Though it seemed impossible, he delved deeper into her with each rhythmic push. She felt those supple contractions against her hands which greedily drew him closer, higher. He kissed her ears, her throat, and, as his thrusts accelerated, her mouth.
After several moments she clasped his head and held it away from her. Her breath was choppy; her flushed breasts rose and fell with each shallow pant. "You don't have to wait on me, Thad."
He looked surprised, then smiled tenderly. "Yes I do."
"No, really. You don't have to do that for me."
"I'm not," he said hoarsely. "I'm doing it for me."
She gave a joyful little gasp when he slid his splayed hands beneath her hips. He rubbed his face against her nipples, once, twice, letting her feel his cheeks, chin, nose, and tongue against them.
With his next deep thrust, her neck involuntarily arched and she lost herself in this splendid mating rite. Her hips responded to his clenching fingers. She ground her body against his, wanting more, always more.
And when she was seized by a rush of sensation so intense she couldn't contain it, she bit her lower lip to hold back a scream of pleasure. The immensity of it was compounded when she felt, deep inside her, the staccato spasms of his release.
Neither knew if it was seconds, minutes, or eons that they lay in a state of complete exhaustion. Thad was the first to move. He propped himself on one elbow and gazed down at her.
"You're beautiful," he said, still breathing unevenly.
"You think so?"
"Oh, yeah," he drawled, smiling and nodding his head.
His unhurried caresses matched his inflection. He drew his index finger across her chin, down her throat, and then continued across her collarbone. From there it meandered over her breasts, following the high curves and dipping into the shallow valley between them. He traced a faint white stretch mark.
"I've been a mother twice," she reminded him apologetically.
He only growled with pleasure. "You certainly have."
Leisurely he circled each nipple with the tip of his finger until they both responded prettily. Lowering his mouth to one, he flicked it with his tongue, then closed his lips around it and sucked gently. Elizabeth made a whimpering sound.
"You like that?" he asked, moving his lips over the glistening bead of flesh.
"Yes."
"Good. So do I. Very much." He covered her other nipple with his mouth and rugged at it hard enough to give pleasure, but temperate enough to prevent pain. He raked his teeth against it and plucked at it lightly with his lips. "I was dreaming of this when you woke me up the other day. I was making love to your sweet breasts."
"You said as much."
"I've had some wonderful dreams about you lately, but you never felt this good against my tongue in any of them. And nothing I've ever dreamed of tasted as good as this."
She had thought that John Burke was a romantic man. But compared to her late husband, Thad was Cyrano de Bergerac. He had the soul of a poet, but the carnal appetites of a sultan.
"You're quite a lover, aren't you, Thad?"
He raised his eyes to hers, at first thinking that she was teasing. But when he saw that she was serious, he answered in kind. "I've had very few complaints from the women I've been with."
"And how many is that?" Regretting the words the moment they were out, she turned her head into the pillow. "I'm sorry. Forget I said that. I have no right to ask."
After a lengthy pause, he said softly, "I bought the teddy for you." Her head came around and she stared up at him, speechless with surprise. "That's right. For you. There is no other woman right now." He reshaped the underside of her breast to fit his hand and fondled her as he spoke. "When I got back from Vietnam, my fiancée ditched me for another guy. Actually, she had ditched me long before I got back but she was kind enough not to write and tell me so.
"Since then, I've kept my relationships brief. I took what I wanted from them, gave back only enough to salve my conscience, then split while lust was the only thing the woman and I had in common. I'm not a saint. Never pretended to be. So, yes, I've been with a lot of women.
"But I never allowed myself to focus on any one woman because, frankly, I liked being single. And," he added, with a shrug, "I guess maybe I was afraid to fall in love and be jilted again. Anyway, I liked my life the way it was.
"Then I moved here. Your kids were so damn cute, I began to have second thoughts about my lifestyle. Every now and then I got a hankering to have kids of my own."
He drew a deep sigh. "And then, of course, there was you. I'd catch myself peering through trees more often than not when I heard your car pull into the driveway. Whenever you came into the backyard I made up reasons to be outside myself just to get a glimpse of you, to see if you were as pretty as you looked from a distance. But you never initiated a conversation, so I left things alone. When I got lonely, I told myself that I was lucky and damn clever to remain unentangled.
"I thank providence for stranding that kitten up in the tree. It gave me a reason to come close." He ran his finger down her cheek. "The instant I looked into your face, the top of my head blew off. And every time I've seen you since then, I've wanted to be in bed with you, doing this."
His voice lowered to a seductive pitch. "That night I caught you by the water hydrant, I barely stopped myself from taking you against the wall."
"Why didn't you?"
He registered surprise. "Would you have let me?"
"I honestly don't know. Why didn't you at least try?"
His eyes looked turbulent, as though he were wrestling with the decision of whether or not to tell her. Finally he met her gaze squarely and said, "Because I thought then that I only wanted to have you sexually. And you deserved better than that."
Her gaze flickered away from his. His blunt honesty was unnerving. "So why did you come into the shop the next day?"
"I couldn't stay away. I wanted to get another look at you in the daylight, to convince myself that you were real. You were." He bent over her and planted a solid, hot kiss on her mouth. "Were you ever."
After another deep kiss he said, "So there I was in Fantasy, damn sure I wanted you, but unsure how you felt about me. I decided to test the waters by trying to make you jealous."
"That was a sneaky, rotten thing to do."
He smiled mischievously. "But it worked, didn't it?" She clamped her lips shut and refused to answer. "Come on, now. I made an ass of myself tonight when you came in from your date with Cavanaugh. Can't you admit to even a trace of jealousy?"
"All right, a trace. I thought it was extremely unchivalrous of you to come into my store to buy a scandalous piece of lingerie for your mistress."
"Mistress?" he echoed, laughing at the old-fashioned term. "Feel free to come over and slip into the teddy and stockings any time." He murmured the words against her throat. "They're still wrapped up in pink tissue paper, even though I've taken them out and played with them a few times."
"How perverted."
"Hmm. I imagined your breasts filling up those lace cups. Your nipples straining against them."
He kissed her thoroughly. His hand sawed back and forth in the hollow of her waist, then flattened against her stomach. He slid it down to cover the triangle of tawny hair. Elizabeth flushed with embarrassment when he ended their kiss so he could watch as his fingers explored. He let the pale curls ensnare them.
"So pretty," he whispered. "So soft and sexy." And that was only the beginning.
"Is this… what you, uh, had in mind… when you put this… hmm… this hammock here?"