When Somebody Loves You (13 page)

“January . . .” His voice was a gentle assurance in the pulsing silence.

One glance at the tortured look in his eyes sent her near to the edge. She was tired of believing he would betray her, that he represented a danger to her future because of her past. But years of conditioning wouldn’t allow her to trust him with the entire truth.

No force on earth, however, could hold back the questions that had always haunted her.

“Why couldn’t my mother have done that, Michael? Why couldn’t she have fought for us? Why couldn’t she have fought for me? Why did she let him hurt her? Hurt . . . me?” Her voice broke on the last word and she bit her lip to keep from crumbling.

She was so tired. She’d been strong for too long, needy for too long. She needed, now. She needed to know she was a person of value, that someone thought she was worth fighting for, worth taking, even if it meant taking a chance.

“Michael, hold me.”

With a groan born from her anguish, Michael pulled her into his arms. He held her fiercely, rocking her, soothing her with his hands in her hair, pressing her cheek against his shoulder.

Her heartbreaking questions confirmed what he’d long suspected. And they explained so much—her initial resistance to physical contact, the undercurrent of distrust, the fact that she’d never before let any man close to her. It hadn’t been just a man who had abused her. It had been her father, the man who should have been protecting her.

It explained so much, but not nearly enough. Not enough to help him heal all the hurts she carried inside her. Not enough to dispel all his dark, horrible thoughts of what she might have gone through.

His work had led him into danger more than once, had placed him in life-or-death situations where it could have come down to killing or being killed. He’d been prepared to face that if he had to, no matter how loathsome the thought of taking a man’s life was. But here, on this sofa with this strong yet fragile woman in his arms, he feared he’d kill and kill gladly if he ever got his hands on the man who’d done this to her. Or the woman who had stood by and let it happen.

Along with his anger, he felt a consuming sense of helplessness. There were words—he was sure there were words he should say to let her know she no longer had to handle this alone. He was a man of words, made his living with words. Yet holding her against him, feeling her strength dissolve into despair, he couldn’t string two coherent, let alone consoling, words together.

But the simple fact was, she didn’t want words from him tonight. The bold, sensual pressure of her body against his told him what she wanted. She wanted strength. And she wanted action.

No warning, however distant, no argument, however valid, could stop him from tipping her face up to his. He didn’t pause to question whether it was the right thing to do. She was reaching out as she never had before, and he reacted instinctively to the need in her voice, to the desperate yearning of her body.

She moved against him with a restless urgency as he captured her mouth in a soulful, searing kiss. He catered to the hunger with which she returned his kiss and to the gut-tightening clutch of desire arrowing through his groin. And he clung by a thumbnail to the knowledge that for her sake he’d have to take it slow.

Slow became a distant, unattainable fantasy, though, when she writhed in his arms like a sudden summer storm. She was all wild, untamed energy, all crackling electric heat. Her ardor was a mind-numbing, loin-thickening reality as she met his openmouthed kisses with hot, liquid passion.

“January,” he gasped, coming up for air. “Baby . . . sweetheart . . . easy.”

She didn’t want easy. She groped for the hem of his sweater and, when she found it, dragged it roughly up and over his head. While he was still recovering from her aggression, she peeled off her own sweater, then unhooked and shrugged out of her bra.

“Michael, I need you . . . need you,” she whispered urgently as she rose to her knees beside him and guided his mouth to her breast.

He lost it then, all reason, all control. The taste of that plump breast filling his mouth, the feel of her tight, straining nipple against his marauding tongue, shattered any hope of taking her gently. By offering herself so wantonly, she was doing the taking. He was helpless to do anything but follow her lead. She drugged him with her throaty murmurs, drove him wild with her sexy shivers.

With a groan of utter defeat, he sank with her to the carpet, then scrambled as frantically as she to rid himself of the rest of his clothes.

When she was naked and writhing beneath him, he parted her thighs, found her wet, swollen core, and thought he’d die before he became one with that tight, silken heat.

A moment of sanity gripped him. “January.” He breathed her name like a prayer against her mouth. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She rocked her hips against him in an instinctive and innocently provocative gesture of submission. “Michael, please . . . don’t stop now. Don’t do that to me!”

The desperation in her voice tore at him as a flood of desire swamped him. Yet he tried; Lord, he tried.

“Sweetheart,” he gasped between harsh breaths, “I have to know . . . are you protected?”

Her eyes flew open. “No. No!” she whispered, looking like she might cry. “Aren’t you . . . don’t you . . . have something?”

Had he not been so needy and she so proud, he might have laughed at the exasperation in her voice and at her crestfallen expression. “I didn’t exactly plan this, love.” He pressed his lips against her breast and asked hoarsely, “When was your last period?”

He felt her body stiffen with embarrassment.

Cupping her face in his hands, he stroked away the tension with a steady caress of his thumbs over her temples. “Think, baby. When?”

Her nipples grazed his chest with each shivery breath she took. He groaned and repeated on an urgent growl, “When?”

“Two . . . three days ago.”

Reacting to the sudden uncertainty in her voice, he brushed a kiss across her brow. “It’s okay. It should be a safe time for you.”

The dim light from the TV and the soft flicker of the burning candle revealed another question hovering in her dark eyes, one he felt compelled to answer. “And you’re safe with me. I would never put you at risk, January. You don’t have to be afraid I’d leave you with anything you don’t want.”

She wilted momentarily, then met his gaze with barely banked longing. “Then make love to me.”

Whispering her name, he covered her mouth with his and eased into her.

