He looked up at her. “But...” He gave a short, shamed laugh.“Why?”
The word was hoarse. He was embarrassed to ask a question that was so cliché. That had no answers.
She slid her arms around his waist and linked her hands. And then she held him tight and fast, so that in this moment of his shipwreck, she was the plank he could cling to. She was how he’d find his way to shore. She’d willingly be the island where he rose again, lived again, triumphed. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
He closed his eyes and exhaled at length. As though he’d been waiting for her and for this. As though her presence was a blessed relief.
And he turned and buried his face in her neck and wrapped his arms around her and held on.
She savored with a quiet, awestruck joy the miraculous rise and fall of each of his long, shuddering breaths. Because there was really no reason he ought to be here at all. He could have died a hundred times before. That was the dumb luck and the glory of life. She felt helpless to do anything but hold him, but therein lay the greatest, sweetest power and gift she’d ever known: he needed her.
He didn’t weep, but she did, a little. Her tears swelled and spilled, softly. Since his heart was her heart, she could do the crying for him.
She turned her head to kiss his temple. Her hands unlinked and glided over his back, where other hard days and heartbreaks were etched in scars on his skin. She stroked his hair, gently.
He turned his head and laid his lips below her ear. He drew them along the clean line of her jaw. She took his face in her hands and brought her lips to his and he groaned softly at the sheer privilege and relief to be kissing her again.
Slow, slow. They’d never before had the luxury of leisure, and he drew her into a spinning world with kisses that were a revelation: languid and searching, sorrowful and tender, wholly inebriating, destroyers of boundaries. She was floating or spinning, divorced from gravity, clinging to him and taking and taking, their breaths staccato and rough now. The skillful glide of his lips, the carnal dive of his tongue, the meeting and parting to meet again, the hunger building and building until she was trembling and the world seemed to be falling, but when her head sank into the pillow she realized Hugh had lowered her there in his arms.
She was now flat on the bed and she knew what was about to happen and it shouldn’t. But she wanted it to.
His lips, his breath, and his tongue applied in thrilling combinations and sequences continued their campaign of pleasure over her ear, along her arched throat, down into the shadow between her breasts, everywhere a river of sensation. Her own dress became a caress when, to her surprise, he peeled the shoulders easily down. The hands that had been playing at the nape of her neck had deftly undone the laces.
She slid her hands under his shirt, up over the furred, hard planes of his chest, and felt like a conqueror when his muscles jumped and he hissed in a breath of pleasure.
He reached behind him and through some magical contortion managed to drag it up and off over his head. The glorious world that was his torso lay before her.
He ducked his head and took her nipple into his mouth and sucked gently.
“Hugh...”His name was a stunned gasp. Pleasure arced through her.
She arched as he did it again, and he shifted his hips to unbutton his trousers before he filled his hands with the silky weight of her other breast, teasing, stroking, until she was rippling from the new and merciless pleasure.
He covered her mouth again and his hands were between the two of them. He dragged his own trousers down and there was his cock, hot and hard, pressing against her.
He gripped a handful of her dress and furled it swiftly up. She helped.
And suddenly she was bare to the waist and he was over her, and his hand slipped between her thighs. Her thighs fell wider when he slipped his hand along where she was aching and wet.
“Hugh... I want...”It was a whispered sob.
He guided his cock into her.
Her eyes flared wide, then shuddered closed, her breath gusting from parted lips.
She opened her eyes again to find him watching her as if he beheld a miracle.
How strange, how glorious, to feel him moving in her. The slow glide as her body welcomed and gripped him; locked together, side by side, their bodies began a cadence he guided, and then with which she colluded, arching up to take him deeper, urging him with the speed of her own hips, as they chased the ultimate pleasure. His eyes had gone nearly black and they burned into her and then he closed them as the cords of his neck went taut and his head went back hard against the building rush of need. He vanished when she closed her eyes to isolate herself with sensation. His hand on her hip; her hands against his chest; her head tucked into the hollow of his neck; there was no sound now, no world save the swift, desperate, rhythmic collision of their bodies and roar of their breathing. It was coming upon her again, that Roman candle release, gathering from the very edges of her being to a point of hot light. She distantly heard her own voice,please, Hugh, oh God,in harsh sobbing breaths.
And then bliss all but tore her from her body. She pressed her face into his chest as a triumphant scream, raw and nearly silent, tore from her, and she clung to him as her body was wracked with wave after wave of pleasure. From somewhere in the stratosphere she heard her own name as a groan as he went still, and then his body bucked, at the mercy of his own release.
Stunned, sated, amazed, they held on to each other as consciousness sifted back into their limp bodies.
She opened her eyes to a pair of blue ones staring down at her, as if memorizing her.
“Are you all right?” he murmured.
“Never better.”
