"Him? Why did I try to kill him?" He pecked at her nose, and she sensed a tenseness in his mouth. "I scarcely remember. It's as though the fog that moming never really cleared from my mind. As best I recall, it had something to do with a frigate." He smiled, the lines in his face softening. Then he slipped an arm beneath her and drew her next to him. Her skin was warm from the sun. "Still, days like this make up for a lot in life. Just being here. With you. Trouble is, I worry I'm beginning to trust you. More than I probably ought."
"I think I trust you too." She turned and kissed him on the lips, testing their feel. The tenseness had vanished, as mysteriously as it had come. She kissed him again, now with his lips meeting hers, and she wanted to crush them against her own. Gone now, all the talk. He had won. He had made her forget herself once again. "I also love you, and I know you well enough by now to know for sure that's unwise."
She moved across him, her breasts against his chest. Would he continue to hold back, to keep something to himself, something he never seemed willing—or able—to give? Only recently had she become aware of it. As she learned to surrender to him more and more fully, she had slowly come to realize that only a part of him was there for her.
Then the quiet of the lagoon settled around them as their bodies molded together, a perfect knowing.
He pulled her against his chest, hard, as he knew she liked to be held. And she moved against him, instinctively. She felt herself wanting him, ready for that most exquisite moment of all. She slipped slowly downward, while he moved carefully to meet her. Her soft breasts were still pillowed against his chest.
She gasped lightly, a barely discernible intake of breath, and closed her eyes as she slowly received him. Her eyes flooded with delight and she rose up, till her breasts swung above him like twin bells. "This is how I want to stay. Forever." She bent back down and kissed him full on the mouth. "Say you'll never move."
"Not even like this . . . ?"
Now the feel of her and the scent of her, as she enclosed him and worked her thighs against him, fully awoke his own desire. It had begun, that need both to give and to take, and he sensed in her an intensity matching his own. So alien, yet so alike.
Gradually he became aware of a quickening of her motions against him, and he knew that, at this instant, he had momentarily ceased to exist for her; he had lost her to something deeper. She leaned closer, not to clasp him but to thrust her breasts against him, wordlessly telling him to touch the hard buds of her nipples. Then the rhythms that rippled her belly shifted downward, strong and driven. With small sounds of anticipation she again rose above him, then suddenly cried aloud and grasped his body with her hands, to draw him into her totally.
This was the moment when together they knew that nothing else mattered. As he felt himself giving way to her, he felt her gasp and again thrust against him, as though to seize and hold the ecstasy that had already begun to drift beyond them.