Public Secrets Part 301

surrender. How could she have known that all of her life she had waited

to be wanted this way? Desperately, exclusively, heedlessly. Nor had

she known that she had waited to feel this same wild recklessness.

He wasn't gentle now, and she reveled in the furor. He wasn't

controlled, and she pushed him further to the edge. When his fingers

dug into her hips, she knew he wasn't thinking of her as frail and

fragile and in need of defending. When her name tore from between his

lips, the need was there, for her. And only for her.

She rolled over him, arching her back with both triumph and release as

she took him into her. The first stunning climax ripped through her,

but didn't weaken. It was his hands that slid from her, that groped

blindly for hers. With their fingers linked, she set the pace, fast and

frantic.

Even after she felt him explode inside her, she rode him, driving him,

demanding more. She brought her mouth back to his, insatiable, until

his lips grew hungry and his breathing shallow. Her tongue slid

along his throat where his pulse began to throb. He murmured something,

dazed and incoherent. But she could only moan as she felt him harden

inside of her again.

Half mad, he reared up, gripping her arms in tense fingers, covering her

mouth with hot, crus.h.i.+ng kisses. Then she was beneath him and his body

was like a fumace, pumping and plunging into hers.

Long and limber, her limbs linked around him. Her eyes were open and on

his. He could see them begin to glaze. Watch her lips begin to

tremble. Pleasure rippled through him as he felt her body shudder over

a new peak. Then he saw her lips curve, slowly, beautifully.

It was the last thing he saw before pa.s.sion dragged him under.

IT iNFuRiATED EMMA that she kept looking over her shoulder. Almost a

week had pa.s.sed since she'd settled back into the house on the

beach-since Michael and Conroy had unofficially settled in with her. A

rehearsal, she sometimes thought, for the future she was beginning to

believe in. Living with Michael, sharing her bed and her time with him,

didn't make her feel trapped. It made her feel, at long last, normal .

. . and happy.

Yet no matter how content she was, Emma couldn't shake the sensation of

being watched. Most of the time she ignored it, or tried to, telling

herself it was just another reporter looking for a new angle. Another

photographer with a long lens looking for an exclusive picture.

They couldn't touch her, or what she was building with Michael.

But she kept the doors locked and Conroy close whenever she was alone.

No matter how often she told herself there was no one there but her own

ghosts, she kept watching, waiting. Even walking down Rodeo Drive in

bright suns.h.i.+ne she felt the tension in the back of her neck.

She was more embarra.s.sed than afraid, and wished she had called a limo

rather than driving herself

She'd thought she would enjoy looking for just the right outfit, trying

on both the outrageous and the cla.s.sic, being pampered and cooed over by

the clerks. But it was only a relief to have it over, to tuck the dress

box into her car and drive off.

It was pitiful, she told herself, this persecution complex. Emma