It was not the first or even second time that he had filled her tonight. He drove into her in long, deep surges, and she only entreated him to do it harder, her voice rising in gasping cries that roused him so unbearably, all he wanted to do was drown in her. Remin buried his face in her soft scented flesh, licking and kissing and biting and feeling nothing but her. Her silky body moving under him. Her silkier insides taking him, stroking his aching length.
It was all warm, and dark, and good.
“Ahhh…” The moans escaped him uncontrollably, every scratch, every thrust.
“Remin, oh, Remin…” Ophele’s mouth captured his in a breathless, messy kiss, and his fingers tangled in her hair as his hips drew back and shoved hard, deep, straining his body into hers, striking together like flint and steel and flying sparks.
She gave a gasping, mewling cry and Remin drew back, but she caught him ferociously.
“No—no!” she gasped. “No, oh, do that again!”
Shifting above her, he did it again, pushing her thighs upward so the angle was even better, deeper, striking the places that he knew felt best to her. His arms shook as he braced himself above her and drove down, his deeper cries mingling with hers.
“Tell me,” he gasped as her flesh seared him, because he wouldn’t notice if someone clubbed him over the head right now. “If I hurt you, tell me…”
“I will, I—” Her body caught, arched, and gripped him in a sudden spasm, a slippery caress that blasted every possible thought from his mind. Remin sucked in a breath and came.
Understanding the mechanics of what he was doing didn’t lessen his pleasure in the slightest. How she clutched him as heemptied inside her, drawing him deep, straining for his seed. It was what their bodies were made to do. And the new learning lingered in his mind afterward, as he lay beside her with one arm wrapped securely around her slender form, lazily replete.
“It is amazing,” he murmured, bending his head to lay a kiss on her belly. “That you can make a babe in here. Perhaps by summer, you will be round with our child.”
“You won’t mind?” Ophele’s head turned on the pillow to watch him as his lips trailed gently upward. “If I get…fat?”
“How could I mind?” But now that they had spoken of it, he knew that it worried her, the changes her body would endure when she conceived and carried their child. “You will be making our family for us,” he said quietly, resting his palm over her belly as if he could already feel it curving. “I never really believed I would have one.”
And inwardly he admitted that it aroused him, to think of her filled with his child, and her breasts swelling with milk. His lips tugged gently at her nipples.
“What if I can’t,” she whispered, her fingers combing his hair. “What if I never can?”
“I will not think of it.” Remin turned his head to kiss both breasts, and then sighed and let his head rest between them. Because of course, he had been thinking of that. “I will not think of it for a long, long time. Nor should you. Promise me you will not.”
“I promise,” she whispered, and sealed the pact with a kiss.
“But Genon was right, we must look to our nursery now,” he went on, turning to more pleasant topics. “It will take the better part of a year for Sousten to consider all possible configurations.”
“I don’t know what babies need,” she said, in the slow tones of epiphany. “At all.”
“That’s why we will have a nurse,” Remin replied comfortably. “One of my cousins had a swing in his playroom. My uncle had it hung from one of the rafters, I pestered my father about it for months afterward.”
“I don’t think we’ll need one of those right away,” she said, and giggled as he moved beside her, his teeth nipping her neck.
“The child will grow,” he informed her.
“I want a rocking horse for him,” she said, nestling against him. “Or her. I had one, it had a mane and tail made of real horsehair. I used to plait flowers into its mane with my…with my mother.”
“You can speak of her to me, wife. It doesn’t bother me.” Remin willed this to be true. “What was your nursery like, do you remember?”
“It was a little garret off my mother’s room, up these twisty stairs. I used to like rabbits, when I was little, and she even painted them on the walls…”
He tended to think most often of his sons, the role they would inherit, all the things he would teach them. But that night Remin drifted off to sleep with her voice conjuring a vision of his daughter. A tiny version of Ophele clutching a stuffed rabbit, her happy voice calling through the house. His little girl. Oh, what wouldn’t he do for her…
He lasted all of two hours before the nightmare jolted him awake, and for a moment he lay rigid as a board, wondering if he might have screamed.
“Remin?” Ophele mumbled beside him, her fingers patting drowsily toward his face.
“Go…go back to sleep,” he whispered, catching her hand and pressing it to his cheek. His heart was hammering so hard, he was surprised she couldn’t hear it, and the afterimage of the nightmare burned behind his eyes.
For a long time, he lay still, focusing on the familiar shapes of the room in the dim light and trying to convince himself that dreams were just dreams. He had always dreamed often, but lately it was almost every night, and though he considered himself a rational man, it was hardnotto see omens in the darkest hours of the morning.
