Big Sky Wedding (26 page)

Zane waited in the kitchen, carrying on a one-sided conversation with Snidely, who lost interest as he greeted the other dogs with sniffs and some tail-wagging.

“Here,” Brylee said, handing Zane the clothes she’d just purloined from Casey’s laundry room. “Put these on before you catch your death of...something. The shower is that way.” She pointed.

He grinned then, and she saw a fire kindle in his eyes, warming her through and through, which was unsettling, considering she hadn’t been cold in the first place.

Zane didn’t head for the shower right away, though. Instead, he took Brylee’s hand. A white-hot charge jolted through her, and he asked the question without saying a single word.

She bit her lower lip and nodded yes.

Which was how the two of them wound up in her bathroom, kissing desperately and repeatedly, all the while peeling off each other’s clothes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I
T
’
S
TOO
SOON
for this,” Zane gasped, as they stood under the steady spray of Brylee’s shower, clinging together, bare-ass naked and reveling in it. Kissing again and again, finding it impossible to stop, except to draw in brief, ragged breaths.

“I know,” Brylee agreed, and she slid her arms around his neck, loving the hard smoothness of his skin, the magnificent contour of his chest and shoulders, the lean power of his hips and thighs.

“And I don’t have a—” Zane managed, between yet another kiss and the one that would inevitably follow.

Brylee, figuring there would be plenty of time for regrets later, had planted herself squarely in the present moment; she felt fully alive and one thousand percent female. Her left brain was on hiatus, leaving her imagination and her body at the controls. “Condom?” she finished for him, when their mouths broke apart again.

Zane nodded. Water poured down over his head, beading in his eyelashes, flowing in rivulets between well-defined chest and arm muscles. “And our first time together
isn’t
going to be in the shower.”

So there
would
be a first time, then. And that implied that there would be
other
times, didn’t it? Glory be.

Brylee had been intimate with very few men, and not one of them had offered her an out, the way Zane just had. Nope, it had been full-throttle, zero-to-sixty in seconds, a two-body free-for-all.

“What’s wrong with making love in the shower?” she teased, wanting to prolong the moment, to prolong
everything,
running the tip of one finger lightly along the line of Zane’s breastbone. The hair on his chest was golden, lighter than his hair, and surprisingly fine, almost silky.

He groaned and drew her against him, his fingers interlaced behind her bottom, even as he continued to argue. “Nothing,” he said, in a rasp, “it’s just that—”

Brylee laughed, exultant, fully herself in a way she’d never dared to be before, ever, at any point, in any situation of any kind, in the whole of her life. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll use the bed.”

She turned off the shower spigot then and slipped past Zane, making sure to brush against him so that all relevant points of contact touched, generated sparks in the process. She grabbed a towel for herself and then tossed a second one to him.

He caught it with slightly unsteady hands and began to dry himself off while Brylee wrapped her towel around her upper body, toga-style, tucking it beneath her armpits. The bottom of the swath of terry cloth barely reached the tops of her thighs.

Even then, Zane wasn’t through making his case, which seemed to be promoting celibacy. “There’s still the problem of—”

Brylee rolled her eyes, laughed again. “I happen to have a few on hand,” she said, opening a cabinet where she stored various articles one might expect to find in any ordinary bathroom. She ferreted through tubes of various sorts of pastes and creams and ointments, over-the-counter cold remedies, most of which were probably past their expiration dates, though this certainly wasn’t the time to find out, the usual hair-care products and a carton of tampons. In the way back, she found it, a small box tucked away behind all the other stuff. She handed it to him.

Zane eyed the supply of condoms with an expression of mingled relief and concern. Whatever misgivings his mind might be entertaining, his
body
said,
Go for it.

Brylee hoped he wouldn’t raise any awkward questions, especially the kind beginning with words like
who
and
when.

“Don’t ask,” Brylee advised pertly, turning to head for her bedroom.

Zane could follow or not—his choice.

They’d reached a crossroads, she supposed. Go or stay, put up or shut up.

He chose to follow.

Zane wore his towel wrapped around his waist now, and he set the condoms on the nightstand and then reached for Brylee, pulling her close again, a low growl-like sound rising from his diaphragm.

Passion surged through her, along with a strange and crazy joy, and a whole tangle of other emotions, all of them jubilant and fiery and—okay—
brazen.

