Authors: Tracy Sumner
That she desperately wanted to kiss away his fear, whisper his name as he moved inside her, and hold him against her breast as he slept didn't make it the right path to take at the moment. "You couldn't be expected to save her. You can't save everyone. Some things are in God's hands, not yours."
"You don't understand. She would rather have moved back home with her folks after she saw what being a wife was. The down and dirty reality of living with a man. And I knew it. I did." His gaze flicked to her. "She didn't like it. She didn't want it. Rory was enough; I should have stayed away."
"When are you going to forgive yourself?"
His shoulders tensed, his fingers quaking around hers. Zach ignored her question, asking one of his own. "Why did you admit that? About the coach house to my brothers?" She found his vulnerability and the way he ducked his head utterly charming.
"Because I'm tired of everyone expecting you to be so perfect and, consequently, making you think you should be." Savannah smiled, brushing her thumb over his knuckle. She'd done all she could to help him thus far. Absolution rested on his shoulders. "I've forgiven you. After all, you broke our agreement, and I've yet to blame you for it."
His head lifted. "What agreement?"
"You said you wouldn't marry me even if we got caught naked in the middle of the street."
A soft burst of laughter ripped from his throat. "In the middle of a rally is what I said. That's all sounds fine and dandy, doesn't it? I didn't think it would actually happen."
A burst of lighting lit their faces. A storm swirled in his eyes, as if he too remembered that night in the jail. Devouring her in that brief moment, she recorded the feeling, mesmerizing her, tempting her closer.
Wild impulses set her skin tingling.
Impossible desires and forbidden dreams.
He leaned in until their faces were close enough for their breaths to mingle. "Say one of those big words for me, Irish."
Words poured through her mind, ridiculously big ones. Yet she uttered only, "Yes."
Taking her wrists in his hands and pinning them above her head, he poured over her like a scalding flood. His mouth crushed hers, swallowing her gasp of startled pleasure.
She met him, letting him possess her from the first instant. Her toes curled beneath the sheet.
He murmured against her lips, gasping a necessary breath of air, "Is that the best you can do? Three... little... letters." His hair fluttered around his face. In the meager light, she couldn't make out his expression.
Hip to hip, the outline of his arousal dug into her moist folds. She shifted from side to side, searching for the ideal fit. He growled low in his throat and linked their fingers, stretching their arms until their knuckles brushed the headboard. The position thrust her pelvis up and had the maddening bonus—for him—of keeping her from engaging him, changing the direction, or leading their erotic dance.
What had his question been? Something about best... somethings. Leaving her lips, he nipped at her neck, her earlobe. Her tortured moan as she struggled for purchase would have to do for an answer.
"I don't know if I have patience for"—he took her nightdress between his teeth and jerked, ripping it down the front—"pretty words and wooing." Air flowed inside the torn garment.
"I don't want wooing or pretty words." Her body practically smoked already. She wanted him. Zachariah. Her husband.
Her love.
Her skin tingled; her body ached; her mind spun.
And her heart?
Zach held that in his hands.
When his lips moved to her breast, his tongue circling, biting gently, she thought she would burst into flames on the spot. She jerked her arms from his grasp and plunged her fingers into his hair, raking her nails over his scalp. "Stop toying with me."
"Ah, sweetheart, if I was toying with you," he said, his breath hot and moist on her, "you would know it."
A light sheen of perspiration coated their skin. Hands moving to clutch his shoulders, she thanked goodness for his shirt only because she questioned keeping a grip on him without it. "Your clothes."
His hand worked its way between their bodies, brushing her mound, sending a shiver through her. Eyes half closed, she threw her head back. "Now, Zach."
Unbuttoning his trousers, he whispered raggedly against her breast, his mouth dragging higher, "How about this time, we try it with them on?"
Her lids flickered, catching him with such a look of bold longing on his face that her heart fluttered. His shirt lay open at the neck, his chest rising in staggered breaths. She bowed her head, kissing, sucking. Moist skin, crisp hair beneath her lips, then his nipple. It hardened slightly under her tongue.
