He didn’t know what she had done to ask forgiveness for. If anyone had left too many words unsaid, it had been him. And now it was too late.
When Zeke fell silent, Rory stirred beside him. She had been quiet all this time, listening, seeming to pass no judgments, asking no questions until he had finished.
Now she said, “But what about your sisters? What happened to them?”
“Agnes married a bank clerk and moved to Brooklyn. Caddie wed some kind of an artist and had three kids. They live in the Village now. And Tessa, well, you heard her story, how I blighted her life by running off that Duracy bum. But I still am not that sorry I did it.”
“Perhaps you did her a favor,” Rory agreed. “But, Zeke, you can’t always be so roughshod with people, even those you care about. Sometimes you have to let them make their own choices, even the wrong ones.”
Zeke grimaced. “That’s what Sadie always used to say.” He twisted back to his side, smiling down at her. “She would have liked you. Although she would have thought you could use a little more meat on your bones.”
He touched her lightly beneath the covers, his fingers brushing the area of her rib cage just below the swell of her breasts. It was a mistake to do so. When he had awoke to discover himself in this extraordinary situation, Rory in his bed, so warm, so near, he had resolved to act the gentleman for once, not take any unfair advantage.
Maybe that’s why he had been blathering on for the past quarter of an hour, to keep his mind off her delectable curves so poorly concealed by that gown half falling off her. He had so much more he could tell her, so much more he wanted to say.
But as he gazed into her face pillowed so near to his own, her eyes quicksilver pools of innocence, her lips so sweet with the promise of pleasures he’d already tasted, his throat suddenly went dry and he ran out of things to talk about.
“Maybe we should try to get some sleep,” he said.
“I don’t know if I can. I just can’t seem to get warm.”
Zeke nearly groaned aloud. To resist an invitation like that, he would have had to have been a saint instead of the son of Satan that he was.
Taking care not to jar the bandage loose from his arm, he drew her closer, cradling her against the lee of his shoulder.
“Better?” he asked.
She nodded.
Maybe for her it was, but not for him. He was achingly aware of every soft curve, the heat of her flesh seeming to sear him through the thin layering of the nightgown, rousing in his loins a fearsome need.
Damn! He caught his breath as, in an effort to get more comfortable, Rory shifted, her fingers brushing along the flat plane of his stomach, lower?—
She snatched her hand away, half-jerking to a sitting position. “Zeke, you don’t have any clothes on.”
“That blasted woman took them.” He half-hoped that the realization that he was naked would send Rory scuttling back to the safety of her own side of the bed.
Instead she hovered over him, her eyes filled with wonder and longing. “I’ve never been in bed with a naked man before.”
“I’m relieved to hear it. For the love of God, Rory, stop looking at me that way. You had had better?—”
He didn’t know what she had better do, but it didn’t matter. Rory didn’t let him finish the sentence. She caught his hand, laying it alongside her cheek.
He could feel the heat of her skin, the way she trembled, but he sensed it was not owing to any embarrassment or shyness.
“Rory.”
Her name on his lips was an anguished plea. He tried to remember that he had decided not to let anything like this happen, that Rory was better off without him in her life. He tried to search deep into his soul for all that noble resolve he hadformed, and found himself searching her eyes instead. Searching and discovering a want that equaled his own.
Slowly, she bent to him, her mouth but a fraction away from his own. Their lips whispered against each other, a whispering that fast became a clamoring of passion.
With a low groan, he caught his arms about her, pulling her down hard on top of him. His tongue delved deep into the sweet hollows of her mouth, and he could feel the thundering of her heart.
Rory was long past considering the wisdom of her actions. She didn’t know at what point she had decided she wanted Zeke to make love to her. Perhaps it had happened sometime as she lay beside him in the darkness, listening to him open up his heart, share his past, or perhaps back there on the beach when she had rejoiced to find them both alive and realized how fleeting, how precious a thing time could be.
Or perhaps it had happened even earlier than that, much earlier, that day when they had first met.
She didn’t know. She only knew that the time, the moment, was now, to find the promise of a desire they had only touched upon before.
