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His hand slid around to her back, as if to pull her even closer. And suddenly he went still. Her heart missed a beat. She’d forgotten. She’d actually forgotten.
His fingers moved, over the puckered, hardened flesh of the three-inch almost round scar on her left shoulder blade. She felt as if a bucket of ice water had doused the heat as he stepped around her to look. She didn’t fight him. Didn’t try to hide it. He might as well know.
When she knew he could see she held her breath, waiting for him to recoil, to pull away. But instead his fingers slid over the burn scar once more, gently, as if he was afraid it still hurt.
“Kaitlyn?”
“I know it’s ugly,” she said, trembling and unable to stop it. “Even though it’s old.”
“Almost twenty years old?” he asked softly.
She wasn’t surprised he’d figured that out. “Yes.”
He was silent. And then he moved, to her shock pressing his lips against the thickened flesh and skin. When he came back to stand in front of her, he seemed to be studying her, as if he had a question he could find the answer to just by looking at her.
And then he said, in such a tone of pained wonder it made something ache deep inside her, “You went back in yourself. To try and save him, just like he tried to save you.”
He wasn’t asking, so she didn’t answer. And then he leaned down and seized her mouth again, kissing her long and hard and deep. As if he’d never seen the ugly scar.
Or as if it didn’t matter.
When he broke the kiss at last it took her a moment to remember how to breathe.
“Tell me we don’t need a condom, because I don’t have any,” he said, sounding as if the words were coming through gritted teeth.
Somehow the idea that he wasn’t prepared only sent her higher. “I get the shots,” she said breathlessly. “My work doesn’t always take me to the nicest places.”
“No more alone,” he grated out.
She could think of a couple of ways that could be interpreted, but then he was kissing her again and thinking wasn’t an option.
“I wanted to go slow,” he muttered, now against the shell of her ear.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, not even recognizing the woman she’d become with him.
“Later,” he said in apparent agreement.
He picked her up as if she were some tiny, delicate thing. And then they were on his bed, and she gave in to what she’d wanted from the moment she’d felt the heavy prod of his erection against her. She slipped her hand down his body, savoring the solid sleekness of him as she went, until her fingers curled around him. He groaned, low and deep, and she felt his every muscle go taut against her.
She’d never felt anything like him, so strong, hard, yet so silken smooth. She stroked, exploring, and when she felt a drop of moisture at the tip she ran her thumb over it. There was no word she could think of for the sound he made then. But she was barely thinking at all now.
And then he was sliding into her, his way eased by a body that had been ready for him, wanting him, since the first time she’d seen him. She cried out at the exquisite fullness as he drove home and thought it might end for her right then. But then he moved and she lost track of everything except the growing, expanding need.
Then he shifted, just slightly. One more long stroke and her body exploded with fierce, drowning sensation. It rippled through her and she cried out, aware of nothing except the sheer, overwhelming pleasure until the moment when she heard him say her name in a voice that sounded exactly like she felt.
*
She wasn’t sureat first what had awakened her. It wasn’t morning, not judging by the level of darkness. For a moment she was afraid to open her eyes, afraid she’d dreamed it all. But then the very atmosphere of where she was proved that wrong; she could feel how different this place was, as if even the air pressure was different in a place as big as this barn loft.
Ry’s loft.
Her eyes snapped open. What had awakened her was him, getting out of the bed where she’d spent the most amazing night of her life. And she had a feeling it would keep that ranking maybe until the end of her life.
But Ry was leaving. He was pulling on the jeans she’d so eagerly helped him shed last night. For a moment she lay frozen, unable to breathe. Her fingers curled at the sight of him, of the shape of that tautly muscled backside as he tugged the jeans up.
So quietly she knew she wouldn’t have heard it had she still been asleep, he covered the distance to the railing where it looked down over his studio in four long, barefoot strides. She watched, entranced now by his sleek, sculpted back and shoulders. Then it struck her he hadn’t even looked back.
Could he be in a hurry to get away, maybe regretting last night? She knew all the jokes about morning-after regret, and if she’d had to say which of them would feel it in the morning, she of course would have guessed him. But he was still barefoot, so he couldn’t be really leaving, could he? He—
