Read Online Ozark Trilogy 2: The Grand Jubilee by Suzette Haden Elgin - Free Book Online

but it falls all the same.
    He ran his fingertips over her thighs, and set his lips to her nipples, and he was not overly careful how much of his weight she had to bear.
    “I dislike that,” she said clearly.
    “This, too?”
    “I dislike that even more.”
    “You lie,” he said.
    She surely did. Everything his body had promised, shirted and trousered and cloaked, it delivered in abundance. Her loins arched toward his touch and she knew most clearly the meaning of longing. She was all out of patience, the aching of her body for him was unbearable, and if she had known any manner of hurrying him she would not have scrupled to use it. Unfortunately, she was operating this time from a position of total ignorance, and she could only grit her teeth till she shuddered, and wait.
    “You’re an anxious creature,” he said finally, and he lifted her onto the gold of his belly and set her gently where she might ease her own need. It was not what she had expected at all, and certainly not what her experience in the stables and goatbarns had led her to expect, and she moaned in desperate frustration.
    “It’s impossible,” She said. “It can’t be done this way!”
    “Lady; lady,” he answered her, “I promised to teach you something useful, For sure it can be done this way, if you will onlythere!”
    Nothing she had heard or read or imagined had prepared her for what it was like to have the full thrust of his maleness within her, and she forgot everything in her determination to draw from him every last measure of the ecstasy offered.
    “You see?” h¢ said roughly.
    She did, most certainly she did, and when he would have held her away from him she, cried out fiercely and slapped at him, frantic in her determination to achieve something-her body knew what it was, though her mind did not-and he laughed and let her have her way for a while.
    Until she hovered just on the edge of that achievement. And then, ignoring her teeth and her hands, he held her still in torment against him.
    “Oh, dear heaven, dear heaven,” she moaned, “let me loose! ”
    “Shhhhh. . . hush. . .”
    “No! I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it another second . . .”
    She fell against him, broken in despair, sobbing and past all pride, and he made a soft noise of satisfaction, gripped her in those sure hands, and held her while the shudders racked her, more and more swift, and her breath tore at her throat, and then he said:
    “Now, Responsible of Brightwater. Now I shall show you the most useful thing of all.”
    And he grasped her hips and moved her, and suddenly she knew that she would die of joy, and he muffled her screams against his shoulders and let her take of him everything that she wanted. It took a very long time, and not once did he make a sound.
     
    She had heard women speak, married women and women of experience, of what happened after the act of love. Some men, it seemed, would talk to you. Others would fall asleep. Some would demand food; among the Traveller males, she had heard it said, there were those that would drop to their knees and give thanks for the blessings just received.
    This man, however, was doing none of those things. He had raised himself on one elbow and was staring at her as if he had never seen anything like her before anywhere. Responsible had no illusions about her beauty, she had Thorn of Guthrie to compare herself with every day of her life; it could not be that which put such an expression on his face. And she was reasonably sure that the look he bore was not the usual afterlove expression.
    “What,” he demanded harshly, “was that? What the Twelve Bleeding Gates happened?”
    Responsible reminded him that she had been the virgin here, not him, which made that a foolish question. “There are a number of words to choose from,” she added, “always depending on your degree of delicacy. Pick the one you like the best.”
    “That’s not what I meant.” And then, “You didn’t notice anything