He pulled her to him, pushed her hips against the hard thrust of his body. “Don’t make me wait,” he whispered huskily.
“Boone…” She was torn, tortured.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the jewelry box. He opened it. Inside were an emerald solitaire and an emerald-and-diamond-studded yellow-gold set of rings. “Everybody in this house knows that I intend to marry you. I’ve had this set of rings for weeks, waiting for Hayes to get enough evidence to put damned Misty and her father out of business! A piece of paper with a seal isn’t going to make that much difference. With this ring,” he said tenderly, sliding the emerald solitaire onto her ring finger, “I thee wed. The rest will come later. I love you, Keely,” he added with reverence. “I’ll love you until I die. Will you marry me?”
She could barely see the ring or him for the blur of tears. “Yes,” she whispered.
He bent and drew his lips over hers, teasing them apart, coaxing them to admit the long, slow thrust of his tongue into her mouth.
She gasped as a charge of passion as powerful as a lightning strike shook her slender body. The shock was in her eyes when she met his.
“We begin here, now, Keely,” he said solemnly. “The first day of the rest of our lives. Let me love you.”
She was already too far gone to think of refusing him. His hands were under the gown, making nonsense of her fears about her scars. She closed her eyes, moaning softly, as his fingers smoothed expertly over the thrust of her breasts, followed in short order by his hungry mouth.
“Yes,” she whispered unsteadily. And for long, passionate minutes, she said nothing more.
He paused just long enough to protect her. “It’s too soon for babies,” he whispered against her damp breasts. “We have a lot of living to do first. Then, when we’re comfortable with each other, they’ll come naturally.”
“I love children,” she said softly.
He smiled. “So do I.”
Her arm protested when she reached up to him, but she ignored the pain. He pleasured her for a long time, until she was shivering all over with desire, pleading for an end to the anguish. At that moment, she felt him lose control. She arched up eagerly to meet the hard downward thrust of his body and tensed, crying out softly, as the barrier protested its invasion.
He hesitated, his whole body pulsing. “I hurt you,” he ground out.
“Only a little,” she whispered, because he looked as if it hurt him, too. “Don’t stop.”
“As if I could,” he managed to say. He laughed as he moved again, and then he groaned and drove for fulfillment, helpless to stop himself.
She moved with him, blind with need, pulsating with delight that grew sharper and more pleasurable with every single second. She felt him in an intimacy that she’d never dreamed possible. Her last thought was that the culmination was going to kill her. The pleasure was so intense that, at the end, she cried out in a high-pitched, keening little tone that she’d never heard torn from her throat in her lifetime.
They clung together in the aftermath. He was spent. He could hardly breathe. Under him, Keely was holding tight, biting into his muscles with her short nails, still moving helplessly against him as the pleasure ebbed and flowed in her untried body. She was only just learning that the peak wasn’t really the peak. She could feel the echoes of that intense, shattering climax happen over and over, just by moving in the right way.
He indulged her for a time, but then his lean hand caught her hip and stilled her. “No more,” he whispered. “You’re very new to this. It will be uncomfortable if we don’t stop.”
“Oh,” she protested.
He kissed her tenderly. “Besides,” he whispered, “we’re tempting fate. These things are only good for one use. They can break.”
Her eyes opened and looked up into his. They widened. “They can?”
She’d sounded almost hopeful. He chuckled. “It’s rare, when that happens. We don’t need a baby right now, at the beginning of our marriage.”
“Are you sure we don’t?” she asked.
He kissed her again. “I’m sure. And it isn’t because I don’t want one,” he clarified. “I want time for us to travel and learn about each other.”
“Travel.”
He chuckled. “Anywhere you want to go.”
“You mean, we could go to Wyoming and see Old Faithful?” she asked excitedly.
He propped up on one elbow. “I was thinking of someplace more exotic.”
“Oh. Like