His breath came out with a hoarse sound.
Instantly she released him.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t know anything about this. You’re the only one I’ve ever kissed besides blood family, and that’s different.”
Conner was right, Case thought grimly. She was married for years and never even kissed.
An odd kind of pain twisted through him, sadness and hunger combined, and a need to cherish Sarah that was greater than any other emotion.
“Are you all right?” she asked unhappily. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t.”
His voice was husky and his eyes were a smoldering silver-green between his nearly closed lashes.
“You groaned,” she said.
“So did you, two weeks ago.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You will this time.”
Sarah stiffened subtly. All she remembered was how she had ended up that morning—her pants around her knees and his hand between her legs.
“We weren’t just kissing then,” she said.
“You weren’t kissing me at all. I was kissing you.”
“But—”
“Hush,” Case said, lowering his mouth over hers again. “It’s just kissing.”
“Mmmph.”
After a few moments she forgot all about what was and wasn’t kissing. The feelings cascading through her were delicious. So was the taste of Case, his heat, the textures of beard and lips, tongue and teeth.
The softening of her body told him that she was no longer anxious about what might happen. Instead, she was returning the intimate kiss with a shy, hesitant, yet passionate thoroughness that made his head spin.
He forgot about the rock digging into his side and the cold wind blowing over his naked back. He forgot about everything except the hot secrets of Sarah’s mouth.
At the back of his mind Case knew he should stop before he got in over his head. He had been a long, long time without a woman. And this particular woman appealed to him far too much for his hard-won peace of mind.
She healed my wounds, he thought. It’s only fair that I heal hers in return.
If I can.
If she’ll even let me try.
He merged his mouth with hers the same way he hungered to merge their bodies. Slowly. Tenderly.
Completely.
Sarah matched him breath for breath, touch for touch, hunger for hunger, until Case felt everything sliding away, leaving only her. He didn’t know he had undone the laces on her doeskin shirt until she tore her mouth free from his.
“You said just kissing,” she accused.
“It’s hard to kiss through doeskin.”
When she understood what he was saying, her eyes widened. Her flushed lips and cheeks made the color of her eyes a radiant, clear silver.
“I’m not wearing doeskin over my mouth,” she said, breathing unevenly.
“I’m not talking about kissing your mouth.”
She stared at him. His eyes were pale green fire against the heightened color of his skin. Each time his head moved, light shimmered over his short black beard like stars against midnight. His lips were red from the pressure of their shared kisses.
“You want to stop kissing, is that it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I want to keep on kissing you and kissing you until the honey flows and you’re as soft as I am hard and we…”
With a sharp breath Case reined in his runaway tongue.
Sarah waited, watching him with wide eyes. Both passion and wariness were in her expression. Passion was stronger.
She was watching his mouth rather than his eyes.
“That’s the idea,” he said huskily. “Watch me. Watch us…kissing.”
His lips and beard were silky against her ear, her neck, the pulse beating just beneath her skin. When his tongue probed the hollow at the base of her throat, her breath broke. He sucked on her skin, bit her tenderly, and shared the ripple of response that went through her.
By the time her shirt was fully unlaced, she had no idea how it had happened. She knew only that the shirt was undone and her nipples were firm rosy crowns standing up against the thin muslin of her chemise.
He bent down. His lips parted over one veiled nipple.
“Case?” she asked uncertainly.
“Just kissing,” he said, his voice deep.
“But I’m not kissing you.”
“There’s more than one way to kiss each other. Watch.”
The sight of him nibbling gently on her breast made an odd, breathless feeling twist through Sarah. The stark contrast of masculine beard and fragile muslin somehow heightened the intensity of the caress.
Slowly, deliberately, he licked the thin cloth that separated his tongue from her taut nipple.
Sensations glittered through her like hidden lightning. Embarrassed, fascinated, held in a delicious net of pleasure, she watched the muslin darken beneath his tongue.
Before she quite knew what was happening, the tip of her breast vanished into his mouth. As he had once seduced her lips, now he seduced her breast, stroking it with tongue and teeth.
Her back arched instinctively, rubbing her nipple even more firmly over his tongue. He responded by increasing the sucking pressure until she whimpered and held him to her breast.
When Case finally lifted his head, her chemise looked as though the muslin had dissolved away, leaving her breast naked to his caressing tongue. She knew she should be embarrassed to see herself so clearly, and to know that he was seeing her in the same way, but her flushed cheeks came from rising passion rather than shame.
She loved watching him caress her.
Delicately, repeatedly, he sipped at the tight pink crown. When his teeth closed tenderly around the nipple, she shivered and cried out sharply.
He lifted his head.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, concerned.
She shook her head.
“Your eyes are as big as silver dollars,” he whispered.
Sarah looked down at her breast.
“What did you do?” she asked. “I’ve never looked like that, even on the coldest mornings.”
“This?” he asked.
