by Terese Ramin
Janina bit her lower lip and smiled almost shyly. “My pleasure.”
“That’s the plan.”
Russ crossed an ankle over a knee behind his wife’s shoulders, leaned in to sandwich her tight against his chest while he nibbled his way down her exposed neck to the pulse point and left a long, openmouthed kiss there. Janina arched her throat and sank readily, greedily into the pleasures he evoked, barely conscious of each of his shoes and socks hitting the floor in turn even when he switched ankles behind her back.
Her hands were on his face, his neck, bandaged and protected fingers clumsy on his collar studs, shirt buttons.
She’d wanted him, needed him, loved him for so long.
Her tape-thickened fingers fumbled, stumbled awkwardly and stalled, unable to make his buttons and studs work the way she wanted them to. Janina yanked at his shirt and growled in frustration.
Russ slicked a smile across her throat and up to her lips. His hands prowled her back, tunneled through her hair, feathered heated caresses along her legs and up her sides but never quite curved, molded, traced in far enough when they reached her bustline, her breasts, where she ached for him to touch. He was too busy slowing things down, setting a pace he could control, making her wait. “Problem?”
Janina tapped his shirt. “Get rid of this.”
“In a minute.”
“No.” She caught his face, his wandering attention between the heels of her hands, forced his gaze level with hers. “Now.”
The single word was fierce, rife with intent, demand, command. His hands worked, hers did not and therefore they must accommodate them both, be available to both, please both—be commanded by both.
In the space of two heartbeats Russ understood what Janina didn’t say. His breathing hitched, the control he’d fought for and won seeped away, the blood in his heart, arteries, veins heated, pounded south and pooled, causing him to lurch upward, swelling painfully hard inside Janina.
Who rolled her hips and arched into him, gasping appreciatively. “Yes!”
Sweat beaded on his skin. He dropped his forehead against hers and clutched her hips to hold her still, afraid of spilling his se and there, and groaned. “Janie. Wait.”
Her voice was a searing breath against his lips, the side of his face, “Trust me,” then she was forcing his attention to hers again, commandeering it, telling him to look at her, into her eyes, and not to stop even as she tugged at his wrists and urged him to get rid of his shirt.
Quickly.
His turn to find his fingers fumbling, stumbling over his buttons and studs while her lips skated his jaw—and her gaze returned to claim his—urgent, hot, dark, liquid.
Sultry.
Hungry.
Russ tore his shirt open and let the pieces hang wide, framing his chest. Janina smiled. Shut her eyes and dropped her chin, opened her eyes and looked at his chest. Drew a shallow, appreciative breath. Mmm—damn, he was beautiful. Copper-bronzed, sculpted, with not an ounce of spare anything, anywhere. Built for her alone to touch.
The thought made her smile go wide enough to make her cheeks ache.
“What?” Nerves and pulse points alert to any movement, touch. Greedy for them.
Janina shook her head, laughed lightly and lifted her Ace-wrapped right hand to run the pads of her fingers carefully down the center of his chest. “Mine,” she whispered.
“God, yes.” He flinched and groaned, his muscles contracted, nipple tightened when she rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. His sex flexed hard inside her. “Janie, geez.”
Her laughter was throaty, wicked. She tilted her head so she could watch him watch her as she bent forward and slicked an openmouthed kiss across to his right nipple, nipped it, then suckled lightly. He inhaled sharply and went utterly still, as though hanging on to sanity or self-control by a thread—and then he simply let go of the thread.
Janina saw it happen, and it still stunned her. She saw his midnight clear eyes turn as smoky as the desert sky gathering a storm before going suddenly, untamably black. Saw him release whatever fetters tied him the same way he rid himself of the remains of his shirt: one moment it was there, the next it was gone and she couldn’t say where it went, or how it happened. And then he’d scooped his hands under her and risen, juggled her briefly, and his pants and boxers were gone, too.
