Luck Of The Draw

by Candace Schuler

  She crossed the room to him, slowly, her gaze locked with his, and reached up, sliding her arms around his neck.

  Travis’s heart slammed against his rib cage like a bull exploding out of the chute. His breath came unevenly. But his hands still hung limp at his sides. He’d rushed her into passion this morning, pushed her, pulled her along with him until there was nothing she could do but respond. He didn’t aim to do it again. Not this time. “You aren’t still trying to accommodate me, are you, darlin’?” he rasped, voice low.

  Eve lifted herself on tiptoe and fitted her mouth to his. She felt his breath against her lips, felt his heart beating wildly against her breasts and, still, he held back, making her work for it. Making her prove it was what she wanted, too. Eve tilted her head and opened her mouth, inviting him in with a sliding caress of her tongue.

  Travis sighed and accepted the invitation. He slipped his tongue between her parted lips, softly, and lifted his arms to wrap them around her, taking what she offered. They stood there for endless minutes, bodies lightly pressed together, mouths fused, feasting on each other in the quiet bedroom, in the quiet house, with the girls sleeping upstairs and the baby in the crib behind them. The wild pounding of Travis’s heart gradually slowed, becoming deep and powerful. His breathing evened out. His arms shifted on her back, caressing her spine, cradling her closer, holding her as if he would never let her go. It was the sweetest kiss he had ever known. The hottest. The most incredibly intense…He lifted his head and looked into her eyes, needing to see if she was as affected by the unexpected sweetness, the richness of it, as he was.

  “Does that feel as if I’m only trying to accommodate you?” she murmured, looking up at him with eyes heavy and clouded by passion. Her breath shuddered against his lips.

  “No,” he breathed. “God, no.”

  And then he bent and lifted her into his arms, carrying her to the bed like a cherished bride. He laid her crosswise, following her down with his body, stretching out beside her on the faded blues and greens of the wedding ring quilt his grandmother had made for her trousseau more than eighty years ago. Propped up on his elbow, looming over her with his forearm under her neck, he stared down at his bride.

  His bride.

  He wanted to do this right, to pay homage to the moment and to her. Sex had always been a lighthearted affair for him, a passing fancy, an itch scratched, a rousing, rollicking good time that he never expected to last beyond the night, or the next day, or the next week.

  But this was special.

  This was forever.

  This was his wife.

  What happened between them tonight would have repercussions for the rest of their lives. And, incredibly, for the first time in his life, Travis Holt was expe riencing first-night jitters. The heartthrob of Selina, Texas, a four-time PRCA Bull Riding Champion, the most-sought-after cowboy on the circuit was afraid he was going to screw things up. If he hadn’t been so nervous, he might have laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “Travis?” Eve murmured, wondering why he didn’t just kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her. Desperately. She wanted that hot, heedless passion he’d shown her when they’d stood pressed together in the barn. That wild, intemperate need that took her beyond herself and left her aching for his possession.

  What was he waiting for? She’d shown him she was willing, that she wanted him…but maybe she hadn’t shown him how much. She slid her hand to the silky hair at his nape and pulled his head down to hers. “Kiss me,” she demanded hotly, lifting her head to meet him halfway. “Kiss me.”

  And, miraculously, Travis’s nervousness disappeared. This was something he understood. A hot, hungry woman. A demanding woman. He knew where he was now.

  He kissed her. Delicately at first, skillfully, his tongue brushing her lips teasingly, darting between them to tempt and tantalize; then more forcefully, his mouth open over hers, his tongue plundering, teeth nipping. His kisses were languid and lazy. Hot and arousing and infinitely skilled. He was a man who had kissed a lot of women and knew just what they liked.

  He flexed the arm under her head, raising it a little, bringing her closer, then tangled his fingers in her hair, loosening the yellow scarf that held it back. He ran his other hand down her body, smoothing his wide, calloused palm over the lush inward slope of her waist, the rich curve of her hip, down her thigh to the back of her knee. He pulled her leg up high, over his hip, as he rolled toward her and slipped his hard horseman’s thigh between hers.

