Her eyes were locked on his, somber and defensive. Her face was flushed, and her hair hung over her shoulders in a curly red mane. She wore only a long white T-shirt, and it stopped high on her legs. She was barefoot. In one hand she clutched a tiny box.
“I don’t want promises or sympathy from you,” she said. Her voice shook a little, but her accusing stare didn’t flinch. “I just want tonight.” She stepped forward, her chest rising and falling roughly, and held out her strange gift.
When he saw she’d brought a box of condoms, alarm merged with the sharp streak of hunger. He couldn’t do what she wanted. Fury grew out of the dilemma. “Get out of here,” he ordered. He heard the thread of desperation in his voice. “Right now.”
Her hand trembled but remained out, the arm rigid, her fingers clenched in a fist around the package. “I’m not going to hang on to you in the morning. I won’t cry and beg and expect you to change your mind. Yeah, I’m asking you to forget about
her
tonight. But you and I had something between us a long time before anybody else laid a claim on you. We were just kids, and it doesn’t mean much now, but it was real.” She shook her hand at him. “You owe me.”
Her manipulation was outrageous but imbued with deadly logic. Artemas tried to intimidate her with a sardonic glare. “Sex won’t help matters. It complicates them.”
“I thought men kept it simple. When you’re hungry, you eat. When you’re horny, you
fuck.
”
The breath rushed out of him with a vicious sound. “I doubt I’m listening to the voice of experience.”
“So teach me.”
“What makes you think I want to?”
Her hand wavered, and for the first time painful uncertainty clouded her eyes. Then she stiffened and said, “I don’t care if you want to or not.”
His patience snapped. He dropped the quilt, leaped forward, and grasped her wrist. “I said leave.” He bullied her up the hall, crowding her, his nearly naked body slamming into hers. She dug her heels in and drew back her free hand in a fist. Artemas caught it and shoved her against a wall. The contact was instant and damning—their bodies sealed together from chest to thighs, her wrists pinned by her shoulders, making her breasts thrust outward, scalding him with their pressure and the electric scrubbing of the soft T-shirt covering them.
They stared at each other in blank desperation. He was hard against her belly, and recognition flashed through her eyes. She cried out—a low, strident moan of relief or fear. His mind was too fogged to know which—he only knew that he couldn’t stand having her feel more fear, hate, or desperation because of him. His head sank against hers. She sighed near his cheek, then kissed the spot. He was lost. Defeated.
“You can say no, or stop, whenever you want to,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “But if you don’t say either one, you’ll have to take what you get.”
Her breath shuddered against his face. “All right.”
He released her wrists with a caustic little shove, then snatched the box of condoms from her. He turned and walked back into her bedroom. The hall light cast the room in a faint glow, leaving deep shadows in the corners. After a second he heard her step in after him and stopped. His back to her, he tossed the box on the mattress’s white sheets, then shoved his briefs down to his feet and kicked them aside. His actions were as graceful as he could make them, but hardly delicate.
He turned to face her. “This is what you think you want. Take it or leave it.”
Even the dim light couldn’t cloak the stark expression of panic on her face, but she quickly shuttered it behind a grim nod. “It’s big enough, I guess. Plenty. I guess I’m lucky. Or unlucky, if it hurts.” She paused. “But nothing could hurt worse than the way I already feel.”
That plaintive remark nearly broke him, but a terrible brand of self-defense had taken over. He dropped to the mattress and sat with one leg jackknifed against the other, waiting. She stood motionless, her hands hanging at her sides, staring down at him. He expected her to turn and walk out at any second. He prayed she would. His body, hard and virile, rejected that prayer.
Instead, she reached under her shirt and pushed her panties down. The strip of white material slipped to her feet, a dull flag of surrender. He wanted to console her, to tell her he didn’t want this charade of uncaring sex. But her pride returned with the sudden, brusque lifting of her chin. She grabbed the bottom of her T-shirt and dragged it over her head. Without hesitating, she dropped it by her feet. Soft and strong, as defenseless as he was, she was devastating.
The torment had been savage before. Now, it became a throbbing menace, a rupture in his self-protective cruelty. “Lesson number one,” he said, sarcasm hammering the words, “my cock doesn’t reach far enough for you to stay by the door.”
