The Bride Wore Blue (10 page)

Her body’s reaction to his velvety promise was instant and electric. Heat infiltrated the night and her blood with a quick, aching anticipation. Sensation tingled along her skin, making her aware of the cool drift of the night breeze through the window, the warm, musky scent of sex clinging to the sheets and her skin, the hot, hard body of the beautiful man beneath her.

She bit her lower lip to keep from crying out when his huge, caressing hands slid down the length of her back, cupping and kneading her buttocks before drifting lower. Watching her face, reading her need, he gripped her thighs in a gentle hold and urged her to part them.

“Open up, Maggie. Let me show you how special you are to me.”

She swallowed hard and gave herself over to him, spreading her legs until she straddled his hips, her knees digging into the mattress at his sides.

His fingers spread wide along her thighs as his hands traveled to her hips and urged her to sit up, astride him. “Let me see how beautiful you are.”

With a slumberous stretch, she obeyed again, the drowsy, sexy look in his eyes convincing her his requests were motivated not by his need to control but by tenderness and a longing to please her.

She felt open and exposed yet as wanton as a woman in love when he lay silent beneath her, his gaze and his hands devouring her body in the soft night shadows.

“So beautiful. So special, Maggie mine,” he murmured as he raised his hands to the wild tangle of her hair and with widespread fingers raked it away from her face. “Tell me how to touch you. Tell me what you like.”

“Anything.” The huskiness of her admission told them both the power he held over her. His eyes flared with the fire of desire. “Anything you want to do,” she confessed shamelessly as she closed her eyes and rocked against his hips. With her back arched, her hair trailing down her back, she showed him with her motions, urged him with her sighs, that all she needed was him beneath her, him inside her to make her come alive.

A groan of passion too powerful to suppress ripped from his throat as he reared up and, with the grip of his strong hands circumferencing her ribs, lowered his head to her offered breast. He consumed her with rough, open-mouth kisses, suckled her with a hunger born of her compliance, then pleasured her with a selflessness inspired by her giving.

He drew her deeply into his mouth then pulled away, teasing, tempting, tormenting her to a restless yearning that had her crying his name.

“Are you wet for me, Maggie?” he demanded, raking his teeth across her nipple as he reached between their bodies and sought his answer.

He groaned his pleasure against her distended nipple. “Sweet, sweet woman,” he growled as he eased a finger inside her slick heat and finessed her to yet another plane of need.

She moved against his questing caress, moaned when he found the swollen, sensitive nub of her femininity with his thumb and gave in to his velvet whisper. “Come for me…come for me.”

Pleasure coiled, swelled and exploded inside her with a wrenching series of powerful, shimmering detonations that stole her breath, robbed her strength and left her limp and spent against him.

He wrapped her in his arms, cradled her face against his chest and rocked her until her trembling subsided. When she could find the strength, she dragged her hair from her eyes, then looped her arms around his neck, cuddling closer. “You…you sure know how to make good on a promise,” she managed on a breathless sigh of contentment.

He chuckled and, gathering her tighter against him, shifted, lifted, then settled her on her back beneath him. “Promises,” he corrected as his mouth tracked in a maddeningly slow path down the length of her body. “Multiple promises,” he murmured as he gently bit her hip point, then moved to the inside of her thigh before cupping her hips in his hands and tilting her to his mouth. “Multiple pleasures for my lady.”

With exquisite attention to her needs, he proceeded to fulfill those promises…as she proceeded to come apart for him again in what proved to be a night of untold pleasures.

“Are you asleep?”

Blue’s voice drifted into her slumber on a hazy cloud of contentment and exhaustion.

She burrowed her face deeper into the pillow, then sighed with pleasure when she felt his hand stroke slowly up and down the length of her bare back. If she’d been a cat, she’d have purred when his mouth followed everywhere his hand had been.

“Wake up, Stretch, I want to show you something.”

She cracked an eye open, realized it was the middle of the night and tried to pull the sheet over her head. “Whatever it is, can’t it wait until morning?”

“Not this time. Come on. You’ll be sorry if you miss it.”

With a resigned groan, she rolled to her back so she could look at him. If he hadn’t reached out and grabbed her, she’d have spilled right off the side of the bed.

