Susan Johnson (36 page)

“I was thinking you might like to gather some rosebuds with me,” Duras murmured, indicating the flowering bushes on the verge of the lawn.

“Someone might come.”

He grinned. “I was planning on it.”

“Libertine. I meant Tamyr or a servant.”

“That’s why I’m offering you the privacy of my rosebushes.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to wait until tonight.”

“Would you?”

She smiled. “I think I might come if you simply touch me.”

“True,” he murmured, recalling her ready passion. “But I thought you might like a trifle more prolonged sensation.”

“How prolonged?” She could feel the pulsing between her legs accelerate.

“You decide,” he whispered, holding out his hand.

And when she placed her fingers in his, she began to tremble.

“It’s been a long time,” he softly said, pulling her to her feet. He lifted her into his arms in a swift, heady sweep of
powerful, flexing muscle and, kissing her, carried her behind the rose hedge.

Sliding her body down his in a slow, lingering greeting, he set her on her feet. She ran her hand down his breeches at the last, her palm trailing over the soft chamois, feeling the smoothness, the hard swell of his erection. Tantalized, her body opened, recognizing him, and she reached for the buttons on his breeches.

His fingers closed around her wrists, pulling her hands away. “Not so fast,
chou-chou
,” he murmured. “I’ve been waiting too long for this.”

“But Pasha may wake up,” she whispered, impatient, needy.

He shook his head.

“You don’t know.” Her voice held a small heated petulance as it always did when she was dying for him.

Glancing over the flowering hedge, he observed his son in blissful repose. “He just went to sleep.” Gently swinging her hands, he smiled. “Plenty of time.”

“Andre!”

“Allow me a moment,” he said with a grin. “I just rode three thousand miles for this.”

“I’ll attack you,” she turbulently asserted.

“That would be interesting. And then what would you do?” he sportively inquired.

He was right of course; how could she force him? “What if I plead?” she asked in a less vehement tone.

He laughed and, lifting her hands to his mouth, kissed her knuckles. “I thought you wanted prolonged sensation.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Do we have time to remove our clothing?” he playfully teased.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” She’d all but stopped breathing. “Eleven months …”

“I’ll hurry,” he said, understanding she was beyond whimsical play. Releasing her hands, he quickly pulled off
his jacket and neckcloth, unbuttoned his shirt just enough to tug it over his head. Frantically struggling to undo the tiny covered buttons at her neckline with trembling fingers, Teo was only partially successful when Duras, after spreading his shirt on the grass, said, “Let me.” Nimbly working the buttons free, he eased the gown off her shoulders.

She helped, wrenching the sleeves down her arms, pushing the froth of printed muslin past her hips. Fumbling with the ribbon at the neckline of her chemise, her senses in tumult, she felt like a skittish, untried maid on her wedding night. The yellow ribbon only knotted more tightly in her hands and she swore in exasperation.

“I’ll do that,” Duras said with a small smile.

“You’re too cool,” she hotly impugned, gazing up at him as he deftly unraveled the knot in the ribbon.

“And you never are. It’s one of your many charms,” he whispered, touching the swell of her breast above the lace-edged neckline of her chemise. “These are beautiful,” he murmured, sliding the fine batiste away, caressing her breasts, his hands warm, gentle. “Very showy.”

“They don’t seem to fit in my clothes anymore,” she breathed, languid waves of heat drifting downward from his stroking hands. “Since the baby …”

He lifted the heavy flesh, let it fall, felt its weight and bounce. “You’re not nursing anymore …” His voice was silky, low, his fingers moving to her nipples, gliding over them, feeling them grow harder under his touch.

“I stopped”—she groaned softly, the spiraling heat rippling down her vagina—“three weeks ago.”

“So I missed having you feed me. How big they must have been full of milk.” Their size was still sumptuous, great. “Next time,” he whispered and she felt a drop of liquid desire slide down her thigh.

He gazed at her, lush, half undressed, her flesh glowing in the sunlight, her green eyes hot with desire, and he wondered how he’d lived without her so long.