She inhaled sharply and shot back, “Maybe I ought to get a pair of heavy pliers and stretch it for you.”
She took two long strides and sank down on the mattress’s foot, her eyes fixed on some point over his shoulder. Her breasts swayed slightly, and he watched her arms tighten along the sides of them. She started to curl her legs beside her, a demure little movement, while one of her hands moved awkwardly from one thigh to the other, obviously fighting an urge to cover the delicate patch of hair between them.
“No. Lie down,” he ordered, scrutinizing her with
unrelenting challenge. She shot him a fierce look but stretched out on her side, her back to him. “For God’s sake, you know what I mean.” The ugly instruction came out sounding hoarse and tortured, not what he’d intended. She flung herself over on her back, clamped her mouth in a tight line, and defiantly laced her hands behind her head, as if to prove that being naked didn’t embarrass her.
“Don’t order me around,” she whispered fiercely. “At least have the guts to
touch
me.”
Touch her. He couldn’t resist the one lovely gift that had always belonged just to him
. In one smooth movement Artemas came down on her, snagging her waist with both hands, sinking his mouth onto hers, pulling her to meet the weight of his torso. She quickly challenged the rough kiss, catching his lower lip between her teeth and biting. The sting of it cleared his senses; he wasn’t capable of humiliating her, not even to make a point.
Jerking his head back, he looked down at her narrowed eyes and gritted teeth. The ragged cadence of her breath roared in his ears. He lowered his mouth to hers again, slower, softer, calculating. It wasn’t a surrender, but she wouldn’t know that.
Her heart beat wildly against his ribs; her lips were tight and unforgiving, but her hands faltered, then rose to his shoulders, digging into them. The taste of her mouth shot through him. He touched her teeth with his tongue, then dragged gently at her lips. He felt her first, tiny concession, as they pursed a fraction, searching.
Losing himself in that pursuit, he coaxed her more, barely touching his mouth to hers for a moment, then sealing it, nudging her with almost imperceptible movements of his jaw. Her heat rushed into him, a backwash of intensity, building, returning, surging outward again. A silent sigh went through her body, and her fingers spread on his arms, feathering across the fevered skin.
Lily felt her anger and humiliation changing to astonishment. His seductive power could erase everything. The surrender worked both ways; he was apologizing—that must be it, because he was suddenly so gentle. The deep,
drugging force of his mouth traveled into her blood like the pulse of a drum. His smoky male scent invaded her; the careful thrusting of his tongue stroked chords of agreement inside her, and a kind of exquisite lethargy radiated from it.
One of his hands smoothed upward, catching her breast. There was the first thrill of fingers other than her own stroking the hot skin, moving in maddeningly small degrees to the nipple, the coarse pad of his thumb scrubbing that peak. And the shudder of his breath in reaction to touching her.
This was too much to think about at once. His leg, a delicious heaviness on her thighs. The moistness on his skin, and hers. The progression of his hand to her other breast, then down the center of her stomach, riding the slight arching of her body. His fingers slid lower, flooded her with a path of heat, pushed into the damp, curly hair between her thighs. Her thoughts focused like a beam of light on them. Distracted pleasures converged on a single small destination.
She rolled against the pressure of his fingers, urging them, showing him with the greed of her kisses that she wanted more. And that she wanted to please him, in return. Her hands slid to his face, touching it gently, telling him she’d never doubted that he was still what he’d always been to her—special, someone to cherish.
Abruptly he took everything away—his mouth, his hand, the weight of his chest and belly, the clamp of his leg. Her eyes flew open, and she watched him sit up. His expression was carved in hard angles, his mouth set in judgment.
Without looking at her or speaking a word, he snatched a packet from the box crushed between them on the mattress, ripped it open, and fitted the filmy sheath over his erection. Chills scattered over her skin, trust fled again, muscles tightened into a shield. His tenderness had been a tactic, not an apology.
He rolled toward her and rose over her—long, powerful arms stabbing down on either side of her shoulders, his
knees spreading hers. With the face of a tyrant he loomed over her, a large-shouldered male animal no longer cloaked in fantasy.
“Say ‘Stop,’ ” he ordered, his voice lower than a whisper, strutted with emotions she couldn’t analyze.
