Wild Orchids

by Karen Robards

  He stared down at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears. His hands tightened on her arms so that his fingers dug into her soft skin, and he gave her a warning shake.

  “Shut up.”

  “Crybaby!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Crybaby!”

  “Argghh!” It was a growl much like a tiger’s, and like a tiger he looked ready to spring. One hand tightened ferociously on her arm while the other lifted, hovering open-palmed in the air. Looking up into his rage-infused face, Lora was certain that he meant to strike her. Every instinct for self-preservation that she possessed urged her to keep quiet, but something, some unnamed thing like a thorn in her flesh, was driving her on. . . .

  “Crybaby!” she cried, glaring up at him defiantly, her eyes daring him to do his worst.

  He growled again, deep in his throat, and she could see the hot blood throb in the artery in his neck. His black eyes glittered with it. But he did not slap her. Instead, the hand that had been poised above her face shot to the back of her head and grabbed a handful of soaking hair. Then he was jerking her toward him, eyes still glittering with murder as his face came down.

  His mouth descended on hers like an avenging fury, assaulting and punishing as it forced her lips apart. Lora felt her lower lip split as he drove it back against her teeth, tasted her own blood in her mouth, felt the harsh rape of his invading tongue. Stunned, she hung in his arms like an sack of flour, too shocked to fight. His fist gripping her hair hurt. His arm that had slid around her shoulders to crush her to him hurt. The hard, unyielding body that bent hers backward hurt. Even his mouth hurt. But she didn’t fight him, didn’t even want to fight him. Dimly, with some still-functioning part of her brain, she realized that this was why she had goaded him. This was what she wanted. . . .

  “Oh, Max,” she groaned into his mouth, and then she was responding to that rapier tongue with a passion that even in his fury he couldn’t mistake.

  “Lora . . .” Her name was a tormented whisper as he kissed her harder, fiercer than before, as if he was starving for the taste of her mouth. She twisted in his arms, not trying to get away but to work her arms free. . . . She managed to push them up through his crushing hold and lock them around his neck. He groaned deep in his throat, and she groaned too in protest as his mouth suddenly left hers. He was looking down at her, his breathing heavy, a wild glitter in his eyes. Lora lifted one hand from the corded nape of his neck and lightly stroked the rough, wet edges of his hair.

  “Kiss me, Max,” she whispered, her mouth reaching for his even as she spoke. Plastered against him as she was, she felt him shudder. She heard the sudden, harsh indrawing of his breath as she touched his mouth with hers. Still, he held himself a little away from her; she could feel the beginning of resistance in his body and it galled her that she should have to be the one to encourage him. Where was her rapist now? she wondered hazily, remembering how she had feared him that time that seemed like eons ago but was actually little more than a week. She had known him just one day more than a week. . . .

  “Please.” And she was begging for him. She, Lora Susan Harding, a “nice girl” who had never, ever done anything like this in her whole life, was begging this man to kiss her. To do more than kiss her. . . .

  “Oh, God,” he groaned as if he was being condemned to eternal hell fire, and bent his mouth to hers again.

  It was a kiss so devouring that Lora closed her eyes and surrendered her soul.

  His hand came up to crush her breast, and at the heat and strength of it burning through the flimsy cloth of her wet t-shirt and bra, Lora trembled. Her knees quivered, and she felt them give beneath her weight. He was bending her back over his arm, both of them thigh-deep in gleaming green water, his mouth locked to hers and his hand on her breast sending shuddering jolts of electricity through her body. Her nipple was stiff beneath his cupping palm. When he found it with his fingers she gasped. Even through the cloth, his touch made her shiver and burn. . . . Only her arms around his neck held her uptight as he abandoned his hold on her waist to cup her breasts with both hands. His mouth ate hers greedily as his hands pushed up beneath the wet cloth of shirt and bra to find her bare skin. . . .

  Lora felt as if she were falling. She was falling. She was slipping down into the water, her knees no longer able to support her, her arms around his neck losing their grip. Tremors coursed through her like electric shocks and she could no longer bear it. . . .

