Jennifer Greene - Wintergreen

“Have you loved many times?” she queried softly.

“Many? No.” His palm brushed back her hair, first one side and then the other. “Let’s get back to potato chips and the other things you think I need to know about you.”

“My weaknesses?”

“I already know your strengths, Misha.” Teasing kisses landed on her temple.

“I have to read before I go to sleep or I have insomnia,” she confessed.

He chuckled, his arms folding loosely around her again, his fingers lifting and playing with the tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck. “Try harder,” he suggested.

“I hate to be interrupted when I’m working. No human being could want to live with me the first day of my period.” He kissed her, hard, on the mouth then, as if he understood how shocked she was at letting that personal detail slip out. “I like TV dinners. I lose socks in the dryer. I also lose my temper on occasion. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those…uh…movies. I have no control over my son, no discipline. I hate grocery shopping… How long do I have to go on?” she questioned. “Your turn for true confessions.”

“Not yet.” His slash of a smile was only token; it did not reach his eyes. Those dark orbs held stark desire, depths of feeling where lightness suddenly didn’t belong.

“I need to hear just a little more.”

Was that why he was still lingering on her doorstep, because he thought he needed a little conversation? Lorna touched her cold fingertips to his cheek. “It’s warmer inside.”

He shook his head.

“Johnny’s next door at Freda’s.”

He turned the key in the lock. The front door that invariably stuck in cold weather obligingly opened at his slightest push. Lorna had forgotten to leave a light on, and it was dark inside. Dark and warm, as Matthew was dark and warm. He took off his coat, then hers, tossed both over a chair. She barely had the chance to slip off her shoes before he reached for her.

“So you need a book to put you to sleep, do you, Misha?” She considered him brilliant for being able to follow that thread of conversation. His lips were still chilled from the outside air, until they were warmed by hers. His mouth sank into hers and stayed there as his arms enfolded her. Up and down, up and down, his hands rubbed in an evocative pattern, first very slowly and then picking up speed until the pressure was almost hurtful. Almost immediately she felt her own response start to build; then it accelerated until she felt an ache inside her that was almost painful, a longing that was alien, fierce, wild.

She could hear his breathing in the dark room, and wondered vaguely why neither of them had turned on a light. The first time they had made love it had happened the same way-so fast, like dynamite, like a raging fire from the first touch. He was so hungry for warmth, fanning those same desperate flames in herself. Her arms curled around his neck, her fingers closing on a handful of dark hair.

His leg insinuated itself between hers, his thigh tight and hard against her softer flesh. She could feel-could almost hear-the change in his heartbeat as his hands stole beneath her sweater and blouse to the skin over her ribs. Her whole body throbbed when his palm closed over one breast, kneading the firm, swollen flesh, heating it… She felt so warm. Restlessly, she stirred, and his mouth followed hers, his tongue stealing between her teeth, thrusting and probing. She was melting like butter in the sun. She was less and less like herself; she was so cautious about pursuing her sexual feelings. Lorna would never be taking such initiative, her fingers fumbling mindlessly with his sweater, angry at that heavy barrier to closeness. Eventually, he helped her remove the sweater.

“Touch,” he urged her. “Touch me, Misha. I feel as if I’ve been separated from you for a year. As if one more minute is too much.” Her palm touched the mat of hair on his chest, then curled, as she traced up and down with her fingers the swell of male breast to his throat, her thumb flicking over the flat nub of masculine nipple exactly as he was doing to her.

“Matthew…”

He slipped her sweater over her head. He undid two buttons on her blouse, then stopped to flick on the lamp by the couch, eventually undid the rest of the buttons, slowly sliding the blouse and her bra off. “God, you’re beautiful.”

The lamp cast a warm apricot light on her high, firm breasts, the darkened nipples pouting up for him. He looked, his touch gentle and slow as his fingertips glided over her creamy satin skin. His eyes were a dark charcoal glaze of want and the most intimate of needs.

She reached up to touch his face with the palm of her hand, and he turned to kiss her palm, then trailed butterfly kisses down her throat to the curve of her shoulder. His hands kneaded the orbs of her breasts together, and he kissed the crease between them, laving it with his tongue. She felt helpless, enthralled, spellbound; her hands wanted to clench and unclench, and her throat was scratchy. She was too warm and lethargic to move, but inside her there was nothing warm and lethargic. It was all a race, a rush, a burgeoning pressure, and a wild, uncontrollable, bittersweet longing ached through her.

His lips came back to hers and he crushed her to his chest again; she ran her hands up and down his back, all the way down to his flat buttocks that contracted when she touched, pressing his arousal between them. “Misha.” He caught her hands suddenly, raising them up behind his neck. “We’re not doing very well making it into the bedroom again.”

“Hmm.” She didn’t want to talk. So much more than the first time, she felt a sheer rush of feminine pleasure at how powerfully her touch aroused him. At how much she wanted him to want her.

“I only came in for a brief nightcap,” he murmured. “You haven’t offered me a single drop. We were just going to finish that little conversation we started outside.”

Her lips tasted the skin at the curve of his shoulder. “You’re thirsty?”

“No.”

“You want to talk?”

“No.”

She smiled. “You want to see the decor in my bedroom?”

“If it isn’t too far.”

Heavens, he was easy to please.

“I’m going to have to lock you up and keep you. You know that, don’t you, Misha?” Matthew’s palm smoothed back her mane of tangled hair. She lay stretched out beside him sleepily, her head tilted back against the pillow so she could look at him.

“I like your body, Matthew,” she said absently.

He chuckled, sliding down lower on the mattress so that they were exactly face to face again. The fierce tumult of lovemaking had exhausted them both, so that they could not seem to move except in slow motion. Slow motion was fine with Lorna.

His body was beautiful. He was so lean, a long torso with small flat buttocks, ribs with no spare flesh. The curve of his shoulders and upper arms fascinated her. He had a small appendectomy scar. The long muscles in his thighs…everything. All of him. When he made love, his movements were fluid; he had a male grace, an animal suppleness of lithe motion and dominant control that was both fierce and lazy.

She couldn’t understand what made him so different from other men in her life, what made him so beautiful to her, what made passion burst like something wild and free when he touched her. Because she loved him? But when she’d been very busy being honest with herself just the other day, she’d told herself that she was just a little too frightened to commit herself to that yet. Calling it love. Her finger absently trailed up his thigh, then turned at a right angle to touch the curling dark hair.

His hand closed over hers, shifted it. “If you don’t behave yourself, I’m going to get up and fetch you a glass of wine to put you to sleep.”