  Eve moaned. This was what she wanted from him. The skilled, reckless passion, the searing heat; the wild desire that turned her mind off and her body on. She reached down, mindlessly clutching at his narrow hip with one hand, rolling her pelvis against his thigh. “Please,” she whispered raggedly.

  Travis went just a little bit crazy. He forgot technique. He forgot strategy. He forgot everything except the need to please and possess this one particular woman. He ran his hand back up her torso, untying the knotted tails of her shirt, reaching for the buttons, fumbling, finally tearing them off in his sudden haste to get to her bare flesh. Her bra proved to be more of an impediment, a heavy-duty nursing model with wide straps and three sturdy hooks that fastened in the back.

  “Wait,” Eve cautioned breathlessly, struggling to sit up as he grappled with the catch. “Wait a minute. Let me.” She pushed his hands away, twisted her arms out of the tangled remains of her shirt and reached behind her to unfasten the hooks.

  The bra gave way and he pulled it off, pushing her back down on the bed at the same time. When he took her breasts in his hands, they filled his palms to overflowing; they were lush, luxuriant globes of warm female flesh, almost too large for the slenderness of her narrow rib cage. They were as pale as cream against his darkly tanned hands, with a faint tracery of blue veins under the delicate skin. Her nipples were as red and plump as ripe strawberries, with large, velvety areolas.

  “Perfect,” he whispered reverently, and bent his head to take one into his mouth.

  Eve arched like a bow, biting her lip against a keening cry of intense pleasure. Her hands fisted in his hair, pushing him away and pulling him toward her at the same time. “Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please,” she moaned raggedly, trying not to scream.

  Travis raised his head. “Am I hurting you?”

  “No. No, I just…” She let out a long, shuddering breath. “I didn’t know they were so sensitive.”

  “Too sensitive?”

  “No. Yes. I mean…oh-h-h,” she sighed as he touched first one nipple, and then the other, with the very tip of his tongue.

  “Better?”

  “Yes. Better. Oh, yes,” she said as he continued to caress her breasts with his mouth.

  He explored them thoroughly, nuzzling, sucking, licking, biting sometimes, taking her to a point just short of pain. A bead of milk appeared, disconcerting him for a moment, reminding him she was different from any other woman he had ever made love to. He lapped it up, savoring the taste of her, relishing the difference.

  His hands wandered over her body, over her hips and thighs and down between her legs, caressing her first through the heavy fabric of her jeans and then, soon-but, somehow, not nearly soon enough—dragging down her zipper, slipping his hand beneath her panties to find the heated core of her.

  She whimpered.

  He touched her delicately, sliding one calloused finger into the moist, swollen folds of flesh between her legs.

  She shuddered and began to tremble. Uncontrollably.

  He continued to stroke her, slowly, relentlessly, holding her down with the weight of his shoulders and chest when she started to writhe.

  “Oh, Travis,” she moaned breathlessly. “Travis, please. Please.”

  He slid two fingers into her, deeply, and rotated his thumb against her nub.

  She stiffened in climax, straining against his hand, biting down on his shoulder to stifle the scream that rose in her throat.

  He drove her up again without giving her t
ime to breathe or recover. She bucked in protest, grabbing at his hand with both of hers, squirming away from his clever, torturous fingers. She couldn’t stand it; the ache was too much to bear alone.

  “I want you inside me,” she demanded, reaching blindly for the fly of his jeans. “I need you inside me,” she pleaded as she grappled with the zipper. “Now. Right now.”

  Travis didn’t need a second invitation. He reached for his pants, pushing them and her hands out of the way, lowering them just enough to free his straining erec tion while she wriggled out of her jeans and kicked off her shoes.

  Hurrying, nearly frantic now, he levered himself over her, lowering himself between her open thighs, reaching down to open her for his possession.

