The Moonlight Mistress

“Well?”

He sounded as impatient as if he had demanded coffee from a recalcitrant waiter. Lucilla laughed a little. He was clumsier than she in these matters. “I was engaged to be married, once. It ended badly, very badly. Yes, I am experienced.” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “And you?”

Fournier snorted, a ticklish sensation against her neck. “Somewhat.”

A delicious sense of freedom flooded her to her bones. Lucilla rubbed her hand along his arm where it lay against her. She liked its heat and the contrast of soft skin over firm muscle, and the friction of hair beneath her palm. He must have liked it, too, for he shifted a little closer to her. She wondered how his skin tasted. “Have you asked me this for a reason?”

“You are toying with me.”

“Teasing,” she corrected giddily. She lifted his arm to her mouth and kissed the back of his hand. It didn’t taste of anything in particular. She would need to taste some other spot, such as—her breath caught at the thought—the crease where his leg met his thigh. “I’ve never done this with a stranger. Or anyone, except the one.”

“I do not make a habit of seducing women,” Fournier said. “If that is what you wished to know. I have always wondered why numbers are considered to be a factor in these matters, if once is enough to be damning.” He paused, rubbing his nose against the back of her neck. Lucilla shivered at the odd but pleasurable sensation. “It was not my plan to seduce you when I brought you here.”

“Oh, surely not,” she said. “You were so gallant. Why, when you offered to share your towel, I declare, my heart was all aflutter.”

She couldn’t help herself; she began to laugh at the absurdity of it all, at the circumstances that had led her, a spinster chemist, to find herself nearly naked in a bed in Germany with a French scientist. She didn’t even know his field of specialization.

That thought sent her off again, and she laughed until her gut hurt. At some point, she gasped out a few words of explanation and Fournier laughed with her. Seemingly without transition, she was on her back and his face loomed above her. She lifted her hand and traced his mustache with her finger, then he was kissing her, first gentle brushing and nibbling, then deep kisses full of bristles and heat and wet swirling sensation, whirlpools sucking her down.

Lucilla clasped her hands behind his neck, stroking the close-cropped hair there, then tangling her fingers in the longer hair above and trying to drag him closer. Fournier pulled away from her mouth instead, and began nipping her throat, each scrape of his teeth like a lightning bolt across her skin and into her sex. He was working his way lower; she felt his fingers at her shirt buttons, slipping one free, then another. His hands circled her nipples and traced designs on the skin of her breasts before he settled in to suckle at her, the pulls of his mouth echoing in her womb. His right hand traveled slowly down her chest, then her belly, unbuttoning her shirt and smoothing the flesh beneath.

She turned to flame. She shifted desperately, lifting her hips to him, her hands roaming over his back, trying to feel every shift of muscle. This was better, so much better, than it had been with the despicable Clive. Already Fournier had spent more time pleasing her than her former fiancé. Of whom she had planned never to think again. She banished the fleeting thought of him easily, as she had an overwhelming distraction at hand and a hard, hot erection digging into her leg. She found the bottom of Fournier’s vest and worked it upward. His skin sang to her palms.

He sucked in a breath when she lightly scratched the small of his back with her nails. “More,” he demanded. She was willing to oblige him. She shoved his thin knitted vest higher on his back and dug her fingers into the straining muscles of his waist, then slid her hands lower, beneath the waist of his drawers, wrenching them down, glorying in his gasp and curse as his erection sprang free and slammed into her thigh. She gripped his buttocks firmly and yanked him to her, wanting his flesh melded to hers. He landed on his injured arm and made a sharp noise of pain. Before Lucilla could apologize, he stopped her words with a quick, hard kiss.

For a few moments, they lay together, panting, her hand circling in the soft hair on his chest. She swore she could feel his cock pulsing against her leg, straining to go higher and burrow deep within her body. Her thighs slid against each other, bathed in her own wetness. She shifted them apart, cradling his narrow hips, needing pressure against her sex more than she needed air to breathe.

