Desert Rose (17 page)

"You."

She blinked in surprise. "Why?"

"I need you."

"And I needed you today," she countered, "but you walked away from me without a word of explanation."

"I know."

Her anger faded when she heard the bleakness in those two words. "Why?" Her voice cracked, but she forced herself to continue. "Why, David?"

"Everything that’s happened…" He paused and gave her a searching look. "Everything that will happen…" He shook his head, seemingly unable to continue.

Emma felt an unexpected calm settle over her, and she couldn’t fathom why. "It’s a shock to be free, isn’t it?" she asked, the anger and hurt absent from her voice now.

He nodded.

She felt desperate to understand his state of mind. "The reality of it must have hit you like a ton of bricks."

He blew out a hard breath. "Something like that."

"So you’re wrestling with what’s happened, and you’re trying to come to terms with it," she reasoned softly. "Is that why you pulled away? Is that why you wouldn’t talk to me?"

"That’s part of it," he conceded.

Hope lurched to life inside of her. Don’t be a fool, a small voice in the back of her head advised. "We’ll both be alright, David, but only if we’re patient with ourselves and with each other. We can… share what we’ve…"

He cut in. "I still need you."

His admission nearly stopped her heart. She reached out, clasped his hands, and tugged him closer. Words failed her even as her emotions threatened to choke her.

"I’ll always need you, babe. That need won’t ever go away," he confessed, that tender and all too familiar roughness back in his voice.

Emma stared up at him. Disengaging one of his hands, he lifted it and cupped her cheek. She covered his fingers with her own, turned her head, and brushed her lips across his palm.

"Forgive me?" he asked.

She held her breath for a long moment. Then, she nodded. The hand cradling her cheek trembled, and the remaining threads of hurt and resistance within her snapped. She wanted him as badly as he seemed to need her.

Now
. It was all that mattered, she told herself.
Now
.

Whatever happened in the future, she would deal with it. Whatever the cost to herself, she would pay it.

With her gaze fixed on his rugged features, she tugged at the ties of her nightgown and peeled it from her body. David stripped out of his robe and pajama bottoms. Extending her arms, she welcomed him into her bed and her heart.

And although she briefly wondered how long he would remain with her, she set aside the thought and the worry it caused. Stay in the now, she cautioned herself. Do not think about anything but right now.

His hands shook as he drew her into the heat and power of his already aroused body. Emma sucked in a sharp breath, feeling scorched by their skin–to–skin contact.

"Love me, David," she whispered.

"I do, Emma. God help me, I do."

Sinking back against the pillows, she wrapped her arms around him in the same split second that she found his mouth. Eager to absorb him into her flesh and ravenous for his taste, she pressed frantic kisses to his chin and mouth before delving past his parted lips and teeth to drink in his essence.

She moaned, a throaty sound that sent a shudder through him—a shudder that she felt and absorbed. After frantically tangling her tongue with his, she sucked the tip between her teeth and worried it with tender bites.

Emma drew up her knees, her hips surging against the hard shaft trapped between their lower bodies. Her body became moist and pleading and painfully needy in her desperation to have him buried deep inside of her. He responded without hesitation, thrusting into her, withdrawing almost completely, and then thrusting even more deeply. All the while he caressed her breasts and teased her nipples to hard points of fire–filled desire.

Tightening spirals of sensation enveloped Emma, exploding like colorful starbursts. She expressed her pleasure with gasping little cries and clutching hands as a sensual storm consumed her.

David advanced and retreated, advanced and retreated. Again and again his invasion of her body possessed the power of a proclamation etched in granite as he claimed her for himself. Wildly aroused, Emma writhed beneath him, the emotional highs and lows she’d experienced that day and well into the night now set aside. Not forgotten, though, despite her best efforts to banish them from her mind.

Relentless in his quest to pleasure her, he increased his pace, driving her past coherent thought, beyond sanity, and then into the ecstasy of a stunning climax. She clung to him, breathless, heart racing, and her body quaking with reaction in the lingering aftershocks of fruition.

