by Susan Wiggs
“Believe me, I’ve considered that. It’s a risk I’m not averse to taking, since...the timing places the odds in my favor.”
“Then what is it? Are you afraid?” His hand swirled downward, then up again, tantalizing the places in her that ached for him. “You’ve got to trust me.”
“I...can’t.”
The hands again. Stroking, stroking... “Try.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m worth the risk, honey. If it turns out I’m wrong, at least you’ll know.”
“At least I’ll know,” she echoed softly, lifting herself into his caress.
He made it easy for her, this forbidden ordeal of lovemaking. She expected clumsy, awkward groping. Timid kisses. Strangeness. Embarrassment. Instead, it was none of those things. Jackson Underhill had skills she’d never imagined. He made each movement silky smooth. Each part of her body he uncovered, he kissed and caressed until she was a little more relaxed, surrendering more of herself with each passing moment, each feathery stroke. As he uncovered each part of his own body, he took her hand and put it there, held it until the sensation felt natural and right. And so it went for endless moments.
By the time they lay together, naked, on their sides and facing each other, she was trembling.
“Cold?” he asked.
“No.”
“Scared?”
“A little.”
“You’re a virgin, Leah?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes it hurts the first time.”
Oh, Jackson, she thought. With you, it could hurt every time and I wouldn’t care.
“I understand that,” she admitted. “In a recent journal, I read a description—”
He stopped her words with his mouth and cupped her hip with his broad hand. She relaxed, and he lifted his mouth from hers. “Maybe it won’t hurt. It’ll be a medical breakthrough.”
“Pain-free deflowering. I could write it up for the medical journals.”
He leaned forward, nipped wickedly at her breast. “Are you going to be taking notes?”
“I don’t see how I can. You keep...urging my hands to be busy.”
He laughed, a low, provocative chuckle. “Then I’ll just have to make sure you don’t forget a single second of this.”
She smiled along with him, but in her heart she knew she would never forget this night. How could she forget the warmth of his hands, everywhere touching her and invading her and teasing her? How could she forget the moist heat of her own body, arching toward him, shuddering when he touched her, shuddering even more when he stopped? How could she forget the way his mouth felt against her lips, her throat, her breasts, the backs of her knees, the arch of her foot, and finally—shockingly—against her woman’s parts? She nearly flew to pieces, felt herself hovering, almost there...but he left her in a fever of wanting. Waiting. Wondering.
He wouldn’t let her be timid or embarrassed even when he made his way upward and kissed her full on the mouth again, sharing a dizzily forbidden taste, and said, “See what happens to you?”
“Yes,” she managed.
He took her hand and guided it downward. “Now here’s what happens to me.”
She trembled, not with fear or even the slightest bit of anxiety, but because she wanted him so much, wanted them to be together, wanted to complete whatever it was Jackson had started with his kisses and caresses.
She stroked him, and he made a hissing sound as if she’d burned him. She smiled into the dark. “I’m ready for more. Are you?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
She faltered in ignorance. The rush of power she found by discovering her effect on him had dissipated. “Then...”
“Then this.” He moved, bracing himself above her. She felt herself lifting toward him and they touched, and he moved again, and they came together slowly. He shook with the effort of restraint, and she wanted to call out to him, to tell him that it was all right, no restraint was necessary, that she wanted him swiftly and now, but she couldn’t make a sound. She hung in a thrall of such exquisite anticipation that the breath stayed locked in her throat.
He kept pressing himself against her in short, rhythmic thrusts, but he didn’t go deep, just rocked back and forth, back and forth, and her nerves burned in a frenzy of arousal. She clutched his shoulders and clenched her eyes shut, lifting toward him, lifting, lifting. Each time he thrust, he drew her closer, went deeper, and she could feel the pressure building inside her, could feel herself climbing higher and higher, holding her breath, terrified everything might come tumbling down on top of her.
Was there pain? Perhaps, but it mattered so little that she barely acknowledged it. All she felt was the sensation of reaching the top, the very crest of the invisible hill she’d been struggling up, and she hovered there for an endless moment, motionless, weightless, and then suddenly she shattered, melted down over the pinnacle, all the love-warmed parts of her languorous in their descent to earth.
She sensed his release, as well, and it surprised her, for she hadn’t realized she would feel it. She took an unexpected satisfaction in the gentle ripples of his pleasure, and she savored it, hoping the feeling was almost as exquisite as her own.
He sank down carefully, breathing hard into her wildly tangled hair. “Are you all right?” he asked at length.
“Yes.” The word sounded inadequate, but she wasn’t certain if she was all right, and she didn’t want the lie to be too big.
“Did I hurt you?”
She remembered the pressure, the bond, the pleasure. “I have arrived at an altogether different notion of what pain is. Dear heaven, your leg!” she said, remembering the wound.
“It’s fine.” He shook with laughter. “Damn, Leah, you’re funny.”
She felt the friction between them. “No one’s ever said that about me before.”
