This Loving Land - Dorothy Garlock [57]
Blindly, not daring to open her eyes, Summer moved her lips to his scarred cheek and kissed the puckers and ridges with her open mouth. His hands moved over her breast and down the length of her body, exploring its curves and hollows through the cotton dress. When his fingers unfastened more buttons, more hooks, she began to shiver, but she could no more have moved to resist him than he, at this moment, could have stopped himself.
His lips moved slowly and lingeringly from her mouth to her earlobe to her eyes and back to bury her mouth with his. He was trembling violently. She felt his mouth on her breast, lips and tongue caressing, nibbling at her nipples. Holding his head to her breast, she groaned, a muted, strangled, incoherent sound. She wanted this! She wanted to lie under his searching hands. None of her imaginings had ever been like this. This was more wonderful, more frightening.
“I love you and want you, but I don’t want to do this to you. Tell me to stop, sweetheart!” Muttered words tumbled from his lips as he pressed fevered kisses along the soft skin of her throat and the beginning swell of her breast, arching her backward over his arm, while his other hand stroked her buttocks and thighs. There was an eagerness in him to know and touch every part of her, to go inside her, to fuse with her. “Is it what you want? Please . . . please, say it’s what you want!”
Summer’s eyes were soft with love as she gazed at him. Placing her palms on either side of his face she said soothingly, as if to a child:
“Yes, my love. It’s what I want. A few words said by a preacher won’t make me any more yours than I am at this moment.”
His mouth lowered to savor the sweet, heady nectar of her lips, and his tongue searched for entry. His fully-clad body lay half-covering her, his leg thrown over her, his arms clutching her to him. She lay soft and pliant, meeting his kisses with gentle ardor. “I must tell you, sweetheart,” his words came against her cheek, “it ... it may not be what you expect. It may....”
“. . . hurt. I know. I know.” Her hands moved impatiently, pulling his shirt away and running her fingertips through the crisp hair on his chest and around to his lean, muscular ribs. His sharp intake of breath thrilled her. She felt briefly abandoned when he left her arms to help her slip out of her dress, but almost before she could voice a complaint he was back, bare and warm and covering her.
Her arms went up to hold him closer, her body straining against his. He covered her face with kisses, releasing his pent-up desire with each touch of his lips. He bent his head and kissed the soft firmness of her breast and his hand moved between her thighs, stroking the soft inner skin, moving upward. She gave a muffled, instinctive cry as his fingers found her wetness and probed gently inside.
He spoke to her softly and coaxingly, and after a while she forgot who she was, where she was, and opened her legs, letting his fingers have their way. Her excitement mounted, her body writhed and strained upward against his hand, aching for something she couldn’t yet understand. “This is the first of a thousand times for us,” he breathed. “I want you to know the pleasure that I will know. I want you to cherish the memory of our first time.”
“Yes, yes! Please. . . .” she whispered, and he moved over her, his knees between her thighs, holding them apart. For an instant, she was afraid. Her hands slipped down his back and felt the clenching and unclenching of his muscles. He lifted himself above her and she felt him large, hot and rock-hard, pushing to enter her. He went inside her a little way and stopped. With ragged breath, he waited a full minute; calming her, reassuring her. Suddenly, he thrust, and her body arched in shock. His mouth stopped her startled cry.
“My precious love,” he soothed her. He stayed inside her without moving, embedded in her, their bodies joined, his hard belly caressing the softness of hers.
The realization