Each second that passed seemed monumentally swift, profound in an intensity of emotion, but going too fast. Once Cait had finally let Allie go, he’d held her tightly himself, needing the contact with his daughter, needing to forge some bond that would see him through the time of separation from her.
He felt like the yo-yo Allie used for a greeting, pulled two ways simultaneously. Danger, child’s play... fear, wonder.
Allie’s eyes grew heavier and heavier though she obviously wanted to fight her body’s demand for a nap. Cait had told him that she would just go down and fall right asleep if she took her into the alcove and placed her in bed. But after the time spent playing with her, eating lunch with her, even reading her a delightfully silly rhyming book, What Do You Give a Butler for His Birthday?, he wanted to share the moment his little girl turned baby again and drifted into dreams.
Her left forefinger crooked and slipped into her mouth and Alec’s chest tightened. He remembered his mother describing his doing exactly the same thing as a child. Were such mannerisms genetic? Inherited memory? Were children who sucked fingers different than those who sucked thumbs? What would she become as she grew older, what would her personality be as a teenager, a young woman, a mother of her own?
Without conscious awareness, his words shifted from meaningless soothers to heartfelt promises. “And when you go to school, if anybody ever bothers you, you just let me know and I’ll stop that nonsense. And if you ever need to just talk, if you’re worried about something, or if you’re feeling lonely, I’ll be as close as you want me to be.”
His hand, tanned from his months in the New Mexico mountains, scarred with half a dozen nicks and scrapes, looked enormous on her fragile back. He had spent the morning and most of the afternoon holding her, fascinated with her, playing with her, and knew she wasn’t as fragile as he’d assumed at first. But seeing his hand on. her now, spanning the full length of her torso, the contrast between them was all the more noticeable.
He was so deeply and irrevocably in love with his daughter that he knew he would never be the same man he used to be. This fathomless, intense emotion marked him, branded him, tied him to her forever and longer.
Cait fought the tears that stung her eyes. Less than six feet from the alcove, she heard every word, each promise Alec uttered to his sleepy—and by this time, sleeping—daughter.
In a more perfect world, all his promises would come true. And in that lovely perfect place, she herself would melt into his embrace and all other details would fall into sweet order. They would, as they had in her loss-driven fantasies, slide into a blissful parenthood, lovers and caretakers, husband and wife, drifting aimlessly and lovingly through the dream-filled days.
No one would be waiting somewhere to kill Alec, he would forget he had ever carried a gun, all bad guys would forever disappear from the face of the earth.
“Cait?”
She looked up at the man who did carry a gun, even if he stashed it on top of the television cabinet to keep it out of Allie’s precocious reach.
She’d shared every single second of the time with him since she woke in her town house certain something was wrong. She’d watched him steal a car, play with Allie, eat breakfast and lunch, she’d even seen him peel his clothing free and she’d lain only a few feet from him, listening to the steady rumble of his chest as he slept. But now she wondered if she had ever truly seen Alec the man before, either in the two-year-old past or in the short twelve hours she’d shared with him.
Her fantasies suddenly seemed flat and lifeless. Pretty, yes, but so removed from any semblance of reality that they lacked depth or sustaining interest. For the first time she wondered if it mightn’t be so bad that they were strangers. Strangers met, learned to know each other, and sometimes, however rarely, two strangers fell in love.
She didn’t know what showed on her face, what thread of her scattered emotions spilled free and lured him to her side. But he walked slowly toward her, one steady step at a time.
She pushed to her feet, her hands pressed against her sides, her heart thundering in her suddenly constricted chest.
Whatever thoughts tumbled in his head, his eyes blazed with hunger, his unsmiling lips parted with direct intention. She knew he would kiss her, knew she wanted him to, no matter how much it scared her to repeat the past. They’d been in danger then and had succumbed to passion. They were in danger now.
But there were differences. Subtle, perhaps, refining and gentled, but differences nonetheless.
She didn’t try to sidestep, couldn’t be coy or pretend shyness with him. Too much had happened between them two years before, and too much lay between them now to hide behind pretense.
He lowered his lips to hers. And if the kiss tasted of uncertainty, it was still roughly honest. She didn’t know what revelations had struck him as he lulled Allie to sleep, but instinctively understood that he had as great a need as she to solidify something between them, a need perhaps to make the present concrete.
He drew her into his arms, gently, and part of her remembered how very well they fit together, the hard planes of his body against her softer curves, her head just at the apex of his shoulder, his mouth reachable if she so much as lifted her lips, leaving her throat vulnerable to his touch, his caress.
He lowered his lips to the throbbing pulse at her collarbone and lightly traced the thready rhythm in the vein with the tip of his tongue. She shuddered but didn’t, couldn’t, tear herself away from him. Her fingers splayed, her body instinctively arched toward him and he caught and held her close.
“Ah, Cait...” he said with a ragged note of longing in his deep voice. “I don’t know how to turn back the clock. I wish I could.”
“What’s happened is past, Alec,” she told him, and raised her trembling fingers to his face. “It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just past.”
He nodded, staring down at her, his blue eyes dark with unspoken emotion. “The two years without knowing her tear me apart,” he said. “Do you hate me for not being there?”
