Her eyelids flew open. “Brian!”
A troubled look crossed his features as he misread her exclamation and withdrew his hand.
“Brian! There’s feeling there!”
“What?” His fingers poised in midair.
“There’s feeling there! It happened, when you touched me just then, something slithery and fiery went ... went whooshing down my body, and ... oh, Brian, don’t you see? The doctor said sometimes the sensation never returns, and I’ve been scared to death thinking it hadn’t come back to me.”
He braced up on one elbow and cupped her jaw. “You never told me before.”
“I am now, but oh Brian, it doesn’t matter anymore, oh please, do it again!” she begged excitedly. “I want to make sure I wasn’t just imagining it.”
He toppled her over beside him, his lips joining hers to press her onto her back as his hand roamed across her ribs, and up, but stopped just short of her breast.
He lifted his head and she opened her eyes to find him gazing down intently into her eyes, his brows lowered in concern. “I won’t hurt you, will I?”
“No,” she whispered.
His mouth and hand moved simultaneously, the one to bestow a kiss, the other a caress. He contoured the warm globe of flesh with his palm, gently at first, then with growing pressure, squeezing, fondling, finally seeking out the nipple, which he tenderly explored through the slip of sheeny, damp material.
Her lips went slack and she dropped her shoulders flat to the bed, lolling in the new feelings of arousal. It was slighter than before, but there just the same. She concentrated hard on grasping it, blindly guiding his hand to the exact spot she thought would revive the strong spurt of sensation as before.
Braced above her, he watched the feelings parade across her face, and at last he reached for the bow at the nape of her neck. Her eyes opened as she felt it slipping free, but just before he could lower the green triangle, she stopped his hand.
“Brian, I have scars, but please don’t let them stop you. They’ll be there for several months yet, but then they’ll fade. And they don’t hurt, they only itch sometimes.”
Some softening expression around his eyes told her he understood, and accepted. Then he peeled the first green tidbit of fabric down and laid it over her ribs, while she watched his eyes. They dropped to the vertical red scar, then flew back to her brown gaze. Wordlessly he stripped down the other half of the bathing suit top.
Where was the shame she had once known? Absent. Evaporated beneath the far greater impact of the loving concern that emanated from Brian’s face.
He slipped his hands behind her back and came away with the suit top, then tossed it onto the pillows and rolled to give her his full attention again.
“How can it not hurt?” Gently he cupped her right breast, riding his thumb up the scar, then lightly, lightly circling the nipple. “Did they make an incision here?”
“Yes, but that scar is all healed.”
“And here, too.” He traced the faded crescent beneath, to its inception just below her armpit. “Oh God, it hurts me to think of them doing that to you.” He lowered his head, trailing his lips along the lower contour scar.
“Brian, it’s all over, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d think. If I hadn’t done it, I might not have been able to overcome all my hangups and be here with you. I feel so different. So ....”
He lifted his head and searched her with tortured eyes. “What do you feel? So ... what?”
“Beautiful,” she admitted, with a lingering note of shyness. “Feature that, would you?” She smiled and her voice became soft and accepting. “Theresa Brubaker with her red hair and freckles, feeling beautiful. But it’s partly because of you. Because of how you treated me last Christmas. You made me believe I had the right to feel this way. You were all the things I’d ever hoped to find in a man.”
“I love you.” His voice was strange, throaty and deep, and not wholly steady. He dipped his head and touched the lips to the cinnamon-colored dots between her breasts. “Every freckle of you.” He moved his mouth to the gentle swelling mound. “Every red hair of you.” And finally to the crest. “Every square inch of you.”
He adored her with the gentle strokes of his tongue, and she lay in a blaze of emotions that sprang more from her consummate love for him than from the part of her he tenderly kissed.
“What’s happening?” he queried, running his tongue down along the underside of her breast.
She sucked in a breath as a sensual response shuddered down her backbone. “I’m falling in love with my body, and your body, and what they can do to each other. I’m plunging through space ... freefalling. Only it’s so strange ... I’m falling up.”
He ran his tongue up to her nipple again, and closed his lips and tongue around it, murmuring some wordless accolade deep in his throat, while both of his arms reached behind her and his hands slid down to cup her buttocks and roll her firmly against him, both of them now on their sides.
“Mmm ... you taste like summer ....”
“Tell me,” she whispered, threading her fingers through his hair, knowing an insatiable appetite for his words, as well as for his arousing touches.
“Sandy beaches and suntan oil that tastes like Popsicles and the sweetest fruit in the jungle ....” He lightly nipped the top of a breast with his teeth. “Berries and coconut ...” He slipped lower, licking the sensitive skin on the rib. “Mangos and kiwi ... Mmm ....” His mouth pressed moistly upon the softest part of her abdomen, just above the navel. “There’s something else here ... wait, let me see ....” He dipped his tongue into her navel and made several seductive circles around and within it. “Mmm ... I think it’s passion fruit.”
