The Unexpected Wedding Gift Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  PIANO music played in the background, the cocktail lounge variety, soft and romantic. The bed, a carved antique affair that they’d chosen together on a shopping spree a month before the wedding, loomed in the middle of the room, its rumpled sheets awash with shadows like dusky snow on miniature mountains. The marriage bed, Ben had called it, the day they’d found it, and whispered outrageous promises in her ear that had left her blushing.

  Julia wasn’t blushing now, though. Suddenly unsure of her ability to carry off such an out-and-out seduction, she was frozen inside, a deep, penetrating chill that extended to her fingertips.

  What was she supposed to do next? Undress him? Strip off her own clothes? Wait for him to make the next move?

  His eyes glittered watchfully in the moonlight. “It’s okay if you’re having second thoughts,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’m not.”

  She meant to sound confident, but the quiver in her voice gave her away. A scared rabbit, that’s what she was, afraid to face what lay ahead and afraid to turn away.

  “Come here,” Ben commanded softly, and pulled her into his arms.

  He had not held her like that—tenderly, yearningly—in so long that she melted against him in relief. Perhaps not so very much had changed between them, after all.

  His thigh nudged hers; his hand pressed against the small of her back. Without conscious thought, she followed his lead, so preoccupied with wondering what her next move should be that it took her a moment or two to realize they were dancing.

  “It’s been a long time since we did this,” she whispered, the shaking that had played such havoc with her insides spreading to the rest of her.

  “Not really,” he said, grazing the wide scooped neckline of her dress with his mouth. “It just seems like forever. I’ve missed you, Julia.”

  “How can you miss someone you’re at odds with?” A foolish question, as she knew from personal experience, given that she’d ached for him every minute that she’d been opposing him, but nervousness had her babbling like the proverbial brook. “I’d have thought you’d be glad to see the back of me.”

  With a muffled snort of laughter, he pushed her dress off her shoulders and down past her breasts. Loose and full, it fell around her ankles with a soft sigh, leaving her standing before him with nothing on but her underwear.

  “Right now, I’m more interested in the front of you,” he said.

  She felt horribly naked and woefully inadequate. When she’d pictured the first time she and Ben made love, she’d imagined herself freshly bathed…perfumed…draped in chiffon against a background of flattering candlelight. Not wearing sandals and a plain white cotton bra and underpants. Not with her hair all tangled, and her skin smelling of the sea, and traces of tears smearing her face.

  Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her breasts and tried to turn away from him, but he would have none of it. “I want to look at you,” he said, pinning her hands in his.

  Grateful for the shadowed light, she allowed him to scrutinize her and prayed he would not be disappointed at what he saw. She’d witnessed too much disillusionment in his eyes recently to endure seeing it again now. Whatever else had gone wrong between them over the past week, this moment had to remain unspoiled.

  He was silent for the longest time; so long, in fact, that she grew flustered under his gaze. “I know I’m no great beauty, Ben,” she said, because it was true. Her waist was fashionably narrow but her breasts were small and her legs, though long and slender enough, were unremarkable.

  “You’re a beauty to me,” he said, his gaze scouring her from head to foot. “I find you lovely beyond anything I’d ever imagined.”

  He dipped his head and caught her in a kiss that stole over her lips as sweetly as the dawn. “I want to touch you,” he murmured against her mouth then, guiding her hands inside his shirt and laying them against the solid planes of his chest, added, “I want you to touch me.”

  He felt warm, strong, vibrantly masculine—and more. Honorable, courageous and able and willing to protect those he loved. Eyes suddenly gushing tears, she stared at him. He is my husband, she thought wonderingly. He is my husband!

  For the first time since their wedding day—perhaps the first time ever—the word had real meaning for her.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, mistaking the reason for her tears. “We can take this as slowly as you like.”

  Mutely, she nodded, because even if she’d known how to answer him, she couldn’t have spoken for the aching fullness in her throat.

  He slid his hands past her waist and holding her by the hips, began to move, taking her with him in slow rhythm to the music still playing quietly in the background.

  He guided her with gentle, insistent pressure, drawing her closer with every step and leaving her acutely conscious of how little separated them. Apart from his shirt, he was wearing only a pair of beachcombers made of lightweight material and held up by a draw-string.

  She glanced down. All it would take was a tug….

  “Do it,” he said.

  “What?” She looked up at him, too taken aback by his mind-reading ability to be embarrassed at being caught staring.

  “Get rid of them, sweetheart, or I will.”

  A blush crept over her face, burning all the way up from her toes. “How did you know…?”

  He inched her even closer until she was so tightly fused against him that not even a beam of light could have come between them. She felt the heat and vigor of him straining against the thin fabric of the slacks, the subtle thrust of him against her belly as he moved to the music.

  “Male intuition,” he said, tracing an intimate line over the curve of her bottom to the inside crease of her thigh.

  A jolt of electricity, so swift and unexpected that it startled her, shot throughout her body to end with throbbing awareness low in her abdomen.

  He’d touched her before, but never as intimately and never with such devastating results. She found herself pressing against him, aching and trembling; almost sobbing for a completion she barely comprehended.

