Madeleine Ch. 08

On Christmas Eve that year, we hosted a farewell party at the bistro, and saluted the memory of Marcel. After we all tossed our glasses into the hearth in a symbolic rite of passage, I held Madeleine as she cried one last time for her father, then we turned our attention to the future.

Marie was already asleep in her mother's arms by the time we returned to the apartment, with visions of gifts and goodies from St. Nicholas to come the next morning.

Once she was put to bed, Madeleine set out some gifts while I changed into something more comfortable, then broke out a bottle of brandy for a nightcap.

I called Madeleine over to sit with me, and pulled a gift out for her that I wanted her to open right then. She smiled as I handed her the package, and her eyes sparkled when she saw what it contained.

It was a peignoir, of a silky material, one that was sleek and trim, with thin straps at the top and about mid-thigh length. She held it up for my approval, and I smiled suggestively.

"Would you like for me to model it now?" Madeleine asked.

"Of course, my love," I said.

When Madeleine emerged from the bedroom, I sucked in a hissing breath. She was like a goddess, Aphrodite emerging from a flower in my mind. She had brushed her hair to a fine sheen and touched up her makeup to create one of the most alluring sights I could imagine.

This was no longer the eager innocent who had given me her virginity on our wedding night. It had only been four and a half years, but it seemed like another life. So much had happened, and she was a girl no more.

No, the woman who emerged from the bedroom as the clock ticked on toward the arrival of Christmas Day was now a mature beauty, a siren who had me bedazzled. And she knew it.

A sly smile passed over her face as she saw me staring at her as she slowly walked -- strutted, actually -- toward the sofa where I sat.

The material of her peignoir clung to the curves of her lithe body, making it quite plain that she was naked underneath. She stood in front of me in a rather provocative pose, her legs slightly spread and her hips cocked to one side.

"So, have you been a good boy this year?" she said softly, imitating Father Christmas, who rewards the good little children with treats.

"I don't know? Have I?" I answered with a wry tone of voice, getting into the game.

"Maybe this will help you decide," she said, and she bent over at the waist, giving me a view of her unfettered breasts, complete with the dark pink nipples standing out in plain arousal.

I reached up and pulled her to me and we kissed, slowly and luxuriantly, savoring the moment, and as we did, Madeleine slowly folded herself onto my lap, and our embrace deepened.

As we kissed, Madeleine slowly ground her ass onto what was now a raging erection under my dressing gown.

She reached into the folds of my robe and fished out my raging-hard cock, and I responded by sliding a hand up her smooth thigh to the hot valley between her legs, which was wet with anticipation.

We slowly stroked each other's sex as we kissed -- lightly at one moment, hard and passionate at another. She gasped as my finger found her swollen clitoris and rolled it softly while running two other fingers between her labia.

"Do you know how much I love you?" Madeleine said breathlessly. I just nodded and kissed her again. "This much."

Quickly, she slid off my lap and knelt between my legs. With no preamble whatsoever, she opened her ruby lips and sucked my cock deep, humming as she worked at least three-quarters of it back and forth in her wet, delicious mouth.

One of her hands was holding my cock upright while the other was buried between her legs, steadily working her throbbing clit.

Female masturbation may have been a taboo for American women, although I suspect that more of them engaged in it than would admit. But European women -- especially French women -- were much less inhibited, and Madeleine had always freely confessed to pleasuring herself.

Nevertheless, the thought of my lovely wife fingering herself while she sucked me was intensely arousing, all the more so when she spread her legs and let me see exactly what she was doing.

I groaned, both at the sight of Madeleine's erotic display and the feeling of her lips and tongue working on my cock. I knew I wasn't going to last long, and I gently pulled on her hair to get her attention.

"I want to fuck you, my love," I said, huskily.

But she just shook her head gently and doubled her efforts with her mouth. At that moment, I realized that I was being given a gift. Madeleine didn't particularly like to swallow my semen, but it appeared that she was doing so tonight as her way of telling me how much she loved me.

I must say, the thought was most stimulating.

Madeleine even pulled her hand away from her own pleasure and gripped the base of my cock with both hands, feeding my thoroughly-swollen cock into her maw, working hard -- up and down, up and down -- to get to that moment of climax.

And it was soon to arrive. I felt the feeling come from deep in my soul, and my whole body stiffened as my orgasm rushed to the fore. With a choking cry, I felt it explode out the end of my cock, and Madeleine held her lips tightly around the base of my cock as I spurted into her mouth.

