Free Wild Honey by Suzanne Forster Page A

sadness, the nearly unbearable longing, but it stung at her lids, ached in her chest. It had nothing to do with the character or the movie—and everything to do with the man and his piercingly beautiful eyes. They ripped through her heart with their breathtaking anguish.
    “What is it?” she asked, her fingers at his temple, hovering at the place where the wound would have been. “How can I help you? Tell me what to do.” She was desperate to make his pain go away, wild to heal his torment, whatever it was. In her mind he was Marc, but he was Jesse too. She couldn’t separate the men or their pain. She was responding to anguish the only way she knew how.
    He answered her with a shuddering groan. “I need you,” he said again drawing her into the V of his legs. “I’ll die without you....” The contact with his body was painful to Sasha’s senses. The heat of his enclosing thighs arrested her breathing.
    She drew back, staring up at him, silenced by the quivering stricture of her throat. No, you won’t die, her eyes told him, I won’t let you die. I can be what you need, whatever that is. Please, let me be what you need.
    She reached up to touch his face, and he flinched under her fingers. Tears welled in her eyes. “Jesse, let me be with you,” she said, her voice breaking. “Let me make love to you.”
    His jaw clenched with pain, and a transfiguring wave moved through his features. For an instant, anguish became something else...cleansing fire, naked need. Eyes that had burned with death now ignited with life. Awed by the change in him, Sasha trembled with a new emotion, wonderment. A luminescence built inside her, piercing softly, opening her clear to her soul. It was an inner dawn breaking through the darkness and bringing with it the exquisite anticipation of beauty, of hope.
    “Angel of death, angel of redemption.” Goethe’s phrase shook in his throat.
    He touched her hand as she caressed his face, and she was seized with longing. She was frantic to be with him, to absorb his pain, to make it her own. It was a bone-deep hunger, a call from the marrow of her being. His hand contracted on her arm, and the heat of it brought a moan of surprise to her lips. Yes, she was frightened, but she understood the fever in him, the desperation. For this moment in time, this split second in the loop of infinity, she was his salvation, his redemption. She could give him back his life.
    He caught hold of the bodice of her shirtdress, his voice a serrated plea. “I need you, to touch you.” Balling the ragged material in his fist, he slowly dragged her closer to him, a staggering mix of emotion in his eyes. For an instant she saw tenderness there, heartbreaking tenderness. And then in its place, naked desire, waves of it...His hands burned her skin, seared her soul. They were hot and hard and rapturously frantic as they worked open the buttons at her neckline. If she hadn’t felt the shuddering roughness in his fingers, she would have believed she was dreaming, dying.
    Glancing down, she drew in a sharp breath as his fingers slipped through the front placket of her dress and grazed her skin. Her breasts shuddered and tightened instantly, shimmering in anticipation of his touch. Mesmerized, she watched the buttons begin to fall free. The first button, the second. A part of her didn’t believe, couldn’t believe any of it was happening. She was an enthralled child on a roller coaster, and it was too late to stop the plunging momentum.
    The third button eluded him. He breathed out a savage word, and with one magnificent wrench he ripped free a triangle of material, jerking Sasha’s body forward with a force that made her cry out. He caught her with one arm and held her suspended, inches from his mouth.
    An inner cry of excitement swept her, rioting through her senses. “Dear Lord,” she said as her nerves registered his fist tangled in the material at her bodice, his fingers pressed into her trembling flesh. He