If Dylan hadn’t already been on his knees, he would have fallen then and there. He’d never seen a more beautiful sight in his life. Earlier she’d mimicked the goddess Isis, but that’s exactly how she looked kneeling there on the edge of the cliff, long hair blowing softly around her face, blue eyes glowing with a promise that could tear a man in two, her soft hands cupping her breasts and lifting them to him.
“Once,” he rasped, “you told me
I
didn’t play fair.”
An unholy smile curved her lips. “Once, I was a fool.”
And once Dylan had trampled the greatest gift imaginable. Not again. With damning clarity, he realized there was nothing he wouldn’t do for this woman, to keep her safe, keep that glow in her eyes.
Keep her his.
In a move as swift as the river racing below, he lowered her to the blanket and put his mouth to her breast. He wanted to go slow, to trace lazy circles around the wide areola, to taste and tease and torture them both, but the way she writhed beneath him had him pulling the nipple into his mouth instead. She cried out and arched upward, wrapping her legs around his.
Desire crashed and surged. He savored the feel of her in his mouth, sucking gently but firmly, using his fingers to toy with her other nipple. Nipples that would one day soon nourish his child.
The thought rocked him to the core.
He was only vaguely aware of Bethany’s hands at the waistband of his shorts, fumbling with the button and the zipper. But when she slid inside his boxers and closed her fingers around his shaft, vague awareness sharpened into excruciating reality. Her hand was soft, sure, squeezing and stroking and driving him half out of his mind.
Shifting his mouth to her other breast, he reached for the front of her shorts, only to have her hands join his there, as well. Together, they made quick work of her khakis and panties.
There between her legs, both of them naked and ready, he wanted to slide inside and step over the edge once again. Instead, he cupped her mound, his hand sliding lower to find her wet and ready.
“Dylan,” she whispered, tilting her hips. “Please.”
The broken word shredded him. He slid his fingers down further, then slipped inside, discovering her as small and tight as the night they’d made a child. But she was also warm and slick and when she cried out, he joined a second finger to the first. She rocked against him, prompting him to return his mouth to hers and absorb the mewl tearing from her throat.
Her hand found him again, and steered him toward her. This time he didn’t hold back. Couldn’t. Desire roared through him. Need. A sense of rightness he’d never before known.
Pushing against her opening, he heard something guttural break from his throat when her body didn’t immediately take him in. He didn’t want to push her, though. Didn’t want to hurt her. Instead, he let her body adjust to his size, sprinkling gentle kisses along her cheekbone as he did so.
“Dylan,” she whispered.
He lifted his head to look at her, the way shadows played across her gaze. But these weren’t shadows of sorrow like before, nor shadows of the past. These shadows stemmed from the evening around them, and in them, she looked even more beautiful.
“Don’t hold back,” she said, lifting her hips. “I want to feel you inside me,” she puffed, pressing a hand to his buttocks. “I want to feel you deep. I want to feel you come unglued.”
Sweet mercy, he almost did right then and there. He stared down at the woman in his arms, no longer an ice princess, no longer in her ice palace.
“Maybe I want to take it slow,” he muttered, grinning at the role reversal. “Maybe I want to savor every moment.”
She bucked against him again. “And maybe you’re not going to have a choice.”
That was all it took. Her body accepted him, allowing him to plunge deep. She closed around him, hot and slick and possessive, little muscles holding him tight. He wanted to stay there forever, suspended in a hazy world where there was only him and Bethany, but need had him pulling back and sinking in again.
“Take me away,” she whispered. “Take me back.”
But he didn’t want to take her anywhere. He wanted to give her everything, all of him, all he’d ever wanted to be.
They started moving together, him thrusting, her tilting her hips. Almost desperately he grabbed for her hand, threading their fingers together and stretching her arm above her head. She arched into him and cried out, and for the second time in one day, Dylan stepped over the edge.
But this time the free fall neither scraped nor burned, but shimmered and sizzled.
It was a long time before they landed.
* * *
Darkness blanketed the land, but not her heart. Beth lay naked in Dylan’s arms, staring at star-dappled sky. Billions of pinpricks of light shone down, clear and unobstructed, dazzling and eternal. The breeze carried the scent of pine, and desire.
“Are you okay?” he asked, stroking a hand along her rib cage.
A delicious shiver ran through her. “Okay isn’t exactly the word I’d use.”
He swore softly. “Was I too rough? Christ, I’m sorry—”
“Sorry?” She lifted her head from his chest to see his face. “I’m not.”
“I … got a little carried away.”
Beth could only stare. The moonlight revealed the shadows in his gaze, the grim set of the mouth that had worshipped hers while evening gave way to night.
Slowly, tentatively, she lifted a hand and ran her fingertips along the stubble covering his jaw. She’d loved the way his whiskers had tickled her body as Dylan’s mouth did deliciously wicked things to places long forgotten. And though the whiskers were soft, she felt sure they’d left their mark on her, as well.
The melting started all over again. For nine long years she’d shut herself off from the passion Dylan St. Croix stoked within her. She’d told herself that passion was bad, destructive. That it led to pain and heartache, that it didn’t, couldn’t, last. That it had been responsible for her miscarriage and the ensuing accident which killed her father. That if she let it rule her, she’d end up as self-centered and destructive as her mother.
That’s why she’d left the cabin before dawn, that cold morning six weeks before. That’s why she’d tried to forget.
