Eye of the Storm (5 page)

Her nipples throbbed, wanting his attention there too. His hands were busy, kneading her ass cheeks, lifting her. Opening her for his next forceful thrust, his thumbs caressing her anus, as though he intended to fuck her there too.

As though he read her mind, knew her need, he dipped his head, took one distended nipple between his teeth and nipped it sharply before drawing it into the moist heat of his mouth and suckling.

Her pussy clenched around his cock, the sensation one of rightness. She felt possessed as she hadn’t for five long years. Overwhelmed, she let her head loll back against the wall, closing her eyes and ears against the storm that raged around them. All that mattered was here. Now. Sam. The white-hot fire that spread from her pussy to her ass to her breasts. Even her brain tingled when the bubble of desire burst and she shattered into a quivering heap, held upright in Sam’s strong arms.

Mastered. Satisfied as none of the meaningless string of lovers ever had…as she now knew no one else could. Sam had claimed her once. Now he claimed her again. Whether because of lust or nostalgia or animal need to mate in the face of death, she had no idea. It didn’t matter. Marcy could fuck a thousand men, but she was certain no one but Sam could ever make her feel like this.

“Oh, baby. Yeah. Squeeze me. Like that. God, you’re wringing me dry.” His scalding semen bathed her cervix, her womb in powerful bursts that seemed to go on forever. Clasping her tightly, he laid her on the bed and lay down beside her, still breathing hard.

It was after they’d lain there a long time that she noticed the wind no longer moaned all around them, and the driving rain had become a gentle shower. “I think the storm has passed.”

“No, baby. We’re in the eye of the storm.”

Chapter Three

Calm. Cool, damp air rich with the smells of Earth surrounded them as they sprawled on the tangled sheets. Marcy laid her head on Sam’s chest, the way she always used to after they’d made love. He stroked the silky skin of her back, remembering.

Late nights when he’d come to her grainy-eyed from studying and she’d rolled over, warm and giving, welcoming him into her bed and her body. Lazy days they’d spent in bed and learned more about what made their bodies feel good than anything he’d studied in medical texts. Fun days when she’d dragged him out of his shell and taught him there was much more to life than studying and work and taking care of the basic human requirements for survival.

Yeah. The memories surrounded him, wrapped them in a special cocoon much like the one with which Hurricane
Kellen
had temporarily surrounded Cabbage Key. A cocoon through which Sam saw everything with rose-colored glasses, but one he knew would soon give way to the tempest of love and hate that had gripped him since that fateful day five years ago.

Unless…unless they could use these moments of suspended time to open old wounds and lance them so the venom would flow out and they might heal. Sam stilled his hand in the hollow of her spine. Thunder clapped in the distance, and bolts of lightning crackled. When she shuddered, he drew her closer.

He felt ambivalent, loving her as he did, yet hating the brittle, hedonistic woman she’d become since they’d split up. Blaming her—and himself—for severing a connection that had begun with childish innocence and withered with suspicion and accusations. His suspicion. His accusations. His refusal to believe her, not the scientific near-certainty that told him the baby she’d lost in the first trimester couldn’t have been his. Her turning a deaf ear each time he’d tried to apologize. To explain and beg for absolution.

His cock stirred again when she cradled his balls in her palm. A sweet gesture, one she’d made a thousand times when they’d lain like this in the aftermath of sex. Had she done the same with the faceless men she’d fucked in the past five years?

Damn it, he didn’t give a shit about the divorce. Marcy was his. She might have fucked half of Tampa, but she belonged to him. Would always belong to him.

“Sam?” When she turned her head, damp strands of her hair tickled his chest.

He lifted his head, looked down at her. Her eyes had turned the soft gray-green of a calm sea, the way they always did after they made love. It would be so easy to sweep the past away, start again as though this were a new relationship. No old hurts, no issues, no resentment.

