Why do these things come into my brain?... and won't let go? Blame it on my reluctance to let go of my OTP…. So I write hot fan fic…lol

The arc of a love affair
His hands rolling down her hair
Love like lightning shaking till it moans

June 1919

The wall was cold against her skin as the man pushed her against the peeling wallpaper. She wanted him to do even more. To make her scream. To command all his attentions. The man pitched her arms above her head. His muscles were lean and elegant. His breath hot. She thrust out her breasts. He grunted, his eyes hungry for her. He bent down and took each breast into his mouth. His lips encircled her peaked nipples. Nibbling, nipping, his tongue flicking and his lips sucking until his actions sent her into an intoxicated ecstasy.

A series of guttural moans from a mouth he sensed was unused to such noises was his reward.

He let go.

She crooked her face into his neck and pressed her teeth into his skin. Making him as putty in her hands. Possessive bite marks formed by her, marking him as hers.

His head moved so that their eyes locked. She was everything he never knew he was looking for in a woman. Yet he did not even know her name.

"Take me" she said, the huskiness of her breath raw from previous claims on his body. But she still demanded more. Afraid he'd stop. "Take all of me."

And she threw him down onto the bed. Crawled and climbed over him as a lioness ascended a tree. Lithe and fully aware of the slenderness of his torso. A perfect V shape down to his groin.

She touched him. His eyes opened. Looked at her with a deliciously open stare.

She was reckless. Impetuous. A liberating activity, one she never indulged in. In this moment. For whatever this moment, this passion brought.

They had been at it for hours.

No identity to get in the way.

Just bodies.

Entwined. Encased. Protected from the outside world.

His tunic tossed aside lay embracing her lace chemise on the floor. His boots, muddy and worn, thrown in a corner. Her heels abandoned on either side of the bed, each lost to the other companion shoe. He had thrown them over his shoulder upon slipping them off her feet as his fingers slid up her slim legs and tore at her under garments. He felt around until she gasped as his touch met the spot.

He had been footloose in Paris in the months following the war. Waiting demobilization. Reluctant to go home to his recluse father and binge in mutual loneliness and despair. That had not appealed. He had lost his mother in a freak bomb blast in Paris while she worked for the Red Cross. Ever the storm braver to the end. His father had yet to recover.

So he stayed in Paris. He wore his uniform as he was a couple weeks away from freedom.

Meeting his military obligations as a researcher/translator to the British peace conference delegation, he also wrote the words to the novel he had dreamed up in his mind's eye while damp and mud-soaked in the trenches. Had a couple of short stories published in French for Les Annales and film reviews for Le Film Complet just to make ends meet. He even wrote some rude fiction for some of the more Bohemian publications.

It was coming in handy here. Her fingers were long. Strong. Stretched out and stroking him just as he needed. Firm pumps making his skin sweat and his mouth dry from the panting. The craving. The need to have her touch all night.

To make the thoughts take flight. To be only in the moment. For the past was another country. One he'd rather see the horizon of as he left it on a voyage to oblivion.

They had bumped into each other on a Parisian street. He had been looking down. He had written an address of a publisher down on the palm of his hand. When he looked up it had been too late.

"Excuse." He mumbled.

Then he looked up.

She was a vision in blue. A wrap around her shoulders it had turned out to be. A hat with sequins and a couple of feathers. A dress that played with fabrics and textures as if to rebel finally against the uniform drabness of the war years. The hemline rose just below her knee giving him a glimpse of a slender ankle and silk stocking.

Open jawed, he had fumbled around and finally tipped his cap. "Excusez-moi, est-ce que je peux passer, s'il vous plaît?" Not really knowing what else to say. He had no money, no job. No way to even have the right to talk to this woman. This beauty.

"Naturellement." She responded. But she did not push past him. Instead she look a bit bewildered.

He risked it anyway. "Voulez-vous du café?" He could not let her go away and never speak again.

"J'adorerais." She said, also pausing in the street even though she was in a desperate hurry. This man. His eyes, clearly in pain yet exquisitely blue, bore into hers as if he could see right into her soul. She stumbled but managed "Bien que je sois à court de temps."

He knew immediately she was English. Not because her French was not perfect. But the way one ex-pat knew another.

"It won't take very long. You do look famished, if I may be so bold." He took the cap off and scratched his skull. The thing always made his scalp itch.

She could not leave not now. One blonde lock fell down across his forehead as he rubbed. She took a gloved hand and moved it back into place.

