Now it was Daniel who reached between her legs and spread her wide. She felt the wet tip of his cock against her. She barely had time to brace herself before he thrust into her so hard, so incredibly deep that she nearly cried.
Eleanor tried to breathe as Daniel rode her with long driving thrusts. He was big but she was well-accustomed to a large size. She was shocked instead by his insistence; every thrust going deeper and deeper until it seemed he pounded into the pit of her stomach. It quickly left the realm of sex and devolved into pure fucking. And he fucked her like a starving man ate. Three years of celibacy and sorrow had turned his body into a vessel of pure hunger. He gripped her wrists as he took her, holding her down hard. If she wanted to escape him she couldn’t. No part of her wanted to escape. Still some lingering defiant spark in her fought off the climax that was threatening to erupt from within her. He was so suddenly possessive of her and she so aware that no matter how he took her, she was not his, that she refused to give him the satisfaction of giving her satisfaction. But no amount of slow steady breathing could stop her. She came and when she came it felt as if her orgasm was wrenched from her. He took it from her body rather than giving it to her. His pace grew faster, harsher, and she held onto the bars of the headboard as he spent his pleasure in her, filling her stomach with his liquid heat.
Eleanor’s heart still raced even as her ragged breathing settled. She looked at Daniel who still lay embedded in her. His eyes were closed and his brow was furrowed in concentration as if he were trying to imprint in his memory this one moment inside her. Eleanor stared at his face. Long blond eyelashes lay on pale cheeks like sunlight on snow, and she felt an unexpected stab of tenderness toward him.
Daniel opened his eyes slowly. Eleanor tried to smile at him but the look he gave her was one of shock. He seemed to be seeing a stranger, and Eleanor realized with a sick churning in her stomach that he was.
“It was her you were fucking, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice soft and without accusation. “Your wife, right? Lucky lady.”
Daniel’s only answer was to slip out of her. He left the bed and threw on his clothes.
“Keep the bed,” he said without looking at her. “Tonight this is the warmest room in the house.”
“But where will you—” Eleanor started to ask, but he was already gone.
She groaned in frustration and collapsed back on the bed. She blew out the candles and yanked the covers to her chin. After a few minutes in the dark, she felt the presence of ghosts in the room—the ghost of Daniel’s late wife and the more fearsome ghost of the man Daniel had been before her death. Eleanor knew she lay with them in the ghost of their marriage bed. She tossed the covers aside, found her nightgown, and returned to her own bedroom. She crawled back into her freezing bed where at least she knew that the only cold body between the sheets would be her own.
* * *
Eleanor awoke the next morning and heard the faint but reassuring hum that indicated the power had been restored to the house. She showered and dressed and scrounged for breakfast in the grand but near-empty kitchen. Still...although the kitchen felt abandoned, something told her she wasn’t alone in the house. Last night’s snow had been far too thick and heavy for the roads to be safely passable yet. Once her stomach was comfortably full, she began a cursory exploration. Ears attuned to the slightest sound, she paused outside a closed door near the backside of the house and heard the unmistakable sound of books sliding across a shelf.
She let loose a wolf whistle as she entered. The library was far larger inside than the unobtrusive door had presaged and was stocked with row after row, case after case of books. Enough books to start her own bookstore.
“I knew I heard books,” she said to no one in particular.
“You hear books?” Daniel’s lightly sarcastic voice came from the far left corner of the library. “Interesting. Most people actually have to read them.”
“It’s a gift,” she said, shrugging. “What are you doing?”
Daniel stood behind a desk stacked shoulder high with books.
“I am draining all the alphabet soup out of my library.” She raised an eyebrow at him as she walked to the desk. “I thought you were a bibliophile,” Daniel taunted in response to her puzzled look.
“I am a bibliophile. A bibliophiend even. But I still have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Well, as your book knowledge comes from the retail side of the industry then I’ll pardon your ignorance.” He winked at her and she fairly flushed as a sensory memory from last night hit her lower stomach with soft but insistent force. And the light, that certain white light created only by the morning sun reflecting off new-fallen snow rendered Daniel’s handsome features almost luminous. She almost forgot what they’d been talking about. “Let’s see, at your bookstore your books are divided by subject and then alphabetized by author’s last name, yes?”
“Right. With a few exceptions.”
“Well, libraries aren’t allowed any exceptions. The books have to be in perfect order at all times. You can’t do that with just sorting by genre and then alphabetizing.”
“Yeah, that’s what the Dewey Decimal system is for, right?”
“But there isn’t just Dewey. There’s the Library of Congress classification system. Dewey is a clean, efficient system, ten main classes divided by ten and so on. The Library of Congress is alpha-numeric and based on 26 classes, one for each letter of the alphabet. Compared to Dewey it is crude and confusing, and I only had the library that way because of Maggie. It’s what she was used to.”
“Alphanumeric—so that’s your alphabet soup.”
