She eventually succumbed to her own fatigue, but only when his vital signs remained steady and strong. She woke up to his body fused to hers, to his gaze tender and restored. It was such a privilege, such luxury to lie there, staring at him, exchanging expressions of gratitude for sharing the ordeal, halving the burden of recollections.
Then he advised her to get out of bed. He was hungry enough to eat her. She would have offered herself as fast food if she hadn’t needed to take care of him first.
The morning nurses came in and tried to do that. He wouldn’t let them. He wanted no one else near him. Gratitude, relief and pride choked her as she fed him breakfast and tended to his medical needs.
Not that anyone but him trusted her measures. With the morning rounds, the hordes of doctors were back, checking and double-checking them. Dante conceded that the fastest way to get rid of them was to go with the flow. This time he let them satisfy themselves, ooh and aah over his luck and improvement. Once the test results were back to confirm his stable condition, the happy news was announced to the panting press and representatives of the Azernian town whose people had been involved in the hostage situation. Then they were let in to visit him.
They got Gulnar’s rushed thanks out of the way before turning the full force of their gratitude on Dante. She tried to convey Dante’s discomfort at the extravagance of their emotions, but it only raised him higher in their eyes. They kept asking what they could do for him in return. It was clear that at the height of their emotions these people would have laid all their belongings, all their daughters at his feet.
No, scratch that. The daughters, and every other woman of every age and marital status, would hurl themselves there. No question.
He was turning away from the mirror now, bringing back that first moment when she’d seen him walking into that hall. After all he’d been through, poetry still coursed in his every move. Looking imposing and majestic in the ridiculous just-below-the-knee hospital gown had to be some world precedent, too!
She waited for her breath to return, her heart to resume beating. No such luck.
What was the matter with her? She’d already shared with him the most traumatic experiences two people could share, had had her hands all over him in every possible way—well, not every one, but she had kissed and fondled him. She’d slept with him—OK, beside him. But to be shy now? When she’d never known what shyness was? For heaven’s sake!
Her mind was incredulous but her body was going to pieces, her heart staggering in her chest with his every step closer.
Look away. Make a joke. Do something.
She escaped his intense gaze, only to find hers rushing down his body, greedy, feeding her rioting thoughts, inflaming her simmering senses.
She had noted the chiseled perfection of his torso and back while treating him. But it had been out of the question to salivate over them then. Now, with her body rested and replenished, with him out of danger, it was a different story. It was beyond her to resist making a visual feast of the rest of him, especially the parts she could see clearly, his legs, oh, my—those legs! She saw them between hers…
He stopped just a foot away. Oh, hell, he had to see her condition, read her thoughts. His gaze was burning. Then he dropped it.
He looked away, exhaled. “You won’t have to do anything else for me again, promise.” He paused, a grimace of disgust twisting his expressive features.
He really didn’t like imposing on others in any way, didn’t he? He really thought it was less than a total pleasure, tending to his every need. Time to disabuse him. “Let’s get one thing straight here, Dante. You can ask anything of me.”
Obsidian eyes turned on her now, explicit, stormy. “Anything, Gulnar?”
Oh, yes. Yes! Anything at all.
Reason tried to intrude, to point out their situation, his shooting just fourteen hours ago. Reason didn’t have a prayer. What was it anyway? Just stupidities and shackles designed to waste life and chances and foster regrets and bitterness. If he wanted her, if he would have her, she’d offer herself. She did, made the offer open-ended, total, unconditional. “Anything, Dante.”
He bent slowly, holding her eyes until he took her lips in a fierce press. In only seconds he stepped back, still uncertain. She pulled him back, her wary self-consciousness gone, the unconditional tenderness she reserved for impersonal duty, the unguarded faith opening her arms around him and her mouth to his tongue.
“Dante…” His name sighed on her lips, a celebration, a supplication, a second chance at life. Her first real chance. He absorbed it into him, took her lips, her breath, like their first kiss. And nothing like it. No tender reassurance here. There were no preliminaries, just all-out invasion and headlong surrender. Never before. This connection, this pure craving, this clear access to another. She had never even imagined this mix of lust and trust, carnality and vulnerability.
