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As his hands covered hers and lifted them to his shirt, holding them whilst he deftly unfastened the buttons, Sara wondered if he had any idea just what he was doing to her, just how weak with wanting him she actually was.
'There. That wasn't hard at all, was it?' he murmured against her mouth as he shrugged himself free of the unfastened shirt.
'Unlike a certain part of my anatomy, ' he added in rueful self-mocking undertone. 'And if kissing your nipples was so very distracting then perhaps we'd better finish our disrobing before I show you just how much I want to distract you even more,' he teased her sensually.
His body was everything Sara had imagined and more. Oh, so very, very much more. Touching him with wondering hesitant fingers, her eyes wide and dark with all that she was feeling, she was filled with the sharp intensity of her own longing.
To be touched and kissed and aroused by Nick to the point where she was virtually moaning with the intensity of her desire, to imagine him inside her after he finally carried her to the bed, was an experience so far outside even her wildest and most wanton imagin-ings that she could hardly comprehend what she was actually feeling.
'Shush...shush...just a minute longer,' Nick was soothing her as he laid her on the bed beneath him and kissed her.
'I want you that way so much, Nick...I want you.'
Unable to stop himself, Nick responded rawly, 'Like this do you mean?'
The sweet hot tightness of her welcomed him, surprisingly hesitantly at first as though...
Sara held her breath as she felt the tightness of her body softening to accept him. It had been several years.
'You feel like a virgin,' Nick whispered hotly to her, 'All sweet tight hotness....'
'It—it's been a long time,' Sara murmured shakily back. 'And besides...'
As he moved deeper and more strongly inside her, her eyes gave away her shocked pleasure.
'You... You feel...' She stopped. After all, what did she have to compare him with apart from her first and her only lover? This magic, their intimacy was uniquely theirs—his—
'I feel what?' Nick demanded as his body reacted to the pleasure of the way they fitted together.
But Sara was beyond being able to make any kind of lucid vocal response. Caught up in the beginnings of the first penetrative orgasm she had experienced, she could only cling to him and cry out her awe and shocked pleasure.
'THE DOCTOR HAS warned me not to get my hopes up too high, but at least she's come out of the coma,'
Molly told Caspar, smiling tenderly at him as he took her arm to prevent her from being jostled by the busy crowd in the coffee shop.
'I'm sorry...about...about last night,' she apologised softly.
Caspar closed his eyes. He was the one who ought to be apologising. What the hell had happened? One moment he had been wanting her so badly that he ached from head to foot with his desire for her...the next...
Molly paused and looked down, fiddling with the button on her coat.
'Caspar, I don't want to sound pushy or to presume too much, but we really ought to talk about...about your marriage. You are still married,' she reminded him gently, 'and to get involved with a married man—
even one as kind and special as you—just isn't something I want to do....'
'Kind!' Caspar grimaced.
'Very kind,' Molly confirmed with a smile, touching him briefly on the arm before saying in a low voice,
'Not many men would have your patience and understanding about...about Ginna. And even if I didn't know from personal experience just how bad the average man can be about handling sickness, just listening to my clients would be enough to warn me. Oh, I'm not saying that men don't care about their families. Of course they do, but for a lot of them the reality of a serious illness is so daunting that they either back off from it and their family or simply refuse to acknowledge that it exists.
'Very often their reaction springs from a fear of losing the person they love, of their illness becoming more important to them than their man. Sometimes it springs from feeling that they should have been able to protect the person they love and to keep them safe—that is a very deep-rooted male instinct. It sounds illogical I know, but...' She gave a small shrug whilst Caspar simply bowed his head in silence.
Out of nowhere he had a sharp acid memory of Olivia at the time she had first discovered her mother's eating disorder, her face contorted with pain and shock as she accused him of not understanding. He could still remember how angry with her he had been, terrified that her mother's claims on her might mean that he might still lose her to the family she had already told him meant nothing to her. He had been too proud then to acknowledge either his jealousy or his insecurity.
Just as more recently he had been too proud to acknowledge that he was jealous of the fact that she put not just their children but her work, too, before him.
'You are doing this to punish me. Not because you want to go to your brother's wedding,' she had screamed at him when he had announced that he was going to Philadelphia with or without her. 'You know I can't take time off now....'
'I'm doing it because my brother is getting married,'
he had lashed bitingly back.
'Come back,' Molly commanded gently.
Guiltily Caspar focused on her.
UNSEEINGLY, Nick stared across the empty hillside. A sharp wind knifed icily against the exposed tautness of his jaw but he barely registered it.
It was just light, the mists of the previous day having given way to a clear sky and a sharp lemon sun, but he was barely aware of either the sun or the cold.
He had left Sara sleeping in the bed they had shared last night...his bed.... She had, at one point, murmured to him that she would return to the guest room but he had refused to let her go, insisting that she stay where she was—in his bed...his arms. He stiffened, closing his eyes as a shudder of prescient emotion sliced through him. What had happened between them last night had gone way beyond the merely sexual. So now what the hell was he going to do? There was no place in his life for the kind of commitment, the kind of complications that what he was feeling for Sara would bring. No, there was no place in his present life for her and no way he could live without her. But somehow he was going to have to.
After all, she had made it plain to him that the last thing she wanted was a permanent relationship with him.
'You're a Crighton,' she had whispered to him last night after the first time they had made love and she had then wept tears of anguish and emotion. He had held he
r and she had told him what was wrong.
'Whose judgement do you trust more?' Nick had demanded angrily. 'Your stepgrandmother's a—a woman who, by all accounts has the reasoning power of a spoiled two-year-old—or yourself...?'
He had known, of course, that he had said the wrong thing even before he had seen the anger burning in her eyes.
'What makes you think I see the Crightons any differently from the way Tania does?' she had demanded.
'Do you really need me to answer that?' he had replied rashly. 'And don't bother telling me that what you and I have just experienced...just shared is something you've had with a dozen men before me,' he had told her, adding succinctly, 'I've never experienced anything like it before....'
'And because of that you just assume that / haven't, either?' Sara had thrown angrily at him.
But in the end she had admitted not just that it had been outside her previous experience but also that her previous experience was limited to just one callow rite-of-passage relationship in her late teens.
'This was supposed to get this ridiculous thing between us totally and completely out of our systems,'
she had reminded him and then she had looked at him and he had looked back at her and then... If they were mutually affronted and angered by the way they wanted one another, then they were also mutually unable to stop themselves from giving in to those desires.
But for him it went much further than mere physical desire, Nick acknowledged. And for Sara...?
Bleakly he looked back towards the cottage.
WHITE-FACED with anguish and misery, Sara pulled on her clothes with hands that shook betrayingly.
It was no use trying to deceive herself any longer.
There was no way what she had experienced last night and into the early hours of the morning could in any way be described as mere sex. And no way, either, that she could ever allow anyone other than herself to know just what her true feelings for Nick were—and how much she loved him.
He had made it plain to her that he relished his single life; that the kind of commitment she was now craving was not part of his plans—with any woman.