  His arms were around her again, lifting her, carrying her. She opened her eyes to find his face hard and taut, his eyes still glittering with that dangerous wildfire as they looked down into her face. She knew her own eyes must be heavy lidded with passion, drugged as Tunafish’s were after he made use of the dope. Because that’s how she felt—as if she were lost in a thick, unbearably sweet fog from which she might never escape. Little slurping noises sighed a protest as the water released Max’s sneaker-clad feet. Then Max was scrambling up the bank with her cradled tight against his chest. She grasped his neck again, holding tightly as he slipped on the wet rocks, not even caring if he dropped her as long as they fell together. But he didn’t, he made it safely across the rock shingles and then he was walking through the knee-high patches of flowers, bending and lying her down in a bed of orchids. Lavender and cream orchids, higher than Max’s knees so that they closed around her as he put her down, enveloping her in perfume so exotic that it was intoxicating. She was intoxicated by the heady scent of the orchids and the surrealistic green beauty of the jungle canopy overhead, by the softly filtered sunlight and the muted cries of birds, by the meandering flight of purple and gold butterflies as they flitted from flower to flower, and the sibilant rustle of the flowers’ slender green stems and leaves. . . .

  And she was intoxicated by him. By Max. Her heart pounded as he dropped to his knees beside her, uncaring of the fragility of the exotic blooms he crushed beneath him, uncaring of everything except her and the passion that arced between them like great bolts of lightning crashing to earth and then roaring back to heaven. On his knees beside her, he stared down at her for a moment, his face with its ferocious mustache and eyebrows and harsh blade of a nose and square, unshaven jaw aggressive even in passion. She looked at the linebacker’s shoulders straining against soaked white cotton, at the tufts of curling black chest hair just visible in the hollow of his throat, at the corded muscles in the sun-bronzed arms, and felt the quiver in her belly that had started with that first kiss expand and grow until she was quivering all over, visibly shaking from head to foot like a lovestruck teenage girl. Then she looked again at the strong brown arms that were supporting his weight as he stretched his length beside her and saw that he was trembling, too.

  And in that instant she knew that he was as vulnerable as she.

  “You’re shaking.” There was wonder and excitement in her whisper.

  He smiled slightly, crookedly, as he leaned over her, his chest not quite touching hers as he supported himself with one hand braced on the ground near the shoulder farthest from him.

  “I want you.” His voice was a whisper too, husky and dark and unbearably sexy.

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  Lora looked up at that hard face, at the bristly jaw and villainous mustache and glittering black eyes, and thought about what she was doing. She, who had never had so much as a parking ticket in her life, was on the verge of giving herself to a man who was involved with all kinds of nefarious characters, a man on the run from the law, a criminal. . . .

  “What’s taking you so long?” she murmured with a broken little laugh, and suddenly he grinned too, swiftly, and his face lightened into tenderness in that instant before he took her mouth again.

  XVIII

  His kiss was hard and hot and slow, with a lazy quality to it that had not been there before. There was passion, much passion, but it was as if he had put the brakes down hard on his libido for some reason Lora couldn’t quite fathom. Not that she was up to fathom
ing much. Even with the brakes on, his kiss was enough to make her blood pound in her ears.

  When he lifted his head at last, she had to grit her teeth to keep from hauling him back down to her. Her arms dropped from his neck to the ground beside her, and her hands clutched handfuls of lavender petals to keep from clutching at him. If he could control himself, she could, too. She was not an animal. . . .

  Or so she kept telling herself as he pushed her t-shirt and bra up until her breasts were bared.

  “You are so goddamn beautiful,” he murmured as he stared down at the naked, pink-tipped breasts his hands had uncovered.