“Well, you are.” He lifted himself up on his elbows and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose. “You’re a lot of things, sugar, but I don’t think you’d believe it if I told you.” Then, very slowly, he eased himself away from her, and even her body was reluctant, tightening so that his eyes flew open and he said, “Damn, Leah!” and chuckled again.
For hours and hours it seemed, they lay side by side, listening to the sounds of the water lapping at the hull. Then, without a word, he started making love to her again, making her want him again, and they coupled tenderly, slowly, with the same shattering results. Drifting toward sleep, she was lost at sea, lost in a sea of sensation. She knew that outside their wooden cocoon, ordinary life went on, unchanged by the cataclysmic event that had transformed Leah Mundy. Everything was different. Everything. She felt as if the world had just changed colors.
And he was the reason.
At dawn, she wept, and Jackson held her close, cushioning her cheek on his bare chest. “Is this a delayed reaction?”
She nodded, closing her burning eyes when he tipped her chin up toward him.
“Open your eyes, Leah,” he said.
She did, but still she wept, unable to stop the tears.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“We shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have made love. I knew there was a reason. Before we even started, I knew there was a reason, but I wouldn’t let myself think about it. But there is a reason, and I finally figured out what it is.”
“And?”
She hesitated. How stupid to think she could survive this. How stupid to realize she’d failed to recognize what she should have known right from the start.
She’d only known him a few months.
But she had loved him for as long as life.
“Leah?” he prompted. “What is it?”
“Making love for one night isn’t enough for me, Jackson. It’ll never be enough.”
&nb
sp; “Then I reckon,” he said easily, “I’d best stay awhile.”
Her heart leaped. “Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
For how long? she wanted to ask him. How long will you stay? But she wouldn’t let herself question him, wouldn’t let her emotions be dictated by his whims. That was the mistake she’d made with her father. She wouldn’t make it again.
Twelve
“‘Be it known that the special moral qualities of women must not be tarnished by unseemly passion.’” Reclining on the captain’s bunk, Jackson eyed Leah over the top of the medical text. She lay at the opposite end, eating a plum and laughing at his absurd recitation from one of her own textbooks.
“Go on,” she said.
“‘...by which it is a certainty that the full force of sexual desire is seldom known to a virtuous woman.’”
The text sounded absurd to her as she relaxed against the bolsters. The captain’s bunk had become her favorite spot on the boat. The little alcove, with its round porthole letting in the daylight, was more than the place she escaped to, the place where she became Jackson’s woman, where she could shed her identity and simply be his lover, drowning in the lavish indulgence of his caresses. In the secret, splendid weeks since they had first become lovers, this had become her refuge, her hideaway.
Here, she was not Dr. Mundy, but just Leah, a woman whose hunger had been awakened, who knew society would frown on what she was doing, and who didn’t care in the least. She sat facing him, watching the late afternoon sun play in his blond hair and feeling a warm flush of sexual contentment.
“‘The heat of the marriage bed is an unnatural obsession of voluptuaries.’” Jackson closed the book and set it aside. He ran his bare foot up the inside of her leg. “Doc, that’s a hell of a way for you to learn about sex.”
“Would you rather I learned it from a fast-talking gambler?”
“So long as that fast-talking gambler is me.” He grinned affably, pretending he had no idea what his foot was doing under the blankets.
She frowned in mock distress. “I don’t remember reading about that in any of my textbooks.”
“It’s a brand-new technique. Still in the experimental stages.” He changed the movement, made it deeper, bolder. “Well, Dr. Mundy?”
“It’s...working.”
“Make a note of that.”
She looked at the letter in her lap, the one she’d started to Penny. She hadn’t gotten past the date and the greeting. With a helpless laugh, she let the paper and fountain pen drop to the floor beside the bunk. “Oops,” she said.
“Never mind that.” Leaning forward, Jackson slid his hands up her legs, pushing aside the covers.
She had learned long ago not to be embarrassed; he wouldn’t stand for embarrassment. He’d taught her that to resist him was folly, and when she cooperated, the rewards were unimaginably sweet.
With his palms flat against her inner thighs, he eyed her frankly for a moment, then moaned. “Christ, it’s hard to believe I need you again, woman.” Without further preamble, without even preparing her as he sometimes spent a long time doing, he thrust inside. She welcomed him, throwing back her head and bringing her arms around his torso. “You’re made for loving, Leah,” he whispered in her ear. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”
She raised her hips as he lowered his head to her breasts. This was what she craved—the mindless ecstasy, a feeling so powerful it would not let in anything so mundane as rational thought. She wove her fingers into his hair and inhaled the scent of him and knew that there was no sweeter sensation to be had.
He filled her completely, crying out her name, his shoulders shuddering and rippling with the movement. It was as close as Jackson Underhill ever came to surrender, and she loved it.
Her own release burst free on a pent-up rush of breath, and she floated for a few moments as if in the aftershock of an earthquake, holding still, not breathing.
The stark truth of a terrible thought raged through her. She lived for these moments. If she lost everything else in her life but this, she could still be happy.
