Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  Ohh. The sound breathed out of her on the wings of his exquisite sexual torture.

  He whorled his tongue over her center of pleasure in excruciating circles. Ohh.

  Apparently, he liked vocal women. Because he kept right on provoking her.

  She exclaimed again and again, higher and higher, her voice rising as he built the charge.

  His own breath became faster, harder, more ragged, synchronized with hers. She felt the warmth of it in her parted center. He placed his open hand across her left nipple and grazed her with the hollow of his palm, building pleasure, matching the speed and intensity of his tongue.

  She peaked loudly, unabashedly.

  He stilled his mouth, a seasoned lover who understood that even pleasure had its limits.

  She lifted her head, bracketed his face with her hands and drew him up to her. He settled his full weight on her. Arms around his shoulders, legs around his hips, she clutched him tightly, all her passion and need unguarded.

  He lay atop her, face buried in her neck, and stroked the hair on her temple while she subsided.

  Daniel held her quietly, hips pressed against hers. Brenna had taken a woman’s greatest risk, opened her body and soul, made herself completely vulnerable to him. And she had done it in this awful room, in this potentially-disastrous situation where their lives hung by a slender thread. If the Nationalists burst in and caught them like this, they’d maul her. She was open, defenseless, her warrior spirit dismantled by love-making. He groaned. She’d known that and made love to him anyway.

  But he had two years of loneliness behind him and no foreseeable future ahead. He couldn’t bear to be adrift any longer. He needed connection, needed to bury himself inside her and forge the elemental link between man and woman. God, he groaned, trying to remain still even though he felt his own need demanding satisfaction. He needed home, and she was it. Forgive me, he thought, kneeling up, groping with his zipper. Forgive me for needing you this much. Forgive me for not being able to keep you safe.

  “Let me,” she said, and covered his hand.

  “Careful,” he hissed, so aroused it was almost painful.

  She sat up, eased her hand inside his jeans, guarding him while she stretched his boxers up and over his engorged shaft and eased his zipper open. She caught the weight of him in her hands.

  Drawing down his hips, she lay back, and parted her knees. He pressed himself into her slick feminine folds, dipping his shaft in her slippery arousal without plunging inside. He rimmed her clitoris, teasing her until she writhed.

  Now, he thought, watching her lovely face. Now. He lined himself up with her womanly center and pushed slowly inward.

  She gasped.

  He felt himself impossibly still engorging. Her softness separated and enfolded him. She spread her knees, opening herself to be fully penetrated.

  He trembled with the exertion of penetrating her, his shaft so thick, so long he had to give her time to mold herself around him. He plowed slowly inward, expanding her, bearing down slowly, burying himself deeper and deeper inside her.

  She moaned as he made his last push and circled him with her legs, arching upwards. He rocked fluidly, adamantly refusing to think about Nationalists, or the pain in his hip, or anything else. He needed Brenna. Needed the welcome of her body with a ferocity he couldn’t fathom.

  She matched him, rising to his thrusts, opening to his engorged sex, taking him deep inside herself. She panted, bucking beneath him, her breasts awash in the rhythm of their undulating bodies. And still he needed more.

  Their coupling grew frenzied. Their bellies slapped together. His breath scraped past his lungs like a sharp handsaw. Sweat ran down his back. Ridiculously, he kept thinking I want to get inside. Want to get inside her. He wanted more but feared injuring her.

  “Don’t hold back,” she gasped. “You won’t hurt me.” Her breath, the sound of her passion, came faster, more ragged. “Oh, Daniel, Daniel.”

  He looked down at her beautiful face, turned aside in abandoned passion, her eyes closing as she gave herself wholly to him.

  His testicles rose, tightening against his body. She was with him. Calling his name. His name. Oh, how he loved the way she gave him her voice. Release your passion. Cry out for me. The foundations of his body shaking, he stiffened and erupted, taking her with him to completion.

  He crumpled, spent, shuddering, deeply bonded.

  She roped her arms around his sweat-soaked neck and hung on tight. “Don’t leave me,” she cried in his ear, her voice a mix of sobs and breathlessness. “Oh, Daniel. Don’t leave me,” she said, racked by a depth of emotion that tore him apart.