Before she could catch her breath, he’d spun about, dragged a pillow off the head of the bed and come back down on the bed with her beneath him and the pillow underneath her hips.
“Russ.” His name left her throat on a moan of shocked pleasure when the move seated him even more deeply within her.
His answering rasp was guttural, dark, strangled. “Janie, I can’t…ah…I can’t…wait. I’m sor…r…y…”
“It’s okay, it’s all right, I don’t want you to wait, I can’t wait anymore eith—” Janina tried to tell him, but he was already moving.
It took him an awkward, jerky moment or two to find the rhythm, but then instinct took over and he was stroking into her high and hard and fast, and without warning, Janina felt as though she’d been struck by lightning.
One instant she was simply relishing the pleasure of having Russ Levoie, her husband, her teenage fantasy, the man of her dreams finally making love to her, and the next she was soaring, part of something grander than herself, blown asunder and coming to bits in more pieces than she could possibly ever put back together again.
It was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to her—and the most remarkable. She struggled against it, afraid of losing herself, losing some identity that she couldn’t quite remember at the moment but one that she might miss tomorrow or the next day if she let it get swallowed up here, in this.
In him.
But then Russ lifted himself on his arms above her and called her name, sounding nearly as unsure as she felt. Janina looked up at him and knew she’d never seen him look so beautiful or so vulnerable, his darkly handsome features cast in passion, his emotions lost in her. Without thought she cast her own fears aside and reached for him, framed his face once again as best she could between her bandaged hands and drew him down to her. He came with a growl, trapping her head between his forearms and winding his hands tightly in her hair. She wrapped her legs more securely around his hips, her arms about his neck, and they went together into that place of light and no tomorrows and no looking back.
There were no mere fireworks, no stars, not even simple bliss, but something further and beyond, more astonishing—if Russ but knew it. An exceedingly amazed and bewildered Janina did.
With their hearts, souls and bodies wrapped securely about each other, what they found within their extraordinary, extended and explosive burst of ecstasy was peace.
Russ’s release was massive, prolonged. His entire body shuddered with it. He’d waited forever to give himself to this one woman, and he had no other way to do it than this, not enough words to ever let her know what she meant, this meant. But he had this.
So he lifted himself on his hands to look down at her and let his body move, hoping it would show her everything his tongue might never say.
But then she whispered his name and reached up for him and something happened. To him. Within him.
He’d always had an innate ability to connect with wounded creatures, especially female ones, whether wild or domestic, had inherited a strange empathy for them, an uncanny gift for understanding language that wasn’t spoken, for communicating in a way that was beyond thought or description but that simply existed. That was simply a “knowing.”
But it only worked if he banged into a situation and didn’t think about what he was doing.
It was a gift he took for granted, had never tried to explain. Some things he simply knew. But he’d never been close enough to another person to experience anything like what was happening to him now. This was…
Connection. Complete, whole, soul to soul, spirits bound by being unbound and undone. Connected. United.
&n
bsp; Married.
The minute Janina touched his face to draw him down to her, Russ felt it, fell into it, into her. What she knew, felt, experienced, he knew, felt, experiencedEverything she was, he became.
When her body clamped around him, he shattered, his heart engulfed in hers, both the lightning and its cause, its victim.
He saw what she saw, as though he were within her eyes and his own at the same time—and it broke him, tamed him, set him free.
Face buried in her neck, against her ear, he spoke to Janina in his mother’s tongue, a language he rarely used, and even then, as he used all verbal language, sparingly.
He didn’t remember what he said, but it hardly mattered. Janina responded to the tone, to the movement of his body within hers, the heartbeat that was one with hers, and the simple terrifying, wondrous, earthshaking knowledge that the world as she knew it, and they understood it, would never be the same again.
He breathed out, she breathed in and vice versa; oxygen shared and exchanged, life blended, entwined.
Intermingled.
Magic.
