Chase the Dawn by Jane Feather

felt it before.”
    Benedict roared with laughter. “There is a world of difference between feeling such a hunger and satisfying it, sweeting. I suspect that you have been tormented with the feeling for quite some time, but its satisfactionis customarily confined to the conjugal bed. And you appear to have no husband, for all your advanced years.”
    “Well, what happens now that I know about you?” Bryony found both his laughter and his statement a little galling and reverted to the original topic.
    His laughter died. “We will have to wait and see what your memory turns up. There’s no point crossing bridges until we reach them.”
    He went down to the creek, leaving Bryony to wrestle with recalcitrant vegetables, and to reflect that, in truth, she still knew very little of the man. His history was as closed to her as her own, and was likely to remain so if Benedict had anything to say about it. It was a history that had scarred him, and she was somehow convinced that the worst scars were those she could neither see nor touch.

A stray wisp of raven’s-wing hair was tickling Ben’s nose. Smiling, he moved it aside and rolled over to examine the hair’s sleeping owner. Miss Bryony was, he decided complacently, a little too good to be true. Long summer days in the sun had kissed her complexion with a delicate gold and produced a most surprising scattering of freckles over the bridge of her small, slightly upturned nose. A certain deep contentment, engendered by the soul’s peace and the body’s fulfillment, lent a suppleness to her features, a translucency to her skin, a languid grace to her movements. The slight hesitancy of the unsure had yielded to the full, rounded beauty of the mature woman—one who took as much pleasure in the giving as she did in the receiving.
    His smile broadened as he slowly drew the blanket down her body, carefully because he didn’t want to wake her just yet; he wished to savor the moments when her body lay in all its sensual beauty, for the moment uninhabited by the vigorous spirit, the bubbling energy, the eagerly inquiring mind that led her to plunge intonew experiences, from baiting fish hooks to making love in company with the fish in the creek. The lady’s soft and so very white hands were now brown, the nails broken and not always perfectly clean.
    It was near impossible to look and not touch, Ben decided, teasing himself with his restraint as he allowed his hands to imagine that they were globing the small, soft hillocks of her breasts, now flattened over her rib cage as she lay on her back, arms flung above her head, hands curled like those of a sleeping child. Just the lightest flick of his fingertip, and the sleep-tight buds of her nipples would lift and harden and her hips would writhe in sympathetic arousal.
    He allowed his gaze to roam with lazy anticipation over the delineation of her ribs, the slender curve of waist and belly, the soft flare of her hips, the raven-black fleece at the apex of her thighs. With a little sigh of resignation, he yielded to the inevitability of needy passion and placed his hand at that apex, fingering the mound beneath the silky fleece, one questing finger pursuing its own course until she stirred, her hips lifting, a contented little moan escaping her lips, parted in the relaxation of sleep.
    Bryony luxuriated in the twilight world of half sleep, where nothing existed but this dreamy arousal as lips nuzzled, a tongue stroked hot and demanding, teeth nibbled with playful intensity, and hands possessed every inch of her sleep-warmed skin until the prickles of pleasure ran like wild fire, connecting every nerve ending, until she was forced to abandon all pretense of sleep and enter the world of powerful sensations that refused to be denied.
    He rolled her onto her side, her back to him, moldinghimself against her curved shape so that he could continue to play, to probe, and to stroke over the exquisitely sensitive center of her arousal as he