While he spoke softly in a near monotone, his eyes held hers, and his fingers continued to ply her breast. Only when she began to writhe beneath him, did he lower his open mouth and cover her lips, suckling in much the same rhythm as his hand on her breast.
Just when she thought she would drown from the assault on her senses, his lips left hers, trailed downward, leaving a wet streak from his tongue along her neck, over her chest, capturing at last the tormented nipple in his mouth.
Her eyes closed tight against the rising passion, as though to better savor it. Her fingers pressed into the back of his head, crushing his face against her breast in an effort to encourage his fierce onslaught. “Brett,” she breathed through abandoned lips. “Brett.”
Before she fully realized what he had done, his hand had bunched her skirts and found its way beneath the layers of clothing. She knew what to expect. She had experienced it in her dreams.
But then his hand reached inside the opening of her bloomers and touched the most intimate, begging part of her. Involuntarily her hips raised, allowing his fingers to slip into the moist folds that seeped with desire. Fiery sensations spiraled in all directions from his touch.
Suddenly, her muscles tightened. What was she doing? Her eyes flew open. “Brett? Stop.”
His hand, which had begun its rhythmic massage inside her, paused, but he did not withdraw it. Instead, he lifted his face from her breast and stared into her startled eyes.
For the longest time they stared at each other, still as a breezeless day. Then his hand slowly began its exploration. Slipping in and out. In and out.
In and out. His eyes held hers. “Do you want me to stop?” he whispered, at length, without stopping at all.
Sensations she had never even imagined built inside her, fiery sensations, wonderful sensations, begging, pleading sensations, radiating from his stroking hand. “No.” Her mouth was so dry she had trouble speaking.
His fingers probed deeper.
Her muscles tightened. “Yes.”
His hand stopped. But this time his lips covered hers, kissing her in the same magical, mesmerizing rhythm, bringing life and moisture back to her senses. After a time, his kisses and her body’s insistence prevailed. Before she knew what she was doing she began lifting her hips against his hand and with each lift his hand became bolder, thrust deeper, faster.
The ground swayed beneath her head. Her heart pumped to his faster rhythm. Heat and longing grew more intense with each lift of her hips, with each thrust of his hand. She felt him take her tongue in his mouth and suckle it as he had done her breast. She took his and did the same. His hand stroked faster, and she wanted it to last forever.
Then his thumb raked a place she hadn’t known existed, spearing her with a new and desperate sense of longing. She felt as though she stood on a bluff overlooking a swirling river, poised to dive into the center of it.
Yet she was the center of it. The center and all the spiraling ripples. Ripples of fire.
And then he stopped, withdrew his hand, and lifted his lips from hers.
“Brett, what—?”
His eyes held hers, neither begging nor pleading, but intense and solemn.
“Do you want to finish?”
Her breath was so short she could manage only to nod her head.
“If you’re not sure … if you’re not positive you want to do this, we’ll stop right here. Now. Before we go so far you’ll always regret it.”
Feebly, she wet her lips with her tongue. “I won’t regret it.”
He smoothed a strand of hair out of her eyes and bent to kiss her forehead. His lips lingered, heating her already fevered skin.
“I won’t regret it,” she repeated.
He lifted his lips and looked again into her eyes, searching now. “You aren’t just saying that? Agreeing for my sake?”
She shook her head. When he still didn’t look convinced, she reached her lips to kiss him. “It’s new and I was skittish. That’s all. I’m sure of what I want.” More certain now than ever, she thought. It was so different from her dream, so real. So wonderful.
Still he didn’t move. She traced his lips with an index finger. “I want it, Brett. I want you. I want you to be the first.”
“The first?”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
With a wan smile, he returned her kiss, then eased her down again, and began where he had started before, by caressing her breast, kissing her lips. Her passion rekindled quickly this time.
This time she knew there was more. This time she craved it, begged for it. Her hips moved against his body, which he had stretched beside her.
“Please, Brett. Hurry.”
He grinned at that and retraced his path beneath her skirts, wreaking havoc with her equilibrium. Finally, when she thought she couldn’t stand it another minute, he withdrew his hand again and moved away from her.
“Brett—?”
He chuckled, deep-throated and husky. “Give me a minute.”
She watched him fumble with his belt. Feeling her face grow hot, she looked demurely away.
“Now’s no time to get modest on me,” he teased. But when he eased her skirts up and moved on top of her, all jesting died in his eyes. He looked at her with such an intense, serious expression that she felt moisture brim in her eyes. “You’re sure?” he whispered again.
She nodded, suddenly aware of the significance of this moment. “I’m sure,” she repeated in as steady a voice as she could muster.
Without taking his eyes from hers, he fumbled through her clothing and eased himself into place. She felt him probe, hard and hot and enormous. Her eyes widened.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I won’t hurt you anymore than I have to. It will hurt a little though.” He continued to stare at her, talking to her, while he eased himself deeper and deeper into her begging core. “But you’re so hot and so wet and so ready,” he was saying, “that it won’t be bad.”