The hell it would. If he wanted his wife back—and he did—he’d have to bare his soul, make her listen now to what she’d refused to hear back then. Make her understand and forgive him. Right. Make her forgive the unforgivable. He stroked her cheek, then brushed an uncharacteristically tousled strand of her hair off her forehead. “What is it?”

“I’m glad you came back. Glad we made love. Damn it, I’ve hated you for what seems like forever, but part of me still loves you too.”

“Me too. You snatched my heart when you were fifteen years old and never let it go. Will you listen to me now, let me try…”

“The baby was yours, Sam.”

“I know.” He should have known it from the start. It shouldn’t have taken DNA testing to make him believe. “I should have trusted you. I’m sorry. You’ve never let me tell you how sorry I was—how sorry I still am. Will you now?” He stroked her cheek, soothed an angry welt caused, he guessed, by the same sort of flying debris that had pelted him while he’d clawed his way to her.

The wind began to howl again, and rain sluiced through the shattered window, enlarging the puddle already on the rough wooden floor. Marcy shuddered. “I guess so. I don’t want to die not knowing what I did to make you believe I was unfaithful.”

“We’re not going to die. We’re going to live.” Recalling the rising tide and the devastation that he’d seen from the leading edge of the hurricane, Sam hoped to hell he wasn’t lying. “You didn’t do anything. It was me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m sterile, or so damn near it that the chances of me fathering a child naturally are something like one in a million. I thought—”

“How long did you know that?” She sat up, riddled him with the kind of gaze he imagined she usually reserved for hostile witnesses in the courtroom. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

He had the decency to look abashed. “Since about six months after we quit using birth control. Don’t know why, but I decided to run tests on myself while I was sending in some samples from a patient’s husband. I didn’t tell you right away because I was fucking ashamed. Ashamed I couldn’t give you one thing every goddamn man should be able to give the woman he loves. Yeah, I know there are a lot of men who’ve got my problem—I see a good many of them in my office—but I’ve never run into a one who wasn’t devastated, hearing that kind of news.”

So that was why Sam had turned surly. Why he’d closeted himself in his study every night with his goddamn medical journals and acted as though he didn’t give a damn when she told him she was pregnant. Finally she knew why he’d stammered around like a defendant caught on the stand in a lie whenever she’d tried to talk with him about the baby.

Marcy might understand his
behavior
now, but that didn’t mean she’d forgive him. “The one thing you owed me—besides your trust—was the truth. And you didn’t come through with it.”

“I know, but damn it, I tried to tell you. You weren’t willing to listen. Understandably,” he added before she could lay into him the way she wanted to. “You never gave me reason to think you were anything but faithful. You deserved my trust.”

The look in his eyes said it all. Sadness, regret, apology…and something else. Unresolved grief? “Sam, did you ever let yourself mourn for our baby?”

“Yes. What I’ve never let myself regret much until now was losing you. Knowing you were giving what belonged to me to half the guys in Tampa.”

She wanted to lay the blame for that back on him. Badly. Before she could form the words, the flimsy walls began to shake again. Her anger forgotten, she dived into Sam’s arms when an entire palmetto frond, torn by the storm from one of the tough plants, flew through the shattered window and landed not six inches from her side of the bed. She stared out the ruined window, transfixed, as a whole small tree the storm apparently had ripped by its roots from the sand flew by. Vegetation, chunks of roof and walls, even swirling sand all tossed about like seedpods in the wind. Would anything be left after the storm passed? An ominous roar rang in her ears. Water slapped against wood and shot under the door, undulating over the rough boards like a deadly serpent.

“Marcy. We’ll get through this. Just like we’ve managed to survive everything else. Right now we need to find something and block off that window. Sorry, baby, I should have thought about this before the wind started blowing again.” He hugged her hard, then rolled to the edge of the bed, waded through the rising puddle of water on the floor, and started taking the bathroom door off its hinges.

Funny how being close to Sam seemed to calm her fear. Firmly refusing to think about what might come through that window next, Marcy slid out of the bed to help. “How are you going to keep the wind from sending that door flying?”

