Eden Burning (25 page)

Her flush deepened even as she returned his teasing smile. “Lucky for you, huh?”

“Damned lucky. Think about it, butterfly. I’m yours to touch any way you want.”

Slowly he let go of her and turned away while he could still control his desire to stroke the tempting curves and hard peaks of her breasts with his hands. His mouth.

“C’mon,” he said without looking back. “The beach can’t be that far away. I’m ready for a swim.”

Closing her eyes, Nicole tried to control the hammering of her heart.

She was on fire.

No man had ever held her like that, teased her sweetly until she ached, then smiled gently at her and turned away. With a small sound of confusion and frustration, she opened her eyes, watching helplessly while Chase covered the rough ground with a power and grace that made her want to run her hands all over him. And her mouth.

The idea should have shocked her. It didn’t. Being caressed by him had become a temptation that was almost beyond her will to resist. The thought of touching him, of being able to find out how to caress him in return, how to please him . . .

That thought was definitely irresistible.

“Chase?” she called, her voice ragged.

He turned and looked back up at her. “Need help?”

She spoke in a rush, afraid she would lose her courage and with it the chance to touch him. “If I touch you, will you tell me if I please you?”

For a moment he thought she was joking—there was no way she could touch him and not please him. Then he saw the tension in her body as she came toward him, waiting for his answer.

She wasn’t joking.

She really didn’t understand how even her most casual touch gave him pleasure.

“Yes,” he said simply as she came to stand next to him. “I’ll tell you. Will you do the same for me?”

“What?”

“Tell me if I please you.”

He saw the look of surprise on her face and wondered at it.

“I thought you knew,” she said in a low voice. “Your touch has always pleased me.”

His smile was bittersweet. He remembered how he had taken her too quickly, in ignorance and stupidity and anger, not even suspecting what a treasure he held.

“There’s more to touching than not being hurt,” he said.

Her breath caught on a cascade of sensual memories. “I know,” she said in a throaty voice. She lifted one hand until her fingertips brushed across his mustache as lightly as a butterfly’s wing. “You taught me that.”

He tilted his head slightly, increasing the pressure of her touch. “And that pleases me more than I can say.”

Her eyes widened in surprise until they looked like pools of liquid gold.

“Didn’t you know?” he whispered huskily, turning her face up to his with a gentle touch of his hand. “Your pleasure multiplies mine.” He smiled crookedly. “Of course, I’m not a saint. If you’d like to make me feel even better by kissing me, I wouldn’t object.”

“You’re sure?” she asked, her eyes lighting with both laughter and anticipation.

“Real sure.”

She braced her hands on his shoulders and stood on tiptoe. Even so, he had to bend down to bring his lips close to hers.

“It’s the oddest feeling,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You make me feel small, feminine, sleek. All the things I’m not.”

“You’re all of those things to me.” He tested the resilience of her waist with his hands. “Or are you trying to say politely that I’m a little oversize?”

She smiled and pressed her lips against his jaw, his pulse. “Bobby’s even bigger, and he doesn’t make me feel this way. Small maybe, but not . . . mmm . . . delicious.”

“Thank God,” Chase said roughly. “The day he makes you feel edible, tell me. Then we’ll see who eats what.”

Her body moved with silent laughter.

Feeling it, he smiled. Then her lips touched his and all thought of laughter burned away in a single instant. Remembering the fragile, trusting butterfly, he held himself still. But he couldn’t control the hungry tightening of his body when her tongue found his and her breath sighed into his mouth, filling him with her sweetness.

Slowly, hesitantly, she ended the kiss.

“I like that,” he whispered against her lips.

“What?”

“Tasting you.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“Let’s try again.” He slid the tip of his tongue along her smile. “I might have been mistaken.”

Her smile widened, parting her lips. With a feeling of pure luxury, she fitted her mouth to his and allowed herself the heady pleasure of kissing him without being afraid that the kiss would spiral out of control into sexual demands she wouldn’t be able to meet.

