Page 91 of Fury In Death

He hitched her up, off her feet, so her legs circled his waist. The cat opened one eye, saw what was coming. On a grumble, he leaped out of the way as they tumbled onto the bed.

“Let me just get this task out of the way.”

He eased up her support tank, sliding his fingers along her skin as he took her mouth again.

Slowly, deepening the kiss slowly, as her body softened under his, on that edge of a surrender he found miraculous. She needed tending, he thought, needed the lovely and the loving. And so, he knew, did he, to shut out—even for a little while—the ugliness, the horror, the cruelty that so often pushed bloody hands into their lives.

So to tend and be tended, long, deep kisses, slow, patient hands.

He could marvel in the wonder of her, how the strength and the softness merged. The long, narrow torso, the leanly muscled arms, the endless legs that tangled with his.

Drawing the tank away, he pressed his lips to her shoulder. Shoulders, he thought, built to carry the weight of her duty, however heavy. Yet the skin over them . . . so much silk, so smooth, so soft to the touch and taste.

He felt her heart against his own, beat for beat.

As she ran her hands through his hair, down his back, she sighed.

“I think your game’s definitely up.”

And felt his lips curve against her throat.

He understood her. Had anyone ever understood her so absolutely, heart, mind, body? He knew her every vulnerability, every weakness, every flaw, yet loved her anyway.

He took her away, as he’d known she’d needed, from everything she’d faced that day, everything she’d face the next. He gave her, as she could give him, a light in the dark, the beauty of life amid so much death.

She rolled with him, a quiet surf beyond a restless ocean, her hands and lips exploring the body she knew as intimately as her own. Strong, lean, disciplined, one it seemed to her could slip through shadows without leaving a ripple.

And that mouth, she thought as it roamed over her. So perfect, so skilled, it could arouse with a whisper.

When his lips glided over her breast, her sigh became a moan; her hand pressed him closer.

Then her heartbeat thickened, and her body slid over the edge of surrender.

Lost now in what they brought each other, she murmured his name. The sound of it trembled through him as they gave each other more. With a touch, a taste, a shudder of pleasure, a skip of the pulse, they gave each other more. Fingers stroking along a thigh, lips grazing along a curve, an angle, before meeting again locked the world away.

In the quiet, in the shimmering dark, as the air seemed to pulse, she opened; he filled. They moved together, slowly, clinging to the moment, the sumptuous pleasure of it. Bodies joined, eyes locked, breath quickening, they took each other deeper. Until there was nothing else, nowhere else, no one else.

And they were lost, together.

When she lay, Roarke’s arm around her, the cat curled at her back, she gave Roarke’s ass a pat.

“That was much better than well enough.”

So they both ended the night on a smile.

Hers didn’t last, not where the dream took her.

A summer night. She felt the heat of high summer, the thickness in the air and the stillness of it. She felt it even as she stood studying the smoking rubble that had once been a building. The torn, charred pieces that had once been living, breathing people.

“Evil did this.” Steven Redman, beside her, spoke quietly. “Only evil could do this.”

“Why? Why did they do this?”

He looked at her, such sorrow in his eyes, and even in sleep her heart hurt. “You know why.”

“I know they wanted you in there, dead, but I don’t know why. What did you find out?”

“It shouldn’t matter what or why. You didn’t stop them. Nobody stopped them. I didn’t stop them.”