Beast (18 page)

Her hands were caught by the wrists. He broke the embrace and stepped back.

They stood there in the dark, breaths hissing, him holding her wrists.

Louise wet her lips as she tried to control the intake and expulsion of air.

Charles let out softly, "
Ho-là
—" cutting
off ho-là-là
, an exclamation that was strictly French. Then, needing to exclaim something, he exhaled a nonsense phrase of Arabic that simply rose up from a decade ago, one of blasphemous wonder. "
La ilaha illa-llahu. "
Half the creed of belief.
There is no God but
Allah
. And Lulu-Louise, not Muhammad, was Heaven's messenger on earth. God above, she was unearthly in his arms, unlike anything else on the planet.

Where was the bedroom? Which way was the bedroom? He laced his fingers into hers, pulling her half a step in God knew which direction. He stopped.

frowning at shadows. He was disoriented from having crawled all over and around her for rive minutes in a slow spin through the dark. He stood there searching, frustration mounting, his breathing labored, holding the hand of a young woman who was more than compliant. She pressed up against the side of him. under his arm. He ended by turning, bending slightly to kiss her again. Another deep, lavish kiss.

More kissing. He couldn't quite get enough. Her mouth was soft, the smoothest, softest lips he could ever remember touching, and softer still on the inside. He shifted her around directly in front of him, stroked her with his tongue as his hands found her hips, pressing her closer, tighter, in rhythm to
a
slathering game of withdrawal and lingual penetration. The kiss became fervid, unruly. She followed, allowing it. contributing to it. taking hold of his robe in front, tight fistfuls. She rose up onto her toes, pressing her hips into him. He broke their embrace again a moment later, laughing, having difficulty speaking. "You know"—he drew a huge breath into his lungs, exhaling as he stroked her back—"we are going to end up right here somewhere between the hearth and piano"—another attempt to get air—"when the bed is so much more comfortable."

He was thinking of his knee that would not withstand too much of a pounding on the floor, not even on tight-woven oriental carpet.

He considered dragging her down onto the floor, anyway, here in the lost dark. It wouldn't take long, he was sure of that. Just a gentle descent, pulling her under him, another kiss like the last, and he would be on top of her. entering her with roughly the same drive and force as held the solar system in alignment.

As if his own concupiscence weren't enough, Louise lay her forehead against his chest. Softly panting, she said, "Oh—" She drew a heaving breath. "Oh—" A breath again. "I—oo—I didn't know this could—" A breath. "What a monstrous lust," she murmured, then laughed. "I feel as though it could break me in two."

"Yes, it's a little crazy," he said. Charles closed his eyes and listened to his own heartbeat thunder in his ears. He laughed raggedly. "Though very nice." It occurred to him to ask, "How much experience exactly do you have with this, by the way?" When she didn't answer, he said, "Because, dear heart, unless we are willing to stop periodically like this, I think I am going to lay you the moment I can find a comfortable place to put your back, and without too much preamble."

"All right," she murmured.

At least that was what he thought he heard. Her voice was small, her head still bent against him. "All right?" He laughed and pulled her shoulders up against him, into his armpit. He squeezed her tightly to him. "It's not all right. I want to make love to you properly. Which way is the bedroom? Do you know?"

He turned completely around one time, walking her with him, three hundred sixty degrees. The faint light through the terrace draperies materialized out from behind him, a landmark. Big, swooping hero that he was, he stooped, found the backs of her knees, and swung her legs up, cradling her back. Louise giggled and kicked lightly, nuzzling against him in a way that was perfectly worth a swollen knee in the morning.

He walked with careful evenness, taking her toward his bed.

An hour ago, an eon ago, his mind had toyed with odd little tricks. Pearls fished out of necklines and passed between lips. Games, perversities in the dark. What he felt now was so simple and straightforward. No detours. No crooked turns. Just a bullet-quick shot straight up to the peak of arousal. From just kissing her mouth and touching her breasts. He could hardly wait to get her onto the mattress.

Once there, though, he wanted more. Sexual gluttony. If it felt this good kissing with their clothes on, he reasoned, well… He wanted her undressed, undone. He no sooner set her buttocks onto the counterpane than he reached into her hair. She caught herself on her arms as he removed pins, at first delicately. One. Two. Three. But there were a lot of pins. Eventually he was slinging them like a madman, pins flying, some silently onto the carpet and some with faint ticks of steel against the nightstand.

