Different Dreams (16 page)

“Yes.” The word formed on her lips, but never passed her tightened throat.

Cam, though, did not need to hear it with his ears, for her acceptance was already inscribed upon his heart.

The stone house seemed to be waiting for them, seemed now to Malou to have been created for them, for their love. It was as Stallings had meant it to be, a place outside the boundary of time. They stepped into it together and shed the nattering cares of modern life. Moonlight more luminous than that which fell anywhere else that night streamed in through the windows. They breathed the wonderfully cool air exhaled by the sturdy stone walls and were caught up again in the otherworldly enchantment of the cottage.

It was as if the last twenty-four hours had been erased. Malou was swamped by the weightless feel of her dream, of the pool last night. It swirled warmly between her legs and lapped over her breasts, leaving them
aching for Cam's caress. His hair had gone silver in the moonlight, and patches of platinum splashed across his lower lip, his eyes.

“Is it going to be all right?” He wanted to know if there had been any second thoughts.

“Yes. More than all right. So much more.” She had crossed the precipice and was alone with Cam on the other side.

He came toward her, cutting through moonbeams and the still, cool air to reach her. Everything was decided; he felt it from the first touch. With the first kiss she was welded to him. It was as if they had spent the past day teasing and wooing, bringing one another to the highest endurable pitch of arousal.

They clung together in this alien territory ruled only by sensation, unable to taste, to touch enough to make up for the hours of denial. She pushed at his shirt with an unbridled will and it was gone. Her hands sought out the smooth, hard contours of his chest, while his hands trapped her wandering mouth to tilt it upward and receive his. A groan tore from them, from whose throat Malou couldn't say. He clawed at the blouse separating them, sighing at the relief of her breasts naked against his chest.

She moaned his name as his hand slid down between her legs to find the place that waited most ardently for his touch. Her hands found his buckle and unfastened it. Then his zipper.

Cam slid her shorts off, then her underwear. She was as undeniably ready for him as he was for her. The reins of control slipped then entirely from his hands.

Malou felt as if she were floating off the ground, wafted away on the breeze that was Cam's strong arms crooked about her, lifting her, bringing her to him. Her heart thundered out a message that Cam's answered with a harshly pounding rhythm. Aching for the deliverance of union with him, she parted her legs and twined them about his waist. He filled her and they were one. Their joining came as the completion of the dream of weightlessness that had started the night after she'd first met him.

Great surges of ecstasy pulsed through her. Increasing in power, they drove them both before the unleashed fury of their intensity. They dictated the rhythm of Cam's hands as he pulled Malou closer. She rose and fell against him with a will as mindless and inexorable as the tides. Cam mated the pace of his need to hers so that they soared together to a shattering crescendo. Her lips found his at the moment of fulfillment. She collapsed against his chest, her head wilting against the spasm of pleasure pulsing through her.

Cam's legs began to buckle. He sagged onto the couch still holding Malou tightly. She nestled against his neck, breathing in the wild scent of their abandonment to one another. He stroked her back, running his fingers up and down the slender column of her spine, then stopping
to gather her to him in a fierce hug. Gradually, conscious thoughts replaced the pattern of sensation that had occupied their minds.

“Malou, I . . .” Cam struggled to put a voice to the enormity of his emotions, but Malou silenced him with a kiss. Now was not the time to try to corral the wildness they had unloosed. To try to brand it, marking it as something that it might not be. She wanted only what they had now. But she wanted all of it.

She sat up, still straddling his lap, and traced her finger across the sweep of his brow, the hard slash of his cheeks, the arch of his nose. She dragged the finger lazily across the bow of his mouth, and as it passed over the fullness of his lower lip, Cam's tongue flicked across the tip of her finger. He pressed her palm to his lips and licked its lacework of delicate lines. Nerves tingled from Malou's sensitive palm up her arm and across her breasts. He nibbled at the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb.

“You have a very sensuous nature,” Cam joked, his mouth still a whisper from her hand. “I know. I can read palms.”

