She strengthened her grip on the rail and stiffened her arms. Ryan seemed all too ready to resume once she'd secured herself. Once again he crashed their bodies together. The entire brass bed began to rattle as a result of Ryan's forcefulness. Her lips stretched into a snarl. She cried out every time Ryan thrust deep and his pelvis whapped loudly against her ass.
"Yes, yes, yes," she chanted mindlessly each time he smacked into her.
The tension she'd been harboring finally reached the breaking point. She clenched her eyes shut and exploded as the spark from the friction ignited into a roaring flame.
Distantly, through pulsing waves of pounding pleasure, she became aware of Ryan's roar as he jumped into the conflagration with her. The knowledge only added to her firestorm of raging desire.
They still panted heavily by the time Ryan unbound her wrists. He retrieved several tissues from the bedside table and carefully wiped his semen from her back and bottom.
Afterward he pulled her over to the bed and they collapsed like two survivors from a great storm in each other's arms. He kissed and nuzzled her breasts as their bodies slowed.
Hope knew Ryan slept when she felt the warm mist of his even breath falling on her breast. She thought of being bent over, spread wide and restrained while she stared up at the headboard of the bed—a bed that she'd slept in since her eighteenth year.
Never in a million years would she have thought she'd experience such grandeur, such depths of the human experience as she had while staring at such a mundane object as the brass bed in her bedroom at 1807 Prairie Avenue.
Ryan turned his chin in his sleep, brushing his lips across her nipple. Her fingers tightened in his thick hair as a powerful wave of emotion crashed into her. Tears burned her eyelids.
She loved him. She loved him so much. Illogically, perhaps, for there really hadn't been enough time to truly understand one another's true selves.
But what was a self compared to a soul?
A sob shuddered through her.
She carefully lifted Ryan's head from her breast and slid a pillow beneath his cheek. He scowled slightly in his sleep, as though he hadn't cared for the replacement. Still, he didn't waken.
Hope stood and went over to the mantel, pausing at the side of the hearth. She placed her hand upon the ledge and bent over, thinking. It was actually a familiar pose of pensiveness. The fire that was usually in the hearth was warm, and she was naturally drawn to it, but her father always worried about her long skirts catching fire if she drew to close.
So she reserved her thoughts—and her tears—for the periphery of the mantel.
For the first time she allowed the image of what Ryan had looked like when she'd asked him earlier today if he'd been able to travel through the great barrier of time to reach her because of his love for her.
For a split second, he'd looked cornered—trapped at the idea of having to answer.
Profound love, even if it did exist mutually, didn't mean they could necessarily bridge the cultural differences of a century. What it meant to Ryan to care for her . . . even love her, didn't have the same consequences in the year 1906 as it did in the year 2008. As much as Hope had yet to learn about Ryan's world, that much had been made abundantly clear to her.
Hope lifted her head and stared at Ryan as he lay sleeping and peaceful upon the brass bed. Such a big, supple . .. beautiful male animal. Again, tears smarted behind her eyelids.
Is this what true love entailed? That she be willing to sacrifice everything in order to gain an even fuller, richer existence?
And what if she made the wrong choice?
She swung around abruptly and stifled a frustrated sob, pounding her fist against her thigh. The tension inside of her spirit felt nearly as untenable as the sexual friction Ryan had built in her flesh. How to soothe herself without bre
aking into wretched tears and disturbing Ryan while he slept so peacefully?
She decisively reached toward the carved mantel, pressing on the well-worn center of a twining branch of leaves. The secret drawer popped forward.
Who knew? Perhaps her copy of Mr. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was still secreted inside after all these years? Hope had always read to soothe her stormy moods, and she doubted anything—even her beloved Shakespeare—would offer a better match to her volatility than Mr. Whitman's carnal prose that spoke so honestly of the joys and sufferings of the human spirit.
Hope's brow crinkled in confusion when she drew out a number of large photographs instead of Leaves of Grass.
For several stretched moments as she looked at each one, nothing moved. Nothing in the universe. Certainly her heart didn't stir, did it?
A memory that she hadn't considered significant at the time /suddenly sprang into her consciousness. She recalled the expression on Ryan's face when she'd exited Eve Daire's storeroom just this afternoon and interrupted him as he talked.
There's something I haven't told Hope yet— something about some photographs I found of her at the mansion—
Now that Hope reflected on it, his lame explanation about the police archival photos of her didn't really adequately explain that statement.