“I know what you want,” Edmund answered, his own breath ragged, his face damp and his kisses now more demanding. “I want to give you what you want. I want you to feel every sensation I can give you.”
One of his hands left her breast and moved to caress the curves of her buttocks and thighs before sliding around to rest on the patch of hair below her belly.
“Edmund!” Diana pleaded again.
“Slowly,” he breathed. “Let it build slowly.”
Diana rubbed her face against his skin, frantic with the heat pulsing in her groin as he cupped her most intimate place in his hand.
“First with my hands, and then with my tongue,” he whispered. “I want to touch you, taste you and show you what pleasure your body is capable of feeling.”
Diana was already beyond speech as his hand shifted and his fingers slipped into her hot, wet slit. This was forbidden territory in every way she could imagine, and she jerked with the spasm that passed through her at the new sensation.
Fire and wonder animated her secret flesh wherever his fingertips touched and pressed: the pulsing bud below her tufts of hair, the swollen lips beneath it and the tight, slick entrance to her body.
Edmund was gentle but sure in his exploration, and she could only gasp and moan as he caressed her slowly with his fingers, first teasingly and then more purposefully and rhythmically, leading her towards the destination she craved.
“You’re so tight and wet,” he whispered in Diana’s ear, his fingers stretching her insides while his thumb continued its pressure on the pleasurable nub above. Diana could only whimper at the unfamiliar sensation and arch her back in pleasure.
“So beautiful… You’re so… very… beautiful, Diana,” Edmund said under his breath, pressing fervent kisses on her rapidly rising and falling breasts, catching her nipples briefly in his mouth when he could.
The sensations were both wonderful and unbearable. Diana was so lost in pleasure that her open mouth no longer emitted any sound but that of her labored breathing. Edmund’s touch, voice and scent overwhelmed her as she pressed helplessly against him.
“Let it happen,” Edmund urged. One hand still asserting its possession of a rounded breast, his other hand stroked her to a climax of shuddering intensity that left her feeling shipwrecked on a warm and welcoming shore.
Looking up at her lover’s intent face in the aftermath of her climax, Diana smiled breathlessly and without a word began opening the remaining buttons of his shirt.
“Oh Diana,” he groaned.
“I want to give you what you want, too,” she explained. “I want you as naked with me as I have been with you.”
“Diana, we can’t,” he said, but without resisting her efforts to undress him. Edmund’s face was suffused with conflicting passion and concern, and she remembered his warning about the danger of such feelings as these between a man and a woman.
With his shirt removed, she could feel every contour of his strong, well-muscled torso and sense the controlled desire beneath his skin. Still, she wanted to feel his skin against hers from head to toe. Her hands continued downwards.
“Oh Diana,” he moaned again.
Before her hands reached the waistband of his trousers, there was a sudden knocking at the connecting door between Percy’s suite and Edmund’s.
Diana gave a yelp of shock, and Edmund quickly put a hand over her mouth.
“What is it, Percy? I’m in bed.”
“Oh, nothing. I heard something and thought you might still be up. It must have been someone else.”
“Goodnight, Percy,” Edmund said firmly. “Go to sleep. We can talk in the morning.”
“Goodnight, Edmund.”
They lay in complete silence for long minutes, only caressing one another’s faces in the flickering light of the candle, too afraid to do more and yet unwilling to release one another entirely.
“You should go,” Edmund whispered at last. “You don’t understand the risks we’re taking.”
“I wish I could stay,” Diana murmured. “I wish it so much…”
“I don’t want you to go, but you must,” he replied softly.
When everything had been still and silent in Percy’s room for some time, Edmund nodded decisively and then kissed her again while pulling them both to their feet with a sigh of resignation.