Going Back

by Judith Arnold

  Daphne moaned. She felt as if she were teetering on the edge of too many emotions—amusement, affection, ravenous passion and something else, something she wouldn’t dare to call love. It was confusing, dizzying, and very, very dangerous. And she didn’t want it to end.

  Just because Brad hadn’t yet succeeded in undressing her didn’t mean she couldn’t start to undress him. She groped for the buttons of his shirt and opened them. Brad assisted her by shrugging his shoulders free of the shirt, then sweeping it down his arms and flinging it across the room. For someone who had always struck Daphne as fastidious, who would never consider tackling the dirty work of renovating a handyman’s special, who even in college had kept his fraternity house bedroom tidy, the careless manner in which he’d disposed of his shirt took Daphne by surprise.

  She was also surprised by the firm, gloriously virile lines of the chest he’d bared. His streamlined muscles stirred beneath bronze skin which was enhanced by a sparse mat of dark hair. His shoulders were solid, rounding into taut biceps in a gracefully masculine way. The stretch of skin above his belt was flat and well-toned, and his neck was even more inviting than she’d realized. Daphne hadn’t remembered him having such a gorgeous physique—but then, she’d remembered nothing positive about the one time she’d seen his body.

  Tonight, she suspected that she’d remember nothing negative. The mishap with the mayonnaise jar, the threat to Brad’s health posed by the dinner, none of it—with the possible exception of her jammed zipper—could alter the pleasure she believed she and Brad were destined to share. “Pull it over my head,” she said.

  Brad understood what it referred to. He gathered the caftan by the hem again, lifted Daphne toward him, and tugged the robe upward. She raised her arms and sparred with the cloth. He yanked it around her head. She opened her mouth to complain about her inability to see and wound up with a clump of fabric trapped in her lips. But somehow, thanks to Brad’s patience and a bit of well-timed wriggling on Daphne’s part, she was liberated from the damned caftan.

  Brad tossed it aside and turned his attention back to her. He ran his gaze over her long pale body, taking in her small breasts, her nipples already taut and flushed, and then the slender span of her waist, the spread of her hips, the triangle of blond hair between her thighs. His breath was even but shallow, as if he were exerting himself mightily to maintain his self-control.

  He seemed on the verge of speaking, but instead he lowered his hand to her, combing his fingers through the golden thatch of curls and discovering the moistness of her flesh beneath it. Both he and Daphne flinched. He issued a strange, broken sound, then whispered, “You feel so good, Daphne.”

  He refused to take his hand away when she reached for his belt. She wasn’t about to ask him to move, even though his position made stripping off his trousers difficult. She wanted his fingers exactly where they were, holding her, arousing her, tantalizing her with delicate caresses and almost indiscernible pressure.

  He helped her as much as he could in the removal of his slacks, shifting his hips so she could pull them off, kicking his feet to free himself from his briefs. And then her hand found him, full and eager, and she held him as he held her.

  He kissed her with unexpected tenderness. “Daff,” he whispered, gripping her wrist and easing her hand from him. She must have looked hurt or bewildered, because he explained his action: “Not yet. It’s too intense, it feels too good.” He lifted her hand to his lips and grazed the tips of her fingers. Then he set her hand free on his shoulder. “Touch my back, instead,” he suggested before conquering her lips with another, deeper kiss.

  At first Daphne wasn’t sure what to make of his talkativeness. Even during her first clumsy attempts at sex with Dennis, she would never have had the audacity to tell him what to do—or to ask him what he wanted her to do. And when she’d been with Brad the last time, from the moment he’d handed her a Cornell mug filled with wine to the moment she’d fled from him, they hadn’t spoken a single word to each other.

  Now, here he was, chatting away. “Do you always talk during sex?” she asked as her hand obediently kneaded the ridge of his shoulder and then crept down to the warm, supple skin of his upper back.

  He groaned happily, leaning back to savor her massage. “Do you always ask men what they always do during sex?” he parried her.

