Free Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass Page B

mouth.”
    “I taste no foulness,” he said, and it was true, for he could taste many things in her mouth—warmth, comfort, tenderness, knowledge beyond knowing, peace—and not one of them was in any manner a close cousin to foulness.
    “John Thornton,” she said as his mouth slipped down her neck, and his hands fumbled with the ties of, first, her skirt and then of her underskirt, “you are a very good man, which is why I am here.”
    Suddenly everything seemed right in John Thornton’s mind: why she was here, and why he reacted to her with as much abandonment and lack of care as he did. He felt somehow graced by the privilege she bestowed upon him.
    He did not feel like the earl’s trusted tutor, taking terrible advantage of one of his charges.
    He did not feel like a man of God who had abandoned every tenet of his belief and righteousness at the first sight ( taste and feel ) of a tender, swelling breast.
    She was unclothed now, and Thornton pulled back from her so he could disrobe. She smiled as his clothes fell away, and pulled him back to her, and she did not seem perturbed or frightened by the feel of his hardness against her belly, and he did not feel perturbed at her lack of fear of his nakedness and arousal.
    He sighed, content, and lifted her to the bed.
    Thornton had slept with two women in his thirty-two years. The first woman had been the kind of woman he both despised and feared: a hard, brazen woman, a widow, who took into her bed young students from the nearby Cambridge colleges for a few pennies scattered across the sheets once they had done.
    He had gone to her three times, driven by the rising, almost uncontrollable desires of youth, and he had despised himself far more than her as he’d risen hastily from her bed and self-consciously tossed the pennies on the sheets.
    The second woman Thornton had lain with was another widow, but this time a woman that Thorntonhad hoped to wed. He was twenty-five, newly graduated but not yet a full member of the Church of England, she twenty-nine, and they had spent a few months in the summer believing that perhaps they had a future together. Their two brief, hurried couplings had been cumbersome, awkward and guilt-ridden, and had likely been the reason the woman and Thornton had decided, finally, to go their separate ways.
    But this, this , this was the first time in his life that Thornton felt as if his sexual union with a woman was also a complete union of body and soul with another human being. There was no awkwardness for either of them, not even in her virginity: no fumbling, no guilt, no desperation.
    Only sweetness, joy, and a warmth and comfort that Thornton had never imagined could exist.
    All this , he wondered at one moment, as she arched her body into his, and laughed, and told him how wonderful he was, in a girl only sixteen .
    But, oh, in sinking into her he felt as if he sank into generations. It was as if he were being invited home after years spent wandering lost, as if he had found himself deep within her.
    “John Thornton,” she whispered to him as she caught at his hips with her hands, and encouraged him into a slower and deeper rhythm, “do you feel it?”
    And yes, he did feel it. He felt the rise and fall of the land as it rolled away over hill and dale; he felt the joy in the waters of the streams and lakes as they tossed and turned under the sway of the moon; he felt the blessed peace of the night give way to the gentle joy of the morning, and then slip away again into twilight and mystery.
    And he felt her, all of her, and knew that there was nothing else awaiting him in this life that would give him any greater sense of joy and blessing than this woman could.
    Later, when they lay quietly side by side, he kissed the beauty of her shoulder and said, “Be my wife.” What more could he ask for but that she be beside him, and be the mother of his children?
    “I cannot,” she said.
    “Why?”
    She did not immediately reply, and