Going Back (21 page)

He refused to take his hand away
when she reached for his belt. She wasn’t about to ask him to move,
even though his position made stripping off his trousers difficult.
She wanted his fingers exactly where they were, holding her,
arousing her, tantalizing her with delicate caresses and almost
indiscernible pressure.

He helped her as much as he could
in the removal of his slacks, shifting his hips so she could pull
them off, kicking his feet to free himself from his briefs. And
then her hand found him, full and eager, and she held him as he
held her.

He kissed her with unexpected
tenderness. “Daff,” he whispered, gripping her wrist and easing her
hand from him. She must have looked hurt or bewildered, because he
explained his action: “Not yet. It’s too intense, it feels too
good.” He lifted her hand to his lips and grazed the tips of her
fingers. Then he set her hand free on his shoulder. “Touch my back,
instead,” he suggested before conquering her lips with another,
deeper kiss.

At first Daphne wasn’t sure what to
make of his talkativeness. Even during her first clumsy attempts at
sex with Dennis, she would never have had the audacity to tell him
what to do—or to ask him what he wanted her to do. And when she’d
been with Brad the last time, from the moment he’d handed her a
Cornell mug filled with wine to the moment she’d fled from him,
they hadn’t spoken a single word to each other.

Now, here he was, chatting away.
“Do you always talk during sex?” she asked as her hand obediently
kneaded the ridge of his shoulder and then crept down to the warm,
supple skin of his upper back.

He groaned happily, leaning back to
savor her massage. “Do you always ask men what they always do
during sex?” he parried her.

It took her a moment to sort
through his question. “I’m not asking to be nosy,” she clarified.
“I don’t care what you do with other women. It’s just...last time,
we didn’t talk.”

“Maybe that was another big mistake
we made,” he commented. “This time...ohh...” He closed his eyes and
sighed as her fingers roved down toward the knotted muscles of his
lower back. “God, that feels too good, too. What are you doing to
me?”

She wasn’t conscious of doing
anything special. What she was doing was exploring his back with
her fingers, sliding her knee against the inner surface of his
thigh, gazing up at him from the pillow on which she rested her
head. She was smiling at him and wanting him, and gasping as his
thumb scaled the rise of her breast to rub her nipple. She was
crying out softly as his tongue followed in the wake of his thumb,
twirling hot and wet over the tiny swell of pink, sucking
hard.

Whatever hazy thoughts she had left
of the last time she’d been with Brad burned away in the fierce
ecstasy of the present. Even if they went no further than this, she
believed she would be satisfied.

But there was no question of
stopping. As Brad shifted his mouth to her other breast, she
lowered her hands to his hips and arched against him. He shuddered.
She slithered down under him, aligning their bodies, and he braced
himself above her. “Kiss me,” she whispered, astonished to hear
herself verbalizing her desires as directly as he had.

He obeyed, devouring her mouth with
his. She bent her knee between his legs again, and he flexed his
thigh against her. Their movements seemed to pick up momentum,
urgency, drive. When he rolled onto his back, bringing Daphne up
onto him, she accepted the new position, not bothering to wonder at
the uncharacteristic aggressiveness that compelled her to kiss his
chest as he’d kissed hers, to run her teeth and tongue over the
small brown nubs of his nipples and her fingers over his ribs and
abdomen. Not bothering to protest when he wedged his hand between
her legs and stroked her. It was too intense, everything was too
intense—and she wanted it to go on forever.

“Daff.” His voice was scarcely
audible. “Daphne...”

She reached down to touch him
again, aware that this time he wouldn’t ask her to stop.

He surged against her palm and
groaned something unintelligible. Opening his eyes, he fixed her
with a dazed smile. “Do you want to be on top?” he asked
thickly.

She laughed, astounded that at this
point he was still capable of shaping a coherent question, and
equally astounded that he wasn’t too swept up in his own rapture to
care about Daphne’s preferences. “No,” she answered, descending to
the mattress, careful not to lose the precious contact of his hand
on her. “You.”

