Then, when his gaze lifted to meet hers, she said, “It’s been a long day. You look done in.”
“I’m ready for bed.”
Another slow second passed, while banked heat and steady resolve and something else darkened her eyes. While the crooner on the stereo sang, here I am, baby. She reached across and took the glass from his hand. “So am I,” she said. “Would you like to take a shower first?”
Oh, yeah. He most definitely would.
Diana thought about joining him in the shower, but vanity prevailed. She’d spent the better part of an hour blow-drying her thick hair and creaming her skin and applying the subtlest of makeup. She waited for him in bed, naked but surprisingly calm. When she felt the sensuous slide of her skin against the cool sheets, she decided that in future she would always sleep nude. And only between superfine Egyptian cotton sheets.
The thought amused her and she was still smiling at herself—or at the superconfident woman who’d invaded her body—when the shower stopped. Everything inside her seemed to pause, as well, like an indrawn breath of anticipation. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, then to twenty, and slowly on to thirty, and her inner tension sharpened to a point akin to pain. She’d left the stereo on, the low volume enough to mask the sound of bare feet on carpet.
Yet she knew he was there.
Opening her eyes, she came up on both elbows and found him in the doorway, wearing one of the hotel robes and holding his refilled glass in one hand. Twin bedside lamps cast a warm glow over the king-size bed but he stood in shadow, his face all square strength and shadowed planes, his jaw dark with evening stubble, his hair wet and towel mussed. The image was slightly uncivilized, far removed from the urbane businessman at lunch, a world apart from the easygoing cowboy she’d fallen so hard for ten years before.
But her body remembered his touch and the memories hummed in her blood and quieted the race of her heartbeat to a deep rhythm. Her gaze remained steady on his and when she spoke her voice sounded calm and composed. “Are you coming to bed?”
“When I finish my drink.”
“Bring it with you,” she said. “I’ve developed a liking for it.”
He didn’t move, except to lift the glass infinitesimally. “How much have you had, exactly?”
Slowly she rose to a sitting position, the crisp white sheet tucked loosely beneath her arms. “I beg your pardon?”
“I want to be sure that you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing, Max. You gave me plenty of time to reconsider and I didn’t need more than one nip of bourbon for courage. But if you’d like me to pass a sobriety test, I’ll walk the straight line over to you.”
A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth—possibly at her primly offended tone—and for a second she thought he would take her up on the offer. Which would serve her right for being a smarty pants. But then he straightened off the doorjamb and started toward her, circling the big bed with unhurried strides. “Tempting,” he said softly, “but I rather like you where you are.”
“You didn’t used to mind where.”
Their eyes met and the air sparked with supercharged memories of those wheres and with burning anticipation of the hows. Mesmerized, Diana didn’t notice that he’d looped a clever finger in the sheet until he tugged it down. Until he leaned closer and she held her breath anticipating his kiss, only to lose that breath in a swift hiss when a tiny spill from his glass trickled down the skin he’d stripped bare.
A deliberate spill, she realized, when he leaned forward to lick it from her skin. He took his sweet time tracking from the hollow at her throat to the dip of her belly-button, and the lazy stroke of his tongue resonated in every female cell she possessed.
When he was done he came up to meet her eyes. “I seem to be developing a liking for it, too.”
Stunned by his audacity and by the intensity of the reaction that rippled through her body, Diana took several seconds to work out the connection. She’d told him to bring his glass with him because she’d developed a liking for the local bourbon. And this is how the clever devil responded.
“Are you going to share?” she asked.
“My drink? Or are you referring to something else?”
She smiled and stroked the bed at her side. “Why don’t you sit down here and we’ll negotiate.”
“I’ve had more than enough negotiating for one day. Let’s assume I’m up for sharing.” He lifted his hands in a have-at-me gesture. “I’m all yours.”
A giddying thought. One Diana didn’t give herself a chance to mull over for fear she’d lose her grip on the teasing mood. Instead she dipped her hand through the sash on his robe and used the leverage to tug him down onto the bed. She lifted both hands to cradle his face and ran her thumbs across the fullness of his bottom lip, such a smooth contrast to the whiskery rasp of his jaw.
“Cool hands,” he murmured. Turning his face within their gentle hold, he pressed his mouth against the palm of one hand and then the other and the warm sensation exploded through her veins to fill her chest.
“Warm mouth,” she murmured, leaning in to kiss him with the same sensual tenderness. She pulled back an inch, enough to look into his eyes before she whispered. “Thank you.”
There was a beat of silence before he asked, “For?”
“For understanding that I needed to make this decision.”
“No need to thank me. I’m right where I always wanted to be.”
A sliver of unease prodded at the back of her mind but she shut it out. He was teasing. And she followed suit, spreading one of her hands wide in the center of his chest and pushing him down against the mattress. “You’re on your back. That is not your favorite position.”
“Says who?” A hand on the back of her head eased her closer to his mouth. “This is one of my very favorite positions.”
He closed the whisper of space to kiss her, at first in gentle exploration and then with increasing ardor, a giving open-mouthed kiss that tasted of bourbon and longing, a delicious combination of the new and the familiar.
