Nine

      Two hours, Tomas told himself, and to prove he was in control of mind and body and emotions he stretched it to two hours twenty. Then he came to her room and quietly closed the door behind him. Head raised and nostrils flared, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the midnight dark.

      It wasn’t like night in the city. This was outback dark, an intense blackness that amplified the other senses to an acute pitch. He could smell the warm female scent of her body. Could hear the quick in-out whisper of her breathing.

      Was she awake? Lying in the dark waiting? Craving the intense pleasure of that first skin to skin contact?

      He shed his clothes quickly, felt the night air stroke him like a lover’s warm sigh. His skin was as hot and tight as a steer hide stretched to dry in the summer sun. As he stripped off his underwear the fleeting brush of his hand caused his erection to jerk with need.

      He sucked in a tense breath, half afraid of the edginess to this lust. Half afraid that the edges were keened with loneliness and need and yearning for more than hot bodies meeting in the darkness. The distant call of a night bird echoed in the dark, a high haunting two-note summons to its mate. Closer he heard the soft stirring of sheets, and his sex quickened in instant response. Its call to mate.

      He started toward the bed, and despite the darkness he could make out the slow stretch of her arms above her head. As he stopped by the bed she made a throaty sound of welcome. “You’re here.”

      “I thought you’d be asleep.”

      She shifted again, rolling onto her side and pushing aside the bedclothes. “I was waiting for you.”

      He sat on the edge of the mattress and her hand glided over his back, a whisper of sensation that reverberated through his body and pulsed in his blood and his sex. So did her scent—the familiar sweet fragrance of skin steeped in honey and cinnamon milk. The same as the day she’d arrived. The same as in Sydney when he’d yearned to taste her.

      Tonight he would.

      Then it wouldn’t matter if he lasted or not, if first he gave her pleasure.

      “Was there really paperwork?” she asked as he settled beside her.

      He didn’t answer, except to groan a deep thankful note as her arms and her legs wrapped around to draw him flush with her body. He didn’t answer because he forgot the question when she rocked against him, breast to chest, groin to groin, soft to hard. Unerringly he found her lips in the dark and kissed her deeply, a long, wet play of tongues and mouths and throaty murmurings that seemed to hang suspended in the heavy curtain of night. He didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t have to hide in the darkness, didn’t have to fear what he might see in her eyes or what she might learn from his.

      Slowly he kissed his way down her body, drinking in the soft taste of her skin and the husky rasp of her breathing and the strong arch of her back when he took each nipple into his mouth. When he palmed the curve of her belly and slid lower to part her thighs, she sucked in a ragged breath.

      “You don’t have to do that.”

      “Yeah, I do.”

      And he did. With tongue and lips, with a hunger long repressed, and when she tensed and cried out, when he felt her press down hard and start to come, he knew he had to be there. Now.

      “Ready?” he asked, and for answer she arched her back and welcomed him inside with a low guttural sound that echoed through his chest and gut, all the way to the organ that drove down hard inside her.

      Staggered by the power of his pleasure, he held himself still and rigid as he fought the urgent desire to keep on driving to an end. He was deep, all the way inside her climaxing body and her legs had wrapped around him, holding him tight against her.

      “I’m always ready for you.”

      God, but that undid him. The thickness of her turned-on voice, the taste of her on his lips, the intensity he felt in her stillness as she watched him start to move. The way she rose to meet the drive of his body, thrust for thrust, flesh meeting flesh. The gentle caress of her fingers on his face and throat, and the not-so-gentle bite of her teeth when she came again without any warning. Against the heat of his skin, where chest and breast met and brushed and drove into hard contact again, he felt the cool brush of her necklace and his fingers twined around the chain and held on while the beast of desire swallowed him whole.

      Head back, he took the last uncontrollable plunge and roared over the edge into completion.

      Somehow Tomas managed to rouse himself before the lure of taking Angie again or letting her sleep in his arms took hold. And when he sat on the side of her bed and rubbed a hand over his face to clear the last traces of temptation from his consciousness, he realized that he held her A-letter necklace in his hand. In the last minutes of that wild ride he must have gripped her chain so hard that he broke a link.

      He rubbed his thumb over the tiny charm and put it down on the bedside table. A for aftermath, afterward, awkward. The time to leave before he got comfortable in the lush folds of her sated body. A, he thought as he scooped up his clothes and retreated to his own bed, for another night, another time, another chance at conception.

      Two more times and that was it. Done.

      Then she was going home.

      Angie heard the drone of a plane coming in from the west and her heart banked and rolled. In fact her whole body revved to instant Tomas-is-home, here-look-at-me! attention a good thirty seconds before logic kicked in. He hadn’t said anything about flying anywhere…but then that didn’t mean anything…more often than not he didn’t say…and with so much acreage to get around, flying was an everyday feature of station life.

      But she couldn’t deny the punchy anticipation low in her stomach, the heaviness in her breasts, the tightness of her nipples. A little early, but Tomas was definitely home…almost. She shoved the last of the flowers she was arranging—until now, artfully—into the table centerpiece and dashed for the bathroom. No time for soaking in milky baths tonight. If he drove straight from the airstrip, no stops in-between, she had a maximum of ten minutes.

       Hurry, hurry, hurry.

      Shedding clothes along the way, she hit the shower running…then ducked straight back out for a shower-cap. No time for drying hair—she needed every precious minute for essentials. The red wine should be opened to breathe. Vegetables peeled. Cream whipped. For a wet, soapy second she rued letting the staff off early, again, so she could savor every detail of preparing and serving this special dinner.

      An intense wave of nervous tension gripped her body. Ovulation day, she’d joked