the tiny chair, then kicked it behind him, pulling her to her feet in front of him.
With a swift flexing of one knee, he took her shorts and panties down to the floor. When he raised up again her hands were waiting to skim down his ribs and shimmy his cutoffs over his hipbones. They hit the floor with a soft jingle of change from one pocket, and he stepped from them and swept both arms around her, as they'd been before, one along her center front, the other center back, resuming the sweet insinuation of which she'd not yet had her fill. Their mouths met with a voluptuous exchange of tongues while her hard stroked, caressed, explored.
'Easy, lady,' he whispered gruffly into her mouth. 'I'm about at my limit.'
'So am I.'
He lifted his head and smiled. 'So soon?'
'Too soon?' she inquired diffidently.
'Mmm…' His eyes caressed. 'Not at all. Come here…' His hair-spattered legs nudged her smooth ones until she came up against the foot of the bed and fell backward.
He dropped to his knees on the floor, parting her legs with his chest as he fell forward, spread ing his hands wide across her ribs while kissing the soft valley at her waist. He pushed himself higher, driving his chest hard against the bony feminine structure that lifted to greet his flesh as it pressed.
Then at last-oh, sweet last-he kissed her breasts, taking turns, a kiss on the left, a kiss on the right. A lick across the left nipple, which lifted in frustration, and then across her right. She clutched the back of his head and would not allow him to move away, directing his mouth to the puckered tip that strained willingly against his tongue, which at last closed over it. Wide, wet, wonderful taking of what she offered, what he'd put off encountering until he, too, had known intense desire for it. He stroked the nipples with his pursed lips as if they had length, much as a clarinet player softens and plies the reed of his instrument before trying to force perfect notes from it.
But the perfect notes were forced from Winn's throat as ecstasy found voice. They were wordless notes of praise and heightened desire. She writhed beneath him and lifted her hips in invitation. But he pressed her flat, taking his time, leaving her breasts with the outward drawing and dampening strokes until the need for more was actual pain down the center of her body.
His warmth disappeared from her breast, and she opened her eyes to look down at him. He was studying her without smile, his eyes slightly somber in the mellow light from the dresser lamps. 'If I'm going to get you for only one night of my life, I want to have all of you. I don't want to look back and wish I'd done what I wanted to do.'
She braced up on both elbows, her blue eyes immersed in his intense brown ones. His pose announced his intentions, and her heart thrummed crazily as she wondered if she were adventurous enough for him. Yet she felt so right with him, her inhibitions waned before the power of his eyes. They were both exceedingly physical people- she should have guessed that in the love act he would be as physical as he was on a racket-ball court. She sensed him waiting for her approval and lifted a hand to caress the hair above his ear. He turned to bite her little finger and spoke with it still between his teeth.
'You still smell too much like me, and I want you to smell the way I remember you smelling. So, lay back, Winn, and indulge me, please, pretty lady.'
She paused uncertainly, then fell back, watching cautiously as he rose to his feet and crossed to her chest of drawers. From its top he took a round white plastic container upon which lay a white fuzzy puff. He slipped the cover off, then turned back toward the bed. Her eyes followed as he came to sit beside her, his knees hooked over the foot of the bed while he twisted at one hip, then fell back onto one elbow. He set the body powder on her far side, dipped the puff and said, 'Lift your chin for me.'
She did, letting her eyes drift closed as the scent of Chanel No. 5 filled her nostrils. He fluffed it upon both of her breasts, her ribs. 'Lift your arms.' She threw them lazily over her head and let erotic images drift across her mind, powered by the evocative scent. He dusted her armpits, then the arms themselves, replenished his supply and leisurely began an excursion down one leg, pushing himself to a sitting position, finally lifting her foot from the floor, bending forward to reach its instep. Her other leg and foot received the same attention before he bent her leg forward and kissed it lightly, then let it drop.
