Medieval 03 - Enchanted

words sank into Simon like light through
darkness, illuminating everything.
    I begin to believe that Ariane
is indeed what she most often seems to be—a skittish virgin
rather than an accomplished flirt .
    “Did you expect me to bite you?” he
asked, only half-joking.
    “Nay. I expected you to throw me on the bed
and—”
    Abruptly Ariane stopped speaking.
    “Ravish you?” Simon suggested.
    She nodded.
    “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said,
smiling crookedly. “I find you most alluring, but not so much
so that lust will overcome me after a single chaste
kiss.”
    “Chaste? I don’t understand.”
    “You will.”
    With that, Simon wet his lips once more with wine
and turned to Ariane. His lips were smooth and shinning. They
tasted firm and warm to her, sweet and oddly salt. But nothing was
as heady as the hot darkness behind his lips, where her tongue
received a caress for each one it gave.
    The half-goblet of wine Ariane had drained bloomed
in a rush of heat through her blood. Before this moment, the heady
feeling would have unnerved her. Now it simply made her want to
crowd closer to Simon, for he was her anchor in a warmly seething
sea.
    Simon felt Ariane leaning toward him. Triumph and
something much hotter flared through him. Only the discipline
learned at such cost during the Holy Crusade allowed Simon to keep
himself from reaching out and wrapping Ariane up in his arms. He
knew it was too soon for the fiery, headlong joining he wanted. She
was only beginning to lose her fear of what was to come.
    Silently cursing the vicious old maid who must have
filled Ariane’s ears with horror stories of the marriage bed,
Simon lured his bride into a deeper kiss, then deeper still, until
their mouths were fully mated and each knew no taste but the
other.
    It was unlike anything Ariane had ever experienced.
A caressing warmth that was sunlight and velvet combined. A complex
flavor to be savored again and yet again, always changing, always
new. A hushed intimacyrising like a silent
silver tide, lapping at the nightmare, forcing it to retreat.
    Thinking nothing, feeling everything with shivering
intensity, Ariane gave herself to the kiss.
    Slowly, carefully, Simon’s arms circled his
bride. Though he would have liked very much to lie down with Ariane
on the bed, her blunt expectation of being thrown down and ravished
made him decide to stay upright for a while longer.
    Gently Simon pulled back from the kiss.
Ariane’s murmured complaint and blind seeking for his lips
made him smile with both triumph and tenderness.
    “Simon?”
    “The wine is gone.”
    “Nay,” Ariane protested. “I can
taste it still.”
    “Can you?”
    “Aye. Can’t you?”
    “Shall we see, nightingale? Part your lips
for me once more.”
    Without thinking, Ariane obeyed. Simon bent and
captured her mouth with a single smooth movement, claiming it
completely with deep rhythms of penetration and retreat.
    At the back of Ariane’s mind, black warnings
stirred. Before she could act on them, the kiss changed.
Simon’s tongue caressed her mouth, touching every soft bit of
it from the satin behind her lips to the different textures of her
tongue. The tender teasing so pleased Ariane that she forgot to be
wary. She joined in the sweet duel of tongue with tongue.
    This time when the rhythmic penetration and retreat
began again, Ariane moaned softly and gave even more of her mouth
to Simon.
    The tiny sound sent desire ripping through him,
swiftly undermining his self-control. Ariane was succumbing to him
so delicately, so hotly, that he wanted to protect and ravish her
in the same wild instant. Everything about her called to his
senses, from the subtle perfume in herhair to
the taste of their joined mouths, from the soft warmth of her neck
beneath his fingertips to the fey fabric that caressed him even as
he caressed the female flesh beneath.
    The silver laces at the neckline seemed as eager to
be undone as Simon was to undo them. He had but to touch, to think
of tugging, and warm silver strings curled around his fingers and
slid away, leaving the sweet territory beneath undefended. It was
the same for the violet cloth, a caressing welcome even as the
fabric folded aside to admit him to the secrets of his
bride’s body.
    Ariane never felt the bodice of her dress give way
to Simon’s quick hands. She was lost to a kiss that was like
Simon himself, intense and controlled, fierce and tender, honest
and complex to the very core.
    The pleasure