My Man Pendleton(65)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

So he gave her more, over and over, laving her, loving her, teasing her, tasting her. Just when she thought she couldn’t tolerate another moment, he moved back up her body, dragging his open mouth over her flat belly, dipping his tongue into her navel, treating each of her br**sts to another slow perusal. He paused on his journey only long enough to fulfill his promise of protecting her, donning a condom he pulled from the nightstand. Then he rolled her over to her side and aligned his body behind hers. He splayed one hand open over her belly, the other across her br**sts. Then he lowered his head until his mouth hovered right beside her ear.

“Are you ready for me?” he whispered. “Because I don’t think I can wait any longer. I want to be inside you, Kit. Deep inside you. In every way either one of us can possibly imagine.”

Somehow, she found the strength to nod, then she turned her head to kiss him. As he consumed her mouth with his, Pendleton eased himself inside her.

“Oh,” she murmured. “Oh, that’s so good.”

She thought he uttered a sound of agreement, but she couldn’t be sure. Deeper and deeper he entered her from behind, his movements slow, steady, certain. Kit had never felt so full, so satisfied, so complete. Until Pendleton began to move inside her. Then she realized just how empty she’d been all this time. And she knew the void was one she would never be able to fill again without him.

He moved his body up and down against hers, in and out of hers, alongside hers, until she thought she would burst with the fullness. Just when she felt herself approaching that elusive edge, he shifted their bodies so that she lay beneath him, facing him.

“I want to see your face when it happens,” he said softly. “And I want you to see mine.”

Deftly, swiftly, he entered her again, even more resolutely than before, doubling his rhythm. Over and over, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, he moved inside her, until both of them were nearly insensate with the wanting, the longing, the needing. At exactly the same time Kit felt the coil of heat inside her explode, Pendleton pelted her with one final thrust. Then both of them arched against each other, stilling as ripples of absolute pleasure wound through them.

For one long, silent moment, they only clung to each other, as if doing so would preserve their union forever. Then Kit drove her fingers into Pendleton’s hair and pulled his head down to hers for an almost brutal kiss.

I love you, she thought, and by some wild miracle, she kept the words locked deep inside. I love you.

When he pulled away from her to speak aloud what he was feeling, she quickly, gently, covered his mouth with her fingers and shook her head. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

“But—”

“Don’t.”

He searched her face in silence, cupping a hand over her jaw before dipping his head to kiss her cheek. Then he rolled away from her and rose from the bed, to tend to that little matter of sexual convenience that had prevented the mingling of their physical essences.

Would that it had been as effective dividing their emotional ones, Kit thought sadly.

At the sound of water running in the bathroom, she closed her eyes. And when Pendleton returned to bed, drawing his hand slowly, gently along the length of her spine, she pretended to be asleep. Doubtless, she didn’t fool him for a minute. But, thankfully, he had the decency to simply lie down beside her, draw her close, and shut his eyes, too.

Always the gentleman, Pendleton, she thought. And she wasn’t sure whether to be happy about that or not.

As had become his habit of late, Pendleton awoke slowly, clinging to the edge of a dream about Kit. This one, however, was different from the others. Normally, right about the time he got Kit na**d in his dreams, the scenario went a little surreal. Like she was suddenly dressed as Carmen Miranda, and she shook a couple of maracas as she marimba-ed out the door. But this time in his dream, she stayed Kit. A na**d Kit—a warm and wonderful na**d Kit who made love with him in the most warm and wonderful—not to mention naked—ways.

It was some dream.

As he rolled over in bed, he threw an arm across his eyes, as if by denying himself a view of his room, he might somehow make real the erotic images parading through the forefront of his brain. Amazingly, the gesture succeeded. Because just as he did in his dream, he heard the soft sigh of Kit’s breathing, tasted the lingering flavor of her on his tongue, smelled the musky fragrance of their coupling, felt the heat of her body as it pressed into his. In fact, so realistically did four of his five senses recreate the events of his dream, that Pendleton removed his arm from over his eyes to see if there might be an equally genuine vision to greet him. But all he saw was the ceiling overhead, noting with some disappointment a patch of flaking plaster he missed the day before.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath.

A languid, muffled murmur was his reply, and he turned his head on the pillow to find that—lo and behold—Kit did indeed emerge from his dream in warm, wonderful, na**d reality. That was when it finally hit him, like a bag of wet plaster upside his head. The dream he had about Kit last night? It wasn’t a dream at all. They really did make love. More than once. After all the sniping and snipping, after all the fighting and flirting, after all the denial of feelings, finally, finally, the two of them came to their senses and submitted to what should have been obvious from the beginning. They’d wanted each other all along.

As if she read his thoughts, Kit stirred, turning onto her side to face him. One arm was shoved beneath her pillow, and the other was folded over her bare br**sts. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was open, curled into the hint of a smile that was very, very naughty.

“Sleep well, dear?” he asked, returning her smile with an equally naughty one of his own.

“Mmm,” was all she said in reply. Her eyes remained closed, but she extended one long leg into a graceful stretch that rocketed Pendleton’s blood to the boiling point.

“Did you have nice dreams?” he asked further.

“Mmm-hmm,” she replied with a stretch of her other leg. Oh, God.

“Was I in any of your dreams?” At this point, Pendleton was really only half paying attention to his side of the conversation, as the comings and goings of Kit’s legs were really much more interesting.

She opened her eyes to half-mast and smiled some more. “No.”

That, finally, brought his attention back around. A little. “No?” he echoed. “I wasn’t in your dreams?” He probably would have felt indignant if it weren’t for the fact that the sheet chose that moment to fall away from her legs, exposing them from thigh to calf.