Once more he dipped the puff, applied a white cloud to her abdomen, and the soft hollow of her inner thighs. He leaned, gave her belly a lingering kiss, then ordered, 'Roll over.'
With hands still thrown above her head, she rolled. The soft tickle of the powder puff touched each inch of tensile skin as she turned her cheek into the rumpled bedding and relaxed. When he brushed the hollow behind one knee, she flinched and rubbed it with the opposite foot.
'Ticklish?'
'Mmm-hmm,' she murmured into the bedspread.
'Mmm… interesting.' He trailed only the finest tips of the puff along her hollows again, and she writhed and reached back to slap his hand away. He chuckled deep in his throat, then the mattress shifted, and she heard a light thump on the floor, the touch of plastic to plastic, and a moment of silence before his knees cracked.
His cool rough hands surrounded her left foot and bent it at the knee. Something warm-his nose-touched it, running from big toe to heel before he kissed and wet the arch, then lowered the foot again and ran a string of moist kisses up her calf, pausing longer at the hollow behind her knee before continuing along her firm thigh, over one buttock, which he bit lightly, then up its rise to her vertebrae. When he reached her neck, his knee was pressed between hers, and a palm rested on either side of her head.
'Winn, my beautiful Winn. If I do something you don't like, just stop me.'
But she couldn't imagine putting a stop to heaven. He knew the female libido as he knew the angles of a racket-ball shot, anticipated Winn's every response, much as he could anticipate the caroms of a ball off walls, ceiling and floor.
He played her with an expertise she found at once appalling for all the practice it must have taken him to become so facile at it, and debilitating for how accurate he was about her most vulnerable spots.
He smoothed his hands over her shoulders, lowered his naked length upon her back and writhed his hips while slipping his hands beneath her to caress her flattened breasts. And all the while his tongue searched and teased her neck, her earlobe, her nape, the tendons below her arms, her waist, her buttocks, then down her legs until he knelt on the floor again.
With gentle but relentless hands he turned her over onto her back again. He kissed the insides of her knees, her thighs, bringing responses singing to the surface of her skin, plunging her into a new realm of wantonness where nothing mattered except that he bring ease to the awesome throbbing within her body.
When he touched her, she was unprepared for the fiery heat of it, and her hips leaped convulsively… once. Then her fingers took great fistfuls of the bedspread and twisted. And twisted. It was like nothing she'd ever experienced before, not only in its power to stimulate, but in its far greater meaning, the total giving over of one's self to another for that burning space of time. It was the epitome of vulnerability. The epitome of trust.
As she lifted to him, she heard his murmured wordless protestations of love. The pleasure was terrifying. And so intense at times she whimpered, hearing her throat creating sounds it had never made before.
She would realize much later that at one point while he stroked her ever closer to the brink of climax, her mind pictured a line of black powder with the sparkles of fire sizzling along at a steady relentless pace; burning its way closer and closer to the detonator, then reaching it at last and sending the earth into the sky.
'Jooooo-seffff…' she growled in two elongated vowels of ecstasy as her body quivered and pulsated.
Then her hips collapsed. There were beads of perspiration on her face and along the center of her chest. Her throat hurt from the rasping cries he'd forced from it. She was lethargic, limp. She was sliding down the bed, drawn by strong hands that curled beneath her knees and tugged. When her hips reached the end of the mattress, Joseph's face appeared above her.
'Winn Gardner, I love you.' His elbows trembled as he braced a palm on either side of her head, then his warm swollen lips pressed to hers. And she tasted of the sweet fragrance with which he'd earlier powdered her.
His rigid body hovered at the entrance to hers, and she reached to guide it within, offering her deepest self as his heart's ease. She learned a new wonder about this act of love: how magnificent it is to experience it in an already sated state. For while Joseph thrust above her, she was replete and aware, taking exploratory interest in each of his tensed muscles as they rippled along her ribs, corded at his inner elbow and bulged across his chest. Her palms hovered lightly on his buttocks, feeling them grow hollow, then round, with each driving stroke of man
