DAWN SHIMMERED over the ocean in tints of rose and gold, lavender and cream. It was a radiant fantasy that filled Cat’s bedroom with a soundless rush of light. Her inner alarm clock prodded her, telling her it was time to be up.
She stirred in silent protest—and realized that she was moving against something warm and very solid. Beneath her cheek a heart beat in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.
Eyes still closed, barely awake, Cat realized that she was lying half on top of a man, breathing as he breathed, her arm thrown across his warm torso, her leg wedged between his.
Travis.
She didn’t have to open her eyes to know who shared her intimate sprawl. It wasn’t so much the vague memories of being carried inside and tucked in bed by Travis that told her who was lying so close by. It was the simple fact that only Travis could have slipped through her defenses to the point where she not only fell asleep on him, but didn’t wake up even when he got in bed beside her.
Deliberately Cat kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to wake up and face the working day. It was deliciously warm lying next to Travis, and dawn was usually so cold. She rubbed her cheek sleepily against his chest and snuggled even closer.
An instant later there was a change in his heartbeat, in his big body, in the tension of the arm wrapped around her waist.
Travis was awake.
That was when Cat realized that he was naked and she wasn’t. Not quite. Her whole body stiffened.
“Don’t be angry,” Travis said softly.
A large hand slowly stroked her hair. The touch was gentle and undemanding.
“If you had finished undressing me,” she said after a moment, “I would be furious.”
“I know.”
Her breath broke. “How?”
Smiling, he let his fingertips drift over her eyebrows. “I just do.”
“How can I—” Cat began, then stopped abruptly.
It wasn’t the sort of question a smart woman asked aloud: How can I defend myself against a man who knows me so well?
The answer was both simple and frightening. She couldn’t.
“Mmmm?” Travis asked.
“How can you be so smart?” she muttered.
“Just about you. Sometimes. And sometimes you surprise the hell out of me.”
Cat hesitated, then sighed and relaxed into his body again. For a few slow breaths she allowed herself to enjoy the feel of his hand moving over her hair.
“If you weren’t bigger than me,” she said finally, yawning, “I’d throw you over the deck into the surf for your morning swim.”
Silent laughter rippled through Travis. “But I am bigger, so what are you going to do with me?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
He slid a hand beneath Cat’s hair and rubbed sensually down to the small of her back.
“May I offer a suggestion?” he asked.
As he spoke, his nails scraped very lightly over the base of her spine.
Cat shivered and arched against him with an instinctive motion. Travis’s breath caught as his heartbeat and his body leaped almost painfully. There had been no calculation in her movement. She simply had responded to his caress with a bone-deep sensuality that made his whole body tighten in anticipation.
He had been right. They were going to be good together. Very, very good.
“A suggestion, huh?” Cat said sleepily.
“A small one.”
She lifted her head and looked down at Travis. Dawn had transformed the arrogant lines of his face into velvet shadows and luminous planes. His eyes were such a deep green they were almost black, yet light turned in their depths, light and intelligence and laughter. Beneath his thick mustache his lips shaped a pirate’s smile.
“Don’t tell me,” she said dryly. “Let me guess.”
“Okay. Here’s your second hint.”
His hand slid up into her hair. Slowly his fingers rubbed over her scalp until she sighed and lay against him again. When he spoke, his voice was even deeper than usual.
“Have you guessed my suggestion?” he asked, but there was no real question in his voice.
“Yeah. That I get to work.”
“On me.”
“You don’t need work.” Cat propped herself up on her elbow. “You look all together to me.”
Travis’s big hands framed her face. “I’m just half together, looking for the other half.” He pulled her gently down to his lips, tasted her. “We’ll fit together very well, two halves that are finally whole.”
“But—”
His mouth moved over Cat’s before she could finish the rest of what he was afraid would be a refusal.
“Don’t say anything yet,” Travis said against her lips. “Just kiss me. That’s all I ask, a single kiss. Just one. You know you can trust me. Say you trust me, sweet Cat, show that you trust me. A kiss. Just one kiss for the well-behaved pirate who wanted to steal you and sail off over the edge of the world, but brought you back to your own room instead.”
Cat felt herself giving in to the gentle power of his words, pulled like a bright leaf into the whirlpool of his desire. No man had ever wanted her like this. His need was as irresistible to her as dawn. Slowly she bent her head until her lips touched his in a breathlessly gentle kiss.
His fingers tightened very slightly around her face, simultaneously reminding her of his strength and his restraint.
Just a kiss.
Just one.
