uranium to sell to the unknown enemy. Making weapons of mass destruction. Building satellite dishes to listen in on our neighbours.’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Okay, I get it. I never was big on small talk.’ His fingers touched hers, and she drew in a breath as her taunt came back to mock her, I don’t want to sleep with you.
To string out the growing warmth between them, the certainty of shared desire, she threw him an incredulous glance. ‘Now, there’s the understatement of the year. You were never big on any talk, except to your horses.’
‘I get it, Anna. I don’t know how to communicate … but I’m trying. I can learn, if you’ll help me out,’ he said quietly, his eyes locked on hers, filled with meaning.
‘I am helping. I’m saying all I want to say for now.’ She sighed, and put her fork and knife down. ‘I don’t want to revisit emotions that are best left buried. Can’t we just talk like this, Jared? Have some fun, like we used to?’
‘All right,’ he agreed, in a lighter tone, ‘but before we descend to the weather and what groceries you want me to buy tomorrow, I have a confession.’
‘Oh, this sounds exciting,’ she teased to hide the sudden kick-up of her pulse. Anticipation was born and grew legs, running away with her galloping imagination. She knew what he was going to say but, oh, she wanted to hear it. ‘Spill. I can hardly wait.’
He leaned toward her, that arousing half-smile coming to life as he murmured, ‘I lied to you when I said I only kissed you yesterday to make you happy.’ The intent look in his eyes, the hunter’s trap, caught her in his sights, and she felt herself melting.
‘Oh?’ she managed to murmur, knowing she’d given herself away when his smile grew.
‘I kissed you to make me happy,’ he said, soft, purposeful, thrilling her.
‘Oh,’ she said again, lame, stupid, needing. The beautiful feminine pain filling her with just a few words, knowing it was going to happen. It was always inevitable; from the first time they’d made love, it had become their release, their addiction.
‘I was starving for you, Anna,’ he whispered, a few inches from her mouth. ‘I’ve lived a year without you, when a day is too long for me.’
She’d lost the power to speak, and he still hadn’t even touched her.
But then he reached for her—but didn’t sweep her into his arms. His index finger caressed her jaw, her throat, a fingertip so light she could barely feel it, and she was gone. ‘I’m still starving for you … and now you’re here, I’ll be doing my dead-level best to have you in my bed—tonight and every night.’
As she gasped softly and wet her lips in instinctive reaction, he leaned right to her and brushed his mouth over hers, once, twice, yet again, slower and deeper, lush and sensual as she knew only Jared could kiss her … and she couldn’t find any words, no resistance inside to stop him, or to stop herself.
‘Come to me,’ he whispered against her mouth, and she moaned, the pleasure-pain low in her belly flashed up, filling her from head to toe. ‘Come to bed with me, love.’ His fingers lightly touched her breast, and she gasped again in unbearable excitement. She swayed into him, everything forgotten but her body’s need too long denied, screaming for release.
‘Jared,’ she whispered, her hands shaking as she unbuttoned his shirt. ‘Ah, Jared, what you do to me.’
‘And you to me,’ he muttered, gruff, husky, making her shiver all over. ‘Now,’ he whispered, after another kiss, rough desire and hot command.
Caution and consequences were drowned in the rain; all she could think of was here and now, Jared’s hands, mouth and body … and that beautiful big bed, only a few feet from where they sat touching as if tomorrow wouldn’t come. ‘Yes, now,’ she whispered.
With that slow half-smile she adored, he swung her up into his arms and carried her inside.
CHAPTER SIX
WHAT a night …
Jared lay on his back on the bed, holding Anna close in the aftermath of the second bout of love-making—both in bed and in the shower—and for the first time in over a year, he felt almost complete, nearly happy. If he’d been starving for her, she’d been just as hungry. Her hands and lips had been all over him; she hadn’t been able to get enough.
He was winning her back. He was close, so close—and though it must be nearly two in the morning, she still wasn’t leaving the bed. She lay tangled over him, hair damp and messy from the shower, tasting his skin with mouth and tongue.
His body leaped from sated to needing in an instant.
She’d always had that ability, from that first haystack kiss. The sexual encounters he’d had with girls he’d met at rodeos and pubs, cattle sales, parties and the infamous Bachelor & Spinster balls during his teens had been a fun diversion, but he’d never bothered using the numbers the girls had given him, or wanted to repeat the experience with the same girl. They didn’t know him, knew only his looks or his name, the Jared West, Bryce Curran’s adopted heir, expected to inherit Jarndirri. And every time he left a girl’s bed, it had left him curiously blank. He’d felt empty from the moment he’d found satisfaction.
Until a single, impulsive, forbidden kiss, given because Anna had looked so adorable with hay in her hair and chocolate smears on her mouth … and instead of pulling away to demand what he was doing, she’d wrapped her arms around his neck with a little, feminine sound of surprised arousal, and had kissed him back. From that moment, like Alice down the rabbit hole, he’d fallen into a desire and need so all-encompassing that, twelve years later, he still hadn’t found a way out.
No amount of waiting, from school to university and the year she’d spent teaching in the Northern Territory; no change in their lives, no loss or even her leaving him lessened the craving. Seeing her pretty, funny pixie face, her lush curves, hearing her husky voice—or even her ridiculous laugh—turned him into a burning mass of desire.
And after a long year of empty abstinence, she was here, keeping him on constant slow burn with mumbled words and lighting trails of fire with her mouth. He turned to her, lifting her face for another I can’t get enough of you kiss. She moaned and arched into him, and they were consumed with each other again.
And with each touch and every kiss he tried to tell her everything his heart kept locked away from the world, all the little family secrets he’d never told anyone, and the overwhelming feelings he had for her.
All the emotion and pain he could never tell Anna had been communicated through the years with his fidelity and his voracious need for her—and he now prayed she understood.
Afterwards Anna yawned and stretched, smiling at him. ‘Can you help me drag a mattress into Melanie’s room?’
Something inside Jared stilled then withered. Okay, after so long apart he hadn’t been completely expecting the words of love she’d always given after loving each other into sublime satiety, but Can you help me move a mattress wasn’t high on his list of things he’d hoped to hear.
Anger flashed through him. ‘You’re staying with me.’
The smile vanished.
