Read Lover Beware 03 - After Midnight for Free Online Page B

until the hard ridge of his sex settled against the sensitive flesh After Midnight
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    between her legs. He pressed more firmly against her, and the tension coiled almost unbearably tight.
    She broke the kiss. "If you keep doing that—"
    "You'll come." His gaze locked with hers, dark and fierce.
    "God, don't say it—"
    One hand closed on her hair, pulling her head back, the movement fierce as his mouth sank on hers. His tongue was hot and wet and salty in her mouth, and her whole being tensed as he walked her back a half step until she was pinned against the doorjamb, his muscled body tight against hers. Her breasts felt swollen and constricted, her skin so sensitive that every touch made her shiver and jerk, the hot ache between her legs so acute it bordered on pain.
    She felt the hard, male shape of him straining for entrance despite the constricted layers of clothing, felt the shudder that swept him as he moved against her, and the gloomy afternoon dissolved in a raw flash of heat.
    The buzz of the phone, the click of her answering machine engaging, registered, and abruptly, she recoiled.
    Patrick. She'd forgotten about Patrick.
    She'd forgotten she was married.
    All Rider had had to do was kiss her and she'd practically forgotten her own name.
    She shook her head, her throat tight. She still felt drawn, magnetized. She wanted to bury her face against the warm skin of his throat, breathe in his scent, open her mouth against his skin and taste him, and for a moment she teetered on the brink, shoved off balance by needs that were so alien and powerful she could barely breathe, let alone think.
    She wanted Rider. It wasn't rational, and it wasn't right.
    His dark gaze caught hers. His mouth dipped again, barely touching hers, and her body reacted, her hips sliding against his, and for a split second, she didn't care, she just wanted.
    He lifted his head and pressed her face into his shoulder, and for endless seconds she clung to him, memorizing his scent, soaking in his warmth.
    His breath stirred in her hair. "I've got to go."
    "I know."
    He eased back. "It's okay. Like I said, I didn't mean to"—
    his thumb swept across her lips—"do this, but I'm glad I did, because I'm going away and I don't know when I'll be back."

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    FIONA BRAND
    "Or- if I’ll be back" hung in the air, and as it turned out, that time he almost hadn't come back.
    Jane didn't see him for more than eighteen months. Eventually, she'd heard secondhand in town that he'd been wounded on some overseas operation. The next time she'd been in Winslow, she'd gone to the library and searched back in the newspaper files, and finally found a small mention of the incident, where "a soldier" had been knifed and evacuated to a military hospital in Germany, his condition serious.
    Worry had eaten at her, and her weight had plummeted, until she'd taken herself in hand and forced herself to eat. One day, months later, she'd turned around in the supermarket and seen him, larger than life and drop-dead gorgeous, loading groceries into a trolley. She couldn't remember what she'd gone to the supermarket to buy, she'd simply turned on her heel, walked back to her car, and driven home. She'd gotten through the rest of the day, she'd managed to function, but that moment in the supermarket had stunned her.
    She'd had visions of him in intensive care, close to death.
    She'd even worried that he had died, and she simply hadn't heard. In the supermarket, he hadn't looked as if he'd suffered anything as traumatic as a life-threatening wound. If anything, he'd seemed even bigger, more muscular—more of everything.
    Jane stared at the note in her hand, brought back to the soft scent of the night air, the whine of mosquitoes on the prowl.
    "What did you want to tell him?" she muttered to herself.
    "That you were head over heels in love with a man you barely knew?"
    Because the fact was, falling in lust with a man had never happened to her before. She wasn't promiscuous, and she