Out of Mind

Chapter 22

Her wrists would be bruised. Ben hated that he’d caused that. If he hadn’t stopped her, she could have clawed his face until he couldn’t see to help her.

“Willow?”

Limp, she sagged in his arms, her head dropped back. Her skin glistened with sweat.

He shook her. “Willow, talk to me. It’s Ben. I’m here.”

Willow came up through layers of darkness, gathering anger, gathering strength, and screamed. She tossed, trying to get free. “Marley,” she called, tears clogging her throat. “Wait for me, Marley.”

Ben shook her harder. He dared not put her down because he knew she would run. “Look at me.” He let her legs slide down and held the hair at the back of her head. “Look at me, Willow.”

Her eyes opened, as if from troubled sleep, and she blinked at him. Slowly the focus cleared. Ben didn’t slacken his grip. She would regain control, and he could only guess what she might do next.

“Did something attack you?” he said, trying to see her skin without attracting her attention too much. “Tell me, for God’s sake.”

It was Ben who held Willow against his naked body. Water dripped from his hair, over his shoulders and chest.

She pushed at him. “I’ve got to go. Please, Ben, don’t stop me. They’ve got Marley. It’s got Marley. Over there.” She tried to twist and see behind her.

“The house shook and everything broke,” she said, pleading with him to understand. “Glass everywhere. It was an earthquake, then that, that—It came. It wants me, not Marley. I have to go.”

“Talk to me,” Ben said. “Slow down. What did you see?”

In a rain of hands and feet, butting him with her head, Willow battered him. He grabbed one of her wrists and she bit his hand. Her strength was abnormal, crazy.

Closing his hands around her waist, he held her at arm’s length, but she jumped and crashed both feet into his diaphragm, shoving herself beyond his arm’s reach, and shot from his grasp.

She landed on the floor and scrambled.

Ben caught a foot, but she rotated her entire body, launched through the door and stumbled to the top of the stairs.

“Don’t come nearer,” she said, pointing both first fingers at him. “Stand there.” Her eyes, the pupils hugely dilated, raked around.

“Calm down—”

“Shut up. Don’t tell me anything. It happened. Everything fell over and broke. There was a hole and Marley was in front of it. It was a raptor coming for her. One of its wings was…” She wanted to see her sister’s face.

There was no hole, no tunnel, no bearded, beaked head—and no Marley.

Willow buried her head in her hands and backed away. “It took her,” she sobbed. “What have I done? She’s gone. Marley!”

Ben had barely an instant to stop Willow from careening backward down the steep flight of stairs. He threw himself at her, wrapped her in his arms and groaned aloud when they fell onto the edges of the steps.

With Willow on top of him, he ducked his head into her shoulder and cushioned her. His muscle and bone thumped on hard treads, banged downward until he slewed sideways and stopped.

Willow trembled. She couldn’t keep still. When she opened her eyes again, Ben’s head rested against a stair and his eyes were closed. He breathed through his mouth.

But he held her so tightly her ribs felt bruised.

She put a hand either side of his face.

Ben didn’t open his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He didn’t answer.

Willow kissed his neck, kissed the pulse that beat heavily there. She touched his face again and again, ran her fingers through his hair. “Ben?”

She could see into the bedroom. The lamps stood where they always had been, and they weren’t broken. Nothing looked different from when they’d first gone into the room.

“Ben, look at me, please.” She wiggled, then held completely still when his grip tightened even more.

“I saw it. It took Marley away. Please, help me.”

“I’m going to,” he murmured. “Just give me a little time, okay?”

“But Marley—”

“Nothing’s been broken. There hasn’t been an earthquake.”

She couldn’t budge a millimeter in his arms. “I felt it and saw it. Broken glass.”

“Do you see any broken glass now?”

She went limp. “What’s happening to me, Ben? I’m not doing all this to myself, am I?”

“No. You’re getting a crash course in being what you truly are, is all.”

“But Marley—”

“If something had happened to Marley, I’d know,” he told her. “Sykes would have contacted me.” His head ached, but not so much that he didn’t feel the throbbing at every point where her body met his. “But let’s call them.”

“I hallucinated,” she mumbled. “They’d think I was mad if I phoned them.”

“You are not mad,” he said.

“We should get up,” Willow said. An ache started between her legs and contracted muscles in every direction. Her cotton wraparound dress was wet against her skin. Her damp bra scraped nipples already burning from Ben’s touch.

She wasn’t only wet on the outside.