  Following his eyes, Lora looked down at herself. The contrast between her own soft, milky white skin and the dark brown skin of his hand as it rested on her rib cage just under her right breast was unbelievably erotic. Her breasts, already full and swollen with passion though he had not yet so much as touched them, swelled even more, their brown-pink nipples tautening until they were almost painful. Never, never had she ever imagined that she could be so hungry for a man. The sight of his body in the wet white t-shirt that clung to his broad shoulders and sculptured chest and allowed tantalizing glimpses of the curling black hair beneath was so erotic that she had to fight an urge to rip the shirt from his back. The wet jeans encasing his narrow hips had an unmistakable bulge in the front that was so erotic that just the sight of it made her toes curl in her wet shoes. The sight of her own naked breasts was erotic. Even the soaking t-shirt and bra that he had pushed up out of his way and that now stretched in a twisted line from armpit to armpit struck her as erotic. The cold wetness of the jeans covering the place that she had never so much as been able to call by name did nothing to quench the heat that was raging between her legs. She wanted him to put his hand there . . . oh, how she wanted him to put his hand there!

  He was still staring down at her breasts, his expression unreadable as he slowly lifted a hand to touch a nipple with a gentle forefinger. The sensation that shot through her at that slight touch was unbelievable. Lora had to grit her teeth to stifle a moan. When his finger moved to her other nipple, still just barely touching, she could not stifle it. The sound reverberated from her throat, soft and shocking in its animalism. But Lora was too far gone to be shocked at anything. She wanted him to touch her, wanted him to kiss her, wanted him to make love to her more than she had ever dreamed it was possible for her to want anything in her life. Her body arched up off its bed of orchids in silent demand; her hands clenched into fists at her sides as she fought to control the impulse to lock her arms around his neck and drag his head down to her throbbing breasts, to catch his hand and place it on the pulsating ache between her legs.

  His hand was covering her breast now, testing it, weighing its softness against his hard palm. The feel of his calloused palm against her skin made her want to writhe. She wanted to feel it everywhere on her body—wanted to feel him everywhere on her body. She wanted him to love her until she begged him to stop. She remembered what he had done to her before, remembered how expertly he had given her ecstasy with only his fingers, and had to clench her thighs together hard. She wanted him to do it again. . . .

  But he didn’t. He caressed her breasts, his hand gentle, the other one propping up his head as he stared down at her, a funny kind of half smile quirking his mouth. How could he be so damned dispassionate when she was going out of her mind and a minute ago he had been too.

  “What’s taking you so long?” The question, which she had meant to be a joking echo of the one she had uttered earlier, did not sound as if she was joking at all. Her gritted teeth might have something to do with that, she thought. But she couldn’t help it. Her self-control was stretched dangerously thin as it was. What was taking him so long? From the ragged sound of his breathing, he was just as turned on as she. . . .

  “I told you before: I like my women hungry.” This reference to their last abortive lovemaking session should have made her go crimson with embarrassment. It didn’t. She looked up into those glittering black eyes, at that masculine, whiskered face, at that passionate mouth beneath its silky mustache, and abruptly all her inhibitions went into hiding.

  “I am hungry,” she whispered shakily. Something flared briefly in his eyes before being sternly brought under control.

  “Prove it.” The husky whisper was almost casual, except for the rasp of his breathing and the faint tremor of his fingers on her breast.

  “How?” She was whispering too. Her voice shook. Her eyes locked with his, and she felt the heat between her legs flare hotter. His eyes glittered with passion. . . .

  “For starters, you can take off your clothes.” That deceptively casual voice would have fooled her if she hadn’t been able to see into his eyes.

  “All right.” She sat up, willing to do whatever he said. Her hands found the edge of the twisted t-shirt.

  “Uh-uh.” He stopped her. She looked at him inquiringly.

  “Stand up.”

  Lora stood up. Her knees were shaking so much that she wasn’t sure they would hold her, and he didn’t help any by looking at her as if he might jump on her bones at any moment. But somehow she managed to pull the t-shirt over her head, to find the hook in the twisted bra and unfasten it, letting the bra drop to the ground. She kicked off her shoes, then felt a little shy as she unsnapped and unzipped her jeans. As she pushed them down her legs and stepped out of them she felt even shyer. She could have taken off her panties, the same white panties that he had stripped off her in that never-to-be-forgotten night in the farmhouse loft, but some lingering instinct of modesty made her leave them on. Or maybe some newly burgeoning erotic instinct was urging her to spin out the striptease. . . .

