Two Alone

by Sandra Brown

  She smiled at him with understanding. “If I could have stood the taste of that whiskey, I might have gotten drunk myself. There have been numerous times since the crash when I’ve wanted that kind of escape. You don’t have to apologize.”

  Moving back to the table, she reached for his plate. He caught her hand. The gesture, unlike anything else he’d done since she met him, was unsure, hesitant. “I’m trying to apologize to you for the things I said.”

  Staring down at the crown of his head, where his hair grew around a boyish swirl, Rusty asked softly, “Did you mean them, Cooper?”

  She knew what she was doing. She was inviting him to make love to her. She wanted him to. There was no sense in fooling herself any longer. He appealed to her like no man ever had. And apparently the attraction was mutual.

  They would never maintain their sanity if they didn’t satisfy this physical craving. They might live through the winter without becoming lovers, but by spring they would both be raving maniacs. This passionate wanting, unreasonable as it was, could no longer be suppressed.

  A relationship between them would be unworkable under ordinary circumstances. Their circumstances were far from ordinary. It simply wasn’t practical to examine whether their life-styles or politics or philosophies were compatible. It didn’t matter. What mattered—very much so—was a basic human need for intimacy with the opposite sex.

  Cooper raised his head slowly. “What did you say?”

  “I asked if you meant them—the things you said.”

  His eyes didn’t even flicker. “Yes. I meant them.”

  He was a man of action, not of words. He reached up and curled his fingers around the back of her neck, pulling her head down for his kiss. He made a sound like that of a feasting wild animal as he used his lips to rub hers apart. His tongue went searching inside her mouth. Rusty welcomed it.

  He stood up, stumbling and off balance. This time his chair did topple backward. It landed on the floor with a crash. Neither of them noticed. His arms slid around her waist, hers around his neck. He drew her body tightly against his. Where hers was bowed, his arched to complement it.

  “Oh, God.” He tore his mouth from hers and pressed it against her neck. The fingers of one hand ravaged her hair, threading through it and weaving it between his fingers. It became hopelessly ensnared in his grip, which was exactly what he wanted. He pulled her head back and stared down into her face. His was taut with desire.

  She met his gaze without shyness. “Kiss me again, Cooper.”

  His mouth claimed hers again, hotly and hungrily. It drew breath from her. As he kissed her, his hand moved to the front of her slacks. He fumbled with the button and zipper until they were undone. When his hand slid into the elastic waistband of her panties, Rusty gasped. She had thought there would be a sensual buildup, a flirtatious progression, extended foreplay.

  She didn’t regret that there wouldn’t be. His boldness, his impatience, was a powerful aphrodisiac. It set off explosions of desire deep within her. She tilted her hips forward and filled his palm with her softness.

  He muttered swearwords that were in themselves arousing because they so explicitly expressed the height of his arousal. Like a Rod Stewart song, they were viscerally sexy; one couldn’t hear them without thinking of a male and a female mating.

  He struggled with the fly of his jeans until his manhood was freed—a hot, hard fullness probing between her thighs. “I feel your hair against me,” he rasped in her ear. “It’s so soft.”

  The erotic message made Rusty weak. She leaned back against the edge of the table and lowered her hands to his hips, inside his jeans. “Please, Cooper, now.”

  One swift and sure stroke planted him solidly inside her. She gasped at the splendid pleasure and pain. He caught his breath and held it. They clung together like the survivors of a catastrophe—which, in fact, they were—as though their very existence depended on never letting go of each other. Oneness was essential to survival.

  It was impossible to say who moved first. Perhaps it was simultaneous. After that initial instant of sheer delight in his total possession, Cooper began to delve deeper yet. He ground his hips against hers, extending himself, stretching her, his goal seemingly to be to reach the very nucleus of her soul.

  Rusty, crying out in ecstasy, flung her head back. He randomly kissed her exposed throat and moved his mouth over her breasts, though she was still wearing her sweater.

  But love play was unnecessary. Nothing could heighten this fire. Cooper’s plunging body became hotter and harder with each savage thrust.

  Then he had no choice in the matter.

  “You’re a very beautiful woman.”

  Rusty gazed up at her lover. One of her arms was folded beneath her head. The other hand was draped over his shoulder. Her pose was provocative. She wanted it to be. She didn’t mind that her breasts were fully revealed and wantonly inviting. She wanted to display them for his entertainment. She enjoyed seeing his eyes turn lambent every time he looked at them and their pouting tips.

  Maybe he’d been right all along. She’d shown a marked lack of modesty since she’d met him. Maybe she had been deliberately seductive because she had wanted him from the beginning. She had wanted this—this languishing aftermath of a coupling that had left her replete.

  “You think I’m beautiful?” she asked coyly, running her fingers through his hair and smiling like the cat who had just lapped up the cream.

  “You know I do.”

  “You don’t have to sound so angry about it.”

  His fingers trailed down the groove between her ribs all the way to her navel. “I am, though. I didn’t want to give in to your charms. I lost the battle with my own lust.”

  “I’m glad you did.” She raised her head and kissed his mouth softly.

  He dusted his fingertips over her navel. “For the time being, so am I.”