As delicately as Chase had once tasted the flower, Nicole tasted him. The tip of her tongue found his, caressed gently, retreated, and returned. Tasting. Just that. So sweet a thing, tasting.

She sensed the quiver of response in the taut male muscles beneath her hands and hesitated, fearful of arousing him too much and having to end the intimacy far too soon.

“It’s all right, butterfly,” he said calmly. “Take as much or as little as you want. I won’t hurt you or demand more than you want to give.”

She looked up into his clear gray eyes and saw that he meant every word. She swallowed and spoke in a husky, hopeful voice. “Does that mean I can kiss you again?”

“Please. Yes. I love the taste of you.”

With a sigh, she stretched up on tiptoe again and threaded her fingers into his thick black hair. This time when she fitted her mouth to his, there was no hesitation. She was hungry to know again the heat and textures of his kiss, to feel the delicious velvet roughness of his tongue sliding over hers. To taste him.

This time when she felt the tremor of his response, it set off tiny shock waves of pleasure in her.
She was pleasing him.
She knew it as surely as she knew that he was pleasing her. Unconsciously she deepened the kiss, wanting more of him.

He felt the difference in her, a change that sent his blood gathering heavily between his thighs. He tried to tame the depth of his response. He couldn’t.

So he simply accepted it, as he accepted that he wouldn’t have the release his body was demanding with every hard, rapid beat of his heart. He had had release before. He wanted more this time. Much more.

He wanted Nicole.

For that, he would have to be patient.

Very slowly he shifted her supple, lush body with his hands, rubbing her breasts against his chest. The tiny intake of her breath as her nipples became more sensitive, more responsive, revealed that she was forgetting her fear and drinking more deeply of the sweetness he was offering.

He told himself it was sneaky and unfair to use such masculine tricks on her, to turn her own awakening sensuality against her. To seduce her. She had never known pleasure with a man, so she had no defenses against it.

And in that lay his best hope of having her again.

Nicole didn’t know how long she stood on tiptoe kissing Chase. She knew only that at some point her bones turned to honey and his arms came hard around her, supporting her. When she finally surfaced from the slow mating of tongues, she could barely breathe.

She opened her eyes, wanting to see him, needing to know if he had enjoyed the kiss as much as she had.

“Yes,” he said, answering the question in her eyes. “Oh, God, yes!”

She smiled, her teeth very white against her reddened mouth. With one finger she touched his full lower lip, loving the sensuous heat and resilience of his flesh.

His tongue flicked out and curled around her fingertip as it had once curled around her nipple. He pulled her finger into his mouth, sucking and stroking with his tongue.

Her breath caught, held, thickened.

“I like that,” she said in a husky voice. “But it makes me kind of . . . I don’t know. Restless.”

Slowly she withdrew her finger, wondering at the very hot, very male smile on Chase’s face.

“Then maybe we’d better get down to the beach,” he suggested. “You can work off some of your restlessness in the water.”

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

“That’s okay,” he said as he set off down the lava again. “There’s nobody around to see you.”

She looked at his broad, retreating back. “Excuse me? Nobody? What are you, chopped liver?”

“I’ve already seen you.” He turned around and looked at her with open male approval. “And I liked everything I saw, especially the color of your nipples fresh from my mouth.” He smiled slightly. “I suppose that embarrasses you.”

She opened her mouth to say yes, then realized it wasn’t true. Not anymore. She let out a long breath and admitted, “It’s hard for me to be naked with a man. I— It makes me nervous. Except for the time with you, the memories I have of being naked and—well, they aren’t very good at all.”

Chase closed his eyes and tried not to think of all the ways a man could make a woman feel bad in bed.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked, needing reassurance that in some way, at least, he hadn’t been cruel. “That night. Did I?”

“No.” She spoke quickly, because she saw a need in him that had nothing to do with desire. “I meant what I said. I never enjoyed sex before that night.”

His breath came out with a ragged sound and he opened his eyes. “I don’t deserve it, but I’m glad.”

Not quite trusting himself any longer, he turned his back and picked his way down the jumbled dark river of lava.

