She moans, the sound engorging my cock further. I withdraw almost completely, then thrust deep. She lifts her legs and wraps them about me. Her willingness almost undoes me. I grimace and hold back from coming.
“Did you finger yourself today, thinking about how flustered and randy I would be to find you already naked?” I demand.
“Yes.” She pants.
I thrust relentlessly into her. “Did you pinch your nipples and imagine my eyes on them?”
Her voice rises. “Yes.”
“And when you were in your bath, when no one could possibly see where your fingers were, did you touch that other place and imagine what it would be like to be sodomized by the entire length of my cock?”
She grunts animal noises and screws up her face, but does not speak.
I fuck her even harder. “Answer me. Did you?”
“Yes!” The word emerges wild and unsteady.
I can’t hold on much longer. I want to—I need to—spill everything inside her. “And did that thought make you come harder than you’ve ever come before?”
She shudders and thrashes, coming harder than she has ever come before.
As do I.
I UNTIE HER WRISTS AND hold her in my arms. To my further shock and amazement, she lifts one hand and settles it in my hair.
I want the moment to last forever.
All too soon, however, she begins to pull away. “I should like to rest now, with your lordship’s permission. Playing with Grisham all day was hard work.”
I do not want to go. I feel like Odysseus, home at last after ten long years at sea. How can I ever leave again?
I give her more room but do not get up. “Let me tell you a good-night story. You deserve one after playing with Grisham all day.”
She casts me an amused glance. “Let me guess—your story is about what the prince really does to Sleeping Beauty when he finds her.”
“No. It will be an entirely original one, written by me.”
“Featuring a slew of carnal acts?”
“Featuring nothing you cannot read aloud to a child in a room of his elders.”
She snorts. “You, writing a story that is safe for children? Go ahead; tell it. I will be on the lookout for hidden depravities.”
I have written a number of stories that are not only safe for children, but intended specifically for children. This one, however, has always been intended for her.
Until now, I have been dropping hints of my sentiments for her. Fairly broad hints at times, but still, hints that can be plausibly denied. Once I tell this story, however, everything will be laid bare and there will be no going back.
“Well,” she prompts me, “are you going to start your story before I fall asleep?”
I realize with a startling clarity that she has been testing just those semi-revealed sentiments tonight, trying to gauge the depth and intensity of my affection for her. Well, now she is about to learn just how deeply and intensely my feelings run.
I turn more fully toward her and begin. “Once upon a time, there was country named Pride. It was a proud country; everyone, from the king and the queen on down to the lowest street sweeper, was proud. But no one was prouder than the prince of the realm, a handsome young man by the name of Narcissus.”
“And he was so enamored of his beauty that he couldn’t stop looking at his own reflection?”
“My dear,” I admonish, “how little faith you have in me. Would I bother to recount such a hackneyed story to you? Trust me; you have not heard of this one.”
The skepticism on her face tells me she is not entirely convinced of my originality, but she says, “Go on then.”
“The most fashionable mode of travel in the country of Pride was a dirigible powered by none other than its owner’s personal pride. The prouder the person, the bigger his or her dirigible, and the higher and faster it flew. No one in all of Pride had a greater or fleeter dirigible than Prince Narcissus’s, which was, aptly enough, called Narcissus’s Pride.”
“And which will be thoroughly punctured by the end of your tale?”
I tsk. “Only ignorant foreigners would propose such a repellent deed. In Pride one would no more think of puncturing another’s dirigible than one would sell one’s mother on the town square.”
“And are you absolutely sure that the practice of mother selling isn’t a popular pastime in Pride?”
I burst out laughing at her ridiculous proposition—and choose not to dignify it with an answer. “The prince devised his own contest for ladies who wished to win his hand. For seven years running, the prince’s contest had been a three-day dirigible race, which he won handily each time. The entire country began to grow anxious for their prince, for he was of an age when he should settle down and beget heirs.