For Better for Worse

She had thought she had remembered every aspect of their previous lovemaking, every angle of his body, every muscle and sinew, every shadow and hollow of its maleness, and yet now the reality of him was somehow much more sharply male, much more intensely masculine. She could feel her body tensing in sensual awareness of his sexuality and her response to it.

Suddenly she longed to be free of her own clothes and her fingers were already reaching eagerly for the buttons on her shirt when Adam leaned over her and gently took them away.

‘No,’ he told her softly. ‘We’re going right back to the very beginning… remember?’

Later, leaning against him, her whole body trembling with unfamiliar pleasure as his mouth gently caressed the curve of her breast, and then opened over her nipple in slowly careful exploration, she rested her head against the thick darkness of his downbent head, stifling her small moan of pleasure as his deliberately gentle kisses gave way to a deeper rhythmic sucking that caused her spine to arch and her body to shake beneath the onslaught of the intense tremor of sensation that spread downwards from his mouth, tightening her body into a sharply spiralling coil of desire.

Each time he touched her it was as though he sensed her need… knew exactly what she felt… what she craved.

Lying naked next to him, she was aware of emotions, sensations she had never experienced before. Slowly she recognised what they were…

For the first time in her life she was aware of how it felt to be loved.

As Adam leaned over her, slowly kissing his way over her body, his hand rested lightly over her sex. Protecting her modesty? No need for that now perhaps, but if she had still been the girl she was when they first met…

‘Oh, Adam.’ She reached out, gently touching his head, overwhelmed by the intensity not just of her arousal but of her emotions as well. She felt him lift his hand, his mouth slowly caressing the inside of her thigh.

Her body trembled… a woman’s body not a girl’s, with a woman’s strongly powerful sexuality and arousal.

She could feel tears begin to sting her eyes as, beneath the surge of pleasure that swamped her, she recognised the care, the tenderness, the reverence almost of his touch.

She could feel his control as well as his need, his care and cherishing of her as well as his masculine desire to take her and hold her, to fill her with his body and fulfil the primitive biological programming of his sex towards the re-creation of himself within her.

‘Adam,’ she cried out his name in anguished pleasure as she felt the heat of his mouth on her body and gave in to its demand that she abandon herself to its promise of pleasure.

‘Now, Adam. Please, please now,’ she begged him huskily, her fingers tightening in his hair, her voice sharpening with need—need and anticipation.

‘N… no… not that,’ she told him fiercely as she felt his mouth begin to move more possessively, more passionately on her sex. ‘You… I want you, Adam. Inside me. Now.’

She shuddered, torn between impatience and arousal, stiffening her body against the shock of losing the sensuous contact of his mouth as he moved to obey her.

Later she would show him the same pleasure he had just shown her, caressing his body with her mouth, arousing it with the deliberate and intimate loving touch of her tongue; give to him the same special expression of her love, her desire to know him completely as he had just given her. Later, not now. Now her im

patient, urgent body craved the full possession of him; her senses, her emotions demanded, commanded that she give herself up completely, abandon herself totally to woman’s most deeply held and atavistic need to experience the total possession of her lover.

Just as strong as the need she could sense within him ran her own complementary need, to feel him so deep within her, to be so totally possessed by him, to feel that he was so absolutely and utterly hers that for those few brief seconds of time they were actually one complete whole, with no barriers, no difference, every thought, every feeling, every breath and every heartbeat completely shared.

So this, then, was the mystical, elevating, almost divine quality that really loving someone and being loved by them could sometimes bring to mortal physical union, Fern reflected dizzily as she cried out to him and reached out for him, comprehension, reality, all of them arrested and then completely overturned as she felt him move within her and was swamped by the exquisite, unbearable intensity of the feeling exploding inside her.

Later, calmer, saner, she flushed a little with self-conscious awareness of her abandonment, not just of her physical self-control but of her mind and emotions as well.

Had she really cried out to Adam that she would die for the feeling of him inside her? That the touch, the heat, the feel… the scent of him aroused her to the point where she wanted to scream his name to the skies?

Had she really not been able to control the building urgency to respond to his thrust within her by scoring the smooth flesh of his back with her nails? As she glanced down at his body she saw that his buttocks still bore the crescent-shaped marks she had inflicted there when…

Beside her she saw Adam reaching for her, smoothing the damp hair back off her face as he kissed her with lingering tenderness and then searched her face anxiously.

‘Are you all right? Did I hurt you? You…’

She shook her head, reaching out to touch his mouth with her fingertip, tracing the shape of it, pushing aside the last of her self-consciousness, sloughing it off like the unwanted skin it now was as she told him frankly, ‘No. I wanted it to be like that… needed it to be like that; it was so cleansing somehow, so… so necessary.’

Adam’s passion and her own, Adam’s possession and her abandonment of herself to it had swept away the sad poverty of her memories of Nick’s touch… what had passed for Nick’s lovemaking. It no longer existed, no longer had any place in her memory… no power to hurt or damage her.

‘I love you, Fern,’ Adam told her emotionally. ‘And just as soon as we can legally do so, I’d like us to marry.

‘I want to be your husband, Fern… your lover… your friend… the father of your children. I want to share with you all the things we should have shared years ago if I hadn’t been a fool and let Nick—’

‘Shush.’ Fern shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter now. I was just as much to blame… it took Cressy to show me the truth. She’s getting married soon… I was with them the other day. I felt so envious… I told myself I should be content with my freedom and my plans for the future, that wanting you, loving you… Oh, Adam, I still feel as though I daren’t let myself believe that this has happened…’