Full Circle

by Shannon Hollis

  “Why is it that people always walk to the waterline?” she mused. “No one ever walks on the beach and hugs the cliff.”

  “We’re ninety percent water, aren’t we? Maybe it’s an element-calling-to-element thing.”

  “Maybe you’re full of it.” She tossed a grin at him. “Maybe it’s just a good excuse for worn-out professionals to get their feet wet and feel like kids again.”

  “I’m far from worn out,” he said with dignity. “How much time do you think we have before the tide comes back in?”

  “There’s a table posted on the back of my door. The people at this place are so helpful, aren’t they? I think high tide is 3:00 a.m.”

  “Only in Big Sur do the tides matter more than the checkout time.”

  Only in Big Sur could she step carefully out of her old life for one weekend and become someone new. After all, wasn’t that the promise of the Old West? You could leave your past behind and reinvent yourself as whomever you wanted to be. Here on the edge of the continent, she was going to uphold that proud tradition.

  At least for these few days. Once her flight landed at LaGuardia, she’d go back to Vandenberg and care again about department politics and classes and getting the next grant. But tonight…tonight belonged to her and Daniel.

  In the shadow of an outcrop that had likely once been an undersea bed of mud but was now twenty feet of shale, Daniel paused. “The wind isn’t so strong here. Want to sit down?”

  A prickle of anticipation tiptoed over the back of her neck. Sitting down was halfway to horizontal, and that was good. The New York Cate might have preferred to be horizontal in a bed with imported cotton sheets, but to the Cate who had been touched by California magic, the beach was perfect. In fact, where else could it be?

  Daniel pulled her down beside him as a particularly big wave thundered in, throwing up spray lit by the moonlight. Legs stretched out, Cate leaned back on her hands and wondered if she needed to wait for him to make the first move, or if she should just push him down onto the sand and kiss him senseless.

  One of her better plans. If she just—

  “Cate.” His eyes were lost in dark hollows as he turned to look at her.

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you run away, that night in the cave?”

  And just like that, California Cate crumbled and she was twenty years old again, sitting in the dark with all her insecurities and fears coming between her and the one person to whom she could never reveal them.

  Except…why couldn’t she? What was the big deal? She didn’t care what he thought of her. All she cared about was pushing him down on the sand and getting on with plan A. Right?

  “Cate?”

  “Because I was afraid.”

  “Of what? Me? Making love? Because that’s what I wanted to do, you know. Make love to you.”

  “All of the above. You must know how attractive you are, Daniel.”

  He made a sound of derision, deep in his throat, and shook his head.

  “I’m serious. You have this charisma, this thing about you that compels a woman to think about sex. To me—to the girl I was—it was overwhelming. I was afraid that if I let myself fall for you, I’d lose myself. I’d never find out who I was meant to be.”

  “Overlooking how this is making me feel, let me ask you this. You knew this at twenty?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not. All I knew then was that I had to run. I got on the next shuttle out of there, even though I had a week left to go at the site. Of course, I had to write an extra paper to make up the chunk they were going to take out of my grade because of it.”

  “And all I knew was that you’d disappeared with no explanation. And I was too proud to call later, when you got the post at Vandenberg. I was happy for you, though.”

  “I’m glad, though I can’t say the same for you. Honestly, Daniel, do you have to encourage them to call you ‘the real Indiana Jones’?”

  He laughed and brought himself one notch closer to horizontal by rolling over on one elbow to watch her. Was his body language telling her something? At this rate, plan A was going to be a snap.

  “I let the media call me that because it ramps up public awareness of what we’re doing. And media attention brings in the grants. That’s all I care about, Cate. Money means discovery. You can understand that.”

  She understood he cared less about public awareness than the media attention, but that was neither here nor there. Here was her opening. She let her gaze ramble over his face, down his neck, to the front of his shirt, where a couple of buttons were open. “Is that really all you care about?”

  He caught her meaning immediately. “Not totally. You know me. Always a sucker for a challenge. Are you going to be a challenge, Cate?”

  “What, another conquest? Another notch on your whip or whatever it is that you notch?”

  The cocky grin faded and this time she knew she was looking at the real Daniel Burke, the one the cameras and the writers for Newsweek never saw. “You know it’s not like that. You know you’ve been under my skin since that night in the cave.” He reached out and ran his fingers up her arm, and an electric sensation sizzled through her blood. “The question is, are you going to run away again?”

  Another wave crashed below them as the night seemed to hush waiting for her answer.

  “Not this time,” she said, and pushed him onto his back.

  7

  HIS BODY WAS SOLID with muscle and heated as though a furnace had been lit inside him. Cate planted her elbows in the sand on either side of his head and let her thighs fall where they would—as long as she had skin-to-trousers contact.

  She smiled into his eyes. “Hello.”

  “Long time no see.” His voice was soft, his eyes a heavy-lidded glitter in the dark. “Do you still kiss the same way?”

  “How did I kiss?” She nuzzled the skin just above his collar. Slowly, her body was remembering how he had felt under her years ago. Remembering, and contrasting then with now. There was simply more of him. More muscle, more strength, more mileage…and more of that magnetic quality that promised a woman the ride of her life.