“How very insightful of you,” she bantered back, a sense of deep, rollicking joy beginning to fill her. “Could you lick along my life line and tell me how long I have to live?”

His tongue flickered tantalizingly along the curve of her palm. “You will live a long and happy life filled with much accomplishment and even more love.”

The last word stabbed Malou in the one spot she had momentarily left unprotected. It pained her far more than she wanted to admit to hear Cam speak of love as part of a trifling jest between them. The pain was fleeting, though, obliterated by the liquid feel of Cam's tongue inscribing bewitching new demands upon her palm, demands that continued to bring her breasts to ever-fer, tingling life until they too strained for the velvet massaging of his tongue. As if her desires had become his, Cam took her hand from his lips and, coaxing her forward across the scant inches separating them, brought the yearning tip of her breast to his mouth.

Leisurely he explored it while fondling her other breast, drawing dizzying circles about first one, then the other nipple. Malou's eyelids fluttered shut. As if Cam's tender ministrations were putting her into a deep sleep, she bent her neck and rested her forehead against Cam's, bracing herself against his shoulders. Even as her nipples came to life in his mouth, Malou felt Cam come alive within her once again.

“This time, we'll take as long as we want,” he promised in a whisper that renewed desire was already turning to a hoarse rasp.

Malou swallowed at the unimaginable delirium of the promise. He pulled her closer and brought her mouth to his. His hands washed over her with the warmth of a tropical rain. He drew her to him and, guided by instincts she'd
never given rein to before, Malou pleasured Cam with an infinity of sinuously fluid motions.

Cam's head rolled back against the couch, his eyes shut against the waves of delight that battered him as her hips rolled against his.

Malou felt herself compelled by rhythms she had never felt before. Following that beat, she led Cam, again and again, to the very limits of his control. But always it guided her back just in time so that the voluptuous rapture could continue.

Together, they both learned the absolute boundaries of their appetite for one another. The enormity of it was frightening. Malou was the first to retreat before it. The teasing, undulating dance of her hips quickened into something more insistent as she pressed toward the climax that neither of them could forestall any longer. In his moment of fulfillment, Cam grabbed for her in an embrace of shuddering intensity, whispering her name over and over like a benediction of what they had created together.

Malou shivered within the grip of his impassioned embrace as the coils of the love they had made together and wound so unbearably tight began to unwind, spiraling out in ever-widening ripples.

* * *

“Bedtime, my dozy darling.”

Malou jerked awake, the slight crick in her neck
alerting her that she had been napping for quite some time against Cam's chest.

“I didn't fall asleep, did I?”

“Afraid so. Even snored the tiniest bit.”

“I don't snore,” Malou maintained stoutly.

“Probably just the wind.” Cam chuckled in the absolute stillness of the night. With his forefinger, he curled one of the ringlets that petaled against Malou's forehead.

“I've never done that before. Never fallen asleep like that. I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize. Only women who are well loved fall asleep. It's one of the infallible indicators.”

“And what about men?” Malou asked, raising herself up to look into his face. “You appear inhumanly alert.”

“Just been amusing myself watching you sleep, and thinking.”

“Thinking? About what?” Malou rolled smoothly off of Cam's lap and snuggled beside him on the couch.

“Oh, about . . .” His eyes searched hers. For the first time, Cam seemed at a loss, uncertain of himself. He retreated from her question. “About why on earth I ever dragged out that trunk of clothes last time we were here and allowed you to wrap yourself up. We're not going to repeat that error when we sleep together tonight.”

“Sounds far from restful,” Malou jibed back, wondering what Cam had really been thinking about. Could it
possibly have been the same question that now deviled her mind?

As they walked to the bedroom, Malou dismissed the possibility. Cameron Landell was not a man to be derailed by love.

M
alou awoke the next morning
to the crystalline notes of the canyon wren's song, filled with a sense of joy she had not known since childhood. It was the kind of feeling that had percolated through her on the first morning of summer vacation as she lay in bed contemplating the prospect of three months of freedom. Reality had intruded when she entered high school, and all her vacations after that had been diligently filled with the kind of summer work and research that eventually won her grants and awards before her time. Now Cam had come bringing a reprieve from reality.

