by Ann Jacobs
But too much had gone down between them. Too many harsh words had been said. Sam stood there shivering as the storm raged outside the little cabin, trying to think of her as just another woman with a problem—just another woman who’d asked him for his help.
It didn’t work. This was Marcy, and the only help she’d ever needed from him, he’d failed to give. A tree crashed down outside, the clattering noise sending her into his arms, the towel apparently forgotten. “Take care of me, Sam,” she whispered, clutching his shoulders as she pressed her breasts hard against his chest. Belly to belly, thigh to thigh, her softness to his rougher, harder planes. The way it should be, male protecting female, giving her safety and strength.
His balls tightened, and his cock swelled against her silky mons. Years fell away, resentment forgotten as the thunder roared and the wind sluiced noisily among the trees and vines outside. As the walls of the cabin shook with the strength of Kellen, Sam trembled in unison with Marcy. It was as though the thin veneer of civilized behavior shattered like the windowpanes, leaving only male and female and unquenched need.
Animal lust. The compulsion to sink his cock into her hot wet cunt and pump her until his semen flooded her womb. To feel her heat and see her face flush when she came. To hear her scream his name, smell the scent of sex flowing between them. To suck her clit and her breasts and taste her honey on his tongue just one more time.
Out of control, Sam lifted Marcy, bracing her back against the quaking wall. “Put your legs around my waist,” he ordered, his tone urgent, terse to his own ears as he flexed his hips and mated their bodies.
No one else had ever made her feel so full, so taken. The storm that raged outside was nothing compared with the one that erupted in her heart when Sam thrust home. Naked flesh to naked flesh, sensation she’d denied herself for five long years of lovers wearing condoms for her protection and their own. His thick cock head stretched her, sliding sensuously within her well-lubricated pussy, nudging her womb. Long, impossibly hard yet smooth as velvet, his cock claimed her, driving her harder into the rough, wooden wall with every pistoning of his narrow hips.
Her nipples throbbed, wanting his attention there too. His hands were busy, kneading her ass cheeks, lifting her. Opening her for his next forceful thrust, his thumbs caressing her anus, as though he intended to fuck her there too.
As though he read her mind, knew her need, he dipped his head, took one distended nipple between his teeth and nipped it sharply before drawing it into the moist heat of his mouth and suckling.
Her pussy clenched around his cock, the sensation one of rightness. She felt possessed as she hadn’t for five long years. Overwhelmed, she let her head loll back against the wall, closing her eyes and ears against the storm that raged around them. All that mattered was here. Now. Sam. The white-hot fire that spread from her pussy to her ass to her breasts. Even her brain tingled when the bubble of desire burst and she shattered into a quivering heap, held upright in Sam’s strong arms.
Mastered. Satisfied as none of the meaningless string of lovers ever had…as she now knew no one else could. Sam had claimed her once. Now he claimed her again. Whether because of lust or nostalgia or animal need to mate in the face of death, she had no idea. It didn’t matter. Marcy could fuck a thousand men, but she was certain no one but Sam could ever make her feel like this.
“Oh, baby. Yeah. Squeeze me. Like that. God, you’re wringing me dry.” His scalding semen bathed her cervix, her womb in powerful bursts that seemed to go on forever. Clasping her tightly, he laid her on the bed and lay down beside her, still breathing hard.
It was after they’d lain there a long time that she noticed the wind no longer moaned all around them, and the driving rain had become a gentle shower. “I think the storm has passed.”
“No, baby. We’re in the eye of the storm.”
Chapter Three
Calm. Cool, damp air rich with the smells of Earth surrounded them as they sprawled on the tangled sheets. Marcy laid her head on Sam’s chest, the way she always used to after they’d made love. He stroked the silky skin of her back, remembering.
