Free I'll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz

Not ever.”
    “That’s what I thought about you the day we met … you’re not a man who fails at anything in life.”
    “Darling, you sound so fierce.” He looked in astonishment at Lily, his mysterious, timorous, inexperienced bride, whose every gesture seemed at once a caress and a quest for nourishment, yet whose expression was suddenly intent in a way he’d never seen before.
    “You don’t really know me, Zachary. I am fierce,” she said in a voice that was so naturally angelic that he simply laughed and kissed her lips. She responded with the still awkward willingness that he found so touching in her. He put his arms around Lily under the layers of blankets. She was warmer now, more relaxed, the shivering had stopped. He ran his blunt fingers over the column of her neck, touching with wonder the astonishing curve where her neck met her shoulder. His hand ventured to her collarbone, felt the strength, the power under the muscles of her slim shoulders. He could ring her upper arm with one of his large hands. There was a delicate tautness there that made him alarmingly aware of the difference in the stuff of which they were made. She was like steel covered with silk and he was just flesh, ordinary flesh.
    Excitement flowed through his veins, moving like a forest fire that has been started by lightning in a dozen different places at once, but he kept himself under absolute control. There was only one
single
thing he knew about teaching Lily how to make love and that was to take it easy, to go as slowly and as tenderly as was humanly possible, or, if it weren’t possible for a human, to become inhumanlycontrolled. Minutes passed, while Lily, her eyes tightly shut, became aware of Zachary’s fingertips gliding with the faintest of pressure from her shoulder to her elbow. The strap of her nightgown was a thin roll of satin, and it slipped off a shoulder, exposing one of her small, saucer-shaped breasts with a tiny, flat nipple, of a pink so pale that it made almost no contrast to the whiteness of her skin. Zachary saw her breast by the light of the fire, caught his breath, squeezed his thighs together mercilessly, and kept his hand away from the ravishing little mound. She wasn’t ready to be touched yet, he told himself, as he lightly brushed his lips along her neck, under her hair. Lily made no sound at all and sat motionless, almost weightless in his lap, but he could feel that she was holding herself together tightly, scarcely breathing.
    “Relax my darling, my baby, I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do, there’s no rush, we have all the time in the world,” he whispered to her, but she gave no sign of hearing him. His fingers left her elbow and descended caressingly along her forearm, reached her wrist and then spread out to cover her hand with his. In a quick movement that surprised him she turned her palm toward his palm, grasped his hand and lifted it up so that it abruptly covered her breast. “No darling, no, you don’t have to, it’s all right,” he said in a low voice and took his hand away. She was only doing what she imagined was expected of her, he thought. Mutely she kissed his mouth, pressing her cool lips on his, seeming more like a child in search of security than a woman. He ground his teeth together to keep himself from thrusting his tongue between her lips. In the last month he had taught her to kiss without keeping her lips tightly together but she had retreated from his tongue as often as she had accepted it, and he was unwilling to initiate anything she might not want, tonight of all nights.
    Lily, with a quick shrug of her other shoulder, caused the second strap of her nightgown to fall away from her body. With the blankets still covering her legs she sat defiantly upright on Zachary’s knees, naked from the waist, her eyes still closed but her torso entirely revealed, a torso in which the combination of the girlishness of her immature breasts and the almost boylike