Forced Offer by Gloria Gay

be in this state all the time.
    Then she suddenly realized that Lord Berrington had climbed on the bed with her and that he wasn't wearing a nightshirt. She looked at his lean, muscled torso and was vaguely aware of a clean soapy scent coming from him as he leaned toward her and with a quick movement undid the ribbon of her nightshift.
    He sat up and pulled the shift over her head, tossed it on the chair over his clothes, and then turning to the candle, blew it off with one puff.
    Unable to half-focus her eyes as she had been doing before, Belinda's sense of place vanished. She felt engulfed in a deep velvet black that was most pleasant as the feeling of floating continued. Then suddenly she felt him on top of her, heavily, and felt his skin against her own bare breasts so that she gasped. Incredibly she felt his lips brush her breasts until they rested on her nipples and he began kissing them, hard and hungrily, startling Belinda so that she was completely still. She had never given a thought to her small, high breasts and she was now very conscious of them as his lips seared them, invading them with shooting sparks of pleasure that made her almost cry out in delight.
    Through her mind a series of memories, of the countless times which she had loved Richard Berrington in silence, within the closed cruelty of her hopeless love for him, flashed through her mind, a mind that was fogged by the effects of liquor. The distant god she had worshipped from afar was now as close as  this   to her and in  this   way. It was sudden and overwhelming. It was a bliss she could not grasp entirely, so that she didn't notice when he tossed the sheets and coverlet away from her impatiently and pulling her legs apart, sent a current of strange sensations throughout her body at the hard warm touch of his hands. But not until he thrust himself against her and she felt a sharp stab of pain as he penetrated her did she realize what had happened, and cried out in pain and alarm. With each succeeding thrust, and there were countless, she felt only pain, and forced herself not to cry out again, biting her lower lip so that it bled.
    Then the pain eased and began to melt away gradually, in its place an intensely pleasurable sensation, which she had never before felt. She had no guide but her own mind. Her mind, now stunted by the unfamiliar effects of liquor, responded to his body without the chains of convention, which in any case she was unaware of, for she was being led through this wondrous landscape without a map, and slowly began to join in with each hard thrust of her husband's body into hers—arching her body and responding in unison.
    Soon they both were one in their pleasure-seeking and currents of bliss shot throughout her body. She felt herself climbing with him—melting into his being as they climbed toward this pinnacle. They were spinning together in the velvet blackness where she floated and as she reached that pinnacle in the same moment that he did, for the first time he let out a muffled cry even as she did too, so that the cry sounded as one.
    Then he fell heavily over her and she felt the perspiration on his chest, as breathless he buried his head in the hollow between her neck and her shoulder. For a few moments he was still and Belinda wished this moment to stretch forever and that she would not have to return to the reality of her life. Nothing could have made her more starkly closer to him than this, this strange way in which they had come together.
    Belinda sensed that as he made this strange love to her he was blocking the world of everything except  her . The thought of it—the enormity of what had happened—was but part of the blissful heaven in which she now floated. She now loved Berrington more than she loved life itself.
    But after a while he turned over and lay by her side in silence, his breathing easier. Then he said, "Do you want the other glass of wine now?"
    "Yes," she managed to say, and when he handed