Late nights when he’d come to her grainy-eyed from studying and she’d rolled over, warm and giving, welcoming him into her bed and her body. Lazy days they’d spent in bed and learned more about what made their bodies feel good than anything he’d studied in medical texts. Fun days when she’d dragged him out of his shell and taught him there was much more to life than studying and work and taking care of the basic human requirements for survival.
Yeah. The memories surrounded him, wrapped them in a special cocoon much like the one with which Hurricane Kellen had temporarily surrounded Cabbage Key. A cocoon through which Sam saw everything with rose-colored glasses, but one he knew would soon give way to the tempest of love and hate that had gripped him since that fateful day five years ago.
Unless…unless they could use these moments of suspended time to open old wounds and lance them so the venom would flow out and they might heal. Sam stilled his hand in the hollow of her spine. Thunder clapped in the distance, and bolts of lightning crackled. When she shuddered, he drew her closer.
He felt ambivalent, loving her as he did, yet hating the brittle, hedonistic woman she’d become since they’d split up. Blaming her—and himself—for severing a connection that had begun with childish innocence and withered with suspicion and accusations. His suspicion. His accusations. His refusal to believe her, not the scientific near-certainty that told him the baby she’d lost in the first trimester couldn’t have been his. Her turning a deaf ear each time he’d tried to apologize. To explain and beg for absolution.
His cock stirred again when she cradled his balls in her palm. A sweet gesture, one she’d made a thousand times when they’d lain like this in the aftermath of sex. Had she done the same with the faceless men she’d fucked in the past five years?
Damn it, he didn’t give a shit about the divorce. Marcy was his. She might have fucked half of Tampa, but she belonged to him. Would always belong to him.
“Sam?” When she turned her head, damp strands of her hair tickled his chest.
He lifted his head, looked down at her. Her eyes had turned the soft gray-green of a calm sea, the way they always did after they made love. It would be so easy to sweep the past away, start again as though this were a new relationship. No old hurts, no issues, no resentment.
The hell it would. If he wanted his wife back—and he did—he’d have to bare his soul, make her listen now to what she’d refused to hear back then. Make her understand and forgive him. Right. Make her forgive the unforgivable. He stroked her cheek, then brushed an uncharacteristically tousled strand of her hair off her forehead. “What is it?”
“I’m glad you came back. Glad we made love. Damn it, I’ve hated you for what seems like forever, but part of me still loves you too.”
“Me too. You snatched my heart when you were fifteen years old and never let it go. Will you listen to me now, let me try…”
“The baby was yours, Sam.”
“I know.” He should have known it from the start. It shouldn’t have taken DNA testing to make him believe. “I should have trusted you. I’m sorry. You’ve never let me tell you how sorry I was—how sorry I still am. Will you now?” He stroked her cheek, soothed an angry welt caused, he guessed, by the same sort of flying debris that had pelted him while he’d clawed his way to her.
The wind began to howl again, and rain sluiced through the shattered window, enlarging the puddle already on the rough wooden floor. Marcy shuddered. “I guess so. I don’t want to die not knowing what I did to make you believe I was unfaithful.”
“We’re not going to die. We’re going to live.” Recalling the rising tide and the devastation that he’d seen from the leading edge of the hurricane, Sam hoped to hell he wasn’t lying. “You didn’t do anything. It was me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m sterile, or so damn near it that the chances of
me fathering a child naturally are something like one in a million. I thought—”
“How long did you know that?” She sat up, riddled him with the kind of gaze he imagined she usually reserved for hostile witnesses in the courtroom. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
He had the decency to look abashed. “Since about six months after we quit using birth control. Don’t know why, but I decided to run tests on myself while I was sending in some samples from a patient’s husband. I didn’t tell you right away because I was fucking ashamed. Ashamed I couldn’t give you one thing every goddamn man should be able to give the woman he loves. Yeah, I know there are a lot of men who’ve got my problem—I see a good many of them in my office—but I’ve never run into a one who wasn’t devastated, hearing that kind of news.”