“Has anyone ever suggested that you take up an enormous amount of sheet space?” she grumbled good-naturedly when he made room and pulled her back toward the center of the mattress.

His face above hers was sober and sincere. “Not lately, no.”

Those few words relieved her much more than she wanted to admit as he slung a long, hairy leg over her thighs and drew her closer.

“As a matter of fact. Not for a very long time.” He hesitated then, his blue eyes probing. “And you. Has anyone suggested that you lay claim to your own side of the sheets very nicely, Ms. Adams?”

She held his gaze, knowing he deserved an answer, feeling compelled to give him one. “Only one. And it’s been a long time for me, too.”

Over a year, in fact, she calculated. While it had been only six months since she’d shared her co-op with Rolfe, it had been much longer since she’d let him share her bed.

She didn’t want to think about Rolfe now. Forcing his memory from her mind, she focused on Blue.

He was truly beautiful as he smiled down at her, his expression rich and warm and open. She stretched up and touched her mouth to his. “What was it you wanted to show me?” she asked huskily as her hand drifted to his chest, then wandered lower.

He laughed, retrieved her questing hand and gave her a scolding scowl. “Something you haven’t already seen tonight. Something you’ll always remember.”

“I’ll always remember
that.
” Her catlike smile had him groaning before he kissed her quickly and rose from the bed.

Offering a hand, he tugged her up with him. “Grab your robe and slip on some shoes.”

“What? Why?”

“No questions,” he insisted as he pulled up his jeans and toed on his deck shoes. “Hurry, or we’ll miss it.” His words were muffled beneath his sweatshirt as he dragged it over his head.

“This better be good,” she grumbled as she wrapped her robe around her and hunted up a pair of shoes.

Coming to her side, he pulled her flush against him. “I thought you’d decided to trust me.”

“That was before I accepted that you were certifiably insane. What kind of a man drags a woman out of a warm bed at…two in the morning?” she groused when she brought his wrist close to her face and checked his watch. “Are you really going to make me go outside?”

“You’re whining.”

She yawned sleepily and dove for the bed. “Your fault.”

Laughing, he hauled her upright again. “Come on. I promise, you won’t be sorry. And you know how I feel about promises.”

Hershey raised his head from his perch on the sofa when they passed by. Apparently he decided he wasn’t up for any nocturnal adventures and laid it back down with a lazy groan.

“I’m with you, Hersh.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” Blue laughed and waylaid her attempted detour back to the sofa, where she intended to curl up on the other end. Tucking her under his arm for security, he walked her toward the door.

They stepped out onto the deck, greeted by a sweet night breeze and an unearthly iridescent glow.

Suddenly awake and wary, she balked when he would have led her down the deck steps. “What
is
that?”

“That,” he said, coaxing her gently with him, “is a major miracle of nature. That,” he continued with an expansive lift of his hand to the heavens as they cleared the cover of trees and stood under an umbrella of surreal and dazzling color, “is what I didn’t want you to miss. Aurora borealis at its brilliant best.”

Enthralled, Maggie gazed toward the sky in wonder and awe. “Northern lights.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder as they looked skyward. “Now are you glad I woke you up?”

She was stunned, completely and totally mesmerized by the beauty of the mysterious phenomenon. Shimmering ethereal columns of reds and greens and blues of varying hues bled color to color in jagged vertical rainbow columns across the midnight Minnesota sky. “I’d only heard about them. I never realized how beautiful they were. And I thought they only occurred in winter.”

“Definitely more often in the winter, but occasionally we get a light show up here this time of year. Come on. Let’s walk out on the dock and get a better look.”

J.D. was drawn to the wonder in Maggie’s eyes as she stood there, her neck arched, her gaze cast skyward, her dark eyes reflecting the aurora, the moonlight and her pleasure.

“What causes it?”

“Does it matter?” he asked softly. “A true romantic doesn’t care what causes it. A true romantic simply enjoys it.”

“And you’re a true romantic, aren’t you, Blue?”

The sadness in her voice tore at him. Someone had taken her ability to believe in romance away from her. He was
determined to give it back, to dispel the shadows of doubt and make her believe again.

