Carter had never felt anything so incredible.
She was so tight, so wet, and so swollen around him.
So perfect.
He leaned down and slammed his mouth over hers as he started to move his hips. What he felt was too elemental to express with a slow and gentle build up. She didn’t seem to mind.
Her arms locked around his neck and she returned his passion, kiss for searing kiss.
Her position didn’t give her much room for movement, but she tried, straining toward him and welcoming his increasingly strong thrusts with feminine sounds of encouragement. Her eraser hard nipples grazed against his chest as her breasts shook from the force of his thrusting. He loved the feeling, but he wanted to see it too.
Rearing up on his arms, he slammed into her with passion he could no longer contain.
“Yes, Carter, oh, yes, please. Don’t stop!”
“I couldn’t,” he admitted with what little breath he had left in his lungs.
Her head thrashed from side to side, pulling her long hair out of its elaborate do for the wedding.
The picture of abandonment to passion she made excited him beyond the point of rational thought. Her nipples were berry red in their excitement and so hard, they pointed straight out. The creamy flesh of her breasts shook with each movement of his body over hers, just begging to be held and caressed.
With a feral growl, he lowered his head and took one of the tempting red morsels into his mouth. Sucked it. Bit it and then kissed it when she made an animal sound of her own. He turned his head and did the same thing to her other nipple, satisfaction coursing through him.
She was his.
He could touch her like this for the rest of their lives.
Finally, after four years. He was holding the phantom that had haunted him in his arms.
And that reality was driving him right over the edge.
“You’ve got to get it or I’m going without you.”
And he couldn’t do that. He wanted to share it with her.
She bowed under him, pressing her pelvis against his own with each thrust. He gyrated his hips to increase the friction around her clitoris and watched with male pride as her eyes glazed over, her mouth opened on a silent scream, and she came. Again. This time with him inside her; her inner muscles held him so tightly that he felt like he really was a part of her body.
Then the pleasure at the base of his shaft seemed to explode up it and he came inside her like a river bursting through a dam. Sensations flooded him. Overwhelming emotions that had no name, but filled his heart to bursting.
Want. Need. Desire. They were all there, but so was an inescapable tenderness. I love you, Daisy, his mind screamed as his throat let loose a raw shout of triumphant gratification.
Afterward, he collapsed on top of her, the softness of her body an irresistible lure to rest for muscles that had lost their ability to function. Her arms fell away from him, and her legs dropped limply to the bed.
They stayed that way for a long time, neither one of them speaking.
Then she turned her head, just a little, but enough to press her lips into his neck. “That was the most beautiful experience of my life.”
“Me too, Daisy. Me too.”
The words his mind had screamed earlier were on the tip of his tongue, but he could not make them come out. Not yet.
It took a while, but he managed to gather enough strength to get up and take care of the condom, come back and tuck them both under the covers before falling into an exhausted sleep, more sated in mind, heart and body than he had been in his entire life.
***
Carter came awake slowly, unsure at first if he was really holding Daisy, or if it was another dream.
But the warm and womanly body in his arms was too real to be a delusion.
And what they’d shared earlier had been too amazing to be just sex. He’d had sex before, many times, but tonight was the first time he’d ever made love to woman in the most literal sense of the words.
For years, he’d believed himself as incapable of that all encompassing emotion as his father, only to discover in the midst of the most mind blowing intimacy of his life that love wasn’t outside his nature after all.
He loved Daisy and it was such a bone deep emotion, he knew he could never dismiss it or her from his life.
The only problem was, he had no idea what she felt.
She’d let him make love to her with a freedom that encompassed his deepest fantasies. She had allowed him to find pleasure in her body and to give her pleasure in a way he was almost positive she’d never had before. But had she done that because of the money, or because she felt something for him like he felt for her?
He couldn’t believe that Daisy would be motivated by the money to love him like she’d done.
Not the woman he’d come to know through her personnel file, talking to her coworkers, and spending time with her.
He didn’t know why she’d married him, but he was almost positive it wasn’t because he’d paid her to do so.
She’d had a rotten sex life in her first marriage and he could almost believe that she’d been willing to marry him because he gave her something she’d never had sexually before. Satisfaction.
But that didn’t ring true either.
A woman like Daisy would need to feel something powerful in her heart for her body to respond the way it did.
Moonlight spilled in through cathedral style bedroom window and he could see the gentle curve of her lips as well as the soft expression of her face in sleep.
Total innocence.
Incomparable beauty.
His Daisy.
He wanted to know what she felt. Needed desperately to know.
He reached out and touched her cheek, rubbing his finger up and down until she started to stir.
***
Daisy woke to the sensation of butterfly wings brushing against her face.
