“I understand,” Natalie said.
He put his hands on her shoulders and urged her to turn. He was a tall shadow looming over her. She couldn’t make out his features, but she sensed his intensity.
“Do you?” he asked.
“I’ve told you before how important I think family is. Of course you wanted to speak to your mother about it before you mentioned anything to me.”
“It’s got nothing to do with family loyalty,” Liam said, a hint of frustration in his voice. “I just…I’m starting to think she’s hiding something.”
“Then let’s stop. Let’s stop, Liam.”
He’d pulled her in contact with his body, so she felt the shock that went through him at her resolute tone.
“How can you say that with so much certainty, when you’re the one who started this? Wouldn’t you regret it…stopping?”
She put her arms around his waist. “I might regret not stopping,” she said, her throat thick with emotion. She thought of what she’d told him when she first visited the cottage, here on this very patio where they now stood. She’d told him there was a chance he might love his father more if he knew the truth of what had motivated Derry that night, not less.
After hearing Brigit’s and Liam’s heated exchange at the Family Center, she was starting to realize just how naive—how selfish—she’d been in saying that.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, Liam,” she whispered.
For a few seconds he didn’t speak. The tension increased in his body. She kept her gaze trained on his shadowed face as if she could read every nuance of his expression, even though the shadows blinded her.
“We’re not stopping,” he said. “We’re not stopping any of it.”
His mouth covered hers, and Natalie knew in that second that Liam’s passion had captured her soul…ruled it. Her awkwardness, her unanswered questions, her anxieties and curiosity about the crash—all those things had once been sovereign in her mind.
Now they receded to the background, bowing down to a new master.
His hands—half cherishing, half commanding—moved over her body. Her breasts tingled beneath his touch. She arched into him, eager to make his heat her own.
The earlier conflict seemed to have created a pressure in both of them, the type of friction that required release. Her clothes seemed to melt off her beneath his hasty, adroit fingers. He urged her on to the cushioned recliner. She laid back and stared up at the black night sky, puffs of air and moans flying past her parted lips. His hands and mouth seemed to be everywhere at once, seemingly turning her into a single, throbbing nerve ending.
When he settled on her hip bone, treating it to a gentle kiss, Natalie cried out in rising need and reached for him, trying to urge him up to her, begging him silently to quench the fire he’d set in her flesh.
He made a hushing sound and grabbed her wrists, restraining her. His head moved between her thighs.
She keened softly in awe as pleasure flooded her.
Did he know he kissed her very soul?
The sound of the waves hitting the rocks became obliterated by the pounding of her heart. It became unbearable to exist in this taut world of bliss, friction and intimacy Liam built in her. She strained tight in surrender. The explosion of pleasure—of sheer feeling—that detonated in her flesh was so intense, it almost hurt to succumb.
She still was recovering when she felt Liam slide inside her, filling her, stopping only when they were pressed tight, belly to heaving belly.
“Shh, I’ve got you,” he whispered, his voice a rough caress in her ear before he kissed her there. She distantly heard her own whimpers of anguished release still escaping from her throat and realized he’d been soothing her.
Then Liam began to move, and her pleasure-dazed brain once again focused on approaching ecstasy.
“I’m going to go to Lake Tahoe,” Liam said later, his lips lingering to caress her breast after he spoke.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end when she registered his words. They lay together on the cushioned recliner, their bodies entwined, the perspiration from their heated lovemaking drying on their skin in the gentle breeze. Natalie realized her stroking fingers in his hair had frozen at his statement.
“To talk to Lincoln DuBois?”
She felt his nod. She resumed stroking him, her mind whirring into overdrive.
“I’m going with you,” she said, glad at that moment he couldn’t see her apprehensive expression because of the darkness.