THE CAVERN OF DEEP HARMONY

PART SEVENTY:

She'd kicked off her ivory satin high heels near the dresser and was now sitting on the edge of their bed, watching Marshall as he stood a moment just inside the doorway, his hands on the frame, paused like something existing out of time. She didn't mind that he kept standing there. He was obviously thinking deeply and she loved the sight of him, the way he looked in his rust-colored tweed. Something in her was still trying to process that he was her husband. Dr. Marshall Sinclair...her husband.

Everyone had gone to Stuart's now, everyone but for Mike and Maria. Mike was driving Maria into town in his truck. He'd seemed more his old self later this evening, friendly, relaxed. She was glad. She'd seen him from time to time through the window that looked out on the porch.

He was resting his cheek on Maria's dark hair as they danced.

Marshall took a couple of steps into the room, closing the door behind him. He knew where everything in this room was and as he passed the rocking chair, slipped off his jacket, hanging

it over the wide oak back.. His cravat and vest joined it and he unbuttoned the top several buttons of his ivory shirt, then continued on to where Eden sat. She watched him intently, her eyes wide and very bright, her body already trembling at his approach.

Kneeling in front of her, he lifted both her hands in his, burying his cheek in her palms. "I have never," he breathed, "made love to a woman who was my wife. I...," but he seemed to lose the ability to speak, let her hands fall and slid his arms around her waist, his lips finding the cleavage revealed in the deep drape of her neckline. "My wife."  He said the word, his voice low, deep, with rather an echo of awe in his tone that moved her so profoundly that she wrapped her
arms lightly about his head, pressing it against her breasts.

They passed a long moment, just so, neither moving or speaking. Then he leaned back enough for her to see his face. "There was a time when only your hands were mine to touch, there that day in the parlor, and times when I wanted you so terribly but the sling did not permit. And then, so very briefly, I could give all myself to you." He smiled wryly. "But forests and pneumonia interrupted that and it has only been in the last week that there has been full freedom to love you as I want, as I must."  He kissed her palms, one then the other. "Now, tonight, we are in the opening hours of a new year, the opening hours of our marriage, and it
is, in its way, such a new beginning, such...well, there is so much freshness to it that it is almost like the first time." He kissed her palms again. "And it is the first for me to love you as my wife. Please," he barely whispered, his fingertips on her neck, "let me...as though I've never gazed at you before."

A soft moan was the only answer she could manage.

His fingers moved up her neck, very, very slowly, then curved along her jawbone, exploring her face. Everywhere he touched, little charges of electricity ran along the pathways of her nervous system. He pulled her lower lip slightly down, feeling the moisture inside, then pressed her back
on the bed, rising to lean over her, replacing his fingertips with his own lips. He kissed her a long, long time and she was aware of this huge rope of bundled nerves that led from her mouth down to her groin. There were only two parts to her body, both open and wet, both aching for his presence. But with his mouth still on hers, his hands began to move again, down her neck, pausing at the rows of silk-covered buttons on her shoulders. She felt his lips smile just a little over hers, then his right hand found the long slit in her sleeve and he moved it inside and down the length of her arm. Everything he did was very, very slow. She wasn't sure how he was managing that because she felt his hardness through the silk over her thigh and she could also feel, just in that awareness of its nearness, all the blood in her body rushing down to greet it.

He undid the small buttons and her bodice was loosened so that he could slide her gown down over her shoulders. He kissed his way along her collar bone, followed the curve of her shoulder and sent his lips like butterfly wings skimming down to her wrists. There were more buttons on the wide cuffs and he raised himself enough to undo them, smiling again when her arms were free and she lay bare to her waist.

She unbuttoned his shirt, her palms sweet and hot over his pectorals. His shirt fell to the floor and he lifted her feet, slipping his own out of his shoes, as she lay back full upon the bed, him

half atop her, his lips doing marvelous things to her breasts. Her back tensed, arched, as he loved his way down her torso rib by rib. She lifted her bottom enough so that he could slide the gown down, down past her hips and was only vaguely aware that he took it on past her ankles and it joined his shirt then his slacks on the rug. A moment more and nothing, not the filmiest

bit of lace, lay between his hands and her skin. She could tell the slowness was important to him, but at his first touch between her legs she began to come and he slid himself inside her in response so they might be together in this first union of theirs as man and wife.