At some point that neither of them would remember specifically but that Janina would never forget, Russ finally undid the rest of the hooks of her bodice and removed it. His response to his first sight of her unbound breasts was mesmerizing, reverent. His eyes burned with heat, his already warm skin went hot, and his touch…
His touch proclaimed her a tabernacle at which he was a barely worthy worshipper. But worship he did, with hands and fingers, lips and teeth, tongue and mouth. Then with his body he adored her again and again and again.
And yet again.
And still it wasn’t enough.
So they slept entwined, woke and loved, then feasted, feeding each other from the room-service cart until food hunger melted to other darker, more urgent hungers and their bodies simply slipped together, found each other, and loved—and loved—some more.
At last, five days into their overextended-without-notifying-anyone-of their-whereabouts three-day-long weekend, there came a moment of…well, not complete satiation exactly, but of contentment and sweetness, of idleness and saturation, of softness and…
Exhaustion.
Sprawled across Russ’s belly, Janina practiced signing variations of her new name with a hotel pen—“Janina E. Levoie” or “Janina Elena Levoie” or “Janina Gálvez Levoie”—above each of his pectorals in turn. Under her, Russ stirred lazily awake and smiled sleepily down at her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, stroking her hair.
She wrinkled her nose and studied her handiwork. “Either autographing your pecs or figuring out which name I want to use when I get my new driver’s license,” she said. She signed “Levoie” with a satisfying flourish and capped the pen tight, amazed by how little her right wrist twinged today. Attaining one’s heart’s desire was a marvelous drug. “I can’t decide.”
Russ craned his neck for a better look, did a double take, and started to laugh—h
Surprised by the sound, Janina shyly peeked up at him from beneath her lashes. She’d never heard him laugh this way, even in the company of his brothers: freely, uninhibitedly, completely relaxed and thoroughly enjoying himself. She chuckled, pleased with herself for eliciting the response—until she realized he was laughing at her or something she’d done.
She sat up and poked him in the chest none too gently. “What? My handwriting’s neat. What’s your problem?”
Unable to respond through his laughter, Russ simply caught her offending fingers in one hand and gestured inadequately at his torso with the other.
Janina shrugged her entire body and gave him a hugely mystified look. “What? I don’t see anything. What is so funny?”
Russ looked “I don’t get it” at her and doubled over, buried his face against her hip and howled.
Janina wrapped the sheet around herself, slipped out of bed and stalked across the room muttering, “I know you’re hell at communication, but this is ridiculous. The least you could do is point at whatever you think I’ve done, for God’s sakes. Married forty-some hours and to what, I ask you—”
“Janie,” Russ managed through his laughter, interrupting her.
His wife turned and eyed him. “What.” It was not a question.
To give Russ credit he tried—oh God how he tried!—to maintain a straight face while he swept a hand from Janina’s autographing on his chest and stomach to the neatly—and boldly—printed legend below his belly button but above the curling black hair: “FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF JANINA ELENA GÁLVEZ LEVOIE” with an arrow indicating Russ’s manhood. Then in smaller print, the line below that read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED AT ONCE AND WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
“Oh,” Janina said in a small innocent voice.
“So.” Russ stuck his tongue in his cheek and tried valiantly to control the urge to lose control of his mirth again. “How much of this stuff washes off?”
“Well, um…” Janina said faintly, backing away. “Um…the stuff on your chest…um, well, um…that—that might. That’s just, I think, pen. But the other stuff, um…we-ell…”
Russ looked at her, looked at the darker, bolder lettering at groin level. “Janie.” Her name was a warning.
“Ah, well…” She used delay to dance farther out of his reach. It might have worked if her legs were longer or if he was shorter.
Or slower on the uptake.
“Janina Elena Gálvez Levoie.”
A bound had her within reach. A grab had her squealing and stripped of her sheet, in his arms and headed for the shower.
“How long will it take for you to scrub it off?” he asked mildly.
“I’m maimed,” she reminded him.
“Ha,” he said. “We’ll bag your fingers and take off your Ace and you can scrub me to my heart’s content. Now, how long?”
