BRIAN HAD BEEN anticipating Tag’s request. He’d known, when she’d nearly refused to part with the headlamp, that she dreaded the impending darkness. He was perfectly willing to provide the support she needed to allay her fear. He just wasn’t sure he could stick with offering comfort, when what he really wanted to do was make love to her.
He fought the desire to kiss her and caress her and bring them both indescribable pleasure, because making love—taking the chance of getting emotionally involved—would create its own set of problems. If there was any chance they were going to die, and the odds of living weren’t currently in their favor, the last thing he wanted to do was fall back in love with Tag. It would be easy enough to do. But that would be asking for a bitch of a heartache when he had to watch her die, or died himself, knowing he was leaving her all alone.
Tag’s erratic breathing was loud in the silence, and Brian wasn’t nearly as detached as he wished he could be.
“Come here,” he said at last.
She threw herself at him, their chins bumping, her arms clinging to his neck, her body aligned with his from chest to hips as his arms slid around her to hold her tight.
“Thank you,” she whispered against his throat. “I’m sorry to be such a baby about this.”
He tried to lighten the situation by saying, “The pleasure is all mine,” which must have been clear to her, from the heat and hardness of his arousal pressing against her belly.
She reached between them and traced the ridge beneath his thin cotton boxers with her fingertips.
He caught her hand and said in a harsh voice, “Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“This won’t help anything, Tag.”
“It can’t hurt anything, either. I want you, Brian. Don’t you want me?”
Their previous bout of sex had done no more than blow the foam off the beer, so to speak, and his body was clamoring for what Tag was offering. Even so, he might have refused her, except he’d heard, in her wistful voice, the girl who hadn’t believed him in high school when he’d told her he loved her. The girl who’d scoffed and said, “No one’s ever loved me. What you love is what I do with you…and to you.”
He’d known she meant all the times she’d put her mouth on him and brought him to climax. To his shame, he hadn’t contradicted her. He’d been too shocked and embarrassed by what she’d said. And too young to realize the pain concealed by her mocking words.
In the darkness, he took her head between his hands and brought his mouth to hers, feeling the softness, the willingness in her supple lips. He kissed each closed eye, then each cheek, and finally, each side of her mouth, before easing her head to his shoulder.
His body was urging him to throw caution to the winds. His head was telling him that making love to Taylor Ann Grayhawk—when it wasn’t the direct result of surviving several harrowing, life-threatening events—was a really bad idea. He couldn’t believe what he was about to say.
“I want to make love to you, but I don’t think we should.”
“Why not?”
He tucked a strand of hair that was tickling his nose behind her ear. It gave him a few moments to think of the best way to explain how he felt. “Considering our situation, it would be easy to do what we want and say to hell with the consequences. But there’s still a chance we’re going to get out of here eventually, and then what?” He blew one of her stray curls away from his cheek. “We haven’t been a couple for a long time. How the hell many years has it been, anyway, since we were together?”
“I was fifteen. I’m twenty-eight. You do the math.”
“Good lord. That’s a lot of years. I guess that makes what I’m about to say even more amazing. The time we spent together is stuck in my mind as tight as that row of Flynn cowboy boots you Brats glued to the mudroom floor.”
“Really? I feel the same way.”
He heard the amazement in her voice and realized she must have felt more for him than she’d admitted at the time. “The point is I have enough good memories from the months we spent together to be glad you’re the one who ended up in here with me. Like it or not, I suspect we’re going to get to know each other a lot better before we get out of here. If we ever do.”
She made a hitching sound that might have been a repressed sob. He hadn’t meant to scare her with that last statement, but it was better if they both faced the facts.
He continued, “Whatever happens—or doesn’t happen—between us, I want you to know up front that I’m never making a commitment to another woman.”
“What does that have to do with our making love now?” She gripped his waist more tightly and said, “Maybe you’d better tell me why you’re planning to spend the rest of your life as a lone wolf.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It is my business, if it’s keeping you from making love to me now.”
Brian was sorry he’d said anything. He should have kept his mouth shut, ordered his body to behave itself, and held Tag until she fell asleep. No one knew the truth about why his marriage had broken up, not even his brothers. He was too ashamed to tell them.
Tricia had been another stray he’d rescued, lost on campus and looking helpless. He’d offered to show her the way to the student union, and the rest was history. Looking back, he realized he might not have been as much in love with her as she’d seemed to be with him. In light of recent events, it appeared she’d needed a savior more than a spouse. Obviously, it had taken her a long time to grow up. When she finally did, several years into their marriage, she hadn’t needed him anymore.
“Well?” Tag prodded. “I’m waiting. What happened to make you swear off relationships with women?”
Brian could feel Tag’s breasts snug against his chest and her soft belly pressed invitingly close, and he wanted desperately to make love to her. The problem was he knew he shouldn’t. So he told her what he’d never told anyone else—to remind him why he’d sworn off women.
“Tricia left me because she fell in love and cheated on me…with another woman.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, Brian. That must have been terrible for you, to lose her to someone else.”
“Not just someone else. Another woman.”
“Is that worse than her leaving you for another man?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Why?”
“Because it means my whole marriage was a sham. Tricia couldn’t have loved me, if she was sexually attracted to women from the start.”
“Maybe she loved you for all the qualities that make you a good person. Maybe she didn’t know how she felt about women when she married you.”
Brian barked a laugh. “Don’t you see? If Tricia could fool me so completely, how can I ever trust myself not to make the same mistake again?”
“So you’re giving up on relationships?”
He heard the incredulity in her voice. What he’d given up on was any physical involvement with a woman that might lead to a deeper relationship. In a word, sex. At least, for the past year, while he’d been licking his wounds.
“But you know I prefer men,” Tag protested.
“Do I?”
She laughed low in her throat, a sound that made his shaft pulse with need.
“Trust me,” she said in a husky voice. “You do. And since getting out of here is something that seems unlikely at the moment, I vote we make love to each other as often as the mood strikes. Like now.”
She sucked lightly on his throat, raising gooseflesh all over his body.
There was no reason not to surrender. It seemed they both wanted the same thing. To live in the present. To take pleasure where it was offered and give it in return.
Brian unerringly found Tag’s mouth in the darkness. She opened to him and their tongues dueled, even as their bodies wrestled for dominance. He grunted when he jarred his wounded leg as he tore at her panties.
She laughed and said, “Don’t rip them! They’re all I have.” The playful sound echoed back to him from the length of the cave. Then she arched her hips off the ground, so he could easily slide the fragile silk down her long legs.
He moved his hand upward along the length of her leg to cup the heart of her, loving the feel of her smooth, warm flesh. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for this. He relished the feast all the more because Tag was sharing it with him.
She shoved his boxers down so she could hold him in her hand, causing him to groan as she smoothed her thumb over the tiny drop of liquid at the tip.
He kicked the cloth out of his way, as she urged him with whispered words to put himself inside her, forgoing tenderness in favor of passion.
But he was a boy no longer, and he owed her more pleasure than she was likely to get if he took what he wanted without giving her at least as much joy.
So he held her hips down when she would have bucked beneath him, inflaming him further, and reached under the chambray shirt to cup her naked breast and tease the nipple.
“Oh.”
She said it with a release of breath that showed how surprised she was that they weren’t headed from kissing to climax in two quick steps.
“Easy now,” he whispered in her ear. “We have all the time in the world to get where we’re going. And nothing and no one to interfere or stop us from getting there.”