“No,” she said. “I could never hate you, Alec.”
“We’ll get through this somehow.”
He used the plural as if it were natural to assume a togetherness. There wasn’t any together to assume.
“Those years are gone and nothing we can ever do will call them back,” she said, more for her own benefit than his.
“But I still want you, Cait. That much survived.” His hands tightened at her waist, drawing her even closer.
His raw honesty stripped any semblance of coherency from her. She raised her lips instead, a question and answer both.
He kissed her almost roughly, demandingly, as seemingly desperate as she to put paid to the past, to establish this moment as the present only. To forge a new bond between them.
She responded to his kiss with every fiber of her being. She shivered as if cold, trembled as if afraid, but in truth she was over warm and strangely calm. It was as if she were coming home, not to that fantasy dream house in the country, but to where she’d always belonged, in his arms, feeling his ragged breathing, hearing his heart thundering in his breast, inhaling his sweet-sharp male scent.
She didn’t know what she felt about him—her emotions were too confused, too conflicting. But in his arms, with his lips pressed against hers, she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to analyze, didn’t have to understand. Drowning in his kiss, in his scent and taste, the feel of his hands on her body, the velvet-soft pressure of his lips and tongue, she could just drift, allow the moment to engulf her, the past to fade and the present to solidify.
With a groan he raised her from the floor and lowered her to the bed tucked in the corner of the bedroom, the bed she’d curled up on, falling asleep to the lulling rhythm of his breathing.
She half felt she should say something, anything, but his lips seized hers again and all words fled as she drowned in his kiss, in the feel of his firm body pressed to hers. Slowly, as if reluctant to leave the taste o
f her lips, he kissed her chin, the sensitive hollow at the base of her throat, coming back to her trembling lips, and dropping back to kiss her shoulders through her blouse, blowing hot, moist air against her responsive skin.
She arched against him, closing her eyes:
“Ah, Cait...” he breathed against the valley between her suddenly aching breasts. As if aware she was drifting from the present, slipping into that nowhere land ’twixt now and then, he stopped his progress and raised his head. She opened her eyes to meet the cautious hunger in his.
To touch him now was to let him know the extent of her want. To reach out for him was tantamount to accepting him in this strange present, accepting the loss of the two years that lay so unalterably between them, and to admitting that what they had found two years ago wasn’t irretrievably buried.
Not to touch him would be to condemn her to forever wondering.
Slowly, her hands shaking so badly that she felt their vibrations to the deepest recesses of her heart, she raised her fingers to his face, not closing her eyes, but watching his squeeze shut as if her fingers burned him. The muscles in the hollows of his cheeks drew taut and flexed beneath her light touch.
“Oh, Alec...” she murmured.
Without opening his eyes, he smiled as if at a tender memory and his face shifted under her fingers.
The smile, the feel of it against her hands, the acceptance inherent in it, tipped her over some precipice of rationality. Everything in the two years of loneliness told her she shouldn’t lower her hands to tug at his sweatshirt, to plunge her hands into the intense heat that hovered between his shirt and his silken skin. But nothing in the world could have stopped her.
He lay still, stretched out beside her, deadly serious now, his eyes raking her face, asking too many questions, revealing far too much for her to consider.
Alec felt his heart become a completely separate entity within him, one struggling furiously for freedom; it hammered against his chest with wild abandon. His hands, normally as steady as the proverbial rock, trembled like a kid’s upon a first kiss.
Cait’s eyes had darkened to emerald with her want. Her lips were full and moist, an invitation and a command he obeyed without question. He felt certain he could die right then and there and never regret a moment of his life. And he was equally certain that everything in his life had been meant for this single moment.
Whatever they’d found and lost in that dismal closet two years ago no longer seemed to matter. It was now that held meaning, the silken feel of Cait’s hands on his bare arms, the sweet taste of her dewy lips, the passion imperfectly banked in her quivering body: this was meaning, this superseded anything in the past.
Her eyelids flickered down, as if she were in pain, but her fingers clung to him, holding him over her. Her body arched upward, meeting his, rousing him to sheer insanity by her artless need. He muttered a curse and thrust his arm behind her to hold her against him, to keep her there.
She murmured something but her words were inchoate. Alec hesitated, waiting for explanation, but she wrapped her fingers around his shoulders and drew him closer still. He was grateful for the dim daylight in the room. He needed to see her, to be with her in the now, in the present. Their times before had always occurred in the pitch darkness.
He needed to see her face, to see her beautiful body, to watch her reaction to his kisses, his touch. They had never dared touch each other in the light two years before. Then, the dark had served as a pseudo security blanket; as long as they couldn’t see each other, no one else would be able to, either.
Here in the light, with the doors locked from the inside this time, the baby asleep, no one aware of where they were, he could make her cry with his tenderness, make her cry out with his caresses. And she could see how very much he ached for her, how strongly she affected him, how she made him feel alive.
Alec released his fierce hold of her, letting her slip back down against the soft mattress. She stared up at him in heavy-lidded bemusement and yet a gentle smile curved her full lips.