She’d been waiting for this for ever. For this man. And she’d never even known. Never known there was that much to dream of. Had it really been only a day? Yes, and it had been her real lifetime, erasing her barren existence before it. It was enough to know he existed, that she could feel this way. She’d never ask for more. Never be the same.
He staggered back, sagged down on the couch, keeping their lips fused, tried to bring her down on his lap.
She resisted his hungry power. “I’ll hurt you…”
His groan reverberated inside her. “I hurt more where I’m not touching you. Touch me, Gulnar, give me your mouth, your body.”
His need sent hers raging, sank her into his mouth again, gasping for him. His breath filled her lungs. Just hours ago, he’d had none. He’d nearly drowned in his own blood, suffocated on his own breath. The tears that had poured out of her soul as she’d struggled to restore his ability to breathe welled again, flooded both their faces. He licked them all, murmured his craving, his soothing, nipped her quivering chin, stilled it in his teeth.
“Dante, you’re in pain—every time you draw breath…”
His grunt confirmed her words, the sound so deep and dark it scared her, aroused her beyond endurance. He only pulled her back into his kiss, muttered against her lips, “Then you kiss me, Gulnar—save me the effort. Let me feel you, tesoro, feel your heat and life and desire.”
She could resist her hunger, for his sake. No way could she withstand his. She capitulated, straddled his thighs, hers taking her weight, her arms keeping her torso off his. He wouldn’t let her keep that distance, his left arm pressing her down and forward.
“Dante!” It was too much—too poignant, feeling him hard with life and arousal. The promise of all that power inside her, the completion, the merging. He snatched his lips from hers to bury his pained pleasure in her neck. She rained her own kisses all over the slashed planes of his face, scraping her abandon across his beard.
“Help me…” His left hand wasn’t up to opening her shirt unaided. She was up to doing anything he wanted and what he wanted was more of her flesh, her willingness. She’d give him all.
Another surge of moist heat flooded her, demanding him inside her, granting them both release and oblivion. Her lips fed at his pulse as she fell into his rhythm, their clothes a chafing barrier. She unbuttoned her top, and what he did then stopped her heart.
He just laid his face against her breasts and breathed her in, breathed out her name almost like a mantra, a prayer. For endless minutes they just stayed there, with his head hugged to her breast, her heart beating just because he’d said her name.
Then he rubbed his face over her breasts, had her writhing before his lips closed over one nipple. She arched on a seizure, on a mute scream. She knew her body, her senses. They weren’t equipped to register that much. Never had there been sensations fiercer than caution, greater than detachment. It had to be him, his effect, causing her metamorphosis.
His eyes captured hers, showing her what it would be like with him driving inside her, filling, inflaming, assuaging. Her muteness shattered, her cries rose, her disbelief, too. Just promising her with his eyes and he was bringing her closer to an unknown cataclysm. Her tremors became quakes.
“Gulnar—from the moment I first saw you, do you know what I wanted to do to you? With you? For you?”
His words, the total abandon they painted, every license she couldn’t wait to grant him. They released her from the crippling build-up, completing the climax that drained her, left her hungrier. The hands that held his head to her breast tore at his headscarf, needing her fingers in his hair, luxuriating and—she froze.
No hair. He had no hair!
Surprise flooded her, immobilized her. Then curiosity swelled by degrees. Dante, without the presumed dark wavy hair? She finally jerked away, bracing herself for a different Dante from the one already imprinted on her awareness, and—Oh!
Her every mental image and presumption disintegrated. What were those compared to his reality?
He—he looked as if he’d just stepped out of a medieval fairy-tale! A knight sworn to an ascetic order—shaved and fasting, perpetually prepared for to-the-death battles!
And he wasn’t shaving the rest of balding hair, like so many men did. A barely there raven shadow clearly delineated his healthy hairline. But it would have been a crime to cover such perfection with hair, no matter how luxurious. He just had to know how unique a shaved head made him look. If he didn’t, her stunned hunger would surely tell him.