He took his time kissing her, delicately tracing her lips with the tip of his tongue and then following with a stronger thrust and parry, his mouth fierce and seeking. She found herself responding with unprecedented ardor. With a soft moan of pleasure at her eager response, he slid his hands down her body to her buttocks and pulled her to him, so that the full length of their bodies was pressed together, crushing the aching round fullness of her breasts against his chest.
She was swept away on a tide of sensation, was lost in it. Her head was swimming, floating, dizzy, and she had the unexpected sensation of drowning in his kisses. Kissing Stuart Adams was like nothing she had ever experienced before, a mad delirium fraught with possibilities that she had heretofore only imagined. And imagination was never like this, never so exquisite, never so incredibly real.
Her dress dropped to her feet, pooling in soft folds around her ankles, and Stuart continued to kiss her as he tucked his fingers into her panties. Slowly, so slowly that she almost stopped breathing, he peeled the gauzy fabric downward. Now she stood before him completely naked, terrified that he wouldn’t like the way she looked.
“Angel,” he said reverently, unable to take his eyes off her. “Oh, Angel.”
No feeling in the world could ever compare to the way she felt when he looked at her with such adoration. She felt humility in the presence of his admiration, and she felt wonder, and joy. She pleased him.
It should have been enough to have him looking at her that way, but all she could think was that, as much as her body was for him, his was for her. She reached for his belt and began to unbuckle it.
Belt, hook, zipper, underwear, and finally hot, pulsing flesh. He gasped as she released him from his briefs. She dared to look at him, her eyes eager, her hands ready to learn the geography of this man who was now her husband, and who was kissing her, touching her, evoking her hidden sensuality. She closed her eyes and sent herself into a darkness where sensation was all; she wrapped her fingers around him, exploring the hard ridges and folds of his sex, learning him by touch, knowing the powerful exultation of possession.
His rough beard bit into her chin, his hands claimed her breasts. She heard her own breathing harsh in her throat, and she couldn’t inhale enough air, couldn’t get her breath, was gasping with a wildness that was totally foreign to the Angel McCabe she had been only a few minutes ago. Every fantasy she had ever had about Stuart Adams or about any other man came alive for her, and suddenly she knew what she had been missing her whole life. This. This magic, this pleasure, this unadulterated bliss.
She opened her eyes and gazed into his. They were beyond beauty, beyond lust, conveying an animal hunger for who and what she was. She knew in that instant that she really was beautiful because he made her feel that way. And she belonged to him, not only because of the vows they had spoken, but because their mission was to create a child together.
He shifted his stance and, taking her cue from him, she reached for the hard, muscular curves of his buttocks. He supported her with one arm as the other slid down and between her legs to weave his fingers into the soft curls. She closed her eyes in sheer rapture as the warmth spread from her molten center toward her stomach, toward her thighs, in ever-radiating circles.
She wanted to tell him how to touch her so that her pleasure could increase, but he seemed to know instinctively. When she had turned to liquid in his arms, when she was ready to flow into him, become part of him, he suddenly positioned her so that her pelvis rode against him, against his maleness, rocking against her in an ever-quickening rhythm.
In a surge of abandon, she thought that if this was what making love could be like, she wanted to do nothing else until the day she died. He must have sensed the depth of her mood, her utter recklessness, because he drew back to look at her, but she only pulled his head down again into a deep, passionate kiss that was meant to signal her readiness.
She felt herself throbbing with the rhythm of his body, breathing with the rhythm of his breath. It was as if her heart and her mind opened to him, making way for her body to open, as well. She wanted to become one with him, to absorb his taste and his smell and his pulse and his passion, to hold him inside her, making him hers and only hers. As she already was his.
Stuart lifted her into his arms, sliding her body upward and inward until her legs wrapped around his waist. He kissed her, deeply, hungrily, his mouth leaving hers only to murmur against her lips, “Let’s make a baby, Angel.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised that she could still speak. “Yes, Stuart. Oh, yes.”
* * *
IF BABIES are the product of pure passion, thought Angel, then we will make a baby for sure.
There was nothing shy about Stuart or about her, but he seemed to want to take his time, to draw out their lovemaking. What had happened on the terrace was only the beginning; he made that clear as he stood over her after he deposited her on the silk-curtained bed, his eyes intently absorbed as they worshiped her body.
This is foreplay, he seemed to be saying to her as he made love to her with his eyes, and for the first time she understood what the prelude to the sex act was all about. It was more than kissing, more than mere touching. It was waiting and wanting and aching and knowing enough to realize that there was so much more.
She wondered if her own anticipation showed in her eyes. Stuart Adams was a magnificent specimen of man, powerfully aroused. At the sight of his body hard and beautiful in the carven perfection of his sex, she was overcome with a sudden, sharp heat in her loins. Her chest rose and fell with increased excitement, and when he took her outstretched hand in one of his, she felt a sensation so new, so incredible, that she could only marvel at it.
“Stuart,” she said, barely able to articulate his name.
“I think you want me as much as I want you,” he said softly.
“Yes,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment, then placed his hand possessively on her breast. “You’ll have to tell me the things you’d like me to do as we make love,” he said.
