Jennifer Greene: Wild in the Moonlight

“No. I wasn’t wondering anything. I was just feeling bad for you.”

“Yeah, well. The thing is…maybe there was a time I wouldn’t have been comfortable with casual sex. But that was then. And this is now. I’ve been alone since the divorce. That’s three years.”

“Hey,” he said gently. Hell’s bells, those tears were welling up. And yeah, of course he knew she cried at the drop of a hat. Only, damn it, this time she had reason to cry, a terrible huge reason to cry, and that was way different from seeing her cry at a Kodak commercial. He scooped her close, stroking her back, feeling her shudder back a real sob, afraid that she was going to do it seriously to him this time-cry until they were both drenched.

“I don’t want a husband,” she said fiercely.

“You don’t have to have a husband.”

“I’ve been trying to scare men away for three years. And doing a great job of it.”

“You’re great at being ditsy,” he reassured her, and stroked, stroked, stroked. “But maybe you don’t have to work at it quite so hard. It’s not like every man wants kids-”

“I know that. But I also had a husband who took off the minute he found out I was…flawed. Yes, he wanted kids. And so did I. But we could have made other choices-like adopting or fostering. That’s when I realized it wasn’t as simple as just being about kids. It was about his seeing me differently, seeing me as less of a woman. My feeling like less of a woman.”

He stopped stroking. “Wait a minute. What kind of horse hockey is this?”

“It’s not horse hockey, Lachlan. You asked me what the deal is, and I’m telling you. In the beginning I just didn’t see a reason to get into all this. It wasn’t your problem, wasn’t your business. But you asked so I’m telling you. I want to get into casual sex. With you. I want to know for sure that you’re leaving. That you’re going back to your own life. That I don’t have to worry about how you think about me as a woman, deep down. How you-”

Damned if he was going to let her finish another idiotic sentence. Enough was enough.

Violet felt completely bewildered when Cameron suddenly grabbed her. She’d been trying to seriously talk to him. She was all riled up and upset that the whole crappy story about her skinny tubes had come out. She’d never wanted Cam to know. It was fine the way it was. Good the way it was. He thought of her as a whole, sexy woman-she knew he did. She didn’t want him to see her differently, and she’d been afraid all along that he would if he knew the whole blasted picture.

Yet suddenly his arms swept around her, tighter than a noose, and his mouth swooped down on hers, slapped hers, crushed hers…then almost immediately lightened. Slower than honey, a taking kind of kiss became a wooing kind of kiss. A coaxing, wooing kind of kiss suddenly became an ardent, I want you need you have to have you kind of kiss. His tongue found hers. His hands sieved into her hair. She felt his long, hard body throb against hers, and suddenly she was trembling from the inside out.

He was going to take her. She knew it in the flash of an instinct, a burst of heat and fear and excitement streaking through her pulse. Right here, right now, right under the deep, dark shade of the maple. No one was around, and the sun was setting fast now, but heaven knew strangers and neighbors both drove by and drove in at all hours.

It was as if he didn’t care. Didn’t notice.

And then neither did she.

She’d never felt like this. As a young girl, she’d dreamed incessantly all that tedious stuff about the prince who’d find her, who’d make her the center of his world, who’d slay dragons for her. But obviously she’d grown up. There were no fairy tales, and she’d wanted a flesh-and-blood guy and not a fake prince anyway. But Cameron…oh, Cameron.

He pushed at clothes, buttons, zippers. Heeled off his shoes, lifted her out of hers. No one had ever swept her away like this. Made her feel as if he couldn’t breathe without her breath, couldn’t survive without touching her, couldn’t live. Without having her.

His eyes were open on hers, intense, unrelenting. Yet his mouth kept coming, even as he swooped her down to the ground on their makeshift nest of clothes. A car went by, maybe saw them, maybe didn’t.

Pagan kiss followed pagan kiss, each more fierce and wild than the last. A button dug into her spine. Grass tickled. Her hair tangled-her darn long hair was always tangling-yet only one thing mattered to her. Cam. And what they seemed to be creating together.

When he suddenly lifted his head, she tried to say something, but the way he looked at her dammed all the words in her throat and her heart was suddenly hammering, hammering. “I love you,” he said roughly. “ Love, Vi. Do you hear me?”

Again she tried to answer, but he moved so fast. One instant he was taking her mouth, the next he’d twisted around, all naked and bronzed and bare, and started over completely at the other end. He kissed her right foot, from arch to toe, then worked his way up. Kisses wreathed from ankle to knee to the inside of her thigh to the core of her, and when she was gasping for breath, he flipped her over. He kissed her fanny; bit softly, tenderly, then laved a silken path up her spine to the nape of her neck. Then flipped her again.

His tongue dove into her mouth, mated with hers, even as he reached down. He wrapped her legs around his waist, intimately tight, and then dove in, drove in, taking her high and tight and intimately. Desire suddenly developed sharp teeth. Need clawed at her, ached through her. The need for completion, but even more, the need to love. Him. To be loved. By him.

“Come with me,” he rasped. The sun dropped so fast, as if understanding they needed privacy, yet the darkness so stealthily brought voyeurs. Crickets. Frogs. Lightning bugs. Cats. And then the moon.

Their moon.

She saw his face above her, so sharply honed, so full of passion and emotion, even as she could feel herself losing any last ounce of control. Love reeled through her, whipped through her senses and heart.

“ Now, Vi,” he said.

She came with him, feeling as if she were freefalling from the top of the sky. But not alone. She fell with Cam, wildly, from the heart. Even minutes later, even hours later, she couldn’t shake the flushed, joyous sensation of feeling totally complete. Totally whole. As if she were the most powerful woman ever born, woman with a capital W, the woman she’d always wanted to be.

Cam’s woman.

And at that moment she couldn’t imagine feeling any other way.

Cameron couldn’t sleep.

It had to be well past two in the morning. They’d eventually made it to her bedroom, dozed for a while, wakened to make love all over again. Now, oddly, he was more wide awake than a hoot owl. She was lying in his arms, damp, warm, draped all over him-or he was draped all over her. Who cared who was doing the draping as long as every inch of his skin was touching every inch of hers?

His eyes were used to the darkness now. He kept staring at the silver moonlight flooding in the open window, the quiet stir of curtains, the pale light falling on that strangely austere bedroom. “Vi,” he whispered.

“Hmm?”

He’d been pretty sure she was awake, just not positive. Her voice was sleepy, sated, content-but awake. “ Chére, are you absolutely positive about the infertility?”

She didn’t stiffen in his arms this time, which told Cameron that she was okay talking about the subject with him now. The trust was there. For him. For her. “Let’s put it this way,” she said with a wry touch of humor. “Originally I learned everything about sex from Simpson-which means that I learned almost everything wrong. From the time we were in high school, Simpson made me think that a guy had to get off or he suffered terribly. That guys couldn’t wait. That sometimes girls made it and sometimes they didn’t, but overall, that Real Women did.”