Look at him, she thought, comforting her. So ready to soothe and hold. Could she be any luckier?
“I’m okay.”
“Are you cold? I’ll light the fire.”
Love simply swamped her. “I’m not cold. Not now.” She rolled over, onto him, laid her lips on his. “How are you?”
She saw his eyes, the dazzle of them close to her own. “Curious at the moment.”
“I had a dream. I’ll tell you about it.” But now she swept kisses over his face. “Then I woke up, and it was good. You were sleeping, and the cat was weighing down my feet. And it was all so good. The world’s so fucked up, Roarke, but right here? It’s all just exactly right.”
He trailed his fingers over the back of her legs, along her hips. “It feels just exactly right.”
“You’re probably tired. That’s okay. You can go back to sleep, and I’ll take care of this.”
“Oh, I think I can manage to stay awake, with the proper motivation.” He rolled her over, pressed center to center. “And there it is.”
“At times like this, I like that men are so easy.”
“Handily, I feel the same. It’s easy enough when I have my wife under me, warm and soft.”
“Maybe.” She hooked his legs with hers, reversed positions again. “But I like having my man under me, hot and hard.”
“That must’ve been some dream.”
She laughed, nipped at his jaw. “Not that kind. Besides, I like this better when it’s real.” She levered up, lifted off the nightshirt she’d pulled on, tossed it aside.
His hands slid up her torso to her breasts. “Again, we agree.”
She pressed her hands to his, closed her eyes as pleasure, easy as breath, wound through her. His hands, his skin, his body, taut and chiseled, under hers. Oh yes, so much better than dreams.
He rose to her, wrapped around her as their mouths met. Deep and slow. Their bodies pressed close, a single shadow in the quiet dark as her hands combed through his hair, tangled there.
He stroked the length of her, his fascinating, complicated Eve, and the muscles he too often found tense and knotted moved warm and loose. He found the pulse in her throat with his lips, relished the life there in that tender curve.
He let her ease him back, but caught her hands and drew her down to him. He so much wanted her mouth, wanted that most simple, most basic of matings before the heat and the hurry.
She gave, thrilled to be wanted, and to want. All but felt her skin shimmer under the glide of his hands. While she shimmered she tasted. The strong line of his throat, the sculpted lines of his torso, the spread of his shoulders.
Not a dream, but dreamy as they moved together, touched, savored. Neither of them heard the solid thump of the cat as he leaped down from the bed, undoubtedly in disgust.
Soft sighs, the whisper of sheets, a sudden catch of breath, and the world centered in that wide pool of bed even as the sky window over it bloomed with the first pale lights of dawn.
In its pearly glow she rose over him again. And took him in with a shudder, shudder of gluttonous pleasure. All and more, she thought as the need squeezed her heart. Together they were all and more.
While she rode him he watched her in that breaking light, her eyes gold and fierce, her long, lean body gleaming. With her hair like a tousled crown, her head fell back as the climax took her. Then even her image blurred as she whipped him to the edge of control. As she snapped it like a single thin thread.
As he broke, he reached for her, and held her close on the long fall.
When she got her breath back, they were still tangled together. And the cat had climbed back onto the bed to stare at them, his bicolored eyes unblinking.
“What’s his problem?” she asked.
“I expect we disturbed his beauty sleep.”
“He gets so much sleep he ought to be the Roarke of cats.”
“The what?”