She felt the world spin. His words, his face, his liquid black eyes, all merged, as she concentrated intensely on the lower regions of her body with wonder and awe and expectation.
“Relax,” he was saying. “Try to relax. It’s going to hurt for a minute—now.” With a quick jab he thrust his body into hers.
She tightened around him, as though she were clinging to him for safety, for security, for fulfillment.
In that moment the spinning world screeched to a halt. Brett kissed her lips, gently, not passionately. His voice droned on, but she was past understanding his words. The pain was brief, her need great, and when he didn’t make a move, she did.
Lifting her hips against him, she felt his hardness slip inside her. She lowered her hips. He slipped out, out, and just before he pulled himself free, she lifted her hips again.
“Please, Brett. I need … I need … something … so bad …”
With infinite tenderness he moved into her again. “I know what you need, chère.”
And indeed he did.
It was as if they had dived together into the center of that spiraling river. And when they came up, it was to a bright sun and crimson flowers and a blue, blue sky. She fell exhausted against the ground, her body weak and flushed with wonderment.
He collapsed beside her, drawing her close, burying his face between her breasts. The intimacy of it brought tears to her eyes. She clung to him, so full of life and joy she thought for sure she wouldn’t be able to contain it.
What had begun as a nightmare had ended in ecstasy, in fulfillment, in wholeness. Moving back she traced the outline of his lips with her fingers. She gazed into the depths of his liquid black eyes.
It took a minute for her spinning senses to recognize the change in him. As though storm clouds had gathered over the clear blue sky, his loving eyes gradually grew dim. His voice, when he spoke, was thick not with passion, but with something akin to anguish.
“God’s bones, Delta! I should be shot at sunrise. What if you conceived my child?”
Their gazes held for the longest time, during which her heart stopped beating at the pain she read on his face. Suddenly the sounds around them beat up in her ears, drowning her with sorrow, and through it all came the desperate crying of a babe.
Burying her face in his shoulder, she clenched her eyelids against the return of her nightmare. Was she going mad? Totally, completely, forever mad?
Chapter Eight
Brett lounged against the rail on the observation deck, watching Delta where she stood in the doorway to the grand salon, selling tickets for the evening’s performance.
She had changed clothes since they arrived back at the boat. In place of the fancy blue gown, she now wore a white shirtwaist with tucks crisscrossing her bosom and a hip-hugging black skirt with a short train that fell from a ti’ bustle. The high collar of the bodice circled her neck like a wedding band and he wondered briefly whether she had worn it to keep his hands off.
At that moment she glanced his way, throwing him a radiant smile, and he knew she would deny him nothing.
She glowed. Gone was the melancholy that had haunted her blue eyes ever since he’d first seen her. He was the one who had chased it away. He knew that. He was the one who had put that smile on her lips. She was his for the taking—and he had taken.
The hunger in his body warned him he might try such a stunt again. Not that he had qualms about taking a desirable woman to bed. He certainly didn’t. But Delta Jarrett wasn’t just any desirable woman. And that fact rankled him.
Rankled and threatened. At first he had thought his attraction to her had something to do with her blue eyes, with the blue-eyed woman who had been slipping into his dreams the last few months. He had put it down to sexual attraction.
The innocent, yet provocative way her hips swayed when she walked, the not-so-innocent passion in her kisses stirred his body to an uncomfortable state, just thinking about them. He would have been aroused by those traits in any woman, he had told himself.
But Delta Jarrett wasn’t any woman. The attraction he felt to her was different from anything he had experienced before. He should have been forewarned when she burst into Wint’s cabin outside Cairo. God’s bones! Even when he thought her out to expose him in her newspaper, all he had wanted was to smother her with kisses and take her to bed.
Then she had related the gruesome news that people were calling him a pirate. A pirate? A smuggler? No matter, either came so close to the truth as to jeopardize his entire mission. Couldn’t they be one and the same? He had been furious enough to strike her for that, even though he had never struck a woman in his life. But instead of ignoring her or riding off and leaving her to find her own way back to town, as would have been his style, what had he done? He had kissed her. He grinned recalling it, thinking he’d have to ask her if she still considered him a pirate from the past.
Berating himself for not taking the situation more seriously, Brett knew he’d better face facts—tangible facts, like the sick, hollow feeling that had gripped his stomach when she called her clothing a trousseau, and he had for one agonizing moment imagined her on her way to wed another man.
Emotional facts, such as the joy he experienced upon discovering he had misunderstood. God’s bones! Joy? In a man who couldn’t recall experiencing such a thing for ten years. Even thinking back on it, a sense of elation ebbed into his body somewhere in the region of his heart and he had difficulty suppressing it.
Delta had put it there, the same way he had put the smile on her face. But how long would her lips spread from ear to ear in the most captivating smile he had ever seen? How long, after the dangers that surrounded him surfaced? How long would her eyes remain free of melancholy? How long, when she learned the truth, the whole truth?
How long, when she discovered that her mysterious pirate was in truth a fugitive from a murder charge that would haunt him to the grave and beyond?
