Page 89 of Across Time

My head falls to his chest and for a single moment I allow his exploration, sighing as I force myself to stay his hands. “The calendar suggests you’d better stop doing that,” I tell him. “Unless you’ve found black market condoms, that is.” The few he’d found last month are long gone by now.

But he doesn’t stop. Instead his hand slides inside my bra, teasing me until I rest on that fine line of pleasure and pain. “You’re sure?”

My breath rasps. “We need to be responsible, Henri. At least right now we do.” But he persists, growing hard, his breathing tight as he shifts against me. “You’re torturing both of us for no reason.”

He kisses me with the kind of intensity he does during sex sometimes, when he is on the cusp of losing his last ounce of restraint, and nods at the grass. “Sit down,” he says, his voice rough, his eyes impossibly dark.

The grass will stain my dress and I know that we can’t continue whatever it is he is planning, but I can’t bring myself to stop. I do as he says and he drops to his knees in front of me. His hands slide the dress up slowly, reverently, to mid-thigh, his mouth hanging open a bit as he takes me in.

We’ve done so much more than this. But for some reason his eyes on me, on my pale thighs in daylight, is almost unbearably intimate. His hands splay over the skin there and he takes a deep, steadying breath. He loosens the garters and carefully peels my stockings off, first the right and then the left. His hands slide up the inside of my thighs until his fingers land at my core and slip beneath my underwear. His eyes flicker to mine, obsidian now.

“Lay back.”

I do as he says, feeling a small tug on my underwear just before it slips down my legs. He pushes my knees farther apart, his fingers teasing me again, circling, and then...his tongue flickers over me. I gasp in shock at the sensation—hot and cold at the same time, almost too exquisite to bear. I’ve stopped him when he’s tried this before, because it doesn’t seem like there’s much in it for him, but today, just for a moment, I allow it. A second and third time, but it still feels as if I should stop him.

“Henri—”

“Let me,” he growls, and there’s something so desperate and determined in his voice that I wouldn’t say no if I wanted to, and obviously I don’t.

He resumes the movement, and when he slides his finger back inside me it becomes something else entirely. Sharp, a fire I crave. “I want to do this to you,” I plead.

He groans. “You will,” he says. “Very soon.” I arch against his mouth, wanting more, and with a groan he gives it to me, his fingers pushing harder inside me, that flickering tongue never resting until I gasp, my hands in his hair.

"It's good, Sarah. Let go," he begs. It’s the desperation in his voice that undoes me more than anything else. I cry out, arching free of the ground, and the moment I settle, he is over me with his cock in his hand. I reach for him, swirl my tongue over the top before it slides down his length.

His eyes are squeezed tight. “I’m so close already,” he gasps.

I take him entirely into my mouth, gagging a little as he thrusts, hitting the back of my throat. There’s nothing comfortable about it but I’m unbelievably turned on by this, by his desperation, by the way he’s lost control of himself. “I’m going to—” he says. I grab his hips, holding him in place so he knows it’s okay, and he explodes with a coarse shout, coating my tongue and my throat. He gives three more slow slides along my tongue, wringing out the last of it, before his eyes open.

“I want to do that again,” I tell him.

His answering laughter is slightly breathless. “You are going to make the most perfect wife.”

32

Once the grapes have been harvested, half are sold to a winemaker and half remain for us to process ourselves.

Henri and I begin to talk about a wedding. I will need papers of some kind, so he goes to Paris for the day to check into it and comes back with the name of someone who can forge a passport and birth certificate for me once I’ve had my picture taken.

And Marie listens, excited for us and also…troubled. I worry she’s uncertain of her role in the house, and it’s confirmed one afternoon when she comes to me, asking permission for something as if the house is mine rather than hers.

“Jeannette’s mother is ill,” she says hesitantly. “She’s going to Paris to check on her and is wondering if we can watch the children.”

I look up from my terrible attempt at knitting with a surprised laugh. “Are you asking me? It’s your home.”

Marie frowns. “It is yours as well, though, and will soon be more yours than mine.”

My chest tightens a little. To some extent, it’s just as Henri predicted that night in the orchard: his marriage will make Marie feel displaced. “It will never, ever be more mine than yours,” I reply. “I would not have returned if I thought you’d feel that way.”

She gives me a small smile, though I’m not sure she’s convinced. “So it’s okay?”

I swallow. The last small child I was asked to care for was my sister. But I can’t live in that shadow forever. “Of course.”

On Thursday afternoon, Marie and Henri drive to Jeannette’s to pick up the children, while I wait at home feeling slightly ill. I’ve already told Marie I don’t want to be in charge of the baby, but three-year-old Charlotte is scary enough. I keep picturing her seeing through me the way my mother did, spying some hidden evil inside me. Knowing it’s ridiculous doesn’t seem to help.

Marie walks in the door a short time later, carrying a swaddled bundle that must be Lucien. And behind them, a little girl with huge hazel eyes and curls past her shoulders, her tiny hand tucked into Henri’s.

He has the widest smile on his face, so wide my heart twists a little. Whoever this little girl is, she’s got him hooked around her finger already.