Her body ached in her most personal places, her nipples were tender, her clit still throbbed with lazy satisfaction, and she could still feel the warmth where his palm had spanked her lightly as he thrust into her from behind.
The sun was barely peeking over the horizon, the blizzard that had grounded the planes in Denver having lifted several hours before. The forecast was for cold and only partly cloudy skies. The text on her phone said her plane would depart in two more hours, taking her home.
Rafer was once again leaving Corbin County and heading back to wherever the Marines needed him.
He had changed in the past seven years, but some things about her hadn’t changed. Rafer still took her breath away. He still made her feel things she didn’t understand and had no idea how to control. But, unlike seven years ago, those feelings were stronger, hotter, and more mature. With that maturity there was the arousal, the lust and hunger that she couldn’t fight.
Rafer’s smile, the hunger in his sapphire-blue eyes, the sensuality that filled his expression. Thick, black lashes that were much too long to fairly belong to a man. His hair wasn’t as long as it once was. Rather than falling to his shoulders, it was almost military short and gave his face a more savage, forbidden cast.
But did she have the good sense to fear what he was capable of doing to her? What she knew he was capable of making her feel?
Of course she didn’t.
Cami?
She lifted her head from the book she was reading, more bored with the story than anything else, but the nearly deserted airport wasn’t providing entertainment of any sort either.
But that voice—
She heard that voice in her dreams so often.
Her gaze rose to meet his brilliant gaze.
“Rafer.” She hadn’t realized his name would slip past her lips so easily until it did.
It was a whisper, and even she recognized the husky need in her own voice.
Her heart began to race at an almost brutal pace, thumping against her breasts erratically as she took a shaky breath.
“Stranded?” His head tilted to the side as he stood before her, a heavy duffel hanging from his hand as though it weighed nothing.
He hadn’t changed. Other than the maturity in his face, the experience in his expression, and the male hunger that gleamed in his sapphire eyes.
He was dressed in street clothes. Jeans and T-shirt, leather coat and boots. His broad shoulders looked a mile wide. His thighs powerful, his legs long and strong.
The moment her gaze traveled over him she could feel her pussy creaming, her clit throbbing, her nipples tightening and hardening, and her entire body sensitizing.
She knew arousal. She had been thirteen the first time she’d felt that breathlessness. At fourteen she’d become aware of her body when she saw him. Rafer, Logan, and Crowe had come home for a week because of yet another lawsuit the Corbins, Raffertys, and Robertses had lodged against their inheritances. When he had, he’d made sure to find a few moments to say hello.
The summer she turned fifteen, they were back again. That year, Rafe had danced with her at the Spring Fling Social. He had entered the festivities, walked straight to her in his black evening suit, and asked her to dance.
He’d asked her how she was doing, how school was. He’d asked her about her parents, about her aunt and uncle. He’d asked her if she needed anything and she’d wanted to cry because all she could think of was how much she had missed him and the fact that it felt so nice to be in his arms. She wanted to be there forever.
The next four years were variations of the same theme, except with each year, with each phase of her own sexual maturity, Cami had come to recognize the signs of arousal, of need, of awakening sensuality whenever she saw him. Over the years she’d seen him several times, and as she matured, those meetings had become even more heated, then explosive, until it had finally flamed out of control.
Until he had stood on the other side of the table at an airport that had nearly been deserted, for once, chance working in the favor of the travelers to provide the majority with accommodations in the nearby hotels. Unfortunately she hadn’t been part of the majority.
“Stranded, Cami?” he repeated the question, his gaze somber but lit with an inner glow of hunger. That glow had been there since the summer she had turned eighteen and slipped out to a street dance in Denver the night she and her aunt had stayed over.
It was there between them, like a live current, pulsing beneath their flesh. He kissed her that night and nothing had been the same since.
“Yes,” she whispered, breathless. She was always breathless around him. Always filled with anticipation and need.
He held out his hand.
A strong, broad palm, his fingers looking powerful, capable, and God help her all she could think about was how it would feel if they were stroking between her thighs, parting the lips of her pussy, rimming the juice-saturated slit of her entrance.
The need for it was so strong, so striking, she was forced to press her thighs together, wishing there was some way to ease the sudden, unbidden throbbing of her clit.
But nothing could have kept her from taking his hand and letting him pull her from the hard plastic stool she had been sitting on.
Their gazes locked, hunger rushing through her body, the need to touch him clamoring through her senses. The feel of his palm, calloused and warm surrounding hers, sent a spike of sensation shooting straight to her womb.
A sensitivity she had never felt before, a need, rose inside her, dark and so sexual, so overriding she could barely keep from begging him to take her at that moment.
“Such hungry eyes,” he whispered. “Every year they’re darker, more mysterious, and always filled with that hunger. Tell me, Cami, how much darker and hungrier could they get?”
Like a switch flipping on, a breaker sending electricity surging through her body, Cami felt the arousal heightening uncontrollably.
She could barely breathe. Getting enough oxygen simply wasn’t going to happen. She had waited so long for the intensity of the hunger she saw in his eyes now. She had endured three years, three hard kisses that had grown in intensity. The awareness that his control was stronger than his need for her, and the knowledge that her body refused to accept any other man.
“Have you made me wait long enough?” she asked him then, realizing in that moment the delicate dance they had been weaving with each other since the summer she turned eighteen was now beginning to whirl out of control.
His gaze slid slowly to her lips as he took a single step to her. As he held her hand with one of his, the other slid into her hair, all the while his eyes holding hers captive, mesmerizing her, drawing her into a vortex of sensation that laid waste to any objections she could have thought of. Not that she had intentions of thinking of any.
His head lowered as he cupped her cheek, held her still, then brushed his lips over hers.
She was a virgin, but she wasn’t completely ignorant of her own body, her needs, or the arousal that just the thought of Rafe could inspire inside her.