Just Once More (17 page)

And if there was ever a sight to make a man feel powerful, surely it was this. The sight of her naked and pregnant, her beautiful hair streaming around her, one hand on his broad thigh, the other one helping out her pretty mouth. And that mouth working so hard. His wife on her knees, her only desire to please him. Willing to do whatever he wanted. Whatever he needed.

His breath was rasping in his throat, and he was shifting on the bed, his muscles tightening. He was getting much too close, and this wasn’t how he wanted to end it. He wanted more. He wanted everything.

He pulled her back from him by the hair, as gently as he could manage it.

“Hannah,” he said, his voice coming out rough. “Wait. I need more.”

She looked up at him, licked her lips, and he almost lost it.

“Geez,” he groaned. “I need to…”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned around, still on her knees, and dropped to her hands.

And there she was. Almost the only position that worked, this far along, and his favorite, and he was nothing but burning now. He was there behind her, his hand diving between her legs, feeling the sweet slickness there, how close she was already, as if what she’d done to him, she’d felt herself.

“So good,” he told her, rubbing a little harder, seeing her start to squirm, hearing the panting gasps turning to moans, feeling her on the brink. He kept on, got another hand around her, found a heavy breast and began to caress her there as well. Gentle pressure, teasing the sensitive flesh, keeping up the swift strokes with his other hand, and feeling what the extra sensation did to her. Delaying the moment when he would be inside her, because he wanted to be there for it, to feel her orgasm around him, and her contractions were so strong when she was this far along. So powerful, and so good.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he told her. “Come on.”

“Drew,” she gasped. “Please. Please.”

“Not until you’re coming.” If his voice was rough, he took care that his hands weren’t. “Come on, Hannah. Let me feel it.”

He was over her, around her, and she was rocking hard into his hand, nothing gentle at all about the wave taking her up. She was falling, plunging, crying out, and he was guiding himself inside her, feeling her grip him so tightly as the spasms continued, again and again, in a long, rolling, powerful orgasm that took him along for the ride.

He groaned, felt himself going fast. She had a hand back where his had been, as if she couldn’t help herself, and she was still keening, and he could swear she was going to come again. Or still, because the contractions had barely eased before they were grabbing him again, pulling him down with her until his panting breath, her soft cries were equaled by the roaring in his head, and he was being dragged down, tumbling over the edge with her.

Drowned. Shattered. Gone.

He slowed at last, sank his head to her back and rested it there, breathed for a moment. He felt her trembling beneath him and rolled to his back, pulled her gently down with him onto the plush cream pile of the carpet.

“That wasn’t…” he got out, “at
all
how I meant this to go. I had a whole romantic…plan. Been thinking about it all day.”

She hummed a little and nuzzled his neck, which felt just as good as everything else she’d done. He ran a hand over her hip, down her thigh, felt the press of her belly against his side, the ripple that was their son moving inside her, and smiled with pure contentment.

“Come on,” he said, getting to his feet and pulling her up with him. “Come lie down for me. Let’s get you on this bed. We’ll pretend this is the beginning, and I’ll show you what I meant to do.”

“Drew…” she managed. She couldn’t even stand up. She was leaning against him a little, limp and boneless, the body that had felt so ungainly earlier that day thrumming with satisfaction. “I’m fine. I’m
so
fine.”

“Nah.” He picked up her jar of body butter. “Lie on down, now, because you didn’t get a chance to put this on yourself tonight, and it’s my turn anyway.”

He cleaned her up first, and she lay back, her upper body propped up by the pillows he arranged for her, and let him do it, because she’d have let him do just about anything. Then he was straddling her, sitting below her belly, scooping out handfuls of rich body butter and rubbing it into her arms, her chest.

She had to smile at the time he took over her breasts. “Mmm,” she said. “You’re so…concerned.”

“Yeh,” he said, his touch gentle, but so deliciously male, the roughness of his hand a thrilling contrast to the smooth coolness of the cream. “No point in doing a job at all if you’re not prepared to get stuck in and do it right. And you know I always get stuck in. Planning to do it right, too. Planning to get you noisy again tonight.”

His words stoked the flame again, and she moaned a little, saw the satisfied smile forming on his face.

“That’s right,” he told her, his hands, his fingers still working, because he knew exactly how to touch her, how sensitive her breasts were, and he loved giving her pleasure there. “Just like that. I want you loud. Going to take care that you are.”

He shifted off her at last to give her legs the same loving attention, and by the time he was smoothing the butter onto her inner thighs, stroking higher and higher, she was breathing hard.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” he said huskily.

“Yes,” she sighed, closing her eyes to focus on the sensation.

“Same for me,” he told her. “Your hands on me feel so much better than mine. I think that every time I’m away from you. I close my eyes, pretend that’s your hand, your mouth there. That I’m inside you. Tell myself I’ll be there soon, imagine what it’ll be like, what I’ll do. When I get off the bus, off the plane…I’m that much closer. But not as close as I mean to be. Not as close as I need to be.”

