Her distress was severe enough that she would never remember removing her shirtwaist and skirt or her petticoats. But she would always remember the strange freedom of being naked in the open night air, and the dizzying, wrenching need to cover herself and shield her legs from his eyes. Shamed, wanting to hide, she dropped her head and did not look at him until he spoke.
“You are so beautiful,” he breathed. Standing over her, rampant in the moonlight, he gazed down at her body. “You are as lovely and as perfect as I imagined you would be.”
Afraid to believe, afraid to trust, she dared a look at him and felt her heart wrench when she read his expression and understood that she truly was whole and beautiful in his eyes. She was as magnificent to him as he was to her.
“Oh, John,” she whispered, choking. Unable to speak further, unable to see him through a blur of tears, she opened her arms and he came to her. Kneeling, he clasped her tightly against his chest and she sucked in a hard breath when her breasts touched his naked hot skin. She hadn’t beleived she would ever again know the touch of bared hearts meeting, would never again experience the thrill of a man’s quickening breath and mounting passion or her own.
Gently, he eased her back on the blanket and warmed her from the night breezes with his body and his kisses and his hands. Unhurried, they explored each other with growing passion and joy. When his fingers and kisses traveled to her right leg, she tensed and would have pushed him away, but he would not allow it, would not permit a single inch of her body to go unloved, unworshiped.
Ceasing to resist, she lay back on the blanket, tears of gratitude and love brimming in her eyes. Then her insistent fingers teased him back up beside her and she began her own exploration with lips and hands and caressing fingertips. When they were wild and trembling with need, drunk with deep intoxicating kisses, John came to her. Gazing into her eyes, he thrust within her and Alex knew a joy that she had never dared imagine. This, then, was what it could be when two people gave of themselves entirely. This was what she had always longed for and had never known in the fullest sense.
Because it had never happened to her before, she didn’t recognize the sweet, almost unbearable tension building between her thighs. Each fevered kiss, each powerful thrust increased her pleasure, and the strange frantic tension raised a patina of perspiration to her skin and turned her wild beneath him. And then it was as if a wave crested and swept her away on a flooding sea of sensation and pleasure more intense than anything she had ever experienced.
When the wave subsided and she could breathe again, she stared up at him in gasping amazement and wonder. “Good heavens!”
Laughing, he bent to kiss her, then he allowed his own burst of pleasure. But he didn’t release her. Rolling to one side, he held her while a breeze played over their cooling bodies, drying the dampness on their skin. If Alex could have been granted one wish, she would have wished that these moments in his arms would never end.
“I was a captain in the Confederacy,” he said against her hair. “A surgeon.”
Holding her, speaking softly, he told her about his practice before the world went mad, and then he spoke of the horrors he had witnessed during the war. He remembered young men with shattered limbs and broken chests, and the despair of knowing he could not save them all. How he had almost welcomed his capture by the Union as an escape from the death and destruction he dealt with every day, and his own bone-deep weariness. But there had been horrors in the Union prison, too. When the final release came, he’d weighed 105 pounds, and the atrocities he had witnessed had seared his mind.
“I returned to my home in Atlanta, but there was nothing left. The foundation still stood, everything else was gone.”
“Were you married?” Alex asked. It was the first she had spoken in an hour.
“Elizabeth died before the war,” he said, stroking her hair. “My son and parents died the night Atlanta burned.”
“I’m so sorry.” Now she understood why he had chosen solitude and open spaces far from the company of men.
Easing away from her, he sat up and reached for the basket beside the blanket. He offered her a plum and a canteen of water. “It’s not very romantic,” he said, smiling at the canteen, “but the best I could manage in the circumstances.”
Laughing, Alex sat up, astonished that her nakedness and his did not embarrass her. She couldn’t have dreamed this would be possible.
“But I did bring you a present.”
“A gift?” she asked in surprise, wiping plum juice from her lips.
He reached to the side of the blanket and lifted the long narrow package she recalled seeing earlier. “Every person in the outfit helped with this. Dal bought the hickory at the Red River Station. Freddy cut a piece of canvas from her tent. Les found the padding among items in Ward’s wagon. Grady cut and cured the rawhide for the straps. I did the carving. There wasn’t a man in the outfit who didn’t help with the smoothing and polishing, including Luther.”