“Yes, and this library has been disorganized soup for far too long.” Daniel shook his head as he wrote out a series of numbers on an index card and slipped it inside the front cover of a book.
“Oh my God,” Eleanor said, sounding utterly shocked.
“What?”
“You’re a nerd.”
Daniel only looked at her a moment before laughing.
“I am not a nerd. I’m a librarian.”
“No way,” she said, recalling again the ferocious passion and the skill he’d demonstrated last night. “Guess they were right.”
“Who?”
“You know, whoever said ‘it’s always the quiet ones.’”
Daniel’s mouth twitched to a wicked half grin. “I’m the quiet ones,” he said, flashing a look at Eleanor that nearly dropped her to her knees.
She coughed and shook herself out of the erotic reverie she’d fallen into.
“Okay,” she said, walking toward him with more gusto than guts. “I can accept that you’re a librarian and a sex god—”
“Well, considering your lover is a pr—”
“Nope. Nyet. Halt. I told you last night—”
“Oh, yes. I had forgotten. Our mutual acquaintance is off-limits to discussion.”
“If you want me to survive this week with what passes for my mental health intact, then yes.”
“Which I do. So I apologize. But as we barely know each other, finding a topic of conversation apart from our mutual friend might be difficult.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” she said, sitting on the table next to a stack of books. “We’ve got books in common, sex...” She ticked them off on her fingers.
“All of two,” Daniel said skeptically.
“Well...” She stuck out her foot and tapped his leg lightly. “We’ve got you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I’m curious. You’re a curiosity. As long as you don’t mind answering personal questions—”
“How personal?” Daniel interrupted.
“Unapologetically intrusive, knowing me. Unconscionably so.”
“You have a large vocabulary, Eleanor.”
“And you have a large...” She paused as he gave her a warning look. “House.”
“I do.”
“How does a librarian afford a house like this? That was the first unapologetically personal question, for those of you keeping count.”
Daniel smiled but Eleanor saw the pale ghost of pain pass across his eyes.
“Librarians can’t afford houses like this. But a partner in a Manhattan law firm can.”
“Your wife? She was a lawyer?”
“She was. A very powerful attorney.”
“You married a shark?” Eleanor asked, laughing.
“A corporate shark, in fact.”
“Wow,” Eleanor said, duly impressed. “How did you meet her?”
“At the library, of course.”
“She read?”
“She gave,” Daniel said with great emphasis on the last word. “She gave balls, galas, parties, charity events, fund-raisers of every stripe. She actually had a heart and a conscience. She was the human face of an otherwise very imposing old firm. She held a gala one year to raise money for a literary charity at the NYPL—”
“Holy shit, you worked at the NYPL?”
“Fifth Avenue, Main Branch,” he said with barely concealed pride.
“With Lenox and Astor?” she asked, naming the two famous lions that guarded the legendary library.
“On warm days I ate my lunch outside with Astor.”
“Why not Lenox?”
“He asked too many personal questions.”
“I like him already. So you were both guests at the party?”
“Oh no. She was the hostess. I happened to be working late that night in the Map Room. Lowly archivist. Not important enough for an invitation.”
“So you were tucked away in a dusty corner alphabetizing 18th century maps of Tierra del Fuego...”
“Something to that effect—”
“And she slips away from the suffocating crowd of the geriatrically wealthy—”
“Has anyone ever told you that you should be a writer?”
“No one who’s ever tried it themselves. But back to you and her. So you’re up to your elbows in Fuego and she rushes in all disheveled elegance, out of breath, desperate for just one moment of solitude...”
“Actually I was examining a map of Eurasia for signs of wear; she strolled in quite calmly, apologized very politely when she saw me and said she simply wanted to see the library by night.”
“I like my version better. But still that is romantic. You gave her a tour? It was love at first sight?”
“Intrigue at first sight. I assumed she was just a guest at the gala. She was lovely, intelligent, a very young-looking thirty-nine.”
“Ohh...an older woman. I love it.”
“Her age or mine was never a factor. Or perhaps it was. She was older than me, powerful, wealthy...but at night when we were alone...”
“She was your slave,” Eleanor said, finishing his sentence.
“My slave. My property. My possession.”
“Your possession...I know how she must have felt. Pressure to be in charge of the world. So much responsibility. The whole world on her...to let go and just give herself to you, to give up to you...”
“I’m glad you understand,” Daniel said as he started sifting through another stack of books. “Few women do.”
“Oh, they do. They’re just afraid to admit it. Yeah, equal pay for equal work and our bodies our selves and Gloria Steinem and all that jazz...but in that dusty dark little corner of every woman’s heart where we keep our maps of Tierra del Fuego lives the hunger to fetch a powerful man his slippers on her hands and knees.”
Eleanor was pleased to see her words had a similar effect on Daniel as his did on her. His breath quickened just slightly as his hands deliberately stroked the leather binding of the book in his hand.