River’s End

friendship so casually she found herself responding in kind before she’d thought it through.
    Thinking it through was vital.
    She liked him well enough, she thought now. He was a likable man. So much so she tended to forget how close he could get, how much he could see. Until his eyes went dark and quiet and simply stripped her down to her deepest secrets. She didn’t want a man who could see inside her that way. She preferred the type that skimmed the surface, accepted it and moved on.
    If admitting that caused an ache around her heart, she’d live with it. Better an ache than pain.
    Better alone than consumed.
    She thought they’d deal with each other well enough now. This was her turf, after all, and she had the home advantage. She’d made the decision to talk to him about her childhood, what she remembered, what she’d experienced. It wouldn’t be without difficulty, but she’d made the choice.
    A choice, she understood, she couldn’t have made when he’d come to her at college. She’d been too soft yet, too unsteady. He might have talked her into it, because she’d been so in love with him, but it would have been a disaster for her. In some part of her heart she’d always wanted to say it all, to get it out and remember her mother in some tangible way. Now she was ready for it. This was her opportunity, and she was grateful she could speak of it to someone she respected. To someone, she realized, who understood well enough to make it all matter. She saw him sleeping by the stream and smiled. She’d pushed him hard, she thought, and he’d held together. A glance around camp showed her he’d done well enough there, too. She secured her line and placed the fish into the running water to keep them fresh, then settled down beside him to watch the water. He sensed her, and she became part of the dream where he walked through the forest in the soft green light. He shifted toward her. reached out to touch. Reached out to take.
    She pulled away, an automatic denial. But the half-formed protest she’d begun to make slipped back down her throat as his eyes opened, green and intense. Her breath caught at what she saw in them, in the way they stayed locked on hers as he sat up and took her face in his hands. Held it as if he had the right. As if he’d always had the right.
    “Look, I don’t—”
    He only shook his head to stop the words, and his eyes never left hers as he drew her closer, as his mouth covered hers. And the taste was ripe and hot and ready. She trembled, maybe in protest, maybe in fear. He wouldn’t accept either. This time she would take what he had to give her, what he’d just come to realize he’d held inside for years to give her, only.
    His hands moved from her face, through her hair, over her shoulders as the kiss roughened, and he pushed her back on the ground and covered her. Panic scrambled inside her to race with desire that had sprung up fast and feral. She pushed at his shoulders as if to hold him off even as she arched up to grind need against need.
    “I can’t give you what you want. I don’t have it in me.”
    How could she not see what he saw? Not feel what he felt? He took his mouth on a journey of her face while she quivered under him. “Then take what you want.” His lips brushed hers, teasing, testing. “Let me touch you.” He skimmed his hand up her ribs, felt the ripple of reaction as his fingers closed lightly over her breast. “Let me have you. Here, in the sunlight.”
    He lowered his mouth to within a whisper of hers, then shifted it to her jaw and heard her moan. The taste of her there, just there along that soft, vulnerable spot where her pulse beat thick and fast, flooded into him.
    He said her name, only her name, and she was lost.
    Her fingers dug into his shoulders, then dragged through his hair to fist hard, to bring his mouth back to hers so she could pull him under with her.
    A savage rush of delight, a raw edge of desire. She felt them both as his mouth warred with hers, knew the reckless greed as he yanked her shirt up, tore it away and filled his hands with her.
    Strong and possessive, flesh molding flesh with the rocky ground under her back and the primitive beat of blood in her veins. For the first time when a man’s body pressed down on hers, she yielded. To him, to herself. As something inside her went silky, her mind went blissfully blank, then filled with him.
    He felt the change, not just in the giving of her body, the deepening of