with me… of how you looked when you made love.'
She dropped her eyes to the floor, and he dropped his hand from the light switch. He leaned to set her bag on the floor, then paused expectantly, waiting for her to make some sign of invitation. Instead, she studied the carpet beneath her bare toes.
'I'm very nervous,' she admitted. Her voice wasn't its usual calm self. It was high and pinched.
'So am I. Agreeing to go to bed together, then putting it off for the better part of an hour is a little nerve- racking, isn't it?'
She glanced up shyly-he was grinning warmly-and laughed nervously.
'I… I'm sorry this room is in such a mess. I'm afraid I'm not the best housekeeper. Other things always seem to come first.'
'At home my bed is made up only on the days when I change the sheets.' He glanced at the tousled bed. Her sheets were white, the blanket army green and the spread a burnt orange-not exactly the boudoir of a vamp, yet it suited her.
With three unhurried steps he moved to stand before her, but when he reached to touch, she ducked aside and avoided him. Before the dressing table she reached up to remove the towel from her head. He took up a hipshot stance, hooked his thumbs in the back waistband of his shorts and watched as she bent forward at the waist, then rubbed her hair briskly. His eyes slid down the curve of her spine to the red knit shorts that magically rode up and down at the same time: up at the hem, revealing the gentle half-moon of skin where her white underwear stretched up to reveal a sliver of derriere, and dipping down at the waist as the elastic curved, revealing two knobs of her vertebrae thrown into shadowed relief.
Silently he moved up behind her and placed his hands on her waist. She jerked erect and met his eyes in the mirror, her own framed by a shock of wet wild hair. He heard the catch in her breath, then they both held motionless. When she realized how unsightly her hair looked, one hand came up to drive it back from her forehead.
He captured her hand and lowered it to her side.
'Sit down,' he ordered softly. 'Let me.'
Her knees quivered as she stood transfixed by his stunning brown eyes in the mirror. Blindly she stepped around the tiny boudoir chair and lowered herself to it, feeling first with her hand to check her aim.
His eyes swerved away. 'Which brush? This one?' A dark hand came into her range of vision, and she watched it select a brush from the three that lay on the vanity top.
'Yes.'
It was a coarse plastic brush with a knob on the end of each bristle. As he lifted his hand, and the bristles bit into the hair at the top of her forehead, the knobs caught and forced her head back against his chest. Immediately his left hand came to press warmly against her forehead. 'Tell me if I'm being too rough,' he ordered, his eyes now on the top of her head while hers followed his every movement, mesmerized. Through her cold damp hair, his chest burned warm, then he backed away and completed the stroke, ending between her shoulder blades. He brushed slowly, lazily, and with each stroke her shirt grew wetter. An involuntary shiver shook her, and goose bumps skittered up her arms. Immediately he glanced up.
'Are you cold?'
'Yes.'
He ran his hands down her arms, pulling her back against his stomach while his eyes locked with hers in the mirror.
'Your shirt is wet.'
She swallowed, the ache of anticipation intensifying across her chest.
'Give me the towel again.'
She handed it up, and he transferred his attention once more to her hair, folding it between two layers of terry cloth and drawing the remaining moisture from it before tossing the towel onto the floor, then giving her hair a final smoothing. She closed her eyes and lolled in the sensuous delight of the brush massaging her scalp, then tickling its way down her back.
'Put your arms up, Winn.'
At his soft command her eyes fled to his, and she realized he was deliberately taking this one slow step at a time to give them longer to get used to each other. There was no hiding the fact that her breasts peaked up into two hard points, nor the fact that they were rising and falling with torturous rapidity as she obediently raised her arms above her head. He grasped the hem of her shirt, inverted it, peeling it up and over her elbows, leaving her torso naked, lighted by the lamps and exposed to his adoring eyes.
'You're beautiful, Winn,' he breathed, 'just as I pictured you.' Her shoulders pressed firmly against his midsection, and she felt his hardness against the center of her back. His right hand still held the brush, but he seemed to have forgotten it. He slid both palms down around her neck, her collarbone, then outward to the top curves of both breasts, around their outer perimeter and finally to their soft lower swells, carefully avoiding the nipples, which stood out like twin rubies set in identical mounts. His eyes coveted them, but still he touched only the skin surrounding them. Her breasts were small, firm, conical, and she wondered how much space they would take up in his palms.
His hands continued to tantalize. She felt the smooth handle of the brush circle her skin, so much smoother than the rough fingertips that rode the paired curves, too, then slipped beneath them like mirrored images before lifting both breasts sharply, pointing her nipples more directly at their reflected faces high in the mirror.
'When I first met you, I wanted to do this. I told myself that someday I would, and that when I felt your flesh for the first time, it would be as hard and firm as mine is.' He allowed her breasts to fall free, then ran one hand down to her ribs while stretching to set the brush on the tabletop. Then both hands were spanning her ribs, sliding down into the hollow above her navel as he dipped his head low and kissed her naked shoulder. 'Your skin is perfect, not soft like most women's. Whoever said soft skin was sexy?' His thumbs circled and dug into the backside of her ribs as his hands rode back up and sheltered in the hollow just beneath both overhanging breasts again.
Against her skin he said, 'You smell too much like me from the soap at the club. All these weeks while I imagined you, I thought you'd smell the way you did the night of the wedding.'
Every word he said fueled her libido. He straightened. His palms cupped the lower halves of her breasts, his thumbs within a quarter inch of their crests now. 'Are you self-conscious, having me look at you this way?'
'No,' she whispered.
'Are you self-conscious looking at yourself this way?'
'No.' She covered the backs of his hands with her own. 'Only impatient.' Then she guided them up, up, until her distended nipples seemed to drill into his palms like diamond bits. She gently moved from left to right, her eyes sliding closed. Her shoulders shifted back and forth, too, and behind her she felt him moving in complementary motions.
'Oh, Joseph, Joseph, you make me so impatient.'
'I've been impatient for a good eight weeks. What's a few more minutes?'
Her eyelids lifted, and she met his gaze in the mirror. 'Have you? Have you really?'
His palms contoured the outer rims of her breasts while he gently twisted the nipples between thumb and forefinger, sending currents of tension zigging downward to meet the fire between her legs that seemed to connect the two disparate parts of her body.
'Right from the start. I wanted you that first night, I think, but after you talked me out of pressing the issue in the gazebo, I decided you just might be right. It might have been spring fancy and nothing more… what with you in your finery and me in mine, and everything setting the stage for romance. But even though I backed off, I didn't stop thinking about you, wanting to do what I'm doing right now, wondering how to go about wooing a woman with another man's ring on her finger.'