  “I can’t explain it,” he whispered. “You’ll have to show me again.”

  His lips welcomed hers. If she’d had any doubts about how they would fit together or if she’d forget how they’d once created such passion in their kisses, they were swept away.

  Because, damn, he was better at this than he used to be.

  She tilted her head a bit more and they fit together like two pieces from the same shattered pot, her curves fitting into his angles, her softness meeting his hardness. His tongue teased the sensitive surfaces of hers, wooing and tempting, drawing her in and making her forget her very surroundings. There was nothing in her consciousness but the heat and the taste of him and the wild rockets of desire going off in her blood.

  His hands held her against him at the waist, then slid lower to cup her derriere and press her gently against the unmistakable bulge in his trousers. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back up to my place?” he said against her lips.

  “And waste all that time? Not a chance.” She let her lips linger on his, learning the differences in texture and how each created a different response inside her.

  “There,” he whispered. “That’s how you kiss. As if each one is a complete experience you might never have again.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not at all. Try another one.”

  She tried one at the corner of his mouth, then she focused on that full lower lip. Unlike some men, Daniel didn’t seem to think that kisses were like mile markers, flashing by on the highway to orgasm. He seemed content to let her explore and taste and even breathe in the scent of his skin as she rappelled slowly down his neck and nuzzled the intersection of throat and chest.

  A man like this shouldn’t be wasted on a fling. Cate squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on the delicious abrasion of the hair on his chest against her cheek. On the way
his rising heat triggered an escalation of her own desire. Because if she thought about the way she was using him, she wouldn’t be able to continue—and right now, every cell in her body was demanding not only that but completion as well. She was the one barreling down the highway to orgasm, and it was all because of him and the chemistry that flared between them.

  “I want to taste every inch of you,” she murmured and went to work on the buttons of his shirt. He rolled to the side and helped her with the last two.

  “Anything you want.” She pulled the soft cotton out of the waistband of his pants, and he shrugged it off and laid it on the sand. “Now, what about this blouse?”

  It was just a flowered bit of silk that had cost a fortune, even on the sale rack. With blissful male disregard for its label, Daniel pulled it off and the cool fabric slid along her arms in a farewell caress.

  His mouth was hot on her skin, tracing the same path she had just forged on him. Was he having the same treacherous thoughts? Did making love with her mean a fling for him, too, or could there ever be anything more?

  She might never know and right now was a bad time to figure it out. Because when he arrived at her throat, he continued down her body until the lace of her bra stopped him.

  “Nice lingerie.” His tongue on the curves of her breasts made her breath come faster, and when he reached around and unfastened her bra, the sudden relaxation of its fabric was like a surrender, taking her past a barrier she could scarcely admit was there. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the fragile lace arc through the air to land on her sandals, and then she stopped caring because his lips had found her nipple.

  The wet heat of his tongue abraded her sensitive areola and she arched up off his shirt, helplessly seeking more. He nibbled her flesh, rolling her nipple on his tongue until she lost herself in the sensation of it and the whimpering sounds she made were carried away on the breeze.

  The muscles of his shoulders flexed and shifted under her hands as he moved along her cleavage and began his exploration of the other breast. Cate barely restrained herself from begging him not to prolong the trip—she needed his mouth on the other nipple now. But he made sure she enjoyed the journey, even though the anticipation she felt as he slowly circled and licked, nibbled and explored on the way to the apex had her gasping with the effort.

  And then she had her reward—pleasure shimmered somewhere deep inside as he tugged gently right where she needed him to. Her body couldn’t do anything but soften and moisten and melt.

  He had made her feel this way on those warm nights in Mexico, too, but there had always been an undercurrent of guilt, of urgency, as though they were doing something wrong. Now that feeling was gone and she could give herself up to the pleasure as voluptuously as she wanted to. She was here on her own terms, she told herself firmly, with no second thoughts…and if Daniel made her feel a little out of control, a little bit over the edge, there was no one here to witness it but him.

  When he lifted his mouth from her breasts, his eyes were heavy-lidded and a little glassy, as though he were drugged. “I could just eat you up all night,” he said, his voice ragged and soft.

  “Please do.” With a grin, she pushed him over onto his back. “But these jeans are stopping me.”

  “You could lose the skirt, too.”

  In moments they had all their clothes off and had fashioned a patchwork blanket out of them to keep most of the sand out of the way. Then Cate settled to the urgent and necessary task of tasting the skin on his stomach.

  “Woman, you’re going to kill me,” Daniel choked as she swirled her tongue along the ridges and planes of his abs in exactly the same way he had tortured the curves of her breasts. When she applied a little pressure with her teeth, she could feel the tremors in his belly under her mouth, and smiled against his skin.

  How delicious to know that she could do this to the famous Daniel Burke. She, Cate Wells, who had never licked a man’s abs in her life, could make him tremble and harden with anticipation in the same way he had made her soften and gasp. Her body had never felt so alive, so conscious of every nuance of his breathing and the movement of his blood. Somehow it made her feel very sexy and powerful, and she forced herself not to think, not to analyze, but simply to move lower, just to see what he would do.

