And kneeling beside the bed, he grabbed her legs and pulled her close, until her legs hung free and she was balanced precariously on the edge of the bed. He lifted her legs, laying them across his shoulders and Keira watched him as he smiled knowingly.
“Your turn,” he whispered and scooped his hands under her behind before lifting her to meet his questing mouth.
Keira sucked in a gulp of air and held it, afraid to let it out because if she did, she might not be able to draw another, and she was pretty sure she was going to need to breathe.
His mouth claimed her, and Keira pushed herself up onto her elbows to watch him take her more intimately than anyone ever had before. Her eyes widened and locked on him, as aroused by the sight of him taking her as she was by the incredible sensations coursing through her.
Keira had never known anything like it. His tongue swept a caress across her inner folds and dipped within her body to tempt her with even more.
She was really grateful for that lungful of air, because now she had forgotten how to breathe. Her world centered on this one man and what he was doing to her body.
Again and again, he stroked and nibbled and caressed. His tongue touched a tiny bud of sensitized flesh and—” Nathan!”
She felt him smiling, and then lost herself in the wonder of what he was able to do to her. He suckled and teased and stroked until the ball of need in the pit of her stomach bubbled into a fiery cauldron that tipped and spilled an unbelievable heat throughout her body. Keira rocked her hips, reached down to cup the back of his head to hold him to her and couldn’t seem to look away.
Her heels dug into his back as he slipped one finger, then two inside her body and quickened the intensity of her experience in a heartbeat. There was so much, too much. Her mind couldn’t capture it all, so she quit trying and surrendered to the incredible wash of anticipation building within.
“Nathan, if you stop,” she whispered through dry lips, “I’ll have to kill you.”
He chuckled and then closed his mouth over that one most sensitive spot. Keira cried out his name as her body shuddered with the force of the cl**ax ripping through her. She held onto him as the only stable point in the universe and as the tremors rocking her slowly faded, like far-reaching ripples in a pond, Nathan moved, easing her legs from his shoulders, shifting her further back onto the bed and then covering her body with his own.
“I can’t…I mean…” She blew out a breath and laughed shortly. “I think I may be paralyzed.”
“Not yet you’re not,” he murmured, dipping his head to taste one of her pale-pink ni**les.
Instantly, need rebuilt at the feel of his body pressing her down into the so-soft mattress. She stroked his skin, running her hands up and down his back, kissing the underside of his jaw, his neck.
“That was…” she said.
“Only the beginning,” he said and kissed her, his tongue plunging into her mouth, tangling with hers, stealing what breath she had left, then giving her his own to replace it.
Keira’s body lit up again with fresh need and she lifted both legs to wrap them around his waist. “I want you inside me, Nathan.”
“Just where I want to be, Keira,” he whispered and lifted his head so he could watch her face as he entered her.
She tipped her head back on the bed, but kept her gaze locked with his. He pushed himself home with one long, deep stroke, and Keira gasped as she rocked her hips, taking even more of him within.
Outside, the storm raged, and inside, a different kind of storm swept the two of them into a world of mindless passion. Where all that mattered was the next touch, the next kiss, the next stroke of heat to heat. Their bodies moved in an ancient dance with a rhythm that seemed as old as time and as new as her next breath.
His body moved with hers, invaded hers, claimed hers, and Keira gave him all she had to give. Her hands smoothed over his back and around to stroke down his chest, her thumbnails flicking at his flat, brown ni**les until he was gritting his teeth to hold back a shout.
She liked knowing that he was as lost to sensation as she was. That his body was screaming for release as loudly as her own. That she could shatter Nathan’s rigid sense of control.
Arching into him again and again, she urged him deeper, faster, harder. Her fingers clawed at his back while the pressure within tightened ferociously, demanding release.
“Now, Nathan,” she groaned, moving with him at a fever pitch that couldn’t be sustained without the two of them bursting into flames, “please now.”
He pushed himself up on his hands, stared down at her face and whispered, “You first, Keira. You first and I’ll follow.”
He slid one hand down the length of her body, across her flat abdomen, down to where their bodies were joined. His fingers dipped into the joining and stroked her damp heat as he continued to move inside her.
“Nathan!” Keira shrieked his name, clutched at his shoulders and bucked beneath him as an overwhelming wave of pleasure swept through her on what felt like an endless tide of mind-shattering explosions rattling just beneath her skin.
“Now,” he groaned and plunged deep inside her, his body shaking as he fell into the same tidal wave that had captured Keira and let it carry them both away.
An hour…or, for all Keira knew, a week later, she forced her eyelids open and stared up at the ceiling. Fire-cast shadows leaped and danced across the beams in hypnotic pulses.
“You okay?” Nathan murmured from close to her ear.
“Not sure yet,” she admitted, turning her head on the pillow to smile at him. Reaching out, she smoothed his hair back from his forehead with her fingertips. “Hey, I can move my hand, so…good sign!”
Pushing himself up on one elbow, he stared down at her for a long minute or two, his eyes unreadable. A curl of unease opened inside Keira as she studied him, searching for a shadow of the passionate man he’d been so short a time ago. But the Nathan watching her now was more like the closed-off man she’d met his first day at the lodge.
“What?” she finally asked, unable to stand the silence any longer.
“I was just thinking.”
“About?” she coaxed.
He looked as if he were about to say something, then thought better of it. Shaking his head, he said only, “Nothing. Never mind.”
He rolled off the bed and walked na**d across the room to a door that he opened to reveal a gigantic closet. It was practically empty from what Keira could see, since he’d brought only enough clothes for a month. But he stepped inside and when he came back out, he was wearing a thick black robe and carrying a dark green one that he tossed onto the foot of the bed. “I brought my own robe, but this green one was hanging in the closet when I got here.”