A/N: You know me—I can't help sharing hot thoughts… Please enjoy.
Hurtling through the violent green of the Congo on a steam engine, England felt far behind. Jane sat across from the two men in their train compartment, the three of them an odd if companionable trio. Williams was a restless traveler—rolling cigarettes, talking frequently, pacing the length of the car up and down. John was not. He could be still for hours at a time with no visible strain, and often preferred it. Besides, he was engrossed in a new book. John was a voracious reader, tearing through volumes in a year that would take an average man a lifetime to get through. John was not an average man.
The day passed into evening. Williams had dozed off, and John was still reading. Jane, who had been sketching the terrain as they sped past, felt her mind wander to John. Still clutching her pencil, she studied him carefully and began to draw. Absorbed in his reading, he took no notice, leaving Jane the ability to observe uninterrupted. She appraised his intelligent face, his wild hair, his large, rough hands. Outwardly, he didn't look any different than when they had left the port, but something in his bearing had changed now that they were back in Africa. Was it confidence? Anticipation? Whatever it was, Jane liked it. Even after years together, he took her breath away.
Soon she was daydreaming.
If John fantasized about the wildness in their encounters together, Jane marveled at their past moments of desire restrained. It wasn't that Jane did not appreciate her husband's passion, his abandon—she was drawn to it, in awe of it. But there was something unbearably sensual in the early moments of their shared time: their small touches like tiny hungry flames, his stray glances that scorched through cloth and flesh, straight to the marrow of her… These were the memories that drew her in, that cast her back to a time when desire was new and strange. A beautiful place. One she was afraid of forgetting.
Jane lost herself in an early memory. They were young—Jane barely eighteen and John just past twenty. He arrived at the Porters in the early evening, Jane's father away tending to a local matter. John told himself he'd come to check on her, to make sure she was safe. But the moment he saw her beaming at him, he knew it was simpler than that. He just wanted to be with her.
They chatted for hours in Jane's room, just the two of them. Warm and funny, without artifice. Although he enjoyed silence, John never seemed to tire of conversation, either—he was still new to it and had stores of language pent up waiting to pour forth. Jane reveled in it, delighted to hear his stories, his jokes. She would have listened to him all night if she could.
Sooner than they realized, night had come. The candles burned low. While this wasn't the first time they were alone together, it was the latest at night and the first in Jane's room. It occurred to Jane that her father would probably not approve of finding them together there, but she did not want him to go.
John sensed this apprehension in her—he was abnormally prescient that way. What had moments before been lighthearted and easy now turned significant. He stood up to leave, muttering a few words to excuse himself.
"Oh stay!" Jane almost shouted, reaching out and grasping his forearm. Taken aback by the sudden warmth of him, the strain of his muscles beneath her hand, she pulled back sharply. By the look on John's face, the gesture had startled him, too.
"Please," she finished softly.
"I should go. It's late," he repeated. Although he turned toward the door, he didn't make a move. A long moment passed, a warm breeze fluttering through the curtain. Jane's heart thundered in her chest as she waited, afraid that any movement on her part would accelerate his exit.
He turned to face her fully, eyes gray and hot, and began again. "Jane…"
"Yes?"
"You… You must know how much I want you."
His words, spoken simply and without command, had a devastating effect on Jane. They slipped sinuously over her shoulders, wrapped themselves tightly around her belly. Even so, she managed a warm smile.
"Is that so?" she asked, deflecting the tension in the way that people who know each other well do so easily.
He nodded. She stood and took a few steps closer.
"Where?"
If her response surprised him, John didn't show it. Completely naturally, he reached a palm toward her, face up. A proposal. Eagerly Jane walked to him and took it, bodies inches away from each other now. He hesitated for just an instant before pressing her hand to his broad chest, just over his heart. Jane could feel the deep thrum of his pulse—a strong, comforting cadence. She was touched by the gesture, and read it as John had intended: an offer of his innermost being, not his desire. Nevertheless, the same strange heat she'd felt earlier burned through his linen shirt.
She was not content to let the matter rest.
"Where else?" she whispered boldly against him, her fingers flexing ever so slightly. John snorted (in humor? in want? Jane wasn't sure) and rotated her slowly in his arms, fingers lightly tracing down her shoulders. Her curiosity and desire aflame, Jane anticipated—hoped even—that he would recklessly press himself against her, indicate the extent of his desire with that impressive length she had glimpsed in their first encounter in the jungle.
But John surprised her. He did nothing of the sort.
Instead, he nudged his nose gently into her hair, running it along the exposed length of her neck, following her spine. This was the most intimate he had been with her since that first investigation, before he knew himself, which hardly counted as intimacy at all. John stayed there a long time, quietly savoring her.
