A Certain Latitude by Janet Mullany

England and their dates, William the Conqueror, 1066 to 1087; William Rufus, 1087 to 1100, killed in the New Forest hunting; poor bastard, Stephen, no Henry, can’t remember; yes, Henry I, 1100 to…
    “Allen, can you feel that, can you…” She clenched on him hard, her face alight with wonder, and he let go, soaring to the heavens.
    Ecstatic, wondrous, like to make him swoon. Precisely.

 
     
     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
    Afterward he held her, stroked her, and told her how beautiful she was. She didn’t quite believe him—it sounded far too much like the sort of idiotic things a well-pleased man might say, and she knew she wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense. Once, in the only comparable circumstances she had experienced, another man had told her he loved her passionately and would never leave her—which he did the next day, abandoning her to the wrath of both an innkeeper demanding payment and her scandalized and tearful family. But she wouldn’t think of her past folly now, not with Allen Pendale warm and large and very much present.
    She sat, untangling herself from his arms.
    “What are you doing? More, already?”
    “I want to look at you.”
    She knelt beside him, skimming her hands over his body—too muscular and broad to truly be called beautiful, and densely furred on chest and groin—legs and arms covered with a fuzz of black hair. His cock stirred as she ran her hands down his chest and onto his flanks.
    “You insatiable slut,” he said, the affection in his voice taking the insult from his words.
    “You are so very dark and hairy,” she commented.
    He grunted. “My mother used to call me her little changeling.”
    “That wasn’t very kind.”
    “You saw the miniature of my sister. My brothers and sisters are, for the most part, tall and slender and very fair, like our father.” He stopped quite suddenly, and she wondered what he had been about to say next. Did he suspect he had been fathered by a man other than the Earl of Frensham?
    “I miss my family,” she admitted. “I would do anything—anything—to be on good terms with them again. When Lord Thelling died, I wrote to my family, suspecting I should soon be without a position. I begged them to forgive me. They would not.”
    “It’s ridiculously illogical,” he grumbled. He reached for her breasts, thumbs rubbing her nipples erect. “As though your seducer bore no part in the matter.”
    “So many things are ridiculously illogical.”
    Meanwhile, the man who had pledged to show her the pleasures of the flesh so she could honor an agreement with a future lover, showed distinct signs of carnal interest. She ran her hand through his bush of dark, curly hair and grasped his cock.
    “Push back my foreskin and lick the top,” he murmured, hands in her hair, pushing her head down.
    “I thought this was for my pleasure.”
    “It will be.”
    As his cock in her hand firmed and quickened, she bent her head to touch it with her tongue, inhaling the dark, earthy scent of him, their mingled fluids still beaded on the curling dark hair.
    He gave a long sigh of satisfaction. “I’ll teach you how to take me in your mouth tomorrow night. But, at the moment, I’m feeling rather lazy. Kneel over my face and I’ll tongue you.”
    She looked at him with some doubt. That sounded—well, vulgar. Arousing, too. But… “Would you like me to wash, first?”
    “Whatever for? I know what I’ll taste. Come on, Clarissa, don’t be a silly prude.”
    “I am not a silly prude!” She scrambled astride him, grabbing one of the berths for support.
    His hands clamped onto her bottom, his tongue snaked right inside her—she wondered how she tasted, with the wine she had used as a preventative, and his seed and her own moisture—and then didn’t care. His lips and mouth caressed her exposed clitoris, his chin scraped rough against her thighs, one hand tweaked her nipple, and the other…oh, my God, the other stroked and caressed her buttocks,