  “Oh, wait…wait,” she cried raggedly, holding him off with her hands while her hips instinctively rolled up to meet his.

  He straightened his arms, holding himself back from that last final penetration with rigid, wavering control. His whole body quivered with the effort it took. “What?” His eyes were black with passion and the driving need to possess. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “The baby,” she explained disjointedly, her eyes nearly as dark and clouded as his. “I’m nursing. I’m not—” She gasped as his rigid penis brushed against the entrance to her body.

  “Not what?” he demanded, gritting his teeth with the effort it took to keep himself from just plunging into her.

  “Birth control,” she managed to rasp, trying to hold on to her sanity for just a moment longer. She hadn’t been fitted for a new diaphragm after Timothy was born and she wasn’t on the pill. “I’m not using any birth control and I—I can’t…we need…” she stuttered, forgetting what it was they needed.

  But Travis knew. With a blistering oath, he rolled over onto his back, reaching down, struggling to thrust his hand into the pocket of the jeans tangled around his thighs. How could he have forgotten something as basic as birth control? He never forgot birth control! His jaw clenched, his hands shaking, he yanked a foilwrapped condom out of his pocket and tore it open.

  Eve sat up beside him, reaching out eagerly, trying to help him as he unrolled the latex sheath down his hard length. He pushed her hands away, pushed her down on her back, and mounted her, driving himself home in one long, powerful thrust.

  And then everything went black as pleasure overwhelmed him.

  He pounded into her, wildly, feeling as out of control as a cowboy on the back of a pile-driving spinner, helpless to stop, unable to do anything but hold on and ride it out. Driving toward completion, toward pleasure, he strained up and away from her, every muscle tense, every nerve stretched taut, every blood cell boiling, exploding into a climax so powerful it rattled his teeth and scrambled his brain. And then he collapsed, damp and spent and trembling.

  Eve cradled him in her arms, holding him close as the last tremors of her own climax faded away.

  “I’m sorry,” Travis murmured after a moment. “I’ll do better next time.”

  Eve didn’t know how he possibly could. “That was wonderful,” she assured him.

  He lifted his head from the crook of her neck to look down at her. “I kind of lost control of things there at the end,” he admitted.

  “I know.” She gave him a smile as old and knowing as her namesake. “I liked it.”

  His eyebrow quirked. “Yeah?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He grinned at her, cocky as a prize-winning stud in a pastureful of brood mares. “I can still do better,” he bragged. “Give me a minute and I’ll prove it to you.”

  “You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

  “Yeah.” His expression turned serious. “I do.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re my wife,” he said, trying to explain as best he could, feeling his way through something he wasn’t quite sure of himself. Something had happened to him tonight. Or maybe it had happened a week ago in the judge’s chamber. Being married changed a man’s perspective about a lot of things. “A man’s wife is special. Different. I wanted this first time to be special, too.”

  “It was,” she assured him. “It is.”

  Travis brushed a curling tendril of hair away from her cheek. “I wanted you to feel cherished,” he said, giving her a rueful smile. “Pounding into you like a pile driver isn’t the way to accomplish that.”

  “It was wonderful. Really. You were wonderful. You made me feel wonderful. I don’t know how it could have been any better.”

  “I promised to make you feel worshipped, remember?”

  Eve felt a little spurt of panic. “Don’t be silly,” she chided, uneasy about what she saw in his eyes. “Worship is for plaster saints in church. I don’t need to be worshiped. I don’t—”

  “Eve.” He cupped her cheek in his hand, sliding his thumb over her lips to stop her words. “Eve, I’m trying to tell you something here. Something—”

  She bit his thumb. “Don’t tell me,” she murmured seductively. She didn’t want words. She didn’t want the promises of love. The guarantees of fidelity. The impassioned vows of happily-ever-after. The lies.

  They had a simple, straightforward marriage of convenience that was working out better than either of them had any right to hope for. Words would only complicate it, raise expectations, cause resentments and tears.

