Lover Beware

from even that simple touch, then he shifted upward, making a low sound of satisfaction as he completed the job of stripping her shirt and singlet from her torso. The blunt shape of his naked sex lodging between her tender folds tipped her over some invisible edge, and she arched, straining against the pressure, the hot, ridged muscles of his belly. Her fingers sank into the heavy muscles of his back. He jerked beneath her touch, then his mouth came down on hers and he shoved deep. For an endless moment she clung to him, her body quivering at the hot shock of penetration.
    He said something low and indistinct, then withdrew and slid home again, forging deeper, the pressure relentless as delicate inner muscles stretched taut.
    He groaned low in his throat, his gaze locked on hers. “How long?”
    She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. The second she’d realized that she was attracted to Rider, she’d been incapable of making love with her husband. Whenever Patrick had touched her, she had frozen. Patrick’s cancer had been both a hell and a saving grace in that respect. It had kept her tied to him when honour demanded she give him the honesty and respect of the truth—and a divorce—but it had also meant separate rooms. She briefly closed her eyes. “Seven years.”
    He went still and suddenly the unreality of lying naked and entwined with Rider on the wet ground in the middle of a cyclone hit her. He was large enough that he took the brunt of the wind, and protected her from most of the rain, but they were both soaked. Rider’s shoulders glistened in the faint glow from the kitchen, water trailed from his hair and dripped from his nose, but wet or not, where his skin touched hers, she burned.
    He framed her face, his palms warm and calloused against her skin. “I nearly went crazy thinking about the two of you in bed.”
    The confession was startling, even though she’d known he’d left his wife for her. Abruptly, a feminine confidence she thought she’d never feel again warmed her, along with knowledge, as solid and real as Rider. Despite the passage of time, despite the doubts that had eaten at her, in all the ways that counted he was hers . “It didn’t happen,” she said flatly. “I couldn’t.”
    Some of the tension left his body. His breath stirred against her cheek. “Thank God for that. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Patrick on my worst enemy, but…”
    He had wanted Patrick out of the picture. The unspoken words hung between them, as raw and uncomplicated as Rider’s weight pressing her into the wet ground, the heat pouring off his skin, the hot, stirring pleasure as he moved inside her.
    The pitch of the wind altered, adding a keening edge to the building savagery of storm. He dipped and his mouth closed over one nipple, and her body shimmered out of control again as hot, dissolving pleasure gripped her.
    He lifted his head, his face slick with rain, his gaze fastened on hers as he shoved deep, and she felt the hot liquid pulse as he held himself deep inside her. The moment was primal and extreme, and she was fiercely glad he hadn’t worn a condom. She wanted his penis naked inside her. In an utterly female way, she quite simply wanted him , and had done so from the first time she’d laid eyes on him.
    At a primitive animal level, the coupling was preordained and logical. She was a female who had been cordoned off and alone for years, and he was a strong, dominant male in his prime. The fact that he could impregnate her, and probably already had, didn’t terrify her. She wanted his semen. Planning didn’t come into it. She’d been locked in deep freeze for years, the chill mired deep in her bones. Getting involved with Rider was the equivalent of stepping into the heat of a blast furnace. He was wild and risky and unexpectedly vulnerable, and she was certain of only one thing: She wanted more.
    Her arms wound around his neck and she stretched and arched beneath him, glorying in his weight pressing her into the ground, the continued penetration as he kept her beneath him, and the delicious throbbing wetness deep inside.
    Experimentally, she gripped him more tightly and felt him twitch and thicken.
    “More?”
    She lifted her face to his, studied the taut line of his jaw, the sharp cut of his cheekbones. “Much more,” and then the liquid glide started again, and she couldn’t think, could barely breathe. The thrusting seemed to go on for a long time, although time was hard to