The parachute settled over them, spreading its gentle sigh of self over his back, enveloping her

in its silken folds of released tension. He lay there, giving her a moment, giving him one, but

soon had slid mostly off the side of the bed and was touching her again. Instantly she was aroused, thinking she would come within mere seconds, but he moved his hands, his fingers, his lips, finding endings to nerves she felt must have been newly created, and he lifted her steadily
upwards, letting her glide along some intense plateau of pleasure that she thought surely must

be the mountaintop, that surely the edge must lie right here. But on and on he lifted her, kept lifting her, and whatever part of her mind was still capable of coherent thought  wondered in
amazement that such feeling could not only continue on and still on but become endlessly more and more intense. The muscles of her thighs had begun to vibrate. Everything, every part of her, every nerve in her body was connected only there where he touched. Her ears, her jaw, her toes, even her teeth were connected only there. This absolutely vast, tension-filled pleasure had taken her completely. But it didn't stop. Somehow he  made it continue, and just when she thought she must surely explode with it, he lifted her to another level and it went on.

 
Minute after minute after minute he did this until she was lost in the enveloping vortex of feeling that her body had become, and then she felt a centeredness to it beginning and knew she was,

at last, at the pinnacle of everything. For long, long seconds the centeredness intensified until all the miles of nerve endings she possessed compacted themselves into a single cell...and then that cell completely shattered, imploding, exploding all at once in a primeval chaos of creation and all her pathways flooded in reverse, the built-up, the stored intensity screaming headlong back up to ear and jaw and toe, coursing down thigh, exploding through knee, through elbow, through neck until it burst through her tongue and she cried aloud with the force of it. He

folded his arms around her, pressing her face to his chest, and just held her. There was no parachute this time. He had taken her beyond where parachutes could fly She had exploded like a star and little pieces of her being settled down to earth, leaving trails akin to those huge willow-like fireworks that sift serenely through a July night. She was the sifting trails of
light, and she was also the dark surface of the river that greeted them, reflected them, and

then flowed on. And then there was peace and quiet and...him...his arms still holding her.

He lay quietly, his lips buried in her hair, aware of the gradual slowing of the pulse in her temple that rested just below his collar bone. Her skin, softly moist and warm against his, began to cool and he listened as her breathing calmed.  The full length of her nestled securely against him, she drifted into sleep. Waking so recently from his nap, he was not tired, and so simply remained still, loving the feel of her in his arms, loving the stir of emotions she generated in his heart. His wife. He loved, too, how she responded to his lightest touch, how she trusted him to

lift her up and not let her fall, how he could lift and lift her and that in his knowing of her she was...satisfied. His hand moved down, cupping over the bare curve of her hip, and she stirred, burrowing even more closely against him. That he also loved and every masculine, protective feeling in him wrapped itself around her nearly as tangibly as his arms.

He did not know when he, too, drifted into sleep, nor even that he had. He only knew that he awakened sometime in the night to her touch on his thigh. He started to prop himself on his left elbow, but she pressed her hand against his chest so that he lay back, lay still. Her breath moved warmly up his ribs, his neck, over his eyes,  then concentrated in his ear. "Allow me," she whispered, "to gaze at my husband." 

In less than a minute she had gazed at him so well his hands were fisted into the sheets and his lips pressed tightly together. She touched her tongue to them, prying them slightly, and felt

them open to her then close over her mouth.  Her fingertips trailed over his inner thigh and he gasped, releasing her lips, so she moved her mouth down his body again, pausing to kiss the small chest tube scar on his side. Its presence brought clearly to her all that he had suffered, all the pain he'd endured. Now she had him, she had him here, safe in their marriage bed, and she was determined that all he would endure would be the touch of her hand, of her mouth, on his skin. She smiled to herself, moving her lips further down his ribcage, her mind filling with all
sorts of things for him to endure this night.

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