Elizabeth Bevarly - Moriah's Mutiny

“Oh, damn,” he muttered brokenly. “Moriah—” But his words were cut off as she cupped him fully in her palm and pressed her hand urgently against him.

That was the last straw. If she wanted to make whoopee, Austen thought, then damn it all, they were going to make whoopee. With the swiftness and grace of a pouncing jaguar, he swept Moriah into his arms and tossed her into the center of the flowered coverlet on the king-size bed. While she gazed at him with hungry intent, he reached back over his shoulder to bunch his T-shirt in one hand, then pulled it over his head and let it fall to the floor.

For a long moment he stood towering over her, his bronzed, naked chest sprinkled with coils of gold-tipped hair rising and falling rapidly with the passion she had raised in him, looking to Moriah like a glorious island king. Feeling more excited and reckless by the moment, she opened her arms to him in invitation, and with a deep and ragged groan, Austen threw himself onto the bed beside her.

For a moment he was too overcome with desire to know where to begin. He’d never, ever, wanted a woman the way he craved Moriah now. His arousal strained painfully against the heavy denim of his jeans, begging to be set free and buried deep inside her welcoming warmth. But Austen wanted this to go slowly, wanted to take his time savoring the gifts she had to offer, wanted her in turn to hit new heights with him she’d never known before. As she lay flat on her back feasting her eyes hungrily upon him, he felt as thought they had all the time in the world to satisfy each other, felt as though this night would be one that continued forever.

Wordlessly, his eyes never leaving hers, Austen dropped his fingers to the hem of Moriah’s denim skirt, spreading his hand open beneath her warm thigh before rubbing his palm urgently under her skirt to cup her hip tightly. Her pupils widened with wanting when he kneaded her flesh with determination, and she moaned out loud when his fingertips dipped quickly and firmly under the lacy fabric of her panties. He wedged his thigh between hers then, pressing it up feverishly to settle against the heated feminine core of her, pulling her body adamantly toward him to rub even more intimately against her. As Moriah arched her back and cried out loud, Austen’s other hand gripped the neckline of her shirt and urged it farther down her shoulder until he exposed one soft, supple breast. With a muffled growl he lowered his head to the swollen mound and took the rosy peak into his mouth. Moriah tangled her hands insistently in his hair and pulled him closer, crying his name out on a gasp, begging him please to never, ever, stop.

With one quick move, he pulled her T-shirt over her head and tossed it to join his on the floor, then bunched up her skirt around her waist and settled himself once again between her thighs. Grasping both of her slender wrists in one hand, he pulled her arms above her head until she was helpless to do anything but surrender to him. Her eyes grew stormy when she understood his intentions, and a wicked gleam joined the fire in Austen’s eyes. Bending his head once again over her breasts, he slowly circled the dusky peaks of one with the tip of his greedy tongue while thumbing the other to life with his rough, callused hand.

He’d never known a woman to be as sweet as Moriah, had never known a woman’s skin could be so soft, so warm, so incredibly responsive. As he touched and tasted her with quiet reverence, letting his fingers and his kisses blaze trails across her flat belly, Austen felt his own body coming alive for the first time. It was suddenly as if any other sexual experience he’d enjoyed in his life had only been a preliminary to this one, as if this time with Moriah were his first. All the anxiety and excitement of his first time paled in comparison to the feelings that burned and bothered him now.

When a new thought invaded his muddled mind, Austen raised himself up on his elbows and gazed down anxiously into Moriah’s drugged, delirious eyes. “Moriah,” he asked her urgently, “are you protected?”

She gazed at him blankly, clearly confused by his statement. “What do you mean?”

Austen dipped his head down with a defeated sigh. “No, for some reason, I didn’t think so.”

“What are you talking about?” Moriah demanded, feeling her blood start to cool rapidly at his seeming disappointment in her, suddenly feeling very tired.

“I mean, are you using any kind of birth control?” he clarified for her.

Her eyes widened in shock. “Birth control?” she repeated, aghast. “Why on earth would I be using birth control?”

He lifted an eyebrow suggestively and looked down meaningfully at their half-naked, intimately entwined bodies.

“Oh,” she said in a very small voice.

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “I never leave home without one.”

Moriah was confused again, and Austen’s strange desire to have a conversation right now was really making her sleepy. “Without one what?” she wanted to know, successfully stifling the yawn she felt threatening.

But Austen had already started looking for the essential square, foil-covered packet that he always had tucked away in his wallet. As he pushed aside an assortment of business and credit cards, dumping a collection of bar receipts and hastily scribbled phone numbers onto the bedspread, he began to panic. He knew he had one in there, but where had it gone? Yanking out the contents of one of the wallet’s many compartments, he discovered an old photograph that he thought he’d lost, one of his father standing proudly beside the old man’s fishing boat. He smiled warmly and briefly at the picture, then remembered the task at hand. Dammit, where had he put it?

“Aha!” he cried triumphantly when he finally uncovered the small packet beside a torn, yellowed clipping from the Miami Herald that his mother had sent him some time ago, one about his ex-fiancée. “It’s all right, Moriah, I—” he turned quickly to Moriah, brandishing his find like a trophy “—I found it.” His shoulders drooped in comical defeat.

The woman who had lain so eagerly and anxiously at his side, the woman who had made him feel giddier and more aroused than he’d ever been in his life, the woman whose dangerous curves had promised the most enervating, exquisite, enlightening road to heaven, was now snuggled up against him like a child, fast asleep.

When Moriah awoke the following morning, it was because a boisterous wrecking crew was slamming a big concrete ball with aching and annoying regularity against the tender membrane beneath her already-shattered skull. In addition to that, something furry and poisonous and foul had found its way into her mouth and died there, rotting away into some sort of linty gelatinous goo that had oozed all over her teeth and tongue. She opened her eyes slowly and painfully, wincing at the stabbing white light of early dawn that pierced her pupils, recoiling at the lurching, nauseating swells that washed up and down in her stomach. This was not a good sign, Moriah thought glumly, wondering where in the hell she was and how she had managed to sleep through the night while all of these terrible things had been happening to her.

It took her all of five minutes to finally inch onto her back so that she could gaze up curiously at the ceiling. Little by little she took in her surroundings and realized she was in a hotel room, and quite a nice one at that. From the sound of the quiet surf that met her ears through the open French doors to her left, Moriah brilliantly deduced that she must be at the shore. But she hated going to the Jersey shore, she remembered with a puzzled frown. Especially in the summer when it was so crowded. It was summer, wasn’t it? Yes, she was certain that it was. Hadn’t she been planning a vacation a short time ago? she wondered, her muddled brain beginning to function a little more clearly now. She vaguely recalled buying some sunscreen at the cosmetic counter in Wanamaker’s. Heavy sunscreen. Because she was going to be vacationing in…the Caribbean! Yes, that’s it! The Caribbean, that must be where she was. She was supposed to be meeting her sisters on St. Thomas at her hotel on Bolongo Bay Beach. That’s where she was all right. She remembered everything now. Sort of.