sounds of pleasure she would make as he took her. He wanted to look down into blue eyes and watch them go blind with passion. He wanted to feel her hands sliding across his skin, holding him tightly to her.
His kiss deepened farther, his tongue tangling with hers in a frenzied dance of desire that pumped through him with the force and rush of a wildfire screaming across the hillsides.
Joy clung to him, letting him know in the most primal way that she felt the same. That her own needs and desires were pushing at her. He took her deeper, held her tighter and spun her around toward the closest couch. Heart pounding, breath slamming in and out of his lungs, he kept his mouth fused to hers as he laid her down on the wide, soft cushions and followed after, keeping her close to his side. She arched up, back bowing as he ran one hand up and down the length of her. All he could think about was touching her skin, feeling the heat of her. He flipped the button of her jeans open, pulled down the zipper, then slid his hand down, across her abdomen, feeling her shiver with every inch of flesh he claimed. His fingers slipped beneath the band of her panties and she lifted her hips as he moved to cup her heat.
She gasped, tore her mouth from his and clutched at his shoulders when he stroked her for the first time. He loved the feel of her—slick, wet, hot. His body tightened painfully as he stared into her eyes. His mind fuzzed out and his body ached. He touched her, again and again, stroking, pushing into her heat, caressing her inside and out, driving them both to the edge of insanity.
“Sam—” She breathed his name and that soft, whispered sound rattled him.
When had she become so important? When had touching her become imperative? He took her mouth, tangling his tongue with hers, taking the taste of her deep inside him as he felt her body coil tighter with the need swamping her. She rocked into his hand, her hips pumping as he pushed her higher, faster. He pulled his head back, wanting, needing to see her eyes glaze with passion when the orgasm hit her.
He wasn’t disappointed. She jolted in his arms when his thumb stroked across that one small nub of sensation at the heart of her. Everything she was feeling flashed through her eyes, across her features. He was caught up, unable to tear his gaze from hers. Joy Curran was a surprise to him on so many levels, he felt as though he’d never really learn them all. And at the moment, he didn’t have to. Right now, he wanted only to hold her as she shattered.
She called his name again and he clutched her to him as her body trembled and shivered in his grasp. Her climax rolled on and on, leaving her breathless and Sam more needy than ever.
His body ached to join hers. His heart pounded in a fast gallop that left him damn near shaking with the want clawing at him.
“Sam,” she whispered, reaching up to cup his face with her palms. “Sam, I need—”
He knew just what she needed because he needed it too. He shifted, pulled his hand free of her body and thought only about stripping them both out of their clothes.
In one small, rational corner of his mind, Sam admitted to himself that he’d never known anything like this before. This pulsing, blinding, overpowering sense of need and pleasure and craving to be part of a woman. To be locked inside her body and lose himself in her. Never.
Not even with Dani.
That thought broke him. He pulled back abruptly and stared down at Joy like a blind man seeing the light for the first time. Both exhilarated and terrified. A bucket full of ice water dumped on his head wouldn’t have shocked him more.
He fought for breath, for balance, but there wasn’t any to be had. His own mind was shouting at him, telling him he was a bastard for feeling more for Joy than he had for his wife. Telling him to deny it, even to himself. To bury these new emotions and go back to feeling nothing. It was safer.
“That’s it,” he said, shaking his head, rolling off the couch, then taking a step, then another, away from her. “I can’t do this.”
“Sure you can,” Joy assured him, a confused half smile on her face as her breath came in short, hard gasps. She pushed herself up to her elbows on the couch. Her hair was a wild tumble of curls and her jeans still lay open, invitingly. “You were doing great.”
“I won’t do this.” His eyes narrowed on her. “Not again.”
“Sam, we should talk—”
He actually laughed, though to him it sounded harsh, strained as it scraped against his throat. “Talking doesn’t solve everything and it won’t solve this. I’m going out to the workshop.”
Joy watched him go, her lips still buzzing from that kiss. Her heart still pounding like a bass drum. She might even have gone after him if her legs weren’t trembling so badly she was forced to drop into the closest chair.
What the hell had just happened?
And how could she make it happen again?
Joy didn’t see Sam at all the next morning, and maybe that was just as well.
She’d lain awake most of the night, reliving the whole scene, though she could admit to herself she spent more time reliving the kiss and the feel of his amazingly talented fingers on her body than the argument that had prompted it. Even now, though, she cringed a little remembering how she’d thrown the truth of his past at him out of nowhere. Honestly, what had she been thinking, just blurting out the fact that she knew about his family? She hadn’t been thinking at all—that was the problem.
She’d stared into those amazing eyes of his and had seen him shuttered away, closing himself off, and it had just made her so angry, she’d confronted him without considering what it might do to the tenuous relationship they already had.
In Kaye’s two-bedroom suite off the kitchen, there had been quiet in Joy’s room and innocent dreams in Holly’s. The house seemed to sigh with a cold wind that whipped through the pines and rattled glass panes. And Joy hadn’t been able to shut off her brain. Or her body. But once she’d gotten past the buzz running rampant through her veins, all she’d been able to think about was the look in his eyes when she’d brought up his lost family.
Lying there in the dark, she’d assured herself that once she’d said the words, opened a door into his past, there’d been no going back. She could still see the shock in his eyes when she’d brought it up, and a twinge of guilt wrapped itself around her heart. But it was no match for the ribbon of anger that was there as well.
Not only had he walked away from his talent, but he’d shut himself off from life. From any kind of future or happiness. Why? His suffering wouldn’t bring them back. Wouldn’t restore the family he’d lost.
“Mommy, are you all done now?”
Joy came out of her thoughts and looked at her daughter, beside her at the kitchen table. Behind them, the outside world was gray and the pines bent nearly in half from that wind sweeping in off the lake. Still no snow and Joy was beginning to think they wouldn’t have a white Christmas after all.
But for now, in the golden lamplight, she looked at Holly, doing her alphabet and numbers on her electronic tablet. The little girl was squirming in her seat, clearly ready to be done with the whole sit-down-and-work thing.
“Not yet, baby,” Joy said, and
