He stood up, stumbling and off balance. This time his chair did topple backward. It landed on the floor with a crash. Neither of them noticed. His arms slid around her waist, hers around his neck. He drew her body tightly against his. Where hers was bowed, his arched to complement it.
“Oh, God.” He tore his mouth from hers and pressed it against her neck. The fingers of one hand ravaged her hair, threading through it and weaving it between his fingers. It became hopelessly ensnared in his grip, which was exactly what he wanted. He pulled her head back and stared down into her face. His was taut with desire.
She met his gaze without shyness. “Kiss me again, Cooper.”
His mouth claimed hers again, hotly and hungrily. It drew breath from her. As he kissed her, his hand moved to the front of her slacks. He fumbled with the button and zipper until they were undone. When his hand slid into the elastic waistband of her panties, Rusty gasped. She had thought there would be a sensual buildup, a flirtatious progression, extended foreplay.
She didn’t regret that there wouldn’t be. His boldness, his impatience, was a powerful aphrodisiac. It set off explosions of desire deep within her. She tilted her hips forward and filled his palm with her softness.
He muttered swearwords that were in themselves arousing because they so explicitly expressed the height of his arousal. Like a Rod Stewart song, they were viscerally sexy; one couldn’t hear them without thinking of a male and a female mating.
He struggled with the fly of his jeans until his manhood was freed—a hot, hard fullness probing between her thighs. “I feel your hair against me,” he rasped in her ear. “It’s so soft.”
The erotic message made Rusty weak. She leaned back against the edge of the table and lowered her hands to his hips, inside his jeans. “Please, Cooper, now.”
One swift and sure stroke planted him solidly inside her. She gasped at the splendid pleasure and pain. He caught his breath and held it. They clung together like the survivors of a catastrophe—which, in fact, they were—as though their very existence depended on never letting go of each other. Oneness was essential to survival.
It was impossible to say who moved first. Perhaps it was simultaneous. After that initial instant of sheer delight in his total possession, Cooper began to delve deeper yet. He ground his hips against hers, extending himself, stretching her, his goal seemingly to be to reach the very nucleus of her soul.
Rusty, crying out in ecstasy, flung her head back. He randomly kissed her exposed throat and moved his mouth over her breasts, though she was still wearing her sweater.
But love play was unnecessary. Nothing could heighten this fire. Cooper’s plunging body became hotter and harder with each savage thrust.
Then he had no choice in the matter.
“You’re a very beautiful woman.”
Rusty gazed up at her lover. One of her arms was folded beneath her head. The other hand was draped over his shoulder. Her pose was provocative. She wanted it to be. She didn’t mind that her breasts were fully revealed and wantonly inviting. She wanted to display them for his entertainment. She enjoyed seeing his eyes turn lambent every time he looked at them and their pouting tips.
Maybe he’d been right all along. She’d shown a marked lack of modesty since she’d met him. Maybe she had been deliberately seductive because she had wanted him from the beginning. She had wanted this—this languishing aftermath of a coupling that had left her replete.
“You think I’m beautiful?” she asked coyly, running her fingers through his hair and smiling like the cat who had just lapped up the cream.
“You know I do.”
“You don’t have to sound so angry about it.”
His fingers trailed down the groove between her ribs all the way to her navel. “I am, though. I didn’t want to give in to your charms. I lost the battle with my own lust.”
“I’m glad you did.” She raised her head and kissed his mouth softly.
He dusted his fingertips over her navel. “For the time being, so am I.”
Rusty didn’t want them to be restricted to a time limit. “Why ‘for the time being’?”
It hadn’t taken them long to undress and make up the pallet in front of the fire. Stretched out naked on the pile of furs, hair a rumpled heap of reddish curls, lips rosy and wet from frequent kissing, eyes drowsy with lovemaking, Rusty looked like a conquering vandal’s battle prize. Cooper had never waxed poetic, surely not right after having sex. The thought brought an involuntary smile to his lips.
He surveyed her alluring body. “Never mind.”
“Tell me.”
“It has something to do with you and me and who we are. But I really don’t want to talk about that now.” He bent his head low and kissed the ginger curls between her thighs. They were damp. They smelled and tasted of himself and he felt his body respond. Her low moan worked as surely as a velvet-fisted caress on his rising sex. He sighed his pleasure. “Did you know that you’re very small?” he whispered into the fleecy delta. Her thighs relaxed and parted. His fingers slipped inside her.
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not all that experienced.”