Then his tongue slid against hers and the desire surged through her body, instant and achingly intense. The hand cupping the back of her head shifted, changing the angle of the kiss and of her body. Her breasts brushed against his chest, sharpening the ache into acute points of need.
So very quickly the kiss wasn’t enough.
For an instant she entertained the notion of chasing a bourbon spill down his body as he had done with her, but no. She was hungry for the taste of his skin on her tongue, clean and untainted. For the feel of his hard muscled body tensing beneath her hands. For that moment of heart-stopping connection when she took him inside her body.
I’m all yours, he’d said, and she claimed him with her mouth, kissing him from collar bone to collar bone then working her way down the hard stretch of his abdomen, opening his robe and pushing it aside as she went. When she lay her open mouth against his exposed belly, when she rolled a long full-tongued lick across his skin, he sucked in an audible breath.
“Below the belt,” he murmured.
“Technically, I’m still above the belt.”
She hadn’t forgotten his size. She hadn’t forgotten the alluring combination of velvet and steel, or the intoxicating power she wielded with the stroke of a finger and the touch of her tongue. Nor had she forgotten the crown-shaped birthmark, so perfectly formed it might have been tattooed into the lean dip of his flank. She traced it with the tip of her index finger and then with her lips, and when he groaned for mercy she kissed her way back up to his mouth.
For a long while she immersed herself in the delicious subtleties of that kiss, giving back all that she could remember and more than she’d forgotten. They sank into the softness of the bed, rolling in a sensuous twining of limbs and sheets and sighs. She barely noticed when he came out of the kiss on top. She didn’t mind that he’d taken control; she didn’t care because his big skilful hands were gliding down her body
, rediscovering her breasts and her belly, the dip of her back and the inner stretch of her thighs with a deliciously unhurried thoroughness.
He kissed her throat, bit the sensitive slope of her shoulder, sucked the tight ache of each nipple, and every sensation built upon the last in a spiraling sensual assault that stole her breath. Hands clutched in the sheets, she rolled her head back on the piled feathery pillows and arched her back in silent invitation. He obliged, sliding down her belly, the hot torment of his mouth everywhere at once, too much but never enough, driving her to the brink of climax then leaving her adrift and trembling.
Then he kissed her again, with her taste on his lips and his need dark and fervent in his eyes. Skin to skin, they stilled, his big body hot and heavy between her thighs. Slowly he stretched her arms above her head, fingers twining in a bond that felt as intimate as the connection of their bodies. A shiver rippled through her, tense and anticipatory.
“Now this,” he murmured, “is my very favorite position. I’m right where I always wanted to be.”
And I’m all yours, her soul whispered back, as wide open and welcoming as her body that took him inside. Their gazes melded to complete the connection, deep, total, complete, and the swell of emotion in her chest drove all the breath from her lungs.
In that instant she knew that she’d lied to him and to herself. She had no clue what she was doing here, and no capacity to separate her emotions from the physical or from the sensual. She couldn’t take him so completely into her body without taking him into her heart.
It was much too late to do anything about it and, worse, when he started to move in her she didn’t even care.
Tilting her hips, she wrapped her legs higher on his sweat-dampened back and drew him deeper, urging him to build the intensity, seeking the perfect angle and the perfect bliss that shimmered on the rim of her senses. Drawing the delicious heat into her heart.
Arms stretched higher, their fingers caught and gripped, their gazes fired by the explosive heat of their connection.
“This is the together I remember.”
“I remember,” she replied on a low exhalation. “Our chemistry is an awfully powerful thing.”
Something dark sparked deep in his eyes, a retraction, an objection, or perhaps an acknowledgement of that conversation, when she’d been so busily protecting herself and her feelings.
“Awful is the wrong word,” he said tightly, paused above her, holding them both on the edge. “This is never awful.”
That was all he said before driving them both to a release that was powerful and prolonged, wild and wonderful.
Later they lay face to face, cooling breaths mingling and binding them together, while her heart ached in lonely certainty that this was all he would ever want from her. Sex—wonderful, wild, always powerful, always fulfilling. She went to sleep wishing that it could be enough.
Nine
They made love again in the dark of early morning and again with dawn sunbeams dancing across the bed, and yet it still wasn’t enough to fill the hollow depths of Max’s hunger. He asked her to stay another day and she agreed without pause. As a reward he let her have her way with him. Not that it was any hardship letting her honeyed tongue work its magic, feeling the cool sweep of her hair over his skin, seeing the utter abandonment on her face when she rode him to her climax. Later he gave it all back, every touch, every taste, every long drawn-out sigh of pleasure. It may have been ten years, she might claim to be a different person, but he still knew every way to make her beg for mercy…and then for more.
What he didn’t know was how to tell her of the fullness in his chest or the rightness in his heart whenever he sank deep into her heat. What he didn’t know was how to bind her to him, to make their together last. He didn’t have the words or the answers. All he could do was show her.
