by Diana Palmer
“It’s the same,” he whispered, stripping her out of the blouse even as his mouth found her again. “It’s just the same, only you’re more beautiful now, and you want me more. Help me…”
She found the buttons of his shirt and fumbled them open, helping him out of it. There had only been one time like this, that magical day in the deserted park, when they’d held each other so close and felt skin against skin and moaned with the aching need to have each other completely. But he’d held back, and none of her pleading words had swayed him.
“Yes,” he whispered, grinding her breasts against the hair-roughened warmth of his chest. “God!”
Her legs were moving under his, she was on fire. It had been so long, so long, and she’d needed him so, and now all at once she could have him. He wanted her, he still wanted her!
“Now,” she whispered mindlessly, her hands on his chest, lower, touching him in remembered ways, ways that drove him wild. “Now, please. Please.”
“All of me?” he whispered back, lifting her hips up against his.
“All of you,” she agreed, shaking.
His hands slid into the waistband of her jeans, onto her bare buttocks, his legs shifted between hers. “Look at me,” he whispered.
She opened her drugged eyes as he eased down over her, letting her feel his hunger in an intimacy that ripped her apart with need. She cried out, a strangled, high-pitched little cry that had all of heaven in it, and he watched her with a face gone rigid in passion.
He moved against her roughly. “Now?”
“Yes,” she ground out with a moan.
His lips parted as he watched her, and his hips ground into hers in a slow, sensuous motion. “Like this?” he breathed.
“Yes!” she whimpered, arching up.
“Here?” he whispered back, taunting her mouth with his.
She couldn’t answer him; her mind was already picturing it, her body was crying out wildly for it.
He nuzzled her mouth. “First, I’ll undress you. Then you’ll undress me. Then I’ll take you, right here on the couch….”
She whimpered again, her hips moving restlessly under the crush of his, until his hands caught and stilled them.
“Not yet,” he breathed unsteadily. “Don’t make me too hungry, or I may not be able to give you what you need. Now lie still while I get these clothes out of the way….”
He started to unbuckle his belt just as a door suddenly opened in the back of the theater and slammed heavily. His eyes looked down into hers and he cursed sharply.
“Damn!”
Her eyes closed as he rolled away from her and got to his feet. She couldn’t move, the picture of seduction lying there with her blouse wide open, the pearly gleam of her breasts beautiful in the subdued light.
“As much as I love looking at you,” he said softly, “you’d better button those buttons. We’ll have company in a minute.”
“Oh.” She sat up, tugging at the blouse with fingers that shook. He knelt just in front of her and opened it gently. His eyes worshiped what he saw. He bent, taking one swollen nipple into his lips to suck it softly, warmly, moistly. Then, while she was taut with the wonder of the ecstasy, he brought the edges together and buttoned the blouse.
“Tonight,” he whispered, looking straight into her eyes. “I’ll take you home. And we’ll love each other all night.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She was too weak to tell him so. She loved him. It was like having every single dream come true, after all the long, empty years. How could she tell him no when she loved him? If one night was all she could ever have, wouldn’t it be worth it?
“I feel as if I’ve waited all my life for you,” he said, standing to straighten his shirt. His eyes searched hers quietly. “Every woman I’ve touched in the past six years has been you.”
That admission brought tears to her eyes. He meant it; it was in every line of his face. And if he wanted her that much, couldn’t it mean that he cared, just a little?
She stood up, brushing back her long hair, oddly shy with him. As the passion left her mind, it became sharp again and she remembered the pain of being pushed aside and wondered if she was strong enough to go through it again.
“Bett.”
She looked up.
“Don’t brood about it,” he said softly. “Tonight, we’ll talk. We’ll make plans.”
“What kinds of plans are there to make?” she asked sadly. “You’ll take me to bed, and I’ll let you, and in the morning, you’ll be gone.”
“No,” he said. He drew her gently into his arms with a long, soulful sigh. “No. I’m no stronger than you are. The past six years have been pure hell. If we make love, it won’t just be a one-night stand.”
Her heart flew straight up. She drew back and looked at him with a hundred questions on the tip of her tongue.
He touched her mouth with a long finger. “Get rid of Hadison,” he said, smiling. “You’re my woman. Tonight, I’ll even prove it to you.”
She smiled. There was just enough time for that before noisy footsteps sounded in the hall, signaling the return of part of the cast. She went back to work with a fatalistic happiness. She’d never considered the possibility that she might want to sleep with a man without marriage. Well, maybe once, with Cul. But now, she had little else to look forward to. It was the way of the world, these arrangements. Marriage wouldn’t make her any more committed to him than she already was. But a small ache deep inside her belied the smooth thought. She’d been raised to believe that people fell in love and got married and had children. It was going to be next to impossible to reconcile what she was contemplating with her conscience.
Nevertheless she put the consequences out of her mind and threw herself wholeheartedly into her role. Cul was obviously pleased, and even managed a kind word for David, which seemed to startle the poor man dumb.
