“I’m just a woman,” she sighed. “I can only resist so much. You know my terrible history and all the reasons for it. And you know my narrow future and all the reasons this can happen only once.”
“This?” he asked.
He was going about this all wrong, and he knew it. His oh-so-proficient powers of seduction had been swept away; only a windy cavern remained.
“Unless you don’t care to...” she ventured, squeezing her eyes shut. She seemed to waffle.
Jason’s reflexes took over.
“I care to,” he assured her, leaning closer. He flattened one hand on the rock beside her hip and cupped the back of her head with the other. She opened hereyes and gave a little whimper. She wrapped an arm around his neck.
He descended in the next breath, locking his mouth on hers.
He was instantly submerged, like every other time. The first contact with her lips sucked him under. He was swept from the river, and the wilderness, and the island, and the Atlantic Ocean. He existed only to taste her, to breathe her.
They could have been anywhere in the world; he lived inside the kiss.
After a torrent of lips and tongue and breath, he collapsed on the rock beside her, panting. He reached for her, pulling her into his lap.
“I’m sorry you had to tell me you needed this.”
“I prefer it,” she assured him, breathless. She hiked her knee and straddled him, tugging her skirts to her hips.
He gathered her by the bottom, molding her to him, and dug his heels into the riverbed, leveraging them.
“I typically pay closer attention to the bit when the kissing comes in,” he said.
“I like to manage things.” She dropped her mouth on his.
“I can live with that,” he said, his last words before he could no longer speak.
He couldn’t shatter her heart, she thought, if her heart was held together by spackling and patches. It would not break so much as... distort?
And also they would do this only once—well, oncemore.
And “this” would be so very fast and fleeting. Just enough to tide them over.
And anyway, how could she feel more heartsick than she already did?
The only true Worse Thing, she reasoned, would benothaving this. Not having some small part of him, here and now, teetering on the top of the world, alone together.
Her justifications didn’t really matter. Every thought was dissolving; he was so very good at kissing, the best she’d ever known. She didn’t want to miss a lick or a nip or a swipe or a—
He sucked in her bottom lip, and she flicked her tongue against him. He pressed her against his erection, and she pressed back, reveling in the explosion of sensation.
He was taller and broader than any man she’d known, and the logistics were delicious. If she wanted to kiss his eyelids, or press her ear to his mouth, or scrape her throat across the roughness of his whiskers, she had toclimbhim.
He helped her, kneading large hands up the backs of her thighs, cupping her bottom, lifting her.
They did not speak.
They kissed as if they would never again experience human touch.
They kissed as if he were a duke and she was a Lost Boy and they’d fallen in love, but neither had the good sense to stay away.
Good sense had no part of their embrace, the very best kind.
When he fell back on the rock, she followed him down, pausing only to claw at his shirt, popping buttons until she reached bare skin. He dug his hands into her hair, flicking pins into the rocks. Her hair fell down around them like sunshine.
