All the emotions he’d held back, held in, erupted inside him and pounded like a drumbeat through his veins.
The dangers of the day, the shocks, the fears—the terrifying prospect that they might lose their chance at making this, their marriage, work and the even more petrifying thought of losing her—all rose and swamped his mind.
He forced himself to lean back against the door and try to find some semblance of control.
But something had shifted inside him; something had escaped. He met her gaze, saw the faint lift of her eyebrow in unspoken question, and helpless to do otherwise, responded.
He pushed away from the door and stalked across the room to her.
As he approached, he reached for her, but she was already moving toward him to plaster herself to him, to clutch his head and haul his lips to hers.
That was all the encouragement the prowling need within him required.
He fell into the kiss, claimed her mouth, and devoured. He cinched his arm around her waist and crushed her to him. Splayed, his hands roved her back, then slid down, cupped the delectable globes of her bottom, and molded her hips to his thighs, the softness of her belly easing the sharp ache of his already rampant erection.
She was more than willing. With her hands, her lips, her tongue—with the seductive, sensuous pressure of her body against his—she urged him on. More, she demanded, and he was entirely ready to meet her every need.
Passion welled and swelled, and the heat of their hunger, heightened and escalated by the events of the day, infused and drove them. Their lips demanding, their hands greedy and grasping, in a flurry of urgent, desperate need, they stripped each other of every last stitch. The instant he flung her chemise aside, he seized her and hoisted her up, and she wrapped her arms about his shoulders, wound her long legs about his hips, and with one powerful thrust, he filled her.
And they froze and clung.
Suspended in that moment of infinite awareness, they struggled to catch their breaths, battled to find their mental feet in the face of a tsunami of incomparable sensation as intimacy battered their senses.
Then she levered up in his arms, flicked her hair from her face, framed his between her hands, and met his eyes. “I love you. Now and forever. I will not lose you.” The last statement was a promise, a vow.
“Nor I you.” His instinctive response came in a guttural growl.
She barely waited to hear it before sealing her lips to his again, then in blatant incitement, she shifted in his arms, using her inner muscles to caress him, and need roared back and crashed over them.
What followed was an education for them both. Years ago, they’d tumbled into love so easily, neither had really questioned what that meant. More recently, when they’d allowed that nascent love to finally blossom as an adult connection, while the feeling had clearly matured, their acceptance of it had remained straightforward, an acknowledgment that the connection existed, that it was there.
Now, as the fires of mutual passion raged and the flames of desire seared, they started to glimpse what such a love—one that had lasted for years and never waned—truly was.
What a force, what a power it could be.
While they’d spent the weeks since their wedding exploring this side of marriage and love, nothing had prepared either of them for the sheer, compulsive power the threats to their lives had unleashed. It went beyond hunger, far beyond mere need.
What gripped them and overwhelmed their minds held echoes of an unrelenting desperation that could only be assuaged by their complete and utter surrender.
To each other, but even more to the compulsive force that needed so powerfully it wouldn’t let either of them go.
Buried to the hilt within her scalding softness, repeatedly, compulsively, he lifted her, and gasping, eyes shut the better to savor each sensation, she slid down as he thrust deep. Their breaths, heated and panting, mingled, as together, they strove, hearts pounding, skins slick, then she tightened that last fraction and, on a softly keening cry, came apart in his arms.
Hanging on to his own impulses with an iron grip, he buried his face in the lustrous bounty of her disarranged hair and locked his arms about her, determined to revel in each and every second of her release.
As it faded, he eased his hold enough to fill his lungs with a much-needed breath, then holding her against him, walked to the side of her bed.
Halting there, he eased her now-limp arms from his shoulders and lowered her until she lay back on the silk counterpane. Her pale skin glowed, pearlescent against the midnight-blue expanse.
Boneless, her legs slid from his hips to lie over the side of the bed. He set his palms flat on either side of her shoulders, nudged her thighs wide, settling his hips between, then leaned over her and, once more, pushed deep.
He flexed his spine, withdrew a little way, then thrust deep again.
As he repeated the exercise, she stirred and raised her heavy lids enough to look up at him from beneath the dark fringe of her lashes.
With his features passion set, he couldn’t manage a smile. “Again.” He thrust into her, and her breath hitched, and her lids fell, but her hands rose to grip his forearms, and she joined him.
Joined him and matched him, and together, they urged each other on, through this new landscape that had opened between them. A place of heat, of raw need, of a furnace forging something finer, harder, more enduring.