He rose, balancing himself above
her, sliding against her palm again. “Now?”

She nodded, bringing him to her,
circling his hips with her legs as he thrust into her. They moaned
in unison. Brad relaxed onto her for an instant, then thrust again,
slow and deep, filling her completely.

She curled her arms tight around
him, distantly aware that her fingernails were digging into his
back. He didn’t seem to mind. His fingers became lost in the
tangled blond halo of her hair, and his lips danced from her
forehead to her chin before settling on her mouth. His body rocked
hers in a steady, pulsing rhythm, sliding, stroking, taking and
giving.

She felt the spinning storm of
emotions gathering once more inside her, less amusement now and
more passion, more affection, more hunger and love and need,
funneling down through her body in a contracting coil until the
thrill of it grew nearly painful. She sobbed an inchoate plea, her
words absorbed by Brad’s kiss—and then ecstasy came in a great,
consuming rush, throbbing through her body and her soul before
capturing Brad, hurling him down into the center of the storm with
her.

Minutes passed, an immeasurable
stretch of time during which they lay fused together, clinging to
each other with an almost deranged desperation. Their chests pumped
against each other, their breathing rough and ragged, their hearts
thudding. Slowly, gradually, Brad lifted himself up. His eyes took
a while to focus on Daphne; his mouth was curved in a dazed grin.
“Well,” he whispered huskily. “I think we’ve finally gotten the
hang of it.”

“And it only took us eight years,”
Daphne quipped, mirroring his blissful smile.

“Believe me—if it had been like
this last time, I wouldn’t have waited eight years to do it again.”
He brushed a few curling tendrils back from her cheeks and kissed
her lovingly. “It was spectacular, Daff. Unbelievable.”

She wrapped her arms around him and
pulled him back down to her. He willingly returned her hug, then
cushioned his head on the pillow next to her and nuzzled the skin
below her earlobe. She closed her eyes, praying that the thoughts
she’d managed to hold at bay so far would continue to keep their
distance for a while longer.

If she let them sneak up on her,
she knew what they’d tell her: that making love with Brad had been
more than spectacular. That her feelings about what had happened
this time were just as overwhelming as they’d been last time—only
this time she wasn’t burning with hatred. That the ground rules
Brad had established for this evening—that he and Daphne were
friends, and that no one would get hurt—might define his position
much more accurately than hers.

If she hadn’t
done something as stupid as fall in love with Brad, she had come
damned close. And if she
had
fallen in love with him, she was going to get
hurt, all his promises to the contrary.

But she wouldn’t think about that
now. For the moment, the only thing she intended to do was curl up
in the protective warmth of his body and pretend that nothing—no
uneaten dinner, no waterlogged flowers, no past or future—existed
beyond the bedroom door.

“YOU MUST BE starving,” she
said.

Brad groaned. At the moment, he was
too mellow to be starving. His entire body resonated with the
tranquil afterglow of their lovemaking. Every cell in his body was
serenely still.

The only thing he could imagine
doing with his mouth right now was kissing Daphne—if she could bear
to be kissed again. Her lips were a dark, rosy color, slightly
puffy from the workout he’d already given them. He considered
asking her whether she’d object to more exercise, then thought
better of it and just went ahead and kissed her. Her response was
sluggish—but, his kiss was sluggish, too. He doubted either of them
had enough energy to embark on an activity as strenuous as
eating.

“Maybe later,” he mumbled, nestling
contentedly into the pillow and forcing Daphne’s head down to his
shoulder. “We’ll eat later.”

She cuddled up to him, tucking one
of her slender legs securely between his and letting her lips brush
against the hollow of his throat. From this position, he could see
only the delicate slope of her shoulder and the fuzzy mop of yellow
curls crowning her head.