David soothed her with stroking fingertips and gentle kisses. Stunned by what she’d just experienced and lulled by his tenderness, Emma lay spent and trembling beneath him.

He unexpectedly shifted partway down her devastated body, startling her when he filled his hands with her still–tingling breasts. She groaned as he closed his mouth around one of her nipples and rolled the other one back and forth between his fingers. As she watched him, she realized that he hadn’t allowed himself to reach completion yet.

David stoked back to a roaring blaze the after–sparks of her first climax. She trembled beneath the sensual assault of his skilled hands and mouth, finally collapsing back against the pillows as her desire for him threatened to incinerate her.

Moaning, Emma savored each nip, each sucking pull, and each swipe of his tongue. He provoked a flood of searing sensations that sent molten heat streaming through her veins. She throbbed deep inside, and her legs shifted restlessly beneath his onslaught, his sensual generosity very nearly overwhelming her.

"Please," she whispered, too shaken by her desire to feel him inside of her again to manage anything more than that one word.

He lifted his lips from her beaded nipples and swollen breasts, his expression tender and filled with the promise of fulfillment. Sitting up, he stroked her cheek with his fingertips, then trailed them from her lower lip to her chin, on to the valley between her breasts and across her quivering belly before he reached the sultry depths of her swollen sex.

Drawing Emma forward a few moments later, he drew her long legs over his thighs. They faced each other, his hands bracketing her hips as she sat atop his strong thighs. She edged closer, seeking connection, needing connection just as much as she needed air to breathe.

"Christ, you’re so damn beautiful, Emma."

She smiled—a wholly feminine smile that promised him every pleasure imaginable. She reached down to stroke him, the searing heat of his pulsing sex branding her fingertips.

David drew her closer still. Their bodies touched, the head of his shaft pressing against her throbbing sex. Their bodies exchanged a devastatingly intimate kiss.

Emma shivered. She felt swollen and wet and incomplete. She needed him inside of her. She tightened her grip on him and stroked. Then, she changed tactics, skimming her fingertips up and down his thick length. An inarticulate sound of raw need spilled out of him. Meeting his gaze, she silently pleaded with him to take her.

"Now, babe?" His voice resonated with the rawest kind of need.

She sighed. "Now, David."

He lifted her and penetrated her sheathe with a forceful thrust that left her trembling in his embrace and gripping his shoulders. His mouth swooped down, demanding, ruthless, and thoroughly carnal. He ate at her lips, his hunger for her voracious, and then he plunged his tongue into her mouth.

Emma responded to his consuming passion without inhibition. She wrapped her legs around him, her world pitching and tilting, her skin scorched by his body’s heat, her senses flayed by devastating need. A tidal wave of desire swamped her, threatening her grasp on reality.

She felt his fingers dig into her hips. His sex swelled deep within her, and she heard the low groan that began in his throat. Sensing he was near the edge and feeling the pressure building higher and higher within her own body, she whispered her love and relinquished herself to the imploding sensations that heralded her own climax. She held nothing back. As a result, she went spinning into a series of starbursts that utterly ravaged her senses.

At the pinnacle of her release, David thrust high and hard and deep. When a hoarse cry escaped him, Emma greedily drank in the sound. He stiffened suddenly, his sex pulsing, his seed spewing hotly into her, his mind and body shattering in the maelstrom of orgasm.

Sometime later, Emma slumped against his broad chest and rested her forehead against his shoulder. Too spent and too breathless to speak, she pressed her lips to his perspiration–slick skin.

David eventually found the strength to lower their still–joined bodies to the narrow bed. Gathering her into the shelter of his embrace, he held her as their respiration calmed and their hearts beat in unison.

He made no false promises to Emma. He simply held her close and watched over her as she drifted off to sleep.

** ** **

Emma opened her eyes several hours later. David, again attired in his pajama bottoms and bathrobe, stood before the window in her hospital room, his facial expression remote. The dawn was slowly lighting the sky, and she heard a hint of the morning activity taking place beyond the locked door of her private room.