She watched him sleep, just as he had watched her last night. Swatches of buttery morning sunlight splashed across him. He'd managed to capture most of the sheet they'd slept under, and it lay clumped in a wad between his legs, one corner drawn up togalike over his shoulder; he looked like a fallen Roman. One knee was
cocked and his fist was jammed beneath his jaw, so that he seemed to be puzzling out a problem in his sleep. A deep well of tenderness opened up in Malou as she watched him so hard at work at sleeping. For a few minutes she felt she knew exactly what he had looked like as a little boy—spindly arms, and eyes too big and dark and intense for his face.

Then those eyes opened and filled with joy; they were the eyes of the young boy she'd been imagining. He smiled.

“So it wasn't a dream after all,” he said, lazily reaching for her. At his touch, all hints of the little boy he might have been vanished. Cam had been a man for a very long time. “You're depraved, do you realize that? You shouldn't go around masquerading as the prim primatologist when you can do the things you can to a man.”

“I suppose the high-dollar developer image fits in pretty well with the kinds of things you're able to do to a woman.” Malou loved the easy bantering between them, the feeling of comfortable sensuality, the fact that they could tease about their careers.

“Come here, you little minx, you.” He grabbed her and pulled her to him. “This high-dollar developer has all kinds of things he wants to do to one very special woman.” Then, with a leisurely abandon, he proceeded to make good on his threat.

“Malou,” he whispered into her ear much later on
as she lay with her back curled against him, drifting in a mindless reverie in the comfort of his arms. “Those ‘kinds of things' you were talking about earlier . . .”

“Mmm,” she mumbled, barely able to focus on anything but the wonderful glow within her.

“I've never done them with other women. Never been inspired to. There is something very, very special about you. Between us.”

The glow turned to a summery radiance at Cam's proclamation.

“I'm really afraid of blowing it. Of going too fast. Of overwhelming you.”

Malou snuggled closer to Cam, encouraging him to go on, to say the words that he wouldn't have had the courage to voice if she'd been staring at him.

“I don't know,” he continued. “Sometimes I look at you and in my mind I see this image of a doe at a water hole and she's just heard a noise. A twig cracking in the distance. Something. But she has her head up, listening, poised, ready to flee if she hears that noise again.”

Malou was astonished to hear Cam speak of such vulnerability. Even more amazed that that was his image of her. She rolled around in his arms to face him.

“I don't want to run, Cam. I like it here with you. I like it a lot.”

“I like it a lot too. Ummm,” he growled with contentment, rolling over and pulling Malou onto his stomach. “I
wish this little idyll could go on just as long as we wanted it to.”

“I was thinking along those same lines. I'd like to officially declare this the first day of summer vacation.”

“I second the declaration, except that we have none of the props necessary for summer vacation. No TV for watching endless reruns and horrible horror movies. No tenement walls for playing handball against. No empty bottles to collect and turn in for two cents apiece.”

“That was
your
summer vacation,” Malou chided Cam. “Today I propose that you learn what a
real
summer vacation is all about.”

“ ‘Real' meaning yours, I presume.”

“Presumption correct,” Malou declared, hopping out of bed, eager now to start the day. She darted over to the trunk where Cam had found the cache of country clothes they had worn their first night in the stone cabin, and pulled out jeans and shirts for both of them. She tossed Cam's outfit at him. “Come on, sleepyhead, we've got to pack three months into this one day.”

The morning air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and with the blossoming of promises. Malou breathed in both as she stepped out into the day with Cam. They wandered through a large meadow behind the cabin, which was overgrown with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. As if cued by the stage directions in
a script, Cam picked a bouquet for Malou. Following the creek that meandered among the century-old live oaks, they ended up at a cool, grassy knoll. The creek widened into a small pool that Malou insisted they wade in. Next came berry gathering when Malou found a patch of dewberries trailing vines heavy with the dark fruit.