  But he understood. Releasing her, he pulled loose the drawstring at his waist, kicked off his pants and tore off his shirt, all with an economy of movement that would have impressed her far more if she hadn’t found her attention riveted on the splendor of his near nudity.

  In slow motion, her gaze rolled down his torso, taking in his width of shoulder and chest, his flat stomach and narrow waist, the symmetry and structure of his lean hips. And finally, because there was no ignoring it, that other part: the part she’d wondered and fantasized about so often in the months that had gone before; the part that would change her forever, taking away the virginity she’d preserved for this man she’d married, but giving back in return a sense of union and intimacy beyond anything she could begin to imagine.

  His skin glowed dark caramel in contrast to his white briefs, which shone like a beacon in the dim light, spotlighting the powerful virility of him, which even she, inexperienced as she was, recognized as formidable. Bemused and quite of its own accord, her hand reached out and dared to touch.

  Shocked by her own temerity, she sprang away from him as if she’d been burned. Maybe she even gasped aloud, because she heard laughter in his voice when he said, “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re…it’s so…big!” The observation, unsophisticated to the point of being childish to her ears, didn’t seem to strike him the same way.

  His grin rivaled his briefs in brilliance. “Well, thanks, honey! I was hoping you’d be pleased.”

  Pleased? She was terrified! How was it possible for a man and a woman to…?

  Abruptly, the thought sheared away, too overwhelming to be entertained. Had this been what her mother was alluding to when, during one of the many attempts she’d made to dissuade Julia from the marriage, she’d warned, “Sex isn’t very dignified, you know. But it’s a wife’s duty to accommodate her husband, whether or n
ot she’s in the mood. Because he’ll always be in the mood and that, my dear, is but one of the many crosses you’ll have to bear.”

  Perhaps Ben sensed her sudden doubt because, very gently, he took Julia’s wrist and raising it to his mouth, sewed a seam of slow, moist kisses all the way up her inner arm. He pressed a kiss at the soft triangle of skin that connected to her shoulder, and another at her ear, her jaw, her eyelids and her nose. At last and with scrupulous dedication, he kissed her mouth, deeply.

  And all the time that he was kissing her, he was touching, too, drawing his forefinger in a long, slow sweep from the hollow of her throat and straight down between her breasts to her midriff, then down even farther, to the one part of her he’d never touched before.

  He left fire in his wake, a torching lava of sensation that bubbled wildly through her veins to converge between her thighs.

  She swallowed and pressed her legs together, ashamed of the sudden flood of fierce heat dampening her underwear like tears too long suppressed. But her attempt at modesty misfired badly, trapping his hand in the very spot she most sought to shield.

  Appalled, she tried to relax, another faulty move because, seizing the moment, his thumb immediately trespassed with stunning audacity inside the high-cut leg of her panties, and parted the slick folds of her flesh.

  At his touch, an arrow of sensation arced through her, so sweetly painful, so pleasurably sinful, that it made a mockery of her former diffidence. “Ah…!” she whimpered on a long breath, opening for him and helpless to contain the shudders wracking her body.

  With a low rumble of satisfaction, Ben caught her up in his arms and carried her to the bed. The sheets whispered against her bare skin, a small sibilant welcome as if to say, It’s about time you got here. We’ve been waiting all week for the honeymoon to start.

  Still battered by the passions he’d aroused in her, Julia barely knew how she and Ben came to be fully naked. Their clothing seemed to melt away in the driving need to press skin to skin. No longer timid or afraid, she set about discovering her husband, touching him everywhere and reveling in the knowledge that she was the reason his flesh surged against her, hot and urgent and completely beyond his ability to control.

  Not that she had much say in how she responded to him! As her body expanded to his touch, so the rational part of her mind shrank and receded. In an assault so powerful that she would have sold her soul rather than forgo the experience, emotion and sensation united to banish any shred of timidity she might once have harbored.

  Ben kissed her all over, putting his mouth in places that only an hour before would have left her covered with blushes. But where then she might have fought the tide cresting over her, now she abandoned herself to it and cried aloud as it swept her to delirium.

  Possessed by the desire to give to him as fully as he gave to her, she rose up to meet him as he knelt above her. He caught her face between his two hands. His eyes, dark and fathomless in the faint light, stared into hers.

  Leaning forward, she kissed him on the mouth. He tasted of the body lotion she’d used that morning, of the sweet sea breeze that had filled the car as she sat watching the sun go down and of her, a woman in the full bloom of passion.

  She had never loved him as deeply or fiercely as she did at that moment. She would have died for him, if he’d asked her to.

  Instead, he steeled himself to patience, the selfless teacher willing to wait as long as it took for her to be ready to progress to the next stage of the journey. It wasn’t easy for him, though. That much she could tell from the way he fought to control his labored breathing, and from the film of sweat pearling his brow.

  But she’d learned at the hands of a master. Now, she knew how to give, as well as take. Unselfconsciously and intent only on trying to return some of the pleasure with which he’d so generously infused her, she ran her lips down the length of his torso and buried her face against the silken heat of him.

