Her hands sweeping up over his shoulders, she sank her fingers into his hair and deepened the kiss even further.
Wantonly met his challenge and, shifting sinuously against him, issued her own.
She’d been right; there was more for them both in this deeper engagement as blindly they breached some level beyond and intensity abruptly flared, their senses expanding dizzyingly until the physical merged with passion, with feeling and driving need, was subsumed by that all-consuming desire and became a conduit, a means of pure expression—of honest, unscreened, irrefutable communication.
Breaking the kiss, he swept her up in his arms and carried her to the bed.
As he laid her down, then joined her, she opened her senses to everything he said. Not in words but with his actions, both the caresses he swept over her quivering flesh, with the web of delight he wove to snare her awareness and hold it captive to the pleasure, the joy, the passion—and the overwhelming, near suffocating eruption of their desire.
She felt it as a pressure in her chest, a swelling, welling, geysering need to give, to open her heart and share, to let that unrelenting build of emotion out. To give it to him, share it with him. Openly.
To let it free.
Her hands tangling in the soft mane of his hair, as she bucked and writhed as his tongue licked and probed and his lips caressed, lightly tugged, and he tasted, eyes closed, breathing ragged, she searched for the way.
He raised his head a heartbeat from the point where it would have been too late, and rose over her.
And she reached for him. Raked her hands down his chest, and felt him shudder.
She found him, rigid and burning, and guided him to her entrance.
He pressed in, then, on a harsh groan, thrust fully home.
He hung over her, head hanging, the muscles in his braced arms quivering with the strain of control, of holding still as she adjusted to the deep penetration, to the solid intrusion, the glorious filling.
Even in extremis, her lips curved.
After the last weeks, she no longer needed that moment but nevertheless gloried in it. Took it and, tonight, used it to reach up, draw his head down to hers, meet his lips with hers, arch her body to his, and join with him.
Wholly and completely and with no reservation.
None.
No screen, no holding back.
She felt her heart open, let it happen, didn’t try to hold anything back. She’d already given him her hand, pledged her future, surrendered her body; now she gave him the last tiny part of her she hadn’t yet bestowed, the small careful piece of her heart she’d held back in case he never fully gave to her.
It was time. She sensed that in every driving thrust, in every synchronous beat of their thundering hearts. Time to risk giving her all. Time to believe in all they could be, to commit herself wholly, irrevocably, in her entirety to that, to being that, to becoming that, to sharing it all with him.
Ryder was long past thinking. Feeling had taken over and now drove him relentlessly, mercilessly on, whipping him toward a surrender he’d never thought to make, to an acknowledgment, a bending of the knee, he’d never even dreamt he might come to.
Nothing had prepared him for this, yet everything that was in him wanted it.
Roared for it.
He thrust into her body deeper and harder, and felt her rise to him, their bodies effortlessly coming together, not just in the physical sense, consumed by the friction and the heat, the slickness and the sensual glory, but driven and determined, reckless and abandoned, merging in a far more fundamental way.
On some deeper level, on some higher plane.
Giving and taking, receiving and lavishing, striving to achieve that last ultimate degree of togetherness.
Racing, urgent and intent, for the cataclysm that would bind them forever.
Sunk so deeply in the pleasure of her body, and of her openly shared pleasure in his, though his senses were reeling that fact shone clearly, glowing in his mind with crystal clarity.
&n
bsp; This was what it meant to be as one.