Free Private Relations by Nancy Warren

slow, restrained patience into licking her as he’d put into kissing her.
    With the first rush of passion spent, she could enjoy a slower build, feel the pressure and moisture of his tongue, the way he explored even as he excited her. She built slowly, and then faster, until her hips were gyrating and her hands fisting against his shoulders.
    So close.
    He moved up her body and she would have begged him to take her if she didn’t feel him already there, not so lazy now, not so slow. But he still took the time to look deep into her eyes when he entered her slowly and completely.
    Lust, passion, memory—it all came together in a kind of bittersweet pleasure as he moved inside her. His palms cupped her face and he kissed her over and over again, even as their breaths grew ragged.
    She tasted herself and a hint of cherry on his lips. And then she tasted him: hot, intense, fully aroused male. He tried to gaze into her eyes as she came but she wouldn’t give him that intimacy, so she shut her eyes, wrapped her legs around him and gripped the firm muscles of his butt, kneading, pulling him deeper, grinding up to meet him.
    As though a leash had snapped, he let himself go, bucking wildly against her until she shattered. It was the cue he’d waited for. Before her own cries had quieted, she heard him cry out his own release.
    How could he be both so mysterious and so familiar, she wondered, as he rolled to his back, bringing her with him so she ended up snuggled against him, her head pillowed on his chest.
    The sex was hauntingly familiar and yet so very different. The pull was still there, she admitted, as strong as ever, but now she knew that just because two people had amazing physical chemistry, it didn’t mean they were soul mates.
    How naive she’d been.
    Good thing she was older and smarter. Now she could enjoy Peter’s body and all the ways he knew how to please her without being in any danger of making a fool of herself a second time.
    It seemed she was going to enjoy a fantasy weekend, too. When she’d planned to marry Peter, there had been a permanence in everything they did. She’d snuggle up to his warm body and think about kids and where they’d live, how she’d decorate their bedroom. Planning, she was always planning.
    These days, her fantasy included making a stellar success of her career, enjoying life to the fullest and avoiding any entanglements that would impede the first two.
    Now, she could focus on nothing but her body’s pleasure with a man who physically excited her and with no concerns at all that he’d try to entangle her. It seemed she was enjoying a fantasy weekend, too.
     
    P EOPLE HAD various notions about time travel—whether it was possible, and if so, how it was accomplished. Peter now knew that time travel was possible, and that for him, the portal to the past was making love with Kit.
    He’d gone back in time. If he opened his eyes he’dsee Kit’s school class schedule hanging on the wall. It had been one of those plastic permanent calendars and each class had been brightly labeled in a different colored marker, with her homework neatly penned beneath. He smiled at the recollection. She’d put math in black ink because it was her most loathed subject. Communications—her favorite—was in purple.
    And yet, even as he fell back in time, he was also acutely in the present. She was wearing some light, sexy scent that was new, and he felt that he was different, more mature, old enough to appreciate what he’d so carelessly let go.
    Was he any closer to getting her back now that they were so physically intimate? For all that their bodies had joined as spectacularly as ever, he felt, from the moment he’d seen that flash of vulnerability in her eyes, that she’d quickly hidden from him, that part of her was shut off. Maybe he wouldn’t have noticed if he couldn’t compare this Kit with the Kit of three years ago who’d been so open she never held anything back—not what she was