  It took her a moment to sort through his question. “I’m not asking to be nosy,” she clarified. “I don’t care what you do with other women. It’s just...last time, we didn’t talk.”

  “Maybe that was another big mistake we made,” he commented. “This time...ohh...” He closed his eyes and sighed as her fingers roved down toward the knotted muscles of his lower back. “God, that feels too good, too. What are you doing to me?”

  She wasn’t conscious of doing anything special. What she was doing was exploring his back with her fingers, sliding her knee against the inner surface of his thigh, gazing up at him from the pillow on which she rested her head. She was smiling at him and wanting him, and gasping as his thumb scaled the rise of her breast to rub her nipple. She was crying out softly as his tongue followed in the wake of his thumb, twirling hot and wet over the tiny swell of pink, sucking hard.

  Whatever hazy thoughts she had left of the last time she’d been with Brad burned away in the fierce ecstasy of the present. Even if they went no further than this, she believed she would be satisfied.

  But there was no question of stopping. As Brad shifted his mouth to her other breast, she lowered her hands to his hips and arched against him. He shuddered. She slithered down under him, aligning their bodies, and he braced himself above her. “Kiss me,” she whispered, astonished to hear herself verbalizing her desires as directly as he had.

  He obeyed, devouring her mouth with his. She bent her knee between his legs again, and he flexed his thigh against her. Their movements seemed to pick up momentum, urgency, drive. When he rolled onto his back, bringing Daphne up onto him, she accepted the new position, not bothering to wonder at the uncharacteristic aggressiveness that compelled her to kiss his chest as he’d kissed hers, to run her teeth and tongue over the small brown nubs of his nipples and her fingers over his ribs and abdomen. Not bothering to protest when he wedged his hand between her legs and stroked her. It was too intense, everything was too intense—and she wanted it to go on forever.

  “Daff.” His voice was scarcely audible. “Daphne...”

  She reached down to touch him again, aware that this time he wouldn’t ask her to stop.

  He surged against her palm and groaned something unintelligible. Opening his eyes, he fixed her with a dazed smile. “Do you want to be on top?” he asked thickly.

  She laughed, astounded that at this point he was still capable of shaping a coherent question, and equally astounded that he wasn’t too swept up in his own rapture to care about Daphne’s preferences. “No,” she answered, descending to the mattress, careful not to lose the precious contact of his hand on her. “You.”

  He rose, balancing himself above her, sliding against her palm again. “Now?”

  She nodded, bringing him to her, circling his hips with her legs as he thrust into her. They moaned in unison. Brad relaxed onto her for an instant, then thrust again, slow and deep, filling her completely.

  She curled her arms tight around him, distantly aware that her fingernails were digging into his back. He didn’t seem to mind. His fingers became lost in the tangled blond halo of her hair, and his lips danced from her forehead to her chin before settling on her mouth. His body rocked hers in a steady, pulsing rhythm, sliding, stroking, taking and giving.

  She felt the spinning storm of emotions gathering once more inside her, less amusement now and more passion, more affection, more hunger and love and need, funneling down through her body in a contracting coil until the thrill of it grew nearly painful. She sobbed an inchoate plea, her words absorbed by Brad’s kiss—and then ecstasy came in a great, consuming rush, throbbing through her body an
d her soul before capturing Brad, hurling him down into the center of the storm with her.

  Minutes passed, an immeasurable stretch of time during which they lay fused together, clinging to each other with an almost deranged desperation. Their chests pumped against each other, their breathing rough and ragged, their hearts thudding. Slowly, gradually, Brad lifted himself up. His eyes took a while to focus on Daphne; his mouth was curved in a dazed grin. “Well,” he whispered huskily. “I think we’ve finally gotten the hang of it.”

  “And it only took us eight years,” Daphne quipped, mirroring his blissful smile.

  “Believe me—if it had been like this last time, I wouldn’t have waited eight years to do it again.” He brushed a few curling tendrils back from her cheeks and kissed her lovingly. “It was spectacular, Daff. Unbelievable.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him back down to her. He willingly returned her hug, then cushioned his head on the pillow next to her and nuzzled the skin below her earlobe. She closed her eyes, praying that the thoughts she’d managed to hold at bay so far would continue to keep their distance for a while longer.