Fournier abruptly sat up. “Prophylaxis,” he said, as if it were a swearword. His chest heaved, and he yanked his vest the rest of the way off, throwing it onto the floor. Lucilla’s hand, without her volition, floated toward the line of dark hair that bisected his belly, pointing the way to his cock.

She said, “I have prophylactics,” and stroked the silky-soft hair all the way down to the tangled, coarser hair of his sex. Fournier froze in place. She grasped his cock in her hand and dreamily stroked it in the ring of her thumb and forefinger. His skin there was the softest and most delicate skin in the world. With some effort, she summoned words to her lips. “I have condoms. In my medical kit. Sometimes they’re useful. As bribes. If you get one, and put it on, we can—”

Panting, Fournier said, “What?” She repeated herself. He said, “Let go. Let go or in moments we will be fucking. Without prophylaxis.”

Clive had never said the word, but that was what they had done. They had fucked. At least this stranger admitted to what they were doing. After Fournier tumbled off the bed and took a moment to finish removing his drawers, Lucilla might have found sanity or decorum. What use, though, were they? She wanted this, and she was old enough to choose for herself. She sat up and decisively stripped her shirt the rest of the way off. The breeze tickled her bare skin, and she shuddered, already needing his hands on her again.

“Fournier, hurry,” she said.

“Pascal,” he growled, then lifted a hand in triumph, holding a paper packet. “What is your name?”

“Lucilla,” she said.

He gave a little bow. “Good. We are introduced,” he said, snorting with laughter. After a moment he noted, “I fear you would enjoy this process too much,” and applied the condom himself before rejoining her on the bed.

She liked the way he’d laughed. Lucilla reached for him as he lay down on his side, butting her forehead into his chest and wrapping one arm firmly around his waist. He was breathing hard; she felt light-headed. “We’re going to do this, aren’t we? We’re really going to do this.”

Pascal said, “It’s my devout hope.” His hands shaped her shoulder blades, her spine, the upper curve of her buttocks as his hips eased against her, flinched away, then shifted toward her again. “It is wondrous. Inexplicable that this mere act can make one forget all else. Not merely a matter of biology. Truly it makes me believe in the physical existence of souls, for they must meet somehow when—you are a scientist. You understand these things, that is why I can say them to you.”

She’d heard Frenchmen were flatterers. She had to confess she liked being flattered—and the incongruity of his theorizing while naked and aroused. Lucilla cupped the head of his cock in her palm. He gasped, and said, “I…am sorry. I fear all the blood has left my brain.”

Lucilla chortled and pressed a kiss to his chest. “A philosopher!” She hesitated, then said, “I think it’s wondrous that our animal bodies can give us such pleasure, which I suppose is a form of transcendence.”

Pascal said, “Do you think the body matters, when it is the soul that is immortal?”

She stroked her free hand over his rib cage. “How can we separate ourselves from our bodies?” she asked. “Would anyone desire that?”

She did not think she had ever met a man who would have had such a conversation, especially with a woman. It made her belly shiver, to think of souls mingling like two chemicals in a beaker. What would be the end product? Apply heat, she thought. Distill.

She said, “I want you inside me. I don’t want to be alone.”

Pascal kissed her, groaning deep in his throat when she squeezed the length of his cock. Lucilla needed his weight on her, enveloping her. She turned onto her back and he followed, bracing himself above her with his injured arm. “Closer,” she said, spreading her thighs. Air tickled and cooled the hot folds of her sex, and she squirmed.

“Soon.” Streetlights limned his tousled hair, the prominent bridge of his nose, the long line of his jaw. He traced his hand down her cheek, her neck, her breast, her hip. He ran his fingers through her pubic hair and thumbed apart her folds, slicking his hand and circling with his thumb until he brushed her clitoris. Lucilla had gone rigid with anticipation, and now a cry escaped her. Her awareness spiraled inward, down and in, as his thumb circled and pressed, circled and pressed, until the whole area was so sensitized she thought she could come from a puff of air. She was moaning, she knew that because she had to gasp in a breath. Pascal pressed the heel of his hand into her mound, slow and steady, imprinting her with pleasure. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to breathe and make this stop. It built, and built still more. She cramped with pangs of ecstasy, and then it overflowed, spilling out of her, jerking her helplessly in its wake.