She batted her eyelashes and tried to look seductive. “Well,” she said, although hedged might be closer to the point, “it’s laundry marker. I think it’ll have to wear off.”
Russ swore, then grinned and started to chuckle again. “At least it’s where no one’ll see it.”
“They’d better not,” Janina warned him firmly.
“But I think I’ll have to make you pay for it.”
“Oh?” Janina raised her eyebrows suspiciously. “How?”
Russ grinned his bad-boy-Levoie grin. “Trust me,” he promised. “I’ll be creative.”
By the time they left Vegas, Janina had paid for her “crimes” several times, much to her—and their—eminent satisfaction.
She also, however, bore the indelible legend low on both her belly and backside: “PROPERTY OF RUSS LEVOIE” and “ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING,” in Russ’s decidedly male script.
Secretly, the turnabout delighted her no end. She had always wanted to be his exclusively, lock, stock and world without end. No way on earth was she about to argue with unwashable ink.
Smiling to herself, she slid closer to Russ, dropped her head to his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his right bicep and hugged it to her breast while he drove. He grinned and brushed a quick kiss in her hair, returned his attention to the road, but not before she nearly blackened his jaw when she suddenly sat up straight and clunked him in it with a panicked, “Oh my God, driveways. Russ, pull over. We haven’t talked about driveways.”
Despite provocation, Russ Levoie did not lose control of the vehicle. He had not earned his lieutenant’s bars due to a propensity to panic in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Which meant that he did not fluster now when the beautiful woman who tongue-tied him on a regular basis popped him in the chops with her head and incomprehensibly announced that they had to stop in the middle of the infamous Route 66 to discuss driveways.
Instead, he very calmly and infuriatingly said, “What?”
To which Janina responded by getting the best grip she possibly could on his lapel and shaking him…well, it…and almost yelling, “Driveways, Russ, houses. We didn’t talk abou
t them. Where are we going to live? We can’t stay at my place, Tobi’s there. And your place…I don’t know. Can we live there? At least to start?”
“No,” Russ said calmly. “I sleep on the couch.”
“What?” Janina asked, wild-eyed. “What kind of life is that for a grown man?”
“I did wonder,” Russ admitted, “until I got drunk and you came along.”
“What?” Janina repeated, staring at him, wondering when she’d lost control of the conversation. “What kind of answer is that? Havyou lost your mind?”
“Possibly. There’s probably no other way to explain this.”
“Russ, really, I’m trying to talk to you about driveways and kitchens and beds and things, and if you’re not even going to be coherent, this marriage isn’t going to survive to Winslow.”
“Beds,” said Russ innocently. “I’m with you now.”
“Why do I so doubt that?” Janina queried blackly.
“No, really.” Russ gave her earnest. Guileless. “Beds. Excellent topic. Speak. I’m listening.”
“Why,” Janina asked him, “do I get the feeling I’m going to prefer you when you don’t communicate?”
Russ’s lips twitched and he blinked at her but said nothing.
She sighed, took a deep breath and calmed down a trifle. “No, really, Russ. I want to know where to come home to after work tomorrow. I want to know where you’ll be sleeping so I can crawl into bed with you and vice versa. I want an address to put on my new driver’s license and all that jazz, you know? So will you pull over so we can figure this out? I can’t think at eighty miles an hour.”
Russ’s wry, thoroughly amused grin told her he was pretty sure she could do otherwise at quadruple the speed, but he pulled off onto the shoulder and canted sideways to rest his elbow on the back of the seat so he could stare at her, waiting.
Patiently.
Which made Janina want to kill him.
Or something.
Then he smiled that slow, lazy, first-thing-in-the-morning-last-thing-at-night-and-anytime-in-between smile at her and or something took precedence and shape. Her brain puddled to jelly and landed in a heated pool in her belly, slid eagerly to that place that fitted him so perfectly between her thighs.
