by Cindy Gerard
She didn’t want easy. She groped for the hem of his sweater and, when she found it, dragged it roughly up and over his head. While he was still recovering from her aggression, she peeled off her own sweater, then unhooked and shrugged out of her bra.
“Michael, I need you . . . need you,” she whispered urgently as she rose to her knees beside him and guided his mouth to her breast.
He lost it then, all reason, all control. The taste of that plump breast filling his mouth, the feel of her tight, straining nipple against his marauding tongue, shattered any hope of taking her gently. By offering herself so wantonly, she was doing the taking. He was helpless to do anything but follow her lead. She drugged him with her throaty murmurs, drove him wild with her sexy shivers.
With a groan of utter defeat, he sank with her to the carpet, then scrambled as frantically as she to rid himself of the rest of his clothes.
When she was naked and writhing beneath him, he parted her thighs, found her wet, swollen core, and thought he’d die before he became one with that tight, silken heat.
A moment of sanity gripped him. “January.” He breathed her name like a prayer against her mouth. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She rocked her hips against him in an instinctive and innocently provocative gesture of submission. “Michael, please . . . don’t stop now. Don’t do that to me!”
The desperation in her voice tore at him as a flood of desire swamped him. Yet he tried; Lord, he tried.
“Sweetheart,” he gasped between harsh breaths, “I have to know . . . are you protected?”
Her eyes flew open. “No. No!” she whispered, looking like she might cry. “Aren’t you . . . don’t you . . . have something?”
Had he not been so needy and she so proud, he might have laughed at the exasperation in her voice and at her crestfallen expression. “I didn’t exactly plan this, love.” He pressed his lips against her breast and asked hoarsely, “When was your last period?”
He felt her body stiffen with embarrassment.
Cupping her face in his hands, he stroked away the tension with a steady caress of his thumbs over her temples. “Think, baby. When?”
Her nipples grazed his chest with each shivery breath she took. He groaned and repeated on an urgent growl, “When?”
“Two . . . three days ago.”
Reacting to the sudden uncertainty in her voice, he brushed a kiss across her brow. “It’s okay. It should be a safe time for you.”
The dim light from the TV and the soft flicker of the burning candle revealed another question hovering in her dark eyes, one he felt compelled to answer. “And you’re safe with me. I would never put you at risk, January. You don’t have to be afraid I’d leave you with anything you don’t want.”
She wilted momentarily, then met his gaze with barely banked longing. “Then make love to me.”
Whispering her name, he covered her mouth with his and eased into her.
She was incredibly hot, impossibly tight. The exquisite clench of her body around him stole his last vestige of control and drove him to the ultimate barrier. On a long, deep stroke, he reached resistance. She stiffened and cried his name.
For too long he’d teased them both with simmering kisses and slow, sensual caresses; too many times he’d brought them to the brink of this act, then withdrawn. There’d be no turning back tonight.
Swallowing her cry, he plunged deep, experiencing a moment of blinding self-hatred as he felt her virginal shield resist, then tear. She gasped and struggled against him even as he languished in the wonderful way she gloved and pulsed around him.
Achingly aware that his pleasure caused her discomfort, but helpless to make himself leave her, he praised her with whispered endearments, scattering soft, pleading kisses over her face.
“Don’t fight . . . please, baby . . . try to relax, and the pain will ease.”
He stroked damp hair from her brow and watched as she swallowed huge breaths, forcing herself to do as he instructed.
“Better?” he asked, as he sensed the tension leave her.
She nodded and licked her kiss-swollen lips.
He chased her tongue back inside her mouth and bit it lightly before losing himself again in a long, breathless kiss. On a groan of passion too long denied, he began moving inside her.
Slow and shallow, he stroked her, then faster and deeper as her body conformed to the size of him, and she rose against him in pleasure instead of pain. But the reality of loving her was more powerful than the expectation had ever been, and too soon he lost the ability to pace, to hold back for her sake.
Her body gripped him like a tight velvet fist, sweetly milking him of his strength, greedily stripping him of his control. On a riotous rush of sheer animal need, he cried out her name and plunged deep, spilling his passion, losing himself in the rich, mind-melting haven she offered.
Inside her small suburban house all things remained the same. In the background the TV droned softly and the flickering candle threw dancing shadows across the ceiling. George whined in his sleep and curled into a tighter ball on the rug by the window.
But January Stewart was irrevocably changed.
At thirty-two, the loss of her virginity should have been cause for celebration. That a man like Michael—a man she loved—had taken it should have been cause for joy. Yet the room’s unnatural quiet where moments ago there had been thunder invited neither.
Something was drastically wrong. She could feel it in the controlled way Michael’s breath fanned her shoulder, in the undeniable thread of tension strung through the powerful male body pressed against her side. Yes, something was wrong . . . and she knew without questioning why that it was her fault.
She shivered involuntarily. Michael reached across her and snagged the quilt from the sofa. Without a word he covered them both, then lay on his back beside her. Stacking his hands beneath his head, he stared broodingly at the ceiling.
