Then her knee began to protest at the uncomfortable pressure she was placing upon it and, on a tiny groan, it was she who was changing their position, rolling onto the mattress beside him and trying to bring him with her. But he was too shrewd for his own good. He’d heard the groan and had recognised it for what it was. Before she realised what he was doing he was leaning down to kiss the hairline pink scars which criss-crossed the once smooth and perfect area.
‘No,’ she whimpered, strangely upset by what he was doing, and she reached to grasp a fistful of his hair to pull him away again.
He let her do it, but came to lean over her with a face carved with tension. ‘If you ever put your life at risk again, I will personally kill you!’ he rasped at her furiously.
She still held tight to a fistful of his hair, and in reply she brought his mouth onto hers to kiss away the fear raking through him. And it was fear; she knew that instinctively. It filled her with a most peculiar feeling of warmth tinged with aching despair.
And, as if he knew it, he entered her like a man caught between two kinds of hell. It should have hurt it was so fierce and possessive. But it didn’t hurt. It was in fact the most exquisite sensation she felt she had ever experienced. He thrust deep and she welcomed him like a long-lost, desperately missed lover.
‘André,’ she breathed again.
It sent him spinning over that finely balanced edge between control and sexual insanity. He drove into her like a man who was being given his last chance to experience this level of ecstasy. And she took each hot, lancing thrust with gasps of pleasure, growing shrill the closer she came to reaching the goal he was driving her towards.
Yet when she reached it she went quiet, and his hand trembled when it raked up to push the tendrils of hair away from her face, so he could watch this woman, who did everything with such frightening totality, absorbing each consuming wave of pleasure he was inducing, in a silence that pierced his heart with the knowledge that she was no longer of this world but floating on another plane entirely.
Then he joined her. With one more sweet, slow plunge, his eyes drew closed and his features grew sharp as he began to spill out his own fierce pleasure.
Neither of them was aware of anything much for the next few, communal minutes while they made a slow return to a sanity that seemed more exhausting than the climb out of it.
Then he became conscious of his weight pressing heavily down on her and reluctantly decided to move. His careful withdrawal from her body caused a final mutual spasm of residual pleasure, then cool air touched their sweat-sheened flesh as he rolled onto his back beside her on the bed.
After that they just lay there, with eyes closed and bodies slack, waiting for reality to come filtering back in. It was the calm after the storm with another storm hovering in the near distance, threatening to roll in depending on what they both chose to do or say next.
Eventually he turned, moving onto his side to face her, and touched her cheek with a finger. ‘Okay?’ he asked huskily.
Samantha nodded, and though her eyes flickered open she couldn’t seem to bring herself to look at him, so she stared at the ceiling instead while she admitted sombrely, ‘I knew your touch.’
The finger stilled in its gentle tracing of her cheekbone. Reaching up, she caught the finger, clutching at it hard as she added shakily, ‘I knew you.’
He didn’t try to recover the finger. In fact he didn’t do anything but lie very still. ‘You say knew not know,’ he remarked finally. ‘Is that significant?’
She closed her eyes again, nodded and felt a tear creep out from the far corner of each eye. ‘Nothing else,’ she whispered. ‘I just—know your touch, and for a while I knew you…’
Which was why she was gripping his finger so tightly, André pondered grimly to himself. And wanted to cry with her, it was that damned wretched.
‘I’m so afraid it will be all I’ll ever know now.’
On a sigh he gathered her in, kissed her brow, stroked his cheek over her tumbled hair, and left his finger right where it was, because—hell—if she did need to touch him then let her keep the finger! He didn’t need it. But, God, he needed her.
‘It will be okay.’ He tried to sound reassuring, though he was no more certain of anything than she was herself. ‘Trust me, cara, and I will promise to get you through this as quickly and as painlessly as I can.’
‘It will be painful, then?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed; it was no use denying it. It was, after all, why they were supposed to be taking things so carefully.
And why they should not even be here like this.
Fool, he cursed himself. A ban on intimacy to this degree should have been a foregone conclusion to anyone with intelligence. Keep your hands off until you have a right to touch, he’d told himself, because he was acutely aware that he had lost that right twelve months ago. So what had he done? Within twenty-four hours of setting eyes on her again he’d tumbled her into the nearest bed and taken just about every liberty he could with her.
Well done, André, he mocked himself harshly. At least last time you managed to wait a whole week before you took her to bed. This time you could barely manage a full day.
Well not again, he vowed. Not until she recovered every last wretched memory! Then he almost groaned in frustration when she began absently stroking the tip of his finger over the softness of her lips. His body quickened. He shut his eyes and grimly forced his senses back into the cupboard they had been languishing in for a whole, miserable year.
‘Come on,’ he said, and got off the bed then bent down to lift her to her feet. Already he was getting used to waiting patiently while she used his forearms as support until she gained a reasonable balance.
‘Okay?’ he prompted when her grip slackened.
‘Mmm,’ she said.