“A hopeless romantic,” he confessed. “Give me an old Cary Grant movie and I’m in heaven. Give me moonlight and I’m putty in your hands.”

“And give you northern lights?”

“Give me northern lights and I take it as a sign that I’ve got more than enough reason to believe in romance.”

His gaze sought hers in the dazzling light show. Sought, and probed and wondered if she would ever open up to him completely.

Someday.
Someday, he was determined she would. But not tonight. Tonight, he just wanted to please her.

“You’re right,” she murmured, turning her gaze back to the sky. “Something this wonderful shouldn’t be questioned. It should be enjoyed. Thank you, Blue. Thank you for showing it to me. It’s beautiful.”

“You’re
beautiful.” He wrapped her in his arms from behind and pulled her close. She was softness and substance and the renewed source of his strength. And in this moment, he wondered how he’d gotten by so long in his life without her. “And thank you for coming back to the lake so I could share it with you. I’m damn glad I found you again, Stretch.”

A deep breath eased through her slight body as she leaned back against him, covering the arms he’d twined around her waist with hers. “Me, too,” she murmured, then tilted her head back and around so she could see his face. “Me, too.”

He kissed her then. There on the dock, with the night breeze embracing them and the northern lights shining down. With the sense of being embraced by the forces of nature and a sense of completeness he’d never before known.

“Come on,” he whispered gruffly. “Let’s go back to bed.”

She turned in his arms, stopping him when he would have headed for the cabin. A warm, inviting light danced in her eyes.

His desire was eclipsed only by his love for her sense of adventure when he realized what she had in mind. A slow, pleased smile tipped up one corner of his mouth. “Here?”

“Here,” she confirmed, coming up on her tiptoes to whisper a slow, enticing kiss across his lips as she reached for the hem of his sweatshirt. “Now.”

The first pale light of the morning sun gilded the bare back of the man sprawled on his stomach sound asleep in her bed. And as she watched him, sleepy yet sated from a night of sweet, thrilling loving, Maggie was afraid she could let herself fall in love.

She should have felt more panicked. But it was getting harder and harder to remind herself that she couldn’t afford to let love happen. Not after a lifetime of learning the hard way that love was nothing more than an illusion. Lasting love, at any rate. From family. Between a man and a woman. She knew firsthand that denying that belief meant losing herself in dependency, degrading herself in need. She’d never intended to let herself fall into that trap again.

Yet as she watched her lover sleep, her intentions crumbled like dust in the wind. Blue Hazzard hadn’t given a hoot about her intentions. And now she was coming close to not giving a hoot about them, either.

“How did this happen?” she murmured in weary frustration as she lay back beside him and stared toward the ceiling for answers. Instead of answers, she got memories. Memories that reminded her why she was here and why she was a fool to have let herself get so involved.

No one had ever guessed the lie she had lived with Rolfe Sebastion. No one had ever known she was little more than a prisoner of Rolfe’s making.

She’d been seventeen when she’d moved to New York. Full of high hopes but no prospects, she’d been waiting tables and scurrying from one cattle call to another with dreams of making it as an actress when Rolfe Sebastion discovered her. The most acclaimed fashion photographer in the States had taken her under his wing as his student, his protégée, his favorite model. And when she’d turned eighteen, he’d made her forget all about her dreams of Broadway when he took her as his lover.

She wiped away a tear that pooled in her eye as she thought back to how easily he’d woven her into his web. Life as she’d known it had been an unending cycle of deprivation and neglect. Except for the Snyders, Rolfe was the first person to offer her an alternative. He’d developed her; he’d nurtured her; he’d enchanted her. Enchantment had turned reluctantly to disillusion, disillusion to painful despair as Rolfe’s nurturing degenerated over the years to demands—demands that had grown ugly and manipulative and as controlling as the sex that she’d mistaken for too long as love.

A determined tear escaped, trickling down her cheek and falling to the pillow. She’d thought he loved her. She’d been wrong.

And here she was again, deeply embroiled and deeply caring for another man. She turned her head to look at Blue. He was a man who was so unlike Rolfe it gave her new hope. A man who would, nonetheless, break her heart when he found out how weak she was, then leave her, in disgust, because of it.