Authors: Sherryl Woods
“Dive in,” he urged. “The water’s wonderful.”
“Not too cold?”
Not that he’d noticed, he thought wryly. He shook his head. “Take the plunge.”
If she caught the unintended double entendre, she didn’t show it by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. She simply walked to the edge at the deep end, lifted her hands in a diver’s stance and cut into the water with barely a ripple to disturb the sparkling surface. Not two seconds later, she came up sputtering, goose bumps already rising on her pale-as-cream skin.
“It’s like ice, damn you!” she said and swam toward him with a gleam of mock ferocity in her eyes.
David couldn’t help laughing at her indignation. “Just the thing for a hot day, don’t you think?”
“It’s not hot yet,” she pointed out as she drew closer. “Maybe by noon this would feel terrific.” As if to emphasize how cold it was, her teeth began to chatter. “S-see what I mean?”
“What you need is a little exercise,” he announced. “It’ll warm you right up. I’ll race you to the end of the pool and back.”
“You’re on,” she agreed with that devilish glint back in her eyes.
She pushed off. The fact that her first kick landed squarely in his midsection was probably just an accident, he told himself as he took off after her.
Kate was good, he realized as he caught her, then found her matching him stroke for stroke. She was also a fighter and she didn’t necessarily play fair. More than once she managed to tangle her legs with his just enough to throw him off, while she swam confidently on. When they’d finished two laps, she grinned at him as she executed a tight flip and muttered, “Again?”
She didn’t wait for his response. She was a half lap ahead by the time he could reverse directions. He was too much a competitor to lag behind for long, though. He pushed his endurance to catch and then pass her. Several laps later, they were both clinging to the side trying to catch their breath.
He looked into her eyes and found himself mesmerized by the light shimmering in their depths. That brilliant spark lured like a lantern in the darkness. Without thinking, just reacting to a deep, yearning need, he tucked one hand around the back of her neck and drew her closer. He felt the shiver that raced over her. When his lips claimed hers, she shuddered. He felt her cool skin turn warm under the persuasive touch of his mouth, the gentle teasing of his tongue.
There was an instant as his hand settled at the curve of her hip when her body tensed as if she might push him away. David’s breath seemed to lodge in his chest as he waited for her decision. And then, when he wasn’t sure he could bear another second of indecision, she relaxed and melted against him. Her hands slid up his chest with slow, teasing deliberation, then locked behind his neck as she turned her head to angle her mouth under his, open to the invasion of his tongue.
David groaned. Her skin was warm and cool at once, the fire inside chilled by the pool’s water. Slick with moisture, her body felt the way it might have after long, sensuous hours of lovemaking. As that thought struck him, he wondered that steam didn’t rise around them.
His hands skimmed along the material of her bathing suit, learning the shape of her, discovering that the layer of fabric tantalized, even as it thwarted flesh-on-flesh contact. He could feel the hardening of her nipples as he caressed her breasts, could feel the way she seemed to move into his touch, rather than holding back. The subtly sensuous movements almost drove him crazy.
He sensed then that Kate was a woman who would hold nothing back when it came to giving and receiving pleasure. A woman like that would be more vulnerable than most and a great tide of tenderness washed over him when he realized the rare gift she was sharing with him, the risk she appeared willing to take with her own peace of mind.
He framed her face with his hands, his gaze locked on hers, trying to see into her soul. He tried to judge one last time if he had misread things, if she truly was with him all the way on the desires that were throbbing deep inside, crowding out everything else. He saw only a need that matched his own. Whatever doubts she might have about them, about the future—and if he had dozens, she was bound to have more—she had committed herself to following his lead. She seemed more than ready to explore the sensations that were as old as time, yet as sparkling new as if this were the first time in their lives for each of them.
“Kate?” he said softly.
Those dark eyes of hers blazed back at him, filled with life, luring him into a world of powerful need and thrilling sensation, drawing him from the past into the present, into this one, single moment in time. Deep inside, something slowly shifted, eased, freeing him forever from the past, blessing his decision to move on.
