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  “Yeah. I haven’t been with many women, and never with a whore or a drug-user. And I give blood at the Red Cross, every three months, so I’m tested regularly.” He said it with an earnestness that touched her. Diaz was so sure of himself in every other way; she liked this more human side of him. She sensed that he really had to trust a woman before he’d let down his guard enough to be intimate with her, and even then he probably kept a tight rein on his emotions.

  Tonight, she would find out.

  She leaned over and kissed him. “Forget the condoms. I’m on birth control.”

  He took control of the kiss, and he might not have had a great deal of sexual experience, but he knew what he was doing. He kissed her deeply, a little roughly, and with growing urgency. When he set her back from him, his eyes were narrowed and fierce. Without a word he put the truck in gear, and they roared down the highway toward Boise.

  20

  The tension between them grew more the closer they got to the hotel, until it was thick and smothering. She tingled from head to foot, her thoughts feverish as she thought about what she was going to do. Against all common sense, she was going to bed with Diaz. This might just be a very human reaction to the danger they’d survived together, she might regret it in the morning, but she was going to do it.

  She was so hungry for him that she ached with need, so desperate to feel him inside her that she thought she might climax as soon as he touched her. She wanted to tell him to pull over to the side of the road so she could straddle his lap and get it done, now, before she died from tension. But, like him, she wanted a bed for what was going to happen between them, so she kept silent and gritted her teeth against the sheer lust that gnawed at her.

  Finally they were there. He stuffed his feet into his wet boots, left his socks on the floorboard, and got out. Milla wasn’t about to hop out with only fabric and pieces of bark to protect her feet, so she sat there while he came around and opened the door to lift her out. She thought that this time he might let her slide along his body, but he held her at least six inches away and set her gently on her feet. She looked up into his face, expecting the hard, remote expression so natural to him, and finding exactly that. But he tucked her against his side and walked with her into the hotel.

  The night desk clerk looked at them with curiosity as they approached, and she knew he didn’t often see a woman with rags wrapped around her feet. At least with the new sweatshirts they didn’t look homeless. If it hadn’t been for that, she suspected the desk clerk might have called security.

  On the way up in the elevator, she and Diaz stood side by side, not talking. She could feel every heartbeat; even her fingertips were tingling.

  He tried his key card and wonder of wonders it still worked.

  He unlocked his door and ushered her inside, turning on the light in the tiny entrance. Suddenly feeling like Little Orphan Annie, Milla sidled toward the open connecting door to her room. “Uh—let me get my feet unwrapped and take a shower, and I’ll—”

  “Sit down,” he said.

  She blinked at him.

  He pulled out a chair and pushed her down into it. After turning on the bedside lamp, he knelt and began untying the knots that held the sleeves around her feet. When her feet were bare, he carefully examined them, looking for scrapes or cuts, but she’d come through the ordeal in good shape.

  When he was finished, he stood up and she did likewise, shoving a hand through her unruly hair. “I’ll take a shower,” she said again, trying to step past him, but he curved a hand around her waist and pulled her back to him.

  “The shower can wait.”

  “My hair—the river water—”

  “The water was clean.”

  “But I’d rather be fresh.” She didn’t know why she was making excuses now to delay what was going to happen, but she was suddenly nervous. It had been a long time for her, and Diaz wasn’t an ordinary man. Both facts were staring her in the face, and she wanted to slow this down.

  He unsnapped her jeans and said, “I want you just like this.” Then he kissed her.

  There was nothing romantic about Diaz, no murmured sweet things, no gallant gestures, just this kiss that went on and on, deep and voracious. She’d never been kissed like this before, with an intensity that stripped everything down to the simplest components: male, female. He held her with his hand burrowed into her hair, her skull gripped in his palm, her head tilted back while he fed from her mouth. That was what it felt like, a taking. And yet he gave, too. He gave pleasure. She burned with it, the flames fueled by nothing more than his mouth and tongue.

  His erection bulged in the crotch of his jeans. It was a rock-hard presence pushing against her stomach, and her loins tightened with need. Frenzied now, she pulled back a little, fought with button and zipper and won, wrenching the damp cloth aside so she could grasp the hard length that thrust outward. She wrapped her fingers around him, delighting in the thickness, the silky slide of his skin. She moved her hand up and down, circling the thick crown of his penis and dragging a deep, raw sound from his throat as he shuddered convulsively.

  His arms tightened and he bore her down on the bed and, in twenty tumultuous seconds, had her stripped naked. Another ten had his own clothes on the floor. He put his hands on her knees and pushed them apart, not waiting for her compliance, and moved into place over her. Milla put her hands on his ribs, holding on as he braced his weight on one arm while with his other hand he guided his penis to her and in the same rough motion pushed deep inside.

  He froze in place, his breath panting between his parted lips as they stared at each other. She couldn’t move; the feel of him inside her was too sharp, almost painful in its intensity. Their gazes met in the mellow lamplight, and she was mesmerized by the tension in his face, the way his steely muscles were locked as if he didn’t dare move. It built and built, that clawing need, and yet she remained poised on the razor’s edge of something she knew she couldn’t control. His chest suddenly heaved on a convulsive breath, and he moved in a long, deep stroke that took him all the way to the hilt.

  She clenched: her vagina, her entire body. She clenched around him and her vision blurred and she began to come, wave after wave of almost blinding pleasure. She had never come like that before, so totally lost in the physical that she had no sense of self, of surroundings, of anything beyond the moment and the ecstasy that spasmed in her belly, down her legs, along her nerve endings. He rode her through it, thrusting hard, demanding his own release and in doing so prolonging hers. He made that raw sound again and arched back, shaking convulsively as his hips jerked and plunged before, long seconds later and trembling in every muscle, he slowly collapsed on top of her.

  The aftermath was like a wasteland, desolate and empty. She lay beneath him, too exhausted to move, barely able to breathe, and fought the urge to cry. She had never before been weepy after sex and didn’t know why she should be now, but she felt a haunting need for comfort. She wanted to bury her face against his shoulder and sob like a child.

  Because this had been a monumental mistake? Or because it was over?

  Even though he lay heavily on her, sucking deep breaths into his lungs, she could still feel a fine, subtle tension running through his every muscle, as if he never quite relaxed—as if he was already thinking of moving on.

  What did one say after an experience like this? “Wow” seemed both inadequate and out of place. “Do it again” was what she wanted to say. Right at this moment, she never wanted to be separated from his body again. Sanity would return, she was certain. Maybe in another few minutes. Maybe tomorrow. Until then, she wanted him inside her. She wanted to feel again what she had felt moments before, though she didn’t know if she could muster the energy to try, or survive it if she did.

  “Do it again.” She said it anyway, because she couldn’t not say it. She slid her legs up his sides and coiled them around him, clung to him with her arms, tilted her pelvis in an effort to hold his softening penis.

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