She felt tears welling behind her eyelids. No one had ever asked her before. Even as she fought the urge to tell him this, her nipple hardened against the callus on his palm, and slowly and gently he massaged until it tightened into a knot that he drew between his fingers, evoking a tugging sensation deep in her abdomen.
“Do you like this?” he asked.
She nodded, unable to speak. He touched her other nipple. “And this? Do you like this?” Her breast swelled to fit his hand, and he laughed low in his throat before bending his head to her neck, where he blew the loose wisps of silvery gold hair aside and nuzzled the sensitive skin beneath her ear. She placed her trembling hands on the sides of his head, winding her fingers through the shiny dark curls.
“I like everything,” she said, absorbing this truth into her reality. She, who had never registered more than a lukewarm response to Howard, was fully enjoying being made love to in Stuart’s inimitable way.
“So do I,” he said, tracing the delicate curves of her ear with his tongue. The growing heat in her belly swirled down, down, and she opened her legs to make room for him. He settled there, his weight and warmth foreign to her, and yet as familiar as if they had done this many times before. She held him between the inner white flesh of her thighs and watched as, his cheeks shadowed by those incomparable dark lashes, he took the soft pink tip of one breast into his mouth, teasing, circling, elongating her nipple and working it with his tongue until she thought she would die of pleasure.
When she was sure that she couldn’t possibly be aroused any further, she caught a glimpse of the two of them in the mirrored wall opposite the bed. As he bent over her, she could see how his darker skin moved like a shadow against hers, how her fingers pressed hollows into the flex and ripple of the muscles in his back, could see the wet flash of his tongue as he abandoned one breast and with his mouth laid down a trail of liquid silver across her breastbone before drawing her other nipple between
his lips. He suckled there greedily, with barely audible sighs, and she felt her self dissolving, merging, losing its separateness.
She kissed his face, his hair, his eyes, and became immediately drunk with the taste and scent of him. Still he did not touch her where she longed to be touched. This was torture, the sweetest torture of all. She undulated her hips against him and reached for his hand, guiding it to the slit between her legs. She was fully wet now, and slippery, and he pressed his fingers into her moist recesses. He swiftly located the tender tip in which her whole being was now centered, circling gently and dipping occasionally into the warm, wet heat of her until she was breathless.
She arched toward him in frustration, wanting more, gasping, aching deep inside as he finally slid his body over hers.
“Look,” she said, her eyes darting toward the mirror and the two of them so passionately entwined. “Look at us.”
He turned his head, and in the mirror his eyes met and locked with hers. He groaned.
“Yes,” he said, and in the mirror she saw the moment he lost control, saw him driving into her, ramming into her as if he were a man demented. In that final moment, the world expanded and contracted into warm circles begetting spirals of need, and she convulsed around him in a spasm of joy and completion as their image in the mirror splintered into a hundred thousand sparkling shards of light.
In that delirious moment when he poured himself into her, when she was so primed to receive him, Angel knew that their baby would be conceived as a result of this act of love. Her body had welcomed Stuart Adams, and now her heart and mind and her very soul reached out to their baby, welcoming it into her, welcoming it home.
Chapter Six
When Angel woke up the next morning, she didn’t know where she was at first. She only knew that she was somewhere other than in her own bed and that a heavy arm was thrown across her thigh. She opened her eyes, still not knowing, and then she saw Stuart’s dark curly hair on the pillow beside her and remembered.
They were married.
Memories of the vows they had spoken weighed heavily on her heart. However, remembering the abandon with which they had given themselves to each other last night, for the first time she realized that she was going to find a lot to like about being married to Stuart Adams.
Carefully she dislodged his arm and turned onto her side so that she could look at her husband. He lay on his back, his body striped by the lemon yellow light sifting through the louvers at the window, bed covers kicked aside to reveal him in all his glory. Angel slowly took in the sight: the strong masculine symmetry of him, the utter handsomeness of his face in repose, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He was beautiful.
And he was a practiced lover, one who took as much care about her own pleasure as he did his. From the moment he first touched her last night, she hadn’t even thought about faking her response. It hadn’t been necessary. With him, she thought with a thrill of happy anticipation, it probably never would be.
Stuart stirred in his sleep and rolled over on his side so that he was facing away from her, and she didn’t have the heart to disturb such a deep sleep. A shred of bright sunlight touched upon the pale curve of scar tissue to the left of his spine. Was it the result of an accident? An operation? She bent to look more closely, resisting the urge to run her fingers along it, to learn this part of him as well as she had learned every other. She made a mental note to ask him about it later.
After a few minutes, she slid carefully out of bed, pulled a thin robe out of the suitcase that she’d never even had time to unpack, and walked barefoot into the living room.
It was already after nine, late for someone who usually started her day at dawn. She slid the wide glass door open and stepped out onto the private terrace overlooking the water. The scene before her was framed by the palm trees planted in lush profusion around the hotel. The newly risen sun still hung low in the sky, and when she held out her hand, its rays gleamed upon the delicate gold beading around the edges of her wedding ring.