  He tightened his hold on her. “Never.”

  Their physical link held tight for a long time before it subsided. He rolled onto his back, bringing her on top of himself so her head rested in the crook of his shoulder and her hair brushed his cheek. He caressed her, quietly reveling in the smooth curve of her back, the flare of her hips, the roundness of her bottom. Even now he felt as if he hadn’t gotten enough of her.

  Soothed by his meandering hands, her breathing slowed and deepened. She was exhausted. For almost three full days—each of which had seemed like eternity—she had carried the burden of their survival. Now it was his turn to stand guard. He tightened his arms around her, enfolding her, willing her to feel secure. If violence burst into their room he would give his life to save hers. He turned his face into her hair and pressed his lips against her scalp, inhaling the scent of her, planting kisses without hurry.

  Little by little, depleted by the emotional catharsis, she yielded to sleep.

  He had been mistaken to think he could separate the warrior from the woman. Without a fighter’s courage, no woman could have surrendered her defenses under these circumstances.

  Chapter 16

  Daniel lay with Brenna in his arms, watching the last of the day’s shadows slide across the walls and fade. The sun would soon submerge itself into the horizon and not come up for air again until tomorrow. When full darkness fell, he would wake her.

  He heard a whimper from down the hall. The babies were waking, probably hungry, and needing diaper changes.

  He stretched his arm out and dragged his and Brenna’s heaped shirts and pants closer. Hands on her hips, he eased her off his chest onto their discarded clothes.

  “Wha—?”

  “Shh,” he murmured, covering her with his jacket. “I’m going to check on the children.” Uncharacteristically oblivious, Brenna had not heard them.

  She nodded and curled up on her side to sleep again.

  He pulled on his jeans and went to the nursery in his bare feet. The children were fidgeting. They needed to be fed again. He pulled Brenna’s knapsack open and rummaged for the bottles. He couldn’t warm them, but the babies needed the nutrition. He unscrewed the caps from the first two bottles and started with Heckle and Jeckle, who were the most restless.

  As he sat in the stillness feeding them, he tuned his ears to the streets beyond the apartment. The sporadic bursts of gunfire sounded sharper, more defined than before.

  Closer.

  Night was rapidly approaching. Maybe darkness would fall before they were discovered. Maybe they’d get the chance to run.

  After all the babies drank their formula and were changed, they fell asleep again. He returned to Brenna, his bare feet pricked by the shards of jagged concrete spewed across the floor. If he was going to die, let it be in her arms. A man could do worse.

  He stood at her feet, looking down at her, curled on her side on the floor. He furrowed his brows. She hadn’t heard him come into the room. That wasn’t normal for her. She was withdrawing into herself, shutting out everything else. Emotionally volatile, swinging between suicide and unbridled laughter, she’d twice today walked away from her camera, in effect breaking her grip on the one thing that kept her grounded.

  He lay down behind her, spooning the length of his body against her back. She shifted, but didn’t wake. Elb
ow crooked, he propped his head in one hand and studied her, stroking the wisps of dark hair at her temple, marveling at how fine it was. Silken, and so delicately cut it feathered as he raked his fingers through it. Unexpectedly feminine for a woman who dodged gunfire for a living.

  He groaned, shaking his head in self-reproof as he recalled their love-making. He had come so close to losing sexual control of himself. At first, he’d felt so primitive, so chaotic. He could have gone over the edge, just plowed into Brenna without safeguarding her. For some crazy reason, she hadn’t feared him, just helped him rein in and start over. How would Aya have responded if such a thing had happened between them? His relationship with her had been so different. More contained, more civilized. Would she have trusted him again, if he’d ever come that close to overpowering her?

  He lifted a fingertip to the curve of Brenna’s seashell ear and traced its delicate pattern. How had he missed this? When he first met her, she seemed indomitable. Now all he saw was vulnerability. He lowered his mouth and delicately traced the folds and whorls of her ear with the tip of his tongue. Thank God she had helped him to be careful of her—helped him be a better man.

