It ended all too soon as far as Serena was concerned, but her heart filled with hope. He had made the first move this time. He had kissed her. It was a beginning. More of a beginning than she thought she would ever have.
Her spirits soared. A slow smile spread across her face. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is something better than a bath.”
“You think so?” he asked with an answering grin. “You must mean food. Let’s go get you fed.”
Matt carried her back to the cave, where he gave her a cup of broth containing chunks of softened jerky.
Serena’s shrunken stomach could hold only about half of what Matt gave her. While he held her on his lap and combed the tangles from her hair, she fell asleep.
He held her against his chest, her head on his shoulder, and ran his fingers from her scalp clear down to the ends of her silky hair. Again and again his fingers threaded through the long black and white tresses, lifting them to the heat of the fire. He tried not to remember that sharp stab of terror he had felt when the black and white scalp had landed in his lap.
Trying not to remember didn’t help. He clenched his fist around a handful of hair and pressed it against his lips. With eyes squeezed shut, he kept feeling the terror, seeing that scalp again and again. Thank God, thank God it hadn’t been hers.
When her hair was dry, he laid her on his bedroll spread out beside the fire. Before drawing the blanket up, he gave in to the need to simply look at her.
The number of bruises on her golden skin appalled him. When he’d first seen her lying naked in the cabin he had thought most of what covered her was dirt. He’d been wrong. A smudge of purple discolored one cheek. Finger-sized bruises marked her upper arms, her waist, her thighs, her breasts.
What set his blood to boiling, what made him wish once again that Scott was still alive so Matt could strangle him slowly, were the teeth marks forming twin curved lines above and below one dusky nipple.
As he covered her with the blanket, his hands shook.
Matt was still awake several hours later, staring out the mouth of the cave into the darkness, when Serena began thrashing and moaning in her sleep, fighting to throw off the blanket.
He’d let the fire burn down, and all that remained were glowing coals. In the dim light, he knelt beside Serena and touched a hand to her bare shoulder.
She came awake with a start, a soundless scream working her throat.
“It’s all right,” he said quickly. “It’s only me, sweetheart. You were having a bad dream, that’s all.”
Serena couldn’t control the shudder that ripped through her from head to toe, nor the fierce pounding of her heart. She looked up at Matt, his face bathed in the orange-red glow of the dying embers, and felt tears sting her eyes. With a silent plea, she leaned up and reached her arms out to him. “Oh, Matt, hold me. Please hold me.”
When his arms came around her, she gasped at the warmth of his bare chest against her naked breasts. God, he felt so good.
“Shh. It’s okay. I’ll hold you,” he crooned softly.
It was an effort for Matt to speak at all with her cold-hardened nipples drilling little holes in his chest and the feel of her long, silky hair beneath his hands. Beneath the hair draped across her shoulders, his calloused fingers touched soft, bare skin.
She trembled and let out a sob. Matt tightened his arms around her.
“Make it go away, Matt,” she whispered against his shoulder. “Make it go away.”
Her hot tears burned his skin. His own stung his eyes. “I will, Rena, I promise. Just tell me what it is, and I’ll make it go away.”
She cried softly against his shoulder. It was a long time before she spoke, then her words came slowly, haltingly, as if she had trouble getting them out.
“It’s…him. His touch. In my sleep, I feel his hands on me, and I can’t stand it! I can’t! Make it stop, Matt, please. Make it go away.”
Her tearful plea pierced his heart and brought a lump to his throat. He lowered her to the bedroll and lay down next to her. “Shh,” he whispered. He sipped hot tears from her cheeks. “It’ll be all right, honey.”
God, please let it be all right, he prayed. After all she had been through in the past weeks, would she ever get over it, ever forget it? Please let her forget. Help me help her.
Not knowing what else to do, Matt trailed tiny kisses across her face until her tears stopped. She lay on her back, he on his side, barely touching her with his body. He raised up on one elbow and leaned over her face. “Look at me, Rena. Open your eyes.”
Shimmering pools of blue blinked up at him. Such trusting eyes. He lowered his mouth to hers. Just before their lips met, he whispered, “Keep your eyes open.”
Serena tried. She really did. But when the gentle, tender kiss turned heated, her lids grew heavy. Warmth filled her veins as his tongue stroked hers. Emotions held in check for weeks burst forth, making her head reel with pleasure.
When he tore his mouth away, they were both gasping for air. “Kiss me again,” she begged. “I can forget everything when you kiss me.”
He obliged her with a kiss so searing it made her squirm. A heaviness throbbed low in her belly. She tried to turn toward him, but his hands on her shoulders stopped her. He drew back slightly, not breaking the kiss, but lessening its intensity.
When he raised his head, he smiled and whispered, “You closed your eyes.”
Her eyes fluttered open, and she answered his smile. “I know.”
Matt’s smile slowly died. “Keep them open, Rena. I’m going to touch you.” He stroked her bruised cheek with one finger. “I’m going to wipe away his touch with mine.” He lightly kissed her cheek, then pulled back and looked at her, his eyes dark and serious. “Keep them open and look at my face. Know it’s me touching you. Just me. No one else.”
