He slipped his arms under her buttocks and lifted her-or did he only suggest, and she come without hesitation? He didn’t know for certain-the water made it such an effortless thing. Her legs parted and slid around his hips and he nested himself in her warm and giving softness…just nestled there, hot and aching with his need. And groaned with the sweet agony of it, knowing it was a need that must not be filled. Not yet…

He walked with her to the shallow water, still plundering her mouth with a hunger that only seemed to grow more insatiable with every kiss. The air cooled on their bodies, raising shivers and goose bumps and hardening her nipples so that they abraded his chest like pebbles. He wanted them in his mouth with an intensity he could taste, sharp and edgy as brass on his tongue. But not yet. Not yet…

She made a small growling sound of protest when he lowered her to the steps, uncoiled her legs and arms from around him and tore his mouth from hers, until he muttered, “Sorry..but before this goes any further, there’s something I have to do.”

She opened her mouth to say something, to protest, and he could see the struggle play out across her expressive face-frustration warring against gratitude. Then she nodded her acceptance. He kissed her once more, lingeringly, promising… asking patience. Then he snatched up the towel he’d left on the deck, knotted it carelessly around his hips and left her there.

He wasn’t gone long; it only seemed like forever to her. She’d been afraid that the fever that had driven her to do this insane, this aberrant thing might cool before he came back, but she’d underestimated the intensity of her hunger for him. Her whole body vibrated with it She waited for him, sitting on the steps, half submerged in the tepid water, rocked by the rhythm of her own life forces and counting the seconds of his absence in the slow drumbeat of the pulses that throbbed in her swollen, secret places.

When he came it was almost without a sound, but she’d have needed none to know he was there; every nerve in her body sprang joyfully to life, humming with excitement. Languid with arousal, her breath heavy in her throat, she tilted her head and watched him as he dropped the towel on the flagstones and stepped into the pool. She couldn’t see his face; his body was a dark sculpture silhouetted against the house lights. Like a phantom, she thought. My phantom lover. And somehow that made it easier, to think of him as something not quite real. Not a real man but a fantasy…a dream that would vanish in the light of reality. Or like Cinderella’s Prince, at the stroke of midnight.

She felt him ease in behind her on the step, felt his legs slide around her so that the silky unsheathed hardness of him nestled in the cleft of her buttocks. She sighed and would have arched back against him, but unexpectedly, almost roughly, he pushed her forward, gathered her hair in his hand and thrust it aside, baring her vulnerable neck. He lowered his mouth to her nape, savagely demanding, raking her tender skin with his teeth, marking her there with his sucking, staking his claim on her in that most primitive and elemental way so that she gasped at the surprise, the raw sexuality of it. Then she began to whimper as desire exploded inside her with such force it frightened her.

She was on the edge of panic when, with a gentling sigh, he abruptly leaned back and drew her with him so that she lay on her back on top of him, completely open and exposed to his sensitive hands…his long, questing fingers. Exposed and vulnerable…bewildered at the flood of feeling that had all but swamped her. Trembling. The warm, humid night air cooled the water on her naked body, raising goose bumps and hardening her nipples until they hurt.

“This is for you. Just for you.” The words were a whisper of warm breath against her ear. She felt his hands warming her breasts, and then the pressure of his fingers on her tight, aching nipples. A shaft of pure need, bright and sharp as pain, arrowed through her belly and deep into her core, and she arched her back and uttered a high, thin, panting cry as she turned her head, frantically seeking him. His head came down, blocking light and thought. As his mouth angled across hers, swallowing up her cry with a masculine growl of satisfaction and encouragement, his hands swept down over her ribs and belly, and the friction of his fingers rubbing on her chilled skin made her burn, but inside. His hands cradled her hips, slipped down and under the backs of her thighs, lifted and drew them apart. She’d never felt so utterly vulnerable, so exposed…so naked and helpless.

Do you trust me?

Where had they come from, those words? Were they a reminder or a plea?

