Identity Crisis(88)

She lay beneath him unmoving, looking up at the sky. Then he kissed her throat again, and her nape and the lobe of her ear. ‘I won’t let you have control, Kendra. It’s ours to share, and that can be good, that can be so good. I’m not your father, and you’re not your mother. You’re Kendra Davis and you’re stunning, and I can’t get you out of my head, not even for a minute. I don’t know how the hell you did it, but you did.’ He eased his weight slightly to one side, giving her space, letting her breathe, giving her room to come back to him from the dark space where she kept herself way too often.

He didn’t know how long they lay there together surrounded by the night sounds. A great horned owl hooted somewhere in the trees. There was a very slight rustle of the evergreens in the breeze, and there was the sound of their own breath, in and out, in and out. At long last, he felt her fingers tracing the line his collar against his neck down to where it opened against his breastbone.

‘Are you all right?’ he whispered.

She only nodded, but he felt it, felt the reassuring in and out of her breath, felt the softness of muscles relaxed beneath him.

‘Garrett.’ She breathed his name. ‘Garrett, will you make love to me?’

He felt as though his chest would burst with the relief of it, with the knowing that she wanted him still, that she had come back to him, and to no one else. He forced his words around the tight knot of emotion in his throat. ‘There’s nothing I’d rather do right now, Kendra.’

With hands made unsteady by the catharsis he hadn’t expected, he unbuttoned her blouse and pushed it aside to kiss down her collarbone and onto the swell of her breasts rising and falling above the lace cups of her bra. She arched her back to bring herself closer to his lips. She lay beneath him, open, completely yielding as he had never seen her before. He eased the straps of her bra down, and with it the cups, until he could nurse on her nipples, already raised and tight. She sighed and gave a little grunt as he stroked his way down the flat of her belly, tight with her efforts to breathe. He toyed with her waistband only briefly before he opened her jeans and slipped his hand in to caress her soft curls. The shift and grind of her bottom raised her pubic bone into his caresses, and opened a path to her clit, resting heavy and tight at the apex of her. Another shifting of her hips and he could wriggle fingers down between her velvety folds, warm and slippery and opening to him. Her breath hitched, expanding her chest, pressing the rise of her breasts closer to his mouth. She curled her fingers in his hair and held him to her, held him against the place where her heart felt like the wild flutter of wings. And he was sure that if he listened hard, if he concentrated just a little more, he could hear the racing of the blood in her veins.

‘Please, Garrett,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t wait. I need you inside me. Please.’

He eased her jeans down until she could kick one leg free. She was already shoving his jeans and boxers over his hips. He managed a condom from his pocket and worried himself into it, less gracefully than he’d have liked, his efforts made clumsy by so much more than just arousal, so much more than just need. The vulnerability of the woman in his arms, and the gift of that vulnerability, was sobering. There was nothing he wanted more than to give her something in return, to give her the release she needed, to somehow give her more. Though he didn’t really know how, or what that more might be.

But there was not the time, nor the wit left to dwell on it. She lifted her hips, positioning herself for him, opening herself with one hand while the other took hold of him and guided him into her with a catch of her breath and a flutter of her eyelids. And God, it felt like heaven! It felt like he’d come home as she lifted her legs around his waist and locked her ankles behind his back and thrust up to meet him.

She came before he did, sobbing and convulsing, fisting tight fingers into the back of his shirt, gripping him with all her might until he could hold back no longer, until he came too. And it felt like he would never stop coming, like he wanted to fill her with all he was and make her understand that she wasn’t alone in her dark places.

‘That’s Cygnus, the swan.’ Garrett pointed to the cross of stars above them. ‘The bright star at the head is Deneb. The Big Dipper, you know. And over there, that one that looks like a sideways M, that’s Cassiopeia.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘I never knew the stars could be so bright.’

‘Ellis chose this place because there was no light pollution and the view of the night sky is stunning.’ But it wasn’t the night sky he was looking at.