"Have you been awake long?" When he didn’t answer, she frowned. "David?"

"Morning, babe."

The quiet cool tone of his voice put her on immediate alert. She sat up, combing her hair back from her face with her fingers. Despite her desire to believe that all was well between them, Emma knew better. She felt too vulnerable, so she reached for her discarded nightgown and slipped it over her head.

"What kind of day is it?" she asked.

David turned finally and looked at her. He made no move to approach her, though. Neither did he answer her. Instead, he searched her face with a probing gaze that she found even more disturbing than his silence.

"Talk to me, David. Don’t shut me out this way. Not again."

She watched him close his hands into tight fists, growing apprehensive when she heard his harsh exhalation. Worried that he was still having trouble adjusting to his newfound freedom, Emma pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

"Stay where you are," he ordered. "There’s something I need to say, and I can’t put it off any longer."

A chill passed over her, and she shrank back. She watched him while she drew on her robe. Then, she straightened, pride forbidding her to huddle beneath her renewed fear that she might lose him. "I’m listening."

"Once I walk out of this room, I won’t be coming back. I’m leaving for Washington this morning."

She smiled, something akin to relief flooding her. "I understand. You’ve probably got all kinds of debriefing sessions ahead of you. We can…"

"Emma!" he interrupted sharply. "Listen to me. You think you love me, but you can’t be sure of your feelings. Especially not after what’s happened to you."

Startled, she insisted, "I do love you. How can you think that I don’t know what I feel?"

He shook his head. Sadness seemed to etch his gaunt face, and his eyes looked haunted. "You
think
you love me," he said. "But once your life’s back to normal, I probably won’t have a place in it except as part of an unwelcome memory. What happened between us would have happened to any couple in our situation. We needed each other. I was your lifeline, just as you were mine. Yes, we wound up caring about each other, but it was a result of our situation and the constant threat of death or torture. The feelings that you believe you have for me are bound to change, so making a commitment to a relationship based on three weeks spent in hell would be a real mistake… a mistake I’m not willing to let you make."

"I trusted you, David." She couldn’t help that her words sounded accusatory.

"I haven’t betrayed your trust. What I’m trying to do now is what’s best for us both. I would never betray your trust, and you know it."

Do I?
she wondered, so shocked by his attitude and his words that she simply stared at him for several long moments.

David remained perfectly still, so still that Emma had the sudden impulse to grab him by the shoulders and shake some life, not to mention a whole lot of sense, back into him.

Instead, she demanded, "What are you feeling? What do you feel when you touch me? What do you feel when I touch you? What, David?"

"I don’t have the time or the desire to play twenty questions."

"What do you feel?" she asked a second time, ignoring his comment.

"Too damn many emotions to even try to name them all, let alone understand them right now."

She paled. "You don’t love me, do you? You just said you did, because you thought I needed to hear the words. Telling me that you loved me was nothing more than your way of giving me hope, of motivating me through the days and nights."

She stopped speaking, horrified at the thought that he’d manipulated her and then told himself that it was for her own good. But the entire idea was nuts, and she knew it—knew it deep inside of her soul. "Damn you, David. You’re lying… to me and to yourself. Why?"

He started to say something, but in the end he stayed silent.

"Why are you lying?"

"Please don’t do this to yourself, babe."

"Don’t do what?" she asked. "Don’t try to understand why you claimed to love me two days ago and now you claim not to love me?"

"You can’t be certain of your own emotions right now."

"Quit saying that!" she shouted. "Quit behaving as though I’m incapable of coherent thought just because I spent some time in a jail cell on the wrong side of the world. I lost weight, not my mind!"

His expression hardened. "You’re making this more difficult than it has to be."

"No, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand, and I think I do now."

"Is it so hard to comprehend the fact that I’m not sure if what we feel is real?" he asked. "And is it so difficult for you to believe that I don’t want either one of us to make a mistake in judgment that could have disastrous results?"