by JoAnn Ross
“Oh, yes.” The sigh shuddered out of her. “That was wonderful.” And a great deal more satisfying than doing it all by herself.
“Hell, that was just to take the edge off so we can enjoy the rest of the night.” He grinned wickedly, like the pirate he could have been. Then kissed her again. Longer. Deeper.
She murmured a soft sound of protest as he left the bed. Then began to watch, enthralled as he pulled his shirt from his jeans and began unbuttoning it.
He was as she'd remembered him, but different. Heavier, but without an ounce of fat from what she could tell. His shoulders were wide, his chest broad, skin tanned to the color of walnuts stretched tight over smooth muscle and sinew.
His eyes didn't move from hers as he stripped off the shirt and tossed it onto a nearby chair. Next he unbuckled his belt, pulling it through each loop with such aching slowness, Dani had to restrain herself from leaping up and finishing the job herself.
After he'd discarded the belt onto the chair with his shirt, he opened the metal button at his waist with a quick flick of his wrist. The hiss of the metal zipper was unnaturally loud in the absolute silence broken only by the sound of their breathing.
Dressed, Jack Callahan was remarkably handsome. Nude he was magnificent. Standing naked and rampant before her, he certainly didn't look like a man who earned his living at a computer keyboard. Male power radiated from every pore as he trailed his splayed wide hand down his chest, following the arrowing of dark hair.
“You do this.” His voice roughened with hunger as he curled his long fingers around his beautifully formed erection. “All I have to do is think of you and I'm hard.”
If the world had been coming to an end, if meteors had begun crashing into the Earth outside the window, if the bayou was rocked with earthquakes, engulfed in flames, Dani could not have moved from this bed. Could not have dragged her gaze away from the arousing sight of that rigid flesh thrusting from a thicket of tight jet curls. A single drop of moisture shimmered on the knobbed, plumhued tip; struck with an overwhelming urge to lick it off, she heard herself moan.
Need welled up inside her. Years of emptiness waiting to be filled. Rising to her knees, she opened her arms, held them out to him as he returned to the bed on that loosehipped, predatory stride which never failed to thrill her. The mattress sank beneath his weight. They knelt together, face to face, soft feminine curves pressed against hard male angles.
He tunneled his hand beneath her hair, cupped the nape of her neck, and kissed her while Dani moved her hands up his back, reveling in the play of long hard muscle beneath her touch, neat short nails nipping into his skin. She closed her eyes against the sweet agony of desire and urged him even closer, wishing she could absorb him into her burning flesh.
When her mind began to shut down, Dani allowed her body—and Jack—to take over, discovering that sexual surrender to the right man could be glorious.
He explored the terrain of her body with hands and lips and teeth and tongue, discovering thrilling points of pain and pleasure she'd never known existed. He touched wherever he liked, tasted what he wanted. Murmured words against her lips, her throat, her quivering stomach, silken cords twining around her heart, binding her to him.
The more control Dani relinquished, the more pleasure she received. There was nothing Jack could have asked for that she would not have willingly given.
Her fingers curled in his hair as his lips nibbled their way up the inside of first one thigh, then the other. Her body arched and she sucked in a deep, shuddering breath when he slid first one, then two fingers into the moist giving folds of her body and began to move them in and out of her with a wet silky, ease.
“Mon Dieu, you're hot,” he marveled. Drawing his head back so he could watch her face, he thrust his fingers higher, stroking, caressing, adoring the very heat of her while the erotic sucking sound make her crave him all the more.
Dani gasped as the orgasm flared, but before she could recover, he'd dragged her back down to the mattress and wrapped her fingers around the white iron bed frame. She thought she heard him tell her to hang on tight, but wasn't quite sure, with the blood pounding in her ears, whether it was his voice, or her own need that had her tightening her hold.
His dark head was between her thighs, stimulating already ultra-sensitive flesh by alternately nipping and licking. Her stomach tensed, her thighs tightened in expectation, she arched her pelvis against his mouth, every atom in her body concentrated on the hooded tangle of tingling nerves hidden in her slick wet lips.