She was incredibly hot, impossibly tight. The exquisite clench of her body around him stole his last vestige of control and drove him to the ultimate barrier. On a long, deep stroke, he reached resistance. She stiffened and cried his name.

For too long he’d teased them both with simmering kisses and slow, sensual caresses; too many times he’d brought them to the brink of this act, then withdrawn. There’d be no turning back tonight.

Swallowing her cry, he plunged deep, experiencing a moment of blinding self-hatred as he felt her virginal shield resist, then tear. She gasped and struggled against him even as he languished in the wonderful way she gloved and pulsed around him.

Achingly aware that his pleasure caused her discomfort, but helpless to make himself leave her, he praised her with whispered endearments, scattering soft, pleading kisses over her face.

“Don’t fight . . . please, baby . . . try to relax, and the pain will ease.”

He stroked damp hair from her brow and watched as she swallowed huge breaths, forcing herself to do as he instructed.

“Better?” he asked, as he sensed the tension leave her.

She nodded and licked her kiss-swollen lips.

He chased her tongue back inside her mouth and bit it lightly before losing himself again in a long, breathless kiss. On a groan of passion too long denied, he began moving inside her.

Slow and shallow, he stroked her, then faster and deeper as her body conformed to the size of him, and she rose against him in pleasure instead of pain. But the reality of loving her was more powerful than the expectation had ever been, and too soon he lost the ability to pace, to hold back for her sake.

Her body gripped him like a tight velvet fist, sweetly milking him of his strength, greedily stripping him of his control. On a riotous rush of sheer animal need, he cried out her name and plunged deep, spilling his passion, losing himself in the rich, mind-melting haven she offered.

Inside her small suburban house all things remained the same. In the background the TV droned softly and the flickering candle threw dancing shadows across the ceiling. George whined in his sleep and curled into a tighter ball on the rug by the window.

But January Stewart was irrevocably changed.

At thirty-two, the loss of her virginity should have been cause for celebration. That a man like Michael—a man she loved—had taken it should have been cause for joy. Yet the room’s unnatural quiet where moments ago there had been thunder invited neither.

Something was drastically wrong. She could feel it in the controlled way Michael’s breath fanned her shoulder, in the undeniable thread of tension strung through the powerful male body pressed against her side. Yes, something was wrong . . . and she knew without questioning why that it was her fault.

She shivered involuntarily. Michael reached across her and snagged the quilt from the sofa. Without a word he covered them both, then lay on his back beside her. Stacking his hands beneath his head, he stared broodingly at the ceiling.

She wanted to dissolve like a stain into the carpet. Since that wasn’t an option, and since she could no longer stand his censuring silence, she sat up, clutched the quilt to her breast, and reached for her discarded sweater.

A gentle hand on her arm stayed her.

Statue still, she closed her eyes and waited.

“I’m sorry, January.” His soft words grated like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. His silence had already told her how sorry he was. It hurt more somehow to actually hear the words. Had it been good for him, he wouldn’t feel the need to apologize. Had she known how to please him, she wouldn’t feel so foolish.

She bowed her head and huddled deeper inside herself. “It’s all right,” she said, feeling awkward and inadequate and anything but all right.

He swore fiercely and in one smooth motion tugged her back down onto her back. Looming over her, he met her eyes with a look of unbridled anger. “There is nothing right about it.” He sucked in a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were dark with his effort to stay under control. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” she answered pridefully.

“Dammit, you are not fine. And I’m the biggest fool to ever unzip a fly.”

She rolled her head to the side, avoiding his look of disgust.

“I promised you we’d make love,” he went on angrily, “and instead I practically attack you! Your first time and I got so wrapped up in wanting you I took you on the floor. On the
floor
, for God’s sake!”

She turned to face him, shaken by the self-loathing in his voice. In his eyes she saw something that made her stop and rethink everything he had said. Vulnerability. The censure in his voice had been unmistakable, but the one he was blaming was himself. He wasn’t disappointed in her for being inadequate, but in himself for losing control.

If relief were sweeter, she’d have died from it. If love were stronger, she couldn’t have borne it. Touching a hand to his hair, she met his eyes with a direct and forgiving gaze. “If there was an attack, Michael, I’m the one who launched it.”

He shook his head. “I was rough with you. I didn’t want it to be like that. . . . But lady, you took me by storm, and before I knew what was happening, it was all over but the thunder.” He pressed her hand, palm open, against his chest, where she could feel his heart still rumbling like the distant reminder of that storm. “I wanted to go so slow with you.”

With a sharp, feminine thrill, she felt him growing hard once more where his hips pressed against her thigh.

“And dammit, here I am . . . already wanting you again.”

Emboldened and inflamed by his arousal, she moved against him and offered a solution. “Then go slow. This time . . . go slow.”

He smiled and gave her a blood-thickening, pulse-quickening kiss, then picked her up and carried her to her bed. Taking a washcloth from the bathroom and ignoring her embarrassed protests, he gently and thoroughly washed both the proof of his passion and the proof of her innocence from her thighs.

Then, as though time didn’t exist or ceased to matter, he proceeded to teach her a whole new definition of slow.

Slow became the smooth glide of his fingers across her face. Slow became the unforgivingly languid journey of his mouth as it charted an erotic, seductive course across her heated skin.

She moaned and sank deeper into the covers, not at all sure she was going to survive slow, as with timeless, torturous leisure he introduced her to sensations she’d never dreamed existed, to pleasures so exquisite they flirted with pain, and finally to a love she’d never believed was real.