by Diana Palmer
“Maybe we’re both done in with nerves,” he murmured. He pulled her up and turned her so that she was lying across his knees. His dark eyes met her tearful ones, and he brushed at the tears with an impatient hand. “But I’ve got the best cure in the world. And it won’t be like breeding cattle,” he said curtly, as his head bent to hers. He bit at her soft lips, enjoying her sudden lapse of breath, the kindling softness in her eyes. “I’m going to strip you down to your silky skin and enjoy you until dawn,” he said sensuously, letting his hand slide down over her breasts to her tiny waist and flat stomach and on to her silk-clad legs. “And you’re going to enjoy me this time. I’m damned well going to ensure it. Come here.”
His hand held her at her nape, bringing her mouth to his. His eyes closed, his brows knitting with pleasure, and he turned her into his arms.
She followed where he led. This time was nothing like the last, except for his exquisite tenderness. It was dark, but he left the lights on, encouraging her to look at him, to learn his body as he’d already learned hers, guiding her hands, smiling at her shy attempts to do what he wanted her to do.
Her body pressed warmly against the length of his, without a scrap of fabric between them, and she trembled with the pure joy of being so close to him, feeling his big, warm hands sliding lazily down her spine, rubbing her breasts against his hair-roughened chest, her hips against his.
His mouth slid onto hers as his hand moved down her body and made sure that she was ready for him. She shuddered at the intimate touch.
He lifted his swollen mouth from hers, and his dark eyes smiled tenderly into hers. “Does it still shock you to be touched this way?” he whispered and did it again. “This is how a man knows if his woman is ready for him, Bess. It’s your body’s own special way of making sure that I won’t hurt you when we join.”
She colored, but he made it sound so natural that she relaxed and didn’t protest. Her eyes searched his when he slid a long, powerful leg across hers and levered himself above her.
“There’s no rush,” he whispered. “We’ve got all night, and I’m not going to pull away until you’re completely satisfied this time.”
“But, I was...” she protested huskily as he eased down over her. She gasped as she felt him intimately and gasped again when he pushed.
“It’s all right,” he said soothingly as the soft, slow joining began. It was still a little uncomfortable at first, but the tenderness of his hands and his mouth made her relax, so that her body made him welcome seconds later.
“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” he whispered, shivering a little as he lifted his head to look into her eyes. “The way we fit together so perfectly when we love.” His hands shaped her face, and he brushed his mouth with delicate mastery over hers, teasing it until her lips followed it and began to respond. Her hands were on his shoulders, resting shyly, but as the kiss and the overwhelming intimacy of their position began to work on her, her hands pulled at him and finally slid down to his hips, lightly touching but still hesitant.
“Cade...?” Her voice broke as his hips lifted and then fell, a stab of remembered pleasure shaking her.
“Yes?” he whispered. His mouth settled softly on hers. “Don’t be afraid. Feel the rhythm. Move with me. Slowly, honey, very, very slowly,” he breathed into her mouth. “You’re my wife. I’m going to take you as sweetly and as tenderly as I know how. I’m going to make love to you...”
It felt like love. She began to whimper as his movements grew slower and deeper, as his lips burned down on her breasts and made her ache with the sensations that rippled through her taut body. She felt his hands on her skin, sliding over her, their deft exploration making her blaze. She tried not to think of how many women there must have been to make him so expert. He was hers now, she thought. Her own. Her husband...
Her short nails dug into his lean flanks, and she felt him shudder and suddenly increase his movements, building the rhythm. His harsh breath in her ear became mingled with the softest kind of Spanish love words as his hands slid beneath her hips and his head lifted to watch.
Her eyes were drawn by his face as he looked down the length of their bodies. She flushed wildly. He caught the awed fascination in her eyes as his hands linked with hers above her head and the rhythm grew suddenly urgent and quick and fierce.
She gasped. His jaw clenched and his eyes blazed, his brows knit and his face strained as he arched his body against hers in a harsh drive for completion.
“Feel it...” He groaned and still his eyes held her shocked ones as she began to shudder and weep under him. “Oh, God, feel it...! Feel it, Bess, feel...it!”
She never knew when the shudders became convulsive, the pleasure so hot and sweeping that she cried out in a voice she knew she’d never used in her life. His face above her was a contorted blur, and when the spasms first hit her, she was afraid. His lean hands controlled the whip of her body, forcing her to completion in a frenzy that brought her into breathless, thoughtless oblivion. She cried out endlessly, vaguely aware of his own shuddering groan in the heated stillness around them.
His shivering body was damp in her arms. She opened her eyes and looked to the ceiling. There was a dull, deep throb in her body and lingering heat. Her hands moved experimentally on Cade’s broad back, moving over it with exquisite tenderness.
After a long, unsteady sigh he lifted himself off and rolled over onto his back beside her, stretching with a lazy, unconscious grace and apparently no inhibitions at all.
Bess stared at him, her eyes tracing the hair-roughened strength of his body from head to toe and back again. His eyes were open, quiet, soft, watching her while she watched him.
“Hello,” she said, her voice soft with love.
