Rexanne Becnel (31 page)

“Tanner,” she whispered, not meaning to impart such a wealth of emotion in that solitary word. “Tanner,” she pleaded with him, unaware she even did so.

“Don’t do this,” he replied, the words low and guttural. Pained even. “Don’t, Abby.”

But it was too late. Even had she known how to stop—or what to stop—she would have been unable. In the midst of chaos Tanner stood rock hard. Firm. In the midst of terror he brought salvation. In the midst of death he was life itself.

She leaned toward him, just a fraction of an inch, the merest shifting of her weight in his direction. He drew her the rest of the way, lifting her free of the saddle and sliding her down along his rigid length, down until they were locked together, chest to breast, belly to loins, thigh to thigh. Tanner’s arm encircled her, crushing her, pressing her to him in an almost desperate embrace. Abby clung to his neck, her arms fastened around him, her fingers caught in his shoulder-length hair.

And their lips met.

Amid all the trappings of hell on earth, Abby found heaven in their kiss. It quenched a thirst that was parched for relief. It fed a hunger that consumed her soul. It filled every crack and crevice and ache in her heart. Just that clinging together, that meeting in mutual longing and need, made all that was wrong disappear. It made everything right.

But if she was starving for this—this affirmation of life, this need to affirm it only with him—he was positively ravenous. He took possession of her mouth with his lips and then with his tongue. Not tentative. Not gentle. But needy and demanding. It was what Abby wanted above all things.

His mouth slanted across hers, fitting them closer as his tongue slid between her sensitive lips in the most provocative manner. In and out he boldly stroked, causing her entire body to react each time he dipped deep, then seductively drew away. Like the telegraph lines she’d heard of, his kiss sent an urgent message skittering up and down her spine, making her skin heat, her breasts tingle, and something warm turn over deep inside her, someplace way down low.

Then he slid one of his hands down her back and over her derriere to cup her bottom and press her close, and her legs nearly melted beneath her. Fire erupted inside her, a brilliant, life-giving fire, and Tanner was at its source.

Abby gasped at the yearning pleasure of it. His long fingers curved very near the apex of her thighs. He gloried in her thighs, the blasphemous thought came to her. Like the bridegroom in Solomon’s Song, he gloried in her thighs. And she gloried as well.

She clutched his head between her hands, reveling in every new sensation. The rake of his stubbled cheeks against her palms. The smell of sweat and mud and leather—and man—that was him and him alone. The firm contours of his mouth.

Emboldened, she used her tongue to explore his mouth as he’d done to her, rubbing back and forth between his lips, gasping when he sucked her tongue farther into his mouth. Back and forth, tongues and lips, they danced the ritual dance, and the fire that had seemed so hot inside her only grew with each new step.

When at last they drew a little apart, each of them gasping for breath, each of them overtaken by passion, his head fell to her shoulder and his lips found her neck and ear. He trailed hot kisses along the overly sensitive skin there, then nibbled and tugged at her ear until she was squirming against him. He thrust his hips forward in response, and it was then Abby realized that he was as affected as she—
aroused
was the term, she knew. For against her belly, hard and insistent, she felt the proof of it.

It should have frightened her, but it didn’t. Instead she was filled with a heady sense of power, purely feminine and wholly new. He desired her every bit as much as she desired him. No, she desired him
and
loved him, the unbidden thought came as she reveled in the crushing pleasure of being caught between his hard arousal and his possessive hand. She loved him, but did he love her?

“Tell me to stop.” The words were a hot, urgent demand in her ear. A plea, almost. “Tell me to stop before it’s too late.”

It is too late.
She turned her head and kissed him, rubbing the entire length of herself against him in shameful repudiation of his demand. Her nipples, hard and alive as they’d never been, felt the nuances of his shirt and vest and even the ridges of his chest muscles. The soft place between her hipbones pressed against the thickness of him, pillowing his thrusting need. And her mouth demanded that he kiss her back.

Still he struggled to reason with her. “You don’t know—you don’t know what you’re doing, Abby.”