  “Don’t tell me,” she repeated, and extended her tongue to delicately assuage the tiny hurt she had inflicted. Her vivid blue eyes were rife with invitation. And need. “Show me, instead,” she purred.

  So Travis showed her, using his body to tell her what he would have been hard put to find the words for anyway.

  He touched her everywhere, caressing her body with hard, gentle hands, nuzzling her neck and shoulders with his cheeks and lips, kissing her sensitive palms and the delicate arches of her feet. He charted her body inch by inch, cataloging her tiniest responses, satisfying her most fleeting desires, arousing and assuaging her deepest, most intense, most secret pleasures.

  She was limp with surrender when he mounted her the second time, flushed, replete, her eyes glazed with spent passion, her body numb with satisfaction, unable to do more than lie beneath him and accept what he gave her. But Travis had spent his life learning to match his rhythm to another living being’s. He found Eve’s again, his hips pumping slowly, powerfully, surging into her, pulling back, rocking…slowly…patiently…relentlessly…until she quickened and caught fire once again. Her climax rolled through her like a huge tsunami rolling across the surface of the sea, lifting her body against his, tightening her muscles, stretching her nerves to the breaking point one last time. He caught her cry of completion in his mouth, taking it inside himself, letting it explode back into her.

  And when it was over, when she lay cradled in the hard curve of his arms, with her back nestled against his broad chest and his warm breath sloughing softly in her ear, she felt worshipped.

  And more afraid than she ever had before.

  IN THE MORNING, in that cold gray hour just before the sun rises, all her fears were realized. Gracie woke up retching, her small body hot and aching from the effects of a particularly nasty strain of viral flu. By midmorning, Laura was showing signs of succumbing to it, as well. By dinnertime, Timothy was hot and fretting. At supper, when Eve sat holding him to her breast, trying to coax him to nurse, he stopped breathing and turned blue.

  12

  THE TRIAGE NURSE at the front desk took one look at the limp, blue-tinged baby cradled in his frantic mother’s arms as they came bursting through the doors of the emergency room and all but jumped over the admissions desk, shouting out instructions and clearing the way. “We’ve got a baby with severe cyanosis!” she hollered, snagging a doctor by the arm as she passed him, dragging him away from the conversation he was having with a colleague. “We need you, now!”

  “He’s almost seven months old,” Eve told them as a nurse took him from her arms and laid him on an examining table. “He has Tetralogy
of Fallot and—”

  “Get the parents out of here,” someone hollered.

  Someone else pushed Travis and Eve out into the hall despite their protests and pulled the curtains across the windows to block their view of what was being done inside.

  Travis could hear the beep of monitors and machines. He could hear the rumble of the medical team’s voices, low, urgent, calling out instructions, calling for medications in terms he couldn’t understand.

  Eve understood them, though. He could see it in the anguished expression on her face. She stood with her hands pressed flat on the glass, her face pale and strained, her eyes dry, staring at the pale green cotton between her and her son as if she could see through it. The medical personnel fighting so hard to save her baby’s life didn’t care that she was a nurse, that she was the one who had performed the CPR that had kept him breathing so they had a life to save.

  To them she was just another anguished, frightened mother, intent on getting in their way.

  Travis reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “Eve. Honey,” he murmured, trying to pull her into his arms, trying to offer what comfort he could.

  She shrugged his touch off with a violent jerk. “Don’t,” she said without looking at him.

  He tried again. “Sweetheart, it’s going to be—”

  Her hands fisted on the glass. “I said don’t,” she repeated through clenched teeth. “Don’t touch me. Not now.”

  He backed off, letting her handle her fear in her own way. Some people couldn’t allow themselves to be comforted until the crisis was over. They had to work it through on their own, hold it together in their own way, maintain control until the danger was past and it was safe to let go. He backed off, but he stayed close, knowing she would need him when the doctor came out to tell her…whatever he had to tell her.