“Fresh out of excuses?” she asked, with a little smile. Lordy, he was a wonder, a cowboy with the body of a classic Greek statue, come to life.

Zane chuckled. “Fresh out,” he conceded.

And then he kissed her, not feverishly like before, but deeply, thoroughly, with just the right combination of gentleness and strength. She loved that his muscles were chiseled and lean, rather than bulky, but that observation soon vanished, along with every other coherent thought in her head.

If the kiss outside the Boot Scoot had been jarringly, fiercely, damnably good, this one raised the bar, well into the realm of the transformative, the impossibly perfect, the predestined. It was a bold claiming, it was reverent homage; it was as all-consuming as a wildfire racing out of control, gobbling up everything in its path.

Brylee knew it for sure then, that there would be no second-guessing this time around, no retreat. She’d fled from the last kiss, dashed home from Parable in a tizzy of confused desire, berating herself the whole way. Now, no power on earth could have made her turn tail and run.

She
wanted
this dangerous thing, wanted Zane Sutton, the way a drowning person fights for air, and consequences be damned. She was a grown-up, not a child, and she was tired of shunting aside perfectly normal human needs, tired of denying herself the pleasures her body and even her soul were wired to crave. Tired of pretending that what she had—money, independence, a well-earned confidence in her own abilities—was enough.

Because it wasn’t. Not for her.

The kissing went on for a long time, slower now, generating sensations so profound, so poignant, that tears of amazement stung Brylee’s eyes at intervals, fell like rain into the broken canyons and dry meadows of her heart, each one a seed of wholeness and healing, certain to take root and then thrive.

They soon wound up on the bed—she didn’t recall the mechanics—and she grasped at Zane as he laid her down, poised himself above her, nibbling at an earlobe, stroking her from breast to thigh, again and again, ever so slowly and ever so gently, until she thought she might implode with the need to be joined with him, have him inside her, make him part of her.

But the man refused to let her set a faster pace; every move he made was separate and distinct from any other, a miniature eternity in its own right. He savored one of her breasts, then the other, at his leisure, and he made no secret of the fact that he was enjoying her far too much to be rushed.

His attention to each luscious detail of loving her made her feel beautiful, desirable, even cherished. It also made her that much more desperate.

Brylee whimpered and tossed her head from side to side on the pillow as the pleasure built inside her, rising to impossible heights, surpassing even those, and then subsiding, like an ebbing tide. Just far enough, though, to drive her even
closer
to the brink of dissolving in a huge burst of fire and light.

“Soon,” she choked out, at long last, “Zane, please,
soon
—”

But Zane only chuckled and made his meandering way down the hills and hollows of her body, already quivering as every nerve came alive under his mouth, his hands, his tongue.

And then he was at her very core, the apex of her femininity, easing her legs apart, preparing her.

Only an instant after she realized what he was about to do, and gave a long, guttural and completely involuntary groan of surrender and false protest, she was in his mouth.

He nibbled, he teased, he feasted. The feeling was exquisite, unrelenting.

A ball of fire rolled up from Brylee’s very center, split itself into separate blazes to shoot down her legs and along her arms, wringing a low, lusty shout from her that came from somewhere deep, deep within her. Her toes
and
her fingers curled with the effort to hold on, to keep from hurtling skyward in ecstasy.

The release, when Zane finally allowed her to have it, shattered Brylee into sweet, tremulous fragments, each one aflame and trailing sparks. For a few moments, she couldn’t see or hear or think—only feel.

It was glorious.

Afterward, he took his time kissing his way back up to her mouth, pausing to tease her navel, to taste the hard peak of each breast, to arouse her all over again, so that she gave a soblike croon of hungry welcome when, at last, his lips found hers again.

“You have to be sure about this, Brylee,” Zane said, very quietly. “We can still stop, if you say the word, but if this goes much further—”

She opened her eyes, her hands still trailing up and down his back, dreamily now, instead of the frantic haste of before, each finger tracing a path from Zane’s strong shoulders to his firm buttocks, following the same course, over and over. Instinctively, she entwined her fingers in his still-damp hair, as she’d done while he was pleasuring her moments before, and she murmured, “No more talk, cowboy. Just make love to me—right
now.
”

Zane grinned, reaching for the box on the nightstand, taking out a packet and tearing it open, and finally putting on the condom, his every motion smooth, practiced, unhurried.