Diana felt bound to mention the predicted rough weather but he shrugged it off with “I’m not planning on leaving this suite.” Cocooned in that safe haven, they didn’t much care when widespread whiteouts shut down airports across a half-dozen states, although the ensuing chaos left them stranded for a second and then a third day. Hearing the news, Max pulled her back under the covers and promised to keep her warm.
Ever diligent and always the perfectionist, he set about keeping that promise…and not only in the bedroom.
Diana discovered how easily he could warm her from the inside out through simple shared pleasures. Games of backgammon where she, the expert, kicked his butt and his ego all around the suite and back again. Smiling over his determination to complete a gigantic old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle…of a snowstorm. Laughing as he chased her down to confiscate her camera after she’d snapped a series of candid shots of him buff and beautiful. He was very diligent in supervising their deletion.
They talked, too, skimming the edges of the years they’d been apart. Max told her about the expansion of his family’s cattle ranching business and sketched out the many other businesses in which he held a stake. Many were in partnership with his friend Zack. He told her how a day out at the Melbourne Cup had fuelled his and Zack’s plan to start the racehorse stud.
“Is the Melbourne Cup a horse race?” she asked.
“It’s Australia’s biggest horse race,” he told her, “and one of our biggest days out. You know how Roland talked about the Bluegrass Stakes with the well-dressed fillies out on parade? Well, that’s a similar picture to our Cup day. People dress up to the nines, they hold all-day picnics in the car park and in marquees on the racecourse lawns.”
“So you and Zack hatched a plan to lure all the well-dressed fillies into your marquee?” she teased.
“I prefer them undressed.” In bed at the time, he stroked a hand down her undressed flank but the seriousness in his eyes belied the teasing mood. “We decided to breed a Melbourne Cup winner.”
Not they wanted to, they decided to. “Surely that isn’t something you can just do. There has to be a lot of luck involved.”
“Study, smart investment, commitment, drive. They all combine to make luck.”
Diana didn’t disagree. She supposed she’d made her own luck with her photography, using some of those very skills. She stroked a hand over his chest, over the steady beat of his heart, and she remembered another time in another bed. Another conversation about dreams, more than a decade old.
“Did you ever build your yacht?” she asked.
He didn’t answer right away and there was an unsettling quality to his silence that made Diana wonder if he remembered….
“You told me once, that a yacht was your ultimate purchase,” she explained. “A big fancy cruiser you could moor on Sydney harbor.”
Because of his outback upbringing, Max had had a fascination with water, with the smooth speed and graceful power of the big boats on the harbor. “Dreams change,” he said shortly. “I moved on.”
That particular dream had moved on with her, shoved aside along with the diamond solitaire and the dreams of carrying her over the threshold into the stateroom before they set sail on their honeymoon. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about that dream in years. He didn’t want to discuss it now. Smoothly he steered the conversation on, relating a long anecdote that involved his brother Brody’s boating misadventure in the Whitsunday Passage. Somehow that led to him telling her stuff he’d never intended about his family, his nieces and nephews, the three he was godfather to.
“The eternal lot of the single brother,” he quipped.
She smiled but her hand on his chest stilled with the same tension he felt in her willowy body. “So, you didn’t ever marry?”
“Almost did once,” he answered, with a tight hitch of his shoulder. “Never been tempted since.”
“Lucky you,” she murmured after a moment.
The emotion triggered by those two telling words punched him hard in the solar plexus. With one phone call this all could have played out so differently for them both.
Yeah, he thought bitterly. I’m one lucky s
on of a gun.
When they couldn’t fly out until Monday afternoon, Diana recalled her real world obligations long enough to call in absent from work. Jeffrey didn’t answer at home, the gallery or his cell phone. After trying numerous times over many hours, she wondered if the storms had closed Sioux Falls down. She couldn’t think of any other reason for the Click phone to go unanswered for so long.
Slightly concerned she called Eliza to pass on the message.
Eliza chuckled. “I don’t think your absence will be noticed, somehow. The city is working overtime to clear the roads and I can’t imagine many businesses opening today. No one in their right mind would venture out of doors for anything but necessities!”
Relieved, Diana made to end the call but Eliza was too quick. “Where, exactly, are you snowed in? I don’t suppose it’s somewhere in Kentucky? Maybe near…hmm…let me think…Lexington? Am I warm?”
“You are. Very.”
“I knew it! Although I bet I’m not nearly as warm as you two!”
Blushing, Diana glanced across the room to where Max seemed engrossed in flicking between sports channels. But Max was a skilled multi-tasker. For example, he was amazingly adept with hands and mouth and a certain other body part, all at the one time. In comparison, listening to three alternate channels and one phone conversation would be child’s play!
“I can’t exactly talk right now,” she murmured into the phone.
“Okay, so I’ll just ask a couple of quick yes-or-no questions and leave you to your fun. Things are fun, right?”
“Right.” Although her heart did a serious lurch just from watching Max stretch his shoulders and neck—without even needing to hark back to their earlier exchange about family. The look on his face when he’d talked about his youngest goddaughter, Alice, and the puppy he’d given her for Christmas. The telling lack of expression when he told her how he’d almost married once. The yearning in her heart had created an overwhelming, almost crippling pain.
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