kiss followed soft kiss. His lips finally deepened on hers, his tongue probing the inside of her mouth, talking to hers in that sweet, silent language of intimacy.
For an instant, he stopped and just looked at her. Turquoise eyes met topaz. And then his lips lowered again, hovering at the sensitive spot behind her ears before touching down again. Nape, neck, throat. She found her voice.
“Listen,” she said weakly.
“I’m listening.”
“This isn’t going to solve anything.”
“It certainly isn’t,” he agreed. He kneaded her breasts together so that he could kiss both of them at the same time, concentrating on the furrow he had created directly over her heartbeat. She was trying very hard to remember exactly why it was such a terrible idea that they make love… Because it clouded up everything else, that was it. Because he thought so little of her love and loyalty; because at core she believed he no longer loved her, because he had been trying to push her away. Because passion was a mockery without commitment…
He shifted just a little, his palm lazily teasing the length of her, over breast and down to the smooth silk of her flat stomach, to the slim roundness of her hip, to the long expanse of her thigh. She could feel the helplessness invade her like sweet heat in her bloodstream.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Do you want me to stop, Erica?” he asked gravely.
She heard that somber note in his voice. Her eyes flickered open. His were just above her, full of the very devil. He knew exactly what he was doing to her.
“Let’s discuss it…in a little while,” she suggested, just as gravely. “Like nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
He smiled, his touch softening, his hand gently combing her hair. “Erica. If you really…” he said seriously.
He deserved a little of his own medicine. Her fingers inched up to his chest, to his broad neck, to the silky thickness of his hair. Gradually, her hands found their way back down again, taking in the long slope of his shoulders, the way his supple flesh lent itself to kneading in her hands. She loved his skin. She loved the way his body responded to her simplest touch. She loved the way he was made, his thighs as taut as iron, his hips so narrow, the spirals of hair covering his chest. She knew exactly what to do to send this man over the edge, and she loved doing it.
Something changed along the way. Kyle had never been happy unless he was active. His hand found its way to the soft skin of her inner thighs, fingers seeking secrets, finding them. His mouth covered hers and didn’t let go. She found herself holding on, off-balance, her breathing hard and erratic; she had the sensation of being halfway through a roller coaster ride where the next slope was dizzyingly in sight. It was forever before he ended that kiss, something started in exquisite tenderness blending with a fierce erotic pressure that demanded her response. Demanded…yet coaxed.
Gradually, his mouth left hers again, and his palm slid back up the length of her, a fingertip smoothing her bruised lips, which his own had just left. “I really don’t think you want to do this,” he murmured huskily. “You wouldn’t have been sleeping alone if you wanted to do this…”
She reached up to silence him with her lips on his. Finally releasing his mouth, she said, “You said something disgustingly similar the first night I woke up next to you.”
“You were a virgin.” He nibbled at her neck. “God knows how you had maintained that status.” He nibbled at the other side of her neck. “Actually, it scared the hell out of me.”
“You never told me that.”
“What if I had hurt you? The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you, sweet. I just wanted to make love to you. Twenty-four hours a day.”
“You did,” she commented idly, loving his smile. But he didn’t really mean that smile. They were both trying to prolong a pleasure that could have erupted too easily and been lost. Part of the sweetness of marriage was knowing each other that way, and that well. There was a time for a fifteen-minute love session, and a time for lovemaking that took hours. “Kyle…”
She didn’t want to wait for hours. She wanted him at that moment more than life. He shifted over her, crushing her swollen breasts to his chest. Her hands were feverish up and down his back, the longing an insistent rhythm, a bittersweet anguish of need. His skin was so warm, both familiar and brand-new, his arousal like fire between them.
For one last instant, he drew back to look at her. The teasing in his eyes had been replaced by an intensity that burned as he surveyed the restless color in her cheeks, the luminous gold in her eyes, the moonlight burnishing a gold on the cream of her skin. For a moment, they were both still, and Erica felt a shiver that trembled all through her. Suddenly she was unsure. They both knew what was to happen; it wasn’t that. It was the sudden fierce possessiveness in his eyes, a need so stark it seemed almost desperate… Instinctively, she reached up to touch his cheek in the darkness. “Kyle, you didn’t force me here. I wanted to be here, with you…like this.”
“God, I need you. I don’t know how to tell you, Erica…”
There was no more play, no more languid, sensual climb. The urge was to join, a mutually primitive drive as basic as breath…as love. Their mating was how she had always understood their marriage at core. He was the stronger, with powers distinctly male, his control dominant and deliberate in love as it was in life…but it was when he lost his control that Erica burst inside.
She complemented him perfectly. Her powers were distinctly feminine. She could cloak his strength inside her softness, take his fierce drive within her. She gave him everything; it was her nature. She drew from him his strength, his power, his control, his protection. Her trust was total, and had been from the beginning; she felt cherished in his keeping, which was the reason he was able to take her so high, the reason she felt freed in loving…
He brought tears to her eyes, a cry from her lips…and then he simply held her, their bodies still joined, their hearts beating in the same triumphant rhythm, gradually slowing at the same pace.
The night finally settled silence on both of them. Erica’s cheek rested on his shoulder, her limbs were entwined with his, and the cool sheet cocooned them in a private world. Kyle slept. She thought again, her eyes wide open in the darkness, that their mating was their marriage. Their lovemaking had always worked; at the worst of times, other emotions had intruded, but he had never failed to demand-and receive-the most from her, knowing her secrets. A woman’s body was created with secrets, none of which she could keep and be a woman. That he understood, and she understood, too, that her loving him was right, so enmeshed in her nature that it was as instinctive as desire, as wanting and needing and breathing.
It would not just…smash. If there was really so much terribly wrong with their marriage, their loving should not have worked. It made no sense. Kyle’s touch was loving, had never failed to be loving through their whole crisis together. She held on to that long into the night.
Chapter 11
It was just past three. Erica could not remember a Wednesday so quiet. Kyle had sent the men home, this time for good. Whatever still had to be finished on the new building they could do themselves. An hour before there had been shouts of congratulations and satisfaction, and then sounds of engines starting as the men left.
Now there was no one but herself, not even a sign of Morgan or Kyle. Erica had grown so accustomed to the sounds made by hammers and saws and power tools that the quiet seemed strange. She’d stood in the doorway for an age watching the men take off in their trucks. They were mostly college students. It wasn’t a town that had an abundance of summer employment for school kids, beyond those whose parents needed them on their own farms. They had been a good group. They had complained loudly that Kyle was a slave driver, and he had complained loudly that they didn’t know a nail from a screwdriver, which they had vigorously and in detail protested when Erica was not supposed to be within hearing range.
She’d offered to make lunch for the entire group more than once, but they’d preferred to cart their girlfriends to the site, eating sandwiches sprawled on the grass, preferably as nearly naked as possible. They worked the same way, though she guessed the heat wave was not so much a factor as their vanity. They wanted to get the darkest