“No.” Her legs flexed, anxious to press inward and keep him out; she willed them apart and drew her knees up slightly. “Hell, no. You come here.” She hesitated. “Please.”
“You don’t want me like this. You don’t want me anymore. Admit it.”
“I want you,” she retorted. “You owe me.”
He said something indecipherable but obscene just by the sound of it, then levered himself into her gently. Still, it was like a wedge driving inch by inch into living wood. Her vision clouded. A willow could feel its fibers ripping, she was certain. The wedge stabbed deeper. Her mind was glazed with the image of the tormented willow. She heard it moan with pain and betrayal, felt it shivering violently.
But she was the willow.
He flexed into her again, but the pressure was collapsing, softening, then slipping away. His head and shoulders sagged; the fierce, unpliable pillar of his back relaxed. Her mind cleared; sight returned. She was looking up into Artemas’s tortured eyes. He raised a fist and slammed it into the mattress. Sinking back on his knees, his chest heaving, he gave her a look of weary defeat.
Lily felt as if her lungs were flattened. She tried to take a deep breath, but it hinged on what he would do next. He lay down beside her, on his back. The mattress was too narrow for privacy; they were joined from shoulder to hip. Lily darted a glance at him. He stared upward, his face, in profile, carved with unhappiness. He drew short, sharp breaths. Intuition too vague to define made her turn on her side and ease her cheek against his shoulder. His hand moved against hers; their fingers intertwined.
She trembled with sympathy as he brought her hand to his chest and continued to hold it. The muscles convulsed
under her fingertips. “My God, Lily.” Slowly he turned his head to look at her. Bittersweet. Troubled. Resigned. “
Lily
,” he said again, and this time it was a caress. They lay still, finally seeing each other for the first time, the battle lost on both sides.
“Could we start over?” she asked. “Could we pretend—just tonight—that nothing else matters, and not talk about anything except what’s happening right now?”
“It would be better if you left.”
She clamped her lips together against an urge to plead with him, squeezed his hand tightly, released it, and sat up, facing forward. Her bare back felt like a freshly turned field exposed to the sun. She knew his eyes were on her.
Artemas couldn’t breathe.
Let her go. It’s for her sake, not yours
.
Lily slid to the end of the mattress and started to rise. There was a soft rustle as he lurched upright. His hand latched on her arm from behind. “Don’t,” he told her hoarsely. “Don’t go.”
Tears slid down her cheeks. She twisted around on her knees and met his outstretched hands, sank into his embrace, and wrapped her arms around his neck. Bending her head beside his, she held him tightly. He pressed his face into the crook of her neck. His fingers dug into her back, quivering. She whispered his name.
Time had no meaning. Hours might be passing, drugged with the slow progression of caresses. They eased down on the mattress, facing each other, kissing, exploring, breathing in each other’s low sighs, sounds like a cat’s purr or a wordless plea. The fearful pleasure she’d felt before was gone; now it was urgent and trusting. He touched her with so much tenderness that everything before was erased; she was bathed in his caring.
His erection was no longer a weapon; it pulsed with welcome inside her awkward, eager hand. He showed her how to remove the sheath over it, and when, marveling at the silky skin, she naively scrubbed the tip too hard, he gave a sharp, gallant laugh as he flinched.
She frantically curled herself over him and kissed it. He
flinched again but not with discomfort, and it was the most natural thing in the world to taste him with her tongue. The musky flavor excited her, and she closed her lips around him, just a bit of him, every nerve tuned to his reaction. His body flexed and rose; she thrilled at the way he wanted more.
“Too much,” he whispered, sinking one hand into her hair and the other beneath her chin. He guided her upward again, held her face between his hot palms, and kissed her deeply. “Too good. I’ll show you why.”
He rolled her onto her back with exquisite roughness and dropped quick, sucking kisses over her breasts, feeding on them, as she gasped and arched her back. His attention moved to her stomach, then the taut plane of her belly, as his hands curved over her legs and eased them apart. Suddenly the fevered core of her womanhood was sealed to his mouth, and unimaginable pleasure streaked through her blood. She cried out, latching her hands in his dark hair, struggling, exploding.