Her hair fell in a mass, long and thick. It hung down to her hips, straight and heavy with a sliding weight to it that poured through his fingers like water—buckets and buckets of cool water, there was so much of it. Like all the rest of her physically,
too
much. Too beautiful… too smooth… too young… too willing…

He took her shoulders and pushed her back, undoing clothing as he kissed her.

She wasn't as eager for this. Or rather was eager, but somehow bewildered by it. She didn't help. She even asked at one point, "What are you doing?"

"
Un
-doing," he answered. "The hooks at the back of your dress. There's a bloody lot of them."

"Oh." She giggled and rolled up onto an elbow, turning so he could get a better angle.

He got distracted halfway through the hooks, though. He had put his mouth into the crook of her shoulder, kissing his way up her neck, when she suddenly backed up into him, pressing her buttocks against his fully roused member. He was so surprised—and she had such a provocative knack for wiggling her backside with a kind of twist to her spine—he nearly expired of bliss on the spot.

"Oh, God, Louise," he groaned—as he fought another small, silent battle: He was having trouble holding to English. French invocations and magnificats kept rising to his lips, calls upon the sainted mother of God, the sacred blood of the saints.

Before Charles knew it, he was on top of her again, fumbling with the front of his trousers. An awful thought occurred: He was responsible for this young woman's health and reputation. And he possessed, in a drawer not ten feet from them, the means to guarantee both. A condom. He should get one. He fought himself over this issue for a split second, then kissed her mouth one quick time and heaved his weight up.

"Where are you going?"

"To get protection."

"To get what?" she asked.

"It's just over here," he assured her. "It will only take a second." He padded through the dark, his trousers open, an erection bobbing along as heavy as a log. His heart, his blood thundered for him to return to the bed and finish the deed off. God, he hated this, he thought. If he'd thought the marriage was as close as a month away, he wouldn't do it.

He found the drawer, bent, opened it.

From the bed. she called to him, "I should tell you something." She laughed lightly through breathy gasps.

He asked over his shoulder, "What?" He wasn't paying too much attention, his fingers fishing clumsily through the invisible interior of a drawer.

"Well—" A breathy pause. "
Technically
I'm a virgin."

Charles stopped, turned, and looked in the direction of her voice. "
Technically
?" He wet his lips. "What other kind is there?"

"You know. A pure one, I guess."

"You're not a pure virgin?"

"Oh, no." she said breezily. "I've kissed lots of men." As if this were sin of the first order.

"A virgin," he repeated dully. The notion rang miserably and instantly true.

She continued, "I mean, I have kissed a lot and, well, you know, a little more than kissing, and I've
talked a
whole lot about what I might or might not do. Oh, but, Charles"—she groaned softly, sweetly—"there has been no one, nothing like you. If there had been, if I had known, why, I would be the biggest tart on earth!"

She meant this as sincere praise, of course. Yet her hyperbole could have been better chosen. Frowning, Charles had to remind himself that, if anything, he was the villain here. She was a virgin. Jesus Christ. An eighteen-year-old virgin who was slightly drunk and, even sober, besotted enough with this guise of his to come the length of the ship and make overtures of her own. She was
not
the biggest tart on earth. She was a young, inexperienced girl—with a precocious mouth—whom he was taking advantage of.

Charles stood up completely, rubbing his forehead. He squinted in her general direction, baffled, trying to take his bearings on this new twist to the situation. He asked, "Do you, ah, want to do this?"

"Oh, yes," she said quickly. "I just didn't want to surprise you."

"Well, I'm surprised." he said. He tried to make light of this comment. He laughed. "And, I'm afraid, I'm a virgin of sorts myself. I have never lain with a woman who was, ah—new to this."

She, her silence, didn't understand what he was saying at first. She rolled on the bed, her silhouette seeming to come to its elbows. She was trying to see him in the dark.

He said reassuringly, "Don't mistake me. If you want to, I'm sure I can handle the matter. I understand the concept, the biology of it. but I have just never come up against the idea in practice."