A light breeze floated through the willows, the leaves fluttering in the sunlight, the heavy scent of blooming rose perfuming the air, and Teo, half nude like some glorious, alluring nymph of summer, gazed up at him with unbridled longing. “I feel as though I should recite some Ovid,” he whispered, bending to kiss her.

“Or compose a sonata,” she murmured against his mouth, a heady kind of dizzying bliss in the air.

“I
have
to thank Bonnay,” he said, heartfelt and grateful.

“We’ll send him … something lavish.” She understood now what it had taken for him to venture so far on a hope.

“The world tied up in a bow wouldn’t be enough for”—he caught his breath as he slipped her chemise down over her hips, watched it fall to the ground—“for this.”

“Welcome to Siberia,” Teo whispered.

“I like the view,” he murmured.

“Now you must undress,” she softly ordered.

He was already pulling off his boots before she finished speaking.

Lying on the makeshift bed, his scent lingering on his shirt, she watched him, watched his attenuated, finely honed muscles moving under his brown skin, rippling across his shoulders, down his arms as his fingers worked the gold buttons through the pliant leather of his breeches. “There,” he murmured with a soft finality, slipping the last button free, looking up briefly to meet her gaze, a smoldering heat in his dark eyes. The pale chamois was stripped down his hips and thighs with haste.

His erection was gigantic.

She felt a purple haze begin to color the world. His naked body was so gorgeous it bordered on sinful. Lithe, powerful, capable, she knew, of the most sybaritic pleasures. Following the line of dark hair running down his torso and belly to his genitals, her gaze came to rest, lingered on his erection curving upward, its head large, beautifully formed, graceful like the rest of him.

Rapacious greed flared through her.

“I’d lock the door if I could,” he said, moving toward her across the small expanse of green grass. “Although a little terror never hurts.”

She was trembling when he lay between her legs.

“You’re safe,” he murmured, misunderstanding her tremors, his lips brushing her earlobe. “No one can see.”

She was liquid, melting, the sensations so familiar with him, so natural—the ache between her legs intense, as if she were coming apart at the seams.

He kissed her softly, lowering himself by degrees, his biceps swelling, guiding himself into her. Easing past the pulsing tissue of her labia, he pressed into her hot wetness. Slowly, slowly, so she could feel the pressure, the folds of her inner flesh absorbing the ridge of his penis, then the entire head, the long, hard length until she gasped, her body shuddering around him, welcoming him home.

Holding him close, her hands glided down the subtle ridges of his backbone to the indentation just above the swell of his buttocks—the hair there soft, fine. And she lifted her pelvis to him and drew him in, heard the hollow echo strumming, vibrating in her ears, felt the first fluttering spasm. Her climax was beginning before he’d completely entered her.

She opened her mouth to scream.

“The baby,” he whispered, his hand covering her mouth.

She gripped him fiercely, holding him inside, not letting him go, and his climax began to peak, as if he were young again, out of control. It had been too long for him too and he drove deeper, driving in so she whimpered into his hand and wrapped her legs so tightly around his hips he could barely move. But indulgent when he could have broken away, he stayed where she wanted him and their senses reeled, their bodies gently rocked, their minds grew feverish with lust.

“Please, please, please,” she cried, biting his hand, and he poured into her with an explosive rush because she wanted him to, because she spoke to him not only in those fervent pleas.

And he heard her.

It was a shuddering, breath-held, gasping orgasm, hushed, constrained, that lasted for a fine-drawn, emblazoned eternity, that shocked their nerves and cut to the soul that made up for their long, grievous months of deprivation.

The willows above her were dappled in sunlight when Teo opened her eyes, brilliant chartreuse and golden movement. “You’re as fine as I remembered,” Teo softly breathed.

He smiled but didn’t open his eyes, didn’t move.

“Are you alive?” Her voice was teasing.

“I’m not sure.” His reply barely audible.

“Will you stay?” It was the most persistent of her thoughts with Duras.

His erection came to life inside her, moved, swelled, sent a thrilling message through her sensory pathways to her brain.

“Yes,” he said, opening his eyes at last, the long dark lashes lifting, unveiling the beauty of his gaze. “I’m staying.”

His arousal grew larger as he spoke, triggering small waves of intoxicating rapture in the heated recesses of Teo’s body.

