or making love on her bed. He didn't have the strength for the former, and he didn't want to face the consequences of the latter.
He turned the doorknob and entered the dark sitting room, making his way through that room and into the adjoining bedchamber. He was lowering her to the bed when she gasped and opened her eyes.
He tried to rise, but she clung to him, pulling herself up, pressing her soft lips against his. His body responded with a will of its own. He wrapped a hand in her loose hair, deepening the kiss despite the alarm that sounded in his fevered mind.
Drawing herself up with her arms around his neck, she brushed her breasts against his chest. Her soft, pliant body beneath him awakened a sleeping torrent of desire that rushed through him with the force of a rain-swollen river.
He rose slightly, trying to remove himself from her embrace, but she only tightened her hold. Unsure whether he could extricate himself without hurting her, he relented.
"Caroline," he whispered against her parted lips. "No."
Releasing his neck, she ran a small hand down his chest in a seductive caress that ended at the waistband of his trousers and left him shaken to his core and painfully aroused. He tried to pull away, but she held him fast with a dark sorcery against which he had no defense.
In the netherworld between sleep and waking, she seemed to give herself over unreservedly to the demands of her body. She held him in thrall, her fingers working almost frantically on the buttons that ran down the front of his shirt.
He hadn't meant for this to happen. He'd meant to carry her to bed and leave quickly. But it had been too long, too long since he'd touched her, tasted her. His body remembered and urged him toward the inevitable culmination.
Cupping a tender breast, he realized on some elemental level that the soft, swollen flesh he felt through the thin fabric of her gown was heavier than before. He ran his hand downward, over the softly rounded curve of her abdomen.
Under his hand beat the heart of his child. The thought filled him with a primal joy and stark terror. Jerking upright, he sprang agilely away from her, his chest heaving, his heart pounding, his arousal still painful and demanding release. The very idea of touching her sickened him, as if by doing so he would be defiling her and the promise of life growing inside her.
"Jason," she murmured, reaching a hand toward him imploringly, like a siren luring an unwary fisherman to his death.
Why couldn't she let him go? Couldn't she see what being near her did to him? He wanted her—God, how he wanted her—wanted her in every way a man could want a woman.
It was all mixed up in his mind—Caroline, the child in her womb, his demons. Inside her body pulsed every mystery of the universe, of creation and life itself. He wanted to grasp it, to hold it and never let it go—never let her go. He wanted to watch his baby grow inside her body and know that they had created something good and perfect—he and Caroline together.
"Jason," she whispered again, her voice soft as silk and deep with desire.
The passion in her wafted around him like her scent. It showed plainly in the labored rise and fall of her breasts, the soft, dazed quality in her eyes. Closing his eyes, he tried not to remember the way her body had opened to his when they made love, the feel of her, soft and aroused beneath him, the way she'd cried out as he drove into her over and over.
Gazing down at her passion-heavy eyes, her swollen, parted lips, her flushed face, he gave in to the hunger surging through his blood. Quickly he slipped out of his clothes and covered her with his body, kissing her deeply, his tongue emulating what he wanted to do with his body.
He pushed her gown up over her hips, and his hand lingered on the moist flesh between her thighs. A terrible tremor ripped through his body as he struggled to control his growing urgency. He pressed her legs apart, and her soft, warm body opened eagerly to him, too eagerly.
All thought of control fled as his need overpowered his mind and he plunged into her, filling her with one unrestrained thrust that tore a gasp from her throat. Arching her body toward his to take him in fully, she