Understanding dawned and she fell back onto the mattress, laughing, peals of giggles. "Well, we shall explore this together then."

Perhaps it was funny, but Charles couldn't appreciate it. He was halted by an odd feeling, that of somehow cuckolding himself. He realized that, if there was tender communion, a once-in-a-lifetime act, he wanted it for himself, his
real
self. He wanted something for them to share in memory, not something he could never speak aloud.

It occurred to him—with a mental clunk reserved for moments when the obvious hit a man over the head: He had separated himself in two. There was Charles Harcourt who spoke French and would marry this girl and love her, no doubt, for the rest of his life (though he might worry a little about her propensity to seek out affairs). And there was Charles of the Arabian dark, who couldn't resist seducing this young woman for his own ego. and whose English-speaking games would get him into a great deal of trouble if she ever found out what he'd been up to and why.

His blood cooled slightly for his game all the way around.

"Perhaps," he suggested, "you want to stop? It's all right. I would understand. A woman sometimes wants to save this for her husband."

Her faintly tipsy giggles deteriorated into round.
ha-ing
. belly laughter. She said in breaks and pauses,

"My who?"—chortle, chortle—"husband?"—soft, laughing chokes from her delicate throat—"for my hunchbacked husband?"

"Excuse me?"

She tried to calm herself. "It doesn't matter." She sniffled. She had laughed herself to tears. "He's disfigured," she reminded him. She added offhandedly, "I don't look forward to this with him."

Charles gritted his teeth. "He's not hunchbacked."

"No, no. Of course not. It doesn't matter."

He pressed his lips together, a grimace that tried to focus on an indistinct silhouette that seemed part woman, part bedclothes. "You think of him as a hunchback?"

"It doesn't matter," she repeated.

"No. Of course."

From the bed, Louise heard the drawer shut, then the shadow of her wonderful lover was suddenly standing over her again at the side of the bed. He said, "I hope you don't mind, but I don't seem to have a sheath."

"A what?"

"It doesn't matter," he said—her phrase and much her own intonation—as the mattress sank. He lay down onto her full-length.

He was heavy, warm. Louise's belly roiled. Her head grew light as he pressed himself along her body, his hands madly pulling at her clothes, opening, removing. This Arab certainly knew his way around the fastens of western women's clothing. She was in her chemise and petticoat in less than a minute. The chemise he merely loosened till it gaped. He rucked her petticoat up in bunches. It lay around her waist as he untied the drawstring of her knickers.

It all seemed a little fast. Fast. Yes. Like a race. Louise's mouth was dry from simply breathing. She breathed hard. Her heart pounded against the walls of her chest. She squirmed, a movement she couldn't seem to control. He backed up far enough to grasp her drawers with both hands, then pull them down her legs, yanking the fabric out from under her, taking it straight down her hips, her thighs, her calves, her ankles, and off, her knickers becoming so much refuse, tossed aside like the pec! of;., banana.

His hand came from nowhere down onto her bare belly, hot against skin newly exposed to cool air. She leaped. His touch was confident, adeptly aware. His palm slid over her stomach, then moved down to rub the rise of her mons; he rubbed her with slow, deliberate pressure. His fingers dug into the hair, combing, stroking closer, ever closer downward.

She knew what was happening, all that was going to happen, yet as it unfolded, it was shocking. He cupped her between her legs. Nudging her knees farther apart, pressing her legs wide, exposing more of her to the night. Then he touched that part of her never felt by anyone… never looked upon or mentioned… her most intimate darkness, so forbidden… Then a surprise of even greater proportion, a delicious, horrible surprise. With his finger, he reached inside her. She had never imagined… It had never occurred to her…

Louise felt herself go liquid, her whole body in thrall to the slow slide of his finger entering her, inmost then out again; such a strange and remarkable breach of privacy. His hand moved on her, in her, unhampered by discretion or scruple or, as he explored, even her own unprecedented shyness. She wanted to close her legs; she wanted to spread them lasciviously, offer herself up, a remarkable urge to open herself to another. Contradictions. Paradoxes again. Louise felt sleek yet swollen… lax of muscle, of will, yet tight, coiling somewhere, rising, lifting toward… something, even as she felt herself sinking deep into the mattress.