White hot stars wheeled behind her closed lids. Just when Dani feared she was in danger of shattering into a million pieces, a ruthless stroke of his tongue had her pouring over his hand.
Her body went limp, but once again Jack refused to give her time to regain her senses.
“Again.” His rough voice was a primal growl as he sent her up once more. Higher this time, hotter. Dani's breath was coming in short sharp pants, her eyes fluttered closed again, the better to concentrate on these exquisite, terrifying sensations. She tossed her head on the pillow while her body, desperate to feel him inside her, bowed.
“Look at me, Danielle.” Jack took hold of her chin and held her gaze to his. “I want to watch your eyes when I take you.”
Unable to deny him anything, Dani opened her eyes, meeting his for a thrilling, suspended moment. Then he plunged into her with a force that left them both equally stunned and breathless.
Jack recovered first. He began rocking against her, thigh to thigh, chest to chest, mouth to mouth.
He was long and thick and rock hard. Dani's body stretched, then tightened around him; her nails dug into his back and she wrapped her legs high around his hips to take him into her, deeply, fully, arching up to meet each rough stroke, hot flesh slapping against hot flesh, her soft cries muffled by his ravenous mouth, his tongue thrusting between her parted lips in rhythm with his bucking hips.
He was, as he'd promised, taking her, claiming her. Consuming her. Dani could not have been more branded if he'd burned his name into her hot slick flesh. And all the time his intense, gleaming gold eyes never left hers.
Hearts pounded, jackhammer hard, jackhammer fast. His movements quickened. Deepened. His back arched, his head was thrown back, every muscle in his body in taut relief.
This time they came together. Dani wept as a seemingly never-ending series of orgasms racked her body while Jack moaned a string of gloriously naughty sounding French words she couldn't understand against her ravaged mouth.
She had no idea how long they lay there on the tangled sheets, arms and legs entwined, but she was still shuddering from the aftershocks when he brushed a kiss against her lips and began to lever himself off her.
She made a small murmur of complaint, tightening her arms around him, holding him close. The ceiling fan was slowly spinning overhead with a faint click, click, click sound, the moving air cooling bare, moist flesh. “Don't go.”
“I won't.”
Dani wondered if Jack was talking about not leaving the bed. Or her life. But wanting to enjoy this stolen time together, she didn't ask. Instead, she cuddled against him and basked in the afterglow of passion.
“That was even better than I remembered,” she said on a soft, utterly satiated sigh. Until this evening she'd always believed the G-spot was yet another myth designed to make women feel insecure about their sexuality.
“So you did think of me from time to time.” He did not sound at all surprised by that revelation. In fact, she thought he sounded downright smug.
“Every once in a while,” she said with exaggerated casualness. “Whenever they showed Rebel Without a Cause on the Movie Channel.”
“I suppose bein' compared to James Dean isn't bad,” he decided. “But his character in that movie was kinda a whiney wuss.”
“He wasn't whiney. He was sensitive.”
“Sensitive's just another word for wuss. The guy wouldn't have lasted forty-eight hours here in the swamp.”
Unfortunately, he was probably right. Bayou males had a lot of appealing traits, but sensitivity, as a rule, wasn't exactly one of them. “So, how would you describe yourself?”
“If we're talkin' fifties flicks, I guess I'd have to go with a cross between Brando in The Wild One and Newman in Hud.”
It fit, Dani admitted. Brando's smolderingly dangerous force with Newman's wickedly blue-eyed, smirking sexuality that clung to him like sweat to a bottle of Dixie beer in August. “I believe Hud was out in the sixties. And I find it interesting that you'd choose two Neanderthal misogynists as role models.”
“Hell, those guys weren't misogynists. They were men's men.”
“How refreshing to find a man in the twentieth-first century whose oversize ego allows him to not even pretend to be the slightest bit politically correct,” she countered dryly.
