A Discovery of Witches(150)

“Answer my question,” I insisted, unable to think clearly now that he was kissing my shoulder. “Did vampires invent bundling?”

“No,” he said softly, his eyes glittering as my fingertip rounded his chin. He nipped at it with his teeth. As promised, he drew no blood. “Once upon a time, we all did it. The Dutch and then the English came up with the variation of putting boards between the intended couple. The rest of us did it the old-fashioned way—we were just wrapped in blankets, shut into a room at dusk, and let out at dawn.”

“It sounds dreadful,” I said sternly. His attention drifted down my arm and across the swell of my belly. I tried to squirm away, but his free hand clamped onto my hip, keeping me still. “Matthew,” I protested.

“As I recall,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “it was a very pleasant way to spend a long winter’s night. The hard part was looking innocent the next day.”

His fingers played against my stomach, making my heart skip around inside my rib cage. I eyed Matthew’s body with interest, picking my next target. My mouth landed on his collarbone while my hand snaked down along his flat stomach.

“I’m sure sleep was involved,” I said after he found it necessary to snatch my hand and hold it away for a few minutes. My hip free, I pressed the length of my body against him. His body responded, and my face showed my satisfaction at the reaction. “No one can talk all night.”

“Ah, but vampires don’t need to sleep,” he reminded me, just before he pulled back, bent his head, and planted a kiss below my breastbone.

I grabbed his head and lifted it. “There’s only one vampire in this bed. Is this how you imagine you’ll keep me awake?”

“I’ve been imagining little else from the first moment I saw you.” Matthew’s eyes shone darkly as he lowered his head. My body arched up to meet his mouth. When it did, he gently but firmly turned me onto my back, grabbing both of my wrists in his right hand and pinning them to the pillow.

Matthew shook his head. “No rushing, remember?”

I was accustomed to the kind of sex that involved a physical release without needless delay or unnecessary emotional complications. As an athlete who spent much of my time with other athletes, I was well acquainted with my body and its needs, and there was usually someone around to help me fill them. I was never casual about sex or my choice of partners, but most of my experiences had been with men who shared my frank attitude and were content to enjoy a few ardent encounters and then return to being friends again as though nothing had happened.

Matthew was making it clear that those days and nights were over. With him there would be no more straightforward sex—and I’d had no other kind. I might as well be a virgin. My deep feelings for him were becoming inextricably bound with my body’s responses, his fingers and mouth tying them together in complicated, agonizing knots.

“We have all the time we need,” he said stroking the undersides of my arms with his fingertips, weaving love and physical longing together until my body felt tight.

Matthew proceeded to study me with the rapt attention of a cartographer who found himself on the shores of a new world. I tried to keep up with him, wanting to discover his body while he was discovering mine, but he held my wrists firmly against the pillows. When I began to complain in earnest about the unfairness of this situation, he found an effective way to silence me. His cool fingers dipped between my legs and touched the only inches of my body that remained uncharted.

“Matthew,” I breathed, “I don’t think that’s bundling.”

“It is in France,” he said complacently, a wicked gleam in his eye. He let go of my wrists, convinced quite rightly that there would be no attempts to squirm away now, and I caught his face in my hands. We kissed each other, long and deep, while my legs opened like the covers of a book. Matthew’s fingers coaxed, teased, and danced between them until the pleasure was so intense it left me shaking.

He held me until the tremors subsided and my heart returned to its normal rhythm. When I finally mustered the energy to look at him, he had the self-satisfied look of a cat.

“What are the historian’s thoughts on bundling now?” he asked.

“It’s far less wholesome than it’s been made out to be in the scholarly literature,” I said, touching his lips with my fingers. “And if this is what the Amish do at night, it’s no wonder they don’t need television.”

Matthew chuckled, the look of contentment never leaving his face. “Are you sleepy now?” he asked, trailing his fingers through my hair.

“Oh, no.” I pushed him over onto his back. He folded his hands beneath his head and looked up at me with another grin. “Not in the slightest. Besides, it’s my turn.”

I studied him with the same intensity that he’d lavished on me. While I was inching up his hip bone, a white shadow in the shape of a triangle caught my attention. It was deep under the surface of his smooth, perfect skin. Frowning, I looked across the expanse of his chest. There were more odd marks, some shaped like snowflakes, others in crisscrossing lines. None of them were on the skin, though. They were all deep within him.

“What is this, Matthew?” I touched a particularly large snowflake under his left collarbone.

“It’s just a scar,” he said, craning his neck to see. “That one was made by the tip of a broadsword. The Hundred Years’ War, maybe? I can’t remember.”