“Be my guest,” she murmured and curved her hand along his jaw to turn his head and draw his mouth toward hers.
The kiss was gentle and deep, more ravishing and seductive than hard passion. It was a slow-burning flame that melted them together as Chase let her feet slide to the floor and turned her against his length. His hands moved to slip the straps of her nightgown off her shoulders and slide them down her arms. Then they were against her flesh, pushing the clinging material down past her waist and over her hips. She gave a little twist of her hips to help shed the garment and heard his half-smothered groan at the movement. While his hands wandered over her naked curves in a sensual rediscovery, her fingers began working on the buttons of his shirt, unfastening them and tugging the tails free of his waistband. She helped him shrug out of the shirt to bare his chest to her touch. His flesh was hard and vital beneath her hands as she felt the raw energy rippling through his muscles. Abandoning her lips, his mouth traveled slowly to the curve of her neck, investigating the hollow of her shoulder. She arched closer, the dark cloud of his chest hairs brushing the sloping mounds of her breasts. The buckle of his belt scraped her tender flesh, causing her to flinch briefly before her hands moved to get rid of it.
As she unfastened the snap of his Levi’s, he murmured against her throat. “It’s easier if we get rid of the boots first. Where’s the bootjack?”
“I don’t have one.” The fevered tremor in her voice brought his mouth to her lips in a hungry kiss before he slowly lifted his head. “I’ll be your bootjack.”
Her hands spread across his chest to push him backward and sit him on the edge of the bed. The small distance and new perspective gave him an overall view of her nude body, a sight his gaze admired openly. Under the stimulation of his look, her breasts seemed to swell, the nipples growing button-hard with desire. She almost forgot the purpose of the separation.
“Give me your foot,” she said, and Chase leaned back on his hands, raising one leg.
She cupped the leather heel in her hand and turned, swinging a leg across his to straddle it and presenting him with a delectable view of her backside. She grasped the back of his boot with both hands, ready to pull when he pushed—only he didn’t push. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him staring at her bottom.
“Ready?” she prompted him, flushing a little with embarrassed pleasure.
His mouth quirked slightly when he realized he had been caught looking. He lifted his other foot with a show of reluctance and placed it gently and carefully against one cheek. “It seems almost a crime to put a boot on something so round and shapely, but if a man had a bootjack like this, he’d be putting his boots on and taking them off all day long, just for the chance to enjoy the scenery.”
She felt the hard imprint of his boot on her soft flesh as he pushed and she tugged at the boot in her hand, slipping it off. Then she repeated the procedure with the other boot, this time with a stockinged foot against her rump. As Maggie bent to set the boot beside its mate, a pair of hands caught hold of her hips and pulled her backward. Her gasping cry of surprise was a mixture of alarm and laughter as Chase planted a kiss on each rounded cheek of her bottom before he let her wiggle around to face him.
“Why haven’t I ever noticed before what a beautiful bottom you have?” he demanded with mock gruffness and tilted his head back to meet her gaze. “Do you suppose I was too busy looking at your beautiful face?”
“Possibly,” she conceded with a sharply twinkling look. “I noticed what a nice bottom you had that first time at the river.” It was crazy how careless and carefree she had begun to feel. The intimacy was natural, spirited. Maggie didn’t feel obliged to flirt or tease or be sexily provocative, which had all been a part of the foreplay with Phillip to manufacture passion through skill and technique.
“You noticed my bottom, did you?” Chase mocked and started to pull her closer, but she slipped out of his hold with a twist of her hips and knelt to pull off his socks.
As she stepped away to tuck them inside his boots, Chase stripped out of his jeans and shorts and half-turned on the bed to drape the Levi’s over the far corner so nothing would fall out of his pockets. When she walked back toward the bed, he reached out to take her hand. She slipped her fingers into his large palm and let him pull her forward to stand between his legs. There was so much written in his eyes that she grew dizzy reading the sensual messages and swayed toward him.
A sun-browned hand slid up to hold the weight of a pure white breast and carry it to his mouth, where his tongue and teeth licked and played with the rosy crest. A heady weakness trembled through Maggie. Her fingers curled into the springing thickness of his hair, cupping the back of his head and pressing him more tightly to her breast. Then he was moving, the moist inside of his mouth seeking her other breast. Her limbs were weakening, forcing Maggie to brace her knees against the bed while she leaned more of her weight on Chase. Even that only helped for a short time; then she began sinking.
His arms caught her, twisting her and drawing her down to the bed. As she lay flat on her back, he shifted his position to bring his face level with hers. Lying on his side, he raised himself up on an elbow and looked at her while his stroking hand caressed her. She spread her fingers through the rough hairs on his chest.
“The other day Culley told me I had forgotten how to be a woman,” she said softly and slanted him a glance through her lashes. “You were the first one to teach me how to be a woman, Chase. Will you show me again?”
His mouth lowered onto hers and kissed her with drugging insistence. He pulled her closer and levered himself onto her. She felt the stiffening muscle rising from his loins, hard and virile. She had a second to marvel at the physical differences of a man and a woman as his hands slid under her hips to lift them—and how perfectly God had made them to fit together and the awesome pleasure each could find in the enjoyment of the other, an enjoyment all the more beautiful and natural because it was born of emotional commitment to the other.
They were joined in a sweeping rush of sensation that engulfed them both. It bound them together with a wondrous urgency, a sexual brilliance that radiated between them. In the long-ago past, they had glimpsed this closeness, this raw demand, this insistence, little knowing that it could always be that way. That it could never be an end, because they could never know enough of it. Even now, all they could know was that they couldn’t get enough of each other.
Chapter XXXIII
Snuggled against his chest, Maggie trailed her fingertips across Chase’s flat stomach. The earthy warm smell of him was all around her, and she felt utter contentment.
“Are you asleep?” she murmured. The hand on her waist had stopped moving a couple of minutes ago. The rise and fall of his chest was steady.
A thumb and forefinger pinched th
e skin over her ribs. A faint yelp escaped her throat as she jerked from the fleeting pain. “Does that feel like I’m asleep?” His voice was low and deep, rumbling through his body beneath her ear.
“No,” she admitted.
His right hand moved to stroke the back of her head, his fingers gliding into the dark curls to grab a handful and tug gently to force her head back. He looked down at her face, studying the features, as if memorizing the way they looked. With his left hand, he thoughtfully traced the curve of her chin.
“Will you believe me when I say that I experienced something that I never felt with any other woman when I made love to you just now?”
“Yes. It was different—special,” she corrected, and she lowered her head when Chase eased the pressure on her hair. “For me, too. I never felt like this with Phillip.”
There was a dismissing rush of breath. “Phillip was old enough to be your father.”
In retaliation for that remark, Maggie pulled at the hair on his chest. He breathed in sharply and grabbed her hand. “Be careful when you imply that Phillip was too old to be a good lover. When I married him, he was only a few years older than you are now.”