  Rusty didn’t want them to be restricted to a time limit. “Why ‘for the time being’?”

  It hadn’t taken them long to undress and make up the pallet in front of the fire. Stretched out naked on the pile of furs, hair a rumpled heap of reddish curls, lips rosy and wet from frequent kissing, eyes drowsy with lovemaking, Rusty looked like a conquering vandal’s battle prize. Cooper had never waxed poetic, surely not right after having sex. The thought brought an involuntary smile to his lips.

  He surveyed her alluring body. “Never mind.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It has something to do with you and me and who we are. But I really don’t want to talk about that now.” He bent his head low and kissed the ginger curls between her thighs. They were damp. They smelled and tasted of himself and he felt his body respond. Her low moan worked as surely as a velvet-fisted caress on his rising sex. He sighed his pleasure. “Did you know that you’re very small?” he whispered into the fleecy delta. Her thighs relaxed and parted. His fingers slipped inside her.

  “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not all that experienced.”

  He gazed down at her doubtfully, but her face was guileless. Abruptly he asked, “How many?”

  “How indelicate!”

  “How many?”

  Rusty wrestled with her decision to tell him. Finally, eyes evasive, she said quietly, “Less than I could count on one hand.”

  “In a year?”

  “Total.”

  Cooper stared down at her, searching for any trace of duplicity in her eyes. God, he wanted to believe her, but couldn’t. His probing caress was telling him what his mind wasn’t ready to accept, what he should have known the moment he entered her, but couldn’t reconcile with his image of her.

  “Less than five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Less than three?” She looked away. “Just one?” She nodded. His heart did an odd little dance, and the emotion that surged through him felt like happiness. But he’d known so little of it, he couldn’t be sure. “And you didn’t live with him, did you, Rusty?�
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  “No.” She tossed her head to one side and bit her lower lip at his thumb’s indolent stroking. The callused pad of it had been gifted with a magical and intuitive touch that paid honor to a woman’s body.

  “Why not?”

  “My father and brother wouldn’t have approved.”

  “Does everything you do have to meet with your father’s approval?”

  “Yes... No... I... I... Cooper, please stop,” she gasped breathlessly. “I can’t think while you’re doing that.”

  “So don’t think.”

  “But I don’t want to...to, you know...oh, please... no...”

  After the last shimmering beam of light had finally burned out, she opened her eyes and met his teasing smile. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  She discovered that she had just enough energy to answer his smile and reach up and touch his mustache with her fingertips. “I didn’t want to do that so soon. I wanted to look at you some more.”

  “I guess that ends the discussion of you and your father.”

  Her brows drew into a frown. “It’s very complex, Cooper. He was devastated when Jeff was killed. So was I. Jeff was...” She searched for the all-encompassing word. “He was wonderful. He could do everything.”

  Cooper brushed her lips with his mustache. “Not everything,” he said mysteriously. “He couldn’t—” He bent down and whispered what Jeff couldn’t do with him, using a street word that brought color rising all the way to Rusty’s hairline. But she blushed with pleasure, not with affront. “So, see? There’s no reason for you to feel inferior to your brother.”

  Before she could expound on the subject, he sealed her lips closed with an arousing, eating kiss. “Now, what was that about looking at me?”

  Her breath was insufficient. She drew in a deep, long one before saying, “I haven’t looked my fill.” Her eyes, shining as brightly as copper pennies, roved down his chest. She lifted her hand to touch him, glanced up at him as though asking permission, then laid her fingers against the springy hair.

  “Go on, coward. I don’t bite.” The glance she gave him was eloquently sensual. He laughed. “Touché. I do. But not all the time.” He leaned down and whispered, “Only when I’m buried inside the sweetest silk I’ve ever found between two thighs.”

  While she explored, he nibbled her ear and took love bites out of her neck. When her fingers flitted across his nipple, he sucked in a sharp breath. She jerked her hand back quickly. He recaptured it and pressed it back against his chest.

  “That wasn’t alarming or painful,” he explained in a hoarse, thick voice. “It’s like connecting two live wires. I wasn’t prepared for the shock. Do it again. All you want.”

  She did. And more. She dallied with him until his breath became choppy. “Something else needs your attention, but we’d better not,” he said, catching her hand on its downward slide. “Not if we want to take this one slow and easy.”

  “Let me touch you.”

  Against such a breathy request, he exercised no willpower. He squeezed his eyes shut and withstood her curious caresses until he couldn’t bear anymore. Then he lifted her hand off him and satisfied them both with a fervent kiss.

  “My turn.” One of her arms was still bent behind her head. Her breasts rose off her chest, perfect domes crowned with delicate, pink crests. He covered each with a hand and squeezed. “Too hard?” he asked in response to Rusty’s change in facial expression.

  “Too wonderful.” She sighed.

  “That night I kissed you...here...” He touched the curving softness of her breast.

  “Yes?”

  “I meant to make the mark.”

  Her sleepy eyelids opened wide. “You did? Why?”

  “Because I’m mean, that’s why.”

  “No, you’re not. You just want everyone to think you are.”