After a moment, she felt his mouth open ever so slightly, the moist heat of his breath against her. Slowly, so slowly, she felt the soft brush of his tongue against her skin and then the rougher rasp of his teeth. Jane shivered against him despite his gentleness, want radiating down the center of her body. The image came to her of mating horses, the male clamping down on the female's neck from behind. The thought occurred that John likely had the same reference point and many more besides it. It sparked something in Jane. Something wild and alive.
They hadn't shared a proper kiss before. Jane felt in some ways that they were already past it as an entry point and yet in others that it presumed an intimacy they had yet to decide upon. The time had come. She turned in his massive arms once again, staring gravely into his piercing eyes.
He opened his mouth to say something but found he could not continue; Jane had grasped his neck in both hands and crushed her lips against his. Desire swept through them like wildfire. Passion now named and unleashed, John swung her effortlessly into his arms, exploring her mouth thoroughly as she opened to him. She was so small in comparison—it could have been a frightening moment to feel his simple, easy manipulation of her body. And yet to Jane, it was dazzling.
After a minute, an hour—who knew?—he put her down, shaken, his wild eyes searching hers for recognition of this burning affection. They stared at each other a long while—the kind of deep, expansive, glowing moment that young people share before they know the joys that come next.
"Do you…" he started, still breathless. "Do you want to be mine?"
Her heart banged out an affirmation. Jane nodded furiously, tears springing to her eyes. She felt him start to lurch toward her but his self-control overtook his lust.
"Good," he said instead. Jane smiled at the understatement. He took her hand, and slowly brought it to his mouth, pressing a searing kiss into her palm.
John may have regained a handle on his faculties, but Jane had not. She made a small choking sound of joy and longing. Suddenly John broke. Just for a second, his want slipped free of restraint. Still holding her hand, he seized one of her fingers between her teeth and bit sharply—an animal's unconscious expression of affection and desire.
It was such a curious, endearing gesture that Jane, who experienced it as unbearably hot and piercingly hilarious at the same time, couldn't help but laugh. The tension between them broke and they both giggled in profound relief. She wrapped her arms around the tree trunk of his body, pressing into him tightly. Here, eyes closed, body awake, she confirmed the secrets hidden away by his clothing, and intuited more than consciously pondered the promise of something more to come: a desired endpoint without knowledge of when it would arrive or how good it would feel. She knew, though, that she trusted this man to take care of her whole self, and she wanted him with every fiber of her being.
After their marriage, in their first few intimacies together where he worked to prepare her to take the enormity of him, Jane was left flushed, gasping, and elated, while John was still hard and full of want. She would reach for him afterward, recognizing the unfulfilled desire in his eyes, and he would shake his head and say, "No matter. I only want Jane." Her knowledge of his tendency toward solicitous, hesitating restraint made it all the more delicious when he finally took her hard and fast, releasing his feral call into the night's black, seething heat.
Back in the train, Jane's body flushed at the memory. A bundle of contradictions—her wild, principled, exquisite mate.
John finally noticed her stare over the top of his book.
"Hallo."
Jane grinned back. "Hi."
As he tried to take in her mood, his gaze fell on the image Jane had been absent-mindedly sketching. While it wasn't finished and upside down from his vantage point, it was clearly John's face.
"What's all this then?"
In an effort to shrug coyly, Jane instead banged her head against the compartment's siding. She laughed, rubbing the sore spot. John chuckled, too, but his brow furrowed in concern.
"Can I get you something, my darling?" He reached across the space between them and took her hand in his.
Jane shook her head. "No, I'm fine."
"You sure?"
"Yes." She played lightly with his fingertips, brushing one delicately over her lips. Her former thoughts returned. "I only want John."
His eyes glittered back. In that instant, she knew—John remembered.
"Where?" he said.
Delighted by the reference and still aroused from her daydream, she suddenly took one of John's knuckles between her teeth and bit down. His arm went rigid and a low rumble escaped his throat.
The train lurched abruptly and Williams, who had been sleeping soundly, jolted awake. John and Jane broke apart, but not before Williams had taken in the intimacy of the scene. He raised an eyebrow.
"Did I miss anything?" he quipped.
"Nothing of interest," John dismissed with a mischievous wink at Jane. Even as he kept up the banter with Williams, Jane felt his gaze return to her frequently.
Jane stared down at the sketch and began to embellish it, furiously encoding the fresh desire she saw in John's eyes. When she was finished, she stopped to admire her work. It was scorching, incendiary, as hot as John had ever looked. Once Williams had nodded off again an hour later, she slipped the sketch into John's hand.
He stared at it for a long while. When he finally looked up, he licked his lips, hungry and hard. Jane felt unbearably exposed.
"How long until we get home?" she asked in a small voice.
"Soon."
"Well, you'd better get ready."
In answer, her patient, kind, proper husband placed a wicked hand just below his belly, drawing her gaze downward.
"I already am."
Jane had been wrong. Her sketch didn't hold a candle to the expression she now saw in his eyes.
A/N: What are you dreaming about these days?