Dead Calm

“What’s so funny, Sophie?” His tongue traced the curve of her mouth, gently, dampening her lips, and the wind touched them, too, and everything in her shivered with delight.

She just wished Judah didn’t look so grim.

So lost.

She didn’t want him lost. She didn’t want emotion now, not his, not hers, only this physical exhilaration that blanked out memories and thought and everything except this.

“Easy,” she murmured. She smoothed the frown between his ocean-blue eyes. “It’s not the end of the world.”

Not answering, not meeting her gaze, he lowered himself over her, fitting his pelvis against hers, sliding his arms under her. “Any chance of getting this damn bottom off?”

“Finnegan, if I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that there’s always a chance.” She squirmed encouragingly, every nerve ending in her thighs and belly quivering with pleasure, with life. “If there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Tomorrow would come soon enough.

And in the meantime, here was Judah, filling her world with taste, with touch, with himself.

Easy, for the moment, so easy to let herself forget the ugliness. So tempting, this surrender to feeling, to the physical anodyne of what they were doing. Surrender to the power, to the wave of pleasure.

There were worse ways to end a day.

Chapter 4

He should have gone home.

Even as Judah slicked back the tangled hair hiding her ear and tasted her, he knew he should get up from the heat of her body, the salty tang of her skin, and leave.

He knew it. Like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard, his brain screeched warnings. Yet he lingered in the illusive comfort of her arms.

Stayed.

And hated himself.

Weakness, this craving to touch and taste. He despised himself for the need, for the loss of will. He hated this weakness that mewed stay when he knew he should flee as if the hounds of hell were on his heels.

Weakness.

And yet…

He stroked the slight swell of her flattened breast and lost himself in the warming whiteness of it, spellbound by the rose flush that crept upward from his touch.

A murmur. A sharp inhalation. Hers. The subtle accommodation of her hips to him fascinated him, whispered to the maleness in him, sang a silent siren song of movement and scent and urgency.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“You’re wrong. At the moment it makes all the sense in the world.”

“You? Me? No.” His brain kept jabbering and screeching, a discordancy of mind and logic against the need for touch and taste. “This is stupid.” He braced himself on his forearms, his hands framing her face and made himself look at her, forced himself to breathe the cool air and not her scent, made himself look at the woman who’d caused George’s death.

Dark streaks against white sand and green pine, her hair fanned out from her round face. She looked back at him, knowledge and sadness and sympathy blurring the blue-gray of her eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that, Sophie.”

“How am I looking at you, Judah?” Quiet as sunlight moving across a wood floor, her voice feathered over him.

“I’m only—”

“Don’t,” he said again.

“Don’t what, Judah?”

“Just…don’t.”

“Ah, Judah.” There was something like regret in that barely heard exhalation, something too much like pity.

From the corner of his eye, he saw her palm lift toward him. Before she could touch him, he fanned his hand across her face, stroked the skin at the corner of her eyes and drew her eyelids closed.

He hated her for the way she made him feel. Hated her for the sympathy in her eyes. Hated her most of all for the understanding glimmering there, an understanding so close to pity he couldn’t bear it. She had no right to see straight down to whatever passed for a soul in the darkness of his heart.

And yet he wanted her. Wanted her. Hated her. And despised himself. A sickness of body and mind he didn’t want to escape.

In that moment when the wind ceased, when all he heard was the pounding of his blood in his head, he learned a truth.

Despite logic, despite loyalty, despite everything, he was going to have Sophie Brennan.

He didn’t want to think about how he was going to live with that choice. Not with her soft and yielding beneath him.

With a quick, fierce movement, he pulled open the fastener of her pants. Her hands were right there on top of his, urging the skintight material down. Caught in the immediacy, he gritted his teeth and struggled with his jeans. Their hands bumped, tangled. She pushed his bumbling fingers aside. He pushed right back, hands and fingers melding in a dance of their own.

“Wait.” She lifted her pelvis and shoved the fabric past her belly.

“No.” Cool, damp, that skin suddenly under his palm. He dipped his mouth to her navel and blew softly against her.

Her belly fluttered beneath his mouth. “Ah,” she said, a tight, sharp sound of surprise.

He flattened his hand against her and pressed, his fingers stroking, testing her inner heat. “Here?”

“Oh, yes. There is good. There is perfect. There…ah.” One of her hands tightened in his hair, the other slid between them, seeking him as he continued pressing and stroking.

“Oh, yes,” and she surged upward, riding the rhythm of his touch as she’d melded with the storm waves. Urgency swamped finesse and he was clumsy, pushing and probing, the blind eye of need driving him into her. Awkward in his haste, no grace in the hurrying, no skill in his movements.

A sixteen-year-old would have had more control.

But she was in the moment with him, just as urgent, just as needy. The impatient sounds of her breathing merged with his, spoke to him in the silence.

He felt the wet denim of his jeans snick open, felt her warm hand, exploring, moving against his belly. Not shy, not delicate, her hands were those of a woman used to touching and examining, accustomed to the feel of the human body. Knowing. Confident. Incredibly seductive, that confidence. Behind his eyes a red haze burned. Then she freed him into the small curl of her hand and he bucked, thrust against her.

Need. Ugly.