“Hello.” He slid his hand under her nape and brought her against him, wrapping her in one arm while he reached and fumbled for cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray with the other. He dragged a pillow behind him and eased himself into a sitting position, with Bess still cradled against his damp body.
The intimacy was as new as their marriage. Before, she’d been too self-conscious and guilty to enjoy what they’d done. But he was her husband now, and the lack of inhibition she felt with him was delicious. Her hand smoothed possessively over his chest and down to his flat stomach.
“Not yet,” he murmured dryly, catching her fingers and dragging them to his mouth. He kissed them before he laid them on his chest, his cigarette still smoking in his hand. He put it to his mouth with a heavy sigh. “Men can’t do that twice in a row without a little rest,” he murmured, enjoying her blush. “While women, I believe, are capable of multiple—”
“Cade!”
He chuckled with pure delight at her expression. “So much for wifely sophistication. Come here and kiss me.”
She lifted her lips to his, enjoying the feeling of possession and sharing. “Your mouth tastes of smoke,” she whispered.
“Yours tastes of smoke, too, now,” he whispered back. His eyes smiled into hers. “God, it was good this time,” he said huskily. “Like being dropped off a balcony. I’ve never had it like that in my life, not even that first time we were together.”
She hid her face in his throat. “I thought men always enjoyed it with women.”
“In different degrees,” he said quietly. He smoothed her hair. “You give me something I’ve never had before.” His chest rose and fell heavily. “You give me peace, Bess.”
What an odd way to put it, she thought, frowning. She stared across his broad, hairy chest. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” He took another draw from the cigarette and shifted so that he could see her face on his bare shoulder. “You fulfill me completely,” he said. “Until now that’s never happened. It takes trust to feel that kind of satisfaction with another person. You have to give up control, to let go of all your inhibitions, your fea
rs of letting your feelings show. At no other time is a man quite as vulnerable as in the throes of passion.” He brushed his mouth over her temple. “Until tonight I’ve never relinquished control completely. I gave myself to you as surely as you gave your body to me.”
She closed her eyes and smiled. “Oh.” Her lips pressed soft, lazy kisses against his bare chest, and she felt the flat nipple suddenly go hard under her mouth. Frowning curiously, she lifted her head and looked at it.
“Yours do that when I kiss them,” he pointed out.
She felt her cheeks go hot. “Yes, but I didn’t know that yours would.”
His eyes twinkled. “Surprise, surprise. And it’s not the only thing that stands—”
She hit him. “You wicked man! Everything I’ve heard about you men is true, that you love to shock women, that you just spend time thinking up embarrassing things to say...!”
“It’s delicious,” he said huskily. He put out the cigarette and threw her down on the bed with tender ferocity, looming over her with eyes that blazed with emotion. “Delicious, watching you blush, seeing you color. Most women these days are so damned blasé about sex, they make it as exciting as a drink of water. You get embarrassed when I talk to you like that, you blush when I look at you and you go up in flames every time I touch you. My God, I’ve never felt more like a man in my life than I do with you! Experience be damned, I’m so proud, I could strut.” He bent and put his mouth hungrily on hers. “Even if it is a double standard,” he murmured huskily, “it’s sweet hell to put my hands on you and know that no other man ever has. If that sounds chauvinistic, I don’t care.”
She lifted her arms around him and held on. “There was never anyone I wanted but you,” she whispered. “There never could be. It would be sacrilege to even let another man kiss me after you...!”
The emotion in her voice sent his heart spinning. He kissed her with aching hunger and eased down onto her, shivering with kindling need. “Is it too soon?” he whispered roughly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me,” she whispered back. “Oh, come here.” She groaned, holding him. “I want you so!”
He cradled her under him and bent to her soft mouth. He wanted to love her so tenderly that she’d never get over the memory of it. Slowly, gently, he brought her body up to his, joined with it, curled his legs around her drawn-up knees so that they were in a position he’d never shared with a woman, curled together like shells. And that way he loved her, cherished her body with his in such a slow, tender lovemaking that she wept helplessly all through it, blinded by soft kisses and tender Spanish words in her ear and hands that were slow and sure. There was nothing fierce about it, nothing urgent until the final few seconds, when the feeling spiraled up into the night and broke past her lips in a sound that was more shattering moan than cry.
She shivered and felt him shiver as the exquisite pleasure rippled along their tightly joined bodies, silver-bright, petal-soft, in gentle explosions that went on and on and on.
He whispered her name in the midst of his satisfaction, his voice shaking like his powerful body. But there had been no violent urgency, nothing except the tenderness of two souls entwining.
“That...was loving,” he whispered, his voice as shaken as his body. “My... God! My God!”
She heard reverence in his faint exclamations and repeated them in her mind. There couldn’t have been that kind of pleasure without an intensity of feeling on both sides. It was then that she knew he was in love with her. It wasn’t desire alone, as she thought it had been the first time. Then, he’d wanted her and lost control. But just now, that wasn’t desire alone. She’d never imagined Cade giving that kind of tenderness to her, and she wept for the beauty and joy of being his wife.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered, kissing the tears away. “Don’t. It was so beautiful.”
