[p124]
He reached out his hands slowly, feeling the tremble begin in his fingers as he closed them over the softness of her upper arms. A drum began pounding in his temples as he touched her, a flashflood ripped through his veins, and his stomach churned like a storm. He brought his mouth down slowly against hers and felt her lithe body flatten up against him the way a candle melts against a sheet of hot metal.

Her mouth was a pliant sweetness that shoved all his thoughts of Terra into the back of his mind; her body trembled against the lean hardness of his in a shiver of passion. The very touch of her tongue against his lips beat aside all the problems that swirled about his muddled mind and awakened the desire and need that had lain dormant within him all this time.

“Darling,” she breathed, when he had pulled his mouth from hers. “Oh, Lors...”

“Shhh.”

There was no need for talking, no sense in it at all. Her body mashed up against him and he allowed his hands to smooth down over the material of her dress, along the curve of her spine to the twin globes of her buttocks. Her mouth lifted to his again,

eager, demanding, while her fingers dug through his tunic and into his flesh with a sharp need that thrilled him.

Her hand reached behind him, her fingers finding the light button and suddenly the room was sheathed in the soft cloak of darkness. Only the tiny nightlight gleamed like a small, yellow eye in the center of the ceiling. She spoke to him, without removing her lips, her breath hot and demanding against his mouth.

“I don’t want to wait any longer, darling,” she [p125] panted, “not another minute.”

His arms slid around her, lifting her at the shoulders and the thighs to carry her to the bed, but she twisted away from him, whirling off into a darkened corner of the room where the yellow light could not touch. He could hear the sigh of the toga-like robe as she whipped it away from her soft flesh. Then she stood there, before him, framed in the alluring gold of the circle of light.

Lors felt his breath suck inward at the sight of her, standing there nude. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered and he felt shaken, to the very roots of his being.