The Complete Mackenzie Collection (35 page)

“Caroline.” His mouth settled over hers just as he said her name, and drowsily she realized that she must have slept, because she hadn’t felt him move, but now he was braced on his elbows, her head cradled in his palms. Without pause she responded, her mouth opening and molding itself to his.

A little while later he forced himself to stop kissing her and gently disengaged their bodies. She remained limply sprawled on the bed while he went into the bathroom and came out a moment later with a wet washcloth. She thought she should be embarrassed at the intimate way he cleaned her, but it was beyond her. She yawned like a sleepy cat and curled onto her side when he had finished. “Did I bleed?” she asked, her voice holding only an absentminded curiosity.

“Only a little.” He caressed her buttocks possessively, filled with fierce satisfaction that she had given herself to him so completely. She hadn’t held anything back, hadn’t let discomfort or fear of the unknown prevent her from hurling herself headlong into the situation. He’d never been wanted like that before, had never wanted anyone like that before, with no reservations or restraints, no boundaries. Any other woman would have been frightened by the savagery of his possession, but Caroline had reveled in it. He’d never
been
so savage before, had never allowed himself to give in to the fierceness of his sexual needs. His rampant sexuality had always been held under ruthless control, yet now he had not only given into it, he had done so without protection. He might have made her pregnant with that one irresponsible act.

He should have been furious and disgusted with himself, but somehow he wasn’t. The utter pleasure of it had been too strong to allow room for regrets. A dangerous image formed in his mind, a picture of Caroline swollen with his child, and to his surprise he began to be aroused again.

She was asleep. He carried the washcloth back to the bathroom and returned to turn back the covers and tuck her between the cool sheets. She murmured softly; then, when he slipped in beside her, she cuddled against him, automatically seeking the comfort of his warmth. He cradled her head on his shoulder, his free arm wrapped possessively around her hips to hold her close. He went to sleep almost as easily as she had.

When he awakened later, his acute sense of time told him that he’d been asleep for about two hours. He was achingly aroused, and by the time he had caressed her awake, she was, too. This time he forced himself to use protection, though for the first time he bitterly resented the thin barrier between their complete intimacy. She gasped a little when he entered her, her tender flesh sore from the first time, but again she wouldn’t let him be gentle, even if he had wanted to be. There would be time for gentleness later; for now there was only the flood tide of desire, demanding release. They writhed and surged together in the darkness, the only sound the roughness of their breathing and the creaking of the bed beneath them.

They slept again. He awakened three more times during the night and had her. He wondered when the urgency would lessen.

It was after eight the next morning when he opened his eyes to find the bright morning sun trying valiantly to pierce the heavy curtains. The room was dim, the air conditioning quietly humming, the air pleasantly cool. His body ached from the unbridled activities of the night.

Caroline lay curled on her side, facing away from him, and for a moment he admired the delicate line of her spine. How could such a soft, delicately made body have withstood the demands he had made on it?

The bed was a wreck. The covers were all pulled loose and twisted, and mostly on the floor. At some point during the night Caroline had pulled one corner of the bedspread up to hug to her breasts. Even the fitted bottom sheet had come loose. One pillow was stuffed under the headboard. He had a distinct memory of there having been three pillows, but he had no idea where the other two were. He also had a distinct memory of having placed one under her hips during one of their ravenous encounters. He yawned, wondering if she would want to remake the bed before the hotel maids could see it. He didn’t see much point in remaking it at all.

He was hungry and gently shook her awake. “What do you want for breakfast, sweetheart? I’ll call room service, then we can take a bath while we’re waiting.”

She opened one eye. “Coffee,” she murmured.

“What else?”

She sighed. “Food.” The eye closed.

He chuckled. “Can you narrow it down a little?”

She thought about it. “Nothing green,” she finally mumbled into the mattress. “I can’t eat green in the mornings.”

Stunned by the idea, he shuddered with revulsion. Come to think of it, he couldn’t eat anything green in the mornings, either.

He ordered pecan waffles and bacon for both of them, with coffee and orange juice. The impersonal voice on the other end of the line informed him that it would be forty-five minutes to an hour before his order arrived, which was fine with him. He hung up the phone and shook Caroline awake again.

“Do you want a shower or a tub bath?”

“Tub. Can’t sit down in a shower.”

He went into the bathroom and turned on the faucets of the playground-size bathtub. Despite the size of the thing, the water level rose quickly. He returned to the bedroom and lifted Caroline in his arms. Her own arms curled trustingly around his neck. “Are you very sore?” he asked with concern.

