The Servants of Twilight

"Charlie. " she said softly.

He licked her swollen nipples, first one, then the other, lovingly.

"No," she said, but she did not push him away with any conviction, only halfheartedly, wanting to be convinced.

"I love you," he said, meaning it. In just a few days, he had fallen in love with her exquisitely composed face, with her body, with her complex mind and wit, with her courage in the face of adversity, with her indomitable spirit, with the way she walked, with the way her hair looked in the wind…

"Joey. " she said.

"He's sleeping."

"He might wake up.

Charlie kissed her throat, felt the throbbing of her pulse against his lips. Her heart was beating fast. So was his.

"He might come out to the gallery… look down and see us," she said.

He led her away from the firelight, to a long, deep sofa that was under the gallery overhang, out of sight. The shadows were deep and purple.

"We shouldn't," she said, but she kept kissing his neck, his chin, lips, cheeks, and eyes." Even here… if he wakes up. "

"He'll call to us first," Charlie said, breathless, aching with need."

He won't just come down into a dark living room."

She kissed his nose, each corner of his mouth, planted a chain of kisses along his jaw line, kissed his ear.

His hands moved over her body, and he thrilled to the perfect form and texture of her. Each sweet concavity and convexity, each enticing angle, the swell of breasts and hips, the taut flatness of belly, the ripeness of buttocks, the sleek roundness of

thigh and calf-all of her seemed, to the millimeter, a precise definition of ideal femininity.

"All right," she said weakly." But silently.

"Not a sound," he promised.

"Not a sound."

"Not one small sound.

The wind moaned at the window above the sofa, but he gave voice to his own intense pleasure only in his mind.

It's the wrong moment, she thought hazily. The wrong place.

The wrong time. The wrong everything.

Joey. Might. Wake up.

But although it should matter, it didn't seem to, not much, not enough for her to resist.

He had said he loved her, and she had said she loved him, and she knew they had both meant it, that it was true, real. She didn't know for sure how long she had loved him, but if she thought about it hard enough she would probably be able to fix the precise moment in which respect and admiration and affection had been transformed into something better and more powerful. After all, she had known him only a few days; the moment of love's birth should not be difficult to pin down in that brief span of time. Of course, at the moment, she couldn't think hard about anything, or clearly; she was swept away, though such a condition was out of character for her.

In spite of their protestations of love, it wasn't merely love that induced her to cast caution aside and take the risk of being overheard in the midst of their passion: it was good, healthy lust, too. She had never wanted a man as much as she wanted Charlie. Suddenly she had to have him within her, couldn't breathe until he took her. His body was lean, the muscles hard and well defined; his sculpted shoulders, his rocklike biceps, smooth broad chest-everything about him excited her to an extent that she had never been excited before. Every nerve in her body was many times more sensitive than before; each kiss and touch, each stroke he took within her, was so explosively pleasurab'ie that it bordered on pain, astonishing pleasure, pleasure that filled her and drove out everything else, every other thought, until she clung mindlessly to him, amazed at the abandon with which she embraced him, unable to understand or resist the primitive rutting fever that possessed her.

The need to be quiet, the oath of silence, had a strangely powerful erotic effect. Even when Charlie climaxed, he did not cry out, but gripped her hips and held her against him and arched his back and opened his mouth but remained mute, and somehow, by containing the cry he also contained his energy and virility, for he didn't lose his erection, not even for a moment, and they paused only to change positions, remaining welded together, but sliding around on the sofa until she was on top, and then she rode him with a pneumatic fluidity and a sinuous rhythm that was unlike anything he had ever known before, and he lost track of time and place, lost himself in the soft, silken, silent song of flesh and motion.