Dancing in the Dark

They waited, looking at each other. Then Seth made a low, rough sound in his throat and gathered Wendy into his arms. Oh, God, the feel of her. She was silk and satin and molten heat. She was all and everything, and how had he ever lived without her?

Wendy caught her breath at the feel of Seth’s hot skin against her. The thud of his heart. The definition of muscle and sinew. The exciting feel of his aroused flesh against her belly.

She was dizzy with wanting him, terrified of the depth of that want. What if this wasn’t everything she remembered? What if lying in his arms didn’t match the memories of those stolen teenage years? She trembled and she knew Seth must have understood, because he caught her wrists, lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them, closed her fingers and sealed the kisses forever.

“Slowly,” he whispered. “Slowly, sweetheart.” He brushed his mouth over hers. “No curfew, remember?” She felt his lips curve in a smile. “No gearshift knob to get in the way, no cold vinyl seat. We have a soft, warm bed and all the time in the world.”

He kissed her again, gently, and she knew he was giving her time to adapt to what was happening. But she didn’t want time. She wanted Seth, his hands, his mouth.

His possession.

She moved against him, tilted her pelvis so that her flesh brushed against his erection. The breath hissed from between his teeth.

“Wendy,” he said thickly, the word a clear warning.

“Yes,” she whispered, “please, yes.”

He swung her into his arms and carried her to the bed, laying her down against the pillows while the wind picked up and the blowing snow danced like a gypsy against the windows.

Seth bent his dark head and kissed Wendy’s mouth and throat, trailing kisses to her breast. She cried out when his lips closed around her nipple, and rose toward him, her body arching with desire.

“Seth. Oh, Seth. I need—I need...”

He touched her, slid his hand between her thighs. Her head fell back, and when he bent to kiss her, he felt the warmth of her tears on his mouth, the warmth of her body’s sweetest moisture on his fingers.

God, he was going to come before he was inside her. All these years. So many, many years—

“Yes,” he whispered, “yes, yes...”

Quickly, he took a small foil packet from a drawer in the bedside table. When he was ready, he knelt between her legs and slid inside her. Deep inside her. She was tight and hot, just as she’d been the first time they’d made love. Her sobs and soft cries of pleasure were the same, and when she clutched his biceps and lifted herself toward him, the years fell away. He was nineteen, she was eighteen, and nothing would ever be more important than this.

“Seth. Seth...”

Wendy sobbed his name in ecstasy. Seth saw her face, saw everything he’d ever needed in her wide eyes, and he let go of his loneliness, his denial, his anger, and poured himself into the warm, welcoming body of the only woman he had ever loved.

* * *

LONG MOMENTS LATER, Wendy stirred.

“Mmm,” she said softly.

Seth smiled as she bit his shoulder lightly. “Mmm is right.” He brushed his mouth over hers. “Are you okay?”

“I’m very okay.” He started to move and she tightened her arms around him. “Don’t go.”

“I’m too heavy for you.”

“You aren’t. I love the feel of you inside me.”

He rolled to his side with her in his arms and gathered her close against him. “That’s good. That’s very, very good, because that’s where I intend to spend a lot of my time.” He twined his fingers in the hair at the nape of her neck, tilted her head back and kissed her again. “How’s that sound?”

He felt her mouth curve against his. “Like a plan I could vote for.”

“That’s two votes, so it’s unanimous.” They lay quietly in each other’s arms for a few moments. Seth shut his eyes. Was now the time to tell her about his connection to Pommier? Would it be better to wait? No. He’d waited too long as it was. “Sweetheart?”

“Mmm?”

“Sweetheart, we need to talk.”

Wendy closed her eyes. He was right, of course, but she didn’t want to talk. Not tonight. Not with such new, wonderful joy in her heart.

“Not now.”

“Sweetheart—”

“Please. No talking. Not yet.”

She rolled over, lay on top of him and kissed him with slow, tender care, sinking her teeth gently into his bottom lip, teasing him with her tongue. She was taking control and, God, she had no mercy.

Just that easily, his brain turned off.

He tumbled her onto her back, clasped her face in his hands, kissed her hungrily. She felt soft as the snow and the night; she tasted like the nectar of a thousand flowers. He bit gently at her throat, her breasts, her belly. The musky female scent of her rose to his nostrils like a drug as he kissed her thigh.

“No!” The word exploded into the silence. “Not my leg. Don’t. Oh, don’t. It’s horrible. Seth, please. It’s ugly!”

“Nothing about you could be ugly to me.”

She gasped as his lips sought and found the scars, the puckered flesh that would forever mark what had been pieced together with screws and metal plates.

Wendy’s head fell back against the pillows. “Why did you do that?” she said in a broken whisper. “I didn’t want—I wanted you to remember me the way I was.”

She spoke with such deep sorrow that it almost broke his heart.

“You are the way you were. You’re better. You’re stronger and braver.” He turned her face to his. “I love you. Do you really think anything could change that?”

Something could. Oh, yes, something could change that.

Wendy shut her eyes, desperately blocking out the swift rush of memory, that last night when Seth had begged her not to go to Lillehammer, not to leave him. He’d said he was worried because she was so tired, too tired to ski such dangerous runs.

Tears trickled from under her lashes. Seth murmured her name, kissed her closed eyelids, kissed her mouth until he felt it soften.

He bent his head lower, kissed her breasts, lavished attention on the furled apricot buds until he heard her sigh.

“Wendy,” he whispered. He sheathed himself again, then moved down her body, tongued her navel, nuzzled her thighs apart and kissed her there, where her taste was sweetest.

She cried out and he slid his hands beneath her, raised her to his lips, let her soft, feminine flesh meet his seeking mouth.

> She moaned, writhed beneath him, cried out, and when she did, Seth rose over her and entered her, groaning as he felt the muscles in her womb contract around him.

“You’re mine,” he said fiercely. “Forever.”

“Yes,” she sobbed, “yes, yes...”

And then they were beyond speech, beyond anything but love.

* * *

SETH AWOKE TO DARKNESS and an empty space in the bed beside him.

“Wendy?”

He sat up. It was late—1:05, according to the illuminated face of the bedside clock—and the wind was still blowing.

Had she left him? She couldn’t have. She had no way to get down the mountain, and besides, she wouldn’t have left him, not after tonight.

Somewhere along the way, he’d pulled up the blankets. Now he tossed them aside, swung his feet to the floor, felt around for his jeans and pulled them on. Maybe she was in the bathroom. No. The bathroom was dark, but now that he was standing, he could see a soft light seeping under the bedroom door.

He went into the hall, leaned his elbows on the loft railing and saw Wendy in the kitchen, seated at the butcher block counter, her back to him. A thin plume of steam was rising from something in front of her. A mug, probably; there was a kettle on the stove and an open box of tea bags beside it.

He went down the steps quietly. He’d dreamed of seeing her here just like this. Her hair was hanging down her back in the wild tendrils he loved. She was barefoot, dressed only in his flannel shirt; it was long enough to cover most of her scars, but he could see a small area of the puckered skin that he now knew stretched from her knee to her hip, and he wondered, not for the first time, how she’d survived such a brutal injury.

Everything inside him wanted to go to her and press his mouth to the wounded flesh, but he knew it would be a mistake. She still insisted on walling him away from what had happened to her in Norway. It was bad enough she judged herself by the accident, but that she should even imagine he would...

He must have made a sound because she spun around. “Oh,” she said, and grabbed for the hem of the shirt. In the process she knocked over the mug.