  If she let them sneak up on her, she knew what they’d tell her: that making love with Brad had been more than spectacular. That her feelings about what had happened this time were just as overwhelming as they’d been last time—only this time she wasn’t burning with hatred. That the ground rules Brad had established for this evening—that he and Daphne were friends, and that no one would get hurt—might define his position much more accurately than hers.

  If she hadn’t done something as stupid as fall in love with Brad, she had come damned close. And if she had fallen in love with him, she was going to get hurt, all his promises to the contrary.

  But she wouldn’t think about that now. For the moment, the only thing she intended to do was curl up in the protective warmth of his body and pretend that nothing—no uneaten dinner, no waterlogged flowers, no past or future—existed beyond the bedroom door.

  Chapter Nine

  “YOU MUST BE starving,” she said.

  Brad groaned. At the moment, he was too mellow to be starving. His entire body resonated with the tranquil afterglow of their lovemaking. Every cell in his body was serenely still.

  The only thing he could imagine doing with his mouth right now was kissing Daphne—if she could bear to be kissed again. Her lips were a dark, rosy color, slightly puffy from the workout he’d already given them. He considered asking her whether she’d object to more exercise, then thought better of it and just went ahead and kissed her. Her response was sluggish—but, his kiss was sluggish, too. He doubted either of them had enough energy to embark on an activity as strenuous as eating.

  “Maybe later,” he mumbled, nestling contentedly into the pillow and forcing Daphne’s head down to his shoulder. “We’ll eat later.”

  She cuddled up to him, tucking one of her slender legs securely between his and letting her lips brush against the hollow of his throat. From this position, he could see only the delicate slope of her shoulder and the fuzzy mop of yellow curls crowning her head.

  The peaceful warmth began to ebb from his flesh, replaced by something equally pleasurable but harder to identify. Some sort of giddy bafflement, perhaps, something that both bewildered and tickled him: the astounding realization that Daphne Stoltz was dynamite in bed.

  Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that this flat-chested, four-eyed woman with the Harpo Marx hairdo could do such incredible things to him? He hadn’t imagined that his discovery of her nakedness under that weird silk bathrobe had smacked him with the force of a lightning bolt, or that her tongue had engaged his in the most unabashedly wicked foreplay he’d ever known, or that her touch had somehow managed to throw his entire nervous system out of alignment. He hadn’t imagined the ferocious urges she’d unleashed in him with her neatly manicured hands, her teeth, her hips colliding with his, her body—that strange, imperfect body of hers surrounding him, carrying him somewhere he’d never been before.

  He had told her it was spectacular and unbelievable. Reflecting on the experience, he decided that those two feeble adjectives hardly began to do justice to what he’d just experienced with Daphne.

  “Let’s make love again,” he suggested, aware even as he spoke that he’d probably need a bottle of megavitamins and an hour of rest to get his system back in functioning order.

  Daphne laughed, her breath warm and dry against his chest. “Right. And then we’ll notify the Guinness Book of World Records.”

  “You, too?” he half-asked, realizing that she was as blissfully depleted as he was. He smiled, pleased to know he wasn’t alone in his thunderstruck response to what they’d shared, that what had been the epitome of physical fulfillment for him had been no less awesome for her.

  He brushed his hand gently through her hair, careful not to let the dense curls trap his fingers, and angled her head away from his arm so he could peer into her eyes. They weren’t truly pretty eyes—the irises reminded Brad of the olives his mother used to garnish her martinis—but there was something incandescent about them right now, the glow of a woman totally and wondrously sated. The last time Brad had been intimate with Daphne, he hadn’t seen that glow. He’d been smart enough not to look for it. But he looked for it this time, and discovering it gratified him in a way that went well beyond the implied compliment about his prowess in bed.