  She stirred against him, moaning in her sleep.

  The sound arrested him. It was raw, sensual, unguarded. He leaned over her, rapidly hardening. Some beguiling chemistry had reorganized the molecules in his body and demanded that he join with her to achieve completion. Somehow, this difficult, challenging, glorious woman had become part of him.

  He tugged his jeans off. He wanted to feel her against his skin.

  Again? Or was it Bren, whispered in her ear?

  Brenna was dreaming, curled inside a warm orange glow—the sun, warming her. The sea, rocking her, rising around her, caressing her hips, her belly, her breasts. A breeze whispered in her ear. Delight spread through her, and she chuckled sensuously. Yes. Sweep me away. Take me out to sea with you.

  The path was familiar, the touch. Ari had brought her here before, taught her not to fight the tide. Give yourself to it. I’ll go with you.

  “Open,” he whispered. He eased her forward, half on her side, half on her belly and slid his hand down the back of her thigh, pressing her knee forward to expose her woman’s core.

  Oh, she moaned, the sweet friction of hard male, gliding between her parted thighs. She opened herself more, as much as she could at this awkward angle, more vulnerable than face-to-face.

  The thick shaft slipped forward along the slick groove of her body. His fingers came down her belly to her abdomen, onto her mound, and lightly straddled the center of her pleasure. He circled her slowly, tugging her gently this way and that.

  She gasped. He was a maestro, pulling the music tauter and tauter, holding the orchestra on the thin edge of a sustained note. She tightened her pelvic muscles, heightening her satisfaction as his engorged body stroked the folds of her own. Occupy me, darling. Fill me.

  He caught the edge of her center, tormenting her with small incursions when she wanted to be fully penetrated.

  “What are you doing to me,” she mumbled, writhing under him, rising slowly through the twilight of sense memory.

  He balanced her on the brink of orgasm, not taking her over the edge.

  His mouth came down on her ear. “Let me have you,” he said.

  The fog lifted and her heart started pounding. She jerked beneath his weight. This wasn’t Ari. It’s Daniel, she told herself. Daniel. She was wavering like a candle, flickering between past and present.

  He pressed forward, nudging her now, petitioning for admission as gently as small waves lapping to shore.

  “Do you want me, Brenna?” His question reached her ear as an entreaty. Tell me you want me. Please say so. There was no demand in his voice, just a heart laid open, and a touch so tender it took her breath away.

  “Yes,” she said, grasping his forearm. “I want you, Daniel.” I want you I want you I want you.

  On her answer, he shifted over her and rolled her on her back. With exquisite tenderness and solicitude, he slid the full length of himself inside her.

  She closed her eyes, utterly lost to him, and let him take her into the storm.

  Afterwards, as she lay in his arms and he caressed her, Brenna charted his features with her fingertips, studying him with the care of an appraiser evaluating a precious gem.

  His face was lined with exhaustion, his eyes heavy-lidded and defenseless-looking with his glasses set aside. She traced the cut over his brow, trailed fingers down his cinder-burned cheek. This was a man who bore the weight of years lived and life experienced. She didn’t mind the mileage. He had substance—an earned face, remarked-upon by his life. He’d lost a wife and child. Lent his strength to a dying boy, been pounded by explosives and ground down by pain and exposure. And yet he held himself with grace.

  His kindness—his goodness—made her heart swell with affection for him. She loved this man heart and soul, as she had once loved Ari.

  Ari.

  Emotion engulfed her.

  Recollection shimmered and danced. Time and place guttered. She pressed her face into the hollows of his neck and dreamt of sun and sea and burnished shoulders. Oh, the light, the blue, the fresh salt air, lying there between them.

  Open heart, sweet surrender, feelings long forbidden. Love unbridled, sea of passion—calm before a mighty storm.

  Ari. Ari felt like this.

  Wicked night, breath so foul, lured her deeper into shadows. Sweet illusion evanesced. Peace was false, safety bogus, love cupped within a brittle globe.