  Many times over the course of their courtship, her hints that she wanted him to make love to her had met with enough resistance to make her wonder if she’d ever possess the wherewithal to shatter his impressive control. But his reaction to her brazen assault banished any lingering doubt.

  Unschooled she might be, but unappealing—at least to the only person on earth who mattered—she was not! His indrawn breath and the sudden swift pressure of his hand against her skull were not the actions of a man unmoved by a woman. Elated, she reveled in the heat of him, in the reflexive spasm gripping his body, and his harsh utterance of her name.

  It was time. She knew it and so did he. When he pulled her up beside him, she came willingly. When he pressed her down against the mattress, she held out her arms to him. When he nudged at her, she opened her legs and accepted him gladly.

  She welcomed the momentary pain as he entered her for the reminder it was: that she had saved herself for this moment and this man. It was a small price to pay for the rush of delicious pleasure that followed, for the sense of belonging she could never, in her wildest dreams, have anticipated.

  This was what marriage was about. This was what formed the charmed circle symbolized by the wedding ring on her finger. As long as they could soar together like this in a world entirely of their own making, nothing could come between them.

  Winding her arms around his neck, she tried to absorb him more deeply within her, but he surprised her by pulling back. Bracing himself on his arms, he stared down at her and slowing the rhythm of his loving until he was barely moving, withdrew from her almost completely.

  “Don’t leave me,” she cried, overwhelmed by an aching sense of loss.

  “Never,” he said huskily, probing deep again in a long, sure sweep. “I love you, Julia.”

  And so it went, with him teasing and provoking her until she was coiled tight as a steel spring and uttering incoherent little pleas for deliverance.

  Enslaved, enraptured, enthralled, she savored every tiny torture, hardly aware that a distant trembling was gathering force within her and threatening to shatter her into a million pieces.

  Ben sensed it before she did. He froze and for a second, she felt she was teetering on the brink of extinction. Unsure what she was asking for but knowing that she couldn’t survive without it, she heard herself whimper, “Please Ben…!”

  “Yes,” he said, driving hard and furiously in answer to her need. “Yes!”

  Time blurred. Life altered shape. Everything that was familiar shifted to a new focus. Caught up in the unrelenting rhythm, she flew with him in a star burst of ecstasy beyond the boundaries of her previous existence to a new and glorious plane.

  Oh, Mother, she thought dazedly, so flooded with scandalous delight that she didn’t know how she remained earthbound, what a lot you must have missed when it comes to being with the man you love!

  She lay beside him, her face flushed and her eyelids still heavy with passion. “I’m so happy, Ben,” she murmured, smiling up at him dreamily.

  “That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you,” he said, and tucked her head into the curve of his shoulder before she picked up on the misgivings a more alert observer would surely have read in his guarded reply.

  She snuggled against him, warm and trusting. “I never thought our first time together would be so wonderful.”

  “Me either.”

  That much at least was true. In fact, to say their lovemaking had been good was tantamount to regarding Mount Everest as a bit of a steep climb. The words had yet to be invented to do justice to the magnitude of the experience. So that being so, why was he lying there staring bleakly into the night and listening to alarm bells clanging out a warning at the back of his mind?

  He knew why. It had all come about too easily. One minute they’d been digging themselves even deeper into the pit of mistrust and disappointment that had defined the parameters of their marriage so far, and the next they’d been rolling around in bed.

  To his way of thinking now that sanity prevailed again, that had been nothi
ng less than a case of shortterm gain for long-term pain. Sex wasn’t the glue that held a relationship together. More likely, it was the thing that fell apart soonest when things began to go wrong.

  On the other hand, it was a beginning and the place where marriage usually began. Maybe they’d get lucky for a change, and what they’d shared tonight would pave the way for greater understanding in other areas, too.

  Smothering a yawn, he punched the pillow more comfortably behind his head and let out a long breath. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so tired. What with the baby’s erratic schedule and the worry gnawing at him every waking moment, he’d barely slept in a week. If he could get in a couple of hours now…

  Right on cue, the monitor next to the bed emitted a testy squawk. Julia heard, too, and when he went to climb out of bed, caught at his arm. “Let me,” she said.

  “No. You don’t have to do this, Julia.”

  Her silhouette showed in dark relief against the faint light at the window. Naked, graceful, beautiful. Weary as he was, and despite his misgivings, he felt the old familiar ache spreading through his belly.

  “I want to,” she said.

  And I want you, he thought. He would always want her. The question was, could he keep her? Perhaps the answer was at hand. If she could accept the baby, the worst hurdles facing them would surely be over. “Okay. But if you need help, I’m here.”

  “I can manage,” she said. “Get some rest, sweetheart.”

  More than happy to accommodate her, he fell back against the pillows. He was almost asleep before she was out of the room.

  The night-light in the nursery showed the baby, redfaced and furious, flailing the air with his tiny fists. Scooping him out of the crib, Julia patted his little bottom experimentally. “Well, no wonder you’re so upset,” she crooned. “You’re soaked and starving.”

  Momentarily distracted by the sound of another voice, he stopped crying and regarded her out of huge, unblinking eyes the exact same shade of blue as Ben’s.

  “Hi,” she said softly. “I’m Julia, your…mommy.”