Bett began to get nervous about nine-thirty, a half hour before Cul released the cast for the night. By the time the rest of them filed out, she was almost trembling with mingled anticipation and wonder because Cul was looking at her in a way he hadn’t in six long years, and she was burning with a mad, helpless fever.
David paused at the door, glancing back until he saw Bett’s eyes on Cul. With a look of sadness, David closed the door behind him. And they were alone.
“Afraid?” Cul teased softly as he led her out into the darkness.
“I don’t know,” she replied, tingling from head to toe.
“At least you aren’t a virgin.” He laughed, and she felt herself cringe at the laughter. “That’s one problem we won’t have.”
He dropped his arm over her shoulders and pulled her close. “Bett, I’m on fire for you,” he breathed as they neared his car. “It’s all I’ve thought about for days.” He turned her against the Porcshe and backed her up, so that his hips crushed her against the curve of the door and roof, letting her feel the wild hunger he’d just expressed verbally.
She could barely breathe as she looked up into his passion-darkened face in the streetlight. “I’ve dreamed of how it would be with you,” she confessed shakily. “In bed, on cool sheets, with all the lights burning…”
He caught his breath, searching her eyes. “Is that how you want it?
“Yes, oh, yes,” she whispered. “I want to see you while it’s happening.”
He groaned something, bending to kiss her slowly, roughly, with a hunger that made him tremble all over. “Let’s go,” he whispered, shaken. “While I can still find the strength to drive.”
She sat beside him in a daze while he drove quickly to his penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan. They stood rigidly together in the elevator. It wasn’t until they were behind the locked door of the penthouse that he turned and looked at her.
“Do you want a drink first?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head slowly. Having waited six years, having made the commitment to him, she only wanted to be in his arms. She moved close, sliding her arms around
him, pressing close with her eyes shut tightly.
“Cul…take a long time with me, all right?” she asked under her breath.
He caressed her back slowly. “I’ll do my best,” he whispered. His lips brushed over her closed eyelids, her nose, her lips. “I want you obsessively, Elisabet, but I’ll be as slow as I can, all right?”
She smiled. “All right.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Cul, I don’t have anything,” she said. “Can you…?”
He touched her mouth with his fingers and laughed with an odd bitterness. “Oh, yes, I can take care of it. Come on.” He lifted her clear off the floor and carried her into the master bedroom with its beige carpet and chocolate-and-cream decor.
The bed was huge. King-sized, to fit a big man. He tossed her onto it and stood looking down at her with a tight smile on his lips, with glittering green eyes.
She sat up as he dropped onto the bed. He pushed her down again with a grin. “First things first.”
He stripped, slowly, letting her watch him. She was fascinated, never having seen a man without clothes before. Her face, she knew, was hot with color, but she didn’t look away. He was magnificent, like one of the photos in that magazine Janet had bought to show her, only much more sensuous. She couldn’t look away.
“You aren’t shy, are you?” he teased, drawing her to her feet.
“I think I am, a little,” she confessed, touching his hair-roughened chest with obvious fascination. “We were never quite this intimate.”
“We were in my mind,” he said, and the smile faded as his fingers began to work at buttons and fastenings.
She stood very still, letting him ease away the fabric from her slender, high-breasted body. And when he was through, she looked at him as he studied her from head to toe with purely masculine appreciation.
“Has it been a long time since you’ve been with a man?” he asked.
“Why?” she asked nervously.
He touched her breasts with slow, tender hands. “Because if it has, I’ll have to be a lot more careful with you, of course,” he whispered, bending to kiss her. “You’d be…like a virgin for me.”
Her lips parted shakily under his. “It…has been…a long time,” she managed.
He smiled against her mouth and his hands went to her thighs to draw her body completely to his.
She caught her breath and moaned, and he smiled even more. His mouth parted hers with a tenderness that took her breath, and she felt a wild kind of shock at the contact with his hair-roughened nudity. She trembled all over from it, bursting with the joy of loving and being wanted.
He lifted her, placing her on the bed, then stretched out beside her. The lights were bright overhead, and she felt no shame at all as he looked at her and touched her. It was like dreaming, to be held and touched by him. And she loved him so… surely loving him was excuse enough to lay her principles at his feet, wasn’t it?
She trembled wildly as he touched her in a new way, his eyes coming up to hers to watch her reaction.
He smiled again as his fingers probed gently and she gasped. “Oh, yes,” he breathed. “Yes, I thought so, I was almost certain….” He bent to her breasts and nuzzled his face slowly against them, cherishing them first with his nose and chin and then, finally, with his warm, open mouth.
It was the beginning. In the minutes that followed, she learned things about herself and about him that made her explode with sensation and pleasure. He was so exquisitely slow that he almost drove her mad. She writhed helplessly, crying out, moaning, and all the time he watched, and watched.
Finally, when it was such torment that she was crying for fulfillment, his body moved over hers. He guided her, stilled her frantic movements, and all at once it was happening.
Her eyes flew open, agonized, straight into his, and he whispered, “Virgin.” As his mouth came down, his body came down, and the ceiling seemed to come down with them as everything blurred into feverish motion and crashing pleasure and, at last, a shuddering kind of exhausted peace.