“If I wasn't in such a good mood, I might argue that misogynist label, though I will admit to having never been a real fan of political correctness. As for my oversize ego”—he skimmed a lazy finger up the inside of her thigh—“just give it a couple minutes to recuperate, and this swamp-dwelling Neanderthal will be more than happy to supersize your sweet little pussy all night long.”
She couldn't help herself. She snorted. “You really are incorrigible.”
He touched his lips to her temple. “I didn't hear you complainin' when you were screaming my name in my ear like a wild woman, sugar.”
She flinched, just a bit, when he skimmed that treacherous fingertip over the still tingling flesh between her thighs.
“Did I hurt you?”
“It's still just a little sensitive. And I did not scream.”
“Sure sounded like screaming to me. But that's okay; I didn't need that eardrum, anyway. One'll probably do me just fine.” He slid down the sheets, scattering kisses down her torso. When he dipped the tip of his tongue in her navel, Dani could feel her body heating up all over again. “Jack—”
“Don't worry, darlin',” he murmured against her stomach. “I'm just gonna kiss it and make it better.”
When he lifted her against his oh, so clever mouth, Dani didn't have the strength to protest. Nor did she want to as he proceeded to use his hands and lips and supersized ego to take her far beyond better all the way to sublime.
Sometime, much, much later, Dani awoke in Jack's arms, unable to remember when, exactly she'd drifted off. The soft steady breathing on the back of her neck revealed that she wasn't the only one who'd fallen asleep. She glanced over at the bedside clock.
“Oh, my God,” she said, trying to extricate herself from the tangle of sheets. “It's late. I've got to get home.”
He pushed himself onto his elbows and blearily eyed the fluorescent green numbers. “It's not that late.”
“Easy for you to say. You're not the one who has to get an eight-year-old off to school and show up at work on time.” If she left now, she just may manage to squeeze in four hours' sleep before her clock radio went off.
He snagged her wrist when she would have left the bed. “Don't go.”
“I can't have Matt waking up and finding me gone.”
“I'll get you back to Orèlia's before he wakes up. But before you go, we need to talk.”
“Really, Jack, that's not necessary. I don't need the pretty words I did when I was seventeen. After all, I may not be the most experienced woman in the world, but I'm adult enough to know that what we did was just sex. Terrific, dynamite, world-class sex, but—”
“That's not it.” He thrust a hand through his loosened hair, which earlier had felt like black silk against her breasts, stomach, her back, as he'd seemed determined to make love to every inch of her body. “There's something I need to tell you.” His voice deepened with an emotion she couldn't quite decipher, rumbling like the warning of thunder on the horizon. Goose bumps rose on chilled flesh that had, just a short time ago, felt as if it was burning up.
Looking into the handsome face that appeared uncharacteristically grim, Dani suddenly realized she'd seen that expression before. Earlier, when he'd been showing off the bathroom.
“It's about that call you got earlier, isn't it?” Dani braced herself for bad news.
“In a way.” He sighed heavily. “It's about that summer. About why I left Blue Bayou.”
Dani couldn't speak as Jack related the story. Couldn't think. She could merely lie in his arms, numbed, chilled, listening in disbelief as Jack related the sordid tale.
“My father was the reason you disappeared in the middle of the night without a word?” The judge might not have been Ward Cleaver; he'd been distant and sometimes out-and-out cold. But until this moment Dani had never thought him to be viciously cruel.
“Yeah. I wanted to talk to you, to try to explain, but he refused to let me say goodbye. Said if I didn't get packed and out within the hour, Maman would lose her job and I'd be tossed in jail on a statutory rape charge.”
His words slashed through her like a razor. “That's so hard to believe.” How could her father have done such a dreadful thing?
His lips pulled into a hard tight line. “I'm not lying.”
“I didn't mean it that way.”
