over to the broad redwood lounge with its slightly damp but heavenly soft cushion. She felt the coolness bite into her feverishly hot skin.
Lowering himself beside her where he could easily reach the table, Kiel shaved off a wafer of cheese and dipped it into the sweet wine. “Open wide,” he ordered, “and say, ahhhh.”
“Before or afterward ... the ahhh, I mean,” Willy gurgled. The combination was irresistible and Kiel proceeded to feed her as if she were a baby, interspersing nibbles of cheese with sips of the ambrosial wine, and he ate from her slices and drank from her glass, turning it so that his lips touched the place where hers had touched.
Once more their eyes caught and held, and when she lost the will to break away, feeling deliciously drowsy from the combination of too much wine, rich food, and the soporific salt air, Kiel placed the glass and the cheese down on the table beside them and drew her unresisting body forward until she collapsed on his hard chest.
He kissed her slowly, as if savoring the richness of the wine, and by some sleight of hand that was beyond her capacity to understand, she found herself lying on top of him, her face tucked into the curve of his neck, and she inhaled the herb-scented soap and slightly musky maleness, a smile quivering on her lips. She daringly opened her mouth and tasted the tautness of his skin and felt his immediate reaction beneath her.
“God . . . Willy, you’re ruining me!” he groaned, and his hands did something at her back and she felt the chill of dew on her flesh as the sides of her dress came unzipped.
Fire raced through her body, rousing her from her dreamy state, and she protested. “Kiel ... no, please.”
He didn’t reply. Instead, his hands moved over the satiny skin of her back and then slipped under her own weight to cup her bare breasts, and she could feel the swollen softness tightening into hard nubs that pushed against his palms in an involuntary invitation that left her stunned and breathless.
He turned his face and she was drawn inexorably into the vortex of a kiss that rendered her open and vulnerable, a kiss that sent wild emergency signals racing to all the most secret areas of her body; and when she felt his hand smoothing her hips, sliding slowly on the bit of nylon that covered her under the fallen sides of her dress, she panicked. His hand was pressing her even closer to his own muscular body and she began to struggle.
“No . . . please, Kiel,” she pleaded, scrambling up to sit trembling on the edge of the chaise. She tugged at her dress, shrugging the straps back up on her suddenly chilled shoulders, but any fastening up was totally beyond her in her present state and she looked around helplessly for her shoes. “I have to go now,” she whispered.
“Spoken like a nice, polite little girl. The party’s over now and I have to go home,” Kiel said bitterly. The moonlight shone down on his dark face, revealing half-closed eyes that seemed to be staring out over her head, and the lines that slashed down his lean cheeks were deeper than ever. Never had moonlight seemed so harsh.
She stood there beside the chaise uncertainly, her stole hanging over one shoulder and her sandals dangling from her hand, and she eyed him cautiously, fascinated in spite of herself. In the stillness of the night, she could hear his breathing and it was far harsher, more ragged than any of the times she had met him when he came from a run along the beach.
“Well? What are you waiting for, absolution?” he ground out at her. Then, tiredly, “Go on home, Willy. You’re safe.”
Chapter Three
Her own breath was coming in deep, starved gasps by the time she let herself into her dark apartment. Without turning on the light, she allowed her dress to fall to the floor, and within a few minutes, she was courting sleep, willing it to chase away the confusing emotions that had aroused her from what she now knew was an artificial apathy that had
Alexis Abbott, Alex Abbott