he said, fumbling with the drawstring of her drawers.
“It isn’t romantic to be ravished beside a country lane?” Lucilla asked.
“Bees, flowers, I suppose so,” he admitted. “Touch me.”
She couldn’t reach much of him, so tangled her fingers in his hair. She didn’t let go even when lifting up so he could drag off her drawers and her awkward skirt. Her petticoat made for admirable protection from the grass, which she quickly forgot about as his rough cheek brushed her thigh. He spread the lips of her sex with his fingers, and for a moment the air on her wet skin was like a chill up her spine. Then his hot breath gusted over her, and his tongue pressed her open with a long lick. She arched into his mouth, her eyes fluttering closed. Delicately, he searched out each fold and traced its path while she twitched in pleasure. She’d never experienced such a light, slick, exact touch; it was as if he found thousands of nerves too hidden for fingers to discover, nerves that tingled and sparked deep inside her belly and sent electrical currents coursing through her arms and legs.
Her belly twisted, coiling her ever tighter. “More,” she said at last. “Please, Pascal. More.”
He shifted her leg, and to her shock lifted her knee over his shoulder. A brief awkwardness, and he did the same with her left leg, wrapping his injured arm lightly around her thigh. She felt splayed open, yet secure because he held her. She tightened her calves against his back and he sighed before bending to kiss her again, his tongue flicking inside her with unbearable intimacy and lapping at each fold of flesh as if it were her mouth. Her body throbbed ceaselessly, and she writhed in his grip, panting for breath. She moaned when he slipped the very tip of his finger into her opening, the sound a momentary relief of the pressure building inside her, until his finger slid deeper and she was forced to moan again. She couldn’t think. “Please,” she said. “I can’t—”
“Harder?” he asked.
“Yes—deeper—”
He slid two fingers inside her, massaging his thumb over her sensitized flesh and, after a moment, closing his mouth over her clitoris and sucking, a bolt of feeling that speared her to the ground. Her back arched; she both craved and winced away from the intensity of his fingers thrusting within her, his lips pulling at her. A brief climax shuddered over her skin without giving her relief. Her body continued to fight toward pleasure until she let her mouth open and screamed, short and satisfying.
Pascal froze and withdrew. “You aren’t hurt?”
Lucilla panted. “Needed air,” she said. “More.”
Lubriciously, his fingers slid into her again, reaching up and in, rotating on withdrawal. He laid his cheek against her thigh, watching his hand move, his expression intent upon her. Lucilla watched his face until she had to close her eyes from the intimacy of it. She laid her head back on the grass and drew deep breaths. The pressure inside built inexorably now, as if her first climax had been only the first road sign on the way to fulfillment. She could feel the tightening within her beginning again, from a different place than before. “It’s so good,” she said, then moaned when he touched his mouth to her again. “Pascal—”
He didn’t withdraw this time, suckling harder, thrusting faster with his fingers. Lucilla lost count of how many times her skin shuddered, flutters of climax teasing her toward some unknown peak. When she crested, at first she expected another small spasm, but it built and built, and then the heavens ripped open and golden sunlight spilled through her and over her, racking her with pleasure in its wake.
She fell into sleep almost immediately after, aware of Pascal kissing her mouth, covering her with her skirt and easing his jacket beneath her head, then no more. She woke, and it was dusk. A dog howled, then another and another, like a pack of foxhounds baying—she realized that was what had woken her. She blinked at the emerging stars, too few as yet to pick out the summer constellations. Pascal was watching her.
“You needed to sleep,” he said, his tone brusque. His finger gently traced the shape of her upper lip. “I don’t think we should stop again.”
Lucilla lifted her arm, which seemed to weigh ten stone, and closed her fingers over Pascal’s wrist. “I will miss you,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her, a quick hard pressure. Then he took her hand and helped her to her feet. They didn’t speak as they stowed the remains of their meal, lit the motor’s lamps and set out again.
INTERLUDE
IN THE UNDERGROUND LABORATORY, TANNEKEN did not change form, so as she had expected, her wounds took three days to heal. She no longer regarded the pain. She refused to think of it. She had long ago given up imagining herself free; now she imagined the hot salt of the old man’s blood coursing across her tongue. She ran pattern after pattern in her head that might lead her to this goal.
During those three days, the old man did not come to the room where she lay on concrete, beneath a bare bulb. Neither did either of the men in uniform, who stank of tobacco. This was unusual, but not unheard of. She would much rather forgo food than suffer their odoriferous presence.
On the third day, she began to wonder if their absence was part of some new test. She paid more attention to the sounds of the laboratory, dim and muffled by this room’s thick walls: water in pipes, the roar of a generator for electricity, the occasional distant rumble of a train rushing over her head. Nothing else. The motorcar did not arrive or depart.
When she’d been in the room with cages, she’d heard wolves whine or growl, but could not smell them to discern whether they were like her or true wolves, or perhaps even dogs. Sometimes she’d seen them, the gleam of their eyes across a room as they watched her, and heard their breath, but the stench of the laboratory blurred all scents, even her own, and she could not identify them at all. Perhaps they were merely dogs. They did not seem large enough to be wolves.
Their presence now, whatever they were, would have been welcome as a diversion as the third day moved into a fourth. Had the old man taken them elsewhere? Was she to be left here to die? Surely he would not waste the opportunity to see how long it took for her to die from his torture.
She was hungry, and glad she had become accustomed to rationing her water. If not for that necessity, she could have gone into her wolf mind and ignored the dull passage of time, but then she would have no water, and though she could live for a few more days without food, water was another matter. She’d been wise not to change form. Her weak human body could not last so long.
On the fifth day, she found a new corner to pace, then lay with her head on her paws, drowsing. It was difficult to remember how long she had been in this room. She had not been entirely conscious when dumped here. Perhaps it had been longer than she thought. She might not have drunk water each day. She might have been forgotten here—
Above, she heard a shallow roar. Not the motorcar, but perhaps a motorbike? She’d heard this one before, or one very like it. It heralded the taller of the uniformed guards, who held her down after she had been drugged, and broke her bones upon request. That one often brought food.
She rose slowly and stretched, careful to loosen each muscle. She might have one chance. The guard might not know she had been alone so long. He might not know that she was fully recovered from her injuries. She might, this time, be able to escape.
She always thought these things, and was always driven back from the door by the old man and his electrical prod. This time he was not there. She had not heard him
