Mountain Investigation (16 page)

Her lips left his as she backed off a few steps. Then she turned, dove cleanly into the warm water and was gone, leaving him standing on the stone overlook, trying to figure out what had just happened to turn his world inside out. And what the hell he was going to do, when what he wanted to do conflicted so thoroughly with what he knew was right.

Mariah told herself she was trembling because of the cold, but even her conscious mind knew that was a crock. She was wired tight, her body humming with nerves as her immediate future hung balanced on the knifepoint of Gray’s choice.

She held her breath, hovering beneath the churning water, which warmed her flesh as she tried to guess what he would decide. Would she surface to see him sitting cross-legged at the edge of the stone ledge, watching over her as she bathed, protector but not lover? Or was he even now stripping down to the hard body she’d felt beneath his clothing, preparing to dive into the pool naked, in tacit agreement with her plan?

She stayed under as long as she could, unwilling to surface and learn the answer. She wanted this, wanted him, for all the reasons she’d cited, and because she’d done the wrong thing before in choosing a man who’d seemed so right for her. This time, she was picking one she knew was wrong, and going in with her eyes wide open.

Knowing that even making the choice was part of
taking control back from the memory of what Lee had done to her, she rose and broke the surface, sucking in a deep breath of air.

She nearly got a lungful of water as Gray dove in beside her.

The impact of his body rocked the churning waters that surrounded her and brought a flare of heat to her belly, a balm of healing to her soul. They might be wrong for each other, she knew, but in this moment they were exactly right.

He surfaced a few feet away from her, treading water as he smoothed back his short-cut hair, leaving it bristling on end, dark in the silver-blue moonlight. He didn’t speak as he sculled toward her, gliding across the distance that separated them.

As he did so, Mariah was acutely aware of the warm press of water on her suddenly sensitized skin. No longer chilled, she burned from within and reveled in the sly touch of watery currents. Mist surrounded them, bringing clinging wetness with every breath, and when she licked her lips, the moisture carried a tang of minerals and a thrill of excitement.

She skimmed gently backward, until she was standing on a submerged outcropping, the water lapping at her collarbones. Gray followed and stopped very near her, not touching her, but close enough that she could touch him if she reached out.

When he didn’t say or do anything, just looked at her, his eyes serious and silver in the moonlight, she said, “I wasn’t sure you’d agree to this.” She rushed on before he interrupted, “I know we said we couldn’t—
and shouldn’t—do this, but I’m not suggesting that we start something. I just want a new memory—one that’s true, rather than tainted.” She looked up into the sky, letting her head tip back and her hair dip into the blood-warm water as mist feathered her face like the faintest of kisses. “I want to make love, here under the waterfall, in a place that’s brought me peace. And don’t worry—I’m using the word
love
in its most generic sense. I want to love life, love our bodies, love what I feel when I’m near you.” She straightened to look at him once again. “Did I just scare the hell out of you?”

“No,” he said simply. “You’ve humbled me. And you make me wish I were a better man, one who could let this be the start of something, rather than just a memory.” He paused, looking around as she had done moments earlier. “You make me wish I had flowers to give you, or poetry. Something worthy of this place and what we’re about to do in it. But I’m not a romantic and I haven’t got a way with words, so I’ll just say it plainly. This will be a memory for me, too, Mariah. I haven’t been with another woman since Stacy. I haven’t wanted anyone that way. Then I saw you.”

Mariah thought she felt her heart sigh, and maybe break and bleed a little for what she couldn’t have. But this was her deal, her terms, so she said only, “I wasn’t looking for poetry or romance, but you just gave me enough of both to count as a memory in itself.”

There was beauty, too, in the powerful promise of his bare shoulders, the bulge of his biceps and the glis
tening planes of his upper torso. There was poetry there, whether he knew it or not.

They drew together and kissed then, because it was impossible not to. The attraction that had started as sparks and grown into something more flared from a warm kernel in Mariah’s belly to a lick of heat when his lips touched hers.

