Whispers of Desire at Cliveden House - 2

Posted on: 16/11/2025

Chapter Two - Her Signal, My Surrender.

Desire stirred, but I stayed still.
The moment hovered between us, charged, trembling, waiting for me to respond, but I let it drift past.
Instead of reaching for the invitation written plainly in her eyes, I straightened, searching for something to salvage the moment. Anything. But all that came out was a quiet, “I should call it a night.”
Magda’s expression shifted, only slightly, but unmistakably.  A soft falter of expectation. She had been waiting for something more.  A confession neither of us was supposed to make.
Her shoulder-length chestnut curls framed her face in the glow of the fire.  A warm halo surrounded her that blurred everything around her, as if we were alone in the room.
She tilted her head, twirling a ringlet around her finger with a gesture that felt both nervous and knowing. She offered no words, only a look that lingered a moment too long, threading itself into me. The tension between us crackled, but subtle enough to escape Max, yet undeniable to the two of us.
I stepped back, unable to look away from her.
Beside her, Max remained half-lost in his phone, thumb tapping rapidly, oblivious to the highly charged current running between his wife and the stranger opposite him.
I stepped toward the doorway, feeling the ache of a moment already slipping through my fingers.
Behind me, they exchanged quick, hushed fragments I couldn’t make out, until Max raised his voice just enough to reach me.
“Are you staying long?” he asked.
“Until Sunday morning,” I replied, glancing back, first at him, then settling on her.
Max nodded and drifted back into the glow of his screen.
But Magda… Magda stayed with me, her gaze holding mine. Something in me answered, my smile stretching all the way to my eyes.
“Goodnight,” I said.
Her response was a quiet, conspiratorial smile. Small. Hidden. A secret shared only with me. Then, checking that Max wasn’t looking, her lips shaped a quiet, secret kiss so soft and so precise, and so unmistakably meant for me.
A fleeting gesture, gone almost as soon as it appeared, but charged enough to ignite every nerve in me.
It could have been missed. It could have been denied.
But I knew exactly what it was.
I left the lounge with the imprint of that silent kiss burning through my thoughts. I was unwilling and so incapable of letting it fade.

In my room, I chastised myself for being ensnared by her beauty. She was taken. Off limits. Forbidden.
“Do not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” my conscience warned in the voice of every moral lesson I’d ever been taught.
But her smile had already claimed me, and as I lay back and closed my eyes, it was the memory of that imagined kiss that settled into the dark beside me.

Chapter Three coming soon ...

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