She wanted to dissolve like a stain into the carpet. Since that wasn’t an option, and since she could no longer stand his censuring silence, she sat up, clutched the quilt to her breast, and reached for her discarded sweater.
A gentle hand on her arm stayed her.
Statue still, she closed her eyes and waited.
“I’m sorry, January.” His soft words grated like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. His silence had already told her how sorry he was. It hurt more somehow to actually hear the words. Had it been good for him, he wouldn’t feel the need to apologize. Had she known how to please him, she wouldn’t feel so foolish.
She bowed her head and huddled deeper inside herself. “It’s all right,” she said, feeling awkward and inadequate and anything but all right.
He swore fiercely and in one smooth motion tugged her back down onto her back. Looming over her, he met her eyes with a look of unbridled anger. “There is nothing right about it.” He sucked in a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were dark with his effort to stay under control. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine,” she answered pridefully.
“Dammit, you are not fine. And I’m the biggest fool to ever unzip a fly.”
She rolled her head to the side, avoiding his look of disgust.
“I promised you we’d make love,” he went on angrily, “and instead I practically attack you! Your first time and I got so wrapped up in wanting you I took you on the floor. On the floor, for God’s sake!”
She turned to face him, shaken by the self-loathing in his voice. In his eyes she saw something that made her stop and rethink everything he had said. Vulnerability. The censure in his voice had been unmistakable, but the one he was blaming was himself. He wasn’t disappointed in her for being inadequate, but in himself for losing control.
If relief were sweeter, she’d have died from it. If love were stronge
r, she couldn’t have borne it. Touching a hand to his hair, she met his eyes with a direct and forgiving gaze. “If there was an attack, Michael, I’m the one who launched it.”
He shook his head. “I was rough with you. I didn’t want it to be like that. . . . But lady, you took me by storm, and before I knew what was happening, it was all over but the thunder.” He pressed her hand, palm open, against his chest, where she could feel his heart still rumbling like the distant reminder of that storm. “I wanted to go so slow with you.”
With a sharp, feminine thrill, she felt him growing hard once more where his hips pressed against her thigh.
“And dammit, here I am . . . already wanting you again.”
Emboldened and inflamed by his arousal, she moved against him and offered a solution. “Then go slow. This time . . . go slow.”
He smiled and gave her a blood-thickening, pulse-quickening kiss, then picked her up and carried her to her bed. Taking a washcloth from the bathroom and ignoring her embarrassed protests, he gently and thoroughly washed both the proof of his passion and the proof of her innocence from her thighs.
Then, as though time didn’t exist or ceased to matter, he proceeded to teach her a whole new definition of slow.
Slow became the smooth glide of his fingers across her face. Slow became the unforgivingly languid journey of his mouth as it charted an erotic, seductive course across her heated skin.
She moaned and sank deeper into the covers, not at all sure she was going to survive slow, as with timeless, torturous leisure he introduced her to sensations she’d never dreamed existed, to pleasures so exquisite they flirted with pain, and finally to a love she’d never believed was real.
She rose to meet his hot lazy kisses, arched into his lush tongue strokes as he made love to her breast, reshaping her with his clever hands, suckling her with a stunning combination of lips and teeth and tongue.
With the same sensuous fervor, he worshipped the pale flesh of her belly before moving on to the sensitive silk of her inner thighs, where he incited her to a restless, reckless yearning for more of what was yet unknown.
Breathless, she cried his name.
Shameless, she begged him for more until, when she was drugged from his passionate loving yet feeling more alive than she’d ever felt a right to be, he finally poised above her.
Stunned, exalted, she opened to him like a long-shaded window to the first sweet promise of sunshine.
His mouth covered the moan that escaped her parted lips as he entered her . . . slow . . . full . . . throbbing.
And the sensations began again. Deeper this time, richer, as he filled a void she had never known was so empty, completed a story she’d never known had such a glorious end.
With his tenderness and honest passion he penetrated a barrier that was as emotional as it was physical and opened a pathway for trust to break through.
Eight
Michael recovered slowly. January was wrapped tightly in his arms, the heat from her body lulling him, her sweet scent surrounding him. She lay so still, it was a long while before he realized she was awake and staring into the darkness.
He nuzzled the underside of her jaw, discovering a spot he hadn’t yet explored to his satisfaction.
“I take it the lady liked slow,” he whispered.
She groaned and burrowed deeper under the covers.
The hand lazily caressing her breast stilled. “What’s this?” he asked, coming up on one elbow.
She shook her head.
He leaned across her and switched on the bedside light.
“Uh-uh,” he murmured, tugging down the sheet she’d drawn over her face. He watched, fascinated, as a slow, pretty blush crept up her neck and flooded her cheeks. Finally, finally, he understood.
So it took a ton of bricks to penetrate his thick skull. He was entitled to a little postecstasy stupidity . . . but not at her expense. She’d left him breathless. Evidently she’d left him senseless, too, or he’d have recognized her insecurity right away.
“Don’t hide from me, January.” He touched her face. He couldn’t stop touching her. “Not ever. I want to see how you look after I love you. I want to see that beautiful flush on your cheeks and know I put it there.”
