A/N: Okay, that was a rather long hiatus and I'm not sure this makes up for the wait, but I hope you like it. Thank you all for your comments and reviews and for sticking around. Not very SFW so, please be aware of that.

Drabble Twenty-Five: the first taste pt. 2

_waking dreams_

He wakes as if still in a dream, her scent around him, the warmth of her hand against his stomach, the wet touch of her lips to his thigh.

Her fingers curl and straighten and he knows that he is awake.

She hovers over him, her form soft and blurred to his blinking eyes.

"Elsie?"

Her lips flutter, a smile against his skin, he thinks and feels his own lips pulling up.

She rises up and there is the smile, sweet and somehow wicked in the first stirrings of faint light through the curtains. They are later this morning than they should be if there is light, but he trusts her. If she is still here, still barely covered in thin cotton, then everything is as it should be, how she has let it be.

"Good morning, Charles."

Her tongue flicks out, licks quickly at her bottom lip and he groans, hardly stops himself from reaching for her and pulling her close. She must taste him there on her lips and it makes him rise harder, expecting to feel the tight constriction of his underwear. Instead nothing holds him tight, keeps him confined and he sees then why she smirks just so, looks down at him. Scoops a slip of worn cotton up in her fingers and shakes it like a surrendering flag.

She has stripped the last resistance from him and he leans on his elbows, sits up among the pillows, curls his legs under him and closes the space between them with a lunge, lays her out on the sheets before she sees him coming.

Her mouth falls open and he will take any advantage he can, covers it with his own and slips his tongue in to curl around hers.

It has been hours since he last kissed her and though he has slept through each one he still feels as though he has missed out.

He has tried - since he returned, since she curled into his arms in the grounds, since she said 'yes' and 'I do' - not to think of the time they allowed to pass without this.

It is hard now not to think of it when she nibbles at his bottom lip the way she does to her own, when her hands are in his hair and running along his side. When he can feel the heat of her pressing up against him as she arches against the mattress.

How can he not consider how much longer he might have had her like this, if he had seen her sooner. If he had looked for her.

Her lips slip away from his and trail up his jaw, slip to his cheek where they rest for a moment, his own turned into her hair, strands falling loose from her braid and tickling.

"I want to know how you taste."

He can feel - even as his heart jumps wildly in his chest, his breath stutters out of him - how her cheeks heat with the forwardness.

She is embarrassed, perhaps even afraid; still she asks for what she wants, his brave Scottish siren.

If he could ever refuse her anything it would not be this, would not be now. He kisses her again in answer, falls back against the bed and pulls her atop him.

She is warm and soft in all the places her corset hid for years and there will not be a time in this life or whatever comes after that he will stop being so thankful she is revealed to him now.

"Please." He whispers across her cheek, she should know, must know, that he would give her anything she wants.

Her hands trail slowly after her down his body and she kisses his thigh again. He is back here, where he woke. Her scent still there, caught forever in his nose.

"I've never-" A warning, a reminder and it thrills him more than perhaps it should, that he has been her first in so many things.

"Me either." He thinks of before, - we'll figure it out together - when he had thought they might stumble and trip their way through the first night. How she was more than he could ever have believed.

The sun rises, there a single burst of first real light in the room and caught in it her hair is as bright as any flame.

Her lips slip along, up, around him and his world is reduced to the wet heat of her. So different to before. Smooth and hot and soft and he cannot think now, does not want to.

Knows only that it is his wife who touches him, kisses him, whose tongue flicks at him and pushes him ever closer to the edge of reason. Who offers him this so freely.

His wife.

Next time: the first date.