After a moment she followed him. She felt unsettled in a new and intriguing way. She didn’t know why. She just knew she felt like sunlight and champagne were fizzing in her blood.

The lava flow went all the way to the water. Together Nicole and Chase stood on a cliff and looked at the black tongue of stone licking out into the yielding sea.

“There must have been one hell of a blast when it all came together,” he said quietly.

“I thought lava flows, especially pahoehoe, were slow, not explosive.” She frowned, thinking about what she had seen. “I mean, sure, there’s some steam when the lava creeps down to the sea, but it’s more like backyard firecrackers than real explosions.”

He smiled slightly. “You ever throw a few drops of water on a really hot griddle?”

“Every time I make pancakes.”

“Well, that lava was once hell’s own griddle with a whole ocean pouring over it. I’ll bet tons of water and stone met and instantly vaporized with a sound like bombs going off.”

She looked at the water and the lava and tried to imagine the wild clash of fire and water.

“That was what it was like at Surtsey,” he said. “We have film in the archives. A river of molten stone running down to an icy sea. The shock waves from the explosions made it sound like a battlefield. And in a way that’s what it was. A natural war zone.”

“What was it like to be there, to see and hear it?”

“Like watching God at work. Awesome.”

Chase glanced to the left, away from the solid lava flow. There was a black-sand beach. After the lava cooled, a fringe of graceful coconut palms had taken root along the upper margin of the beach.

“Look,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the black sand came from. The explosive meeting of ocean and lava.”

“I thought it came from old lava crumbling.”

“A little probably does. But a whole lot of black sand comes from the moment when red-hot stone and seawater explode on contact.”

Nicole looked at the peaceful sand curving out to embrace the sea. “I’m glad everything has cooled off.”

Not quite everything,
he thought ruefully, feeling the heaviness of his erection with every heartbeat.
But there’s no danger of an explosion either.

I hope.

Together they left behind the wild jumble of lava where the boiling blood of the volcano had once met the sea. As they walked toward a grove of palms, Chase took Nicole’s hand. When they reached the grove, he kissed her palm, tasted it once with a lingering touch of his tongue, released her, and reached for the fastenings of his hiking boots. Bracing his butt against a tree trunk, he took off one boot and stuffed a sock into it.

She watched and thought about stripping naked in full sunlight with him. She doubted that she had the nerve.

“There are three ways we can do this,” he said matter-of-factly, working on the other boot.

“Do what?”

“Go skinny-dipping. We can pretend we aren’t—” he began.

She made a strangled sound and tried not to laugh out loud.

“Yeah, that’s the way it strikes me, too.” He looked at her with a wry smile. “The second way is we sneak sideways looks at each other and trip all over our own feet on the way to the water.”

This time she gave up and laughed out loud. “What’s the third choice?”

“We just take a good look and get over it.”

With a single quick, twisting motion he stripped off his shirt. Then he pulled off his shorts and underwear and stood in front of her, naked.

“Of course, a man is at a real disadvantage in this situation,” he said.

“He is?” she asked in an odd voice. Her glance traveled helplessly down his hard male body. Very male.
Very
hard. “Oh,” she said, understanding what he meant about being at a disadvantage. “I see.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you do,” he agreed wryly. “I want you, and there’s no damn way on earth I can disguise it when I’m naked. But I’m a man, not a baby. I don’t expect to get everything I want the second I want it.” He waited until her golden eyes came up to meet his. “Don’t be frightened, butterfly. This is just my body’s way of saying that, as a woman, you please me very much. Is that so bad?”

She let out the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. And she waited for fear to come.

She was still waiting several breaths later, looking at him, when she realized that the thought of pleasing Chase as a woman was not frightening in the least. She cleared her throat and tried to be as honest with him as he was being with her.

“No. It’s good. I like the idea of . . . well, exciting you.”

“Do you?” he asked with a slow smile.

She closed her eyes and spoke quickly, painfully, forcing out the words. “You won’t be angry with me? Ted always was. He expected me to want him instantly, constantly. I’m not like that.”

“Neither am I. I don’t walk around ready to fuck anything female that will hold still for it.”

