On Pins and Needles (19 page)

Megan decided she'd come this far, she might as well go the rest of the way, but it would have been easier if Josh had seemed more receptive. As it was, the whole time she told him about what she'd realized about him, about herself, he remained stony-faced.

“I can't stop being who I am. I
won't
stop being who I am,” she said in conclusion when she'd covered everything. Well,
almost
everything. She hadn't told him how she felt about him because she was worried what his lack of reaction meant and didn't want to go too far out onto that limb.

“But if you think you can take me the way I am…” She let her voice dwindle off, waiting herself now.

Josh didn't jump right in the way she wished he would have. For another eternal moment he just went on watching her as if weighing what she'd said against some thing she couldn't imagine.

But when he finally did speak, his words were music to her ears.

“I love you, Megan,” he said matter-of-factly. “Just the way you are. I never asked you to be anything else.”

“I know. I know. What you were talking about Saturday morning were only compromises. They weren't what I took them for. I was just paranoid, I guess,” she said even as her mind was ringing with the fact that he'd told her he loved her.

Then his body language opened up, too. He un crossed
his arms and cupped his hands around the edge of the desk on either side of his hips.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked, obviously not wanting to tap into that paranoia again and so leaving things up to her.

“I don't know. That every-night, every-morning thing sounds pretty good now.”

“Does that mean you'll marry me or is marriage asking too much and you just want to live together?”

Her heart actually felt as if it were soaring. “Marriage isn't asking too much. If you're asking.”

“I was asking last Saturday.”

“And now that you've had a week to think about it?”

Josh pushed off the edge of the desk and came to her, taking her into his arms. “Now that I've had a week to think about it I'm asking again. Will you marry me?”

“I will.”

“Because…”

“Because I love you, too.”

Apparently that had been the correct answer because it made him smile for the first time since she'd shown up there.

“You have put me through one lousy week,” he complained good-naturedly then.

“I take it that's why your brothers looked like they wanted to string me up.”

“They'll get over it.”

“But I under stand your allergy is better. Don't I get points for that?”

“You cured my sneezing and broke my heart.”

“Haven't I fixed that, too, now?” she said, tilting her chin to look up at his ruggedly handsome face.

“Mmm. Pretty much.”

“Only pretty much?”

He kissed her, a long, lingering kiss, as if that was what he needed to mend his broken heart. But then, as if it hadn't been enough, he said, “I think I need a deeper balm.”

“Oh? What did you have in mind?”

He showed her by pulling her so close she could feel the hard ridge of his desire for her.

“Here?” she asked with a scandalized laugh.

“I think it's what I need,” he reiterated with mock sincerity. “Then I can be convinced that you're giving yourself to me, heart and soul.”

“You're evil.”

He grinned to prove it. “I guess you better get used to the idea of marrying an evil man.”

“There's no lock on the door,” Megan said with a glance over her shoulder in that direction.

“Millie's gone for the day.”

“What if someone else comes in?”

“If they come in without knocking they deserve what they get.”

“And here I thought you were conservative,” she said as he kissed a path down the side of her neck to the hollow of her throat and lit tiny sparks in her bloodstream.

“Maybe it's you who's changin' me.”

“I don't want you changed. I want you just the way you are, too.”

“And I want you on that couch.”

Which was just where he took her, to the over stuffed sofa that lined the wall opposite his desk, capturing her mouth again as he laid them both down, his body more on top of hers than not.

But Megan didn't protest. The sense of wickedness that went with doing something completely inappropriate in his office just added to the titillation.

Not that she needed any more than she was getting as Josh unfastened the buttons that held her smock dress closed down the front and un clasped her front-hook bra, too. Certainly she didn't need more titillation than she was getting when his hand closed over her already engorged breast and began to work his wonders with her nipple.

But if she was going to be exposed she decided he was, too, and she didn't hesitate to pull his shirt tails from his jeans, to undo his buttons and slip the uniform shirt off his shoulders so she could have access to his glorious back and shoulders and biceps and pectorals.

By then the week-long hunger for him that Megan had been fighting grew bigger than she was and she lost all aware ness of where they were, of everything but Josh and being there with him, having him do all the things she'd lain in her bed and torturously relived each night since last Friday.

But this was no torture as some where along the way his jeans came off and she came all the way out of her dress and her underthings. As his mouth and tongue and hands explored her, aroused her, nearly drove her wild. As she filled her own hands, her own mouth, her
own senses with every inch of him until neither of them could stand not to be joined and he slipped into her as seamlessly as if he were meant to be a part of her.

And together they rode the tidal wave of a passion set free. A passion they now could—and did—indulge in without inhibition. A passion that sealed them as one and gifted them with an ecstatic peak of pleasure so intense neither of them could do anything but hold on to the other and let it take them higher and higher, melding their bodies, their spirits, their lives into one.

And when that passion, that ecstasy, had spent itself, they settled in the soft cushions of the couch, Josh on his side, the wonderfully heavy weight of his thigh across hers, as he kissed her again. A deep, replete, bonding kiss.

“I do love you, Megan,” he whispered.

“Weird nesses and all?”

“Weird nesses and all.”

“Good. Because I love you, too.”

“Conservativeness and all?”

She glanced down at their naked, entwined bodies. “Oh yeah, conservativeness and all,” she said with a laugh.

“Besides, maybe you aren't so weird,” Josh added. “I met Kate McDermot today and she told me to tell you she had an ultra sound and you were right—she's having a girl.”

“Of course I was right,” Megan said. But that wasn't the only thing she felt confident about. As Josh kissed her once more, sweetly, slowly, and with passion rising between them again already, Megan also felt confident
that despite their differences they really could have a future together as man and wife.

Because in that moment when his mouth was plundering hers yet again, when his hands began the miracles they could work on her body, and his desire for her was making itself known, she knew without a doubt that none of their differences were greater than the love they shared.

The love they would go on sharing for the rest of their lives.

The love that would allow them to celebrate their differences, to revel in them, and to accept each other without ever asking for more.