  Sex hadn’t been great just now because he’d been great. It had been great because Daphne had been great—because they’d been great together.

  “Just a warning, Daff,” he murmured, leaning toward her and kissing the undefined tip of her nose. “Sooner or later, we’re going to have to make love again. That’s the way it is with any proper experiment: if you can’t believe how good the results are the first time, you’re supposed to repeat the experiment to make sure.”

  “I’m not arguing,” she said languidly. “All I’m saying is, we’d better eat something first.”

  “Ah, so you’re starving.”

  “Mm-hm. Can I interest you in some clams?”

  “That was low,” he said, sending her a wounded expression. Then he leaned forward to kiss her again. “I’ll settle for the linguini with a little melted butter on top.”

  “Forget it,” she declared. “The linguini’s been sitting in a pot of hot water for well over a half-hour, which means it’s probably all mushy. And to tell you the truth, Brad, I’m not in the mood to cook another batch.”

  He didn’t blame her. “Have you got any peanut butter?” he asked, deciding their best strategy was to keep their snack quick and simple. The sooner they ate and replenished their reserves of strength, the sooner they could be making love again.

  She grinned and swung her legs off the bed. “With or without jelly?”

  “You’re the hostess. I’ll leave it up to you.”

  He pushed himself away from the mattress to sit, but a sharp glance from her kept him in place. “We’re going to eat in bed,” she informed him as she crossed the room to her robe, which had landed in a rumpled heap on the floor near her closet door. She picked it up, examined the snagged zipper and snorted. After throwing the garment onto a chair, she opened a drawer of her dresser and pulled out an oversize man’s shirt. She buttoned it on. “You stay right where you are. I’m going to serve you in bed. How’s that for romantic?”

  “It sounds more romantic than mushy pasta.” He could think of only one thing more romantic that he’d rather do in bed with Daphne than eat, and they’d already established that they need to refuel for that.

  “Well, I figure, one way or another, something’s going to go right tonight in the romance department.”

  “Something already did,” he reminded her, his smile a hybrid of lecherousness and gratitude.

  She laughed. “Something besides that,” she said, slipping her eyeglasses on and then heading for the door in a loping stride.

  “I might get bread crumbs on the sh
eets,” he called after her in a warning.

  “I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for that,” she said before vanishing down the hall.

  Temporarily abandoned, he propped the pillows against the headboard, fashioning a more comfortable seat for himself. Then he contemplated the woman who’d just left the room. He thought about her lanky legs, her shapeless nose, the angular protrusions of her shoulder blades, the milky pallor of her skin, the inexplicable drabness of her eyes...the way her questing mouth had felt on his chest, and her fingernails when she’d scraped them across his back, and the way he’d sensed as much as heard the low, purring sound of rapture that filled her throat the moment she’d peaked.

  Even without an emergency dose of megavitamins, he felt himself getting hard again. Twisting to examine the back of his shoulder, he saw a red welt where she’d scratched him—and the sight aroused him even more. If she didn’t look so much like an improved version of the dowdy co-ed with whom he’d botched things so badly in college, he would have been convinced that the Daphne Stoltz he remembered and this one were two completely different creatures. It didn’t seem possible to him that the same woman could have been responsible for both the worst and the best sex he’d ever experienced in his life.

  The best? Well, no, he and Daphne had just had a terrific time, but it hadn’t really been the best he’d ever had, had it? Back in Seattle, he’d been seriously considering marriage to Nancy, for God’s sake. He’d loved Nancy, revered her, been dazzled by her. He’d spent more than two years dating her, and untold hours meditating on her perfectly shaped hazel eyes, the lustrous auburn waves of her hair, her peaches-and-cream complexion, her voluptuous breasts and microscopic waist and soft, sultry lips...

  But the truth was, sex with Daphne just now had been better than anything he’d ever known with Nancy.

  It must have been a fluke, the orgasmic equivalent of an optical illusion. Surely he and Daphne would never be able to scale such heights a second time...although his insistently aroused body seemed more than ready to deny that prediction.