Free Crimson by Shirley Conran Page B

fingers softly probed her moist warmth until his middle finger met less resistance. Insistent, he pushed. Eventually his finger found the small opening and worked its way inside, enlarging it, with minimal pain to his bride. Elinor whimpered as he won his gentle battle.
    At first she felt panic as he entered her. With his body stretched upon her, Billy lay still and reassured her with gentle kisses until she relaxed.
    “Like this,” he whispered, and his hands twisted her hips in a circular motion.
    Slowly her body took up the motion. In silence, Billy controlled each movement, each twist. Limbs entangled, they writhed in a leisurely, horizontal dance as they explored each other. Through the night, they slid from one side of the feather bed to the other, sometimes moving slowly, sometimes lunging swiftly, as their hunger for each other mounted and then was satisfied, only to grow again.
     
    At times, he crouched above her like some great triumphant beast, looking down on his conquest spread out Wow him.
    She felt that the entire world existed only as a vague two-dimensional blur. Only their crumpled nest of pillows and sheets, and the pungent male body on top of her sliding, slipping, thrusting inside her were sharply in focus, three-dimensional, and real. She could not think beyond this erotic joining of their flesh in the dimly shadowed, voluptuous bed, perfumed by their bodies.
    Sometimes he lay beneath her, cradling her breasts in his hands, feeling her soft flesh quiver against his lips, and she sat panting upon his stomach as his strong hands held and rotated her hips. He gripped her to control her movements, so she could not move as she wished, could not move except as he wished.
    At first she had’ demurely crossed her arms to hide her breasts, but eventually, flinging her arms high in abandon, she rode him like a plunging dolphin, until she fell forward, exhausted, and her breasts rubbed against the damp hair of his chest.
    By morning, her flesh was bruised in places, like an overripe pear, and these pale contusions marked her as the property of Billy as surely as a cattle brand.
    She was besotted, enchanted, in love, completely in Billy’s thrall. Like lightning, he excited, frightened, and fascinated her.
    That morning, momentarily disoriented, Elinor sleepily lifted her head from the pillow. Then she remembered the night, and she buried her face in the bedclothes. Her face grew hot as she recalled how Billy had manipulated her senses and rendered her boneless and helpless beneath his touch.
    Then she realized that, in the billowing warmth, of the feather bed, she could feel no body next to hers.
    She sat up. Billy her husband was leaning out of the open window. He was stark naked. For a moment, Elinor looked through lowered eyelashes at his cropped fair hair, his strong neck, his long back; she gazed admiringly at his long, lean legs the left foot still bandaged and his muscular buttocks, so different from her soft, pliable flesh. Throughout her life, this private peek at Billy’s body was frozen in her mind, and at the memory, Elinor would melt, and forgive him anything.
    During the first weeks of her marriage, Elinor slid slowly, agreeably, voluptuously into sensuality.
    What had originally attracted Billy to Elinor as much as her beauty and exuberant energy was the innocence that she had protected so firmly, and to which Billy had responded with classic male determination.
    Having destroyed that innocence, Billy now sought to artificially rebuild it, for the pleasure of again breaching it. At first Elinor refused to re-enact her timid virginity so that Billy could theft pretend to break her in as he had on their wedding night.
    “Why can’t we undress before we go to bed, as usual? don’t understand why you want me to playact,” she protested. But then she grew to enjoy his little fantasy.
    Dexterously, swiftly, Billy turned his bride into a slave of her own eroticism. She could think about nothing