Free With This Ring by Patricia Kay Page B

around him, crying out his name, he could no longer hold on. He exploded into her, and as the powerful sensations pummeled him, he knew they had started something that might be completely impossible to stop.
     
    * * *
    "It'll be better next time, I promise."
    Amy smiled lazily. "So you've decided I'm your type after all?" she teased. In all of her twenty-seven years, she had never felt this way. Making love with Sam was incredible. It was everything she had ever imagined it could be.
He
was everything she'd ever imagined he could be. He was everything she'd ever wanted.
    She sighed with happiness and deep contentment.
    He cupped her left breast, rubbing the nipple until it perked into a hard little nub. "Don't be a smart ass."
    "Why don't you show me right now?" she murmured.
    "Show you what?"
    "You know. How much better it can be." She couldn't believe this was her, Amy Carpenter, talking this way. She'd never talked this way to a man before. Of course, she'd never felt this way about a man before. Totally shameless. She tightened her arms around him, feeling the hard contours of his back, the muscles moving beneath the surface of the skin.
    "Oh, I'll show you all right." His mouth moved slowly down her body as his fingers delved, finding the exact spot that ached to be touched.
    They didn't talk again for a long time.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    For the next two weeks, Amy walked around in a dizzying haze of new love and sexual discovery and physical wellbeing. Years from now, she would look back on these magical days and nights and remember them as a perfect time.
    Everything she did and saw and smelled and tasted and touched was clearer and brighter and richer and more intense. Her body was on sensory overload, and she reveled in it.
    She and Sam spent every moment they could together. After that first night in Sam's apartment, where they'd awakened the following morning to no food in the refrigerator and barely enough coffee to brew a pot, they'd spent most of their time at Amy's place. Gradually, Sam's belongings appeared. His bathrobe joined her bathrobe on the hook at the back of the bathroom door. His toothbrush and shaving supplies joined her toothbrush and cosmetics on the bathroom vanity. His clothes and his camera equipment joined her clothes and her art supplies in the closets and cupboards.
    They couldn't seem to get enough of each other. He would no sooner walk in the door than they were tearing off their clothes and heading for her bed. Sometimes they didn't even make it to the bed. Sam joked about it, saying, "we've got to stop doing this on the floor, it's killing my back."
    Amy was deeply in love. So in love that it almost hurt to look at Sam. Even hearing his whistle as he came up the outside stairs could make her knees go weak and her chest tighten.
    Sam hadn't said he loved her, but Amy knew what he felt down deep, even if he didn't yet. She also knew he would eventually realize what his feelings for her were . . . and then he would say the words.
    She could wait. In the meantime, she would just enjoy being with him, laughing and talking and making love.
    They had so much fun together.
    They went to movies and ate hot dogs dripping with mustard and huge bags of buttered popcorn, then came back to her apartment and shed their clothes and slipped into her bed where they whispered and laughed and made unhurried love.
    They swam naked in the moonlight in the backyard pool and made love standing up in the warm water. Amy liked it so much, she wanted to do it again and again.
    They went to Astroworld one day and rode every single roller coaster and stuffed themselves on junk food and stayed late to watch the fireworks.
    One night they got all dressed up—it was the first time Amy saw Sam in a suit, and she couldn't believe how handsome he looked—and went to Brennan's. They sat at a window table and drank wine and ate turtle soup and warm spinach salad and baked red snapper stuffed with crabmeat and tiny shrimp