  “Cate!” he ground out as she reached the junction where his abdomen met his thigh. His erection from this angle was huge and demanding and she held her breath. Whatever he was about to do was bound to be good.

  “Enough.” With one smooth movement, he rolled her on top of him, so that he lay on the pool of clothes, his face a study in light and shadow, his eyes bottomless with desire. “You can’t do that to me and get away with it.”

  “What will my punishment be?” she asked, torn between laughter and anticipation.

  “Twenty lashes with wet kelp.”

  She grinned down at him, her hands on his chest. She’d wanted fun with her sex, hadn’t she? Couldn’t she be happy with that? “I have a better idea.”

  She was straddling his waist, and now she slid down until she could feel the rock-hard power of his erection between her thighs. Her entire body tensed with anticipation while the sensitive, slick tissues of her vulva caressed his length, teasing both him and her.

  “You look like a goddess,” he breathed, and her heart clenched at the expression in his eyes—as though he’d seen a vision, and that vision was herself.

  “Everyone knows we goddesses like to be on top.”

  Balancing with one hand on the ground, she took him in her other hand and lifted up a little so she could stroke herself with the big, cushiony head of his penis.

  “Ah, Cate…” Now even the muscles in his thighs were trembling, and she realized exactly how much it was costing him to let her take her time and explore not only her own responses, but his, as well.

  She knew the mechanics of making love as well as any woman, but what she hadn’t known was this sense of power that welled up at the same time as this helpless adoration of every play of light on his face, or this wonderful addiction to the scent and the heat of his skin. How was it possible for one woman’s body to contain such a fountain of both physical and emotional sensation?

  It was impossible. The first tremors of the impending explosion began to build deep inside her with the glorious, wet friction.

  “Daniel, oh, I’m—”

  Without a word and without interrupting their rhythm, he grabbed her at the waist and rolled her onto the mat of their clothes, and as the first waves of orgasm crashed through her, he slid into her body as if she had been waiting all these years just for him.

  “Daniel!” she cried at the orchestra of new pleasure, as his length filled her emptiness, filled it, stretched it and made her body scream with the newness of it.

  And yet, he didn’t stop. Even as she shuddered and her mind tilted sideways, he thrust into her again and again, and she lifted her knees as if to pull him even deeper. It felt as though the atmosphere were bending, the beach were bucking, mimicking the tidal wave in her body. Daniel cried out and convulsed with his own release, dropping to his elbows to gasp an incoherent word into her ear.

  But the waves kept coming. She’d never known an orgasm like this—it felt as if her whole body were still shaking and a sound like thunder roared in her ears. She’d known it would be good. But she’d had no idea that sex with Daniel would be such a cataclysm.

  Daniel gasped something that turned into a shout and she finally realized what he had been trying to say. It wasn’t her name, either.

  “Earthquake!” He rolled off her body and pulled her to her feet in one smooth motion. Her bones and muscles were still liquefied with the magnitude of what she’d just experienced, though, and she fell to her knees.

  “Cate, get up! We have to get out of here.”

  The roar in her ears began to separate into terrifying components. The breakers foaming in lashed at the beach, thrown off their incoming rhythm by the lurching of the e
arth. A chunk of shale split off the cliff above them and crashed down not six feet away, impaling the sand. Beneath her knees she felt the beach still shuddering in the moment of tectonic release, in exactly the way she had with her own release thirty seconds ago.

  “Cate, run! Get away from the cliff!”

  Daniel grabbed her wrist and tugged her to her feet a second time. Together they staggered toward the waterline, the ground jerking so that every step landed a few inches away from where it was meant to go. They probably looked like a couple of drunks, walking a line that kept jumping out of the way.

  Behind her, Cate heard a rumble that goosed her into a run. Wide-eyed, she looked over her shoulder.

  “Daniel, the cliff! It’s coming down!”

  In the moonlight it looked as though the whole cliff had liquefied into a moving waterfall of stone. Cate’s perception of reality wavered for a second—the cliff couldn’t move like that, it wasn’t possible—until she blinked and saw that the layers of shale were shearing off and sliding toward the beach, raining chunks as big as her body onto the sand where they’d been lying.

  “My clothes!”

  “Cate, no!” Daniel grabbed her around the waist and, stark naked, they stood at the waterline with cold ocean slapping their ankles angrily. Cate hardly felt it.

  “The whole cliff. It came down right where we were—where we—”

  “Were making love.” Daniel’s voice was soft but grim as he widened his stance and braced himself while he held her. The secondary seismic waves were fading even as they spoke, the way the vibrations of a train fade after it passes. “They’ll be feeling this in San Francisco in a couple of seconds.”

  “Wow,” she breathed. “It’s been a long time. I’d forgotten what it was like.”

  “I didn’t think they got these in New York.”

  She shook her head, her hair moving on her bare shoulders. She was beginning to feel sand in places where sand wasn’t meant to go. “Not NewYork. At home in San Diego. Very frightening. Do you think it’s over?”