"You're English?" she said, settling the confusion she felt at a Frenchman in an English regiment.

"As are you." He smiled.

"How did you know?" She had always prided herself on well accented French. Years of governesses and finishing schools had seen to that.

"It's all in the body language. We English think we can hide ourselves in a foreign land. But actually we stick out like thumbs."

Her laugh radiated as an English rose. Something both painful and arousing. As was her touch, encased though it was in a leather glove. He knew she felt it too.

It had been a while for the both of them it turned out. The café merely an excuse to take her back to his hotel.

He had ordered coffee. She said she'd pour. "Mieux vaut être seuls." Said with a sly smirk, she waved the waitress away from their table.

"Absolument!" His voice low, pitched for her ears alone. "Je ne veux rien de plus qu'être seul avec vous."

She had leaned across the table to retrieve some sugar. Allowing him a glimpse of décolletage. Their eyes met. He motioned with his hand to the stairs. She imperceptibly nodded and followed him.

His room was small. Spare. But adequate to the task. The bed was in the corner of the room. Light flooded in from outside.

She closed the door behind her.

He turned. She moved to take him.

Her nimble fingers unbuttoned his tunic with rapid functionality. He caught his breath.

"I was trained to help recuperative soldiers during the war." She explained. "It's become habit."

"I approve." He sucked some air as her hands reached the buttons on his khaki trousers. His own hands then went to work taking off her shoes, moving his hands up her intoxicating thighs and spreading her legs until he worked his way through her under garments to her most erogenous spot.

Her moan and collapse into his arms meant he had found it. His feather like touches worked into a slow grinding motion making her more aware of her body than it had been in years.

Within seconds of being in this room with him, she knew him. She knew him and trusted him.

Her life had taken such a twist she hardly knew it anymore. Having lived most of the war in a marriage of her own creation, she had regretted her rash action. Her husband, cold and demanding, had been a youthful rebellion against her father's wishes.

She had never fully trusted him. Her husband's idea of sex had been for his pleasure alone. She was merely a tool. A means to an end. And once he had relieved his immediate urge, he turned away from her and fell asleep. Leaving her cold. Naked and alone. And once it was clear she was unable to provide him with children, his roaming eyes began to take in fresh prey.

Well she had gotten out of that. He had committed adultery with a woman in Edinburgh. Once found out, the divorce was inevitable.

Free, she decided to join her mother in Paris for a trip to the House of Patou to see the new post-war designs. Liberated in all senses of the word had been intoxicating.

But one thing her marriage had taught her, much to her chagrin, was that she had a strong sexual drive. A need left unsatiated for far too long.

Until now.

Until this man. And this time.

She went to his room, knowing what he wanted. Wanting it herself. Maybe a dirty week end away was just the ticket to forget her life before.

Her grunts of approval at his touch was only the beginning. He tasted her skin. He dragged and tore the garments free from her body. Kissed and ran his tongue along each of her thighs in turn as she looked on with approval.

She trembled. He grinned for the first time.

Once free of her garments, she straddled her leg over his left side. His own clothes had been lain aside. His body, though scarred from the war and pale, was fit and tight. She could see his elongated member throbbing and expanding in size before her eyes. She reached out and touched its length. Her fingers shook but it was a practiced hand that took him. She gripped lightly at first, then as it twitched and pulsed in her grasp she tightened her fingers and stroked.

His body heaved and jerked in time to the sensations pulsating his body.

She licked her lips deliciously, seductively. "What are you waiting for?" And reached out and maneuvered her hips to take all of him inside her.

She gave him every excuse to indulge his need. A need, hungry and deep that she could see in those sad eyes.

Hungry. Shuddering. Helpless. He pounded and beat abandoned to any other sensation inside her. He contorted his body to better meet her own mounting expectations. Her intense stare of concentration as she drove him on by hitching her body higher to meet his. Her fingers slid around and took command of his rounded, firm rear end. Fingernails driving and kneading into his soft skin. She tightened her pelvic muscles around him. The constricted sensation engorged him further. The built up pressure making the sensations that much more desirable.

He quickened his motion. Driving now towards a climax. Insane, intense explosions of pleasure wracked his body. He took a moment to look down on her. Her eyes closed, a pulsing, rippling motion of her body meant that she too felt it. The vibrations of his erection deep inside her, driving her to sensations she had though long ago escaped her life.

Now they had all been fulfilled. The surge of her peaks making her warm and wet and alive. She felt a voracious need to take him again and again.

