Still kissing him, still teasing his tongue with hers, she pushed the jacket off her shoulders and then started to pull up her sweater. Both of them needed a second to suck in air, and it was that second when she yanked the sweater off her head and tossed it.
Not a great idea. Mop and Duster promptly took off with it and tore across the yard, but that was an oh-well. Fox’s eyes were open at that moment. Dark and deep and confused. He opened his mouth—so she shut it again.
Headlights suddenly glowed from the neighbor’s driveway—far enough away that they couldn’t really see much. Or maybe they could. She didn’t care. She didn’t unbutton his shirt because she’d have to kill him if he caught cold because of her. She went directly for the snap on his jeans.
He needed gentle treatment, she thought. He needed tenderness.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to get either.
At that instant she hated the kind of world that would hurt Fox that way. The kind of world where a child could die that way. It was infuriating and untenable and despairing and awful. She told him, in hot velvet kisses, in angry pressure-cooker kisses, in rubbed-in caresses and kneaded stroking. She told him, with her hands, sliding over skin, touching, owning, claiming every part of Fox she could love. She told him by closing her eyes and concentrating and emoting every ounce of love she could beg, borrow or conjure.
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He hissed a swear word. She was pretty sure it was her name.
She gave him her fury…another gift she could offer through the sense of touch and sound and taste. She whispered kisses on him, closing his eyelids with the most precious touch, painting softness with more kisses down his throat. It wasn’t fury the way a man would express it, but it was a torrent of feeling all the same. It was all she knew how to do. When something was this unbearable, it was all she could do.
There was no fixing his wounds, so all she could try to do was share them.
She whisked more kisses down his chest, over his shirt, down to the open vee of his zipper. My. He popped up faster than a kid for candy. She couldn’t make that memory disappear for him. Now, and maybe forever, she’d never make that mental picture disappear for herself, either. But she could slip her hands inside his jeans and slide that fabric down, down, down. He yelped when his bare, bony fanny connected with the cold boards of the deck.
“Is this any way to treat an invalid?” he demanded in a whisper.
“Don’t try to get out of this.”
“Are you out of your tree? I wouldn’t want to get out of this if my life depended on it. I’d just as soon we weren’t arrested for public exposure, though. At least until after.”
“We might be. But my neighbors aren’t kids. Don’t have kids.”
“Good,” he murmured, and then took his turn at sweeping her under. Most of her clothes had undergone major rearranging by then. Her sweater was completely gone. One bra strap seemed to be hanging off her shoulder. Her black slacks seemed to be hanging around her hips—but only for another second or so, because once Fox got motivated, he could have given courses in inspired action.
Yet there was suddenly a moment when he slowed everything down. He threaded his hands through her hair, just looking at her in the moonlight, and then tortured them both by tuning their channel to slow, lazy motion. He scraped his bearded cheek between her breasts, polished her nipples with his tongue, took in each breast. Tenderly. Ardently. He offered a caress of tongue and teeth that pulled at every need she’d never known and made a girl-growl hiss from her throat.
“Oh, yeah, you,” he murmured. “Now. Now, Phoebe…”
Shewas doing the seducing, darn it, but somehow…somehow he was the one strapping her legs around him, probing and then diving in, then fitting the two of them tighter than satin Velcro. Moonbeams danced in front of her closed eyes. Sunshine seemed to shine from the inside of him to the inside of her. He started the ride…a wild, wild ride on the cold porch on their dark, dark night…and something loosened in her that had never been loosened before.
It was the rage, she thought. She’d never been angry like this.
That had to be it.
They both seemed to tip off the cliff at the same time. He let out a joyful yell that made her want to laugh…yet she felt the same exuberant burst of joy. Nothing was going to erase that terrible experience for him, she knew that. But for this moment—these moments—that sadness had been bearable. Love had a way of lifting and healing, she believed from the heart…which was why she simply had to offer him hers.
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Eyes still closed, still breathing like a freight train, she kissed him and kissed him and kissed him. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. They started regaining their breath—and a cold whisk of midnight air made them both shiver…and smile at each other. A private smile that belonged to the two of them and no one else.
No one had ever smiled at her the way Fox did.
No one had ever made her feel the way Fox did.
He stroked her hair back.