She felt his damp skin under her cheek after a few minutes, and her eyes opened, dazed, to stare across the swirls of hair just shades darker than that on his head. His chest still vibrated with the heavy beat of his heart, like her own.
His fingers smoothed her long, damp hair gently. “Did you save it for me, all those years?” he whispered.
“Save what?” she whispered.
“Your virginity,” he replied. “Because, up until about ten minutes ago, you still had it. I knew.”
She caught her breath. She’d thought she heard him whisper, but she’d been so wracked with pleasure that she hadn’t been sure.
“You knew?”
“Umm-hmmm,” he murmured lazily. “Do you mind if I feel unforgivably smug? I’ve never made love to an inexperienced woman before. And you didn’t seem to be in very much pain,” he added dryly.
“I wouldn’t have known if I had been,” she murmured, burying her face against him. “Cul, do you mind if I love you?”
“No,” he whispered. “I don’t mind. Because I’ve never stopped loving you.”
She lifted her head, needing to see his face. And it was there, all of it, the passion and the tenderness and, yes, love.
“Then why…?” she began bitterly.
“Because you weren’t old enough,” he replied, brushing back the damp hair from her forehead to kiss it. “What we just gave each other is all I can offer you, Bett. I’m no more interested in marriage now than I was six years ago. I love you, quite desperately. But I can’t marry you.”
She searched his eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to, darling,” he replied. He rolled onto his side, tenderly drawing his fingers across her cheeks, her chin, in the lazy aftermath of passion. He bent to kiss her softly on her swollen mouth. “There are reasons.”
“Then what…what do you want?” she asked.
“I want to sleep with you, of course,” he said, letting his hand wander slowly down her body until it made her leap with unexpected sensitivity. “All the time.”
“For how long?” she managed in a last grasp at sanity.
“For as long as rehearsals last,” he whispered as he bent and kissed her very slowly on the mouth. “Maybe for longer than that. Can’t we just take it one day at a time, Bett?”
“Cul, I have to know…” she began.
But his body rolled onto hers and his mouth took possession of her parted lips, and the slow, rocking motion of it ignited new fires. It was almost dawn before they eventually slept, and she hadn’t had the breath to ask any more questions.
It was just like Atlanta, only better. They were inseparable, something that David Hadison saw and reluctantly accepted. Bett was sorry for him, but too caught up in the fury of loving and being loved that she hardly noticed him for days afterward.
She and Cul went home to his apartment every night, and together in the big king-sized bed they made love in ways she’d never dreamed they could. As she grew more experienced and less inhibited, she began to notice that he wasn’t taking any precautions. One night while they were watching a late movie on television, she mentioned it to him.
“I wouldn’t mind if I got pregnant, of course, you know how much I want children,” she murmured, feeling him stiffen. “But we’re not really doing anything to prevent it.”
He seemed to take a long time to answer, and she felt the rough rise and fall of his chest under her ear.
“Yes, you’re right,” he said finally, his voice oddly strained. “Look, we’re almost through rehearsals, and I’m going to be in Hollywood for at least a month or so. You’ll be in Philadelphia with the tryout. Let’s cool it for a while.”
She drew back and gaped up at him. He hadn’t mentioned going to Hollywood, and her eyes widened with pure terror. Was he telling her that he’d tired of her, that it was over?
“Don’t look at me that way,” he said, his voice agonized. He caught her roughly against him, h
urting her with the strength of the embrace. “God, don’t look at me like that. I love you!”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Then why are you walking out on me again?”
“I’m not,” he breathed. His arms tightened even more. “You know about the play. I have to go out and finish work on the screenplay. And I have casting approval. I can’t drop the project now. Besides,” he sighed, drawing back to touch her wet face gently, “you’re going to be busy yourself, getting geared up to win a Tony. Right?”
She smiled wanly. “Right.” Her eyes searched his, fearfully. “You aren’t breaking it off? I don’t think I could bear it, Cul.”
He swallowed, and his face paled. “It’s just some breathing space, that’s all,” he said softly. He smiled down at her, although his eyes were oddly dark. “I love you, Bett. Believe that, at least.”
“I do.” She snuggled close to him with a long, relieved sigh. But if she could have seen the expression on Cul’s face, she might not have felt that relief. He looked like a man being torn apart.
That was the first night he took her back to her apartment. She didn’t argue with him, his face was set and he had that unbending expression on it. Besides, perhaps he was right. When he’d spent a few late evenings watching the news and movies by himself, when he’d done without her beside him in bed to warm him in the cool night, he’d let her come back. She was sure of it.
In the meantime, dress rehearsals began. The play was ready to go out of town. Set designers were finished with the backdrops, all the props and costumes were ready to go to Philadelphia. Everything was loaded up and Cul said goodbye to Bett all too soon when she drove him to La Guardia to catch his California flight.
“Write to me,” she told him with bleak eyes as he searched her pale face.
“Of course. Darling, you’re so pale, are you all right?” he asked softly, studying her.
“Yes, I’m fine. Just a virus. Janet had it, and I had supper with her a couple of nights ago, you know.”
