He brushed her tangled hair back from her forehead, drank from the dark well of her mouth. He plunged his tongue deep inside her, tasting, tempting, pulling panting little whimpers from her as she danced in his hands. He slid his hand down her sleek belly to dip beneath the nest of curls there. She lifted her hips to him, pulled at him, her breasts thick and delicious against his chest, her hands insatiable. He slipped his fingers in between the hot petals of her and shuddered with her cry of discovery. She was so slick, so swollen. Her body was a gift for him, her gathering pleasure so entangled in his own that he couldn’t tell them apart anymore. He felt her wrap her own fingers around him and almost let the world splinter away.
But he didn’t. He stroked and he kissed and he touched. He held off as long as he could, the ache so hard he could barely stand it, the agony the sweetest he’d ever known. And then, when he felt the shudders build, deep inside her where he knew he wanted to be, when her eyes flew open in surprise and her whimpers grew to cries, he accepted her welcome and slipped home.
She was crying. She was crying his name. She was scrabbling at him, her body easing into the ancient rhythms, her skin sheened with perspiration, her eyes wide and wet. Jake closed himself in her, wrapped her around him, so tight and warm it was agony. It was life. It was home. He answered once, crying her name as the world finally gave way, as he spilled deep inside her, as he spent himself in her arms, shuddering and gasping with the release of control.
“We forgot the comforter again,” she murmured some minutes later, still wrapped in him, her heart not yet slowed or her respirations eased.
Jake could barely pull a coherent thought together. All he knew was that he was warm in a way he’d never been in his life. Warm and content and, just for a moment, happy.
“What?”
“The comforter,” she repeated with a disinterested yawn. “We’re going to have to cover up soon. It’s gonna get cold.”
Jake didn’t care. He couldn’t quite pull himself past the moment, past the easing thunder of his heart or the lingering taste of coffee and tears on his tongue, or the alien warmth of a woman in his arms. A woman he suddenly couldn’t get enough of.
His hands were still restless with her, smoothing her hair, outlining her shoulder and hip, dipping into the hollow at her waist and tucking themselves up beneath the warm weight of her breasts. His body couldn’t get its fill of her, at once sated and empty again, filled with memories and yet demanding more.
Jake nuzzled his cheek against her hair and wished with all his heart that he never had to worry about lasting past this moment when everything was so right. When Amanda still didn’t realize what a coward he was.
God, how he wanted to go with her. He’d wanted it before he’d ever met her, to wander along the banks of the Seine and fly over the top of the world, to swim the moonlit waters of the Aegean and sit down to a meal with a person who didn’t know how to speak his language. It had been a cancer that had gnawed at him since the day he’d picked up his firstNational Geographic,that had grown in silence and festered in isolation. It was a dream he’d never see, and he knew it.
But to go with Amanda. To see her eyes light up with discovery, to hear that unquenchable hunger in her voice, to have the world opened up to him with her words and reflections. To know...to know...
“Jake?” Her voice was sleepy and satisfied, the kind of music a man only dreams of.
He stroked her hair and fought the bitter taste of loneliness. “Yes?”
She snuggled closer, her small hands wrapping tight around his waist, her head tucked beneath his. “Couldn’t we try?” she asked. “Couldn’t we just take it one step at a time?”
Jake couldn’t help a bark of surprised laughter. “Amanda,” he admonished, “I think we’ve jumped a couple of steps in the last few days.”
She stilled in his embrace. “Do you want to go back?”
And in the end, all he could give her was the truth. “No. Never. But that still doesn’t mean that there’s anywhere to go from here.”
“Do you believe me?” she asked. “That I’ll love you no matter what?”
It was an effort to breathe. To work past the truth. “I think you believe it.”
She lifted herself up on an elbow so that she could face him. She was moonlight in the darkness, mystery, compulsion. Her hair brushed her shoulders with dark fire, and her areolas were dusky roses. Jake ached hard for the taste of them again. For the taste of her. He wanted to bury himself so deeply in her that nothing else would matter. That nothing else would exist. He wanted peace, and Amanda was the only place he found it, even for a little while.
He saw some kind of battle being waged in those deceptively serene eyes. He saw it tighten and shift in her, and then ease away into a soft smile of determination. “Well, then,” was all she said, “I’m just going to have to get you to believe it, too.”
Jake wanted to protest. He wanted to warn her about the dreams of nighttime that dissipated in the sun. He wanted to prevent her from making it more difficult for him when she finally left, because he still knew she would. A woman like Amanda. A woman who’d gone the places she’d gone and done the things she’d done. She just wouldn’t settle for returning to the old life, no matter what she thought.
A woman like Amanda. She deliberately leaned over him, turning him onto his back, her hair and her breasts skimming his chest, her eyes melting from determination into seduction.
“I’ll have to show you,” she insisted, her voice like honey as she bent down to kiss him.
And she did. She showed him. She turned her own passion loose on him and made him forget the morning.
Amanda was a rank coward. She should have confronted Jake last night, should have shared her suspicion as she’d intended and eased his burden of deception. He’d been alone for so long, even amid a family that loved him, a town that respected him, that she couldn’t bear his being alone any longer.
But she still wasn’t absolutely sure she was right. She had suspicions, saw a pattern. She was nagged by familiarity. But any number of things could account for Jake’s actions. Amanda might lay her theory at his feet to have herself proved wrong, to learn that it was her he disdained and not himself.
And even if she was right, she wasn’t absolved. If she was right... Oh, God, the weight of that collected in her with the memories she hadn’t resurrected in so long—the frustration, the anger, the accusations.
Jake Kendall was a proud man, a man who had constructed an entire world around him without anyone being the wiser. A man who called his own shots and made his own rules. A man who would not admit any weakness easily, even if that weakness were only in his own mind. Amanda knew. Her Uncle Mick had been a proud man. He’d lived until his fortieth birthday practicing one of the most clever deceptions a man could, getting Amanda to do his work for him, to intercede with the outside world for him. Uncle Mick had hoardedNational Geographiestoo. He’d dreamed of going to faraway places and doing exotic things. But without money, he’d always said, he’d just be happy to look at the pictures.