The peaceful warmth began to ebb
from his flesh, replaced by something equally pleasurable but
harder to identify. Some sort of giddy bafflement, perhaps,
something that both bewildered and tickled him: the astounding
realization that Daphne Stoltz was dynamite in bed.

Who would have thought it? Who
would have thought that this flat-chested, four-eyed woman with the
Harpo Marx hairdo could do such incredible things to him? He hadn’t
imagined that his discovery of her nakedness under that weird silk
bathrobe had smacked him with the force of a lightning bolt, or
that her tongue had engaged his in the most unabashedly wicked
foreplay he’d ever known, or that her touch had somehow managed to
throw his entire nervous system out of alignment. He hadn’t
imagined the ferocious urges she’d unleashed in him with her neatly
manicured hands, her teeth, her hips colliding with his, her
body—that strange, imperfect body of hers surrounding him, carrying
him somewhere he’d never been before.

He had told her it was spectacular
and unbelievable. Reflecting on the experience, he decided that
those two feeble adjectives hardly began to do justice to what he’d
just experienced with Daphne.

“Let’s make love again,” he
suggested, aware even as he spoke that he’d probably need a bottle
of megavitamins and an hour of rest to get his system back in
functioning order.

Daphne laughed, her breath warm and
dry against his chest. “Right. And then we’ll notify the Guinness
Book of World Records.”

“You, too?” he half-asked,
realizing that she was as blissfully depleted as he was. He smiled,
pleased to know he wasn’t alone in his thunderstruck response to
what they’d shared, that what had been the epitome of physical
fulfillment for him had been no less awesome for her.

He brushed his hand gently through
her hair, careful not to let the dense curls trap his fingers, and
angled her head away from his arm so he could peer into her eyes.
They weren’t truly pretty eyes—the irises reminded Brad of the
olives his mother used to garnish her martinis—but there was
something incandescent about them right now, the glow of a woman
totally and wondrously sated. The last time Brad had been intimate
with Daphne, he hadn’t seen that glow. He’d been smart enough not
to look for it. But he looked for it this time, and discovering it
gratified him in a way that went well beyond the implied compliment
about his prowess in bed.

Sex hadn’t been great just now
because he’d been great. It had been great because Daphne had been
great—because they’d been great together.

“Just a warning, Daff,” he
murmured, leaning toward her and kissing the undefined tip of her
nose. “Sooner or later, we’re going to have to make love again.
That’s the way it is with any proper experiment: if you can’t
believe how good the results are the first time, you’re supposed to
repeat the experiment to make sure.”

“I’m not arguing,” she said
languidly. “All I’m saying is, we’d better eat something
first.”

“Ah, so
you’re
starving.”

“Mm-hm. Can I interest you in some
clams?”

“That was low,” he said, sending
her a wounded expression. Then he leaned forward to kiss her again.
“I’ll settle for the linguini with a little melted butter on
top.”

“Forget it,” she declared. “The
linguini’s been sitting in a pot of hot water for well over a
half-hour, which means it’s probably all mushy. And to tell you the
truth, Brad, I’m not in the mood to cook another batch.”

He didn’t blame her. “Have you got
any peanut butter?” he asked, deciding their best strategy was to
keep their snack quick and simple. The sooner they ate and
replenished their reserves of strength, the sooner they could be
making love again.

She grinned and swung her legs off
the bed. “With or without jelly?”

“You’re the hostess. I’ll leave it
up to you.”

He pushed himself away from the
mattress to sit, but a sharp glance from her kept him in place.
“We’re going to eat in bed,” she informed him as she crossed the
room to her robe, which had landed in a rumpled heap on the floor
near her closet door. She picked it up, examined the snagged zipper
and snorted. After throwing the garment onto a chair, she opened a
drawer of her dresser and pulled out an oversize man’s shirt. She
buttoned it on. “You stay right where you are. I’m going to serve
you in bed. How’s that for romantic?”