Oxfordshire, England – 11 pm

She crawled backwards onto the bed, beneath his hovering weight, watching his steady eyes without fear. She smiled as her tears dried, and sighed tenderly when she saw John's hand covering the red satin on the front of her bodice. She was covered with icy warmth as he carefully bunched her skirts and lifted them from her calves, sliding his body between her widened legs, where she welcomed him at long last.

"Tell me everything you wish for," he mumbled against the heat of her lips. "Start from the very beginning and don't stop until I've fulfilled every need you have, Ella."

Her entire body tingled with the words, his continued offering. She finally had him where she had most craved him being, and he was hers for the taking, available to her every sexual whim. She leaned further into his stone hard chest, her hand traveling from his stomach to his neck, weaving through the black curls of his wig to tear it away. He accepted with a laugh and she knew that she wanted every possible thing imaginable, every last bit of pleasure that could ever be derived in one evening, by one man and for any one woman. She wanted it all.

"I wish for your mouth." The tips of her fingers touched his lips. "I want to feel your mouth all over me. Kiss every pore you find."

He grinned wickedly and parted his lips to draw her few fingers inside. He stared at her deeply as his tongue swathed the tips and her thick black lashes flurried, covering her green eyes from sight. That's when John eased her gently to her side, then face down into the pillows of the sprawling bed. She moaned softly into the linens as he straddled her legs, unweaving the laces and buttons of her dress, tearing one layer away at a time. Every move he made slightly to the left or right, she felt the prodding hardness beneath the loose fabric of his breeches, grinding into the backs of her legs with a warned ache. Ella knew that the only thing she really wanted was to feel all of him buried deep inside of her where it was warm, where he would cool her passionately.

"John?"

He pulled away the last remnants of her dress, leaving her in a thin white chemise and gartered stockings as he leaned down. His chest was pressed to her back to reach the sound of her voice.

"My darling?" he whispered upon her ear, counting the ripples beneath her skin.

"Read to me more of your poetry," Ella sighed. "I want to hear you speak those beautiful words to me again."

"Such an enthusiast you are, Miss Rousseau."

She breathed a laugh as she felt him remove the thin sleeve of her lace chemise, then press his cool lips to her burning skin, kissing as he recited.

"Absent from thee I languish still. Then ask me not, when I return?"

His mouth brushed carefully across her right shoulder blade, down the valley of her high, smooth back to the left blade. He kissed her deeply with a stroke of his tongue that made her muscles all tense beneath him.

"The straying fool it will plainly kill. To wish all day, all night to mourn."

An iced breath covered her as he watched her body arching off the bed, nearly hugging his chest with her desperation for more of his mouth, more of those words she seemed so lost between. He drew down the chemise even further, to bear witness to the plane of honey skin wrapping her spine, and kissed each soft knot as it twitched and calmed, his lips and tongue the curator.

"Dear, from thine arms then let me fly. That my fantastic mind may prove the torments it deserves to try, that tears my fixed heart from my love."

John held her hips firmly as he worked his way down the curvature of her back, tongue tracing the pathway to the low, where beads of sweat existed in every pore, where the incline to her sweet bottom rested in his palms. She wished for him to kiss her skin dry of desperation, and so he followed as she whimpered and softened beneath him, like heat to crème, or ice to scorching tea.

"I want to see you," she pleaded into the pillows. "John—let me see your eyes."

He did as he was asked, gently rolling her body over in his arms so that his head rested upon the curve of her right hip. He stared up at her as he hugged her thighs and breathed in the scent of lust between them, under the lace shift. Ella had a helpless expression on her face as she reached out for him, begging him to come nearer.

