animalistic pleasure in their mating, their eager beginning escalating to near violence.
The wondrous physicality deep within their united bodies excited Amanda’s senses, sending them streaking toward her extremities and beyond. The heat of his hot, fevered breath against her cheek, the scent of their consolidation, acrid and rough, smooth and manufactured, the texture of his taut, pebbled chest, the roughness of his encompassing thighs, and a thousand other instant impressions melded into a physical spirituality that made her soare, lifted her higher and higher.
Marc plunged deeper and deeper into her being, to become one with her innermost self as she welcomed him in, tantalized him deeper, captured and held him in the most secret places that he had discovered and revealed to her in his fervent explorations.
Even as she closed around him to capture his urgency inside her, the thought intruded that it was too perfect, too unbelievably blissful, too devastatingly exciting for her to contain.
She erupted in an explosion of shattering physicality that simultaneously ripped her apart and reconfigured her. She had never been so intensely completed.
He held her together as she splintered into delicious shards of delight. Erupting and fulfilling, expelling and emptying. She giggled and grunted, gasped fresh supplies of oxygen to fuel her fiery finale, her nails dragging over his body, marking her territory. Over and over she rose and fell, tsunami waves with troughs of anticipation instantly filled beyond all expectation.
He paused as she plunged to earth, his musky eyes scouring her face. His sexy smirk of satisfaction fired her senses and her sense of self-preservation giving way instantly to a second round of shivering delight.
The smart-ass raised eyebrows and crooked grin nudged her drugged ego to protest in silence.
She closed her eyes and showed him a look of pure satisfaction. A chuckle rumbled up from his toes, curled against her calves, and his frame renewed its relentless pursuit of matching her total release.
When he reached his goal Amanda was stunned. She had never had to deal with such a release of energy. To contain his joyful outbursts seemed almost impossible and yet at the same time she felt as if she couldn’t absorb enough of his elation.
He had matched her. They were one in their complete immersion in one another, the total giving into of the other’s complete accommodation.
Amanda shivered in suspended joy and dread.
It could never, ever, be this perfect again.
MARC LAY panting, trying to remember his whole body weight was pressing down on Amanda. He felt completely wrung out. Tromped on? Marauding elephants couldn’t have done a more eviscerating job.
It was the most intense sexual experience of his life. It scared the shit out of him.
He tried to read some reaction in her melted body, lying totally receptive beneath his crushing force. He pushed himself up on his elbows, loathing the separation, entranced at the softness peeling from his skin and reblooming immediately of its own accord. She was so amazing, so beautiful, so devastatingly sexy.
He had never dealt with anyone as total as Ace. She fired him to unbelievable accomplishments, leading him, challenging him, enveloping him, absorbing him.
He lowered his head against her cheek, realizing his unshaven jaw might be rough. He took a breath to apologize and acknowledged speech was beyond him. The silence was like honey, their breathing the quiet buzzing of bees manufacturing pure bliss.
Her breath was more even now, a calm Mother Earth. Every inch, every millimeter etched itself into his tingling flesh. The roughness of her pubic hair knitted with his; the incredible smoothness of her thighs melded with his elongated packs of trembling muscle fiber- tissue developed to its limit- shorn of its blond dusting of body hair.
He regretted all the other false acts he had committed on her behalf.
He wouldn’t think about that now. He was doing his job. He was protecting her. He wouldn’t think about that now. She was slipping away.
The aftermath was usually a letdown. Nobody liked to leave the top of the mountain. But this was scary. He hadn’t only been to the top he had taken off. He had flown. He had been lifted into spaces he had never before encountered. He had heard about this stuff; he had expected some day to encounter it, to enjoy it, to embrace it as an exciting new kick.
He had enough action going that he was doing a fair sampling. Odds were, eventually, he’d connect with Someone Special.
This was nothing like he had expected. He had experienced phenomenal sex but he had also experienced flashes of
A couple of hard slam dunks and those thoughts of hearth, home, commitment were outta sight, outta mind. He slowly rolled off Amanda, careful to maintain the plastic barrier that separated them. On his back he slipped off the shield of modern sexuality and laid it carefully aside.
Maybe it could be preserved as a memento.
He snorted a derisive grunt at his romantic foolery and flung his arm over Amanda’s head, snuggling her into his side. She looked at him, amber eyes wide and mellow, dark lashes moist and glittering. He remembered her warm body against his, underneath him, encompassing him, containing him.
The tactile memory of the swell of her perfect breasts rolled over his chest. He had meant to taste the buds of her nipples as he had tasted her perfection. He had meant to tickle the firmness of her beautiful bottom with his unshaven jowls, trace the perfect indentation of her backbone with his mouth. Examine her toes, kiss the inside of her elbows, explore the classical transition from her breast to her arms. He lay drugged in a perfect state of bliss.
She murmured beside him and began to trace the line of his breastbone with her fingernail. She continued on, droopy-eyed with languorous teasing, down the rippling rises of his abdomen, into the tangle of hair at the apex of his thighs, and lower.
Her eyes widened and she sat up. “Good grief, Marc.”
They made frighteningly passionate love again.
New territories, new spaces, new intimacies discovered. He was astonished at her vastness. He could spend the rest of his life charting her.
He remembered once watching from a stormy Southern California shore the most amazing surf exhibition he had ever seen, the day violent, the waves near terrifying. He had seen a surfer ride through a death-defying barrel roll and catch a perfect incoming swell that seemed to raise the young daredevil triumphant into the glowering heavens and deposit him effortlessly onto the beach.
Marc had raced to the young man, to bathe in the aura of one who had experienced such total triumph.
Tears had streamed down the kid’s face.
“I’ve done it, man. It’ll never be like that again. Never. No matter how hard I try to find it.”
An endless pursuit of what he would never be able to achieve again. Because the experience itself had changed him irrevocably.
Marc pressed his face into the perfect nape of her neck and scrubbed the wetness from his cheeks with the waves of her hair.
The kid was way wrong. Perfection could be reattained.
Marc lay still. He had never been at this place before.
Chapter 12
NOR HAD either of them been at the place they were the next morning.
They both were tentative in dealing with “the morning after,” Amanda felt, though their good-morning kiss was languorous and passionate, and weakened her knees in remembered passion, it seemed a part of the relaxed
