by Diana Palmer
He gasped, too, at the shock as she eased the way for him and he felt the complete union of their bodies all the way up his spine.
"Allthe way," he bit off, his hips moving now with short, sharp stabs that were slow and smooth even as they aroused. His fists clenched by her head on the pillow and his face began to contort. "Oh, God, baby, allthewaynow!"
She couldn't answer him. The terrible, sweet rhythm had her in its coils, too, and she answered him with her body, measuring it to his as the rhythm deepened to unimaginable oneness. She felt him as she never had, felt the agonizing completeness as they reached with painful slowness to grasp a thread of pure electricity and then gave themselves to the staggering jolt of fulfillment.
In the back of her mind, she heard his hoarse groan at her ear, felt him convulse helplessly over her. She went with him, into the maelstrom, into the heat, laughing brokenly as she fell into a hot, black oblivion where ecstasy was the only occupant.
She couldn't breathe. A heartbeat was shaking her body, and she was drenched in sweat. She opened her eyes, feeling thick hair against her tender breasts, powerful legs brushing abrasively against her own as he moved with a slow, predatory laugh.
She managed a weary smile for him, her hands possessive as they touched his hard face, his damp, unruly hair.
"I love you," he whispered, and it was in his eyes, in his face.
He'd told her that he'd never said the words before. Tears stung her eyes. "I'd have known already," she whispered back. "But it sounds like sweet heaven."
"Yes. Say it to me."
"I love you," she obliged lazily. She reached up and nibbled his mouth with her teeth, smiling at his instant response. "Do it again."
"Optimist," he chided.
But she knew better. She smiled wickedly and moved her hips, very gently. His response was instant and intense, and she laughed. "One man out of twenty," she reminded him, gasping as he reacted slowly to the teasing words and movements.
"Is capable of multiple orgasms," he finished for her, his eyes sparkling as he bent again to her mouth. "I can. Can you?"
"Oh, yes," she sighed with pure delight. She smiled under the warm crush of his mouth. "All night."
"When you've had enough, whisper uncle," he said into her open mouth, and she laughed.
It was almost dawn when she whispered it, and by that time he was exhausted, too. They slept in a tangle of bare arms and legs and didn't wake until well after dark.
She could barely move when her eyes finally opened, and her first thought was of his back. How could she have forgotten?
She sat up jerkily, her eyes horrified.
He opened his lazily and then wide, arching a thick dark eyebrow at the look on her face. "Did you think you'd killed me?" he asked politely.
"Your back!"
"My back is fine. How is our baby?" he whispered, sliding his hand over her warm belly. "We didn't hurt him, did we?"
"He, or she, is just fine, thank you," she said with a loving smile. She slid onto his body with a tired sigh, drinking in the ecstasy of being loved, being close to him. "I love you."
"That goes double for me." He kissed her hair and folded her closer. "Try to get away now."
"I wouldn't dare, you might let me go."
"Never again. Not unless I go with you." He eased her over onto her back and looked down at her tenderly.
She traced the thick hair on his chest. "But what we did last night was like dying."
"Every time we love will be like that, from now on," he said quietly, searching her eyes. "Because for the first time, we aren't keeping secrets, flying false colors. We love with everything in us, no holding back."
"Yes." She smoothed her hands over his chest. "I'm glad I came back to Billings, Cy," she said. "Even if it was originally for all the wrong reasons."
"So am I. Although, if I'd known where to find you, I'd have been looking long before this. I've looked for years, Meredith. I don't think I've ever stopped. And here you turned up, all by yourself."
She nodded. "Out of revenge."
"You had that." He touched her belly. "But it backfired, didn't it?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," she murmured dryly.
"No? Then what would you say?"
"That he or she is the product of an extremely satisfying merger between two industrial giants."
He burst out laughing. "Well, he or she is marketable and shows a steady profit," Cy said outrageously, gathering her smiling face in his hands to kiss it soundly.
A little over seven months later, Russell Lawrence Harden was born, despite a completely pink layette that his mother had painstakingly assembled.
"I told you to have the amniocentesis," Cy murmured smugly when he was holding his son in his arms. "My father came from a line of boys, didn't Mother tell you? Not a girl in the bunch. And it's the father," he added with unforgivable superiority, "who determines sex."
"Wait until I get home and well, and I'll show you who determines sex," Meredith said with a challenging twinkle in her weary gray eyes.
He stood over her lovingly, his son cradled against the hospital gown they'd made him put on to hold the infant. "That would be a first," he mused. "I almost had to get a fly swatter to keep you out of my bed this last month."
She made a face. "Can I help it if you're so sexy, you make my knees go weak just by walking into a room? I get turned on just listening to you talk on the telephone."
His eyes twinkled. "Useful knowledge, that. I'll have two new phones put in."
"You do that," she said with a demure smile.
Myrna Harden came in, gowned like Cy, her wrinkled face beaming as she was allowed to hold her second grandchild.
"How's Blake?" Meredith asked her, because Blake and Mr. Smith were still at the house.
"Missing you, and very anxious to meet his new brother," Myrna replied, crooning to the tiny infant. "Isn't he beautiful?"
"Handsome," Cy said with a glare.
"He's a baby, he can be beautiful if he wants to be," Meredith fussed.
He threw up his hands. "Oh, for heaven's sake !"
Meredith laughed. "Grumpy"
"I'm entitled to be grumpy. You were in the recovery room for hours, and this is the first day you've had any color at all in your face. I've been worried."
"I'm going to be fine," she reassured him. "And you were with me every minute, until they took me into the delivery room," she said, smiling at him. She grimaced a little, because she'd had to have another C-section. They'd anticipated it, though, and she'd checked into the hospital on the date Dr. Jacobson, the obstetrician, had named. "You must be tired."
"You're the one entitled to be that," he said, clasping her hand as he bent to kiss her forehead. "You can come home in four days."
"That will be lovely."
"And Blake can read you bedtime stories," Myrna offered.
Meredith laughed. Her eyes held her husband's for one long, lovely instant, and then she dragged them away to watch first her son's tiny face and then the radiant elderly one bending over it. Three of the dearest people in her world, she thought, two of them finally displayed in their true colors, long having discarded the masks that hid their pain and guilt and doubt.
"Colors," she said absently.
"What?" Cy asked.
She just shook her head, smiling. "Nothing. Just thinking out loud."
She closed her eyes as the fatigue began to catch up with her, compounded by drowsiness from the pain medication. But when sleep finally arrived, like the sun after the storm, she dreamed of rainbows.
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