She waited. An eternity passed.
“Yes,” he said. He trapped her arms and pulled her down flat on top of him. “Yes, damn you.”
And he proved it with his kiss.
Chapter Twenty
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
—THOMAS OSBERT MORDAUNT
THEY DANCED.
No decorous waltz this time, but a wild and primitive duet that began with a kiss and followed only one inescapable rhythm.
It didn’t matter that he was experienced and Mac had almost none. She knew her instincts were good when he groaned at her touch, at the stroke of her tongue on his neck and chest and belly. She gloried in the power of her newfound womanhood.
But Liam wasn’t quite prepared to surrender his traditional masculine prerogatives. When matters had progressed to the greatest extremity he rolled Mac beneath him again, parted her legs, and entered with a deep, bold stroke.
He’d been right. She wanted him hard and fast. There was no pain, though she’d been celibate for more years than she wanted to count. He made her forget there was such a thing as celibacy. He made her forget there was anything beyond this rapture, this completion, this unbearable joy of taking and being taken.
But it was more than that. A shifting had begun inside her, and she almost grasped the meaning of it before Liam drove it from her mind again.
Plain, skinny Mac was gone, reborn like a phoenix out of the fires of passion, from the conflagration that consumed them both and left them weary and tangled in each other’s arms.
For a moment suspended out of all time they were in harmony, all conflict forgotten, content beyond joy. Mac took that moment and built a box around it within her mind, a case of velvet and satin and clouds and dreams. Wherever, whenever she went, it would go with her, protected and eternal.
She didn’t mind when Liam slept afterward. She studied his face, so unguarded in sleep. Almost gentle. Almost innocent. She could see the boy he’d been, the boy who had existed before the school of hard knocks got hold of him. A boy who’d fought all his life and didn’t know how to stop.
But there was so much she didn’t know about him. So much she badly wanted to know. Who that boy had been. What he had suffered. How that suffering had built his obsessions and his need to save and protect those he thought incapable of caring for themselves.
Like Caroline. Like the slave girls. Irrational in one obsession, noble in the other.
Wanting even to protect her. Mac, who’d never had anyone but Homer try to protect her from anything.
Liam had called her jealous. She was—jealous of the secrets Liam kept so firmly locked within himself.
She brushed Liam’s hair from his forehead and immediately flashed back to that time in the jungle when he’d come so close to death.
God.
Her hand trembled, and she snatched it away before she woke him. Suddenly, so suddenly, she understood what had changed in her heart even as Liam had filled her body.
It was impossible. It was crazy. It was true.
She rocked back and closed her eyes. When had it happened? How? Had it been during one of their numerous verbal battles? At Cliff House, when she first began to understand him, or at the ball, when she’d found the nerve to make her move and felt the depth of his response?
Or had it begun the first time she saw him in the rain, a photograph come to life—a man she would never have met if not for a fluke of time and fate? A man who drove her crazy, a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist, arrogant as all get-out and totally oblivious to the feelings of any other human being…
No. Not every human being. Just the girl who’d been his ward and the woman who loved him.
Mac got up, pulled on her chemise, and wandered to the bay windows. The sky was patterned with scudding clouds against the darkness, as unquiet as her thoughts. The city was likewise dark except for the streetlamps and houses beyond the commercial district. Dark and alien. Not her city. Never her city.