That was the only point of contact at first—mouth on mouth. Mariah tasted the tang of mineralized water on his lips, and gloried in the press of wetness, of heat. She felt the brush of his bare legs against hers, felt one of his hands skim across her hip.

A bubble of joy burst through her at the caress, and the glint that entered his eyes. His normally closed expression held acceptance, anticipation and blatant male hunger. She touched her lips to his, then sank into the kiss, into the water, and tangled her legs with his. They dipped beneath the surface, lost in each other.

The kiss spun out on a single breath, a single moment, as they came together, skin on skin, with her breasts pressed against his powerfully sculpted chest, and the solid, hard length of his erection nestled between them. Her flesh burned at the points of contact, and the perfection of the fit, the feeling of connectedness, was so acute she shied away from it, afraid she was in over her head, figuratively as well as literally.

With a powerful surge, he sent them back to the surface. Mariah’s head was spinning when they broke into the misty air, and she regained her footing. She ended the kiss to suck in a great lungful of air, exhaling it again on a delighted laugh when Gray hooked an
arm around her, pulled her from the ledge and started swimming, aiming them at the waterfall.

“You’ll drown us!” she exclaimed, though she hung on to his neck, reveling in the coarse friction of masculine hair against her water-softened skin, and the powerful play of muscles as he drew them beneath the thundering stream.

“Then you’d better hang on!” With that scant warning, he dove beneath the waterfall, wrapping his arms around her and taking her with him.

They surfaced, laughing, in the sheltered space behind the waterfall. She’d swum there before, and had explored the small niche where centuries—maybe millennia—of watery friction had carved a soft-edged bowl in the stones behind the cataract. She’d never been there at night, though, never seen it moonlit.

“Oh,” she said in a small gasp of pleasure as Gray released her, touched bottom and stood, rising over her to inspect the ledge.

The silvery moonlight cast the waterfall in a brilliant white glow. Against it, Gray was a black silhouette of masculinity as he reached down to take her hand. “Come here,” he said, his voice pitched low beneath the waterfall’s thunder.

Mariah went. How could she not join him in the shallow niche? How could she not rise from the water with him, and lie with him there, in that place outside reality?

They lay on their sides on the warm, water-smoothed stone, facing each other, and sank into a kiss that spun out endlessly. The water cooled slightly on Mariah’s skin, bringing delicious shivers instead of chills as she
touched him, tentatively at first, running her hands over his shoulders and down the leashed strength of his arms.

He copied her actions, slicking the water on her skin and kindling the sparks within her to a flame. She murmured her pleasure and crowded close.

It was all that she’d dreamed of in her premarriage fantasies—a romantic setting with a handsome man, out in the open, though with little threat of discovery. The realization brought a laugh bubbling to the surface, and Gray pulled away to look down at her, his features unreadable in the dark silhouette of his powerful form.

“That tickle?”

“No. Or rather, yes, but in a good way.” She paused, then went with the truth. “I was just thinking that before—well, when I was younger—I always imagined doing this outside. I never have until now.”

A low growl rumbled in his chest, a mix of amusement and feral sexuality that kicked her pulse a notch higher. “What, exactly, did you imagine?”

She blushed hard and hot. And she told him, embellishing in the places where her innocence had fallen short before marriage. Not that her marital sex had been great, ranging as it had along a descending continuum from pleasant to domineering, but it had given her some ideas of how things were supposed to work.

And oh, boy, did they. Gray took her at her word and then went from there, kissing her, touching her, exploring her body more intimately than she’d imagined in the not-so-wild fantasies that had suddenly become real, and then been exceeded. He licked her, suckled her, made her bow back in ecstasy.

A small orgasm caught her unexpectedly, vising her inner muscles in a long, languid pull of pleasure that had her crying out, her words lost beneath the water-thunder. Then he was shifting onto his back, and lifting her above him.

