For a moment Annie felt almost as though she was going to die from the shock of pleasure that sheeted through her, its intensity such that it made her catch her breath and feel as though her life itself was momentarily held in suspension. Behind her closed eyelids she could see the same brilliant whiteness she remembered from her moment of near-death: pure, burning, intense, soul-touching…like the very best kind of love itself.
Quickly she opened her eyes and focused on his downbent raven-dark head. The warm flesh of his exposed nape was a tantalising contradiction of his stance towards her and her reaction back to him, that of a man to a woman at its most sensually intense. That exposed nape was so very much that of a vulnerable boy, a child…the child they would one day have…
Immediately Annie tensed, as though somehow something had touched an exposed raw nerve within her memory. The pain, initially so intense that it had shocked her into protective immobility, was fading now, but it still had the power to frighten her.
‘What is it? Not second thoughts?’ he was asking her almost brusquely as his lips relinquished possession of her nipple and he lifted his head to look in her eyes.
In his own there was something, an expression, a darkness, that made her look away from him. Somewhere deep within her a pain, a wariness was stirring, but she quickly suppressed it. Nothing…nothing…could be allowed to spoil this special magical coming together. Nothing!
‘I…’ she began slowly, wanting to find the words to tell him how she was feeling, to ask him to help her smother the sharp needle of pain she could feel threatening her, to disarm it of its potential harm.
But instead of listening to her he shook his head and said smoothly, ‘I thought you wanted us to go to bed. You do want that, don’t you, Annie?’
Annie! He knew her name. Her heart slammed fiercely against her ribs, her whole body convulsed by the sweetly searing surge of her shock.
‘I…I want us to make love…’ she managed to tell him shakily, before adding breathlessly, so that he would know that her intuition, her knowingness, her acknowledgement of their shared fate matched his, ‘Upstairs…in the room…the room…’
‘I know which one,’ he assured her, and if her ears thought they had caught a rough, searing note of anger beneath the sensual smoothness of his low-toned voice she quickly assured herself that she had to have imagined it.
They walked upstairs together, one step at a time, her body pressed close to his, his arm around her as she leaned helplessly into him. On the half-landing she stopped, automatically gazing through the window towards the river.
‘This house was built by a whaling captain,’ she told him huskily.
‘Yes, I know,’ he agreed tersely, his arm dropping momentarily away from her.
‘I…I dream about it sometimes,’ she told him, searching carefully for the right words to tell him what she had experienced. ‘About…the room…and…and about you…’
Without saying anything else she moved back into the protection of his body, only realising that she had been holding her breath a little nervously when his arm finally rose and held her.
They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing in the doorway to the room before he said the words that made her heart turn somersaults of joy inside her body.
‘I dream of you too.’
He dreamed of her. She wasn’t alone in her belief…her recognition. Flooded with joy, she turned to him, holding his arm with her hand as she demanded, ‘You recognised me, then, the other night…in the restaurant?’
The abrupt, almost reluctant inclination of his head he gave in assent made her ache with female protectiveness. He felt embarrassed, almost afraid to reveal his vulnerability to her. Oh, how much she loved him. How wonderful it was that they had found one another.
‘It’s going to be so good,’ she told him tenderly. ‘We are going to be so good…’
Inside the room everything was just as she had dreamed. The large windows with the view of the drop down to the river and the fields and hills on the other side of it. The floor, wooden, polished, bare. The walls, bare too; the windows with their filmy ethereal curtaining. The bed…
Annie shivered as she saw it, unable to take her gaze off it as her eyes widened and focused unblinkingly on the oh, so familiar iron bedstead. Unlike hers, this, she knew immediately, was original. Very slowly and gently she reached out and touched the frame at the foot of the bed. The metal felt warm to her touch, warm and worn slightly with age. The bed was bigger than hers, much bigger, and piled high with creamy white traditional linen bedding. As she reached down and smoothed the edge of one of the covers she could almost smell the scent of lavender being released by her touch.
‘This bed…’ she began, dry-mouthed.
‘It’s a marriage bed,’ he told her quickly, and she could almost taste the bitterness in his voice. But before she could question it, turning to him, her eyes quickening with surprise, he was reaching for her, the fierceness, the immediacy of his desire surprising her. She had expected passion, intensity, and even male possessiveness, but this fierce, heated nowness he was exhibiting, this silent, hungry concentrated way in which he was reaching for her, holding her…
‘Open your mouth. Kiss me properly. You know how,’ she could hear him insisting rawly as the fierce, biting intensity of his own kisses threatened to bruise the already swollen softness of her own mouth.
But willingly she complied, wanting only the pleasure she knew she would have in pleasing him. Her breath was drawn into his mouth, mingling with his in a small sobbing moan of acquiescence as he started to imitate the hot, pulsing tide she could feel within her own body, and within his, with small, pulsating thrusts of his tongue. Somehow they were undressing, her own fingers revealing a dexterity, a knowledge she hadn’t guessed they possessed.
There was nothing for her to fear, of course. From her dreams she already knew him as he knew her. In them there was not a curve, a corner of one another’s bodies they had not explored and enjoyed.
Even so…A fine shudder of female nervousness and shyness ran through her. The merest delicate frisson of sensation, but she knew he could feel it, knew that it was transmitting itself to him where his fingertips touched her flesh.
‘You’re afraid…’
He made it sound almost as though the thought of her fear pleased him, and Annie’s tension increased.
‘No,’ she denied, her body and her eyes suddenly softening as she told him lovingly, ‘How could I ever be afraid…with you?’
It was as though somehow she had unleashed a catalyst, a power, a primitive force that was beyond the control of either of them, because suddenly he had picked her up and was carrying her to the bed, kneeling over her as he laid her down on it, his eyes hot and dark, the colour and heat of a tropical night sky, the flesh of his face drawn so tightly over his bones that she felt compelled to reach out and touch it…him…
A primal sound, a groan, a warning growl, a low, mating purr—Annie did not know which—rasped deep in his throat as he turned his mouth to her hand, nibbling at the tender flesh on the mound of Venus beneath the base of her thumb.
Quivers of hot cataclysmic pleasure melted through her.
‘Yes…Yes…Oh, yes,’ she heard herself moaning as he continued to undress her, her body arching, moving to accommodate the increasing speed of his hands as the hot ache deep within her flesh manifested itself in a series of revealing uncoordinated jerky movements when she tried to get closer and closer to him. If she closed her eyes she could feel his heat, sense his need. Deep within her mind she already knew his possession, knew the hot, silken sheathed reality of him, the taut, urgent thrust of his body within her own.
A quiver, an ache, a wild yearning need possessed her.
‘I want you. I want you,’ she told him recklessly over and over again as her own eager fingers tore buttons from their buttonholes, eagerly pushing away the too intrusive fabric of his clothes where they came between them.