So that was why Sam had turned surly. Why he’d closeted himself in his study every night with his goddamn medical journals and acted as though he didn’t give a damn when she told him she was pregnant. Finally she knew why he’d stammered around like a defendant caught on the stand in a lie whenever she’d tried to talk with him about the baby.
Marcy might understand his behavior now, but that didn’t mean she’d forgive him. “The one thing you owed me—besides your trust—was the truth. And you didn’t come through with it.”
“I know, but damn it, I tried to tell you. You weren’t willing to listen. Understandably,” he added before she could lay into him the way she wanted to. “You never gave me reason to think you were anything but faithful. You deserved my trust.”
The look in his eyes said it all. Sadness, regret, apology…and something else. Unresolved grief? “Sam, did you ever let yourself mourn for our baby?”
“Yes. What I’ve never let myself regret much until now was losing you. Knowing you were giving what belonged to me to half the guys in Tampa.”
She wanted to lay the blame for that back on him. Badly. Before she could form the words, the flimsy walls began to shake again. Her anger forgotten, she dived into Sam’s arms when an entire palmetto frond, torn by the storm from one of the tough plants, flew through the shattered window and landed not six inches from her side of the bed. She stared out the ruined window, transfixed, as a whole small tree the storm apparently had ripped by its roots from the sand flew by. Vegetation, chunks of roof and walls, even swirling sand all tossed about like seedpods in the wind. Would anything be left after the storm passed? An ominous roar rang in her ears. Water slapped against wood and shot under the door, undulating over the rough boards like a deadly serpent.
“Marcy. We’ll get through this. Just like we’ve managed to survive everything else. Right now we need to find something and block off that window. Sorry, baby, I should have thought about this before the wind started blowing again.” He hugged her hard, then rolled to the edge of the bed, waded through the rising puddle of water on the floor, and started taking the bathroom door off its hinges.
Funny how being close to Sam seemed to calm her fear. Firmly refusing to think about what might come through that window next, Marcy slid out of the bed to help. “How are you going to keep the wind from sending that door flying?”
“We’ll prop it with that dresser. It ought to be heavy enough.”
Marcy gave the knotty-pine armoire a tentative shove. “It’s heavy enough that I can’t move it.”
“Together, I think we can manage.” Setting the door flat on the floor, he added his strength to hers. Droplets of water glowed on his tanned, muscular body, slithering over his bulging muscles each time he leaned into the heavy chest. By the time they got the window blocked, they both were panting and soaked. “Now we can be fairly well assured that nothing’s going to fly in here and skewer us. Grab some towels out of the bathroom and let’s dry off as best we can. Much as I like looking at you naked, I don’t want to get the blankets soaked.”
“What about the water? It’s rising awfully fast.”
“That’s the storm surge. I don’t expect it will come much higher, and it’ll recede soon enough as the storm blows out to sea.” Sam’s voice lacked its usual authority and assurance.
Maybe…but maybe not. Perhaps they’d be swept away on the wind, never to be heard from again. Damn it, she didn’t want to die, but if this was going to end up being their watery grave, she wasn’t about to leave so much unresolved. So much resentment where there used to be so much love. Lying back on the bed, she forced a smile. “Let’s make this time for us…now. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. Please, for God’s sake, love me now.” The roar outside subsided, replaced by an even more ominous quiet. Another lull as Kellen gathered her destructive strength to strike again.
He sat beside her, regarding her sternly as though she were an errant child begging for absolution of her sins. For some reason, that look got her juices flowing even thicker, as did his next words. “If you want me, babe, it’s got to be just me. You’ve got to take me for better or worse, the way I am.”
Was he talking about his sterility or her other lovers? It didn’t matter, because she wanted him now, whatever the terms. “I do.” Reaching out, she laid a hand on his thigh, thrilled at the reflexive tightening she saw in his balls, the stiffening of his big, thick cock. “I always have. You just didn’t believe me.”