He pushed the sheet lower, then watched in reverent fascination as he framed a lush white breast in the V between his thumb and index finger. “I want to see your pretty breasts, all rosy and swollen from my mouth. And here,” he whispered, sliding the sheet even lower. Very gently he traced the curve of her waist, the sharp, delicate point of her hip, then the smooth skin of her inner thigh. “I want to see you here.”
As a kid and at his sexual peak he’d never been a marathon man. Yet this woman, with just a look, repeatedly turned him to steel. Enthralled, he watched the slender lines of her throat as she swallowed and met his eyes, eyes he knew had gone all languid and smoky again with newly fired passion. For her sake he banked it.
“Lord, you are beautiful,” he murmured. “Do you have any idea what it does to a man when a woman comes apart for him the way you did for me? The way you moved beneath me, the low, lusty sounds you made?”
She shook her head.
He smiled because he realized she honestly didn’t know. “It makes him think he owns the whole circus, sweetheart.” He leaned down and whispered a kiss over her pink nipple, then suckled it into a tight velvet peak. “It makes him want to leap tall buildings, beat on his chest with his fists, and shout to the world at large that he’s a man. A man with a woman who satisfies him like no other woman ever has.”
That finally won him a smile . . . a smile laced with tentative and surprised pride and so much vulnerability it made his heart ache. With a possessive groan he drew her against his side. “And makes him think he can slay his lady’s dragons,” he added, tucking her head under his chin.
Immediately she stiffened, sensing the direction his conversation was leading.
“No, baby, don’t,” he said, knowing he was rushing her but needing this from her now more than ever. “Talk to me, January.” He pulled back so he could see her face. “Tell me what he did to hurt you, so I can make it better.”
She tried to look away. He wouldn’t let her.
“After what we just shared,” he said, “you’ve got to know how much I care about you. Don’t shut me out any longer.”
“It’s too much, Michael,” she said, shaking her head. “And too soon. I need a little time to get used to . . .” She made a vague gesture to the room in general. “. . . to all of this.”
“Time,” he echoed, unable to conceal the hurt in his voice. “Time to figure out more ways to hide your feelings like you just tried to hide your body?”
When she bit her bottom lip and held her silence, he swore softly. “January, I have tried,” he said, as disappointment and anger knotted in his gut. “Dammit, I’ve tried to give you time. Now I need something from you. What just happened between us was spectacular, and I won’t believe for a minute that you weren’t responding to me emotionally as well as physically. Your reactions were honest and real, and the intensity rocked me to my toenails. But don’t you see that if you still can’t trust me, then we made love for all the wrong reasons?”
He clawed a hand through his hair, struggling to find a way to make her understand his frustration. “As wonderful as it was, I let you down tonight,” he said, his voice gentling. “I swore that when we made love, it would be after you realized you could trust me.”
“I do trust you,” she insisted.
“With your body,” he said, feeling defeated.
Her eyes were pleading and overbright as she touched a hand to his cheek. “Yes.”
He turned his mouth into her palm. “It’s not enough.”
Tears crowded her eyes, and when she spoke it was in a soft, tortured whisper. “It’s as much as I’m capable of. It’s
more than I ever thought possible. Please, Michael, can’t you accept it as enough?”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” He heard the ache in his voice and didn’t try to conceal it. “You still don’t realize that I love you.”
Her beautiful brown eyes darkened with what he refused to accept was fear.
“Don’t do this,” she begged.
“I’m not doing anything. You’re the one who’s reducing this to conditions.” Frustrated, he lay back and stared sightlessly at the ceiling.
He couldn’t believe what was happening. They’d just shared something that should have ended with a sense of beauty and bonding. He’d told her what he’d never told another woman, and she was acting like he’d committed murder.
She cared for him. Dammit, she loved him, he knew she did! What he didn’t know was why she wouldn’t let herself accept it.
Sighing heavily, he turned his head on the pillow. She was watching him. The look in her eyes finally made him realize that if there was one truth in what she was telling him, it was that she needed more time.
Think, man, he mentally blasted himself. If he’d learned anything from dealing with Toby, it was that a child who’d been the victim of abuse or neglect repressed the feelings that hurt him the most. It was his only way to deal with the pain and still survive. January wasn’t a child. That didn’t mean her memories weren’t still painful. If what Toby’s psychologist told him ran true to form, then January, too, had been dealing—or not dealing—with her memories for years by shoving them as far away as she could. Tonight she’d given him a glimpse of the past that haunted her. He’d be a fool to think she’d be ready yet to entrust him with traumas she’d spent a lifetime suppressing.
He’d be a bigger fool if he didn’t give her the time she asked for. She was worth the wait. If the way she had come alive in his arms that night was any indication of what lay in store, she was worth any wait.
Groaning, he again pulled her against his side. “Okay,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her temple. “I’ll accept your conditions—for now. But someday you are going to realize you can count on me. For anything. For everything. Nothing you’ve done, nothing that’s happened to you, could make me love you less. Nothing.”