I could feel her throat muscles working to swallow every drop of my hot, thick sperm, and as she did our eyes locked, and for that moment, I saw once again the sparkling look of mischief that had been missing far too often during these past few months of difficulty.

At last, I slumped back in the sofa, temporarily sated, and Madeleine pulled herself away from my deflating penis and crawled back up into my lap. We kissed again, deeply, and I got a good taste of the lingering dregs of my ejaculate.

However, I wasn't ready to simply sit back and rest.

I quickly maneuvered my wife onto the sofa on her back and slid down in a similar position that she had been in just moments before. I had always made Madeleine's pleasure a important part of our lovemaking, and this was an occasion that called for reciprocation.

I used my hands to spread open her legs, and I was gratified to see the gleaming wetness of her vagina. Maybe she had been anticipating this, because she had trimmed the dark hair between her legs, exposing her sex to my inspection.

As she had done with me, I didn't hesitate, but got right to it. I slashed my way from the pink puckered hole of her ass all the way up through her labia to her clit, circling the throbbing nub with the tip of my tongue, then putting my lips fully onto her sex.

I devoured her like a hungry wolf with a juicy steak, ravishing her pulsing vagina as she writhed on the sofa. Her hands gripped the back of my head, kneading my hair as I worked my mouth on her cunt.

I happened to glance up from my work and saw a sight that sent a wave of pleasure through my body. Madeleine's eyes were closed and head was thrown back in ecstasy, her tongue working lasciviously over her lips while gasps and coos escaped her mouth.

It didn't take long before she too went rigid, then she shuddered from head to toe, gasping and crying out in utter pleasure.

I gave her no time to react. I climbed up on my knees, threw off my dressing gown, pressed the head of my recharged cock to her opening and rammed it home.

"Oh, Robert!" she cried. "Yesssssss!"

I grabbed her ankles and bent her almost in half as I furiously fucked my beautiful wife with a madness I hadn't shown in quite some time -- certainly since before she'd gotten sick.

Yes, we were making love, but we were also purging our demons with an almost animalistic mating, reclaiming each other in a frenzy of lust.

After a few minutes, I slid out of her, and turned her over, so that she was on her knees, leaning over the back of the sofa. Even as I lined my cock up to put it back in, Madeleine reached underneath her body and opened her swollen labia, giving me a bigger target.

She looked back over her shoulder with a look of pure lust on her face, and begged me to fuck her and to fuck her hard.

I did just that. I grabbed her hips and worked myself like a piston engine in her soupy vagina, and she thrust herself back to keep as much of my cock buried in her sex as possible.

We were hurtling together toward another climax of epic proportions, and we both threw our heads back simultaneously and surrendered to our mutual release.

As we both jerked and came together, I leaned over Madeleine's now-sweaty back and kissed the back of her neck, then licked her ears and finally our lips met as we finally came down off our sexual high.

"I do love you so much," I whispered in her ear as we settled in a sweaty heap onto the sofa. "I don't know what I would have done without you."

"Merry Christmas, my love," Madeleine said softly. "You are the best man."

After lying together in quiet afterglow, we finally disentangled ourselves and walked arm-in-arm back to our bedroom. Marie would be rising early for Christmas and we had a full day ahead, as we were all going to the embassy for dinner.

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about how lucky we had been. We had survived challenges that might have broken those who were weaker than we were, and I knew we were ready for whatever life threw at us.

A few days after the new year, I received orders to return to Washington to await a new posting, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in the State Department. I didn't think I was cut out for the intrigues of life in the office in Washington, and I knew I didn't want to drag my family all over the world.

But I was going to return anyway, and explore my options, and Madeleine was entirely on board. After the death of her father, Paris had little appeal for either of us, and she was eager to see America, and finally meet my family.

We had packed our things and sent them on ahead, we had tied up our business in France and now we were headed back to America.

All of this passed my mind in but a second as I stood on the rail of the ocean liner, then as the chill of the open sea began to reach through my overcoat, I followed Madeleine to the stairs and down to the cabin where she had gone with Marie.

It would be my last look back. I was going home, and I was ready now to face the future.

EPILOGUE

Arlington, Va.

December, 1967

I was walking through the garden at the comfortable house I had bought back in 1924. My steps were slow, but I was still relatively healthy for a man of 88, although, as I mentioned, I had had a bit of heart trouble in recent years.