Trust me. A great shudder passed through her body. With emotion swelling inside her like a tsunami, she lifted her arms high above her head, thus opening herself to him even more, making of herself an offering, totally without restriction or restraint. She reached blindly for him, found his shoulders and then his neck, clung to him and whimpered as his fingers stroked her, soothed her, parted her, pushed into her yielding softness…and then withdrew… slid inside her again, gently at first, then deeper, deeper…until she felt as if he touched the very center of her being. It was then that she felt herself coming apart, as though her physical self was separating into its individual atoms and then merging with all the bright electrical impulses that made up her emotional self…her soul, her being… so that it was no longer possible to distinguish one from the other. Her physical self and her emotional self were one, and somehow she knew that neither would ever be the same again. She held on to him, to Riley, the man who had brought her to this, dazed and sobbing partly with rage, partly with rapture, and with hopelessness, too. And fear. And she thought, What have you done to me? I trusted you. And you’ve shown me heaven, knowing I can never have it Knowing this is just a fantasy that must end at the stroke of midnight…

It was later, much later, when Riley carried her to the nearest chaise and laid her gently, tenderly down. He ached so exquisitely, the pressure inside him was so intense he feared he would explode before he’d even had a chance to savor the feel of her feminine softness around him. He was surprised then, and humbled, too, when he felt her body enfold him, almost immediately swell and heat and quicken to his urgent rhythms, and finally, one last time and even as his own body tightened and trembled, then seemed to break apart in total devastation, he heard her small, wild cry and felt her body pulsing with his, drawing him out, nurturing his release… healing, even then.

They lay together in the aftermath, bathed in the warm, soft night, lulled by the soothing music of the water, stroking each other with lazy, sated fingers. Riley couldn’t remember ever having felt so relaxed in his life before. Or so…he realized with a shock that the word he was looking for was happy. He felt dazed with happiness, dizzy with it…awed by it, as if he’d spent his entire life up to this point under clouds and was seeing the sun for the first time. When Summer sighed and sat up, stretching and combing her hair back with her fingers, he felt bereft, even though he knew and understood that they couldn’t have stayed where they were.

“Come upstairs with me,” he whispered, drawing his fingers lightly down her spine. But when she looked at him with longing and shook her head, he understood that, too.

So he sighed and drew her down for one more lingering kiss. And when she’d pulled away from him and turned to pick up her dress from where she’d left it in a puddle like melted butter on the deck, and her fingers were deft and hurried on the buttons, he gently and wryly teased her, saying, “What’s your hurry? Do we turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight?”

He didn’t understand what made her burst into ironic and pain-filled laughter.

Chapter 14

The next three days were a time of waiting. Hurricane Angela, now a category-three storm, wobbled her way through the Atlantic, gathering strength. She would only grow more powerful the longer she vacillated, drawing energy from the warm ocean waters. Storm flags were up all along the coast from Savannah to the Outer Banks, with the National Guard positioned to help with the evacuations, if necessary. The weather stayed overcast, hot and oppressive.

While the Southeast waited to see what Hurricane Angela would do, Riley and Summer waited for a phone call. The trap had been set; now all they could do was wait and see if the quarry they sought would take the bait.

To Riley, the atmosphere in his house seemed to have turned as gray and heavy as the weather, sultry with unvoiced passion and weighed down by the awareness that regardless of the outcome of the FBI’s “sting,” there could be no happy ever-after outcome for what had begun between himself and Summer. Once the threat to her and her children had been eliminated, by whatever means, she would leave his life forever; she was adamant about that. And he was left on the horns of a terrible dilemma, knowing that the circumstances that would give her back her life would, in effect, take away his.

Because he was in love with her. Of that he was no longer in any doubt. The thought of his life beyond her leaving loomed like the vast emptiness he’d known all his life, and felt sometimes now even as he held her in his arms.

Sometimes when he looked at her, when he looked at the children…when Helen squinched up her face in that imp-look she got just before she bopped him on the nose with one of her pile-driver kisses, or when David looked up from the computer at him with that sudden brightening of joy that erased the pleat of worry between his eyes…then he’d teeter on the brink, thinking, Maybe… maybe I could. But each time, the fear drove him back from the edge.