DESPITE A taxing day of travel, medical tests, an interview with the hospital’s psychologist, and a lengthy phone conversation with her parents, Emma couldn’t sleep. She slouched against the pillows plumped behind her, the covers drawn up to her waist, and she stared into the semi-darkness.
The quiet of Freedom Hall, the section of the hospital reserved for newly liberated Americans in transit to the United States, seemed deafening in contrast to the violent sounds she’d grown accustomed to during her imprisonment.
Emma loathed the isolation of her private hospital room. And she ached for David, which made her feel pathetic and stupid when she forced herself to recall his apparent change of heart now that they were free.
Emma reminded herself yet again that being free – of actually being able to resume her life – should have been enough of a blessing for her, but she knew she was lying to herself every time the thought crossed her mind. It wasn’t enough. It never would be. The feelings of grief that had built up inside of her throughout the day persisted, leaving her with a shattered heart and a distrust of her own instincts.
How could she have been so wrong about David? She sank lower onto the bed and closed her eyes, her mind racing a hundred miles a second as she tried to make sense of what had happened.
How, she wondered, could he have told her he loved her and then treated her with such casual disregard? After what they’d survived together, why had he retreated into himself and then walked away from her without even a backward glance? She closed her hands into fists, struggling not to surrender to the urge to wail like a wounded animal.
“Why? Someone please tell me why?” she whispered, hot tears seeping from her eyes. “I don’t … understand.”
Frustrated with herself, she swiped at her tears. She pressed a button on the bed’s control panel, wincing against the faint illumination provided by the light on the wall behind her bed. She lifted her hands to her temples and massaged the throbbing area with her fingertips. When the pain failed to abate, she decided to make her way to the nurse’s station down the hall and ask for some aspirin.
Straightening, she threw back the covers and slid to the edge of the bed, but she went perfectly still when the door to her room swung open.
David stood in the doorway.
The shock of his sudden appearance made her heart pound like a jackhammer. Emma remained poised on the edge of the bed, staring at him in disbelief.
He stepped into the room, shut and locked the door, and then moved toward her. He paused less than a foot away, his expression intent as he studied her. “How are you feeling?” he asked after a long minute of contemplation.
Her temper ignited, sarcasm and anger edging her voice when she spoke. “Terrific! Couldn’t be better, Major. But I’m not your problem any longer, so you can leave now.”
“You couldn’t be a problem even if you tried.”
She heard his fatigue, but she steeled herself against responding to it. “What do you want?”
“You.”
She blinked in surprise. “Why?”
“I need you.”
“And I needed you today,” she countered, “but you walked away from me without a word of explanation.”
“I know.”
Her anger faded when she heard the bleakness in those two words. “Why?” Her voice cracked, but she forced herself to continue. “Why, David?”
“Everything that’s happened …” He paused and gave her a searching look. “Everything that will happen…” He shook his head, seemingly unable to continue.
Emma felt an unexpected calm settle over her, and she couldn’t fathom why. “It’s a shock to be free, isn’t it?” she asked, the anger and hurt absent from her voice now.
He nodded.
She felt desperate to understand his state of mind. “The reality of it must have hit you like a ton of bricks.”
He blew out a hard breath. “Something like that.”
“So you’re wrestling with what’s happened, and you’re trying to come to terms with it,” she reasoned softly. “Is that why you pulled away? Is that why you wouldn’t talk to me?”
“That’s part of it,” he conceded.
Hope lurched to life inside of her. Don’t be a fool, a small voice in the back of her head advised. “We’ll both be alright, David, but only if we’re patient with ourselves and with each other. We can … share what we’ve … ”
He cut in. “I still need you.”
His admission nearly stopped her heart. She reached out, clasped his hands, and tugged him closer. Words failed her even as her emotions threatened to choke her.
“I’ll always need you, babe. That need won’t ever go away,” he confessed, that tender and all too familiar roughness back in his voice.
Emma stared up at him. Disengaging one of his hands, he lifted it and cupped her cheek. She covered his fingers with her own, turned her head, and brushed her lips across his palm.
“Forgive me?” he asked.
She held her breath for a long moment. Then, she nodded. The hand cradling her cheek trembled, and the remaining threads of hurt and resistance within her snapped. She wanted him as badly as he seemed to need her.
Now. It was all that mattered, she told herself. Now.
Whatever happened in the future, she would deal with it. Whatever the cost to herself, she would pay it.
With her gaze fixed on his rugged features, she tugged at the ties of her nightgown and peeled it from her body. David stripped out of his robe and pajama bottoms. Extending her arms, she welcomed him into her bed and her heart.
And although she briefly wondered how long he would remain with her, she set aside the thought and the worry it caused. Stay in the now, she cautioned herself. Do not think about anything but right now.
His hands shook as he drew her into the heat and power of his already aroused body. Emma sucked in a sharp breath, feeling scorched by their skin-to-skin contact.
“Love me, David,” she whispered.
“I do, Emma. God help me, I do.”
Sinking back against the pillows, she wrapped her arms around him in the same split second that she found his mouth. Eager to absorb him into her flesh and ravenous for his taste, she pressed frantic kisses to his chin and mouth before delving past his parted lips and teeth to drink in his essence.
