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His skin was flushed. It burned her hands as she moved them over the rippling, supple muscles of his back and hips. She cupped his hard buttocks and drew him deeper yet. He moaned her name and brought their mouths together again. His kiss was carnally symbolic.
Rusty didn’t feel vanquished by his virile power, though she could well have. On the contrary, she felt free and unfettered, strong enough to fly, to soar to the limits of the universe. Just as her body was opened to him, so was her heart and soul. Love poured out of them abundantly. He must feel it. He must know.
She was sure he did, because he was saying her name in cadence to his thrusts. His voice was raw with emotion. But a heartbeat before he lost his ability to reason, she felt him about to withdraw.
“No! Don’t you dare.”
“Yes, Rusty, yes.”
“I love you, Cooper.” She crossed her ankles at the small of his back. “I want you. All of you.”
“No, no,” he groaned in misery as well as ecstasy.
“I love you.”
Clenching his teeth and baring them, he threw his head back and surrendered to orgasm with a long, low, primal groan that worked its way up from the bottom of his soul. He filled this woman who loved him with his hot, rich seed.
Chapter Thirteen
Sweat dripped from his face. He was drenched in it. His body hair was curled with it. He collapsed atop her. She held him tightly. Her maternal instinct asserted itself; she wanted to cuddle him like a child.
It was an endless forever before he regained enough strength to move, but neither was in a hurry for him to leave her. Finally, he rolled away from her and lay on his back, replete. Rusty gazed at his beloved face. His eyes were closed. The lines on either side of his stern mouth had relaxed considerably since he’d come through her front door.
She laid her head on his chest and smoothed her hand over his stomach, combing through the crinkled, damp hair. “It wasn’t just me you withdrew from, was it?” Somehow she knew that this was the first time in a long time that Cooper had completed the love act.
“No.”
“It wasn’t because I might get pregnant, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Why did you make love that way, Cooper?” He opened his eyes. She stared down into them. They were guarded. He, who she had assumed was fearless, was afraid of her, a naked woman, lying helplessly beside him, utterly fascinated by him and under his spell. What threat could she possibly represent?
“Why did you impose that kind of discipline on yourself?” she asked gently. “Tell me.”
He stared at the ceiling. “There was a woman.”
Ah, the woman, Rusty thought.
“Her name was Melody. I met her soon after I got back from Nam. I was messed up. Bitter. Angry. She—” he made a helpless gesture “—she put things back into perspective, gave focus to my life. I was attending college on the GI bill. We were going to get married as soon as I finished. I thought that everything was going well for us. It was.”
He closed his eyes again and Rusty knew he was approaching the difficult part of the story. “Then she got pregnant. Without my knowledge, she had an abortion.” His hands curled into fists and his jaw grew rigid with fury. Rusty actually jumped when he turned to her abruptly.
“She killed my baby. After all the death I’d seen, she...” His breathing became so harsh that Rusty was afraid he’d go into cardiac arrest. She laid a comforting hand on his chest and softly spoke his name.
“I’m so sorry, Cooper, darling. I’m so sorry.”
He breathed deeply, until he had filled his lungs with sufficient air. “Yeah.”
“You’ve been angry at her ever since.”
“At first. But then I came to hate her too much to be angry at her. I’d shared so many confidences with her. She knew what was going on inside my head, how I felt about things. She’d urged me to talk about the prison camp and everything that happened there.”
“Did you feel that she abused that confidence?”
“Abused and betrayed it.” With the pad of his thumb, he caught a tear rolling down Rusty’s cheek and swept it away. “She’d held me in her arms while I cried like a baby, telling her about buddies I’d seen...killed,” he finished in a hoarse whisper.
“I’d told her about the hell I went through to escape and then what I did to survive until I was rescued. Even after that, after I’d described how I’d lain in a heap of rotting, stinking corpses to keep from being recaptured—”
