huskily, her eyes never leaving his face as she waited for his response.
It seemed a lifetime, an aeon before he replied, both his mouth and his voice oddly stiff as he eventually responded, ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘Yes,’ she told him boldly. ‘Yes, it is…what I want.’ I want…I want you. I love you. She ached to tell him, but events were moving too fast to give her time to make such an emotional statement.
Instead…
She started to release his arm and turn towards the stairs, and then, impetuously, she reached up and touched his face with her fingertips, absorbing through them the longed for human warmth, the human reality of his skin, not a dream lover’s flesh any more but that of a real man, a real lover.
Although he was clean shaven she could feel the rasp of his skin where he shaved, a prickle of such intense maleness against the acute female sensitivity of her own fingertips that she almost cried out in the raw shock of it, snatching her fingers away as though they had been burned, her eyes wide and dark, almost haunted as she looked up to his.
‘You want me,’ he said rawly. But it was a statement rather than a question. Still Annie nodded her head, mute, dumb, now that the final moment, the final acknowledgement of what lay between them, of what fate had ordained for them, was actually here.
Her glance darted over his face as nervous as that of a woodland fawn. His eyes…navy blue now, and smouldering with heat; his cheekbones…taut and hard where the flesh stretched across them, his mouth…
She felt giddy, dizzy with the force of her own longing. The silence, the tension between them stretched out like the thinnest of ice over the deepest, coldest and most dangerous water there could be, inviting only the most reckless, only the most foolhardy, to dare its danger.
‘Come here,’ he commanded her with soft force.
Immediately she did so, closing the gap between them as she moved, almost swayed into the burning inferno of his body heat, the breath driven out of her lungs in a soft, yearning gasp of delirious pleasure as his arms finally closed around her and she turned her face up to his for his kiss, her own lips so soft, swollen, parting with moist longing.
‘Oh, yes…Yes…You want me…’
She heard him etch out the sharp, stingingly sensuous words against her mouth, his voice creamy with satisfaction and male pride as his arms made a tight, imprisoning band around her and he bent her back over them, so that the cradle of her pelvis was thrust up tight against his own body.
And then his mouth finally came down on hers in a kiss that her shocked senses registered as being so raw and branding, so determined to imprint on her his stamp of possession, so intent on taking her and breaking her in the most primitive of man to woman embraces that she almost sobbed aloud in an appeal for his awareness of her vulnerability, her lack of experience, her unknowingness. And yet in some confusing way she did know, did recognise.
‘Was that good?’ she heard him asking her in a low, satisfied voice when he finally released her kiss-bitten mouth, and then, before she could answer, before she could move, he was lowering his head again, to make the same hot, mouth-biting love assault on the erect peak of her nipple, his fingers expertly pushing her clothes out of the way of one soft sweetly pink-apexed breast whilst his lips, too hungry to wait, eagerly caressed the other through the thin fabric of her bra and shirt.
For a moment Annie felt almost as though she was going to die from the shock of pleasure that sheeted through her, its intensity such that it made her catch her breath and feel as though her life itself was momentarily held in suspension. Behind her closed eyelids she could see the same brilliant whiteness she remembered from her moment of near-death: pure, burning, intense, soul-touching…like the very best kind of love itself.
Quickly she opened her eyes and focused on his downbent raven-dark head. The warm flesh of his exposed nape was a tantalising contradiction of his stance towards her and her reaction back to him, that of a man to a woman at its most sensually intense. That exposed nape was so very much that of a vulnerable boy, a child…the child they would one day have…
Immediately Annie tensed, as though somehow something had touched an exposed raw nerve within her memory. The pain, initially so intense that it had shocked her into protective immobility, was fading now, but it still had the power to frighten her.
‘What is it? Not second thoughts?’ he was asking her almost brusquely as his lips relinquished possession of her nipple and he lifted his head to look in her eyes.
In his own there was something, an expression, a darkness, that made her look away from him. Somewhere deep within her a pain, a wariness was stirring, but she quickly suppressed it. Nothing…nothing…could be allowed to spoil this special magical coming together. Nothing!
‘I…’ she began slowly, wanting to find the words to tell him how she was feeling, to ask him to help her smother the sharp needle of pain she could feel threatening her, to disarm it of its potential harm.
But instead of listening to her he shook his head and said smoothly, ‘I thought you wanted us to go to bed. You do want that, don’t you, Annie?’
Annie! He knew her name. Her heart slammed fiercely against her ribs, her whole body convulsed by the sweetly searing surge of her shock.
‘I…I want us to make love…’ she managed to tell him shakily, before adding breathlessly, so that he would know that her intuition, her knowingness, her acknowledgement of their shared fate matched his, ‘Upstairs…in the room…the room…’
‘I know which one,’ he assured her, and if her ears thought they had caught a rough, searing note of anger beneath the sensual smoothness of his low-toned voice she quickly assured herself that she had to have imagined it.
They walked upstairs together, one step at a time, her body pressed close to his, his arm around her as she leaned helplessly into him. On the half-landing she stopped, automatically gazing through the window towards the river.
‘This house was built by a whaling captain,’ she told him huskily.
‘Yes, I know,’ he agreed tersely, his arm dropping momentarily away from her.
‘I…I dream about it sometimes,’ she told him, searching carefully for the right words to tell him what she had experienced. ‘About…the room…and…and about you…’
Without saying anything else she moved back into the protection of his body, only realising that she had been holding her breath a little nervously when his arm finally rose and held her.
They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing in the doorway to the room before he said the words that made her heart turn somersaults of joy inside her body.
‘I dream of you too.’
He dreamed of her. She wasn’t alone in her belief…her recognition. Flooded with joy, she turned to him, holding his arm with her hand as she demanded, ‘You recognised me, then, the other night…in the restaurant?’
The abrupt, almost reluctant inclination of his head he gave in assent made her ache with female protectiveness. He felt embarrassed, almost afraid to reveal his vulnerability to her. Oh, how much she loved him. How wonderful it was that they had found one another.
‘It’s going to be so good,’