“Not
too
sore, if that’s what you’re asking.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “It’s just that I can’t walk.”

He stepped into the tub with her still in his arms and carefully lowered himself into the warm water, then reclined against the back of the tub with her between his legs, her back to his chest. She sighed with pleasure as the warm water began soaking the stiffness from her legs and easing the discomfort between them.

She would have expected to be embarrassed by the intimacy that had passed between them during the night, as well as uneasy with their nudity, but she didn’t feel any of that. She felt bone-deep contentment, a sense of rightness and completion that she’d never before known existed. He was her man, she was his woman; how could she be embarrassed with him?

He bathed her, lathering his hands with the fragrant soap and gently sliding them over the tender parts of her body, which somehow seemed to need more attention than the other parts. By the time he finished she was feeling very warm and so was he, if the fullness of his hard male length was any indication. She returned the favor and bathed him, but the imminent arrival of their food prevented him from doing anything to relieve his arousal.

There were two thick, hooded terry bathrobes hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and they put them on a scant two minutes before the brisk knock on the door heralded room service. Joe signed the order slip while the cart was immobilized and the covers removed from the dishes.

The delicious scent of coffee brought her drifting in from the bedroom. Joe’s eyes sharpened with the quick resurgence of lust. Even with her face bare of makeup, her hair tousled and her body wrapped in a thick bathrobe, she was more alluring than every other woman he’d had or even seen. The men she worked with might call her the Beauty Queen because of her fastidious attention to her appearance, but her attraction didn’t rely on it.

She attacked the food with unselfconscious appetite, and he thought that even the way she ate made him hard. When she was finished she leaned back with a sigh of contentment and smiled at him, a lazy smile that made his blood sizzle.

“What are we going to do today?”

He lifted his black eyebrow. His pale eyes looked as hard and brilliant as diamonds, and there was fire in their depths. “I don’t plan on leaving the suite this entire weekend,” he said evenly. “Unless we run out of condoms.”

Slowly she stood up. “Maybe room service will deliver,” she said in a voice that was suddenly tight with need, and then she was in his arms.

S
he drowned in sensuality that weekend. The two rooms of that impersonal hotel suite became very personal, imbued with the aura and memories of their lovemaking. They didn’t leave the suite at all, relying on room service for their food, and never dressing in anything except the bathrobes.

As a lover, he more than matched the strength of her passion. Caroline never did anything in halfway measures; she had been fiercely virgin, and now she was just as fierce in the giving of herself. He had never before given free rein to his appetites, but with Caroline he could. He sated himself with her, and yet never felt as if he had had enough. The hunger would roar back, again and again.

He had no inhibitions. He was earthy and powerful, sweeping her along with him, introducing her to more variations, techniques and positions than she could have imagined. Sometimes he was on top and sometimes she was; sometimes he was behind her. Sometimes he used his mouth, and he taught her how to use hers to pleasure him. He made love to her in the bathtub, on the couch, on the floor, wherever they happened to be.

He had a beeper on his belt, but the beeper remained silent and the outside world didn’t intrude on them. She had never before been so completely, overwhelmingly involved with another human being, to the exclusion of everything else. She didn’t think about work, didn’t fret for a book to read. She simply experienced.

By Sunday morning the initial frenzied hunger had been fed and their lovemaking had become more lei-surely, bringing with it the patience to linger over both arousal and satisfaction. An hour of sensual play had satisfied them for the moment, and Joe ordered a late breakfast; then they lounged in the parlor with their feet up while they watched television and caught up on the news. Caroline curled against his side, heavy-eyed with contentment.

He lifted a pale strand of her hair and let it drift down, the sunlight catching the gold and making it glitter. “Where are your parents?” he asked absently, paying more attention to the play of light than to his own question.

“Usually, or at this exact moment?” Her voice was just as lazy as his.

“Both.”

“Usually they’re in North Carolina, where they teach. Right this moment, they’re in Greece on a summer-long cultural tour. They’re supposed to come home the middle of September.”

“Were you lonely when you were little?”

“Not that I noticed. I wanted to
learn,
” she explained. “I couldn’t learn fast enough to keep myself satisfied. I wasn’t a comfortable child to be around, I don’t think. If I hadn’t had them for parents I probably would have been a complete wreck, but they helped me handle the frustration and didn’t try to limit what I learned.”