As he laid his head upon her delicate breasts, he whispered, "When wearied with a world of woe, to thy safe bosom, I retire." Ella smiled and ran her fingers through his choppy black locks. "Where love and peace and truth does flow, may I contented there expire…"

In conclusion, he turned his mouth to capture the pebble of her left nipple between his lips and suckled it quietly. She felt her bones replaced with a cold liveliness as his tongue danced over the sensitive peak of her breast. His fingers squeezed the open flesh of her right hip and outer thigh. In all of this, no matter that she was weak with need and he was strong with deliverance for her needs, Ella and John's eyes never parted ways. They never gave into the intensity between them or tore their fiery gazes from one another's. They were fixed, intent to carry out the waves of every corner of bliss to their actions. She was determined to have him the way she'd dreamt for weeks.

"Speak to me, Eloise." He smiled and removed his mouth from her breast. "Enlighten me of the things I see boiling in your eyes, before I go mad upon this bed. Upon you."

She relaxed under the spell of his eyes, his hands, and most importantly his soft mouth, where she touched it again with the tips of her fingers.

"Open me. Taste me," Ella said proudly. He felt his body harden all over again, knowing just what and where and how she meant for him to, "Make love to me with your mouth."

"Oh, love. How dare you to lie there in praise of my words. Have you no idea what you're capable of doing to a man who encompasses no beating organs, with mere syllables?"

She watched through humored eyes as he descended to her navel, then further, kissing the entire way down. With him, went the remainder of the chemise. He pulled it from her legs and spread them wide for the invitation she offered. His hands were smooth and tempting as they ran down her inner thighs, over the white silk stockings and wine colored ribbons at each side. Her heart beat a million times more quickly, and her legs trembled as he removed her golden heels. John lifted each leg atop his shoulders, bracing her for his possession of her last steady breath.

He winked once for warning, and waited for her smile to take his proper hide in the midst of her rich thighs. He disappeared from sight and Ella felt even the damaged muscles in her bad knee—the one that refused to dance—spasm with a spark of untouchable pleasure. She gasped at his cold tongue moving swiftly between the damp folds of skin at her core. Her back arched off the bed as if she were flying, and she cried out his name.

Then the tempo became so suddenly fixed and she relaxed back beneath the comfort of his hand on her navel. She found his eyes darting open from between her legs, his black gaze wild upon hers, and it lulled her down into the pillows. Ella was soothed by the entrance and exit of his tongue from within her body, where he tasted every slick wall in a swirling motion that had her completely undone from head to toe. Her legs were hooked more desperately to his face, pulling him down to where she most needed him and already had all of him.

And then she felt, as if from out of nowhere, his hand sliding down from her navel, through the soft, dark patch of hair hiding her from the world. The pad of his thumb pressed her clitoris lightly, prolonging the agony of her soaring ecstasy. Ella writhed in the blankets, fingers gripping for anything they could - pillows, sheets, the top of his head and her own knees even. She rolled her hips with the fast movement of his mouth, accepting as much of his tongue as she could, and reveling in the slight circular motions his thumb was making to the ball of nerve endings that caused her every pore to tingle bitterly.

"Mm…" he heard her purr anxiously. Then her one word, "Yes," drove him over the edge as he drilled through the contracting heat more furiously, desperate to taste more of what she had, what she was holding back. Ella's ankles and the heels of her feet dug into his back, urging him without the words she couldn't speak between breaths and mews. Her fingers wove through his short hair, forcing his mouth against her roughly, deliciously, while the first wave of bliss washed his tongue in the tart sweetness of her innermost juices.

"Sweet Ella," she heard him mumble as he devoured her, sweetening the sourness by licking at her sweating thighs against his cheeks.

There were clocks ticking overhead and candles flickering against walls, but the only thing that seemed to be steady at all, was the rush of her heat against the coldness of his lips. It was the most profound surge he'd ever conquered with another, in all of those long years running. He was lost in her, all of her, crawled from between her legs to gently cradle her in his arms in the center of the bed. John kissed every small bead of sweat from her brow, counted the number of times she smiled beyond the stars in her eyes. He listened for minutes, at the flow of her breath from spotted to smooth. She was mesmerizing even more than she had been before to him. She was like a perfect glass of wine, or a perfect line in a perfect poem—two things he'd always known well.