All her strings had been cut. She lay gasping while Pascal kissed her forehead, then her mouth. She could feel him smiling. “In me,” she murmured. “We haven’t finished this experiment.”

She held him close as he guided his cock into her, both of them flinching at first from the intensity of the sensation. She laid her cheek against his chest, liking the slide of his flesh on her face as his cock pressed the walls of her vagina. She flung one arm over her head and he twined his fingers with hers as he thrust and withdrew. After a time, she found the strength to lift her hips to his, working with him toward climax. It all flowed into one sensation of lazy pleasure, an endless rocking and slapping like floating in the sea. She did not climax again, but she didn’t mind. It was too fascinating to concentrate on Pascal, the feel and sound and musky salt scent of him as he lost himself to physical pleasure.

At last, he growled, his fingers tightening on hers as his hips rapidly jerked. She felt his cock twitching within her and kissed his chest lingeringly until his crisis passed and he sagged onto her, panting. A few moments later, he kissed her, withdrew with a sigh and disposed of the condom. Lucilla snuggled into his arms when he turned back to her, drifting in a lake of well-being. Their skins were slick with sweat in the summer air, but lying still, the breeze began to cool them. Her eyelids drooped. From the limp weight of Pascal’s arm on her, he was already asleep.

After one of the worst days she could remember, and the most surprising evening, Lucilla slept the best sleep of her life, at least until an elbow dug painfully into her breast. She shoved Pascal’s arm away. His eyes opened and he blinked at her, dazed. “Quelle heure est-il?” he asked.

“Go back to sleep,” Lucilla mumbled. A loud noise from the street sent her bolt upright, clutching his forearm. “A gun?”

“Backfire, from an auto,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I have had army training. I know the sound of a gun.” He turned to her and smoothed her hair away from her face. “You must not be afraid. It will obscure your thinking.”

“You aren’t afraid?” She thought he must be, given that he had embraced her in the night for comfort before he had done so for sex. She wished, now, that she had been brave enough to draw nearer to him. The mere act of joining together had strengthened her, soothing the near panic that had buzzed along her nerves like bees.

She sensed him smile. “Were I an English gentleman, I would say I wasn’t afraid. It would be a lie, of course.”

“No, it’s a way of pretending until the pretending feels real.” Lucilla grabbed his wrist and turned it to see his wristwatch in the light from the window. Three o’clock. “It will be light soon,” she said. “If there are no trains, I had thought we might find someone with a wagon who would be willing to take us closer to the border. Perhaps one of the men who brought deliveries to the Institute. They will recognize me, and I have some money.”

“If we can reach my colleague at the Institute, perhaps we can borrow his motorcar,” he said. “That is why I came here in the first place, to see him. Perhaps he will feel obligated.”

“You sound doubtful.” Lucilla drew up her knees and rested her chin on them.

Pascal turned to his side, facing her. “I was…dismayed, by Herr Doktor Professor Kauz. We had never met before last week, only corresponded. He requested I come here, insisted he must share a discovery of incalculable importance.”

“Kauz,” Lucilla said, remembering a paper-skinned old man with wild hair and a cane. “A biologist as well as a chemist, with a grant from the kaiser’s special fund. He was rude to me.” In truth, he’d said a woman who worked alongside men was no better than—she’d had to research the German word he’d used, which turned out to mean whore. From his vicious tone when he’d said it, and his frequent vituperative glances, she hadn’t been surprised by the meaning.

Pascal hesitated then said in a rush, “I did not like his laboratory. He used animals in ways that were cruel, even for science. He said I was soft, and all Frenchmen doubly so.”

“You study—”

“Everything,” he said, with no trace of arrogance that she could detect. “I have a special fondness for maths and engineering, but my work now, it is to find the new things in biology, on behalf of an agency in the government. Since I am paid for that, and I prefer to eat and provide a home for my cats, I cannot practice engineering as I would like. Though I find biology is something like engineering.”