Lover Beware

tightened in answer and hers responded with another aftershock. They were merged so completely, so tightly bound together he couldn’t tell where he started or left off.
    “Stay with me the rest of the day, Sarah. All night. We can do anything you like. Just be with me.” He propped himself up on his elbows to take most of his weight off of her. He wanted to be locked together, one body, sharing the same skin, absorbing her.
    She reached up to trace the lines of his face. “I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be or who I’d rather be spending time with.”
    “Do you wonder why you chose me? I stopped asking myself that question and just accept it. I’m grateful, Sarah.”
    “I look at you and I just know. Who can say why one heart belongs to another? I don’t ask myself that question either, Damon. I’m just grateful the gate opened for you.” She laughed with sudden amusement. “It has occurred to me you might be seducing me to try to get the secret of paint preservation.”
    He tangled his fingers with hers, stretched her arms above her head. “It did seem a good idea. Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to speak when I’m making love to you and I’ll be able to pry the secret out of you.”
    “Good plan; it might work, too, if I could manage to speak when you’re making love to me.” She gasped as he lowered his head to her breast. “Damon.” Her body was hypersensitive, but she arched into the heat of his mouth.
    “I’m sorry, you looked so tempting, I couldn’t help myself. How do you feel about just lying here without a stitch on while I build a fire and cook something for you to eat? I’m not certain I can bear for you to put your clothes back on.” His teeth scraped back and forth over her breast. His tongue laved her nipple.
    Sarah’s entire body tightened, every muscle going taut. “You just want me to be lying here waiting for you?”
    “Waiting eagerly for me,” he corrected. “Needing me would be good. I wouldn’t mind if you just lay here on my bed thinking of my body buried inside you.”
    “I see. I thought it might be better if I just followed you around, looking at you, touching you while you worked. Inspiring you. I have my ways, you know, of inspiring you.”
    There was a wicked note in her voice that made his entire body aware of how receptive and pliant she was. He was all at once as hard as a rock, thick with need. Damon watched her eyes widen in pleased surprise. Desire spread through both of them, sheer bliss. “I’ve never felt this way with any other woman, Sarah. I know it isn’t possible. I think you really could walk on water.”
    “For a man who spent a lot of time in a laboratory, you know your way around women,” she pointed out. He was moving with that exquisite slowness he used to drive her straight up the wall. The friction on her already sensitive body was turning her inside out. It didn’t matter how many times she went over the edge, Damon moved with almost perfect insight, perfect knowledge of what she needed. What she wanted.
    “I can read your face and your body,” he said. “I love that, Sarah. You don’t hold anything back from me.”
    “Why should I?” Why would she want to when the rewards were so great? If Damon was the man destiny insisted would be the love of her life, her best friend and partner, she was willing to accept whatever he had to give.
    Sarah loved the sound of his voice, the thoughtful intelligent way he approached every subject. And she loved his complete honesty. There was that same raw honesty in his lovemaking. He gave himself to her, even as he took her for his own. She felt his possession deep in her soul, branded into her very bones.
    There was that patient thoroughness and then, when he was fully aroused, his body was a driving force, each stroke hard and fast and insistent, taking them both soaring out over the sea, free-falling through time and space until neither could move again.
    Damon held her in his arms, curled next to her, not wanting to end the closeness between them. They were completely sated for the moment, exhausted, breathing with effort, yet there was the same sense of absolute peace. “Sarah.” He whispered her name, a tribute more than anything else.
    “All those things you feel about me,” she said, snuggling closer to him, “I feel about you. I didn’t want anyone in my life any more than you did. I sometimes tire of giving pieces of myself to other people, yet I can’t