But she did. Or at least she was fairly certain she did. When he capitulated, however—a low curse and a sudden crushing embrace that lifted her off her feet and swung her around and around until she was dizzy and giddy and no longer aware of up or down, right or wrong—she wasn’t certain of anything at all.

For a few moments she’d been in control, and it had been incredible. Now he took over, setting her down in a bed of sedge and foxtail barley, tossing aside his hat and stripping off his holster, vest, and shirt. Abby lay there, bereft of his warmth, scared of what she might have unleashed, yet still desperate to finally know the answer to all those secrets between a man and a woman. And to know them through Tanner.

In a moment he spread a blanket for them. Then he extended a hand to her, and in that instant she knew that the decision could still be hers. She could turn away and he still retained enough self-control to let her do so. Despite the dark of the prairie night she nevertheless could see that much in his eyes. He wanted her. His harsh breathing and smoldering gaze left her in no doubt on that score. But he wouldn’t force her.

As those other men would have.

For an awful second that horror intruded. Then she reached her hand to him, and all else faded away. Tanner was a hard man. He could be violent and cruel. But he would never force her to this act. She would have to come willingly.

As he met her hand and took it into his own strong grip, she was willing.

They lay down on the blanket together beneath the two cottonwoods. The ancient pair formed an enclosure for them, a private bower that excluded the rest of the world. The wind sighed for them, cool and refreshing. Some night-hunting bird offered its mournful solitary song for them. A mosquito buzzed but then disappeared, so that for Abby there was only Tanner.

He knelt at her feet and unlaced her boots—so ordinary a task, yet made intimate beyond all understanding because he did it for her. He rolled her stockings down and then left her skirt bunched at her thighs as he lightly caressed her ankles and calves and knees.

Abby’s heart pounded so violently, she feared it must surely burst right then and there. With every touch, every gentle stroke, he pitched her anticipation to new and impossible heights. A low moan came—hers? Her breathing quickened to a fast, shallow panting. She needed to breathe deep.

She couldn’t breathe at all.

Then his hands disappeared beneath her skirt, slipping up along her thighs, and Abby thought she would surely faint. It was so exquisite to have him touch her there. She felt the toughness of those limber hands, and every callus on his fingers and palms as they caressed the soft, secret flesh beneath her skirts. She’d imagined these things in her private, dark wonderings. But the tiny thrills she’d felt then were nothing like this. Nothing at all.

Her eyes came open when he stopped—when had they fallen closed? As she watched, he removed his own boots and socks. Then, never taking his eyes from her, he peeled his dusty trousers down.

In the sparse light of the crescent moon and watching stars, he stood, clad only in his long drawers. Drawers much like what her father had worn. Like every man wore, she supposed. But though she’d seen such garment hanging from many a clothesline and indeed had washed her father’s often enough, she’d never seen them on a man. Against the soft fabric his maleness strained, almost like something alive and apart from him, a separate something that was necessarily a mystery to all females. But she had ever been a curious student, and she was mightily curious now.

No, more than curious. She
needed
to know about such things. She needed to know or else she would surely expire from the tumultuous feelings inside her.

He freed the two buttons at the waist and with one swift movement removed the last of his clothes. Then he stood, proud and motionless at her feet, while she quite simply stared.

At the sight of his masculine nakedness Abby was positively unsettled. He was so unlike her—so unlike any woman—as to make him seem part of some other species. He was hard and lean, his body sculpted in planes and hollows that bore no resemblance to hers. Ripples of muscles patterned his stomach where she was soft and smooth. Hair made dark designs on him—dark at the chest, narrowing down his stomach. Then at his groin that bold, jutting flesh that was meant to fit within her.

Something warm and wet stirred between her legs, and she shifted restlessly. She lifted her eyes back to his shadowed face. “Shall I … shall I remove my dress?”

He shook his head. “Allow me.”

With that simple declaration, words that a gentleman might say on any number of occasions to a lady, the most exquisite sort of torture Abby could ever imagine began. He joined her on the blanket and once more kissed her, long, slow, mind-drugging kisses that had her clutching him to her. But whenever she tried to get too near, he held her off.

