His palm slid down, cupping gently over her tender core, and her teeth nipped helplessly at his shoulder. “Mitch. Don’t play.”
“Oh, yes, sweet. We’re definitely going to play,” he murmured. His voice sounded as if it had come out through a long tunnel; he couldn’t help it. Nothing could stop the pounding of his heart. There wasn’t a chance in hell he could pull back, not this time.
His hand glided up, caressing the warm satin of her skin. Slowly, his lips dipped down to the hollow of her throat and planted a kiss that was infinitely loving. He kissed once, and then twice, and then firmly, gravely, reached over her to turn on the light.
She blinked in bewilderment, and an odd shyness. Mitch’s face, above her, held no smile. His eyes met hers with such intensity that she couldn’t possibly have looked away. “You’re more than I ever dreamed of,” he whispered quietly. “I love you, Kay. I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you-but you have to know something before I can make love to you. Feel this…”
He took her palm and pressed it to his chest. She’d felt the scar before. His whole torso was covered with rough, springy hair, but there was that single smooth line. And it interested her not at all. She was concentrating on the love in his haunted, very dark, very brown, very liquid eyes.
“I caught a simple strep infection when I was fifteen,” he said in a low voice. “Only it didn’t prove quite so simple. It affected a valve in my heart. Repairing heart valves isn’t a big thing these days, and it wasn’t then, but a body can be rather fussy about what kind of foreign object it will accept. Mine was more than fussy. I tried three times.”
She swallowed, aching for him. “What you must have gone through. Dammit, why didn’t you just tell me?” She saw the moisture on his brow and fiercely brushed it away. “Mitch, didn’t you think I’d care?”
“You should have cared,” he said gruffly. His fingers combed back her hair with total tenderness, yet his body was tense as it hadn’t been moments before. “It wasn’t that many years ago that even new valves didn’t guarantee a normal…life expectancy. You have a right to know that. And to know that technology has changed for the better, Kay. Maybe I can’t give you a written guarantee that I’ll live to be eighty, but I can promise you that I have every reasonable hope…”
Yes. Her heart exulted in his talk of the future. This was no fly-by-night affair. And how she ached for him, for everything he had suffered through…but Mitch was trying, too darn hard, not to tell her something else. She could sense it in his hoarse voice, in the jammed-up thickness in his throat…
Her heart heard the words he wasn’t saying. She suddenly understood…so much. All that gentlemanly leaving her at the door, all that respect, all that not rushing her into bed…such a fraud. It had been most unfair timing for a man, to be out of commission in the years when most men were sowing their wild oats. Mitch was a virgin. And worried about it. Unable to admit it to her.
Oh, Mitch, she thought tenderly.
But Mitch was still talking about irrelevant details. “I’ll understand,” he whispered, “if you don’t feel…comfortable with that. I should have told you, Kay-”
“I love you,” she said vibrantly, and pressed her lips first to his scar, then trailed up to the hollow of his neck. Suddenly, he was totally still. Did they give out prizes for nervousness?
“I don’t take any drugs at all, not anymore. I don’t want you to think you’d be stuck with some kind of…pill factory. There’s no reason to believe…Kay…”
He wanted to talk. Her so-reticent man all of a sudden wanted to chatter. Kay, smiling in the darkness, felt the utterly delectable pleasure of knowing the man was about to be hers. She’d never before understood that peculiar satisfaction a man got from making love to a virgin; every feminist cell in her body had always scoffed at the myth.
It wasn’t a myth. How infinitely special she felt to be his first. How terribly she wanted it to be right for him. Ever so tenderly, she let her lips trace the line of his scar, then pressed a kiss on each of his male nipples, those tiny orbs buried in a mat of chest hair.
“Kay.”
Subtle as a whisper, her fingertips glided down to his thighs. “The pain you must have gone through, Mitch…”
His voice had the rasp of impatience. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all long over with. But you had the right to know…Kay.”
Her fingers closed on him, and she felt an electric volt shoot through his body, a restless heat suddenly radiate from his muscles. He shifted, pulling her closer to him when she couldn’t possibly be any closer, his lips busy-busy, all over her skin, everywhere he could reach.
“I wish I had been there for you,” she whispered. “I wish I’d been by your side through all of it. Come to me, Mitch…”
He surged over her, his mouth sealed on hers and his arms holding her as if she were unbearably precious. She welcomed the weight of him. She welcomed the huge shudder of need that ached through his body, the glaze of wanting in his eyes, all the messages that he was losing control. “I don’t want to hurt…”
“You won’t. You won’t. Come to me…”
Her fingers had every intention of guiding him; as it happened, that wasn’t necessary. Mitch had massively well-developed sexual instincts; she should already have guessed that. His body knew exactly what it wanted and where it wanted to go, and when she felt that probing heat inside the core of her for the first time, she cried out.
“Kay-?”
“It’s fine,” she whispered roughly. “So beautiful, Mitch.”
“I believe…” Mitch cleared his throat. “I believe we just set a track record.” Propped on one elbow, he slowly stroked back the hair on her forehead, over and over. “Not that there’s anything wrong with setting records, but, Kay, I wanted you to-”
“Mitch.” Kay smiled sleepily up at him. “Take a good look, would you? See what a disgracefully satisfied woman looks like.”
His lips curled just slightly as he leaned over to brush a kiss on her lips. His ninetieth in the past twenty minutes. “You look beautiful,” he announced.
She reached up to touch the bristly growth on his cheek with her fingertips. Mitch was having a terrible time meeting her eyes for more than a second at a time. Her very serious man didn’t really want her to see that he’d just discovered Christmas.
“We went too fast. It wasn’t fair to you,” he continued, his mouth pressing a kiss into the hollow of her palm, then dipping down to the tip of her shoulder.
“We might just both have been in a terrible hurry to make love. Did you ever think of that?”
“I thought of that.” He suddenly shoved back the covers that he’d tucked protectively around her minutes before. “I still think we went too fast. I didn’t have nearly enough time to savor the feel of you.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I really think-” he kissed the underside of one breast, studied its swollen tip with immense satisfaction, and glanced back up to her eyes with a frown “-that we’d better do it all again. In slow motion this time.”
“Mitch, you must be sleepy.”
“How’s your allergy, Kay? I’m checking for dizziness. For instance, does this make you dizzy, and this…”