He lay down, spent in all meanings of the word. The sweat of his brow. The deep heaving of his breath. His hair tousled and unkempt. His mind vacant while his tactile sensations were like painful pinpricks all over his body.

She was numb from the pleasure. Yet wanting more. In complete control, yet giving herself completely to another. She had behaved in the most indecent of ways. Wanton. Unladylike.

They turned to face each other in the rumpled bed sheets. Eyes meeting eyes in total awareness of their actions.

He never felt more vulnerable to a woman's touch. His own wife was dead. He felt no guilt.

She had never had such intense desires. She felt no shame.

They had not even kissed.

XX
One month later

Lady Mary Crawley took a seat on the divan in the library next to her mother.

"Your father has some kind of announcement to make." Cora told her. They had both been summoned as if on command by Lord Grantham.

Mary had returned from a month's holiday to Paris. And the countryside of France, left unscarred by war. Her mother had wondered why her daughter had insisted that a longer visit to the French capital was necessary, but she was her own woman—divorced and childless- and could make her own decisions. She no longer needed or wanted any chaperoning.

Although Cora probed, Mary remained mum on her activities, saying merely she had taken in the sites and relaxed. It had done her a world of good. And now she was ready to get on with her life.

"You make it sound quite scandalous, you know." Her mother had insinuated. "Staying alone at a hotel in Paris. Anything could have happened."

Mary merely flicked an insouciant eyebrow in her mama's direction but said nothing. She shifted her body around the seat. She was sore from her excursion to Paris. Sore in the most pleasurable of ways.

Cora had no idea how close to the truth she had gotten.

"Now that we are all assembled," Robert looked around. Sybil was in Ireland with her husband so she was absent. Edith was present, although editing a journal article in her hand even as she looked up to give her father some attention.

"Just get on with it Papa," Mary encouraged.

"After Patrick died at Amiens, the inheritance was thrown open. Well Murray has found the new heir. And he's arriving today. Within a few minutes as I had word with the train station on the telephone and sent Parsons with the car to fetch him." Robert turned specifically to Mary. "Be nice to him will you. Unlike Patrick you might actually accept a proposal this time so we can secure the line."

Mary looked stunned. Even after all this time her father still only thought of her as a piece of property to be given to the man next to her at dinner. Especially if he was to inherit the title and the estate. And the money that she still believed to be hers. The entail had been the bane of her existence all her life. The money tied up with everything else. Her father unwilling to short shrift any heir by demanding a private bill in parliament.

So the man got everything. And she was just supposed to bat her eyelashes and allow him to choose her as his wife.

Well hell would freeze over first, Mary determined.

"Here he is now." Robert clapped his hands together in anticipation. Carson brought the young man into the library.

"Matthew Crawley, my lord." The butler intoned, looking slightly disapproving at the younger man's threadbare suit. His bowler hat had seen better days as well.

Robert came over. "Hello. Welcome to Downton. Here's the family."

And Matthew moved aside so he could better see the women on the divan. One staring back at him with the same wild eyed look that took over his own. She shifted uneasily in her seat.

"We met in London two days ago." Robert explained to his wife and assembled daughters. "But you've not had the chance to be properly introduced."

Oh that's for bloody sure, Matthew thought as he swallowed and licked his lips in nervous action. He knew the woman on the sofa. Knew her intimately. Knew every nook, every cranny of her body. His tongue had tasted her. His body given to her.

He knew all of her. Her body. Her thoughts. Even some of her history.

He knew her...

Except who she was.

Her father prattling on only making things worse. "Perhaps it would be a good thing for you two to get to know one another better. This is my daughter…."

The woman whose skin he marked with his bruises, matching the fingernail scratches along his own back. Her name was Lady Mary Crawley.

And she was now casting daggers into his soul.

Matthew could only splutter out a barely coherent response. "Right." His voice squeaked it out. He shifted his collar with his fingers. My God, he thought, he had taken possession of this woman time and time again, not five days previous, now she made him weak at the knees staring at him as if suddenly he was the enemy.

He had no idea what he had done wrong.

"Papa," Mary dryly observed, cold and unmistakable. "I very much doubt Mr. Crawley and I will be friends. He is taking my fortune while you are giving him a title. Isn't that enough."

And with that she got up, sauntered towards him, and dismissed his pleading eyes with an icy, brittle heartless stare.

And quit the room.

XX

so…should I continue this?