His lips followed his fingers across her shoulder and down one arm until he had touched and kissed every bruise in his path. His voice, his words, hypnotized her. She watched his face and saw his pained expression when he reached the teeth marks on her breast.
He traced the bruises with his fingers. “See? It’s just me. There’s nothing left but my touch. Mine is the only touch you’ll remember.”
Slowly, deliberately, he lowered his head. Her pulse raced. His tongue traced the same path his fingers had followed. Then his lips settled over her nipple and she gasped. Heat rushed through her veins and centered where his lips met her flesh. Yes, she thought fiercely. Yours is the touch I’ll remember for the rest of my life. No one but you will ever touch me again.
Serena grasped the bedroll beneath her with both hands to keep from touching him. She was afraid to move, afraid the magic spell he weaved would be broken. Afraid he would remember she was only a little sister to him.
His fingers and lips touched every inch of her arms and torso down to her stomach. When he bypassed the place that throbbed for his touch the most and stroked his way down her thighs, she groaned aloud.
He touched and kissed his way down one thigh and up the other, then buried his face in the tight black curls at the juncture of her legs. His hot breath drew a moan from deep within her. She couldn’t help but move her hips against him.
His head came up slowly, then his gaze locked with hers. “No touch but mine. Not ever.”
Chapter Eighteen
Matt watched every flicker of her expression as he explored the silken secrets of her body. Her bright blue eyes darkened until they were almost black. Her mouth parted, gasping for breath. Was that her heartbeat, or his, thundering in his ears?
She groaned.
He got harder. Her response triggered an excitement beyond any he’d ever known. She came alive at this touch. The little whimpering sounds in her throat made his blood heat. The darker her eyes turned, the faster he breathed. She was like liquid fire in his arms. He bit the inside of his jaw to keep from whispering words that would shock her. Hot words of need and want and sex. Words he wouldn’t be able to take back.
He couldn’t give her that. All he could give her was this.
Serena’s very bones seemed to melt beneath his touch. His hand…oh, God, what was he doing to her with his hand? Could a person die from such exquisite pleasure? If so, she didn’t care.
Her hips raised and rotated with no direction from her mind. Her mind had ceased to function.
Matt’s voice was hoarse and strained in her ear. “That’s it, honey. Just let it happen. Look in my eyes and let it happen.”
Serena felt the throbbing between her legs grow. The pressure built until she whimpered with want of something she didn’t fully understand. But she never took her eyes from his. She strained upward with her hips, pushing against his hand, harder…harder. Climbing. Striving. Turning into a mass of wild, burning sensation.
Feelings, both emotional and physical, tore through her. Feelings so powerful, so out of her control, that for a moment fear threatened to douse the fire. Then she blinked, and Matt’s face came back into focus. The fear melted into nothing, leaving her soaring free and high on the headiness of his touch.
Then came an explosion within her body that ripped her loose from the world. She half rose from the ground with a cry, her eyes widening as a thousand stars burst around her. Brown eyes became the center of her scattering universe.
With his mouth against hers, Matt caught her cry and shuddered as she fell apart in his arms. The urge to take her then and there rode him hard. So hard that for a moment, he thought he would lose the battle he fought.
Then he felt tears trickle down her cheeks to his lips. He sipped and tasted salt. God, what had he done? “Rena, Rena, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Beneath his lips, her cheek flexed. A smile?
“I didn’t know I was crying,” she whispered.
Matt raised his head. The look in her eyes took his breath away. She wasn’t hurt or angry or humiliated. She was none of the things he had feared her tears meant. She was…she was…the only word he could think of was glowing. Her eyes, her smile, her whole face glowed with physical satisfaction, with the new knowledge of her own body he had given her, and with an emotion so deep, so obvious, and so pointedly directed at him, he felt humbled. And scared. It was the look of a woman in love.
“Rena, I—”
“No.” She put her fingers over his lips. “Thank you.” She closed her eyes and replaced her fingers with her mouth. The softness of her mouth and the heat in his veins would not let Matt resist. He closed his eyes and kissed her back.
When they surfaced for air, Matt found himself on his back with Serena draped across his chest, one of her legs tucked between his.
“Thank you,” she said again. “I knew it had to be good, but I had no idea anything could be so beautiful.”
He smiled sadly and held her close. “I know you didn’t. I’m not sure you should now. At least, not with me.”
“We’re not back to that again, are we? We’ve had this conversation before. If not you,” she said, running her hand through the hair on his chest, tracing a scar, “then who am I supposed to be with like this? Name him. Name the man I’m supposed to share myself with.”
Name the man. The thought had Matt grinding his teeth. She was playing him like a fish on a line, and they both knew it. He would kill any man who touched her. By the grin on her face, she knew that, too.
“Stop teasing me,” he told her.
Her grin faded, and her look turned bold. Deliberate. “I’m not teasing. I’m trying to get you to admit you don’t want another man touching me. Surely you weren’t being my brother just now.” She moved against him, her knee against his groin.
Matt squeezed his eyes shut and nearly groaned aloud. His arousal leaped in response to her touch “No.” The word came out through clenched teeth.