He touched her nipple with the tip of his tongue.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“It’s your body’s way of saying it likes being kissed. It’s kissing me in return.”
“Just…kissing?”
He made a rumbling sound of agreement.
“Of course,” he said deeply, “if you wouldn’t mind, I would love to pet those pretty breasts while I’m kissing them.”
She shivered at the look in his eyes—half-open, heavy-lidded, he was watching her breasts the way a starving man watched a banquet.
“Just petting?” she asked in a small voice.
“Just petting.”
“Will it leave marks?”
His head lifted sharply. “Did he bruise you?”
“Only when I wouldn’t hold still. Then he…”
Sarah’s voice died.
“What did he do?” Case asked gently, wondering if she had mistaken passion for ill use. “I don’t want to scare you.”
“He just grabbed my breasts and dug in with his fingernails until I quit fighting.”
For a moment Case couldn’t even speak.
It’s a good thing Conner killed Hal accidentally, he thought. I sure as hell would have done it deliberately, and hanged for it.
“I would never hurt you that way,” Case said simply.
She hesitated, then let out a ragged little breath.
“All right,” she said in a rush. “You can do what—what you said you wanted to.”
“It will feel better without your chemise. For both of us.”
“Nothing covering me?” she asked in a high voice.
“My mouth. My hands.”
She shivered at the thought of wearing him as intimately as her own underclothes.
“All right,” she whispered, for her mouth was too dry to speak any other way.
He took off her shirt and shifted her until she was lying on her back with the doeskin beneath her. His hands slid up along her ribs beneath her chemise. He lifted his thumbs to ease the muslin up over her aroused breasts.
And then he simply looked at her.
“Lord, woman,” he breathed. “You put the sun and moon to shame.”
Sarah blushed from her breasts to her forehead.
He bent and smoothed his face against her, from her collarbone down over each breast and back again, kissing and stroking every bit of the way. The thought of such delicate beauty being savaged by any man, even her lawful husband, made Case want to lick and kiss and pet away every last memory of pain.
Bracing himself on his elbows, he dipped his face between her breasts, stroking her, aching for the ill treatment she had known. If he could have, he would have taken her pain inside himself, all of it, leaving her with only the pleasure.
The thought that such a healing might be possible was almost agonizing to him. He shuddered and redoubled his caresses, tenderly devouring her.
For Sarah, it was like her dream all over again, with the sun worshipping her naked skin. The rough silk of his beard brought her breasts to aching peaks that were soothed by his tongue and caressed by his fingertips and palms. Her breasts were flushed and taut, fully alive for the first time in her life.
She made a hoarse sound and jerked when his mouth closed over a nipple.
“I’ve never done this with a woman,” Case whispered, lifting his head. “You’ll have to tell me if I do something you don’t like.”
At first she didn’t really hear the words, for she was too caught up in the pleasure that rippled and shimmered through her to understand anything else.
“Never done this?” she managed finally.
“Not like this.”
“How is it different?”
“I want to take all the pain and leave sweetness in its place. Before now, all I wanted was…”
His voice died as he kissed the inner curve of Sarah’s breasts, then raked his teeth with exquisite care over each nipple. The jerk of her response and her fingers clenching suddenly in his hair told him just how much she enjoyed his caresses.
“Hell,” he said huskily. “I can’t even remember how it was before. I just know it wasn’t like this.”
He lowered his head and delicately consumed her breasts, lingering over the hard pink tips.
“There’s more of you I want to pet and pleasure,” he said. “Will you let me?”
Her only answer was a dazed sound and her fingers silently urging his head back to her hungry breasts.
“You’ll like it even more than what I’ve done so far,” he said. “Let me touch all of you, honey. Let me.”
“It won’t…hurt?” she asked raggedly.
“Have you ever felt something so good it almost hurt?” he whispered.
“You mean, like the song of the first meadowlark in spring?”
Her words made him clench with pain and pleasure combined. He had never guessed that anyone else felt like that about hearing a meadowlark for the first time after winter’s long, icy silence.
Until this instant, Case had forgotten what it was to feel like that himself.
“Yes,” he said unevenly. “Like a silver needle stitching through your soul. That’s not a real hurt, is it?”
“No. It’s beautiful. Like you, so strong and yet so careful of me.”
Case kissed Sarah very gently.
“I’d give my soul to take back what that savage old man did to you,” he whispered.
Tears came suddenly to her eyes. She touched his mouth tenderly with her fingertips.
“You can’t go back,” she whispered. “You can only go forward.”
With a hoarse sound, he put his forehead against her heart and let the steady beat of her life sink into him. Slowly, very slowly, his mouth slid down to her navel. He probed the sensitive hollow with his tongue.
She gasped in surprise at the sensations radiating through her with each movement of his tongue. His hands circled her breasts and plucked the aching peaks. At the same time he repeated his velvet probing of her navel. Her back arched and she cried out in a low voice.