It was cold, but there was no snow on the ground -- that would come later -- and I was contemplating my life, all of it, from my boyhood in Louisiana to my old age as a retired professor of history.

Just then, I heard the approach of someone coming, and I smiled to see that it was Madeleine. She suffered from arthritis and was forced to walk with a cane, but she was still the same slender beauty I'd fallen in love with all those years ago.

Like me, her hair had turned silver, but it shill shone with a vibrancy that belied her 70 years. She still had the same smile that had beguiled me, and in her later years she had recovered much of the dazzle and mischievousness of her youth.

When I had returned to Washington in 1920, I had been offered the No. 2 position in the American Embassy in Canada, and I had accepted.

However, it didn't take me long to realize that it was pretty much an honorific, with little real work involved. To be honest, I was bored to tears, but I stuck with it long enough for Madeleine to get through nursing school there in Ottawa.

When she did, I resigned from the State Department and took a position as professor of history at Georgetown University, back in Washington. I had had several colleges and universities vying for my services, should I decide to leave State, and I had chosen the best offer.

Madeleine had found work as a registered nurse at a hospital in Washington, we had bought a house in Arlington, and settled in as a middle-class family, albeit with a live-in nanny.

Yes, Greta had come with us to the United States. She had grown fond of us and felt we were the family she had lost in Belgium. She still had her daughters, but they had married, and I had come to learn there was a bit of estrangement between Greta and her daughters.

Unlike many in the middle class, I avoided the stock market, preferring to invest my fairly considerable wealth in other, more secure ways.

I still lost quite a lot when the market crashed in 1929, but because of our job situations and my astute planning, we got through the Great Depression without much hardship.

Marie had grown to become a fine young woman, with the same independent mind as her mother. She went to college at Georgetown, convenient for us, since she could ride with me to class, and studied pre-medicine.

She eventually became a doctor, one of the early female doctors in the D.C. area. She married a heart surgeon who had served as an Army doctor in Europe during World War II, and gave us three grandchildren.

I had written my memoirs, and several other books on the Great War, plus I had been a guest columnist for the Washington Post, where I became known for my often-prescient views on world events.

My opinions weren't always popular, given the neutralist bent the country took in the inter-war years, but I was proven correct at virtually every turn.

I had been one of the first American writers to warn of the dangers Hitler posed in Germany, and that France and Britain had their heads buried in the sand if they thought they could deal rationally with a man like that.

Having been in the trenches, though not as a soldier, I knew where Hitler had come from, knew something of the German mind and I understood what drove him, even as his views appalled me.

During the war that I had been anticipating since 1919, I worked as a consultant to the State Department on a contract basis, and my views were considered gospel, especially among those who had known me when I was in France for the great war that was now known as World War I.

We returned to France periodically over the years, especially as trans-Atlantic travel became easier.

Madeleine always put roses at the grave site where her parents lay side-by-side, and after World War II, we added the grave of Rosa LaPerriere, the daughter of Madeleine's friend Therese who had been hung from a streetlamp by the Germans during the war for being a part of the Resistance.

Sadly, Rosa's awful fate had left Therese mentally unhinged, and she spent the final 10 years of her life in a mental institution. She had never remarried, and in the wake of everything that happened, she lost the bistro.

What had been Marcel's sat abandoned for several years before being transformed into a fashionable boutique.

It broke our hearts to see what had become of the place, and it seemed like every time we went back we were haunted by the ghosts of those who had enjoyed the warmth of the pub during its heyday.

Eventually, Madeleine became head of nursing at a hospital in Arlington, and I rose to become dean of the History Department and professor emeritus at Georgetown.

Even now, I was often invited to speak at symposiums around the area and was a guest lecturer at colleges and universities that surrounded Washington.

All of those memories passed between us unspoken in but a moment as we walked hand-in-hand through the garden.

"It has been a good life, has it not?" Madeleine said in her still heavily-accented English.

"Yes, many ups and downs," I said. "But it has been a good life, and I love you for making it better. If I die now, I die happy for having spent it with you."

"Ah, Robert, you are, as always, a silver-tongued devil," Madeleine laughed. "But, yes, I love you always and forever."

With that, we returned to our house, to the warmth of our hearth, to live out the rest of our days in quiet contentment.

FINIS