My Husband's First Wife Died a Saint, Then I Found Her Key novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Drafting Table

She walks into his carriage house in the dead woman's nightgown and tells him to take it off her, and he lifts her onto the drafting table.

"It's the roof, Mother," Patrick called down the stairwell. "A slate's loose. Go to bed."

The cane stayed where it was for a long moment.

Then it tapped away along the landing, and a door closed on the first floor.

Patrick let go of the post behind my head.

He looked at me in the work lamp's yellow light, at the nightgown rucked up on my hip and my mouth, which I knew was swollen.

"The carriage house," he said. "Ten minutes. Take the garden door."

"Is that an invitation?"

"It's an apology for the attic," he said. "And then I'll find out if I mean it."

I went down the back stairs in Ivy's nightgown with my own heart banging.

The garden was wet with the night.

The carriage house stood at the back of the walled yard, a brick building with tall doors and one lit window.

Its smell reached me before I did.

Lime, old wood, coffee, a sharp dry dust.

He had told me he restored buildings, and I had pictured clean offices.

I opened the door on a long room with a drafting table under a hanging lamp.

There were rolled drawings in racks, a workbench with a vise, and a cot nobody had made.

Patrick was standing at the table with his back to me and both hands flat on a plan of a church.

He turned around.

He had taken off his shirt.

I am a nurse and I have seen men's bodies in every condition.

I had not expected this one, wide and hard through the shoulder.

A long pale scar curved behind his left ear into his hair, and grey dusted his chest.

"You said bring a door," he said.

He crossed the floor, reached past me, and shot the iron bolt home.

"I brought a door."

"You did," I said. "Good. Now come here."

He came.

His mouth took mine and there was nothing careful in it anymore.

I got my hands into his hair.

He lifted me by the backs of the thighs and set me on the edge of the drafting table, and the drawings crushed under me.

"The plans," I said against his mouth.

"I have copies."

His hands went to the buttons at the neck of the nightgown.

There were eleven of them.

He undid them one at a time, slowly, with his eyes on mine and his knuckles dragging over my skin.

At the sixth I said, "Faster."

"No."

"Patrick."

"I've thought about this since Friday," he said. "I'm going to look at you."

He parted the cotton and pushed it off my shoulders.

It fell to my waist.

He looked at my breasts, full and heavy in the lamplight, with my nipples already tight.

The sound he made came from low in his chest.

"Christ, Edie."

The nightgown was Ivy's, but the name was mine.

He had said it, and it went straight through me.

He bent and took one nipple in his mouth, hot and wet, and I arched into him and cried out.

I held his head against me.

He sucked and licked until I was shaking, and then he did the other one.

His big hand pushed up under the gown at my thigh.

I opened my legs for it.

His fingers found me bare, because I had not put anything on under that gown, and he went still.

"You came across the garden like this."

"I was in a hurry."

He pushed one finger inside me and I made a sound I'd never made in a bed.

"You're soaked," he said.

"Because of you. Don't talk. Do something."

He pulled the gown up over my hips and off my legs, and I lay back on the plans, naked on a man's work.

He pulled a stool close with his foot, sat on it, and took hold of my thighs.

"You walked in here wet for me," he said, "so you'll lie still and take it."

"Put your mouth on me."

He put his mouth on me.

The first stroke of his tongue was slow, flat and warm, right up the center of me, and I lifted off the table.

He pressed me down by the hip with one hand.

"Stay," he said.

I stayed.

He licked me slowly, with all his attention, and he knew exactly where to spend it.

He circled my clit with the tip of his tongue until I was begging.

Then he closed his lips around it and sucked, and two fingers slid inside me and curled.

"There," I gasped. "Right there. Don't stop. Slower."

He slowed.

He kept me on that edge, my back arched off the paper and my fingers twisted in his hair.

The whole low part of me drew tight, and I came with his name in my mouth.

I came hard and long against his tongue.

He kept going, gentler, until I pushed at his head.

Then he stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist, and I looked at him.

His jeans were tight across his cock, and the shape of it made my mouth water.

"Come here," I said. "Take them off."

He undid his belt with unsteady hands.

When he pushed his jeans down, he was thick and long, flushed dark, with a bead of wetness at the tip.

I reached for him and wrapped my hand around him, and he groaned.

"You're beautiful," I said, and he shut his eyes.

"Edie, I've been three years without."

"Then you need to fuck me."

I pulled him between my legs by the cock.

He gripped my hips and slid the head through my wet, once, twice, until I shuddered.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

He held my eyes and pushed into me, an inch at a time, and I felt every part of him stretching me open.

The drafting board creaked.

He was so deep that I cried out, and he stopped with his forehead against mine and his whole body shaking.

"Move," I said. "Please move."

He drew almost out and drove back in, and I locked my legs around him.

He fucked me hard, with the table jumping under us and the plans sliding off the board.

"That's it," he said into my neck. "That's it, take it, you're so good, you feel so good."

His voice did something to me.

I rocked up to meet him with my nails in his back.

Every thrust hit a place inside me that lit up behind my eyes.

I came again, clenching around him, with a cry that I was sure carried to the street.

"Edie."

"Don't you dare stop."

He held me by the waist and fucked me through it.

When he finally let go, it came out of him in a long rough groan.

His hips stayed pinned against mine and his face was in my hair.

We stayed like that.

I felt his heart slamming against my chest and his breath hot against my neck.

I stroked his back slowly, the way I would for a patient coming round.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a while. "That was..."

"If you apologize for it, I'll hit you."

He laughed into my shoulder.

I turned my head and looked at the ceiling, at the beams and the hanging lamp.

"Two rules," I said.

"All right."

"In this room, I'm Edie. Not Edith, not Mrs. Habersham, and not her."

"Edie," he said. "That's easy."

"And I don't want to do this in her bed. Ever."

He lifted his head and studied my face.

"I wouldn't," he said.

"Then we agree."

He kissed me, softly this time.

A white light swung across the window glass.

It stopped on the drawings, on the nightgown on the floor, and on the two of us.

Then Beatrix's voice came through the pane, very calm.

"Edith," she said. "Ivy's room is not a room to leave empty."

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend