How much farther?”
“Two hundred yards. More or less.” She nipped at his ear and ran her hand down from his belt as far as she could.
“Not much farther, big guy.” His arousal surged against the heel of her hand, and she moved coaxingly against it.
He stumbled. She slid down his body. The soggy fabric of his jeans rubbed against her, sent sparks shooting through her.
“We’re not going to make it,” he muttered, frustration in every syllable.
Laughing, she let all the night’s misery drift away in the wind. “You don’t have to look so grim.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He still held her snagged against him as he marched her backwards toward her house.
“Really?” she whispered slyly. “How…impressive.”
Stomping onward, he glowered at her. “What? What?”
“Nothing.” She stroked her hand down the hard front of his jeans, felt him throb into her curving palm.
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed.” She laughed again. She could never have hoped for this kind of ending to the horrible night. In Finnegan’s arms, all the destruction of the ER melted away.
Here was life. Here was pleasure. She moved her flat palm against him again. Here was power. His.
Hers.
Laughter kept bubbling up from deep inside. Her body fizzed and sparkled, everything inside her coiling and tumbling. And still he marched her relentlessly backwards, bumping against her, struggling with the waistband of her suit bottom as he kept moving. Trapped by his arms, the sides of her open vest bent back under her arms.
The wind blew against her bare breasts, tickling her with sand and cold. Her nipples brushed against his wet shirt, hardened.
“This is crazy, Sophie.” But he didn’t stop. Didn’t stop touching, didn’t stop moving her back to the house, his bare feet tangling with hers at every step, his pants legs flapping against her bare calves and knees.
Sensation everywhere. She was drowning in touch and smell. Drowning in Judah.
Careening backward, she tripped on the root of one of the pine trees and fell, a dizzying swoon of gray sky and his blue eyes.
Landing on the cushion of pine needles with Judah coming right after her, his arms still wrapped around her, she couldn’t stop laughing at the silliness of it all. Oh, she’d needed this, this laughter, this touching, this. How could she not have known how much she needed his touch? She slid her palms under his wet jacket, let them slip down wet skin, traced the contours of muscles, felt their response to her touch. Some rawness in her soul eased under the balm of touching and being touched and laughing.
And in some distant place in her brain she pictured them tangled together on the beach, a mess of sloppy wet clothes and sandy bodies and she laughed again.
“What’s so funny, Sophie?” His tongue traced the curve of her mouth, gently, dampening her lips, and the wind touched them, too, and everything in her shivered with delight.
She just wished Judah didn’t look so grim.
So lost.
She didn’t want him lost. She didn’t want emotion now, not his, not hers, only this physical exhilaration that blanked out memories and thought and everything except this.
“Easy,” she murmured. She smoothed the frown between his ocean-blue eyes. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Not answering, not meeting her gaze, he lowered himself over her, fitting his pelvis against hers, sliding his arms under her. “Any chance of getting this damn bottom off?”
“Finnegan, if I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that there’s always a chance.” She squirmed encouragingly, every nerve ending in her thighs and belly quivering with pleasure, with life. “If there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Tomorrow would come soon enough.
And in the meantime, here was Judah, filling her world with taste, with touch, with himself.
Easy, for the moment, so easy to let herself forget the ugliness. So tempting, this surrender to feeling, to the physical anodyne of what they were doing. Surrender to the power, to the wave of pleasure.
There were worse ways to end a day.
Chapter 4
He should have gone home.
Even as Judah slicked back the tangled hair hiding her ear and tasted her, he knew he should get up from the heat of her body, the salty tang of her skin, and leave.
He knew it. Like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard, his brain screeched warnings. Yet he lingered in the illusive comfort of her arms.
Stayed.
And hated himself.
Weakness, this craving to touch and taste. He despised himself for the need, for the loss of will. He hated this weakness that mewed stay when he knew he should flee as if the hounds of hell were on his heels.
Weakness.
And yet…
He stroked the slight swell of her flattened breast and lost himself in the warming whiteness of it, spellbound by the rose flush that crept upward from his touch.
A murmur. A sharp inhalation. Hers. The subtle accommodation of her hips to him fascinated him, whispered to the maleness in him, sang a silent siren song of movement and scent and urgency.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“You’re wrong. At the moment it makes all the sense in the world.”
“You? Me? No.” His brain kept jabbering and screeching, a discordancy of mind and logic against the need for touch and taste. “This is stupid.” He braced himself on his forearms, his hands framing her face and made himself look at her, forced himself to breathe the cool air and not her scent, made himself look at the woman who’d caused George’s death.
Dark streaks against white sand and green pine, her hair fanned out from her round face. She looked back at him, knowledge and sadness and sympathy blurring the blue-gray of her eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that, Sophie.”
“How am I looking at you, Judah?” Quiet as sunlight moving across a wood floor, her voice feathered over him.
“I’m only—”
“Don’t,” he said again.
“Don’t what, Judah?”
“Just…don’t.”
“Ah, Judah.” There was something like regret in that
