He kissed her until he was shaking with it, until she had forgotten they had ever stopped kissing in their lives, and yet the embrace felt as new and as compelling as that very first kiss, that day in the summer glade when the other hikers had been all that stopped them.
“God, I wish I knew what to do,” he said into her throat, as her face fell back into the stream of water. He had done this before, tried to make love to her as their relationship tore apart, tried to get through to her with sex. Oh, God, they couldn’t go back there again. They had been at peace. They had been healing.
And yet she didn’t feel as she had then—angry and grieving and hating him—but alive, flooding with warmth, wanting to expand into him the way he had expanded into the hot water. Her hands scrubbed down his body. Those water-slickened muscles felt so good.
I love you.
God, where had that come from? She couldn’t say that. It would do untold damage. She bit the words back as hard as she could, bit her tongue on them, and twisted her head around suddenly and bit him, right in the curve of his shoulder.
He drew a hoarse breath and lifted her up, pressing her back against the shower wall, so that the sprays massaged from too close, almost painful against her body. He rode her on his thigh while he pulled her soaked sweater over her head. It felt so good to have its clinging wetness off, to have the water beating painfully against her from all sides, to have his hands slide down her ribs and up again over her breasts, as warm now as the water but so much more intimate and caressing. She loved it when his hands got a little too hard on her body, when he lost his care. She had always loved that.
That old thrill of driving him crazy surged back in her as she pulled herself into him, as she found his mouth through the water and kissed it again, claiming it this time for herself, in hot, hungry, invasive kisses, taking it for hers.
He drew one of her legs up, knee bent, past his hip, stretching all her muscles, running his hand down her jeans-clad calf until he could find her furry suede slipper-boot, and he pulled it off and threw it out of the shower. Scooping that arm around her bottom to hold her into him, he pulled the other leg up and did the same thing.
Her feet, bared twice now in only an hour, and for the same reason, curled and flexed into the water, thrilled beyond measure. This warmth from him was so gorgeous. She wanted to soak it up everywhere.
He unfastened her jeans and worked them and her panties off her, with some difficulty, the wet denim clinging to every inch of skin on the way down. She liked it, she liked it so much, the feel of his hands loosening that denim over and over, sliding between it and skin, the water streaming down her bared legs, chasing his hands.
He knelt before her a second, when he had finally gotten them off, staring up at her. And then he surged to his feet, pressing her in one great rush of his body back into the wall, burying his face in her neck and shoulder, kissing her, nibbling her, devouring her, and then he surged up higher, until her face was the one buried in him, as he pulled her legs around his hips and cupped one hand under her bottom—and thrust into her.
He gasped when he did it. She didn’t, she just wrapped her body around him, closing all her muscles on him, more than ready. Tension ran all through him, a corded, angry, desperate energy. “Kai,” he said, as if he had to double-check. As if someone else might have snuck in and taken her place while he wasn’t looking. Or as if he had woken time and again to find himself making love to a succubus of her. Or a dream.
She’d done that sometimes, after a summer day spent hiking in the open air, focusing on trees and birds and sky and life, trying to become again someone with whom she could live the rest of her life. She would sleep well those nights and dream of old happy days, of making love outside in the grass, and wake to find herself cuddling a pillow to her, thinking it was him.
She’d even learned to come to peace with waking that way: to stroke the pillow, kiss it, set it aside, and rise to try to learn to embrace her day again.
“Kurt.” Her hands clutched him, loving how much harder it was to press into his muscle and bone than into any pillow. Loving his body’s resilience, its aliveness, and how very well she knew it. “Kurt.”
“Kai.” He pulled almost out and thrust into her again, sinking one hand into her hair, kissing her hard, too hard, while the water poured over them. “Oh, God damn it.”
Yes. Yes. God damn it, damn her, for everything. She sank her fingers into him harder, made him real. Wrapping around him, pulling him in. Yes, you’re real, you’re real, you’re real. Harder. You’re so real.
Oh, this feels so good.
The thrust of him, the life, the hunger.
Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.
But his thrusts grew too hard, too urgent, too fast to last. He forgot all about her. Taking her so fiercely, so intensely, unable to think about anything but taking.
He forgot all about her, and she didn’t even mind. Wrapping her arms and legs around him as he took her, holding onto him as tightly as she could, she gloried in it. She wouldn’t have let him go for anything.
Chapter Three