Free Tread Softly by Ann Cristy Page B

of triumph that he was as aroused as she by their love play. Maybe
she wouldn't be able to keep him forever, she thought, but while she had him
she was going to love him.
    Rafe
pushed open the shower door and grabbed for a bath towel, still holding her.
She pouted when he had to release her to wrap the towel around his waist.
    He laughed down
at her. "You look younger now than you did at eighteen." He touched
her lips with one finger. "And don't pout like that or I'll take you here
on the bathroom floor."
    Cady felt the
heat start in her toes and course upward until her entire being was on fire.
"Are we going to talk all morning?"
    "No."
Rafe guffawed, sweeping her up into his arms. "We're going back to
bed."
    As they sank
together on the bed, the interhouse phone rang.
    "Damn
them to hell," Rafe muttered, lifting the receiver and barking into it.
"What? When? Well, you tell Bruno I said to head them off and he'd damn
well better do it. Yes. Yes, damn it, I'm coming." Rafe slammed down the
phone. "That was Sam Davis down at the office. It seems my father's friend
Greeley has mounted an assault against the senators backing the environmental
bill. According to Sam, he has some pretty big guns," Rafe mused, his hand
still drawing imaginary whorls on her abdomen. "I have to get to the
Hill."
    "Of
course," Cady agreed, edging away from him. "Would you like me to go
with you?" she queried, trying to smother her frustrated longing. She was
sure Rafe wouldn't want her along on one of the first big tests of his strength
since taking back the reins of the senatorship.
    "Yes,
I'll want you with me, but more important, I want you back here, lady, not over
there." Rafe reached for her, chuckling at her open mouth. "They can
wait a few more minutes. Bruno can handle it." Rafe's mouth sank onto hers
as though he had been drawn there by a homing device.
    Cady
could hear a purring sound as Rafe's head moved down her body. "Are you
turning into a cat?" Rafe's laugh was uneven.
    "Yes."
Cady turned her body to his, reveling in arousing Rafe as he had aroused her.
    "I
think when I retire from public life, I'll take you away to a desert
island," Rafe offered, seeming to be entranced with her navel.
    "You'll
get no argument from me," Cady choked, not really believing what she heard
him say, but treasuring the words as though they were precious jewels.
    Then there were
no more words, just sensation after sensation, like waves crashing on a shore.
Cady heard him cry her name in a hoarse climax. The ebb tide of their love
seemed almost as satisfying as the act itself, and Cady was loath to release
him, not wanting to come back to the real world where Rafe would belong to
other people, where as he became better he would be inundated in the river of
persons that seemed to surround his every movement.
    He rolled to his feet, pulling her with him, a lazy,
sensuous look in his eyes as they roved over her body. "You were so tiny
when I married you, but you're even smaller now." His fingers circled her
waist as he led her to thebathroom. "You don't diet, do you Cady?"
    "No."
She wanted to tell him how pleased she was by his attention to her, but she
turned toward the shower instead, mumbling that she would be right out. The quick,
cold spray invigorated her without dispelling the glow that Rafe's lovemaking
had given her.
    His freshly shaved face turned from the mirror as she
wrapped herself in a bath towel. "Of all your clothing, that suits you
best." The sensual droop to his lower lip sent Cady's pulse racing.
    She
left the bathroom almost at a gallop, knowing that one word from Rafe and she
would have dropped the towel and begged him to take her back to bed. Damn the
man, she fumed to herself, she wouldn't let him rule her like that. She wasn't
an eighteen-year-old girl anymore. She was a thirty-year-old woman. She could
have run for the Senate. Cady looked in the dressing-table mirror as she
applied a stroke of eyeliner. "And I could have won, too,"