He went still; was he hurting her?
“Don’t stop,” she said, “don’t-stop-don’t-stop-don’t-stop—”
He took her mouth with his. And moved inside her. Hard. Fast. She screamed as she came and still he went deeper, deeper, so deep that when the triumphal cry of his completion escaped his throat, the world spun away.
* * *
Somehow, they made it to the bed.
He put her down, kissed her, found his way to the bathroom and disposed of the condom.
The mattress was narrow; she made room for him but he gathered her to him, held her so she was draped over him, and the fact that there wasn’t really room for two people in her bed didn’t matter because he was never going to let go of her.
He was going to hold her like this until the end of time.
“Travis.”
“Mmm?”
“I’m too heavy...”
He laughed.
So did Jennie.
It was a lovely feeling, all that rock-hard male muscle vibrating with laughter beneath her.
The scientist in her had never thought that people would laugh when they made love.
The woman in her was thrilled by the realization.
“Seriously. You can’t be comforta—”
“You know,” he said, “when I was a kid, I had this old blanket that I absolutely adored.”
She folded her hands on his chest, propped her chin on them and gave him a wary look.
“And?”
“And,” he said, his expression dead-serious, “I couldn’t go to sleep unless I had it draped on top of me.”
It took all her effort to keep a straight face.
“Nice. Very nice. So, I remind you of an old blanket?”
He grinned.
“Does it help if I say it was a comforter, not a blanket?”
Jennie sank her teeth lightly into his shoulder. He gave a mock yelp.
“Hey. That was a compliment.”
“Telling a woman she reminds you of a blanket, even if you call it a comforter, is not a compliment, Mr. Wilde.”
“I didn’t tell it to a woman, I told it to you.” His grin faded. “Only to you, Jennie. Because you’re the only woman I want in my arms.”
“That’s lovely,” she said softly. “Because you’re the only man I want in mine.”
He kissed her. Kissed her again. She could feel him hardening against her and then he kissed her one last time and gently moved out from under her.
“Don’t go,” she said, before she could call back the plea, but it was okay, saying it, letting him know how much she wanted him, it was fine because he kissed her again and told her, against her lips, that he wasn’t going anywhere except to get another condom.
“Why would I ever leave you?” he said when he came back to her and rolled her beneath him.
“Travis.” His name trembled on her lips. “Oh, Travis...”
“Jennie,” he whispered, and then he was inside her.
* * *
She awoke to middle-of-the-night darkness, and to confusion.
She was in her bed—there was no mistaking the lumpy mattress—but she wasn’t alone.
She was lying on her side, head pillowed on a hard shoulder. An equally hard arm and leg were flung possessively over her body.
For a split second, her brain froze.
And then it all came back.
Travis, taking her out of that bar. His anger and then his concern. His toughness and then his tenderness.
His lovemaking.
His amazing, incredible, glorious lovemaking.
I should get up, she thought. Do whatever it is a woman does when she awakens with a man beside her.
What did you do in those circumstances?
You left the bed. And, what? Did you do just the basics? A bathroom visit? Fix your hair? Put on some makeup? Get dressed. Oh, absolutely. Get dressed, for sure. Get out of the bedroom, give the man some space.
All of that made sense.
Except, she really didn’t want to move.
It was—well, it was lovely, just lying here, Travis’s shoulder serving as her pillow, his arm and leg over her.
He was so warm. So solid.
So wonderfully real.
Sex wasn’t what you read about in textbooks. It wasn’t what you saw in psych counseling videos. It was—it was—
It was Travis.
He stirred in his sleep; his arm tightened around her and he drew her closer.
And this. Waking in a man’s arms. The feeling of him caring about you, protecting you.
Who would have dreamed that, too, was part of sex?
Research. That was what she’d called her plan to learn what sex was like, because calling it anything else had seemed ugly—but there was no pretending this was research any longer.
This was about him. Travis Wilde. A man she’d picked up in a bar, who was now her lover.
For a heartbeat, surely no more than that, Jennie gave in to the luxury of letting herself think of him that way. As her lover...