“Ah, Jackson,” she confessed, “this can’t be good for us.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Still joined with her, he moved back, cradled her face between his big hands.
“Just that...it...you fill my life too completely. When I’m not with you, I think of you constantly. And when I am with you, I want to be touching you. I want you inside me.”
“Then I’m right where you want me.”
“But what about the rest of the world? What about the rest of life?”
“It’ll still be there when we decide to leave this bunk.”
He didn’t understand. He wasn’t the sort to plan from one day to the next. By filling her life, he drew her attention away from patients and boarders and the surgery—things that mattered to her. Did they matter still? She told herself yes, but did loving Jackson leave room for them?
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said, only half-joking, “we should never get out of bed again.”
“Fine with me.” He shifted his hips and she felt him harden again. Her body responded with an instant spasm of welcome. “Damn, Leah,” he said.
She smiled and started to speak, but he stopped her mouth with his own, kissing her deeply, probing and tasting until she forgot what she was going to say. And then he moved again, filling her again, and the onrush of sensation cleared her mind like a wave. Afterward, she floated, empty of thought. This was too dangerously pleasant, she told herself. She shouldn’t like it so much.
Later, she snuggled against his bare chest while he read to himself from the textbook, chuckling at the sexual advice, but showing a genuine interest in diseases common to seafaring men. Leah’s mind wandered. She thought about the married couples she knew, her patients and people she’d met in passing. Perhaps she had missed something, but she could not recall that any of those women appeared to experience this unholy obsession with a man.
Perhaps that was the great secret a marriage hid. The terrible ecstasy of loving someone not just with the heart, but with the body, the soul, the entire being.
And then the inevitable question snaked into her thoughts like the serpent into the Garden of Eden. Had it been like this for Jackson and Carrie?
She stirred restlessly against him.
“What?” he asked, attuned to her every nuance. “Again?”
She lifted her head to him, looked into his face—so full of mystery, so captivating. “Yes, again, but...this way,” she said, and slipped downward, her kisses bold and fervent with a hunger to forget, to fill herself with him yet again, because that was the only way she could escape. She felt his breath catch when she kissed him there; it was something he had told her about but had never asked of her; something that had been written of in dry tones in a medical text; yet another matter that print had reduced to a patent absurdity. But when he groaned her name and his chest heaved with mindless pleasure, there was nothing absurd about it, and afterward she was able to disappear into sleep.
* * *
More happy than he had a right to be, Jackson curved both arms protectively around Leah as she stirred to wakefulness. She squinted at the porthole over the bunk. “What time is it?”
“Past suppertime. Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
He grinned into the gathering twilight. “I like a woman with an appetite.” He handed her a plum from a bowl and took one for himself. They ate in silence for a time.
Finally, she said, “I take it Carrie didn’t have much of an appetite.” She spoke slowly as if considering each word.
“No.” His reply was terse. He didn’t want to talk about this, but he could tell from Leah’s tone she wouldn’t leave it be.
“
The craving for the drug, and then the drug itself, tends to suppress the appetite.”
She shifted, rubbing the silkiness of her bare shoulder against him. He bent down and kissed it. Damn, she was soft, the softest woman he’d ever touched.
“Jackson?”
“Mmm?”
She took a long breath, then let out her next words. “There’s something I’ve been wondering.”
“Mmm?”
“About...you and Carrie.”
He sensed a sudden chill in the air. “Yeah?”
“Did you...were the two of you...like this?”
“For chrissakes, Leah. Don’t bring another woman into our bed.” His voice had grown harsh with irritation.
She pushed away from him, leaving a cold spot on his chest and gathering the blanket around her. “You were man and wife. Is it any surprise that I wonder if you ever loved each other...like this?”
“Nope. No surprise.”
“So did you?”
“I don’t kiss and tell.” He grabbed her and kissed her soundly.
Drawing back, she scowled at him from the shadows. “This is all so new to me. I cannot imagine doing this...feeling this...with anyone but you.”
So that was what had been on her mind. He’d been wondering. Sometimes she’d grow silent and thoughtful, and she’d look at him with an intensity that made him think of those microscope slides he’d read about in her medical journals. She wanted to know if what they had was special, unique, a once-in-a-lifetime love that they’d never find again, that few people ever found.
He looked at her and thought, Yes. This thing we share, this bond. It could last a lifetime.
Wait. Doubts reared up inside him. All this sensual pleasure made him soft in the head. Skewed his thoughts. Jackson started to panic. He couldn’t own up to these feelings, couldn’t believe in them. He knew this couldn’t last as surely as he knew he was being stalked by federal marshals. He had to go. She had to stay. It was as simple as that.
And so Jackson T. Underhill did what he was best at. He lied.
“Honey, you’re the doctor, so I feel sort of funny being the one to explain. But this—” he gestured at the rumpled covers heaped on the bed “—is like a drug, I guess. And a body gets to craving it like a drug, see? I don’t have a damned thing some other man doesn’t have, more or less. So it’s just a physical thing.”