“Annie.”
His voice was soft and husky. The sound of it sent her heartbeat racing. Say something, she told herself, but her throat felt paralyzed.
“Annie.” He stepped into the room, his eyes locked on hers. “I lied,” he said. “It isn’t the chair that kept me from sleeping. It’s you.”
It was a moment for a flippant remark. A little humor, a little sarcasm; something along the lines of, “Really? Well, it’s good to know I’m giving you a bad time.”
But she didn’t want to toss him a fast one-liner.
She wanted what he wanted. Why keep up the pretense any longer?
They were two adults, alone on an island that might just as easily have been spinning in the dark reaches of space instead of being just off the Washington coast. Going into Chase’s arms, loving him just for tonight, would hurt no one.
He has a fiancée, a voice inside her whispered. He belongs to another woman now.
“Annie? I want to make love to you. I need to make love to you. Tell me to go away, babe, and I will, if that’s what you really want, but I don’t think it is. I think you want to come into my arms and taste my kisses. I think you want us to hold each other, the way we used to.”
The blanket fell from Annie’s hands. She gave a little sob and her arms opened wide.
Chase whispered her name, pulled off his clothes and went to her.
He kissed her mouth, and her throat. He kissed the soft skin behind her ear and buried his face in that sweet curve of neck and shoulder that felt like warm silk.
She’d been wearing something under the blanket, after all. A bra and panties, just plain white cotton, but he thought he’d never seen anything as sexy in his life. His hands had never trembled more than they did as he unfastened the bra and slid the panties down Annie’s long legs.
“My beautiful Annie,” he murmured, when she lay naked in his arms.
“I’m not,” she said, with a little catch in her throat. “I’m older. Everything’s starting to sag.”
Her breath caught as Chase bent and kissed the slope of her breast.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered, his breath warm against her flesh. “More beautiful than before.”
His hands cupped her breasts; he bent his head and licked her nipples. It was the truth. She’d gone from being a lovely girl to being a beautiful woman. Her body was classic in its femininity, lushly curved and warm with desire beneath his hands and his mouth. Annie smelled like rosebuds and warm honey, and she tasted like the nectar of the gods.
She was a feast for a man who’d been starving for five long, lonely years.
“Chase,” she whispered, when he kissed his way down her belly. Her voice broke as he parted her thighs. “Chase,” she said again.
He looked up at her, his eyes dark and fierce. “I never forgot,” he said. “The smell of you. The heat.” His hands clasped her thighs. Slowly he lowered his head. “The taste.”
Annie cried out as his mouth found her. It had been so long. Five years of lonely nights and empty days, of wanting Chase and never admitting it, of dreaming of him, of this, and then denying the dreams in the morning.
I love you, she thought fiercely, Chase, my husband, my beloved, I adore you. How could I have ever forgotten that?
He kissed her again and she shattered against the kiss, tumbling through the darkness of the night, and just before she fell to earth he rose up over her and thrust into her body with one deep, hard stroke.
“Chase,” she cried, and this time, when she came, he was with her, holding her tightly in his arms as they made the breathless free fall through space together.
The last thing she saw, just before she fell asleep in his arms, was the crescent moon, framed overhead in the skylight, as the clouds parted and the gentle rain ceased.
* * *
She awakened during the night, to the soft brush of Chase’s mouth against her nape.
It was as if the years had fallen away. How many times bad she come awake to his kisses, and to his touch?
“I never stopped thinking about you,” he whispered.
I never stopped loving you, was what he wanted to say, but he wanted to look into her eyes when he did, to read her answer there.
So he spoke to her with his body instead, burying himself in her heat, one hand on her breast and the other low across her belly, moving within her, matching his rhythm to hers, until he groaned and she cried out. Then he turned her into his embrace, kissed her and slipped inside her again, still hard, still wanting her, and this time when she came, she wept.
“Did I hurt you?” he said softly, and for an instant she almost told him that the pain would come in the morning, when the sun rose and the night ended, and all of this would be nothing more substantial than a dream.