He knew, though, that if they ventured further—he and this warm, passionate woman he held—for him there would be no turning back. To him, making love had always been a commitment, a promise, and for reasons he couldn’t have explained if he’d tried, he knew that was as true for him now as it had ever been. It didn’t seem to matter that Kate was only weeks past being a stranger. It didn’t even seem to matter that she was a declared adversary. In fact, he was stunned to discover that it felt so right that his choice this time was Kate, a woman so unlike Alicia. She was harder, more fiercely competitive, more passionate about everything.
And then he looked more deeply into her eyes, those windows to the soul, and saw the anxiety, the wellspring of gentleness, the yearning. So, he thought, as he captured her mouth once more, it wasn’t so surprising after all.
The surprise came when he carried her from the pool and, still dripping wet, into the master bedroom suite. It came when she declined slow, gentle touches and set a pace that was just shy of desperate, a frenzied claiming that left them in a tangle of wet bathing suits and pushed them into a fevered, urgent release that rocked the bed and left them both gasping for breath.
“Dear Lord,” he said, when he could finally gather breath to say anything at all.
Kate, her hair a dark tangle against the pillow, her skin flushed and damp, merely smiled. It was a contented Mona Lisa smile. Had she been a cat, David thought with amusement, she would have been purring. Even her slow, lazy, sensuous stretch spoke of satisfaction and bore no hint of the self-consciousness she had displayed earlier. This Kate was all woman and reveling in it.
“It occurs to me that you should wear a tag warning of danger,” he teased, still pleasantly startled by her complete and generous sharing of her body. “I’m stunned.”
“I must admit to being a little stunned myself,” she said, laughing with him. “Two hours ago I would have sworn that I didn’t want this to happen, that I wouldn’t allow it to happen.”
Having felt much the same way, David circled his arms around her and settled her against his chest. He smoothed her hair away from her face. “What happened to change your mind?”
He felt the slight shake of her head.
“I’m not sure,” she said, her breath whispering against his overheated flesh. “Suddenly it just felt right, as if it would be absolutely foolish to resist when I wanted to be held like this more than anything.”
“By me?”
Her gaze, filled with surprise, met his. “Of course by you.” She pulled away and she studied him more intently. “What about you? Is this what you had in mind when you lured me over here?”
David searched his heart for the answer to that. The quick, easy answer was no. The truth seemed much more complicated. “Although I’ve denied it for weeks now, I think I’ve wanted you from the first moment I set eyes on you.”
“You thought I was an uppity bitch when you first laid eyes on me,” she reminded him.
“Always the biggest challenge,” he retorted, chuckling at the indignation that flared in her eyes. He touched her lips, which were threatening to curve into a smile despite her best efforts to stop herself. “Ah, Kate, you’ve made me laugh again.”
“And yell,” she said. “Don’t forget the yelling.”
He pressed a kiss against her forehead. “The point is you’ve made me feel things again. For a very long time, I wasn’t sure that was possible.”
She sighed and settled more comfortably in his arms. “Right this instant, almost anything seems possible.”
“Yes,” he murmured. “It does.”
He heard her breathing slow into a quiet, steady rhythm. He swept a hand down her spine, stopping eventually on the curve of her bottom. He was fascinated by the unexpectedly easy intimacy between them. He’d expected if the time ever came when he brought another woman to this bed, he would be battling ghosts.
Perhaps that explained Kate’s aggressive, urgent lovemaking, he thought with sudden understanding. She hadn’t wanted him to have time to think. She had wanted him so caught up in what was happening between the two of them, in the perfect fit of their bodies, in the demanding need, that there was no time for second thoughts. If that had indeed been her intention, he owed her for making this step easier for him to take.
“Ah, Kate,” he murmured, even though she wasn’t awake to hear him. “You are, perhaps, the most enchanting, complex woman I have ever known.”
* * *
How the hell was she supposed to extricate herself from this mess, Kate wondered when she awoke. She was not thinking of the tangled sheets and bathing suits currently holding her captive in this bed, either. She was referring to the fact that she had ignored her best intentions and behaved like an absolutely wanton woman the very first time David Winthrop had so much as given her a come-hither glance.