She felt him smile against her belly and smiled in return.
His mouth was arousingly warm, and his breath heated the silky triangle of fabric still covering her. His chest weighted her legs, then he lightly bit her through the bathing suit—fabric, hair and a little skin. Her ribs lifted off the bedspread, and she gasped while desire welled and bubbled over in her feminine depths. His fingers found the sensitive skin at the back of her knee, then his mouth warmed the flesh that she’d thought could not possibly know a heat any greater than it had already experienced. She trembled and lifted her hips from the bed, offering herself as fully as he cared to partake. He kissed her through the silky bikini and worked his chin firmly against the throbbing flesh within until she found herself moving against the hardness, seeking something ... something ....
And when her desire had grown to its fullest, he moved back up to join his mouth to hers, running his palms along the elastic waist of her briefs, then down inside to cup her firm backside while rolling his weight fully on top of hers, his hips undulating against hers while their mouths locked in a bond of mutual desire.
His weight lifted. She felt the wisp of fabric leave the juncture of her legs and inch downward along her thighs, then pass lower still until his mouth was forced to leave hers, and he eased the garment down and off, then tossed it over his shoulder to join its mate on the pillows.
He pressed her back, back, against the bed and caressed her bare stomach with his musician’s fingers that were capable, she learned, of much more than adroitly strumming love songs. They raised a kind of music in her flesh as he explored the soft skin of her inner thighs, then the most intimate part of her body.
She was eager, and open, and not in the least abashed by his touch that sought and entered her virgin flesh. Love, that gift of the gods, took away all insecurities, all timidity, all shame, and allowed her the freedom to express her newfound feminity in the way she had so long dreamed.
A soft, passionate sound issued from her throat. She stretched and allowed him total access to explore her as he would, trembling at times, smiling at others, her heart a wild thing in her breast.
But just short of taking her over the edge of bliss, he lay back. And then it was her turn to explore. “Experience will take care of itself,” Br
ian had said. And she believed it as she embarked upon her half of this maiden voyage toward mutuality.
She found the tight waist of his trunks and slipped her palms inside, against the skin of his lower spine, finding it cool from the slightly damp fabric.
Her caresses were restricted by the taut garment, yet she thrilled at the firmness beneath her palms and the inviting rhythm her touch had set off in his hips. He reached behind his back, found her arm and carried it up out of the elastic and around to his front, pressing it against the flattened, hidden hills between his legs, moving against her palm to initiate it into the ways of sexual contact.
To Theresa’s amazement, her own voice begged throatily, “Take it off, Brian, please.”
The words were partially muffled by his lips, but when the request had been made, he lifted his head and smiled into her beseeching eyes, his breath beating warmly upon her face.
“Anything you say, love.”
He slipped to the edge of the bed, and she rolled onto her side and curled her body up like a lazy caterpillar, watching as he reached inside the garment and found a hidden string against his belly, tugged it, then stood and skinned the trunks down, down, down, before dropping to sit on the edge of the bed again and kicking the suit away across the carpet as he rolled toward her, reaching.
He was beautiful, and somehow it seemed the most natural thing in the world to reach out and caress him.
“Oh, Brian, you’re silky ... and so hot.”
“So are you. But I think that’s how we’re supposed to be.” He reached again for the entrance to her womanhood touching it with a sleek, knowing rhythm until sensation dazzled her nerve endings. She closed her eyes and undulated with the protracted and relentless stroking.
“Brian, something’s happening!”
“Let it. Shh ...
“But ... but ....” It was too late to wonder if it was torture or treasure, for in the next instant the question was answered for Theresa. A burst of sensation lifted her limbs and sent liquid explosions rocketing outward. Then she was shuddering, feeling spasms from the deepest reaches of her body, until she fell back sated, exhausted, gasping.
“Oh, sweet, sweet woman. The first time,” he said against her neck after a minute, still holding her tightly. “Do you know how rare that is?”
“No... I thought from the movies that it happens to everyone.”
“Not women, not all the time. Usually just men. You must have been storing it all these years, waiting for the right one to come along and set it free.”
“And he did.”
He smiled lovingly into her eyes, then kissed each lid, then her nose, then her swollen lips. And while he strung the kisses upon her face, he raised his body over hers and pressed it firmly to her entire length.
“I love you, darling—keep remembering that in case it hurts.”
“I love you, Br—”
She never finished the word, for in that instant he entered her and she knew the sleek ligature of their two joined bodies, but no pain, only texture and heightened sensations building once again as his hips moved above hers. She felt only pleasure as he began moving, reaching back to teach her how to lift her knees and create a nesting place of warm, firm flesh that buttressed his hips as he shared the consummation of their love.
When he clenched his fists and quivered, she opened her eyes to find his closed in ecstacy. He rode the crest of his climax while she watched the reaction expressed on his beloved features—the closed, trembling eyelids, the flaring nostrils and the lips that pulled back in a near grimace as sweat broke out on his back and the muscles rippled for an exhausted moment. Then he shivered a last interminable time, called out at the final peak, and relaxed.
