with incredulity. Alex grinned at her and began flipping pages. He located the sign he was looking for. “Make.” He placed his right fist upon his left and made a twisting motion as though he were unscrewing something. “Music.” He waved the flat of his right hand from left to right in front of his flattened left hand, palm facing right. “Please.” Smiling, he made a counterclockwise circle with the flat of his right hand over his heart. “That’s all there is to it.” Making the signs again, this time more rapidly, with no hesitation between, he repeated the words, “Make music, please?” Settling back in his chair, he eyed her with lazy arrogance. “Now, you do it. Or forget playing the organ today. Your choice.”