He trembled above her, his hand grasping what was left of her nightdress and yanking it to her waist. With a muffled oath and a warning, he entered her in one fluid stroke, stretching her nearly to her limit. She raised her hips, clasping her legs around his.
"I want to feel your mouth beneath mine as I come inside you, Irish." He withdrew to the tip, his lips coming down on hers, commanding and aggressive.
Moving together in a tangle of moist skin, she kissed him, held him to her, and gave him everything she had. Though he did not know it, she lost herself as they became one. It was fantastic. Extraordinary. Remarkable. Heat and bursts of light, a raging storm. Inside her body, outside the windows of their bedroom.
A blinding, white-hot explosion.
He cupped one breast, testing its weight and gently squeezing, thumb finding her nipple and caressing in time to his thrusts. One hand went to her hip, lifting her in the same rhythm. Slanting his head, he deepened the kiss, closing in on his climax. She could tell from his frantic plunging and his efforts to bring her with him with whispered pleas. The recognizable sensation started swelling, raising prickles in her lower back.
His hand moved between her legs. "Ah, there, yes," she whispered.
He knew what she needed.
The sound of feet on the stairs barely registered.
The pounding of a fist on the door did.
"Christ," Zach whispered against her ear. His breath charged from his lips. "Not when we're so—"
"Zach!"
Caleb. Yelling something about a ship and the shoals and meeting him downstairs. Zach's body trembled from trying to hold back; his buttocks quivered beneath her hand. A bead of perspiration rolled down his cheek to his chin. Angry, he shouldered if away.
Tipping his head back, he shouted an affirmative reply and thrust deep, his voice covering the sound of the bed ropes squeaking.
"You have to—"
He cut her off with a brutal kiss, his hand stroking, seeking. He thrust silently, surely, to the tip and back, again and again.
"Come on," he murmured, pleading now, "before I... have to go."
Close. So close. But someone was outside and duty called.
"Later. We can—"
"
Now
. I would suck this if I had time." His finger flicked the nub hidden amongst her damp curls, circling it. "If I had time. I would make you shatter into a thousand pieces."
The image of his lips on her body, delving lower, between her thighs and beyond, something he had done to her only twice before, lit her fuse.
It was a short one.
The explosion rocked her harder because she held it back, held it
in
, breathing her shout of ecstasy into his mouth, digging her nails into his skin to keep from writhing off the bed. She whispered her hope that he would suck that part of her body into his mouth. Very soon.
He thrust deep, a lengthy, shuddering release. A well-timed din of thunder obscured his violent gasp.
His body trembling, he withdrew, apologizing profusely and pausing every second to touch her, to smooth her hair from her eyes or grasp her hands. Pulling on his boots with an angry oath, he buttoned his britches, pulling himself together quickly. Thankfully, they hadn't been completely naked. However, Zach looked bedraggled at best. Sweaty and disheveled and agitated at worst.
Truthfully, he looked like a man who had just been made thorough love to.
"Do you think he'll know we—"
"Most definitely," he said, stopping her short with his discomforting reply and a forceful kiss. Then he crossed the room with a shaky stride, his shirttail whipping against his hips. "Stay put," he ordered. "I have enough to worry about as it is."
"Zach."
He swiveled his head, hand on the doorknob, and stood staring, just staring. As if he sought to record the night. Or the room.
Or
her
.
Lines of worry chalked the skin around his eyes. A bust of lightning lit him in a silvery tinge. He quivered, his shoulders shaking.
I love you
. Her heart pounded in three beats, saying the words. "My father, a boy was all that mattered to him."
"I'll cherish this baby no matter what, Irish. You can count on that." Then he blew her a kiss and was gone. His feet pounded on the staircase. From below, Caleb's voice mingled with his, then the front door slammed as they ran into the stormy night.
"Be careful," she whispered to the empty doorway, feeling as if her heart had left with him.
* * *
The boy was young. No more than seventeen, if that. His chin had a pitiful sprinkling of peach fuzz on its round tip; a small crescent scar lay pink and fresh beneath his nose. Skin free of worry or time, he seemed a baby in the scheme of things.