Myriad emotions bombarded Dani, so many she thought she might be crushed from the weight of them. Pushing aside her own personal pain for a moment, she lifted a trembling hand to Jack's face, felt the sensual roughness of his beard against her palm and was amazed that even as she fought against the drowning feelings of betrayal and loss, she could still feel a distant, renewed stir of desire.
“It was so horribly unfair to you. To me.” To our unborn child, she thought but did not say. A sob rose in her throat, nearly choking her. “And to your mother, who kept her job, but lost one of her sons that night.”
Jack hadn't deserted her. Not really. The knowledge, after believing otherwise for so many years, was staggering. Reeling, unable to remain still, Dani abandoned the warmth of the bed, the comfort of his arms, and began to pace.
“All these years.” She fought against the rising pain, struggled to keep it from engulfing her. “Ever since that night, my entire life has been built on a foundation of my father's betrayal.”
She'd never tried to find Jack. Never attempted to contact him. Not even after she'd learned she was pregnant. Because—oh, God—she'd believed he'd left because he'd no longer wanted her.
Memories flooded back in a torrent of painful images, the worst of them being that autumn afternoon when her father had calmly, cooly, calculatingly convinced her Jack's desertion proved he hadn't loved her, so there was no reason to believe he'd want to learn he was going to be a father.
Oh, he'd been so logical, she thought, as she whipped back and forth across the newly sanded floor, painful memories filling her head like smoke. So clear-headed when she was not, calmly ticking off all the reasons why her gilded visions of a life with Jack Callahan were merely romantic schoolgirl fantasies.
Did she have any idea the emotional costs of a shotgun wedding? he'd asked. He'd seen the results, again and again: angry, bitter men who'd take out their frustration at having been trapped into a marriage on the women they blamed for ruining their lives. Even worse, he'd seen the damage done to innocent children unfortunate to have been born into such marital war zones.
In tears Dani had argued that Jack wasn't that way. That she knew he'd never, ever lift a hand to a woman or a child. To which her father had, in the same deep, self-assured voice he'd issued edicts from the bench, asked if she could have ever suspected he'd take her virginity, use her for his own summer amusement, then abandon her.
She could not challenge that point, because it was true that she'd never, in a million years, expected such behavior from Jack. But also true was the fact that somewhere, deep down inside her, she'd known that the boy she loved was nothing like the self-indulgent portrait her father was painting.
Unfortunately, at the time, alone, afraid, pregnant at seventeen, battered by confusion and hormones, she hadn't b
een able to think clearly.
Oh, God. She rested her brow against the rippled glass and pressed a hand against her stomach, which heaved in her throat the same way it had that day, when, unable to hide her morning sickness any longer, she'd been forced to tell her father she was pregnant with Bad Jack Callahan's child.
“There's no denying that the judge changed both our futures that day.” Lost in her own whirling thoughts, Dani hadn't heard Jack come up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her waist, leaned her back against him and rested his chin atop her pounding head. “But it didn't all turn out so bad. It's obvious you adore Matt.”
“Of course I do.” She felt the hot traitorous tears begin to overfill her eyes. Tears of anger and betrayal. Of regrets too numerous to calculate. “He's the most important thing to me.”
Jack held her tight when she would have pulled away. “He's a beautiful, bright child, Danielle. A blessing and you've no idea how many times in the past weeks I've wished he were mine.”
He turned her in his arms, and to soothe himself, as well as Dani, he brushed away the glittering moisture trailing down her face with his fingertips. Her eyes were haunted and dark with something close to desperation he couldn't quite understand. Then again, he remembered feeling as if the judge had pulled the rug out from under him. It wasn't all that surprising that Dani would feel much the same way despite the passage of time.
“As you've already pointed out, Matt wouldn't exist if you hadn't married the man you did. Which you might not have done, if your father hadn't run me out of Blue Bayou.”
He watched the storm of emotions rage and knew the exact moment when she accepted that reasoning. “You're right, of course. But I think I hate how you can be so calm, when I'm not.”
“I've had more time to live with it. Come to grips with it.” He combed a hand through the love-tousled silk of her hair.