  “It works, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled. “Sometimes. Sometimes I’ve thought you were very mean. Other times I knew you were feeling a lot of pain and that being deliberately mean was your only way of coping with it. I think it goes back to your days as a POW.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Cooper?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Make another mark if you want to.”

  His eyes darted up to hers. Then he moved above her and kissed her mouth thoroughly while his hands continued to massage her breasts. He brushed her wet and swollen lips with his mustache before dragging it down her neck, nipping her lightly with his teeth as he went. He kissed his way across her collarbone and down her chest until he reached the upper curve of her breast.

  “I’m responsible for the bruises on your bottom. Then the passion mark. I guess in a primitive way I wanted to brand you mine. I don’t have to put a mark on you now,” he said, moving his lips lightly over her skin. “You belong to me. For a little while, anyway.”

  Rusty wanted to take issue with his choice of words and tell him that she would belong to him for as long as he liked, but his roving lips emptied her mind of the correct phrases. He kissed every inch of her breasts, avoiding the nipples. Then he licked them all over and at once, like a greedy child with a quickly melting ice-cream cone. When Rusty didn’t think she could stand any more, she clutched handfuls of his hair and pulled his mouth directly above one of the achy, stiff peaks.

  His tongue flicked over it, lightly, deftly, until her head was thrashing from side to side. He used his mustache to tickle and tease. When he closed his lips around her nipple and surrounded it with the scalding, tugging pressure of his mouth, she cried his name out loud.

  “Oh, baby, you’re nice.” He moved his head from one side of her body to the other. His mouth was ravenous, but tender.

  “Cooper?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Cooper?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Cooper?” She curled her fingers around his ears and pulled his head up even with hers. “Why’d you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  He avoided looking at her by staring at a spot beyond the top of her head. “You know what.” She wet her lips anxiously. “Why did you...withdraw...before...?”

  She felt apprehensive and disappointed, just as she had earlier when, at the last possible heartbeat, he’d cheated her out of the ultimate high, that of feeling him come inside her.

  He became perfectly still. For a moment she was afraid she’d made him angry and that he was going to leave the pallet. After a long, tense moment, he cut his eyes back to hers. “I guess you’re due an explanation.” She said nothing. He released her name on a sigh. “We might be here for a long time. I don’t think either of us wants or needs another mouth to feed.”

  “A baby?” Her voice was hushed with awe. She played with the idea of having a baby and didn’t find it repugnant at all. In fact her lips formed a winsome smile. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well, I had. We’re both young, healthy adults. I know you’re not using a contraceptive because I know everything that we brought into this cabin with us. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” she said timidly, like a child confessing a small transgression.

  “I didn’t pack anything to take with me to the hunting lodge.”

  “But it probably won’t even happen.”

  “We can’t be sure. I’m taking no chances. So—”

  “But if it should,” she interrupted excitedly, “we’d be found before the child was born.”

  “Probably, but—”

  “Even if we weren’t, I’d be the one responsible for feeding it.”

  This talk about a child had his stomach churning. His mouth was set in its familiar, firm, hard line. It softened now when he saw how earnest Rusty was. Almost naive. “That’s just it,” he said roughly, his mouth moving toward her breasts. “I can’t stand the thought of sharing you with anyone.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry. That’s the way it’s got to be.”

  She wanted to protest and pursue the argument. But he
used his hands and lips and tongue with such prurient talent that they dissolved in a mutual, simultaneous orgasm before she realized that once again he had withdrawn from her just in time.

  They kept each other so sated with sex that they didn’t get hungry or cold or tired. They made love all that day and into the evening. Finally, exhausted, they wrapped themselves in fur and each other, and slept.

  Only the unexpected rat-a-tat drumbeat of helicopter blades could have disturbed their dreams.

  Chapter Ten

  He was going to miss the chopper. He knew that. He always did. But he kept running anyway. He always did that, too. Jungle foliage blocked his path. He clawed his way through it toward the clearing. He was running so hard his lungs were on fire. His breathing sounded loud to his own ears.

  But he could still hear the rotating blades of the chopper. Close. So close. Noisy.

  I’ve got to make it this time, he cried to himself. I’ve got to make it or I’ll be captured again.

  But he knew he wouldn’t make it, although he kept running. Running. Running...

  As always, after having the nightmare, Cooper sat up, chest heaving with exertion and drenched with sweat. God, it had been real this time. The racket of those chopper blades seemed—

  Suddenly he realized that he could still hear the helicopter. Was he awake? Yes, he was. There lay Rusty, sleeping peacefully beside him. This wasn’t Nam; this was Canada. And, by God, he heard a helicopter!

  He scrambled to his feet and crossed the cabin’s chilly floor with running footsteps. Since the day they’d missed the search plane, the flare gun had remained on a shelf next to the door. He grabbed it on his way out. When he dashed across the porch and leaped to the ground, he was still naked, but the flare gun was clutched tightly in his right hand.

  Shading his eyes with his left, he scanned the sky. The sun was brilliant and just even with the tops of the trees. His eyes teared because it was so bright. He couldn’t see a damn thing. He only had six flares. He mustn’t waste them. Each one had to count. But he could still hear the chopper. So he acted on impulse and fired two of the flares directly overhead.