  Thunder roars. Sunlight fails. Sky becomes the killing black. The burst, the rent, the warm moist tissue. Forearms drenched in sticky crimson.

  Grief squeezed hard, and pulled her taut, a vise around her chest. She remembered now, with devastating clarity, the armored bullet ripping through her heart. Air constricted, caught inside. I’m hit. I am hit! she sobbed, uninjured.

  “Bren?”

  Ari. Daniel. Same deep love. History repeating.

  The sea rushed back, and further still, a vanishing horizon. Don’t go near. This is wrong. Inward gasp before the rush.

  Her heart thumped wildly, then flew loose.

  “Brenna.”

  Run! she screamed, paralyzed and speechless. Feet were rooted. Did not move. She smelled the dying flesh.

  Her chest quaked uncontrollably.

  The roar, the sea. I hear it now. Charging toward our tiny figures.

  She flung out her arms and fished around. Tried to find her camera.

  A distant hand caught hers. Another soothed her back. “Brenna. Oh, Jesus.”

  No dear God, this cannot be. I’m frozen on this spot. Watching, knowing. So small, inconsequential.

  Dark green night closed in on her, protest strangled in her throat. Deep in shadows lies my shelter. Deep in shadows lies my grave.

  “Stay with me, sweetheart.”

  Love forgotten and refound going down beside me. Her body shook, convulsed by memory.

  The wall of water crashes forward, bent upon its evil. Shadows rise from leading edge, ghostly apparitions. Alien oblong mouths, march onward, uniformly grim.

  Boots crunched the road, edged along exterior walls. Ragged breath. Stink of fear. Enemy unknown.

  She sat bolt upright. Roll the tape. Capture this forever.

  Her fingers twitched, as soldiers’ did, on triggers.

  Warm strong hands shook her shoulders. “Brenna, wake up!”

  Here they came, seven or eight. Hard dry whispers. Chafing gear. Move on in. Clear the room. Shoot anything that’s moving.

  Daniel dove for the clothes on the floor.

  “They’re here,” she said, voice shaped at last inside her throat. “Downstairs.” Rats-feet scrabbling over grit. Charging forth on threats not here.

  “I know,” Daniel said, standing nude, gathering the fabric of her turtleneck. “Over the head.”

  There’s no escape, no run and hide.

  The shirt came down.
He grasped her hands, guided them through the sleeves.

  There is no God, just deserted sparrows.

  “Stand up, love.” He spoke quietly, handling her tenderly. “I won’t have them find you naked.”

  She obeyed, faced the door. Me first.

  He bent over, grasped her ankle, and guided her foot into the pants leg. Balancing herself on his shoulder, she momentarily glanced at the fragile trench running down his spine. Not gaped open. Yet. But soon. Pain twisted through her entrails.

  He took her other foot, laced it through, and pulled the pants up. A beam of light bounced against the corridor wall.

  Here it comes. They’re right next door.

  He buttoned her. Reached for his own jeans.

  She stared at the door. Terrible things were going to happen. She shook her head. Straightened with resolve. Lifted her chin. I accept my fate—

  —But refuse to witness anyone else’s.

  Any moment now, the shadowed men would surge through the apartment—systematically check the living room, the kitchen, the nursery…

  Her eyes widened in horror.

  The children!

  Adrenaline—powerful and transformative—flooded through her, sweeping the remnants of her fugue in its path.

  She leapt for the door.

  “Brenna!” Daniel, pants partway up, lunged for her and missed.

  She ran to meet the Nationalists head-on. She had to draw attention away from the babies. Or die before she saw what happened.

  After all she had witnessed in Kavsak, she could be allowed one selfish act.

  Daniel blurred down the corridor behind her.

  “Me!” she cried, running barefoot over needle-sharp grit, caroming off the corridor walls, waving her arms to catch their attention.

  Gunfire exploded.

  Daniel caught up to her in the living room.

  A second shot ricocheted off the ceiling.

  Daniel caught her waist and corkscrewed, shielding her with his body.

  She fought him with savage fury.

  He lurched. Flashlight bounced off the walls around them. “Brenna! No! For God’s sakes!”