Free Made For Each Other by Parris Afton Bonds Page B

Raf fer, throwing themselves on him.
    “My turn,” he said.
    “No, I—I’ve already put—”
    “But not on your back,” he pointed out
and took the tube from her tight grasp. He pushed her face down on
the towel and deftly un-snapped the bikini top. Without regard for
her gasp of protest, he began to rub the cream into her soft skin.
Held immobile by the brace on her shoulders and by his thighs
locked about her hips, she could only lie passively while those
sure fingers stroked her in a manner that was anything but
impersonal, trailing along the fine line of her back to encircle
her waist and slide back up to massage the graceful curve of her
shoulders.
    She held her breath, afraid, yet
excited. Her heart seemed to beat so loudly that the rumble of the
surf against the beach was a distant whisper in comparison. She
wanted to feel more than Nick’s hands on her; she wanted to feel
the entire length of his sun- warmed body pressed against
hers.
    But when his hands slipped around her
small rib cage to encompass her freed breasts, she quivered as if
an electric wire had touched her. And yet she could do no more than
lie passively as his knowing fingers found her nipples and teased
them into life. “Nick. . . ” His name on her lips was a half moan,
half plea.
    “Admit you want me,” he whispered at
her ear.
    She wanted his gentle massaging to go
on forever. “Yes!” she rasped. “I want you”—the words slipped out
unintentionally—“but I’ll hate myself and you ... for making me
like your other women.”
     
     
     

Chapter Six
     
    T he weight of Nick’s body on her buttocks was suddenly
withdrawn. Julie turned her head to see him standing above her,
fists planted on hips. His lips were stretched in a flat, grim
line. “I’m going for a swim; then we’d better get ready to
leave.”
    She watched him as he strode across
the white sand toward the gentle roll of turquoise waves. She
desperately wished he were not so virile, that he did not have such
a magnetic personality or such an intelligent mind . . . anything
to make her want him less.
    And she knew she could never really
have him. As it was, he detested her for her outspoken columns. Now
that she was his wife, he could only compare her unfavorably with
Santa Fe’s young socialites who competed for his attentions. He
could have married any one of them, and now he was trapped in a
loveless marriage with her. But though he could and did have any
number of women at his command, she swore that she would not join
the throng of women who had surrendered to him.
    Yet it would not be easy to live in
such intimate contact with him. Her skin still burned with the heat
of his touch . . . as inside she burned with unfulfillment. She
watched his easy, sure strokes cut through the incoming waves,
thinking that if it were not for the broken collarbone she would be
out there swimming also, if for no other reason than to cool off
her desire for him.
    Nick’s distant but unfailing courtesy
on the flight back to El Paso accomplished the cooling most
effectively. And by the time they had made the silent journey by
car in the early-morning hours from El Paso to Santa Fe she felt
positively frozen inside.
    When the Blazer left the highway that
paralleled the Rio Grande and traveled down a dirt road to halt in
what seemed the middle of the high desert, she was ready to storm
from the car. Only the thought of a scandalous paragraph in Dee
Morley’s column kept her anchored to her seat.
    “Why are we stopping here?” she
demanded, keeping her eyes trained on the distant peaks of the
Sangre de Cristo Mountains that were painted pink by dawn’s first
light.
    Nick switched off the engine. “This is
where I live.”
    She looked around. She saw only a
juniper-dotted mound. “Where?”
    Nick pointed before him.
“There—beneath that mound. I built an underground home last year—to
escape the demands of city life.”
    Now she could make out on the southern
side windows