So this is why I was born a woman and Brian Scanlon was born a man, why we were meant to seek and find each other in this world of strangers. She caressed his shoulder blades, coveting the dead weight of him pressing her into the resilient water-filled baffles beneath her.
“Oh, Brian it was so good .. so good.”
He rolled to his side and opened his eyes, lifting one hand that appeared too tired to quite succeed in the effort of caressing her face. It fell upon her cheek.
He chuckled—a rich, resonant sound from deep in his chest and closed his eyes and sighed, then lay unmoving.
She studied him in repose, smoothed the tousled hair above his temple. His eyes didn’t open, and his palm didn’t move. She knew an abiding sense of completion.
The noon sun lit the ceiling of the room by some magical twist of physics. The sheets at the window riffled lightly, and the sounds of the pool activity were constant now. From the living room came the repeated songs of the same record—she smiled, wondering how many times it had played.
“Do you know when I first became intrigued with you?”
She turned to find his eyes open, watching her. “When?”
They were still entwined, and he pulled her closer to keep possession of her while he went on. “It started when Jeff let me read a letter from you. In it you said you’d gone out on a date with somebody named Lyle, and he turned out to be Jack the Gripper.”
She chuckled, recalling both the letter and the disastrous date.
“That long ago?”
“Uh-huh. Two years or more. Anyway, after we laughed about it, and I wondered what kind of woman had written it, I began asking questions about you. Little by little I learned everything. About your red hair.” He threaded his fingers into it just where her widow’s peak would have been, had she one. “And your freckles.” He trailed a finger down her nose. “And your endowment.” He passed a palm down her breast. “And about the time Jeff defended you and punched out that kid, and about how you taught music in an elementary school and played violin, and how Jeff thought the sun rose and set in you, and how much he wanted you to be happy, to find some man who’d treat you honorably and wouldn’t ogle and grope and grip.”
“Two years ago?” she repeated, stunned.
“Longer than that. Closer to three now. Since Jeff and I were in Germany together. Anyway, then I saw your picture. It was one of your school pictures, and you were wearing a gray sweater buttoned around your shoulders, with a little white blouse collar showing from beneath. I asked Jeff a lot of questions then, and pieced together a picture of you and your hangup even before I knew you. There have been times when I even suspected that Jeff filled me in on all the details about you in hopes that when I met you I’d be the first man to treat you right, and end up doing exactly what I just did.”
“Jeff?” She exclaimed, surprised.
“Jeff. Didn’t you ever suspect that he engineered this whole thing from the start, feeding me tidbits about his marvelous, straight sister, who’d never had boyfriends, but who had so much to offer a man—the right man.”
She braced up on one elbow and looked thoughtful. “Jeff! You really think so?”
“Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, he all but admitted it when we were on the plane back after Christmas. He suspected things had fired up between us and came right out and said it’d been on his mind a while that he wouldn’t mind me as a brother-in-law.”
She smirked and lifted a delicate jaw. “Remind me to give old Jeff a gigantic thank-you kiss next time I see him, huh?”
“And what about you? When did you start thinking of me as a potential lover?”
“The truth?” She peered up at him coquettishly.
“The truth.”
“That night in the theater, when the love scene was on the screen. Your elbow was sharing the armrest with mine, and when the woman climaxed, your bones were almost cutting off my blood supply. Then when the man’s face came on, showing him in the throes of rapture, your elbow nearly broke mine, and when it was over, you wilted.”
“Me?” he yelped disbelievingly, “I did not!”
“You did too. I was practically dying of embarrassment, and then you dropped your hands down to cover your lap, and I wanted to crawl underneath the seats.??
?
“Are you serious? Did I really do that?”
“Of course I’m serious. Would I lie about a thing like that? I was so turned on myself I hardly knew what to do about it. Part of it was the movie, but part of it was you and your arm. After that I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like with you. Somehow I knew you’d be good ... and gentle ... and just what a freckled redhead needed to make her feel like Cinderella.”
“Do I make you feel like Cinderella?”
She studied him for a long moment, traced his lips with an index finger and nodded.
He captured the finger, bit it, then as his eyes closed, he lay very still, pressing her four fingertips against his lips.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered.
His eyes opened, but for a moment he didn’t answer. Instead he pressed his palm to hers and threaded their fingers together with slow deliberation. His fingers squeezed possessively. Hers answered. “About tomorrow. And the day after that and the day after that, and how we’ll never have to be alone again. There’ll always be each other ... and babies.” His fingers gripped more tightly. His eyes probed hers. “Do you want babies, Theresa?”
He felt her grip relax, then tug away. His stomach went light with warning, and he gripped her hand to keep it from escaping. “Theresa?”
She gazed at his face, wide-eyed, and when he saw the color begin to heighten between her freckles, he leaned above her on an elbow, frowning. “Theresa, what is it?”