She started to slide the ring from her finger before remembering something she’d once heard her mother, who was born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, say. “It’s bad luck to take off your wedding ring before your first child is born,” Mama had told her. “Mayhap a woman never will have any babies if she takes off that ring beforehand.” Angel herself had certainly seen no point in wearing a wedding ring at all, but now that she had it, why tempt fate? Slowly she pushed the ring back over her knuckle and stared at it, scarcely believing that she was really a wife.
All right. So she was really married. She might as well believe it. And soon—she knew it with every fiber of her being—she would be a mother. But for now, she would have to get used to her new status. She would have to get used to this new husband of hers.
With that thought, Angel inhaled deeply of the fresh sea breeze. For a moment, she felt a sharp pang of longing for the island and everything that it represented to her—her work, her freedom and her solitude. Her sojourn there, before the advent of Stuart Adams, had been a halcyon time, full of beauty and sunshine and a peace that she’d never achieved anywhere else. She’d had her cat and her garden and her work, and she’d had the physical pleasures of swimming and snorkeling and sunbathing.
She had been afraid that she was going to lose at least some of those pleasures with the addition of Stuart to Halos Island, but she had learned last night that she had only added another pleasure to them, that of making love with him. She was in awe of the power of the act as they had performed it; she felt changed by it. She almost felt hopeful for their relationship, but in the same moment, she was afraid for herself. This was no real relationship; it was a sham of a marriage, arranged for only one purpose—lawful procreation.
“Angel?”
She turned quickly to see Stuart, his tall frame outlined against the flaming magenta blossoms of the bougainvillea vine climbing the side of the building. He had wrapped a white towel around his waist, and he hadn’t bothered to comb his hair.
Her heart quickened at the sight of him. With his hair mussed and his eyelids still droopy with sleep, he seemed boyish and vulnerable. Ah, but she knew the real Stuart now. The real Stuart was not merely the handsome, charming heir to a family fortune, he was a living, breathing, passionate human being. He was more than the father of her future child, the one that was surely being conceived even now deep within the mysterious inner folds of her body. He was a real person. And, at the moment, he only had eyes for her.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” she said, suddenly shy.
He walked to her swiftly and gathered her into his arms. “I missed you,” he said simply, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she lifted her lips for his kiss, all her doubts about him and their relationship and his intrusion into her life falling away.
She didn’t expect to be transported to a state of bliss by one good-morning kiss, but before it was over, she was clinging to him, her head spinning.
“I missed you when I woke up and you weren’t there,” he said, his lips moving against her hair.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, you have my permission to wake me up anytime you like,” he said.
“I always get up early. I’m usually out in the field by this time,” she said in a rush. She had no idea what she was supposed to say to a husband she hardly knew after a wedding night that must have broken all records for sheer sensuality. Stuart was an indefatigable lover, thorough and inventive. Remembering now how they had made love over and over, she felt a flush spreading upward from her neck. Stuart noticed and smiled, bending his head to touch his lips to her rosy cheek. He then slid the robe off her shoulders and deliberately spread his hands over her breasts, shaping them to the curves of his palms.
She closed her eyes, drawing the sensation deep inside her, using it to recall the passion of the night before. She had been a passionate person the
n; had it been a fluke? Or had that passionate side of her nature become part of the person she really was, the Angel McCabe she had thought she never could be? And if she was this new person—this passionate, sexy woman—what had happened to the person she used to be? Was that Angel gone forever?
Or was it the world that had changed, not her? No, she thought as she opened her eyes, the rest of the world continued as it had before. Somewhere she heard hedge clippers grooming shrubbery; birds sang as they built nests in hollows beneath terra cotta roof tiles. The world was not taking note of her response to Stuart’s considerable sexual prowess. It didn’t care that a few short hours after they had fallen asleep, exhausted and besotted after a spectacular wedding night, Stuart Adams was touching her, wanting her, making her want him again.
“Let me see you in the sunshine,” he whispered, dropping her robe to the floor and kicking it away with one impatient foot.
She didn’t like him looking at her, though she knew that, as her husband, he had every right. On the other hand, she certainly enjoyed looking at him—at the wide, muscled chest, with its two dark nipples nestled among whorls of black hair, at the taut skin of his abdomen, at the part of him that so blatantly declared his maleness.
He ran his hands over the arc of her hips. “Your body pleases me,” he said, close to her ear. “You please me.”
She swallowed, afraid to show him how happy these statements made her. “Shouldn’t we go inside? Someone might see us,” she said.
He chuckled. “This is the honeymoon suite. We’re supposed to act like honeymooners.” He touched the tip of his tongue to her earlobe.
“I think I could get to like what honeymooners do,” she said unsteadily as her nipples drew into hard little nubs.
He must have noticed his effect on her, because his fingers soon found those little nubs and rolled them, slowly and gently, until she tingled all the way down to her toes. He bent his head until his tongue swirled moisture on one uptilted nipple, then the other, and his fingers resumed their circling. “Honeymooners do a lot more than this,” he said, in between leisurely tastes of her breasts, her shoulder, the soft skin stretched across her sternum. “By the way, Mrs. Adams, we’re assured of complete privacy on the terrace, as well as in the bedroom. I read it on a placard in the bathroom.”
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