“That’s good. Because you know I could never let another man near me. Not now, not ever. I belong to you. Just as you belong to me.” She rubbed a palm down his chest toward his waist, then paused.
Matt sucked in a sharp breath. “Rena, no.” Between her knee, her hand, and her words, she was killing him. He pushed her knee away and covered his face with a bent arm.
“You gave me so much a few minutes ago.” Her knee brushed his groin again. “Why didn’t you give me this?”
He brushed her knee away without looking at her. “Don’t.”
His voice sounded so cold and stiff, Serena almost relented. But the hardness below his waist was still there. She could see it straining against his buckskins. “You gave me such pleasure, Matt. I only want to do the same for you. Show me what to do.”
“You’re not ready for this, Rena.”
Not ready? “How can you say that?”
Finally he took his arm from his face and looked at her. “You’re too…vulnerable right now. You’ve been kidnapped, abused…” He traced the raw flesh on her wrist. The gentleness of his touch, the pain in his eyes, made her want to weep.
“The bastard nearly raped you, damn it,” he said fiercely. “You need time to get past that.”
Serena’s heart rate doubled. He wasn’t saying no! He wasn’t telling her how wrong he was for her, or she for him! “How—” She had to stop and swallow. “How much time?”
He met her gaze with a head-on directness that took her breath away. “In a few days, when you’re rested and feeling better, we’ll talk.”
She swallowed again. “Do you mean it?”
After a long pause, he gave her a nod.
Her heart leaped. She wanted to shout for joy. Oh, Matt, I love you. But she didn’t say the words. Not yet. She didn’t want to send him running, or make him push her away again.
But neither did she want to let him forget this night. If only he would cooperate. “All right, we’ll talk later. But for now, I can’t leave you wanting.”
The touch of her hand through his pants took Matt completely by surprise. Every muscle in his body tensed and jerked. But when he reached down, instead of flinging her hand away, he covered it with his own and thrust upward with his hips.
Ah, God. He ground his teeth together. He had to stop this. It was crazy. It was dangerous. But knowing that didn’t help. Her response to his touch moments ago had driven him nearly over the edge. Her fulfillment left him wanting, panting for that same state of mindlessness. He had wanted nothing more than to lose himself in her hot, dark depths.
But he couldn’t. Not here, not now, when she was so vulnerable. So he had settled for giving her pleasure and denying his body what it craved.
Now, here she was, wanting to pleasure him. That she was willing to do this took his breath away. That she was doing it nearly stopped his heart. Never had a woman’s touch affected him so thoroughly. Common sense fled as her fingers tightened through the buckskin. His fingers clamped around hers.
“Like this?” she whispered.
He groaned. “Yes!” he couldn’t stop her now if he tried. “Oh God, yes.”
When she took her hand away, it was all he could do to keep from whimpering. She had changed her mind. He squeezed his eyes shut, determined to somehow live through the pain.
In the next instant, soft, warm fingers worked their way beneath the waist of his pants and grasped him fully, firmly, flesh to flesh.
Serena was enthralled with the feel of him. He was the hardest steel sheathed in the smoothest, softest velvet. Steel that pulsed and throbbed with a life of its own.
Matt’s eyes flew open in shock just in time to see her lowering her lips to his. Her kiss was tentative at first, then bolder as she drew on the response he could not hold back. He was lost. He closed his eyes and groaned. He clenched his fists to keep from flinging her on her back and plunging into her.
“Tell me what to do, Matt,” she whispered a
gainst his lips. “Show me.” Her fingers tightened around him, making him gasp in tortured pleasure.
His mind, his control snapped. He fumbled with one hand to unlace his buckskins. With his other hand, he held her tightly by the waist, afraid she might disappear, that this was only a dream that would blow away like smoke on the wind.
But Serena wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t about to let go of this sense of power his response gave her. She knew instinctively that while she held him in her hand, he would promise anything, do anything she asked. She buried her lips in the crisp blond curls on his chest to keep from asking. To keep from demanding that he love her the way she loved him.
The opened pants gave her freer access to him. She loosened her grip and ran her fingers lightly from base to tip and back again, wrenching another groan from deep in his chest.
Her teasing drove Matt right over the edge of sanity. He wrapped his fingers around hers and guided her hand up and down his length, tighter, harder, faster. Faster still, until, with a deep moan, he rolled over, away from her, and thrust his hips to the ground. Her hand still gripped him; his still gripped hers.
Serena lay sprawled across his bare back with her arm disappearing round his waist. Her hand felt crushed, trapped as it was, with his, between the ground and his body. But she didn’t care. She trailed hot, moist kisses along the scars on his back. Knowing what she knew now, she sensed he was near the end of his journey to the far side of the stars.
The next time, she determined, they would travel together as one.
Suddenly Matt stiffened beneath her with one final, forceful thrust. His tortured cry echoed forever along the walls of the small cave and down into Serena’s very soul.
It was a long time before he raised enough to remove both their hands from beneath him. Longer still before his breathing returned to normal. Serena stroked and kissed his smooth, hard back. She couldn’t stop touching him.
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