She didn’t answer. She was watching him now, his familiar, beloved face tough, intent, the way she’d seen it so often. But this time, all that fierce concentration was for her.

He shifted to her belly, his hands stroking its contours as he smoothed the rich cream into her skin.

“So pretty,” he told her. “Always. You have the most beautiful skin. Thought so that first time, when I had you on my boat. Wanted to touch it just like this. Wanted to kiss it. Wanted to lay you down and…touch you.”

She knew what he’d wanted to do, what he wasn’t saying, and the thrill of it shivered along her skin along with his hands. She reached a hand up, traced the network of fine white lines above his eyebrow, along his jawline, his chin. Scarred, battle-hardened. A warrior, first and last. All man, and all hers.

“I wanted to touch you too,” she told him softly. “So much. You…overwhelmed me. You still do. And what you said, about how you feel…”

She stopped, watched him twist the top on the tub of cream, set it on the table, then slide back over her, all the way down so his big hands cupped either side of her belly. Her breath hitched as he kissed her there, below her navel, began to move down, his hands stroking the skin of her abdomen, making her feel beautiful, and desired, and his.

“When you’re…gone, and you imagine me,” she managed to say, “that it’s my hand, and my mouth. I…I imagine you too, those nights. When I…” She stopped on a gasp as his mouth found her, as his lips and tongue began to work. “But it never feels like…this,” she got out. “Like…oh.” He’d found exactly the right spot, and she could barely speak. “Like…you.”

She wouldn’t have thought she could manage it again, or that she needed to. But she could, and she did. She needed it so much. His gentle touch, and, later, when it wasn’t quite as gentle, when his mouth, his hands were harder, more urgent. When her own hands were fisting, yanking frantically at the sheet beneath her, and then, in desperation, grabbing for his hair, and she was pulling it, just like he’d pulled hers.

He took that for the signal it was, increased the pressure until she was rising off the bed, crying out her pleasure, knowing he was feeling it as surely as she’d felt his. Knowing that he needed to know he was giving it to her. That her pleasure was his own. Always.

She was still trembling when he rose up over her again, pulled one of the pillows out from under her and stuck it beneath his own head, settled down beside her.

“I should put my nightgown on,” she murmured, snuggling closer, the heat of his big body radiating through her. Knowing that he knew she really meant, “Please go get me my nightgown,” and that he would do it.

Except that he didn’t.

“Not tonight,” he said, stroking a hand down her back, soothing her as if she’d been a skittish horse, and she sighed and let him do it. “Please. I love you naked. Love to touch you, feel your skin against mine.”

“Even when I’m this pregnant?” She searched his face. “It wouldn’t be better to cover up a bit?”

She could see the amusement crinkling the corners of his gray eyes. As cold and forbidding as the winter sea when they needed to be, but so warm when he looked at her.

“After all this,” he said, “you can still ask me that? You really don’t know?”

“Know what?” His hand was still moving, sending wonderful tingles through her.

“How much I want you when you’re like this. Why I do.”

When she didn’t answer, just continued to look at him, he went on. “It’s a…it’s a male thing, I guess. Well,” he said, chuckling a bit, “it’d have to be, wouldn’t it? It’s…how much you’re mine, when you’re pregnant. I see you like that, my baby in your belly, and it’s…it’s possession, I reckon. Virility. Proof. Something like that. It’s your
body showing the world what I did, what I did to you. And I know that’s a bit caveman,” he hurried on. “But then, I
am
a bit cavemen. I can be. I know.”

He had his hand on the side of her distended abdomen now, a soft touch over the firm contours. “It’s all mine,” he confessed, “and I love it. And the more you feel that way to me, the more I want you.”

She was tingling from more than his touch now. “Then I guess I’m a cavewoman myself,” she told him, “because that’s exactly how it feels to me too. That I’m yours, and how much I want to be. And the thing that turns me on the most, so
you
know? It’s knowing you want me. Having you tell me so, seeing it in your eyes, feeling it in your body. That’s the sexiest thing you can do for me. Just want me that much. Just show me you do.”

“If that’s all it takes,” he said, “I’m a lucky man, not that I don’t know that already. I want you, and I can show you how much I do. How often I do. Which is at least as often as you want it. And exactly that much, too. More than that much.”

She smiled at him, loving him so hard her heart ached with it, because she knew what he was doing. What he was doing for her.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.

He laughed a little, leaned over, and kissed her hair. “Nah, sweetheart. Thank
you.”

Hannah woke to more bright morning light around the blinds. She wasn’t alone this time, she realized. Drew’s quiet approach through the double doors of the master bedroom must have woken her.

He came across to the bed, a mug in his hand, and set it on the table beside her. She scooted over, patted the spot next to her, and hoisted herself up.