Trusting Travis’s control, Cat moved her lips lightly on his. She felt the sensual tension that rippled through him in response. It told her how desirable she was to him as no words could have. Shivers of heightened awareness went through her. With them came a feeling of feminine power that was as new and heady to her as the cognac she had sipped from warm crystal last night.
Her ex-husband had required that she lie still and be quiet until he was finished, because women who enjoyed sex weren’t fit to be the mothers of children. Wives were passive. Whores cooperated. Sluts enjoyed.
Following Billy’s rules hadn’t been a problem for Cat; he wasn’t an enjoyable lover. The only pleasure she had ever found from sex had been some hasty, furtive, and finally rather embarrassing petting in high school.
While Travis was in no way as boring as Billy or as embarrassing as a high school boy, Cat didn’t expect anything from Travis once the brief preliminaries were over. Sex was one of Mother Nature’s jokes on women. Men were fast and hard and women weren’t.
But on the plus side, it had been very nice for Cat to wake up feeling Travis’s heartbeat under her cheek and his warmth all along her body. She had slept better than she had in years. If the price of that kind of peace and companionship was a few hurried, uncomfortable minutes underneath him . . . well, she had learned after her father died that nothing in life was truly free.
Even while Cat brushed her lips lightly against Travis’s mouth, she expected the soft kiss to end immediately in an assertion of male sexual prerogative. Yet he showed no signs of impatience, much less of a headlong rush toward sex.
Curious in a way she hadn’t been since high school, Cat increased the pressure of her kiss. She didn’t stop until she could savor the firmness of his lips, sense the smooth hardness of his teeth, and feel the warmth of his breath blending with hers.
Long fingers flexed in her hair, encouraging her without imprisoning her, coaxing rather than demanding that the kiss continue. With a ragged sigh she opened her lips and recklessly traced the line of Travis’s mouth as he had once traced hers.
The instant Cat realized what she had done, she froze. Three years of marriage to Billy had taught her that men disliked anything but straight-line, quick sex. Kissing just got in the way.
She tried to raise her head, to end the kiss, but found she couldn’t. She was held tenderly, immovably, in Travis’s hands. Their lips were still touching.
“Travis?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“What?”
“Whatever you’re asking, the answer is yes. As long as it doesn’t mean that the kiss ends before I taste you. I have to taste you, Cat. Is that so very much to ask of a kiss?”
Her eyes opened in shock.
Travis was watching her. His eyes were a blue-green blaze that filled her world.
“You don’t mind?” Cat said against his lips.
“Mind what?”
“This.”
She closed her eyes and probed the corners of his mouth with the tip of her tongue. As she did, she wondered if Travis was as sensitive there as she had been when his tongue teased her.
“Mind?” he asked huskily. “Hell, no. I like that.”
“What about this?”
She licked his lips with catlike neatness. The sultry little caresses made him want to open her thighs and seek out flesh that was even hotter, wetter.
But it was much too soon. She was as skittish as a girl with her first man.
“I like that,” Travis said. “A lot.”
His fingers kneaded down Cat’s back. She didn’t notice the fine trembling of his hands against her skin. She was too busy memorizing the shape of his smile with her tongue to let anything else distract her. She had never guessed how sensitive her tongue could be. Each caress she gave returned to her in warmth and quickened breathing.
“And this?” Cat whispered. “What about this?”
Her tongue pressed inside his lower lip, then delicately touched the serrations of his teeth just as he had once touched hers. The temptation to sink into him and pull him around her kept warring with her experience of men and sex.
Cat hesitated against the inviting warmth of Travis’s mouth, not touching him with her tongue. She didn’t want the slow, sensual exploration to end in a jarring rush of sex.
“Do it,” Travis whispered. “Taste me the way I want to taste you.”
The heat of his voice was like a tongue stroking sensitive nerves. She shivered with pleasure and sought him in the warm darkness of his mouth. Instinctively she moved her lips and tongue over his, finding the points of greatest mingling, most intense pleasure.
Travis met and matched the kiss, teased and retreated, encouraged and enjoyed; and always he lured Cat deeper and deeper into his embrace.
After a time she forget to tense against the instant when she would find herself flat on her back with Travis sweating over her. She forgot Billy’s harsh teaching, forgot that she hadn’t known Travis long, forgot everything but the heat and restrained power of the man who was confident enough to let her test herself on him.
The kiss became a timeless sensual awakening for Cat, a hot sunrise that ended her long night of ignorance and misunderstanding of what sexual play could be with the right man. With a ragged sound she stopped thinking of anything at all. She gave herself completely to the hot, wild kiss.
