Free The Gift of Shame by Sophie Hope-Walker Page A

perhaps he would call with flowers and get two kisses. Some days later she might receive chocolates
and
flowers …’ His lips on her breasts were creating tidal waves, making it difficult for her to maintain her little-girl tone so she broke off to indulge herself in moaning restlessness.
    ‘And, after all this long drawn out courtship – what did he get?’
    ‘Movietone never showed that,’ she managed – the words barely escaping her throat.
    ‘Shall we try an educated guess?’ he asked as his lips moved to cover her urgent mouth.
    Suddenly the bed was a battlefield. No more a place for bantering philosophers or, even, thought. Here only the animal responders could survive. Ecstatically, her body greeted his penetrating surge while her brain became fixed in a loop of joy.
    This was right! This act between these two people at this time and place, she thought, was the true definition of consummation ; the saturation and the wholesome, natural completion of self.
    She welcomed his unstoppable climactic surge with genuine joy, screaming out with an intensity more appropriate to fear than pleasure. Suddenly they fell apart like broken dolls to lay appalled at the pleasure they had known at each other’s loins.
    She was the first to find words. ‘
Ah, mon Colonel! Où sont les autres?
’
    He was still gasping for breath. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk French to me. I can barely think in English!’
    Filled with the joy of a confident temptress she rolled to press her breasts against his heaving chest. ‘I wanted to know where the rest were?’
    ‘Rest of what?’ he gasped.
    ‘Your Regiment! We liberated women do not stint to reward our liberators and we show no discrimination!’
    ‘Or mercy!’ he gasped.
    Kissing her way down the centre seam of his chest and belly she came upon his fearful pride.
    ‘
Pauvre petit!
’ she murmured. ‘
Je crois trouver un héros tombé!
’ With sinuous tongue she reached out to tease the ‘fallen hero’ now limply lying in repose, bringing a moan of delighted protest from him.
    ‘I see it all now,’ he said. ‘The entire Machiavellian plot!’ Reaching down he seized her head and turned her grinning face towards his own. ‘You’ve insured me for a million pounds and now you’re set on fucking me to death!’
    Her laugh rang out in delight. ‘The way I see it, is that it’s got to be worth a damn good try!’
    Dragging her up the length of his body he brought her nose to nose. ‘’Tis a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done.’
    She joined in to mangle his quote. ‘That a man should give his life for a woman’s pleasure?’
    Closing his eyes against the intensity of his sigh he pushed her head to rest on his chest. ‘This is a moment of such exquisite pleasure I feel there ought to be a way of preserving it forever in amber.’
    Each pleasurably confident that their thoughts were identical, they lay in silent communion for some minutes before he spoke.
    ‘Tell me something,’ he said.
    She smiled upward. ‘Like yesterday?’
    ‘No. Yesterday I asked you to say something you have never before dared say to a lover. This is different.’
    She waited, confident that there was nothing she couldn’t tell him.
    ‘Tell me something about yourself that you’ve never told anyone. Not even your best friend.’
    A twinge of pain, discomfort, shuddered through her. This man had plundered her body in the most absolute manner possible, and she had rejoiced in the surrender, but now it seemed he wanted to assault that most intimate part of her body – her mind.
    She knew exactly what he wanted to know. Just as yesterday the five words that had hovered on the edge of her lips, unspoken for years, had struggled free, now her greatest secret was there, fully formed, and impatiently waiting its turn – but it was too painful to share, even with him.
    When she was very young and still experimenting with her own sexuality she had discovered that the man who