“You were probably a holy terror,” he said dryly.

“Probably.” She felt comfortable with it. “What about you?”

He didn’t answer immediately, and a tiny quiver of unease intruded on her massive contentment. He would talk easily about his experiences as a pilot, about work, but he kept his private life very private. He had relaxed his guard a little in telling her that he was a half-breed, and that he had three brothers and one sister, but very little else. He hadn’t related any childhood experiences to let the conversation get very close to him. Of course, she reminded herself, she hadn’t known him for long at all, actually less than a week. The speed and intensity of their relationship dazed her, made the flow of time seem exaggeratedly long.

“No, I wasn’t a holy terror,” he finally said. She sensed the remoteness in his answer.

“Are any of your brothers or your sister?”

Because she was so close to him, she could feel the subtle relaxation of his muscles. “Just my sister, and it isn’t that she’s destructive or bad tempered, just
very
determined to have her own way. She’s a little steam-roller.”

His deep love for his family was evident in his voice. She snuggled closer to him, hoping to keep him talking. “How old are your brothers and sister? What are their names?”

“Michael is eighteen. He’s just gotten out of high school and starts college next month. He’s interested in cattle ranching and will probably start his own spread when he gets out of college. Joshua is sixteen, and he’s the best-natured of the bunch, but he’s a jet freak, just like I was at his age. Damn his hide, though, he wants to be a Navy flier. Zane is thirteen, and he’s…intense. Silent and dangerous, like Dad. Then there’s Maris. She’s eleven going on a hundred. Small for her age, so delicate she looks like a breeze would send her airborne, and a will like iron. We’re all good with horses, damn good, but Dad is sheer magic with them, and so is Maris.”

“What about your stepmother?” Anything to keep him talking.

He gave a quiet laugh. “Mary. She’s even smaller than you are.”

She sat up. “I’m not small.” Her chin jutted out belligerently.

“You’re not exactly tall, either. Not quite average, I’d say. I’m almost a foot taller than you.” He pulled her back down against his side, her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder. “Do you want to know about Mary or not?”

“Go ahead,” she grumbled, and he kissed her forehead.

“Mary is warm and open and loving, and when she makes up her mind to do something she’s unstoppable. She’s a teacher. I wouldn’t have made it into the Academy without her tutoring.”

“So you didn’t mind when she and your father married?”

“Mind?” He gave that quiet laugh again. “I did everything I could to throw them together. Not that it was all that difficult. Dad was like a corralled stallion. He was determined to have her, no matter how many fences he had to kick down or go over.”

His ease and earthy understanding of his father’s sexual nature made her smile. For her part, she simply couldn’t imagine her own parents as intensely sexual beings, probably because they weren’t. She was proof that they did have sex, but both of them were low-key and concerned more with intellectual matters than those of a physical nature. Their love life was probably warm and affectionate, rather than the raw, raunchy, intense lovemaking Joe had swept her into.

“What about your dad? What’s he like?”

“Tough. Dangerous. And the best father in the world. Even when I was a little kid, I always knew he’d fight to the death for me.”

That was an odd way to describe one’s parent, but looking at Joe she could easily believe that his father was dangerous. They were probably mirror images of each other.

“That’s enough about me,” he said abruptly, though very little of the conversation had actually told her about
him.
She sensed that wariness in him again as the steel door guarding his inner thoughts clanged shut. He lifted her astride his lap and pushed her robe open, closing his hands over her breasts. “I want to find out about you.”

She shivered and looked down at her breasts, at his bronze hands covering the soft, pale mounds. “That’s no longer virgin territory to you.”

“So it isn’t.” The blue of his eyes grew darker, more intense. He stroked one of his hands down her belly and into the notch of her legs, lightly probing. “This isn’t, either, but it’s even more exciting now than it was before. I could only imagine what you’d feel like before, but now I know how tight and hot you are, and how you start getting wet as soon as I touch you.” He circled her delicate opening with one rough fingertip, using exquisite care. She shuddered as pleasure rushed through her, hot and sharp, tightening her muscles and giving him the dampness he sought as her body immediately began preparing to receive him. He pushed his finger a little way into her, and her body quickened, her breath sighing in and out of her lungs, a fine quivering seizing her.

Joe pushed his own robe open. He was as ready as a stallion, his thin nostrils flaring at the female scent of her. With his hand on her bottom he urged her forward, positioned her, then reached down to hold himself steady as she sank onto him with a soft, wild cry. She enveloped him, and he moved his hand, using it to urge her closer.