Eventually, she turned her mouth towards his open chest and he felt her kiss his cool skin, mumbling something gratuitous.

"What else is it you require of me, my angel? Name it."

Ella fell back in his arms and stared up into his eyes for a moment. Then she slowly sat at his level, her legs tied around his waist and her hands soft on his cheeks. She smiled and torment struck his hardened flesh.

"I want only one more thing," she cooed and kissed his chin. And while he was lost in the trenches of her forested eyes, he felt her hand sliding down his chest, lifting the ancient linen of his tunic out of his breeches. Her hand fell gently upon his solid length. He did not flinch. He only eased into her breath and voice and smiles more. "I want to feel what you plan to give to me for the rest of our long days together. I want to know what pleasure I'm seeking in eternity with your charming form."

"Charming?"

She nodded with a kiss on his upper lip, sitting on her knees to hover over him.

"You have me charmed."

"Have I?"

"You have," she replied and kissed the bridge of his nose as she began lifting his tunic from his chest. Once it was off his head and tossed from the bed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts to his cool skin. "Frozen as you are, Lord Rochester. You have me burned for nothing but you. Harm me if you must, but swear you'll take me to the stars first."

He smirked. "Witty Eloise."

"Witty yes, and desperate for you still."

Before he captured her mouth, John whispered, "I adore you as nothing but in this bed. You desperate, forlorn little creature. Let us solve this crisis, here and now."

She laughed upon his lips when they crashed to hers, and when they tumbled back down to the castle of bedding together. He held her like an already eternal lover, a man who'd held her no differently for the whole of his life, and then beyond to his afterlife. John had her so tangled in his striking passion that she hardly gave a single thought to Frederick at all. She saw only a small glimpse of him in the back of her mind when she felt John pulling from his trousers that which had her named etched upon its hardness.

She thought of Fred then for a split second, of what he would think of her position, of her crawling into the arms of another man, a half killed, half living, half 'there at all' man. Ella wondered if he would disown her completely, or fall at her feet and wretch for the loss of her, or if he would simply stand at the end of the bed and contemplate why he'd ever bothered giving her his heart. She wondered on it, and then she felt John's cold mouth pressed to the valley of her breasts, breaking her inner battle to bring her back to the reality of what was happening.

"Look at me," he demanded sweetly.

And she did.

"Before I bestow this wretchedness upon your perfect beauty, before I change you forever for my own greed," John hovered where she most loved seeing him, where her hands were pressed tenderly to his chest. "Tell me, with absolute conviction, that it's what you want. Swear it to me, Ella. Assure me that this will make you most happy in the world. To be with me, healed completely of injury. You will able to dance just as before, if not better. You will be otherworldly in your greatness. But the immoral truth will remain of what you are, what you will become same as I."

She gulped and held his chest more firmly.

"There is no going back from here. No restoration from the point of no return."

"I know that," she whispered.

"And yet you're sure? You're willing to give him up for me, at last?"

The indirect mention of Frederick unwound her spirit. She was wounded by the notion of 'him', the other 'him', her living, breathing 'him', with safe arms and open eyes and a beating heart just for her. Ella died a little bit in that moment, under John's pensive gaze, and at the command of her confused head and heart. She second guessed herself all over again. She trembled at the touch of his hand, his swelling manhood between her legs, and his stone cold perfectness in lifelessness, the thing she was trading her Frederick for. She paused in want of a gifted answer, and found none.

The choice was hers, not nature's any longer. And maybe that's why she was far too hasty.

Ella drew his face down to hers carefully and pressed her nose to the tip of his as she breathed. "I'm sure. I wish to be yours, evermore."

Before she could think up another word to speak, John had granted her one lovely smile that began at the corner of his mouth and crept slowly, at the same rate of which he filled her body with his aching length. He was devoured by her every sweet fold. She yelped his name lovingly, held fast to his neck and let herself drown in the frozen warmth of him sliding deep into hide within her.

Ella crashed to the bed then, surrendering to the spell of his immortal bliss.