No doubt about it. This wasn’t
his
first rodeo.

He studied her face once more, his eyes solemn and searching, alert to any sign of reluctance on her part, and then he eased himself inside her, just far enough to give her one last shimmering mirage of a chance to say no.

And to make her want him even more.

When Brylee bit her lower lip and arched her back instead of putting an end to their lovemaking, wordlessly offering herself, he took her in a single, deep-driving stroke, filling her with his hardness and power and heat in ways that were more than physical, pausing in her depths, letting her body seize around him in spasms so delicious she wasn’t sure she could bear them.

Slowly, Zane began to move on top of Brylee,
inside
Brylee, conquering her and yet surrendering to her, and she matched his rhythm with her own, thinking she might die of the wanting and the need if he didn’t bring her to an almost immediate climax and, at one and the same time, praying these sensations would never, ever end.

She’d enjoyed sex, whenever she’d felt close enough to a man to make herself vulnerable, which hadn’t been that often, but this—
this
—was so much more than she’d even guessed was possible.

Their pace increased slowly, their bodies grew slick, and both of them moaned as the friction intensified, Zane’s cries torn from him, low and ragged and hoarse, Brylee’s responses eager and greedy for more of him, all of him, body
and
soul.

When their restraint finally snapped, it happened simultaneously, causing them to flex in unison, straining wildly, taking and giving and, most of all,
sharing.

Brylee soared, breathless and dazed, long after Zane had recovered his control, and he murmured gently, senselessly, in her ear, while she came apart in his arms.

Nonetheless, his meaning was as clear as if he’d spoken every word in plain English:
It’s okay, let it happen, let go—you’re so beautiful—I knew it would be like this. I
knew.

By the time Brylee crashed back into her everyday self, with the virtual impact of a skydiver sans parachute striking hard ground from a very great height, Zane had already begun to kindle new desires in her.

He succeeded admirably.

And the lovemaking, this lovely communion of two bodies, went on—and on. Brylee couldn’t have said for how long, but she was pretty sure the condom supply was destined to give out soon.

Time shifted; the past and the future blended seamlessly into one magical
now.
The rain stopped hammering at the roof. The light changed.

An hour might have passed, or a day, or a decade—Brylee had no way of knowing, didn’t care. She’d been lost in Zane Sutton’s touch, his words, his kisses, for what seemed like always.

“I have to go,” he said presently, his head resting beside hers on the pillow, his breath warm in her hair and soft against her ear, one leg sprawled over both of hers, a welcome, steely weight against her skin.

Brylee didn’t object to Zane’s leaving; she had too much self-respect for that. Nor did she ask when she’d see him again, or if he’d call soon, or what he was feeling—physical satisfaction, certainly, but was there some regret, too?

She didn’t dare explore
his
feelings, since her own were confounding enough. She was happy and, somehow, sad, too. She was at once mended and broken, restored and ruined. She was completely, deliciously sated, but she knew Zane could stir her, make her need him again, turn her right back into the she-wolf she’d been only minutes before, clawing at his back, pleading with him for more and then still more, making plaintive, howl-like sounds when another release overtook her.

If he’d chosen to do that, anyway. Which he didn’t.

She couldn’t say anything at all. Doubted, in fact, that she would have the strength even to whisper his name, let alone make any speeches.

Zane kissed her once more, briefly and gently, and then he was sitting up, getting out of bed, finding the clothes she’d lent him after they came in out of the rain, putting them on. He paused in the bedroom doorway, a figure framed in faint light, coming from where Brylee didn’t exactly know, and she heard him sigh, a heavy sound that settled over her chest like a chilly blanket and made it hard to breathe.

“Brylee,” he said. That was all.

It wasn’t a question or a statement, it wasn’t a reprimand, and it wasn’t a promise, either. He said it again, in a husky voice, and then he turned away, and the doorway was dark and empty with his absence.

Brylee pulled the rumpled covers up over her head and snuggled down into the soft, tangled, still-moist sheets. She waited to feel something—rage or grief, joy or sorrow, but there was only the sweet aftermath of being loved the way she’d yearned to be loved, and blessed exhaustion overtook her in the next moment