“I like kissing you.” Sara brushed his hair back and levered up to capture his mouth again. “Like it a lot.”

As did he, but Beck’s concentration was fixed on the territory Sara had given into his exclusive control. As she settled into the kissing and let her hands roam over his back, Beck gradually eased himself more snugly against her sex. The urge to thrust—to push into her and keep pushing—was nearly overwhelming, but he contented himself with nudging, then nudging again.

“This is harder than I thought it would be, this holding still,” Sara said against his neck. He angled up on his arms to regard her.

“Is it too difficult?” Let alone hard.

“No.” Sara smiled slightly. “But what is the problem? I want you inside me, Beckman.”

“This is the problem.” He did flex his hips then, and by rights—she’d had a child, for pity’s sake—he should have begun to slip into the sweet, wet heat of her.

Sara cocked her head on the pillow. “It doesn’t hurt. Do that again.”

He did, watching her face closely, waiting for the telltale wince.

“Again.”

He gained a bit of entry but saw her expression change fleetingly. “I’m hurting you.”

“No. It’s just different, that’s all. Again.”

He complied, hamstrung between increasing arousal and the certain conviction—as closely as her body wrapped him—he had to be hurting her. She wasn’t hurting him, though; God above, just the bloody opposite.

“Don’t stop, Beck,” Sara said, but he could hear the caution in her tone as the head of his cock was now lodged blissfully inside her.

He tried to think.

“Close yourself around me,” he suggested, settling down on his forearms.

Sara hugged him to her more tightly.

“Inside, too, Sara. Here.” He gave her a minute thrust to demonstrate.

“Close myself?”

“Grip my cock with your sex. Like you don’t want me to pull out.” She comprehended that, and Beck felt the snugness of her contract around him. Had he been a Papist, he would have started saying the rosary on behalf of his disintegrating wits.

“Do that again, slowly, as if you could pull me into you, then let me go.”

She did it, and he experimentally eased forward as she relaxed.

“That works,” she reported, starting up again.

It worked too bloody well. It worked to arouse him to the point where his entire being was an exercise in self-discipline. By the smallest increments imaginable, Sara’s body eased around him and admitted him to her intimate depths.

“Are you in pain?” Sara’s hands were anchored on his buttocks, her face tucked against his chest.

“Bliss,” he managed. But as soon as he let go, the bliss would implode into ecstasy. He couldn’t do that until he was sure he wouldn’t hurt her. “Can you move just a little on me now?”

“Like this?” She rolled her hips conservatively.

“Just like that,” Beck rasped. “Until you’re comfortable.”

Or until he died, because all this holding back would surely kill him.

“I’m comfortable.” She set up a tidy little rocking. “I just…”

“What, love?” Beck dropped his forehead to hers. “Tell me. Please.”

“I want more.” Sara let go with a luxurious undulation and sighed against his neck.

Sainthood loomed within Beck’s grasp, but he declined for the greater pleasure of making love to the woman in his bed.

“I think we’ve earned a little more,” he said. “But you hold still now. I don’t want to take any chances.”

Immediately, she quieted and waited for him. When he flexed on a long, slow thrust, she moaned softly and melted around him. “Better,” she pronounced.

Thank you, God.

Beck found a rhythm, keeping his movements slow and languid but not letting himself open his eyes, not when the sound of Sara’s sighs alone was driving him beyond reason.

“I want to move, Beck.” Sara took his earlobe in her mouth and gently nipped him. “Just a little.” He nodded. His jaw was clenched too tightly for speech.

Sara didn’t warn him, though, that she was going to wrap her legs around him, lock her ankles at the small of his back, and use her considerable leg strength to anchor him to her. She added “just a little” movement to that shift in position, and Beck was lost.

His thrusting picked up depth and speed, and his arms locked behind Sara’s head.

“Don’t let me hurt…” He felt Sara’s fingers lace with his own, grounding him.

“Love me, Beckman.” She turned her head to kiss the heel of his hand. “Let go. It will be all right.”

She clasped him with the interior muscles he’d shown her earlier, and Beckman was undone, dissolved in pleasure and passion when he felt Sara’s body coming apart with him.

His restraint abandoned him as Sara’s body communicated its delight, gripping and pulling at him, proving to him graphically that his satisfaction was her own.

When he could not have sustained any greater experience of fulfillment, Beck hung over Sara on his forearms, stroking her hair as he pulled the breath back into his body by force of will.

God help him…

“Did I hurt…?”

Sara’s fingers brushed over his mouth then trailed around the back of his head to urge him down against her shoulder. While he waited, panting, for his wits to reassemble, she shifted her hips slowly, maybe treating herself to a little more pleasure, and surely answering Beck’s question the most convincing way possible.

“That’s all right then,” Beck said, realizing it might be a little afterthought of an orgasm making her quiver around him like that, not just erotic sensitivity. “You’re all right.”

She kissed his throat and cuddled into him.

He lifted up a little—the woman needed to breathe—but Sara’s fingers tightened in his hair, and so he lingered. He kissed her eyes and her cheek and her mouth, suckled her earlobe, and nuzzled her eyebrows. He closed his eyes and listened to her breathing, then buried his face in the fragrant cloud of her hair.

He could stay there, in that bed, feasting his senses on her forever. His cock was softening, but still Sara’s body held him gently, and he knew the temptation to start up again, to ease from the bliss of fulfillment to the bliss of anticipation, again and again.

She would not thank him, though. Not tomorrow, maybe not even the day after.

“I’ll be right back,” Beck said, kissing her mouth one last time. Carefully, he uncoupled from her body then crossed the room to retrieve the wash water. He tended to himself, his cock still sensitive, then wrung out the cloth and sat on the bed at Sara’s hip.

“Covers back.”

Sara complied, barely, so Beck had to reach beneath the covers to hold the cool cloth gently against her sex. “Now, I wish we had a chandelier hanging over the bed.”

“You want to peek?”

“I want to memorize the glory of you,” Beck said. “And I want to make sure you’re not… sore.”

“Stop worrying.” Sara’s smile in the moonlight was radiant. “I am not sore, and I will not be sore, and so far, I like this dallying business rather a lot.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Beck turned the cloth over, giving her the cooler side. “I did not want to spend our remaining nights here playing cards.”

Or drinking. The thought slipped past his postcoital glow, puzzling him, for all it was the truth.

“You’re frowning. We can play cards if you insist.”

“It isn’t that.” Beck returned the cloth to the basin and climbed in beside her. “Budge up.”

“As we’re truly good friends now, I suppose?”

He arranged her straddling him, and bless the woman, she snuggled right down against his body.

“We’re friends, at least,” Beck said, wrapping his arms around her. He wasn’t a man who begrudged his partners affection, but neither in the usual course was he exactly interested in lingering in a woman’s bed. Still, he didn’t question the pleasure he took in Sara’s willingness to fall asleep in his arms. Didn’t deny he enjoyed stroking that glorious hair down her back long after dreams had claimed her.