In time not even the deepest kiss was enough for Cat. She had to be closer to Travis, then closer still. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t get close enough to him, couldn’t hold him tightly enough, couldn’t take enough of his mouth. Her legs tangled with his as she pressed herself against his chest, trying to melt into him as completely as he was melting into her.
His hands shifted and his arms flexed. Without breaking the deep kiss, he lifted her over himself like a hot satin blanket.
But that still wasn’t close enough for Cat. With a low sound she pulled herself against Travis, caressing him with sinuous movements of her body that at first eased and then savagely increased her need for him.
“Closer,” Cat whispered without knowing what she was saying. “Closer.”
Travis spread his legs and let Cat sink between them. Then he slid his legs around and over hers, pulled her ankles apart with his heels, and opened her soft, flushed core. Her response was another of the reckless, sliding movements of her hips over his that made sweat stand out on his skin.
The temptation to slide beneath her lacy briefs and push deep inside her was so great that he shook. But he wouldn’t do what he wanted so badly. He would not take her.
He hadn’t had sex without a condom since Tina had aborted his baby. He wasn’t going to start now, no matter how wild Cat made him.
And from Cat’s odd combination of hesitation and headlong sensuality, Travis was very much afraid that she didn’t practice the kind of offhanded sexuality that meant a box of condoms in the bedside table, just in case she ended up astride a date.
Travis groaned deep in his chest and pushed his erection between her legs in a blunt, sensual questing. She made a broken sound against his mouth, shivered, and melted over him. Her instant, sultry response made him wonder if he was wrong about the contents of her bedside drawer.
Cat barely noticed Travis’s hands moving over her body. Dark scraps of lace slid away, leaving her as naked as he was. She didn’t object. She welcomed it. She wanted to be still closer to him, skin to skin, hunger to hunger, burning away a lifetime of chill in his unique fire.
It was Travis who finally ended the passionate kiss. He lifted Cat’s face until he could see her eyes, smoky with hunger, and her lips, reddened with all that she had given and taken.
“Are you sure?” Travis asked simply.
Dazed, breathing hard, Cat trembled full-length against him. She didn’t understand his question or why he had stopped.
“I’ve never wanted—like this,” she said raggedly. “Is that—what you mean?”
Desire ripped through Travis. His elemental response to her words made his whole body rigid. He slipped the leash on his control for just an instant, long enough to tell her without words what her admission meant to him. He pulled her down and kissed her hungrily, achingly, penetrating her mouth with his tongue in a single, swift stab, filling her in the only way he would permit himself for now.
Then he held Cat away from him once more and fought to control himself.
“That’s more than I asked,” he said thickly. “I’m not contagious, but I have to know if you’re protected against pregnancy.”
At first Cat didn’t understand. When she did, she stiffened against Travis. She was well, painfully well, protected against getting pregnant.
With a small cry she rolled away from him. She didn’t want to see his eyes change when he knew that she wasn’t a whole woman. She couldn’t bear to know the exact moment when he would no longer desire her.
Swiftly Travis turned onto his side. His long arm slid over Cat’s waist and gathered her close to him again. His rigid arousal lay against her, hot and heavy, urgent. Yet his voice was calm rather than harsh.
“Ah, Cat, don’t be angry with your blunt pirate. I have a right to know.”
She let her breath out slowly and relaxed a little, but still refused to look at Travis. “I’m not angry.”
His lips brushed gently over her shoulder. Though he said nothing, she knew that he was waiting for an answer to his question.
The words simply wouldn’t take shape on her tongue.
“Cat?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “I won’t get pregnant.”
The words sounded flat to her, harsh, but there was nothing she could do to soften them. She had told the truth.
She wouldn’t get pregnant.
Bothered by the change in Cat’s voice and her refusal to meet his eyes, Travis turned her face toward him. When he spoke, his own voice was as hard as hers had been.
“Look at me,” he demanded. “Are you certain you won’t get pregnant?”
Anger raced through Cat. Travis had the right to ask the question once, but no more.
“I’m very certain,” she said distinctly. “But it doesn’t matter.”
He raised a tawny eyebrow. “Like hell it doesn’t. I was caught in the baby trap once. Once was more than enough.”
Cat’s smile made him flinch.
“Not to worry, Mr. T. H. Danvers,” she said in a brittle voice. “I’m fresh out of baby traps.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sterile!”
As Cat spoke the last words she twisted aside, trying to get out from under his weight, out of bed, out of his reach, out of the room . . . out.
