Chapter One

Lenore tossed, disturbing the covers, and the man’s hands pushed the comforter back, molding her shape as he followed the flowing curves to the flare of her hips. “Come to me, come to me,” he whispered, trailing his fingers over her bare shoulders. He spread her hair across the pillow, then drew one long, curling tress down her chest, feathering the tip of the curl around her breasts, over her nipples.

            She murmured a plea. As his touch stroked upwards, caressing the undersides of her breasts, her nipples hardened, ached. His breath fanning over them did nothing to ease the sweet pain. She wanted . . . She needed . . . He must . . . Her soft moan became a demand. Her body arched. She heard herself begging for his mouth, his lips, his tongue, for all the pleasures his touch promised.

            And something deeper, some need, to be filled by him . . . .

            “Yes, yes. Come to me,” he said again and she kicked back the sheet, the ancient, heavy quilt, heat scorching her body from within as the touch of his hands seared her skin from the outside. His light stroking smoothed over her abdomen, leaving a subtle trail of flames in its wake, fire that grew and grew until it threatened to incinerate her where she lay. It traveled down one leg to the tips of her toes. She burned all over and rolled face down as if obeying an unheard request. Even that did not quench the flames.

            The sensual assault continued over her back, fingertips walking lightly up her spine, filtering through the thickness of her hair, kneading her scalp. Flat, hard palms spread over her back, massaging expertly, pressing her into the mattress, spanning her waist, fingers sliding under her hipbones, lifting slightly, down her legs to her knees, parting them. Hot breath fanned across the small of her back, over her buttocks as the man knelt by her, surprising, teasing with tiny, intermittent kisses, shocking little nips of teeth. His ministrations sent wave after wave of incomparable sensation coursing through her, leaving her teetering on the verge of a climax she knew would be of shattering proportions.

            She ached for it, needed it. It was too much to bear, going so far without completion. Within, her barren womb contracted, begging for . . .for his seed? Yes! Fill me, her soul cried. Mate with me. Let me give you a child.

            The craving became a hunger knowing no end, and dimly she recognized it as one having long eroded her, and that only this man could feed it. A baby to hold, a child to love. The logical outcome of these intense feelings, of the union yet to come. The need left her gasping, aching, all but weeping with urgency.

            With an inarticulate cry, she rolled to her back. She strained to make out his face, but he was nothing more than shadows and soft sounds, tantalizing caresses of hands whose strength she could only imagine from the exquisite restraint of his touch. She tried to reach out to him, but her arms lay heavy at her sides, her fingers pressing into the sheet.

            Blunt nails raked down one leg. “Lenore . . .Lenore. Come.” His fingers tracked up the other leg, seeking out the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, exploring in widening circles, close, but never quite close enough, tantalizing her with promises of fulfillment that ended just short of fruition.

            “Please . . . please,” she moaned as she lifted her knees instinctively, let her legs fall apart in response to his knowing invasion. “Jon . . . touch me! I need you.”

            “Yes,” he murmured, one finger sliding in, parting the wet, swollen folds that protected her entrance. “I need you too. But . . . come to me.”

            Lenore shuddered as he withdrew his touch and backed from her, fading into the night, leaving only a beckoning hand for her gaze to follow and then, that, too was gone.

            “No!” she cried out, snapping to a sitting position, managing now to lift her weighted arms, reaching for him.

            Clammy sweat beaded her face, trickled between her breasts, chilling her as she awoke from the dream, despite the thick, warm flannel gown she wore. Her chest pumped up and down frantically, too hard, with the force of her breathing, and her heart hammered uncomfortably, audible in the silent, empty bedroom, which she occupied alone.

            Empty? Of course. Finally, with difficulty, she brought herself back from the edge. “Stop it, stop it,” she said to her crazed libido. “It was only a dream. It wasn’t real.”

            She switched on the light, just to be sure she was alone. The patchwork quilt lay in an untidy heap near the foot of the white-painted iron bed where she had pushed it. A bentwood rocker held a worn teddy-bear. The dresser and highboy both wore white crocheted scarves made by some distant ancestor of her friend Caroline’s. This room, where she and Caroline had slept as girls on vacation from boarding school, had, even then, been like a museum display entitled “Late-Twentieth Century Girl’s Room.” Now, though the bunk beds in the room they’d shared had been replaced by a double bed, it still looked so innocent and virginal that she felt momentarily ashamed of her eroticism.

            She poured a glass of water from the carafe on the nightstand and gulped it down before pouring another, and sipping. Her hands shook. The glass rattled for a moment against her teeth. Quickly, she set it down though her thirst was unslaked.

            She stared at her reflection in the dressing table mirror, seeing a perfectly ordinary female face on which the residue of distress and frustration mingled with bewildered hurt. She carefully composed her features, reminding herself that the dream had been no more real than any of the others that had plagued her over the past three years. It—and those during the two nights preceding this one—had simply been different manifestations of the same problem: She wanted a baby.

            She shoved a hank of hair off her forehead—dark brown hair with what could only be termed—if one were being kind, “body”—certainly not “curl”. It was cut in a short, practical style that needed a salon only once every six to eight weeks for a trim. With a frown, Lenore recalled how, in the dream, the man had teased her breasts with her own long, curling locks.

            “Good Lord!” she groaned, leaning forward, grasping the covers and dragging them back up over her. A reminiscent shudder of need coursed through her. She lay down, legs and arms rigid. “You’re depraved, Lenore Henning!”

            I am not! another side of her argued. She was a mature, sensible woman; an accountant who knew that two plus two always made four—not four and a half, not three and a bit, but an indisputable four.

            There were immutable truths in this world and she accepted them gladly; they kept life in balance. Truth. Reality. Constants.

            Tides rose. Tides fell. Seasons came, seasons went. People were born, they grew up, they grew old, and they died. It always had been so. It always would be so. And she’d do well to stick to the truths that had so-far governed her. There was no place in her life for chimeras that came out of the night to disturb her sleep with images like something out of the Kama Sutra. Not that she’d ever so much as seen a copy of it, but she’d heard of it.

            Snaking one arm out from beneath the covers, she switched off the light, hoping sleep would come again.

            Hoping for the dream?

            Oh, yes . . . No!

            Yet . . . she rolled restlessly to one side. What if, she thought with an anticipatory shudder, what if this time, the dream goes all the way?