Her eyes fluttered open to the sight of Carter leaning over her, an incredibly fervent expression on his face.
She smiled. “Hi.”
His hand shifted to cup her cheek. “Hi.”
She slid one leg between his. “Mmm...that’s nice.”
His eyes closed. “Very nice.”
She reached down and brushed his male flesh. It twitched at her touch and he groaned, but then his hand caught her wrist.
“Stop for a second.” His eyes were open again.
“Why?” She could tell he liked it, so she didn’t feel even a smidgen of rejection.
“I need to ask you a question.”
She leaned forward and kissed the muscled wall of his chest. “Then ask it.”
“Did you make love to me like that because you were trying to give me full value for that damn money or because you love me?”
She went completely still. “Isn’t there an Option C?”
“I don’t know. Is there?”
She moved back a little so she could see his face. The semi-darkness could not hide the vulnerability in his expression.
“I didn’t come to your bed because you paid me to do it.”
“You kept harping on the fact I was paying you to sleep with me.”
She bit her lip, then sighed. “Well, you see, your motives weren’t necessarily mine, if you know what I mean.”
“I hope I do. Explain it to me, just in case.” He had the air of a man hanging on her every word and she really didn’t want to mess this up.
“You offered me money to do something I wanted to do. So, it didn’t matter you were offering the money except that it made me feel sort of racy and exciting when I’d always been a boring little nobody.”
“You are not boring. You’re the most exciting woman I have ever known.”
That deserved another kiss, so she gave it. “Thank you.”
“So, why did you want to marry me? Was it the sex?”
“You’re pretty good at that.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Why are you asking?” she demanded in an attempt at stalling the inevitable. She was going to have to admit she loved him and part of her didn’t mind at all.
He’d told her it would be all right if she came to love him, so she had to assume he wouldn’t mind that she’d loved him all along.
“I love you, Daisy and it’s killing me to think you don’t feel the same way.”
Her lungs froze right between taking a breath and letting it out. “Wh...” she couldn’t make the word come out.
“Daisy?”
The bedroom was getting really dark and then he was pounding on her back and she started breathing again. She gasped in air and let it out several times before she got the question she’d meant to ask out. “What?”
“I love you, and I’m not sure how you feel about me, but I’ll be damned if I expected the news to make you stop breathing in shock.”
Tears filled her eyes and she hugged him as tight as she could, tiny sobs escaping between kisses to his chest, his neck, his chin, his mouth and his cheeks.
Two big hands locked onto either side of her head. “Does this mean you’re happy about how I feel?”
She laughed. “Yes.” How could he doubt it? She went back to kissing him.
He caught her face again. “And you love me too?”
She sat straight up and looked down at him, this man that she now, finally believed she could have for a lifetime. “Oh, yes. I love you. I’ve loved you forever, it seems. Jack used to accuse me of mooning over you, the unattainable man. I tried not to, when I was married, but after he died, you were everything my dreams were made of.”
He sat up too, his big body gleaming in the moonlight. “How could you love me? You didn’t know me.”
“Didn’t I? You were right when you said your life is an open book to the town of New Hope. I knew about your childhood, how cold your mother is and how careful you’ve always been with her. I knew about the way you treated your jerk of a dad with respect and the way you were always looking for ways to improve the employees’ lot with the company.”
“And then I met you. Four years ago and every daydream I had had about this ideal man coalesced around a reality that devastated me. I cried when I read about your engagement to Phoebe. I ached with missing you when you moved to New York, even though I only saw you occasionally as it was.”
“I left because of you.”
She couldn’t comprehend what he’d just said.
“I broke my engagement with Phoebe because I wanted you so much I woke up in a cold sweat at night after dreaming about you. I thought I was fickle like my father, that I wasn’t capable of love. So, I left, to protect Phoebe from marrying a man who would hurt her in the end and to protect you from an affair with the same guy.”
Her heart contracted with pain for what he’d believed about himself. “But you came back.”
“It didn’t go away. The ache, or the wanting and being in New York didn’t make any difference. I figured that even if I couldn’t do love, I knew I could do fidelity. I was already doing it.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You couldn’t have wanted me that much.” Her voice cracked on tears that insisted on rolling down her cheeks.
“You’re right.” He pulled her into his lap and cradled her against him, brushing the tears from her cheeks with his fingers. “It wasn’t just want. It was love. I don’t understand it, but I know it’s real.”
She leaned into him, inhaling his scent, soaking in his warmth. “Oh yes, it’s real.”
“A forever kind of real.”
She leaned up to kiss him and that led to more touching which led to pleasure that left her in tears all over again.
Later, curled into his body, her legs entwined with his and on the verge of sleep, she laid her hand against his heart. “Forever.”