Her quickness wasn’t enough. Travis had sensed her tension, guessed what she was going to do. He flattened her on the bed beneath him.
“Not so fast, Cat. Not before you tell me why.”
Her body twisted violently as she tested his hold. She quickly realized that Travis not only had position on her, he also had even more sheer power than she had guessed.
His strength didn’t frighten Cat the way she had been frightened when she realized Ashcroft’s power. The difference between the two men was both simple and devastating—Cat trusted Travis not to rape her and chalk up her struggles to coyness.
But trusting Travis didn’t mean that she was pleased to be his captive.
“Why what?” she asked in a stranger’s voice. “Why am I sterile? Or don’t you believe that I am? Would you like a note from my gynecologist certifying my defect?”
His breath came in sharply. “Don’t, Cat. Please don’t.” Travis bent to kiss her gently, realizing too late how much the subject hurt her. “I believe you.”
She jerked her head aside, avoiding his kiss. “Then if your curiosity is satisfied, get the hell out of my bed.”
“Try to understand,” Travis said against her cheek. Between words his tongue delicately traced the contours of her ear. “After my divorce, I swore I’d never be caught in the baby trap again. I’d be a regular Boy Scout, always prepared.”
He laughed without humor. “And I have been. If I’d taken you to my own bed, this never would have happened. But when I saw your single bed, I knew that Harrington was right, fire and ice, and I couldn’t leave you. I had to stay and warm myself with your fire.”
“Stop it!” Cat said, shaking with anger and the desire Travis could call out of her with a look, a touch, a word.
“Why?” he whispered. His breath stirred her hair as his hips slid hungrily over hers.
Her body went rigid. “No.”
Gently Travis turned her face toward his, forcing her to look at him. “Why?”
“I don’t feel like celebrating my defect right now,” Cat said bitterly.
“It isn’t a defect,” he said, his voice certain.
“That depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Billy wanted a dynasty. You want a roll in the hay.”
Travis touched her hair with fingers that trembled very slightly. “And you, Cat. What do you want?”
She said nothing at all.
He looked at her and was afraid that he had lost everything before either of them even had a chance to win. Her face was framed in a cloud of auburn hair that shimmered and smoldered with each rapid breath she took. Her eyes were pale as ice, staring through him. She was proud and distant, quivering like a racing sloop under full sail, heeled over dangerously far, pursued by a storm.
“I can’t change the past,” Travis said, watching Cat with eyes that shared her hurt. “But I can give you a chance to run before the storm, to feel ecstasy in every motion, every touch. And when the storm finally breaks, I’ll be there. Let me love you, Cat.”
Like a warm, soft wind his lips brushed over her cheek, her shoulder, her breast, stealing away her anger while the gentle warmth of his hands gave her back the gift of passion.
Slowly Cat’s stiff body relaxed, softening beneath Travis. Her breath trembled out in a sound that might have been his name. He answered it with a kiss whispered against her ear. His weight no longer imprisoned her. There was no need. She was held more securely by the pleasure he was giving her than she had been by his strength.
His tongue teased her breast for long moments before he drew her nipple into the heat and pressure of his mouth. She shivered at the unexpected sensations consuming her. His hand surrounded her with warmth. His fingers slowly, deliciously kneaded her breast.
Cat made a startled sound as streamers of heat shot through her. When his teeth caressed her hardened nipple, she arched wildly. Her fingernails sank into his shoulders, clinging to him urgently. He was the only solid thing in a sea of swirling pleasure.
Slowly Travis released her nipple and lifted his head, wanting to see the tight crown he had drawn from her flesh.
“No,” Cat said on a broken breath. Her hands slid into his hair, bringing his head back down to her breast while she moved beneath his mouth. “Don’t stop. Please. It feels so good.”
Travis laughed softly and gave her a sweet, biting caress that made her gasp.
“It’s too soon to worry about stopping,” he said huskily. “We’ve barely started.”
He bent his head and feasted on her breasts until she was shivering and crying, twisting beneath him, moving her hips against him with a hunger that she didn’t even try to hide.
With any other woman Travis would have ended the preliminaries then and there. But she wasn’t any other woman. She was Cat, wary and welcoming by turns, mysterious and yet sometimes as familiar to him as his own breath.
“Travis, I—” Cat’s voice broke as he caressed her breasts with fingers and tongue. The pleasure shooting through her was good, wonderful, incredible.
And it wasn’t enough.
“I know,” Travis said in answer to her incoherent words. “We’ll get there. Let the storm build for a while. Let me find out.”
“What?”
