She watched him, her eyes cautious and dark with passion. “I want this,” she said simply. “You make me crazy with wanting you.”
He pushed into her, felt her wet heat close around him as tightly as a surgical glove, and ground his teeth together to keep his concentration. He began to move, slowly, concentrating not only on his pleasure, but on hers. He watched her eyes glaze. Perspiration slicked her forehead. She rose to meet him, strength for strength, stroke for stroke, desperation for desperation.
“Tell me,” he said, not sure what he was asking, wanting to hear her say the words that were in her heart, wishing he could reach inside her instead, look into that heart and see if she had anything left for him.
She came apart in his arms a moment later. He watched her crest, awed and amazed and humbled that he could do that to her. That she would share the most intimate of moments with him. Never taking his eyes from hers, he continued stroking her, steady and deep and all-encompassing. He felt his own completion approach, and fought it, but he knew it was a losing battle. He didn’t want this moment to end, but he couldn’t stop the inevitable.
A moment later the pleasure took him over the top. He slipped over the edge like a man falling off a cliff, not sure what awaited him at the bottom.
“I love you, Kelly,” he whispered. “I never stopped loving you.”
Vaguely, he was aware of her stiffening in his arms, but he was beyond interpreting, beyond comprehension. With a final thrust and a guttural cry wrenched from somewhere deep inside him, he emptied his seed into the deepest reaches of her.
And he tried desperately not to think about what he’d just done.
Chapter 14
D awn broke cold and gray. Buzz woke at first light to an empty sleeping bag and the disturbing memory of making a confession he’d spent the last few years denying. A confession consisting of three words he’d spent the same amount of time trying to exorcise from his heart as if they were some evil demon.
Raising up on an elbow, he looked around and tried not to think about the stiffness in his arms and legs or the stabbing pain in the small of his back. His shoulder creaked as he worked out a kink. His neck was stiff as a board.
But worse than any physical pain, he felt the aftermath of a very bad mistake he’d sworn he wouldn’t make again.
I love you.
His own damning words rang like a death knell in his head. How could he have been so stupid? Saying something like that in the heat of the moment to a woman who wanted nothing more than to sever all ties to him wasn’t exactly smooth.
Snippets of the night before came to him like flashes of memory to a drunk after a blackout. The beauty of her body. The body he’d missed so desperately for all these years. The way her eyes had glazed with pleasure when he’d moved within her. The tight sheath of her when he’d been inside her heat. The memory of the magic they’d shared, both physically and emotionally, made him shake inside.
I love you.
God, how could he be such an idiot? Best to face reality now, he thought darkly. The bottom line was she hadn’t reciprocated the words. Not that he’d expected her to. That he’d wakened alone said it all, he realized. And for the first time in a long time he felt vulnerable and stupid and incredibly alone.
He must have been asleep when she’d sneaked out of his sleeping bag and climbed back into the tent with Eddie. She hadn’t bothered to tell Buzz she was leaving. Or kiss him goodbye. He told himself she hadn’t had a choice but to go back to Eddie. Of course, she didn’t want her little boy—their little boy—to see her sleeping in the arms of a man he barely knew. Something like that could be confusing to a child. Still, it bothered him that she hadn’t seen fit to wake him.
Realizing there was nothing he could do about the mistakes he’d made the night before except try like hell not to make the same ones all over again today, he unzipped the bag and stood. He tried to stretch, ended up wincing instead. He needed to check in with RMSAR. The winds had died down. They should be able to get the chopper in to pick them up.
“I’m hungry.”
Buzz actually jolted at the sound of the little voice. He spun to see Eddie standing a few feet outside the tent with his hair sticking up and the stuffed bear clutched in his grasp. The sight of his child, so soft and vulnerable and innocent, struck him squarely in the gut. For a moment, he could do nothing but stare, telling himself it didn’t hurt to stand there and look at him and know that in a few short hours he would be gone forever.
“What are you hungry for?” he managed after a minute.
Eddie rubbed his eyes. “Fat egg.”
Buzz didn’t have a clue what a fat egg was. “How about some granola and hot chocolate?”
“Okay, but I gotta pee first.”
“Right.” Buzz wiped a hand over his jaw to hide the smile. “You ever been camping before?”
“No.”
“You ever been a Boy Scout?”