Pain knifed behind her eye, a brutal reminder of the truth and of where that truth would inevitably take her.
She clamped her lips together, biting back the cry that rose in her throat, but there was no stopping the pain. It was red-hot; it was ice-cold. It was worse than it had ever been.
She knew what would happen next. The chills. The shaking. The bits of her vision going gray.
She couldn’t let that happen, not while Travis was here.
She bit her lips hard, anything to keep the agony at bay, to let her get away without waking him. She moved quickly, carefully, slipped out from under the shelter of his arm and leg.
He stirred again, mumbled something. She held her breath until he was quiet. Then she rose to her feet, stumbling a little, recovering fast, gritting her teeth against the agonizing throbbing inside her skull.
She wanted to find her robe but there was no time to look for it with the room buried in the blackness of night. The last month, she’d slept with a night-light, a foolish talisman against the dark that was coming for her, but it gave her comfort. She slept with the one-eared toy dog, too; for foolishly sentimental reasons, she’d kept it all through her teen years. It had ended up being the one remnant of a time she’d been whole and well.
Tonight, of course, there was no light. And no toy dog.
Travis had been her talisman. Her comfort.
Carefully, she made her way to the bathroom. She eased the door shut behind her, felt for the shelf over the sink, danced her fingers along it, searching for the little bottle of tablets.
She didn’t touch the light switch.
She knew, from experience, that it would hurt her eyes. Besides, it would seep under the door and wake—
Her hand swept over the collection of tiny vials and containers.
“No,” she whispered, but it was too late. All of them fell, tumbling into the sink, the sound as loud and clear as if she’d come in here to play the cymbals.
The door flew open. The switch on the wall beside her clicked on; bright light flooded the bathroom.
She flung her arm over her eyes.
“Jennie,” Travis said sharply, his voice rough with sleep. “Baby, are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
Travis stared at her.
Fine?
He’d been thrown from horses just learnin
g the feel of a man’s weight; he’d been ejected from a plane about to go down under enemy fire. He’d been hauled through a public square by a squad of goons determined to make an example of the Yankee pilot who represented everything they despised.
He understood what “fine” meant when it was spoken through tight lips from a face white with pain.
“The hell you are,” he growled.
Gently, he clasped her shoulders, then sat her on the closed toilet seat. There was a mess of pill bottles in the sink, plastic, probably, but he checked her face, her hands, her body for blood.
Satisfied that she wasn’t hurt, he clasped her wrist to draw her arm from her eyes...
“Don’t!”
Her voice was high and sharp.
His heartbeat tripped into double-time. So much for her not being hurt.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I told you, I’m—”
Travis cursed, gently drew her arm down.
Her eyes were tightly closed.
Okay.
No blood. No cuts. No bruises. But she was paper-white, and shaking, and when he asked her to open her eyes so he could check them, she hissed out a long, low “noooo.”
“Jen,” he said, squatting down before her, “you have to talk to me. What happened? I woke up, you were gone and then I heard a crash—”
“I—I had a headache.” Her voice seemed weak; it sent a chill down his spine. “So I came in here to get—to get something for it.”
“Why didn’t you put on the light? Why won’t you let me see your eyes?”
“I didn’t think I’d need the light. I mean, I know where everything is. And my eyes...”
A soft moan broke from her throat.
Travis cursed himself for being an ass.
She was hurting; she’d probably scared herself half to death and instead of helping her, he was asking her a bunch of dumb questions.
“Okay, baby. I get it. You have another headache, like the one you had earlier. And the light...”
The light.
Of course.
A former P.A. had suffered from migraines; she’d told him about the unbearable pain, the way exposure to light made the pain worse.
It was clear that Jennie had the same problem, and that she was having a bad attack.
He rose, switched off the light. He’d turned on the bedside lamp; its soft glow, coming through the open door, was enough for him to see by.
“Don’t move,” he said in a voice that commanded as much as it comforted.
Quickly, he scooped everything out of the sink—the vials and containers had all stayed closed—carried the stuff into the bedroom and dumped it on the dresser.