“Slow down, sweetheart. Let me show you how.”

With great effort she did so, lying back, breathing hard, and trying not to imagine how he’d learned what he meant to show her now. That he’d done this with another woman—or other women—didn’t bear thinking about.

But Tanner swiftly drove those thoughts out of her mind, for once more his hand wandered up beneath her skirts even as his mouth trailed kisses down her neck and throat. Then his lips moved along her collarbone to her chest and the upper swells of her breasts, and Abby stopped breathing again. When had the small buttons of her blouse come undone? When had he opened her bodice to expose her chemise to his view?

Those questions, however, needed no answers, for truly she did not care. Her left arm curved around his head; her fingers tangled in his hair as his mouth moved in devastating kisses to the loosened edge of her lace-trimmed chemise. Just as surely as he roused her nipples into hard, yearning crests, anticipating the first touch of his clever lips to their aching need, so did his fingers wend their way, amid several fiery side forays, to the damp place at the juncture of her legs.

Then both goals were simultaneously attained, and Abby cried out both in relief and in a greater need. His lips caught her left nipple through the soft cotton fabric, wetting, sucking, destroying her very sanity, just as his fingers dipped inside her. She nearly came off the blanket, as if lightning had flashed from the sky to strike her, to jolt her to the absolute depths of her being. To scar her and leave her forever changed, forever marked by this one moment in time.

He sucked her breasts, evoking soft cries that Abby didn’t even know she made. His fingers dipped deeper, slipping rhythmically as his tongue had done in her mouth, stroking with unbearable accuracy, burning with its heat any shred of decency that should demand that she make him stop. He stroked in a slowly building pulse, alternating the attentions of his mouth from one of her breasts to the other, and Abby began to pant in an uneven panic.

“Something … something …”

Her hands twisted the blanket into knots. Her heels dug in as she rose to meet the unholy rhythm he’d created. Then his fingers slid up to a new place and she nearly swooned with a new form of agony. His head lifted from her breasts and he watched her face with an avidity that embarrassed her.

“No,” she whispered, turning her face so that he could not see. It was somehow wrong if he could see what he did to her. How he made her so wanton. How he made her so willing.

“You want me to stop?” His hand stilled, though his breathing still came fast and hard, almost as if it hurt him to breathe.

“No,” Abby answered without even thinking. She looked back at him, fearful, needy. Confused.

He stroked her again, a long, sensuous slide of his finger within the damp folds of her most private place. It wrenched a hoarse groan from her throat.

“Do you like this, Abby?” he asked, low and urgent as he started up the rhythm once more. “Do you?”

She was breathing so hard, she could barely answer. But his dark, unrelenting gaze forced her to. “Don’t watch me,” she pleaded, knowing she bared everything to him now. “Don’t …”

“But that’s the best part,” he answered, an odd note in his voice. Then his tone grew huskier still. “I want to watch you shatter under my hand.”

He dipped his finger inside her, then began to rub the same place again, the place she’d not even known she possessed. “I want to watch as you find that ultimate pleasure.”

That ultimate pleasure. Could there be even more than this? Abby wondered as she met his intent gaze. Then all rational thought shut down and she gave herself over to him.

He kissed her, taking absolute possession of her mouth and thrusting his tongue in and out, mirroring the action of his hand. There
was
more. There was, she realized dimly as her body lifted and strained—and then suddenly peaked.

Like a visceral bolt of lightning, a jagged burst of heavenly energy, it tore through her, scaring her—killing her with its very intensity.

Abby was stunned almost senseless, blind to all but this piercing inner turmoil, deaf to anything but the rush of her own blood in her ears. But before she could recover, before her world stopped spinning, Tanner covered her with his body.

Her clothing somehow was gone. Where her skirt had been his powerful thighs now lay. Where her blouse and chemise had rested his chest now pressed. He parted her thighs with his own, even as he once more slid his finger inside her.

Abby stared up at him in wonder. There was more to come? Then his freed hand curved around her cheek, holding her for his kiss while his other hand guided the heated length of him to where he’d touched her before.