Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

something deeper, a pleasure whose piercing sweetness was like silver lightning stitching through his soul. She did no more than soap him, rinse him, sleek her hands down him to take off the excess water—and he felt as though he had walked into a bare electrical wire.
    She turned away, shutting off the water. When she faced him again, he couldn’t conceal the vital hardening of his body, the blunt physical need that made her eyes widen. Hunger poured through her like a firestorm. She took his hand and led him toward the bed. The coolness of the room after the steamy shower made her shiver. She didn’t even notice it. At that moment, nothing existed for her but Archer.
    “I didn’t know if you still would—” she began, but her breath backed up before she could finish.
    The smokiness of her voice and her eyes made him feel like he had been stroked from head to heels. “If I would what?”
    “Want. Like me.”
    His smile was a razor acceptance of the pain that would come when she no longer wanted him. “When it’s you, Hannah, I’ll want until I can’t. And then I’ll still want.”
    “Then let me,” she whispered.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. This. Everything.”
    She tasted his chin, his shoulders, his nipples, the median line of his body where water had gathered and slid down past his waist. And like water, she flowed down him. Her mouth was open, a heat that healed even as it burned. He gave an involuntary shudder when her tongue traced his erection.
    “I’m told men like this. Do you?” Hannah asked.
    “Yes. But it’s not necessary unless you—” his breath ripped and his head spun as she sucked lightly on him “—like it, too,” he finished hoarsely.
    “I don’t know.” Her tongue swirled around him. “I’ve never done this before, just as I’d never had a man love me the way you did.” She dipped her head again. Found him again. Murmured even as she circled him. “I think . . .” She closed her mouth fully over him, lingered, learned, memorized the heat and pulse of life in him, took him deeply and lost herself, tasted the salt of creation. Slowly, slowly, she released him. “Yes, I like it. A lot.”
    The pleasure on Hannah’s face as she bent to caress him again made Archer fight for the control that she stripped from him so effortlessly. He lay on his back, fingers digging into the bedcovers. As the sultry tugging of her mouth consumed him, he wondered if she had any idea of what she was doing to him.
    “You keep that up and you’re going to make me come,” he said finally, raggedly.
    She looked up and his breath fragmented in a groan; her eyes were heavy lidded, as sensual as her mouth caressing him, and her nipples were drawn into hard, hungry peaks. Clearly she liked arousing him, pleasuring him.
    “I’d rather be inside you,” he said thickly. “But it’s your call, sweetheart.”
    “Would you mind?”
    “Whatever you want,” he said simply, closing his eyes, giving himself to her. “However you want it.”
    He felt her weight shift on the bed until she was astride him. She guided him home, taking him inside her with a slow, slow motion of her hips that made the world go a radiant kind of black all around him. Hot black. Deep and sweet and dangerous. Without knowing it, he groaned.
    She heard. Need pricked her with exquisite claws. Shivering, she gave him what she couldn’t hold back, took from him what she needed to survive. With every breath, every heartbeat, she kissed him, her mouth open and lazy. Forehead, eyelids, lips, neck, shoulders, everything she could reach without losing the slow, complete rhythm of giving and taking and needing and sharing.
    And then she felt him change, sensed the rigid tension and the hot surge deep within her body, his strength given to her without hesitation, her name broken on his lips, and the elemental pulses that were both his and her own. She trembled with him, around him, in a long, shivering consummation that was all the more shattering for its tenderness. Boneless, spent, she sprawled the length of his body and waited to find out if she was still alive.
    As the sweat cooled on their bodies, Archer shifted.
    “No,” Hannah whispered, wrapping her arms around him. “Don’t leave me.”
    “Don’t worry.”
    Leaving her was the last thing on his mind. That would come later, and with it would come the kind of pain he didn’t want to think about. He grabbed the down comforter, wrapped them up in it like a