Okay, so it had been more than a glance. It had been a couple of those bone-melting kisses, but the point was the same. Her resolve, based on pretty sound, rational thought, had vanished like a puff of smoke. Poof! Gone! And she’d convinced herself that she was a woman ruled by her intellect rather than her hormones, she thought wryly. What a joke that was.
She blinked open one eye and dared a glance at the man against whom she was currently snuggled up. He was drop-dead handsome, she thought with a sigh. And sexy. Even now, when regrets were stampeding through her at a hundred miles an hour, she wanted him. She wanted him to look at her the way he had earlier, as if she were the most desirable woman on the face of the earth. She wanted him to touch her again with that mixture of reverence and fascination that turned suddenly urgent. She wanted to be swept away on a tide of glorious, magical sensation one more time.
And then she wanted to go home and pretend it had never happened, wipe it from her mind, go on living as if something cataclysmic hadn’t just happened to her. It was very important that she be able to do that, too. She didn’t have a doubt in the world that a man who hadn’t been able to push grief aside for the sake of his beloved son was hardly ready to embrace a new relationship.
As for her, everyone knew she had chosen to go through life alone. It was less complicated, less hurtful. There might be a real shortage of peaks, but there definitely were no miserable valleys, either. She’d plunged into the lowest valley of them all with Ryan and vowed never again.
She stroked her fingers along David’s smooth jaw. It was too bad it had to be this way, she thought regretfully. The peak they had just attained without half trying had been one damned fine peak.
She closed her eyes and wished they could linger this way forever, suspended in time. Suddenly she felt him nuzzling against her, felt his mouth, warm and wet, surround her nipple. The deep, sucking sensation sent a live current jolting through her. Regrets fled. Common sense fled. Only need, sweet and wild, sliced through her as she felt her body waken beneath his slow, lazy caresses.
Hands roughened, probably by one too many close encounters with chain saws, skimmed over her flesh, teasing, setting her ablaze. She twisted and bucked as fingers reached wetness and invaded in a slow, rhythmic movement.
“When you come awake, you really come awake, don’t you?” she murmured, fighting the all-consuming sensation that threatened to sweep her over the edge before he had joined her.
“Don’t fight me,” he whispered back, the strokes more intense, deeper, more demanding.
She let go then, let the flood of feeling wash over her, through her. Then, just when she thought she would spin free, the touches slowed, taunted. Wild now with need, she pleaded silently, gazing into eyes darkened with passion.
“You want me?” he asked in that husky, low-down, sneaky tone that conjured images of the back-seat scrambling of adolescence, the hunger to try everything.
She wanted to say no, wanted to say she didn’t need anyone, ever, but it would have been a lie. Right now, this instant, she couldn’t bear the thought of one more second without him inside her, without that full, throbbing sense of completion.
Breathless, she rose instinctively toward him, hips lifting off the bed as she admitted between gasps, “I…want…you.”
Satisfaction broke over his face as he joined her then with one powerful thrust. Even then, even when she felt she would explode with sensation—skin sensitive, fire in her veins—he took his time. He led her to the edge and back again and again, each time a little higher, the ride a little wilder until at last she felt the sweet waves of a shuddering climax consume first her and then him.
It was a long time before either of them spoke, before either of them could move. Kate was content to be held in his arms, her body still joined with his in the most intimate way possible. As long as they were together like this, she wouldn’t have to decide whether to go or stay.
It was David who moved eventually, brushing a kiss on her bare shoulder as he left the bed and padded into the bathroom. She heard the shower go on and then, before she realized he’d returned, he had scooped her once again into his arms.
In the steamy bathroom she regarded the shower skeptically. “I’m not sure I trust you where water’s concerned. Maybe I’d better test this myself before I plunge in.”
He grinned. “It’s warm. I promise,” he said, standing her on her feet at the edge of the huge sunken tub. He grabbed a towel and headed for the door. “You go ahead. I’ll pull on my suit and go for another swim.”