“Willow, I won’t let you run from me again,” Ben said. There was nothing light about what he said, or how he said it. He had put her on notice.

“I…I can’t breathe,” she said. “I feel everywhere. It’s you, it’s touching you.”

“We’d better get used to it,” he said. “You’ve marked me, Willow, and I’ll stay marked. I want to.”

“When they talk about pleasure and pain, this is what they mean, isn’t it?”

He gave a short laugh and eased to sit up on a stair with her hugged in his lap. “I doubt it, my love. This isn’t anything earthly.”

“Ben…”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. I keep making you suffer, but you don’t go away.”

“Get used to it. You’re my drug, Willow.”

“Let’s go to bed,” she said. “Let’s take what time we can before it all starts again.”

He couldn’t think of anything more appealing, but he didn’t fool himself that their troubles had really paused. They could choose to make themselves a little hiatus, though.

Her knuckles brushed his contracting belly. “You’d better not punch me, warrior woman,” he said.

With her eyes lowered, she pulled the tie on her damp cotton dress undone. She opened the front and shrugged her free arm loose.

Then she looked up at him. “My dress is wet.”

Ben kissed her, taking his time, smoothing her hair away from her face. He stroked her from neck to back, down her spine to her waist, up her arm, into the dips beneath her collarbones and over the soft rise of her breasts above her bra.

She sighed and shuddered, moaned at the electrical responses they both absorbed.

And he tucked the ends of his fingers under the edge of the bra to catch the very edge of a nipple. He played there, taking his time, changed his grip and pressed his hand flat over her ribs, her belly, and came to rest over the tops of her thighs where they met her body, and her warm little mound.

Willow turned in his arms, tried to get even closer. The skin he didn’t touch clamored; the skin he did touch pulsed.

“You seem pretty comfortable sitting on a naked man’s lap,” Ben said into her ear, running the tip of his tongue around the folds. “It can’t be too comfortable.”

She tapped him lightly. “If you’re looking for compliments, you’ve got them. You are a hard man.”

They didn’t laugh.

Ben got her up the stairs and into the bedroom without dropping her, and stood her on the floor by the white-covered bed.

He stood back just far enough that she could see all of him. His drying hair had begun to shine again. A faint sheen threw shadows beneath his cheekbones—and in dips beneath muscles that flexed with the slightest move he made.

The heat Willow felt had nothing to do with embarrassment. Need set up a steady beat, just beneath her skin, into every tissue, every sinew.

She wanted him again, so strongly.

Ben flipped the other shoulder of her dress and it fell to the floor. Once more he embraced her. She was so much shorter, but he hiked her up and held her so he could fit their bodies where they belonged. Her pelvis tipped into him and he gritted his teeth.

Willow eased her bra straps down and undid the front fastener. “I have to feel all of you,” she said, her voice a husky whisper.

He felt her, too. Muscles in his legs shook from the effort of holding back.

A heartbeat and she stood before him, naked.

She lay across the bed, her arms stretched above her head.

He made very sure she wouldn’t read anything in his mind unless he wanted her to. Looking down on her, he admitted that in many ways he was merely a man, a man with the luck to have found a woman who turned lovemaking into a mystical adventure.

With his knee, he parted her thighs. Lowering himself, he supported his weight on his elbows and kissed every part of her he could reach. By the time he licked each nipple and took it between his teeth, she writhed and begged for him to stop teasing her.

“You think you’re the only one I’m teasing?” he said.

She knew she wasn’t.

Slipping his hands up the undersides of her arms, he laced their fingers together. At the same time he slid the tip of his penis back and forth over the slippery flesh between her folds.

Willow rocked her hips, called out to him, and he said her name over and over.

Like hot surf crashing over her, the release began and brought her arching up from the bed.

Ben felt her breaking apart and glided into her. She was so tight and he knew he was adding to the physical extremes she already confronted. He kept his elbows pressed into the mattress on either side of her, withdrew slowly, sucking air through his teeth and trying to swallow his own groans. He feared she might be sore from earlier.

“Let go,” Willow said. “I want you now.” She bit his shoulder, wrapped her legs around his waist and moved. She moved him in and out of her with the power of her beautiful, strong legs.

“I’ll always want you,” Ben told her.

Ben heard their cries, heard his name on Willow’s lips and hers on his own.

The night was black, red, thrashing, hot wet skin fused to hot, wet skin, and his only thought was that he wanted them to share what she felt now forever.