  “Those panties turn me on.”

  She looked at him, sitting cross-legged on the ground not three feet away, his eyes burning as they inched over every millimeter of her skin. The huskiness of his voice sent her senses quaking. Her hands shook as she hooked her thumbs in the waistband of the panties.

  “Leave them on. And come here.” The words were almost a growl. His black eyes almost scorched her as she met them.

  Lora swallowed, and took the single step toward him that was needed to put her within reach. Before she could drop down beside him, his arms came around her and he pulled her close, burying his face in the vee between her legs as his hands crushed the roundness of her bottom, his fingers finding and sensuously exploring the crevasse through the thin nylon. . . .

  Lora caught her breath, her heart pounding so hard that she was aware of no other sound as he opened his mouth against the silky cloth covering the apex of her legs. She could feel the heat of it in burning contrast to the cool dampness of the material elsewhere. He opened his mouth more, pressing harder against her, and she could feel the soft slither of his tongue as he sought and found the secret point that quivered and throbbed in aching need. Her hands came up to clutch at the rough blackness of his hair, holding his head in place with two tight fists as his tongue caressed her. He hadn’t even parted her legs. . . . Lora’s eyes shut tight, and she moaned at the feel of his tongue and mouth gently but insistently urging her highter. . . . The very fact that her panties formed a thin barrier between his mouth and her flesh made what he was doing to her all the more exciting. Even in her wildest fantasies she had never imagined a man doing anything like this . . . or herself feeling anything like this. . . .

  She couldn’t stand it anymore. Another second and she would surely die. Her knees buckled, and she slithered down in his hold, collapsing in a heap in his lap. Her barely clad bottom planted on a jeans-clad leg; her naked breasts came into surprisingly arousing contact with a hard chest wall covered with a cold, damp t-shirt. The shock was just enough to bring her back from the edge. Her eyes opened to find him looking down into her face. That maddening half smile was still there, but she didn’t care. She only cared about the black eyes that smoldered and smoked, and about the ache that radiated out from between her legs to make her body throb from head to toe.
. . .

  Eyes blind with passion, her arms came up to circle his shoulders and her mouth found his, her lips soft and shaking and seeking. Her tongue found its way between his lips and kissed him with an intensity that she would have thought, before, to be utterly foreign to her nature. His arms tightened around her body, holding her close as he returned her kiss with lips and teeth and tongue, and yet she sensed that he was not giving all of himself—yet.

  “Damn you, what do you want?” she whispered, goaded, pulling her mouth away from his and almost glaring into those too-controlled black eyes. She wanted him in the same state as herself, on fire with passion, driven mad with passion.

  “I told you, I want you hungry.”

  The words were soft, factual, but they drove Lora into a frenzy. She snarled at him, baring her teeth, her fists beating down on his shoulders until he caught her wrists in his hands and deftly twisted her until she was no longer sitting on his lap but lying flat on her back on the broken stalks of ruined flowers. With a deft movement he released her hands and stripped the panties from her, leaving her lying naked as he straightened and looked down at her, his eyes suddenly flaming. It took him just seconds to pull the t-shirt over his head, to slide out of the shoes and jeans and shorts, to lay the pistol that he always carried tucked into the waistband of his jeans on the ground nearby, but to Lora it felt like an eternity. It was all she could do to keep from moaning and writhing where she lay. She had to clench her thighs together to fight the impulse. . . .

  Then he was coming down beside her. She gasped as he moved over her, and her eyes closed tight with passion. The crush of his lower body on her legs and belly and thighs was just what she craved. Her legs parted instantly to allow him access. She arched her back in anticipation, feeling the quaking between her legs intensify to a fevered pitch. Now he would take her. . . .