A few minutes later, he stops me.
“I don’t want to...this isn’t how I want....well., I just..” Andrew isn’t a stammerer, so this is charming. I do this to him. My mouth, my hands, my attentions take away his poise and leave him more real.
I stand on tiptoes and kiss him.
“You want me.”
“I want to be in you. I want you in my arms. Not on your knees.” He’s breathing hard, his eyes dark and intense. “I want to make love with you, Amanda. In my bed, under me, on top of me—but together.”
Rather than answer, I lead him to the bed and he takes control, crawling over my body as he warms my heart, my toes, my eyes and arms and legs and everything.
“I wanted to ask you a question in the car,” I whisper as he kisses my collarbone, his breath coming in sighs and sounds like restraint becoming frayed by too much use.
“Yes?”
“What do you feel? For me?” I murmur. His face hovers above my breast, brow relaxed and smooth. One second passes. Two. Three. I lose count because time becomes a blur of chaos as I wait to hear my anchor in the endless river of hope.
He lifts his head up and moves so our faces are inches apart. The moon pokes out from clouds here and there, making the light erratic, carrying a dewy glow like gossamer flattened with an iron and spread thin. I cannot see his eyes in full, but I feel the soft energy of his breath against my chest.
“I,” he says sweetly, “feel....” He sighs, then gives me a look of earnest connection that makes all my doubts disappear.
“Everything, Amanda. I feel everything.”
The kiss that seals my fate comes with a sense that time itself ripples right now, like a stone thrown into a pond. The water will go back to being placid and smooth, but the stone remains forever moved, the water displaced just so forever. And ever.
And everything.
Discreet and quiet, he reaches into his nightstand and finds what he needs for protection, the same way he has each time we’ve made love before. I’m grateful for the smooth integration, for his responsibility, for the thoughtful resoluteness in making sure that making love is safe.
His words make all the blood in my body rush to places where his touch thrills and sates, where we get as close as two individuals can possibly be. I want him in me, too, and as I stretch back and pull him to me, I wrap my legs around him, inviting him the only way I know how without words.
He finds me wet and wanting, his hips moving against me with a measured distraction that I find alluring. His fingers trace a circle around one nipple as he thrusts gently, all the way, making me tip my hips to take him in.
The fresh heat of him over me captivates every part of my being. Andrew is in me, over me, arms around me and I am enraptured. The strands of web that make up Amanda are woven by time, experience, emotion and senses, and right now he is threaded in me, weaving new patterns into the tapestry of my essence.
We move against each other with slow strokes that carry the groundswell of urge and need, of fire and ice, of everything.
Everything.
“I feel you, Amanda,” he murmurs, his voice harder to control. “And you’re all I want to feel. I want you.” My own control is fading, too, as impulse driven by logic dissolves under the moans that build in my throat. Too many years of no one, too many memories of loneliness, and far too many missed chances flood me as my blood skyrockets and crests, fevered and pulsing, searching for ways to find more of him.
From the way his hands grasp and explore, seeking to find new ways to touch and ignite, I think he feels it, too.
“You have me now,” I say, my words caught in my throat as my pulse quickens and the glow inside spreads, so powerful it pulls him in, too. As we come together we integrate, those threads of passion and respect, of shared time and futures to come, all mixing with flesh and bone. He’s carrying me away to some place we create between our hearts, where the only risk is in never taking a chance at all.
I tuck my head up against his shoulder and lick his neck, then give him a soulful kiss. He tastes like some exotic flavor, alluring and new. As we move against each other in the night, he fills me with a joyous bliss and hearing him call out my name in the throes of intimacy is, well....
Everything.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“He’s in Tokyo again.” Shannon whines. “Why do they both have to be there?” Declan went with Andrew for this round of negotiations. We’re both feeling their absence. They come home tomorrow after nine days away. I’m squeezing in as many DoggieDates as I can while Andrew’s out of town and can’t magically appear at any of them.
I know. I’m lying to him. Great way to start a relationship, right? But it’s for a higher cause. The Paycheck Cause. Can’t pay my bills with kisses and breve lattes in bed. Oh, if only I could...
“They come home tomorrow,” Marie says with an eye roll. She and Carol are getting ready to go out for work, purses in hand, faces excited. But first, Marie fiddles with some folders on the dining table. Jason has let Marie turn their dining room into a wedding Command Central that puts the White House emergency bunker to shame. The Jacoby family dining room looks like the War Room at the White House. No—not quite.
It is more organized.
And speaking of the White House...
“We still haven’t received an RSVP from the president or vice president,” Marie says with a disappointed sigh as she goes through the mail and sorts response cards.
“You expected the President of the United States to attend Declan and Shannon’s wedding?” Carol snorts.