“How good we’re going to be.”
“I’m not—I mean—I—”
Cat gave up trying to make sense. Travis was moving over her with the smooth power of a breaking wave. She was pinned again beneath his big body and she loved every inch of it. She stretched and twisted against him, her skin on fire with pleasure everywhere she touched him.
“You’re trying to push me over the edge, aren’t you?” Travis asked, hungry and laughing at the same time.
The dazed look Cat gave him said better than words could have that she wasn’t aware of what she was doing. She was simply responding to him and to the wild, unexpected storm he had called from her core. The knowledge almost stripped away his control.
Abruptly Travis took Cat’s mouth with his own, needing to sink into her in some way. His tongue probed her lips with increasing pressure, demanding that she share the kiss. When her mouth opened, he asked for more, took it, his tongue sliding between her teeth until he was in complete possession of every soft, hot bit of her mouth.
She responded with a need that equaled his, invading his mouth with her tongue, trying to consume him even as he consumed her. Her hands moved recklessly down his back, glorying in the rippling strength of his body, digging into the tensed muscles of his buttocks, seeking his hardened flesh, finding it, holding it.
His breath broke, then came out in a hoarse groan that was a warning of how close to the edge he was.
Too late Cat remembered all that her ex-husband had taught her about a woman’s role in bed. Instantly she snatched back her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said raggedly.
“For what?” Travis asked. His voice was rough with pleasure and his hands were seeking her as intimately as hers had sought him.
“I know that men—don’t like—aggressive women. I forgot. I’m sorry.” Cat’s words jerked out, sharp with the humiliating memories.
“Are you talking about that sorry bastard you married?”
Numbly Cat nodded.
“Billy was a fool,” Travis said. “You’re passionate, not aggressive. That might frighten a boy, but it’s exciting as hell to a man.”
As he spoke, he pulled Cat’s hands back down his body, then shuddered openly when her fingers brushed against him. He was so hard that his flesh jerked with every racing heartbeat. Her touch was heaven and hell at once, but above all it was a storm swirling around both of them, a storm building toward the moment of breaking.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Travis said, moving between Cat’s hands, letting her see and feel his pleasure. “I want my woman to touch me all over, everywhere, any and every way she wants to.”
Cat stared at him, wanting to ask what he meant, unable to think of the words. He felt so exciting between her hands, hard and smooth, hot and quivering with life.
Travis smiled down at her in lazy contradiction to the smoldering blue-green fire of his eyes.
“That’s it,” he said almost roughly. “Touch me all over. Anything. Everything. It’s the way I’m going to touch you. All over, everywhere, any and every way I want.”
She shivered at the sensual promise that radiated from him, the certainty of ecstasy burning in his eyes, the intense pleasure that rippled through him when she curled her fingers around him. The feel of him was unbearably arousing. She buried her face in his neck, caressing his skin with her tongue, biting the hard tendons, then licking away the marks her teeth left.
Travis made a raw sound of pleasure and hunger. He could sense her liquid heat close to him, so close, it would be sweet hell to slide into her. The scent of her arousal infused the air like lightning. Her hands teased and praised him, measuring and caressing him in the same sexy movements.
“That’s it,” he said, laughing softly, triumphantly. “Test me, Cat. See how hard I am.” As he spoke, one of his hands moved between her thighs, opening them. A long finger slid into her. “And how soft you are.”
Cat gasped with surprise at the sensations surging through her body. She tried to say Travis’s name, to ask what he was doing to her. All that came out was a ragged sound of need.
Deliberately Travis circled the soft, sleek folds of skin until he found the point of greatest pleasure for her. Then he stroked and teased and rubbed until she cried out and melted in his hand.
“Travis?” Cat asked almost desperately. “What—”
Her voice broke as another gust of pleasure shook her, a storm wave cresting endlessly within her, sweeping her toward an unknown shore.
Body arched, she closed her eyes and gave herself over to the storm and to Travis. She lived only where he touched her, and he touched her everywhere, the storm building until she couldn’t bear it anymore. She cried out with a pleasure so intense it was almost pain.
His hips flexed and he sank into her. The powerful movement joined their bodies deeply, completely. Lightning scored her with searing pleasure. She clung to him, frantically matching his rhythmic movements, sharing his strength as they raced before the storm they had created, wanting both to outrun and be consumed by it.
Then they could run no further and the storm broke around them, consuming them.
Cat would have been frightened, but Travis was there, surrounding her, sheltering her while ecstasy shattered her world, then holding her while her world slowly reformed. It was a different world now, for he was part of her.