The restaurant opening in Richmond means I’ve had all evening with Taggie, and I tell myself that our romantic dinner, with plenty of opportunities for small touches to her shoulder, and kisses to her hair, has sated me. She told me about the books she’d read from the library in her room, and her eyes sparkled when she tasted the cheesecake for dessert.
I try to bury myself in work, firing off emails requesting updates from the men guarding her grandmother, and reading the report from the cuckoo. I’m gratified that the death of Thaxted’s sons has hit him hard. He’s angry.
Keeping Taggie safe, and torturing Thaxted, I shouldn’t need more. But she compels me like no woman ever has.
I mean to go to bed, but my feet take me where I crave to be, despite my mind yelling that I mustn’t. I hold my breath as I try her door, and the relief when it’s open is almost enough to make me fall to my knees.
Then when I see my fake wife, I go weak all over again. I was already hard in anticipation, but seeing her like this, blood rushes to my cook. I’m solid. Throbbing.
She’s wearing a small, strappy top, and the covers only reach to her waist. I can see far more of her breasts than a man twice her age ought to. Her face is upturned, and the moonlight highlights one side of her serene features. She smiles slightly in her sleep.
“You’re so beautiful.” My whisper is a little raspy.
I don’t want to wake her, but I need to be with her, so I approach and stand over her bed. With a reverent fingertip, I trace the line of her cheekbone over to her ear, and down her neck. Unlike me, she’s unmarked. No scars. And she’s soft, so incredibly soft.
“I should stop.” But I don’t.
It’s pointless to resist. I keep trailing down to the gentle wing of her collarbone, then further.
“Your breasts are perfect little handfuls, bambola. They’d look so pretty with my come on them.”
I groan as I feel the curve of her breast, nudging aside her top and yes, just as I thought. She is made for me. My hand fits over like we were designed together, rather than the reality that we were born decades apart.
Her nipple pebbles beneath my palm, and it’s too easy to imagine that she’s awake and welcoming my touch. Out of the corner of my eye I see a movement, or I think I do. But when I flick my gaze from her breasts to her face, her eyes are closed.
She’s not awake. She would say something if she was. She’d run.
Continuing my exploration of the exposed parts of her with one hand, I free my cock with the other and begin to jerk it, slow but rough.
It’s dry, and it would feel better with lubricant. But the sharpness of it as I stroke is right.
“You make me so hard. I don’t deserve you. I wish I did, but… fuck. I can’t leave you. If all I ever have is these moments, and your joy at books and dresses, could that be enough?”
It’s a question. I don’t have the answer.
“My hunger is growing,” I admit as I accelerate my hand movements, the tendons in my forearm bulging.
And it’s not even her breasts that I have stopped my fingertips on. No. I recognise through my arousal that it’s her soft throat, where her pulse beats fast for a sleeping creature.
“Are you dreaming of me? Dreaming of your stalker who loves and adores you?”
I’ve never said that to any woman before Taggie.
I mean it.
“Ti amo così tanto. I’m obsessed with you.”
I look up to her closed eyes and moan as my orgasm barrels through me and out of my cock.
Just in time, I withdraw my hand from Taggie and place it over the blunt head of my lock, catching it in spurt after spurt.
The pleasure tingles down my spine. Good, but not satisfying. Not really, when what I most want is her hand. Her mouth. Her wet pussy and her dark-blue eyes on me as I make it bliss for her and me together, so she screams for more.
“You’re mine, Taggie.” She doesn’t respond. Of course she doesn’t. She’s asleep.
“I want us to be a family, and you to wear my name for real. Not because you’re scared, but because you love me.”
It’s a raw confession.
“I need to be inside you in every way.”
I sigh as I look at her. I can’t have that. Can I?
A glance down at my hand, and to her parted lips and a filthy idea occurs to me.
So wrong. And yet even as I tell myself that, I’m sitting on the edge of her bed—good thing this is an outrageously expensive mattress, so it only gives beneath me—and bending over her.
I scoop white ejaculate onto my fingertip, and hold it just above her mouth, watching with savage delight as it drips in.
“That’s it. Take your husband’s come. Swallow it,” I murmur.
She doesn’t. But it calms some primal part of me that I’m inside her. My seed is on her tongue.
I need more.
Wiping my hand carelessly on my underwear, I shift so I’m braced fully over her, one fist on either side of her shoulders.
“It’s difficult to explain this feeling, Taggie.” I don’t know why I’m talking to her as though she can hear. My girl obviously sleeps like the dead. “I want to be part of you.”
I brush kisses over her cheeks, soft as rose petals, then pause.
“My sweet little doll.” Pursing my lips, I let a drop of saliva fall, stretching out until it connects us, until finally it breaks and it’s there.
Another small bit of me, in her.
I wish it were a baby. One day, I swear, it will be my baby filling her belly.