Her eyes flew open at his bluntness.

“I know that might be hard for you to believe,” he said, “considering the evidence in front of me. But it’s true all the same. You have a potent effect on me. And it’s
you
I want, not just sex. Hell, if it was just sex, I’d be in town right now, riding some faceless body. Sex isn’t hard to find.”

She watched as he turned and walked into the waves, leaving her to admire the fact that his tan was the same even shade of brown all over. Everywhere. When she realized she was staring, she flushed—and kept right on staring. Despite his size, his body wasn’t bulky. He was simply powerful, coordinated, and
male.

With fingers that trembled, she went to work on her boots. Then her clothes. Then she gathered her courage in both hands and walked into the water. Naked.

Chase stood waist-deep in the jeweled blue sea.

So did Nicole, but she was still half uncovered.

“Women,” she said, her voice desperately normal, “are at a disadvantage in this case.”

Accepting that as the invitation it was, he turned and looked at her. Slowly. Very thoroughly.

“Beautiful,” he said simply.

And she was, with her wide amber eyes and the slanting line of her cheekbones stained with red. Long, elegant neck, as smooth as the shadow in the hollow of her throat. Her nipples were taut and deep pink and her breasts were the same smooth golden brown as her arms.

“I see you don’t like bathing suits any better than I do,” he said.

“I hate them. I like—” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and admitted to him what she had never told anyone before. “I like to feel the sun on my breasts, and the breeze and the warm rain everywhere.”

Her words undid whatever cooling effect the ocean had had on Chase’s erection.

“Someday you’ll feel me like that,” he said, running his fingertips from her forehead to her thighs hidden beneath a bright surge of water. “I’ll be all over you like a warm rain. I won’t even take you. I’ll just pleasure you.” He lifted his hand. His wet fingertip touched first one nipple, then the other, leaving a diamond drop of water behind. “Think about it, butterfly. All you have to do is ask.”

She couldn’t help thinking about it. Ripples of sensual response coursed through her, making her nipples tighten even more.

He saw, and wished with savage urgency that he could simply pull her into his arms and seduce her.

But he couldn’t. If she got afraid all over again and backed away, she would blame herself, not him. That would hurt her more than anything he had done to her.

He let a quiet breath out through his clenched teeth. He had to be the way he had been in the clearing—motionless, offering himself while she spiraled closer and closer to him on velvet wings. She had to come and drink the sweetness from him. Only then would she lose her fear of being crushed and thrown aside.

Even knowing that, he couldn’t stop himself from bending down and licking the drop of seawater from one of her nipples.

“Salt is bad for the skin,” he said almost roughly. “And you have such beautiful skin.”

She watched with a shivering feeling of inevitability while his head moved to her other breast and his tongue flicked out, touching her far too briefly.

“Chase.” Her voice was tight, ragged.

He straightened, expecting her to retreat. “Yes?”

“I—I like that. I really like it. Would you do it again?”

Slowly he touched each of her nipples with a wet fingertip, leaving behind a drop of glittering water. This time he removed the drop with exquisite care before he took the taut peak into his mouth and tugged at it.

Heat shot out from the core of her body, fire snaking through every pore, molten need racing through her. Long before he turned to her other breast, her hands were clinging to him for support. His mustache stroked her like a silk brush before he drew her deeply into his mouth. She made a tiny sound in the back of her throat and arched her back, offering herself to him as she never had to any man.

By the time Chase finally released Nicole, she was trembling and breathing brokenly. Somehow he scraped up the determination to stop before it was too late.

And the next breath would be too late.

Closing his eyes, locking his jaw, he held her in his arms, just held her, letting the warm surge and retreat of the water bring her against him and then take her away.

After a few minutes of quiet holding, he trusted himself not to lift her up and fit her over his rigid, aching flesh, to feel again the satin heat and tightness of her surrounding him, tugging at him with every breath, every caress.

When he felt her stir in his arms, he reluctantly loosened his hold. Her cheek rubbed against his chest. Slowly she turned her head from side to side, openly enjoying his male textures.