“We need a priest.”

“Later.”

“Soon.” He drove in, rigid again, unsated. “Very soon.”

“Yes,” she agreed on a blissful sigh.

He made love to her slowly then, his initial, impetuous lust partially assuaged. And the next time she made love to him as he lay sprawled on the cool green grass, gleaming with sweat, still panting. She stroked the dampness of his chest, licked the salt from his neck, moved slowly down his body, kissing him softly with her lips and tongue, his fingers in her hair.

And when she touched his penis, half curled in repose, his breath caught and it came to life. She smiled; she could do that to him.

An orgasmic scent clung to their bodies; she was wet from him, from herself, and when she straddled his hips and moved downward, he slid inside her, glided on a shimmering pearly river, sank in right up to the hilt and sighed, “Oh, God.”

Their bodies slithered and slipped on each other, perspiration making it difficult for Duras to retain a firm grip on Teo’s hips, a kind of frenzy invading their minds, the world reduced to an undulating rhythm, to unabashed sensation.

It resembled a small piece of heaven that summer afternoon under the willows, a private, sequestered homecoming—feverish and heated, sweetly luxurious, indulgent.

A paradise of deeply requited love.

Much later when the sound of breaking china indicated their son was up, Duras quickly kissed Teo and whispered with a grin, “Put on your clothes, you hussy.” Swiftly slipping on his breeches with an expertise acquired in countless boudoirs over the years, he leaped over the rose hedge and scooped up his son before he poured the sugar bowl over his head.

“Come see your mommy,” he said to Pasha, strolling over to peer over the flowering hedge. “She’s just waking up from a nap too. Did you find your nap refreshing, darling?”

“I adore naps,” Teo purred, still half undressed, her gown in disarray, opened at the neckline, swirled high about her thighs.

“I remember that about you,” he said, his voice wickedly seductive, thinking he should have her painted like that. A picture for private viewing.

“What would you say,” she said in a husky murmur, rolling over on her side so her breasts fell out of the low décolletage like ripe fruit, “if I told you I have this curious
sensation?” Her green eyes were still languid, half-lidded. “This unmistakable feeling … this irrepressible perception”—she stretched deliciously, luxuriously—“that you just made me pregnant.”

His brows flickered upward for a moment, and his smile spread lush and warm. “I’d say I believe you this time,
ma chère
.”

In the spring their daughter was born in Nice, delivered by their new family physician, Anton Mingen, and Odile Aurore spent her first six months sailing the Mediterranean with her family. But France needed Duras and too soon he had to leave to fight the Coalition again. In the next decade he served his country on several occasions, but as the empire came into being, he no longer felt the same allegiance. All the republican principles he’d fought for were destroyed under Napoleon’s dictatorship.

He retired then with his growing family, his five children the delight of his life. The seasons dictated their choice of homes: summers at Teo’s dacha; winters at Duras’s villa in Nice; spring in Paris; fall at their country house on the Seine. On occasion they’d sail for months at a time.

They ignored as much as possible the political struggles,
the cabals and conspiracies, Napoleon’s deification, his downfall, the Restoration. The pattern of their lives was designed outside the artful world of the Talleyrands.

Their love endured and deepened, their joy in each other a daily gift of delight and happiness. They often recalled the chance circumstances of their first meeting and considered themselves the very luckiest of people to have found each other.

Until one day an unforeseen occurrence jeopardized their generous good fortune. Their oldest daughter, Odile, having met a man of dubious background at a literary salon in Paris, told her parents she intended to marry him.

“She’s much too young and vulnerable and he’s forty-eight,” Teo anxiously noted, having received their daughter’s passionate declaration in a note delivered to their country house that afternoon.

Duras turned back from the winter view of the Seine outside the window, his expression grim. “Worse yet, he cheats at cards.”

“I don’t know if I should mention Langelier has a mistress tucked away in the Marin,” Pasha casually declared, shifting his long legs draped over the arm of the couch into a more comfortable sprawl. His lack of sleep last night was beginning to catch up with him. “Dilly should look beyond his suave charm and his dramatic propensity to quote Goethe.”