“Yes. That’s why,” she whispered. Her eyes looked into his, seeing him only as a faint blur. “I love you so much...!” Her voice broke and her trembling arms encircled his neck as she hid her face against his damp throat. “I want to give you a child more than anything in the world.” She did, but saying it aloud only tormented her and she cried more.
He didn’t understand her emotional state, unless his lovemaking had shattered her. Probably it had, because it had certainly shattered him. He’d given and received more than ever before in his life. His hands soothed her, cradled her. He couldn’t seem to make his body leave hers, though, and they were still in the same position they’d shared during that exquisite loving.
“We’re still part of each other,” he whispered. His eyes closed as he held her. “I can’t...quite get enough of this closeness. Do you want me to move?”
“No,” she said. “Oh, no, not ever.”
“Do you feel it, too?” he asked, lifting his head, searching her soft eyes. “The...oneness.”
“Yes.” She touched his face with trembling fingers, adoring it, worshipping its hard lines and stark strength. “Kiss me.”
He bent and put his mouth on hers. Incredibly his body hardened. He gasped, and her eyes opened. She lifted her arms, offering herself.
“You won’t hurt me,” she promised when he hesitated. She closed her eyes and stretched up toward him with the first stirrings of her own femininity. “Cade, put your mouth on me...!” she pleaded, offering her breasts.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SINCE BESS HAD been given the rest of the week off for a brief honeymoon, Cade put her in the truck and carried her, bag and baggage, to Lariat the next morning. The quicker she got used to living there, the better, he told her.
She was nervous about the move. She hated her own anxieties. She liked his mother and brothers and she’d enjoyed her stay at the ranch when she’d come out of the hospital. But that had been different. She’d been an invalid, and Cade had been distant. Now they were close and it would show, and she didn’t know if she could stand much teasing from Robert and Gary. Everything would be different. And at night she was going to be inhibited, because Cade’s bedroom was right across the hall from Robert’s.
He glanced at her disturbed expression. “What’s wrong, honey?” he asked gently.
She turned toward him. “Just nervous, I guess,” she said softly. Her loving eyes paused on his hard face. He looked more relaxed than she’d seen him in years, and the memory of the night before was there in his dark eyes as they briefly met hers.
He reached out a hand and caught hers, holding it in a strong clasp as he drove down the long highway out of San Antonio. It was a beautiful summer day, hot and airy. Everything was green and lazy out the windows of the old pickup truck.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured her. “You’re family now.”
“Yes, but...” She gnawed her lower lip and frowned.
“But what?”
She sighed. “Robert’s room is just across the hall from yours...”
“Oh. Yes, I see. And Gary’s is next door. And you and I are noisy when we make love, aren’t we?” he added with a slow, knowing look.
She lowered her eyes while her heart cut cartwheels in her chest. “Yes,” she whispered, smiling shyly.
“Then let me surprise you, Mrs. Hollister, by telling you that we are now located downstairs in the old master bedroom, away from everyone.” He grinned, glancing at her relieved face. “Not that it’s going to matter tonight,” he murmured dryly. “After what we did last night, I doubt if either of us is in any condition for protracted lovemaking.”
That was true, she thought. It had been morning before they finally slept, and she was a little uncomfortable even now.
“You’re very thoughtful,” she said.
“I care about you, cupcake,” he returned easily. His fingers curled closer into hers as they rode down the long, sparsely settled road, seeing hardly
any cars on the way. “Are you happy?”
“Happier than I ever dreamed of being,” she said honestly. She ran her fingers over his long ones, enjoying their strength. Just to be allowed to touch him was a thrill. “Your hands are very dark,” she remarked.
“Comanche blood,” he reminded her, smiling. “Our kids will have some Comanche heritage from my side of the family and some Scotch-Irish from yours.”
She stared at his hand, forcing her face not to give anything away. “Yes.” She looked to the windshield. “You’re sure you want me to give up the apartment?” she asked.
“Why not? There isn’t much point in keeping it when we’ll be living at Lariat and you’ll be commuting. I don’t want you away from me at night, Bess,” he added firmly. “I’ll want you to sleep in my arms even if we don’t have each other every night.”
She felt her body melting at the thought. This morning she’d curled up against him and slept as she’d never slept in her life, close and warm in his arms, against his bare flesh. It was an experience she couldn’t wait to repeat.
“Yes, I want that, too,” she said softly.
His fingers tightened quickly around hers before he let go of them to light a cigarette. “I’ll have to teach you the cattle business, society girl,” he teased in a deep and sensual voice. “You’ve got a lot to learn about ranches.”
“And about you,” she added. “I used to be so afraid of you,” she recalled. “Nervous and shy and shaky with longing, all at once. I love looking at you, Cade. Do you mind?”
He glanced at her again, his eyes running down the green linen dress that clung so attractively to her figure. “No,” he said. “I like looking at you, too.”
She leaned back against the seat with a long sigh. “Everything is new,” she murmured. “Beautiful and bright. I’ve been so alone all my life, until now.”
