Lone Calder Star (Calder Saga 9)

Lightning flashed outside Quint’s bedroom window, briefly illuminating its interior. Quint lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with one arm flung across the pillow under his head, and the bedcovers pulled halfway up his bare chest. His jaw was clenched against the annoying and incessant drip of water from the eaves.

A troubled sigh came from him. He tried closing his eyes again, but his mind wouldn’t rest. In irritation, Quint rolled onto his side, his glance sliding to the luminescent face of the alarm clock that sat on the bedside table. Its hands were positioned at eight minutes after midnight.

“So much for an early night,” he muttered and gave the pillow a punch, using more force than necessary to bunch it under his head.

Thunder rumbled long and low, almost muffling the faint scrape of a releasing door latch. But his nerves were strung too fine, sharpening his senses too keenly for Quint to miss it. With a quick, turning lift of his head, he glanced at the door and watched it swing inward.

For a split second he stared at the woman’s shape in the doorway, backlit by the glow from the bathroom’s night-light. An oversized T-shirt stopped near midthigh, revealing a familiar pair of long legs.

Something leaped inside him, but he’d already been burned once tonight. Quint sat upright, the covers slipping down to his hips.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low, half-angry voice.

“I couldn’t sleep.” Dallas’s voice was soft and hesitant.

But Quint found no satisfaction in knowing that sleep had been equally elusive for her. “Unless you’ve made up your mind, you’d better turn around and leave right now.”

It was a warning, generated by the raw desire that ripped through him at the sight of her briefly clad body, when it was obvious she was wearing nothing underneath that thin cotton shirt.

“I have. That’s why I’m here.” Dallas closed the door behind her and crossed to the side of the bed where he was, the fabric falling in a soft drape from the pointed roundness of her breasts. “Quint, there’s something you need to know.”

But it was the dip of the mattress under the weight of the knee she placed on it and not her words that snapped the thing that had held Quint motionless.

He reached out and pulled her onto the bed with him. “There isn’t anything I need to know.” He pressed her back onto the sheets, his body following to pin her there. “You’re here. That’s enough.”

“You don’t understand.” Her head moved in protest, a plea in her eyes.

“No, you don’t understand.” All the hunger and torment of being without her rose up inside Quint as his hand spread itself across her rib cage just beneath the swell of her breasts. “I love you. There’s nothing you can say or do that will ever change that.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Dallas whispered.

The doubt in her voice momentarily froze him, forcing him to question the assumptions he had made. “Tell me one thing, Dallas, do you love me?”

“Yes, b—”

The single word was all he needed to hear. His mouth came down to smother the unnecessary ones in a kiss rough with need. There was an instant when he thought she was going to resist him. Then her arms wound around him, her hands pressing and urgent in their caress.

Gone was the steady calm that had always ruled him, its place taken by something primitive and demanding. Her lips parted under the insistence of his, allowing him to mate with her tongue. But it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

The T-shirt’s thin material became an irritating barrier, denying him the sensation of skin against skin. A hand tunneled under its hem and rolled it up while it explored the smooth bend of a hip, the quivering flatness of her stomach, and the button-hard peak of a round breast. The need surfaced to take it into his mouth and taste it.

But with the first dragging movement away from her lips, he encountered the shirt’s bunched cloth. Impatient hands pushed at it even as hers reached down to pull it off.

Then there was nothing between them, nothing to block the heat of her body from burning its impression along the length of him. The contact with it, the motion of it, wanting and eager, banished all else from his consciousness except the knowledge that her need matched the fierceness of his.

The hot urgency of it turned them both wild as they hungrily sought all the pleasure that can exist between a man and a woman. Time stood still, without a yesterday or tomorrow—only this night, this moment, together.

There was no patience, no gentleness. The strain of waiting, wondering, wanting, allowed no room for it. There was only the desperate hunger that drove each of them relentlessly and ruthlessly with its urgent demands.

As wave after wave of awesome pleasure shuddered through Quint, an awareness swept through him that one night would never be enough to satisfy his desire for this woman. For that he would need a lifetime.

Filled with a high sense of ease, Quint pulled in a long contented breath as he lay in a loose-limbed sprawl on the bed, one arm hooked around Dallas. She was curled against him, using his chest for a pillow. The heat and the weight of her along his length felt right, the way a night in bed should be.

He idly studied the shadow patterns on the ceiling, slow to absorb anything beyond feeling Dallas against him and remembering the satisfaction they had shared. Even as he listened to the steadying sound of her breathing, he noticed the absence of that annoying drip of water from the eaves.

“I think the rain’s stopped,” he murmured.

She stirred, her head lifting fractionally as if to listen, then settled back against him, snuggling closer, a soft sound of agreement coming from her throat.