“Now I know how soft you are,” he whispered, “and how you shiver around me, how all those sweet little muscles try to grab me tight and start milking me when we’re…
damn!
” The last word was low and fierce. Caroline scarcely heard it. She began moving on him, hungry for him, desperate for the release already luring her.

His hands bit into her hips almost as if he would stay her movements, and she whimpered, but then with another muttered curse he grasped her buttocks and moved her in a hard, quick rhythm on his invading length. This wasn’t one of the leisurely times; it was fast and ruthless and basic. She grabbed at his shoulders for balance as she began convulsing and only a heartbeat later he joined her, his head arching back, veins and tendons cording in his muscular neck.

Recovery took longer than the act itself. She slumped forward to lie in exhausted silence on his chest. He smoothed her hair away from her face with gentle fingers, then held her close to him. “I haven’t been taking very good care of you,” he said quietly. “That’s twice.”

She couldn’t think of any way he could take any
better
care of her. “What is?” she murmured.

“That I’ve taken you without protection.”

“But I asked you to.” She closed her eyes, savoring in both memory and actuality the intimate feel of him. “I wanted to know everything, feel everything, about you.”

“The first time, yes. Even then, I should have had better sense. And there wasn’t any excuse for this time.”

At the hardness of his tone she sat up and squarely met his gaze. “I’m neither a child nor an idiot, Joe. I know the risk and the consequence, and the responsibility is half mine. I could have said no, but I didn’t. The risk isn’t that great. One of the benefits of having an inquiring mind is that I’m curious about almost everything, so I read about it. I know all about rhythm and timing, and we’re fairly safe. Safe enough that I’m not going to sweat and watch the calendar.”

“There’s no guarantee on that. All the timing can give us is better than even odds, and I told you, I’m not a gambler.”

“Would you mind so very much?” she asked steadily.

“Wouldn’t
you?
”

She shook her head. “No.” Her voice was quiet and rock solid.

He gave her a piercing look. She waited for him to ask her why, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I want to know if your next period is even a day late.”

His tone of command was so obvious that she snapped off a sharp salute and barked, “Yes, sir!” Sometimes he was very much the colonel.

He laughed and swatted her lightly on the bottom as he shifted her off his lap. She stood up and tied the robe around her. “When do we have to leave?”

“I arranged for a late checkout,” he said. “By six tonight.”

So their remaining time locked in their private little world could now be counted in a dwindling number of hours. It was amazing how quickly she had grown accustomed to room and maid service, to having him all to herself, to the intoxicating delights of the flesh. Probably this seclusion would wear thin if it stretched out for a week, but she would like to have that week. It wasn’t to be, however. Tomorrow they would both be back at work, she on the ground and he in the air. Tomorrow she would have to deal with the fear all over again, because the man she loved was doing something dangerous and she couldn’t stop it. It would be obscene to even try. Joe was an eagle; only death or age would ground him. She would gladly endure years of quiet terror, if only they would be granted.

For now, she didn’t want to waste even one minute before they were forced to face real life again.

She didn’t know what this weekend had meant to him, maybe only a prolonged, intense roll in the hay, sufficient for the pleasure it provided, but for her the man and the weekend had been the catalyst that had unlocked the passion of her nature. She felt…changed inside, somehow, freer, more content. It was as if she had been viewing life through a gray veil and it had been ripped aside, letting her see the true, vibrant colors. She no longer felt set aside and isolated, but part of it all. She was no longer alone, as she had essentially been for most of her life, from the time she had first realized that her brain made her different. In giving herself to him, she had gained rather than lost, because she now had a part of Joe that would never leave her. He had given her memories, experience…ecstasy. Under his earthy tutelage, she had bloomed inside herself, learned the rich depths of her own nature.

Abruptly, despite her own common sense and in full recognition of the difficulties it would involve, she hoped that the timing had been wrong for her and she was carrying his child.

“What?” he asked, black brows lifted, and she realized she had been standing in front of him staring intently at him for God only knew how long.

A slow smile broke across her face, lighting her up like dawn. “I was just thinking,” she said seriously, “that a lot more women would enlist if you’d just pose for recruiting posters in the nude.”

He looked briefly startled, then gave a roar of laughter as he surged to his feet. He grabbed a fistful of robe and hauled her to him. “Do you mean you’d share me with the women of America?”

“Not in this life time.”

“Not even if my country needed my services? Where’s your patriotism?”