It was well and fine to need the present and the present only, but the past couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be switched off like the light he craved now. “Cait, I’m so sorry—”
Her fingers sealed the words within his lips and he realized she’d guessed something of what he might say.
“When we were together two years ago,” she murmured, “we found a passion that could take away the fear. It was like a drug—”
“A marvelous narcotic.”
“Yes, just like that. We knew we were going to die, and that passion took away the pain of that knowing.”
Alec was almost afraid to ask. Afraid to hope. “And now?”
“And now we’re together.”
He knew he should explore that cryptic comment, the many things it didn’t say, but she snaked her hand to the nape of his neck and drew him down to her lips for another taste, another kiss. And her fingers inched beneath his hair, making goose bumps rise on his back, more effectively forcing him to the present than any lengthy discussion could ever have done. He found he could ignore the might-have-beens, the should-havebeen-saids.
Cait didn’t want logic or explanations. Instinctively she understood this was a very precarious present, that what linked them together now was as uncertain as a stormy night in the desert; it might rain torrents with lightning and huge claps of thunder, or it could be blown away on a freezing wind. She’d lost too much already. She deserved ... they deserved...this oh-so-precious moment. Together.
When Allie woke, needing dinner and tending, when Aunt Margaret would be met, when plans needed to be made, when futures forced their unwelcome presence between them, that would be time enough to study the past, time for regrets, revelations and possible recriminations, but now she only wanted his body pressing against hers, his hands rousing her to mindlessness.
As if in tune with her thinking, which he’d always, always been able to do, Alec rolled her over and positioned her astride his long body. He lifted shaking hands to her blouse and slowly began unbuttoning the garment. One by one, he freed each button, not opening her blouse yet, but drawing out the moment when she would feel, could watch him gazing at her. Alec tugged her blouse from her trousers and continued his slow, deliberate unfastening. When finished, including the two at her wrists, he smiled, as if satisfied with his task.
His eyes rose to hers. He kept them there as he pushed her blouse from her shoulders, letting it slide down her arms and pool at her hands. And kept them linked with hers as he lowered his fingers to unhook her bra. And maintained that gaze as he slowly drew the blouse and silky straps free and tossed the last remaining barrier aside.
Only then did Alec lower his eyes and, as he had earlier that day when he had only kissed her and nothing more, he made no move to raise his hands to touch her. She understood, though it made her shiver; he wanted to study her, to memorize her, to know her as intimately by sight as he’d known her in the dark before.
Beneath his regard, her nipples grew hard and her breasts seemed to swell and ache for his touch. She shivered again, not from any sense of cold, but rather from the opposite, as if she were on fire. Alec raised his hands then and gently laid them on her shoulders, gripped them fiercely for a moment, then released her to trail his fingers down the full length of her arms and back up again. And over, grazing her collarbone, and lower, to follow the full line of her breasts. He cupped both gently, raising them, then palming them, rubbing her hardened nipples against his lightly callused hands.
She shuddered and closed her eyes as he raised her up, shifting her forward. And bit back a moan as he took one nipple between his lips and laved it with a hot, knowing tongue. His hands, gentle and tender, kneaded her back, exhorting her to rock into him. Then, as she fell into a rhythm as primal as nature itself, his hands firmed in their exploration, stroking her back with long, sure caresses. His suckling intensified, switching back and forth from breast to breast in avid attention.
“You are so incredibly beautiful,” he said. He made her believe it was true, and she felt the power such words could give infuse her veins with languor, making her legs lax with the need to feel him against her.
Two years ago she’d been half terrified of her tremendous response to him, had attributed it over the lonely months of his absence to a syndrome prisoners often succumbed to, that of feeling deep emotional or physical bonds with fellow inmates. She’d had only two choices, the pretty dream or the sick syndrome. But she wasn’t dreaming now, nor was she a prisoner. The lights were on and they had control of their environment. And that same scalding passion caught her and shook her, holding her in its fierce and demanding thrall.
Alec, as snared by Cait’s sensuality as by her passion, caught in the wonder of the myriad emotions he saw flicker across her features, found he could no longer be content with seeing only half of her; he had to see everything. To know everything about her.
He forced himself to go slowly, and held his breath to steady the hands unfastening her trousers. She quivered at his touch and he rasped out her name. He’d remembered her touch, her responsive questing hands, but he’d forgotten what it felt like to drown in her. The circumstances were different, altered enough so that even the gift of her body seemed freer, changed.
Danger lurked outside the doors like prowling wolves just waiting for a chance to catch them unaware. And somehow, feeling Cait’s fingers unbuckling his belt, the danger wasn’t outside, it was here, now, a possible future unfolding as surely as his pants unzippered.
They could turn back. Stop this sweet madness. And slowly, carefully try to build a future from a rocky, uncertain present. That would be the wise thing to do. That would be prudent, responsible. Smart.
Her hand slid beneath the band of his shorts and sheathed him. He groaned aloud and shifted off her to tug at her trousers, sending a silent prayer of thanks to the manufacturers of loose-fitting pants. He tossed them to the other bed and moments later his own pants joined them, legs intertwined every bit as much as their human counterparts.
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