He took the towel he’d been drying with and pressed it to a damp spot in the hollow around her belly button. “I didn’t care about you obeying me when I was a wet-behind-the-ears kid, but I do now. Show me now you want a guy who can’t give you a baby and didn’t have the balls to tell you when he first found out, the way you proved to everyone when we were kids that the ultimate princess could actually get hot for the bookworm nerd I used to be. Do it if you really want me now. Get me hot, baby. We both know you know how.”
Yes, Marcy knew how. “Like this?” she asked, sitting up and raking her nails gently up the inside of his thigh, then stopping to rub the pad of her thumb gently over the soft curly hair that cushioned his sex.
“Oh yeah.” His cock lengthened and thickened, rising up against a belly whose muscular ridges were more defined than she remembered.
God, he was gorgeous. His chest muscles rippled when he moved, and the light sheen of sweat made his body glow golden in the dim light. He might have started out an ugly duckling, but he’d turned into the sort of guy women would fall all over. “How many lovers have you had, darling?” She encircled his erection with one hand, caressed his heavy scrotum with the other.
“None that matter now. Damn. I’ve missed you. Missed this.” When he cupped her breasts, with his large warm hands, her nipples began to tingle.
His big hands on her hips, he urged her to lie back down, following her and continuing the sensual massage. “I want to feel your mouth on me. Your hands. Oh yeah, you make me so hot…” His words faded into a rumbling sort of purr, made her glad she was a woman—his woman.
She trailed hot, wet kisses along his jaw, loving the feel of his late-afternoon stubble abrading her lips before moving lower, along his throat. His coppery nipples hardened when she bathed them with her tongue, and when she flicked his navel, he shuddered.
“You know, I always liked the taste of this,” she murmured when she licked away a glistening drop of fluid from the tip of his big, beautiful cock.
“But you didn’t like doing anything more than tasting.”
“I know. But I know you like it. And it’s something I’ve never done for any other man.” Taking a deep breath, she took him in her mouth, hoping she’d do it well enough to please him.
It felt right, doing for him what she’d never done for any other lover. Tangling her fingers in his soft pubic curls, she cupped his balls, rolling them gently between her palms while she used her tongue to map the velvety surface of his cock, each vein and ridge and pulsating inch of the shaft. Every inch around the ridge of the corona. She sucked the plum-like head of him, eagerly tasting his essence. When she backed off and lapped at the dimpled slit at its tip, he grasped her head and lifted it, forcing h
er to meet his glittering gaze.
“I wanted you to get me hot. Well, whether it was what you said or the feel of you giving me what you’ve never given anybody else, or a little bit of both, I’m on fire. My balls are ready to burst. Come here. My turn now.” He drew her up the length of his body. “Sit on my face. I’m hungry.”
He’d never let her grow hair here again. Her wet, swollen labia felt satiny to his tongue, gave him easy access he’d never considered as a benefit when examining a woman who was shaved. Of course he never examined them with his tongue. He licked the slick folds now, loving the taste of her honey, loving more the knowledge that her cunt still wanted him. Her rigid little clit, always sensitive, seemed to swell more when he took it between his teeth.
When he reached up and found her breasts she whimpered, sinking down on him. He opened his lips and sampled more of her glistening flesh, flailing her swollen clit with his tongue as he tugged on her nipples. He loved the sound of her breathy scream that carried even over the booms of thunder in the distance.
She squirmed on him, as though wanting more, then rose on her knees. “Fuck me, Sam. Fuck me now. Put your big, beautiful cock in me and make love to me until I can’t hear the roar of the wind. Fuck me until there’s nothing on my mind but you.”
He wanted her on her knees, helpless, her naked pussy gleaming, her cunt and anus open and inviting his rock-hard cock. Submissive, offering whatever he chose to take. But despite her raw plea, he sensed she needed more. To see his face, feel his touch and return it. Taste herself on his lips and drown out the noise of the storm with the wet, primal sounds of mating.