Oui, it was time to face facts, reality—the harsh reality that he could not live in Delta Jarrett’s world and she would not be safe in his.
He tried to turn away from her, but again she cast a smile his way. A smile full of promises and hope. A smile full of … love.
He recalled the utter despair, almost anger, he had felt when she told him she wanted him to be the first.
The first! When what he wanted was to be the last.
And that in itself was a first—the first time in ten years he could remember wanting anything. Unable to keep his eyes from roaming her inviting form, he spun away. Staring into the black depths of the muddy Mississippi, he contemplated jumping overboard. He could swim to shore and never see her again.
Oui, he wanted her. God’s bones, how he wanted her. But he could never have her, so he’d better find some way to keep that pertinent fact from hurting her.
Brett flinched when she tugged at his sleeve. “Come on, the play’s about to begin.”
Turning, he looked down at her, an action he recognized as a mistake the moment he got lost in her eyes.
He tried to brush it off. “I’ve seen that melodrama a dozen times.”
“Me, too. But they expect us to be there. If we’re not, they might think—” Her words stopped. He watched her drop her eyes. He recalled the way she had modestly looked aside when he undressed by the river.
The thought of it shot desire straight to the lower region of his body. He shifted his weight uncomfortably.
Seeing no way out, short of walking away from her, he took her arm and escorted her toward the grand salon. “Let’s go, then. I certainly wouldn’t want to ruin a lady’s reputation.”
Not until they were seated on the back row of golden bamboo chairs did he realize he had taken the coward’s way out. He could have let her come alone.
He should have. But by the time the performance ended, he had convinced himself that this way was better. He would escort her back to her cabin and explain that he couldn’t see her again. He owed her that much—an explanation—of sorts.
When the cast returned to the stage for a curtain call, the audience applauded vigorously and Delta leaned close to whisper in Brett’s ear.
“Nat doesn’t look at all like a bounty hunter.”
Her warm, sweet breath against his ear startled him. He felt his body flex and knew he’d best make his explanation short.
“Does he?” she prompted.
Brett looked down at her, a mistake he had made once before this evening. “Does who, what?”
Her expression was serious and innocent and he thought suddenly that she had no idea of the effect she had on him.
“Nat doesn’t look like … you know, what he is.”
He smiled in spite of his promise to remain aloof. “You mean he’s too handsome to kill folks for a living?”
She shook her head, setting her loose curls to swaying. With the greatest difficulty Brett kept his hands to himself.
“No,” Delta was saying, “he looks too … too baby-faced to be dangerous.”
“So does William Bonney but he’s rumored to have killed twenty-one men.”
She shuddered and he regretted jesting about something so serious. “Don’t worry, chère, Nat’s likely after some real outlaw. I’m only a pirate, remember?”
They slipped out of the salon ahead of the crowd and he guided her directly toward the cabin deck, where he had every intention of telling her good night—and good-bye.
He guided her by her elbow until touching her became too intimate. He dropped his hand, tried to grip his resolve, but the brush of her skirt against his leg reminded him of how close she was, of how much closer he wanted her.
She babbled gaily while they walked along the near-deserted decks. He couldn’t recall her babbling before and couldn’t stop himself wondering whether she would again tomorrow. Or would her eyes be filled with melancholy once more?
The sweet sounds of her voice mingled with the soft summer breeze and the gentle lapping of the river against the sides of the moored boat. He tried to close them o
ut, to concentrate on what he intended to say to her, how he would phrase it, but like a cork bobbling on a fishing line, he felt his concentration ebb and flow. By the time they reached her cabin, he knew he had better say his piece and be gone.
“Delta, I’m sorry about this afternoon, I—”
She had stopped in front of her stateroom door. In the dim light he could make out the eighteenth-century lady and her squire painted on the top panel. At his words, she lifted her face to look at him, and it hit him in the gut—all the guilt he had been running from for ten damned years.
And here he was, apologizing to this woman again. Seems that’s all he ever did. “I don’t want you to think—”
“Come over here, Brett.” She pulled him toward the rail. “Isn’t it a beautiful sight? Moonlight on the water. It glistens, doesn’t it? Looking at it now, you can’t see the sandbars that wreck boats on the—”
“Delta—”
“It looks so clean and beautiful. So free of snags and sawyers—”
“Dammit Delta, hush.” Before he realized it, he had grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Listen to me.”
Her innocent expression further provoked him. “You can’t get close to me. I can’t allow you to. We can’t—”
Without warning, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him softly on the lips. “We already are.”
“Are what?”
“We are,” she replied.
Suddenly he realized they had exchanged these words before. These selfsame words. Except it had been he who insisted they couldn’t change the course they were on.
He pulled her to his chest, cradling her head against his beating heart. What the hell kind of spell did this woman weave?
Drawing away, she reached to trace the outline of his lips. He stood stock still, willing himself not to show how affected he was by her tender touch. Staring at her own lips, he recalled how they had looked after their lovemaking, full and swollen and rosy-ripe. He wished he could kiss her that way now.
“Don’t misunderstand me, Brett. I’m not asking for a commitment.”
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 14