Why, Zach asked, why take someone starting life instead of someone finishing it? They had pulled an old man from the sea, and not that Zach wished him harm, yet why would God, if he had to take a member of the ship's crew, take this boy?
Choking back rage and sorrow, he touched the boy's lips, as blue as the whisper of sky he had glimpsed outside the jail's lone window the day he made love to Savannah. The day his life changed forever.
The body before him lay still, the soul far from reach. Had this boy ever felt a woman's touch and heard her whisper his name as he took her? Had he even been old enough to dream of doing that? Had he felt anything close to the irrepressible need Zach felt for Savannah?
It was too late to question anything now. Once again, he had been too late.
He placed the boy's hand in a damp puddle, giving it a final, useless squeeze. Shoving to his feet, he wiped his face, tears mixing with rain and sand and salt. Crashing thunder shook the ground beneath his feet, flinging the branches above his head together with a crack.
He felt just as turbulent, unsettled in way he wished to forget. Was his whole goddamned life useless, he wondered savagely?
Was
he
useless?
The anger took him by surprise, the piece of driftwood in his hands before he had time to put into words what he was feeling or remember picking it up. Smashing it against a tree in the same circle where they'd had their long-ago picnic and now placed bodies from a doomed ship, the impact rocked up his arm in a painful spasm.
"Stop it, Zach." Noah's hand came down on his shoulder and slipped off his slick cotton shirt. Thrown off balance, Zach stumbled, falling to his knees. Rain slashed at his skin. "You're killing yourself," Noah growled. A hard shake followed this pronouncement. "You have been for a long time."
Zach dropped his head to his hands, misery and fear rolling through him as relentlessly as the waves against the shore fifty yards away. He hated death. From the end of spring when the azalea and dogwood blooms wilted and fell to the ground to the last glimpse of the sun after an awe-inspiring sunset. Those felt like death to him. Finality. An end.
But most, most of
all
, he found he hated the guilt that came with surviving.
"Let him go." Noah gestured to the boy, then sighed. "Let
her
go."
Zach's head lifted, water streaming into his eyes. Lightning lit the sky behind Noah in dazzling flashes. The look on his brother's rain-drenched face reminded him of the look on his when he was worried to death about Caleb or Noah or Rory doing something reckless and endangering their lives.
When he was afraid of losing them.
"Hannah's gone by no fault of your own. You've got to realize that and accept it or risk losing your future. Rory, Savannah, your baby. Do you want them to disappear behind this wall you've erected to protect yourself? Your son won't be a child forever, Zach. What happens once he starts patrolling the beaches with us or moves to a city away from your watchful eye? Do you plan to cut him out of your life because of fear? Because you don't know what's going to happen? Because you want to dictate every move?"
"Of course not." Like any parent, Zach didn't like to imagine his child leaving home. The rest—death and loss that every family had a taste of—he just couldn't imagine in relation to his son. "If you want me to fish a boy's body from the sea and
ever
forget his face or the feel of his chest pushing out his last breath, then you've got the wrong man."
"When did this happen? Grief has its talons sunk so deep in you that I agonize about you ever getting away."
Zach ignored the comment and rose shakily to his feet. With one last glance at the lost young sailor, he lumbered over the dunes. An angry gust of wind pressed his soaked shirt against his chest. He shivered, watching waves slash the shore in violent spouts of foam. The white-capped swells flung pieces of the ship's hull carelessly about, like a spilled box of toothpicks.
Searching the horizon, he prayed for mercy. For himself and the men on the ill-fated
Augustus
. One of the few they had been able to rescue from the frothy sea had told a tale of a drunken crew and a disastrous decision to challenge the shoals in an area many called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
"Do you see the last lifeboat we sent out?" Noah asked, coming to stand beside him, hand over his eyes to keep the rain from his vision. They were the only ones left on the beach. The other men in the patrol had taken the survivors across the bay and into town for Dr. Magnus's attention. Zach and Noah had offered to stay.