“I miss you,” he
rasped against my mouth. He had his hand fisted in my
hair, using it to hold me still as he took the kiss
deeper.
“How can you miss me?”
I smiled at him. Even in my dreams, I had to keep it
light, had to. “I’m right here.”
“Not really, you’re
not.” He stroked a hand down my side, cupped my hip and
circled against me. “I’ll wake up alone…this is just a
dream.”
“Hmmm.” I nipped his
shoulder. “If it’s just a dream, we should probably make
the most of it, don’t you think?”
Nudging at his
shoulders, I pushed until he moved away and lay on his
back. I rolled on top of him and took him inside,
shuddering in pleasure. His hands gripped my hips and
his eyes, those dark, sinfully sexy eyes, stared at me,
rapt on my face.
Like nothing else
existed for him…just me.
“Nothing else does
exist for me,” he muttered. “Not when you are near me.”
Part of me wondered
how he knew I was thinking that. The other part didn’t
care—the other part was too lost in the pleasure to
comprehend thought. He lifted me up with his strong
hands as though I weighed nothing. Slow…steady…
And not enough.
Reaching down, I
wrapped my fingers around his wrists. “Faster,” I said,
staring down at him. “Harder.”
Rip’s lashes lowered.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to scare you.”
“You wouldn’t ever
hurt me. You couldn’t ever scare me.”
As I said it, the
dream shifted around me and we were no longer the beach,
but in a bed. A big, soft bed that cradled me like a
dream as Rip moved over me.
“Say my name,” he
whispered. “Let me hear it.”
“Rip…”
“Tell me you’ve missed
me,” he ordered, kissing me hard and rough. His voice
was just this side of desperate, something I wasn’t
prepared for, not with him. “Give me something, damn
it.”
But I couldn’t ignore
that plea—it was just an echo of my own need,
anyway…right? That’s all dreams were.
“I’ve missed you,” I
told him. Then his mouth came down on mine and he was
kissing me like he could drown in me.
One second I was
dreaming, lost in Rip’s arms, lost in his kiss and
hovering on the edge of climax, and the next second I
was awake, brutally awake and all too aware of the fact
that I was being watched. I jerked up in bed, clutching
the sheets and blankets to my chest.
Rip was standing in
the doorway with one shoulder propped against the door
jam. He had a look in his eyes that sent my skin to
tingling all over. I mean all over—I felt it in
my lips, my toes and every square inch in between.
“Hey,” I said. My
voice cracked.
He continued to stare
at me.
It was very, very
unnerving the way he watched me.
“Ahh…is everything
okay?”
He didn’t answer.
Nope, what he did was push off the door jam and come
over to the bed. He knelt down by the bed, resting one
hand on top of the blankets. He had such damn nice
hands…the hands of a poet, a warrior…a lover. One of
those lovely hands was only an inch away from my thigh
too. I thought I could even feel the heat of it, through
the blankets.
“You were dreaming,”
Rip said, his voice low and rough.
Oh, shit.
Swallowing, I dredged up an innocent smile. “Was I?”
“Yes.” His eyes, that
dark, melted-chocolate gaze, locked on mine and I felt
frozen in place. Unable to move as he laid a hand on my
cheek and stroked my lower lip with his thumb. “Do you
remember it?”
Oh, man, did I
remember. But I couldn’t really tell him that, now could
I? Self-preservation is a lovely thing, and I looked him
dead in the eye and lied. “Nope.”
Self-preservation is a
lovely thing, yeah, but it doesn’t make me a better
liar.
He smiled, a wolf’s
smile. “You don’t remember?” He leaned in and nuzzled my
neck, his breath teasing across my flesh like a caress.
“Maybe I could jog your memory.”
The hand on my cheek
stroked down, over my neck, across my collarbone, down,
down. The tips of his fingers brushed against the curve
of my breast and I realized I’d dropped the blankets and
was sitting there as naked as the day I was born.
“I’m good. No need to
jog the memory.”
“You whispered my
name,” he murmured, nipping my earlobe. “Then you
moaned. You sounded exactly like you did the first time
I made you come.”