An answering wave of passion swept through him, shaking him. Knowing that he was bringing her pleasure for the first time in her life was like a drug to him. He repeated the caresses again and again and again, tenderly, recklessly.
He didn’t want to stop. He didn’t even want to try.
With trembling hands he unfastened her pants and eased them down her hips. Beneath doeskin and muslin, the scent of roses and feminine arousal combined in a heady perfume. He inhaled deeply, dizzy with the sensual possibilities of her body.
“Case?” she asked, her voice uncertain.
“The sun, the moon, the stars,” he said thickly, looking at her. “Nothing is more beautiful than you.”
The pale fire of his eyes devoured her, yet his hands and mouth on her body were as gentle as the golden shadow of flame.
Torn between embarrassment and a heat she had felt only once before, in a dream of sunlight, she watched him caressing her. She didn’t object when he slid her pants completely off her legs and tucked the clothing under her. She didn’t object when he laid his cheek on her body and stroked her belly as he had once stroked her breasts, teeth and tongue and hands combined.
Then he began smoothing his forehead and bearded cheeks over the top of her thighs. His silky mouth and sensuously hard hands followed. The sweetly conflicting textures were heightened by the tender raking of his teeth.
Gently he seduced her legs as completely as he had seduced the rest of her body. She forgot that she was vulnerable to his much greater strength. She forgot the cold wind and the hard rock. She forgot everything but the pleasure gathering deep inside her with each kiss he gave her, each caress, each husky word telling her how much he cherished her body.
The stiffness of her legs melted away before his tender assault. Distantly she realized that he was kissing and stroking the inside of her knees, her thighs, her—
“Case.”
He made a hungry, questioning, oddly soothing sound.
“You’re inside me,” she said in a high voice.
“God, yes. You’re pure honey.”
He moved his hand again, slowly.
Satin heat flowed once more.
“Honey and fire enough to melt winter itself,” he whispered.
She tried to speak. She couldn’t. A wave of intense pleasure was bursting through her, arching her back like a drawn bow.
With heavy-lidded eyes, Case watched shock and surprise and sensuality overwhelm Sarah. She no longer protested his hand moving so intimately between her legs. Instead, she gave herself to his caresses with a trust that humbled and savagely aroused him at the same time.
Slowly, steadily, he doubled his presence inside her body, testing and stretching her in the same sensuous motions.
She made a ragged, throaty sound.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
She couldn’t answer, but her body could.
Her sultry response was even more irresistible to him than the call of the first meadowlark after winter’s silence. He shifted until he was kneeling between her legs. Then he repeated the caress slowly, deeply.
In that instant Sarah realized she was completely vulnerable to him. She started to protest her helplessness, but words became a husky cry of pleasure as his hand moved again. When he was deep inside her once more, his thumb rubbed over the sleek bud that rising passion had revealed.
Intense, shocking pleasure burst inside her, drenching her with heat.
He shifted again, moving over her in a gentle, overwhelming wave. He was everywhere, hot and powerful, tender and caressing, surrounding her.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” he said huskily.
She barely heard the words. She kn
ew only a sense of heat between her legs, and a stretching that went on and on, delicious, frightening, endless, sensuous beyond belief.
Case made a throttled sound as he felt the sultry resistance of her body both pushing against him and at the same time inviting him to penetrate more deeply.
“Sarah?” he asked hoarsely. “Am I hurting you?”
“I feel so…strange.”
She shivered rhythmically. The fragile movements were like a mouth moving over his aroused flesh, kissing him intimately.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Not exactly.”
He rolled over, taking her with him.
She made a surprised sound when she found herself on top of his hips.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You’re so sweet and tight,” he said, his voice thick. “This way you can decide how much of me you want.”
“I don’t understand.”
The corner of his mouth lifted.
“Look down,” he said.
Sarah did. Her eyes widened when she saw that their bodies were joined in the most elemental way possible.
“We’re…” Her voice dried up.
“We sure are. Well,” he amended, “we’re halfway there. The rest is up to you.”
“How?”
“If you want more, settle down on me a little, then lift up a little, then come back down.”
Hesitantly she moved her hips.
Sultry silk tugged at him.
He clenched his jaw against the temptation to spend himself right then and there.
“How does it feel?” Case asked through his teeth.
“I think I…like it.”
She moved again, then again.
He made a hoarse sound.
Sarah froze.
“Does it hurt you?” she asked.
“Like a meadowlark singing.”
She hesitated, then smiled, understanding.
“You like it, too,” she murmured.
“I’m not sure,” he said, lying through his teeth. “Try it a few more times.”
Slowly she slid up and then down, then up again.
His hand moved. Fingertips searched through her slick auburn thatch until he found the swollen knot of passion. He circled it, retreated, circled, retreated, spreading the liquid heat of her response between them.
Winter Fire Page 21