She moaned, a throaty sound that sent a shudder through him – a shudder that she felt and absorbed. After frantically tangling her tongue with his, she sucked the tip between her teeth and worried it with tender bites.
Emma drew up her knees, her hips surging against the hard shaft trapped between their lower bodies. Her body became moist and pleading and painfully needy in her desperation to have him buried deep inside of her. He responded without hesitation, thrusting into her, withdrawing almost completely, and then thrusting even more deeply. All the while he caressed her breasts and teased her nipples to hard points of fire-filled desire.
Tightening spirals of sensation enveloped Emma, exploding like colorful starbursts. She expressed her pleasure with gasping little cries and clutching hands as a sensual storm consumed her.
David advanced and retreated, advanced and retreated. Again and again his invasion of her body possessed the power of a proclamation etched in granite as he claimed her for himself. Wildly aroused, Emma writhed beneath him, the emotional highs and lows she’d experienced that day and well into the night now set aside. Not forgotten, though, despite her best efforts to banish them from her mind.
Relentless in his quest to pleasure her, he increased his pace, driving her past coherent thought, beyond sanity, and then into the ecstasy of a stunning climax. She clung to him, breathless, heart racing, and her body quaking with reaction in the lingering aftershocks of fruition.
David soothed her with stroking fingertips and gentle kisses. Stunned by what she’d just experienced and lulled by his tenderness, Emma lay spent and trembling beneath him.
He unexpectedly shifted partway down her devastated body, star
tling her when he filled his hands with her still-tingling breasts. She groaned when he closed his mouth around one of her nipples and rolled the other one back and forth between his fingers. As she watched him, she realized that he hadn’t allowed himself to reach completion yet.
David stoked back to a roaring blaze the after-sparks of her first climax. She trembled beneath the sensual assault of his skilled hands and mouth, finally collapsing back against the pillows as her desire for him threatened to incinerate her.
Moaning, Emma savored each nip, each sucking pull, and each swipe of his tongue. He provoked a flood of searing sensations that sent molten heat streaming through her veins. She throbbed deep inside, and her legs shifted restlessly beneath his onslaught, his sensual generosity very nearly overwhelming her.
“Please,” she whispered, too shaken by her desire to feel him inside of her again to manage anything more than that one word.
He lifted his lips from her beaded nipples and swollen breasts, his expression tender and filled with the promise of fulfillment. Sitting up, he stroked her cheek with his fingertips, then trailed them from her lower lip to her chin, on to the valley between her breasts and across her quivering belly before he reached the sultry depths of her swollen sex.
Drawing Emma forward a few moments later, he drew her long legs over his thighs. They faced each other, his hands bracketing her hips as she sat atop his strong thighs. She edged closer, seeking connection, needing connection just as much as she needed air to breathe.
“Christ, you’re so damn beautiful, Emma.”
She smiled – a wholly feminine smile that promised him every pleasure imaginable. She reached down to stroke him, the searing heat of his pulsing sex branding her fingertips.
David drew her closer still. They touched, the head of his shaft pressing against her throbbing sex. Their bodies exchanged a devastatingly intimate kiss.
Emma shivered. She felt swollen and wet and incomplete. She needed him inside of her. She tightened her grip on him and stroked. Then, she changed tactics, skimming her fingertips up and down his thick length. An inarticulate sound of raw need spilled out of him. Meeting his gaze, she silently pleaded with him to take her.
“Now, babe?” His voice resonated with the rawest kind of need.
She sighed. “Now, David.”
He lifted her and penetrated her sheathe with a forceful thrust that left her trembling in his embrace and gripping his shoulders. His mouth swooped down, demanding, ruthless, and thoroughly carnal. He ate at her lips, his hunger for her voracious, and then he plunged his tongue into her mouth.
Emma responded to his consuming passion without inhibition. She wrapped her legs around him, her world pitching and tilting, her skin scorched by his body’s heat, her senses flayed by devastating need. A tidal wave of desire swamped her, threatening her grasp on reality.
She felt his fingers dig into her hips. His sex swelled deep within her, and she heard the low groan that began in his throat. Sensing he was near the edge and feeling the pressure building higher and higher within her own body, she whispered her love and relinquished herself to the imploding sensations that heralded her own climax. She held nothing back. As a result, she went spinning into a series of starbursts that utterly ravaged her senses.
At the pinnacle of her release, David thrust high and hard and deep. When a hoarse cry escaped him, Emma greedily drank in the sound. He stiffened suddenly, his sex pulsing, his seed spewing hotly into her, his mind and body shattering in the maelstrom of orgasm.
Sometime later, Emma slumped against his broad chest and rested her forehead against his shoulder. Too spent and too breathless to speak, she pressed her lips to his perspiration-slick skin.
David eventually found the strength to lower their still-joined bodies to the narrow bed. Gathering her into the shelter of his embrace, he held her as their respiration calmed and their hearts beat in unison.
He made no false promises to Emma. He simply held her close and watched over her as she drifted off to sleep.