“We’ll prop it with that dresser. It ought to be heavy enough.”

Marcy gave the knotty-pine armoire a tentative shove. “It’s heavy enough that I can’t move it.”

“Together, I think we can manage.” Setting the door flat on the floor, he added his strength to hers. Droplets of water glowed on his tanned, muscular body, slithering over his bulging muscles each time he leaned into the heavy chest. By the time they got the window blocked, they both were panting and soaked. “Now we can be fairly well assured that nothing’s going to fly in here and skewer us. Grab some towels out of the bathroom and let’s dry off as best we can. Much as I like looking at you naked, I don’t want to get the blankets soaked.”

“What about the water? It’s rising awfully fast.”

“That’s the storm surge. I don’t expect it will come much higher, and it’ll recede soon enough as the storm blows out to sea.” Sam’s voice lacked its usual authority and assurance.

Maybe…but maybe not. Perhaps they’d be swept away on the wind, never to be heard from again. Damn it, she didn’t want to die, but if this was going to end up being their watery grave, she wasn’t about to leave so much unresolved. So much resentment where there used to be so much love. Lying back on the bed, she forced a smile. “Let’s make this time for us…now. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. Please, for God’s sake, love me now.” The roar outside subsided, replaced by an even more ominous quiet. Another lull as
Kellen
gathered her destructive strength to strike again.

He sat beside her, regarding her sternly as though she were an errant child begging for absolution of her sins. For some reason, that look got her juices flowing even thicker, as did his next words. “If you want me, babe, it’s got to be just me. You’ve got to take me for better or worse, the way I am.”

Was he talking about his sterility or her other lovers? It didn’t matter, because she wanted him now, whatever the terms. “I do.” Reaching out, she laid a hand on his thigh, thrilled at the reflexive tightening she saw in his balls, the stiffening of his big, thick cock. “I always have. You just didn’t believe me.”

He took the towel he’d been drying with and pressed it to a damp spot in the hollow around her belly button. “I didn’t care about you obeying me when I was a wet-behind-the-ears kid, but I do now. Show me now you want a guy who can’t give you a baby and didn’t have the balls to tell you when he first found out, the way you proved to everyone when we were kids that the ultimate princess could actually get hot for the bookworm nerd I used to be. Do it if you really want me now. Get me hot, baby. We both know you know how.”

Yes, Marcy knew how. “Like this?” she asked, sitting up and raking her nails gently up the inside of his thigh, then stopping to rub the pad of her thumb gently over the soft curly hair that cushioned his sex.

“Oh yeah.” His cock lengthened and thickened, rising up against a belly whose muscular ridges were more defined than she remembered.

God, he was gorgeous. His chest muscles rippled when he moved, and the light sheen of sweat made his body glow golden in the dim light. He might have started out an ugly duckling, but he’d turned into the sort of guy women would fall all over. “How many lovers have you had, darling?” She encircled his erection with one hand, caressed his heavy scrotum with the other.

“None that matter now. Damn. I’ve missed you. Missed this.” When he cupped her breasts, with his large warm hands, her nipples began to tingle.

His big hands on her hips, he urged her to lie back down, following her and continuing the sensual massage. “I want to feel your mouth on me. Your hands. Oh yeah, you make me so hot…” His words faded into a rumbling sort of purr, made her glad she was a woman—his woman.

She trailed hot, wet kisses along his jaw, loving the feel of his late-afternoon stubble abrading her lips before moving lower, along his throat. His coppery nipples hardened when she bathed them with her tongue, and when she flicked his navel, he shuddered.

“You know, I always liked the taste of this,” she murmured when she licked away a glistening drop of fluid from the tip of his big, beautiful cock.

“But you didn’t like doing anything more than tasting.”

“I know. But I know you like it. And it’s something I’ve never done for any other man.” Taking a deep breath, she took him in her mouth, hoping she’d do it well enough to please him.