She stiffened. “I don’t know—”

“The stone’s worn smooth, but it’s still stone. Trust me, this’ll work better than me squashing you flat. And…it’ll let you work out more of those fantasies. That is, assuming you’ve had a few of what you’d like to do to your lover.”

She didn’t miss his use of the generic—he hadn’t said “what you’d like to do to me,” as though any man would’ve done once she’d made the decision to take a lover. Though she understood his need for distance, she put a purr in her voice when she said, “I don’t know about that, but I’ve definitely gotten a few ideas over the past week or so.”

And she proceeded to show him.

If she fumbled anything, he didn’t seem to notice or care, showing her his appreciation with long, possessive strokes down her back and sides, letting her hear it in his groans. When it finally became too much, when they’d driven each other beyond reason and joining wasn’t just the next step, it was the only one, he gripped her hips in his powerful hands and shifted her so the long, hard length of his erection was poised for entry.

There, he paused. “Okay?” he asked, his voice a sexy rumble almost the same pitch as the water. “We’re condomless, but I’m clean.”

“Oh.” Positioned there, poised for the most intimate
of joinings, she scrambled to collect her thoughts. “Yeah. Yeah, we’re good. I got tested after…well, after.” After she learned her husband wasn’t even close to being the man she’d thought. “As far as the other, I’ve got an IUD. For medical reasons, not because I sleep around.”

“Yeah. I sort of got that from the part where you haven’t been with anyone except the ex.”

The reminder probably should’ve been a cold one. Instead, it made the comparison between the two men that much more poignant.

Lee had insisted on being on top, on being in control. Gray had touched her the way she wanted, then put himself on the bottom so he’d be the one with his back to the stone.

Because of that, she found a smile when part of her wanted to weep for the girl she’d been, for the way her life might’ve gone if she’d chosen better the first time around. “Then that’s your answer. Bombs away.”

Her words were flip, but there was nothing frivolous about the sensations or emotions when she eased down and back, taking him within her. She couldn’t see his face in the darkness behind the waterfall, but she could feel his intensity in the reverence of his touch, hear it in the catch of his breath and his low hiss of pleasure.

He was large inside her, filling her, stretching her, his size magnifying each sensation, every burst of pleasure. Her eyelids eased down, blocking out even the silver glow of moonlight. The sound of the waterfall surrounded her, as did the feel of the man who moved beneath her, urging her, guiding her, touching her as he whispered praise and promises, making her feel every
bit of the woman she’d once imagined herself becoming.

She bent to kiss him and he rose to meet her, so they were sitting face-to-face, with her straddling his lap. The position brought new sensations, new heats and desires. She went with them, riding him until they were both groaning and gasping and laughing, partners in pleasure.

Then he dropped them down into the water, still joined, still wrapped together. He pressed her back against the stone wall, pinning her hips in place and driving deep.

Mariah arched back on a strangled gasp, gripping his shoulders as the sensations within her changed from pleasure to blinding heat, from play to something larger and darker, an all-consuming need that threatened to take over and leave her helpless.

Yet even as Gray thrust into her, pressing her against the stone and holding her steady as he pistoned, she knew he was as much in her power as she was in his. This pleasure was a give-and-take, not a domination.

The knowledge, and the strength it brought, gave her the confidence to let go. She strained into him, against him, and touched her lips to his.

The kiss held a sweetness at odds with the rampaging fury of their bodies. She sank into it, into him, and heard him murmur her name as the awesome madness of their pleasure rose up, sweeping her into a pulsing coil of heat and need, and the power they made together.

Her orgasm was a long, throbbing pull of pleasure that bound her to him, and him to her, as he shuddered
in her arms and cut loose. She felt him surge within her, felt her inner muscles contract to prolong the spasms—his, hers, theirs. And when she leaned back onto the rock ledge where he’d held her pinned, he followed her down, turning them so they were on their sides, she tucked against him. Then he turned his face into the side of her neck, breathing her in. And whispered her name once again.