Never Trust A Lady

came, softer than she’d ever heard it, soft as the voices of bees on lazy summer afternoons. “You are beautiful, but that’s not the reason I wanted the light on. The part of you I really want to see is your eyes…”

She felt his hands moving, fanning down her rib cage to the sensitive sides of her waist She sucked in air when his fingers feathered across her belly, dipped under the elastic waistband of her leggings and eased them gently over her hips. With his hands firmly cupping her bottom, he paused and murmured, “Your turn…”

She struggled with his belt buckle, her fingers nerveless and stiff as wire. It parted more of its own accord, she thought, or some kind of miracle, perhaps, than from anything she’d done. But when she slipped her hands inside his waistband, his skin felt warm and smooth, like silk. She wanted desperately to kiss him there. Do I dare? she thought. Would it be too bold?

“Look at me,” he said more insistently now. “You look scared. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

It took a moment; her tongue felt wrapped in cotton wool. When she did try, her words kept getting caught in her breathing and bumping into her wildly pounding heartbeat, so they came out in broken gasps. “I keep…thinking I feel…like I’ve never…done this before.” She tried to laugh and failed miserably. “Silly…”

“But you haven’t,” he said. And neither have I. He kept trying to believe otherwise, that it was as she’d said, that she was no different than any of the other women-lovely women, each and every one-he’d been in lust with during the past seven years. He was trying his best to make it all about sex, but it kept getting away from him and turning into…something else. What. exactly, he didn’t know. What he did know was that all the women he’d made love to in his lifetime hadn’t prepared him for making love to this woman. Nothing had prepared him for Jane.

Prepared. The thought hit him like a bucket of cold water.

How, he wondered, silently cursing himself with all the virtuosity of half a lifetime’s international experience, could he have been so stupid? He felt as clumsy and ill-equipped as an adolescent boy.

“What?” The word was a warm, frightened puff against the base of his throat, and he realized that he’d gone stiff and still as a post, with his hands neatly cupping the part of her that had contributed most to his lustful fantasies, not to mention a couple of recent sleepless nights.

“Carlysle,” he groaned, “please tell me you’re on the Pill.”

“I’m not.” She pulled back a little, frowning. “I mean, there wasn’t…” He sighed, and slowly eased his hands away from her bottom. “Wait,” she gasped. “Don’t go ’way.” And before he could stop her, she’d slipped out of his arms and was darting across the bedroom, forgetting to be self-conscious about the fact that she was wearing only a pair of formfitting leggings.

A diaphragm? he thought, bemused. Would such a thing still be functional after five years? But no, she was making, not for the bathroom across the way, but down the hall to one of the bedrooms he’d assumed belonged to her daughters. He heard a door open, then drawers scraping in and out.

A moment later she was back, looking embarrassed but triumphant as she came to him, all too aware now of her nakedness, but determined not to cower. He wondered if he could ever make her understand how sexy she looked to him. She was right, hers was a forty-five-year-old’s body, not a young girl’s, and all the more beautiful because of it…lush and ripe as the fruits of summer, or a velvety, full-blown rose.

“How’s this?” she said breathlessly as she dropped a foil packet onto the nightstand. She flushed and nervously pushed her hair back from her face, and didn’t look at him as she explained, “I got them…a while back. For Lynn. She’s on the Pill now, so I don’t think she’ll mind.”

“You bought condoms…for your daughter?” Hawk didn’t know why he felt so shocked; some sort of residual fatherhood instinct, he supposed.

Jane leveled a look at him and said in her quiet way, “She’s twenty-two and has a steady boyfriend. What would you have me do?”

He didn’t answer. But he was thinking again as he gently pulled her against him and felt her breasts nestle in his chest hair, about what she’d said about nothing being as simple as when they were young. He was wondering what his life might have been like if Jason had lived, and what kind of father he’d have been. Wondering how it was that he could think of Jason now and feel only a twinge of pain, and the bittersweet ache of regret.

Wondering if it might have something to do with the woman he held so closely in his arms that right now he could feel her heartbeat as his own.

They finished undressing each other quickly after that, and lay together side by side…almost, for that moment, at least, like old lovers. As if, Hawk thought, they’d both accepted that this time, the first time, there was just too much tension for languid explorations, too many nerves and inhibitions for prolonged and inventive foreplay.

And yet, when he reached for the foil packet, she leaned across him and placed her hand over his and whispered, “No…don’t. Not yet. I want to touch you first. You feel…so good.”

He didn’t say a word, just drew her down onto his chest and cradled her head in his hands, and gently wove his fingers through her warm, damp hair while she explored his body with her hands and her mouth and all the speechless wonder and curiosity of a child with a newfound treasure. He wondered later where he got the self- control to keep his hands so gentle and his body so still, when he felt as tight and tense as an overwound spring, and full to the point of pain. Her mouth, her tongue, her sweet, warm breath felt cool as rain on his fevered skin…

This feels so good…he feels so good, Jane thought. I’d forgotten. No-did I ever know? It was so different, not like anything she’d ever experienced before. Not like David with another name, but something completely new, completely wonderful. The way he gave himself up to her so completely, encouraging her so gently, never urging, never forcing, just…enjoying. Enjoying her.

And when he finally growled, “Enough…” and took back control from her, it didn’t seem like a taking at all, but more as if they were two pianists making music on the same keyboard, first one taking the melody, then the other, in beautifully synchronized rhythm. Or like a dance. Yes, she thought again as she had before, in the car. That was what it was like. The most glorious…incredible…beautiful dance.

He became her partner in the fullest sense of that word. He seemed tuned to her body’s rhythms, seemed to understand better than she did how she felt, what she needed, when to go slowly and when to pick up the tempo. And like the very best of partners, he telegraphed his every move, so that she never felt clumsy, or awkward, or shy. She felt graceful, beautiful and incredibly sexy. She felt earthy, and daring, and…free.

Chapter 16

It was so easy. So incredibly easy.

Somnolent as a cat, she watched him put on the condom and felt no apprehension at all, not one smidgen of tension, urgency or doubt She felt glazed and dewy as an overripe plum, warm and weighted, and at the same time pulsing with anticipation and excitement. And joy…oh, yes, that most of all. What she was most conscious of as he gently, so gently, so perfectly filled her, was…happiness.

He chuckled when she sighed, and leaned over to kiss her, languidly, deeply, a long sweet kiss, intoxicating as champagne. And then she laughed, too, partly with relief because it was so easy, but mostly with sheer joy.

Braced on his forearms, he held her face between his hands and kissed her nose, her eyelids and then her mouth again, and all the while he was moving inside her, moving to the rhythms of her own body, fitting himself to her so perfectly, it seemed as if he’d become part of her.

And as he came into her body and became part of it, it seemed as if he’d also entered her mind and her heart and her soul and become part of those, too, so that she knew nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing, except him. At last there was no such thing as thought. Only feeling.

Only him…and her…and such incredible. overwhelming emotions… feelings…sensations. She could feel them gathering strength and power within her, like a tsunami, building- and building until they took her over completely, until finally all she could do was close her eyes, cling helplessly to Tom and hold on for dear life while the wave broke upon her. While it battered and tossed and pummeled her and finally flung her, dazed and sobbing, into the quiet eddy of his arms.

“Oh,” she whimpered, awed and shaking. “Oh, dear…oh…my.”