“Beautiful, beautiful man.” She smiled into his eyes and stroked the golden hair back off his forehead.
“You’ve been alone so very long.” She cupped his face in her hands, loving the silky smoothness of his skin, the contrast of her darker flesh against his lighter, more golden tones. Bending closer, she feathered kisses across his face. “Don’t you think it’s time to come out of the cold?” She breathed the last into his ear, and followed it with an impulsive flick of her tongue.
He shuddered. His arms came up, locking her in a tight embrace. His head tilted to one side, mouth slanting across hers with sudden fervor. His hands found her hips and pressed her down against his lap, against the rock-hard bulge beneath the clothes she’d given him.
Eve gasped as dizzying sensations swept through her in rippling waves. The edge of his teeth scraped down her exposed neck. The moist heat of his breath warmed her skin. Lips and tongue tracked burning trails down her chest. His hand caught in her dense curls, and he pulled her head back, baring her chest, her breasts to his mouth and teeth and lips and tongue.
“Dear God!” Just that fast, she was on fire. Breath heaved from her lungs. His teeth closed around one nipple through the thin cloth of her tunic. She sobbed and ripped at the fabric, wanting those teeth, those lips, on her naked skin. Cool air kissed her breast, turning dark brown nipples into hard, pebbled points as she flung the tunic away. And then his mouth followed the caress of the breeze, suckling with strong, hard pulls. The feeling ignited a taut, fiery cord that reached from each nipple straight down to her core.
She moaned and thrust herself against him, pressing her breast into his mouth, clutching his hair in tight fists and pulling him tight against her.
Then they were ripping at the rest of their clothes. Who tore what from whom, she would not remember, nor did she care. All she cared about – all she wanted – was the pure, sensual fire of his naked flesh pressed against hers, rubbing against her, driving her wild.
“I’ve never—” She gasped. “Never – ah!” His fingers had found a spot between her legs, and sensation exploded across every nerve ending. Hot creamy moisture drenched her, making her body slick and steamy.
“Nor I, Eve. You are so beautiful. I never . . . knew . . .” He guided the thick, hard length of his erection to her. The wide, silky-soft head pushed against her, into her, pressure building, stretching . . . The tendons in his neck stood out. His muscles flexed and trembled.
She panted, rocking against him, biting her lip to stop from sobbing. “Don’t stop . . . don’t . . .” Her eyes squeezed shut. Something gave way. She registered a sharp pain, but then he was full inside her, hot and throbbing and filling an emptiness she’d never known existed. He moved his hips, and gripped hers to raise her up, then brought her sharply back down upon him.
“Oh, my God . . .” Stars exploded across her vision. There was a word for this moment: ecstasy. But she’d never understood the magnitude of what that word meant until now. It swept her up in a firestorm, flung conscious thought to the winds. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, scientist. She wasn’t Eve Cartwright, sister. Not even Eve Cartwright, mother.
She was just Eve.
Woman.
Born for this moment, for this man.
He moved inside her, above her, through her, body and soul. He moved, and her world moved with him, following his lead every shuddering, breathtaking, mind-shattering step of the way. Her nails scraped across the broad, strong blades of his shoulders as her feminine core clenched tight around him, suckling him with strong, rippling quakes. He flung her onto her back and crouched over her, hips pistoning, driving his body deep inside her in swift, hard, rhythmic thrusts until she screamed and exploded yet again, and then his body went rigid, as hard and unyielding as steel. He shuddered against her, and thrust into her one, two, three final times before collapsing to one side, his chest heaving like bellows.
“Dear God.” Eve gasped and flung an arm across her face. She struggled to catch her breath. “You may not think much of the human race, but you can’t honestly tell me that isn’t worth saving.”
One eyelid cracked open. One stunning blue eye peered at her. He laughed. And the rich, deep sound of it nearly made her climax all over again.
Overwhelmed with emotion, humor fading, Eve brushed her fingertips against his jaw. She couldn’t believe this was real – couldn’t believe he was real. “You said you came here to die. But would you consider something else instead? Like staying here to live? With me?”
He propped himself up on one elbow, his expression turning serious. With his free hand, he brushed the sweaty curls away from her temple. His gaze swept slowly over her face, as if drinking in the memory of her at this moment. For one, heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to say goodbye, but then the corner of his mouth tilted up in a wondering smile, as if he had just discovered an unexpected treasure.
“Yes,” he murmured. He bent down to kiss her, lips brushing against hers with exquisite tenderness.
“Yes, Eve, I think I would like that. I think I would like that very much.”
The rover flew over the dunes of the wastes. Eve gripped the steering wheel firmly between her gloved hands to keep from constantly touching the man sitting beside her. In the back seat of the rover, Shar and Misha clung to the roll bar and laughed with a joyous abandon Eve had only ever seen on holovids of long-dead families from before the End.
The noah had decided to stay. He would take Beri’s place in Homebase and add his collected samples of their world to their own. Together, they would bring life back to their planet. They were going now to fetch his ship. He had assured Eve that the outer hull of the ship had absorbed the bulk of the energy from the crash, and he was certain he could pilot it back to Homebase, where they could work on a way to transfer his biological storage units into their warehouses.
Like the children, Eve was bubbling over with happiness. She’d lived her whole life with just her sisters around her, but now that the noah had come, she couldn’t imagine a life without him.
Nonna, who wasn’t big on change – especially change involving the presence of a man in their midst – hadn’t been as enthusiastic as her younger sisters, but she had come around after the noah offered her full access to his ship’s computers and his vast organic library of plants and animal life long since extinct on their world. Science was her weakness, and it didn’t take the noah long to ferret out how best to win her over. Mind-reading definitely had its benefits.
“You know, you still haven’t told me your name.” Eve maneuvered the rover around a rocky outcropping. The green lights on her in-helmet display showed the map she was following to the coordinates of the noah’s ship. “I can’t go on calling you ‘the noah’ forever.”
“I have no name. I and my brothers are just the noahs. There has never been need for more.”
“Well, there’s need now. We could call you Noah, if you like.”
He considered it briefly, then shook his head. “No. A noah is what I was, and what I am no longer.
Now, I am just a man.”
“Then we’ll come up with a name for you. We’ll have to give it some thought. Names are important things. You wouldn’t want to be called something horrible like Englebart or Euphaestus.” When he didn’t answer, she darted a worried look his way. He had lifted the polarized visor on his biosuit helmet, and through the glass faceplate, she saw him mouthing the names and frowning in consideration. Oh Lord, what had she done? He was seriously going to pick one of those. “No. We are not calling your Englebart – and not Euphaestus either. That was a joke.”