But now, looking into Dylan’s glittering green eyes, she could find no malice or danger in what they’d just shared. Only peace and happiness, a sense of contentment as brilliant as the night sky.
“You did get a little carried away,” she said, sliding a finger from his jaw to his lower lip. “But I forgive you.”
Her tone was purposefully playful, but his gaze remained serious. “Do you?”
She hated seeing him like this, her man of passion so still and expressionless. Sliding on top of him, she pressed a kiss to the side of the mouth she desperately wanted to see smile.
“I wanted it as much as you did,” she reminded.
But he didn’t give her the smile she wanted. “Not for making love to you, Bethany. For that night on the mountain. For mauling you, when I knew damn good and well you’d gone there to be alone.”
And finally, at last, she understood. Their lovemaking had ripped down the walls between them, leaving only man and woman, truths as raw and unforgiving as the river thundering below.
She’d been so blinded by the enormity of Lance’s murder and the discovery of her pregnancy, the soul-shattering revelation that Dylan had fathered her child, she’d never, not once, stopped to think about what Dylan must be going through.
His world had been blown apart every bit as brutally as hers.
Dylan had always been bigger than life to her, capable of dealing with anything. He was a man driven by passion, but principles, as well. Because of the hypocritical world in which he’d grown up, pretenses made him sick. Lies made him crazy. He’d turned crusading for the truth into his life’s calling. But now, he’d not just gone against the moral compass that defined him, he’d shattered it.
“Dylan.” She met his gaze with hers, gave him a smile born in her heart. “You’ve given me the greatest gift imaginable,” she whispered, and meant. “What malice can I find in that? We were both there that night. We’re both consenting adults. We both knew what we were doing. There’s nothing to forgive.”
He closed his eyes, but not before emotion flashed in green depths. “I don’t deserve you.”
The quiet words destroyed her. She looked at him lying
beneath her, and wondered how she’d ever found the
strength to
walk away. If
she could do it
again. He’d been
electrifying as a boy, but as a
man … the hard-won combination of passion and strength and tenderness devastated.
And it was that man who deserved to know the secret she’d lived with for six long
years.
“The night before I married Lance, I dreamed of you.”
Beneath her, he tensed. His eyes came open, revealing a punishing combination of surprise and … dread.
“I
dreamed of making love with you,”
she
admitted. She’d thrashed restlessly in the bed of her childhood, heart
hammering, blood heated, certain
that he’d been there with her. “I dreamed it was you waiting for me at the altar.”
Dylan swore softly, shifting her from his body and standing in one svelte movement. He jerked on his shorts and walked from her, walked from the confession that cost her so much, moving to stand at the edge of the cliff.
The rejection cut deep, but Beth wasn’t about to let it silence her. She’d kept the words, the truth, bottled up for too long, never realizing what a coward she’d become.
“It was so real,” she said, drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “I woke up with my body on fire, as though you’d really been there in that room with me.”
Through the hazy moonlight, she saw Dylan’s shoulders stiffen, but he said nothing. He just stood staring out over the side of the mountain. She wondered what he saw in the darkness, if he saw anything at all.
Long moments passed. Long quiet moments punctuated by the ruffling of the wind and the urgent pounding of her heart. Long moments shattered by two words.
“I was.”
Beth went very still, all but her heart. It strummed low and hard. Deep. “You were what?”
Dylan turned to her. “I was there, Bethany. I was with you.”
Now it was her turn to step over the side of the mountain, and fall. “You mean figuratively, right?”
“Flesh and blood,”
Dylan corrected, but didn’t move.
He just stood there seemingly on
the edge of the world, the star-filled night sky behind him,
his expression as hard
as a rock. “I knew you were marrying my cousin the next
day, and
I knew there was nothing
I
could do to stop you.
But I wasn’t ready to let you go. I wasn’t ready to live my life without touching you one last time. Kissing you. Telling you goodbye.”
Shock streamed through her, not hard and punishing, but languid and seductive. Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Heat came next, the memory of his hands and mouth on her body, the lingering scent of jasmine. She’d jerked herself awake, horrified. What kind of a woman dreamed of making love with her former lover the night before she married another man?
Her mother’s daughter, that’s who.
She’d summoned the other memories as fast as she could, the screams and the blood, the baby she’d lost due to the blinding passion she felt for Dylan. And from those memories, she’d found the strength, the resolve, to walk down the aisle and pledge her life to a man who didn’t send her world spinning.
“How?” she asked, standing.
For the first time, the hard lines of his face softened, and the side of his mouth quirked up into a smile. “Remember that window you showed me with the broken
lock?”
She remembered, all right. It’s how she’d sneaked him into her room after everyone else slept.
“Your grandfather never had it fixed.
”
No wonder, Beth thought wildly. No wonder the scent of sandalwood had mingled with that of her jasmine candle. “My God.”
Dylan crossed to her and
picked up his chambray shirt,
then draped it around her shoulders.
Only then did she realize she’d begun to shake.
“You looked so beautiful,” he said, lifting a hand to her face. “Peaceful. I stood there a long time letting that image
override memories of the accident. Your screams … Jesus.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them
a moment later. “I
can’t tell you how many nights I jerked
myself awake, convinced I’d find your blood on my hands
all over again.”
Horror staggered through her, bringing with it the need to comfort. She’d been so determined not to turn into her mother and casually hurt those around her, but somehow she’d never realized that in doing so, she’d hurt the only man she’d ever loved.
There’d been a time she hadn’t
even thought that possible.