Free Desperado by Diana Palmer Page B

touch. “You like me to touch you,” he murmured quietly. “I don’t know how I went so many years without noticing. Or maybe I just didn’t want to notice.”
    She pulled against his hands, to no avail. “I’m leaving the country very soon,” she pointed out, hating the breathless sound of her voice. “You won’t ever have to notice anything again.”
    “I’ll be completely alone,” he said solemnly. “So will you.”
    Her face tautened. “I’ve always been alone,” she said in a husky tone. “Let me go.”
    He caught the hands that pressed into his chest and guided them up around his neck. She shivered and tried to pull away. His arms encircled her and captured her there, against him.
    “No you don’t,” he said softly. “It’s time we both came to terms with this.”
    She was panicking. It was in her eyes. “I don’t want to come to terms with anything! I just want to go!”
    He scowled, all too aware that he was aroused and she knew it, and that her hips were straining violently away from his.
    “You’re afraid of me,” he whispered, shattered.
    She bit her lower lip hard. “I’m afraid of any man, this close, especially you!” she blurted out, visible tears stinging her eyes. “Oh, please, let me go!”
    He allowed her to move back to what she considered a decent proximity, but he wouldn’t let go completely. “It couldn’t have been that one night with me that made you this way,” he said, thinking aloud. “Because you’ve always worn clothes that showed nothing of your body. You dress like an old woman to go to bed. You don’t even flirt—except one time when we went out to dinner together and ran into Eb Scott. And you only did that to irritate me.”
    “I never understood why you asked me out at all. You’d only just gotten back into the country.”
    He reached out and slid his hand against her cheek, caressing it. “It was an impulse,” he said softly. “I wanted to see if marriage had changed you. It had, but not in the way I expected. You were even more tense and nervous than before. Now I understand why.”
    She met his gaze. “No, you don’t,” she said abruptly.
    He bent unexpectedly and put his mouth against her eyelids,closing them. She shivered, once, and then she relaxed, letting him draw her close. He kissed her eyebrows, running his tongue softly along them, and then he kissed her cheeks, working his way up her nose and over to her eyes again. It was the most tender caress she’d felt in her whole life. It shocked her into submission, when submission had been the very last thing on her mind.
    His hands slid up her back and into the thick wealth of her long hair. “I love long hair,” he breathed against her temple. “You know it.”
    Her hands curled into the thick hair behind his head, short and cool in her fingers. Her body was on fire with unsatisfied hungers that she hadn’t felt in years, not since the night Amy had died and, at first, she’d vibrated with delicious unknown sensations when he started touching her.
    The memory made her uncertain and she stiffened again.
    He lifted his head to look down into her frightened eyes. “I was drunk,” he said very gently, because he knew what she was remembering. “No man should ever touch a woman in that condition. I wasn’t brutal to you, but I hurt you, just the same, because I was out of control.”
    Her eyes were wide and uncertain and strangely curious.
    “You don’t understand,” he murmured, reading it in her face. “A man has to control his desire long enough to arouse the woman he’s with, Maggie,” he said gently. “It takes longer for a woman to feel the things a man does, especially when it’s her first time.”
    She flushed a little, but she didn’t look away.
    “Your body didn’t reject me, but you were tense and embarrassed and I went too fast,” he said with a frown. “I remember thinking how odd it was that your body didn’t feel virginal even if your reactions were