Maggie was sure. She felt herself expanding to welcome him, and the expansion was a burning ache that only his taking could relieve. Wildly, her fingers clutching at Reeve’s back, she nodded her head.

He entered her slowly, by careful degrees, and each advance increased Maggie’s pleasure a thousandfold. She tried to raise her hips so that he would take her fully, but Reeve would permit no deviation from the pace he was setting. Finally, he reached a barrier of some sort and there was a brief, searing pain as he passed it. Maggie gasped and he did not move deeper inside her until several moments had gone by.

Reeve reached beneath Maggie and cupped her bottom in his hands, lifting her slightly, and then he was wholly, gloriously hers. Maggie trembled, her hands tangling in his hair, forcing him to bend his head for her kiss.

While they kissed, their tongues fighting a fierce and friendly war, Reeve began a rhythm of pleasure that drove all semblance of rational thought from Maggie’s mind. He withdrew slowly, then delved deep, then withdrew again. And each time he pulled away, Maggie wanted to weep for the need of him.

His slow pace was excruciatingly sweet, commanding, and, at the same time, gentle. Maggie had only to give herself up to the wondrous sensations that possessed her, for Reeve guided the motion of her hips with his hands.

Each time their joining deepened, Maggie moaned. There were kisses, some brief and frantic, some long and hungry, and all the while Reeve’s body set the pace for hers. The passion grew until it filled Maggie, swirling through her mind, swelling her lush breasts and hardening their peaks. She grasped at Reeve’s shoulders, pleading, “Reeve—Reeve—”

And then the riot of sensations tearing through her culminated in one shuddering, desperate eruption of feeling, of needing, of loving. At the same time Maggie cried out in her pleasure, the skies replied with a deafening salvo of thunder.

Reeve was still approaching his own pinnacle of release; he groaned and began to move faster and faster along the velvety channel that teased and taunted even as it caressed. There was no thunder to mask the cry of despairing rapture that tore itself from his throat.

Maggie reveled in the shuddering exhaustion that caused his body to fall to hers, warm and heavy and perspiring from exertion. She wrapped her arms around Reeve’s heaving middle and held him close.

Only when Reeve rolled to his side, his breathing still ragged, did Maggie release him, and then she idly caressed his arm with one hand.

Moments later she slept, cuddled close to Reeve, and she had no way of knowing that he lay awake for hours, staring up at the shadowy canvas roof that protected them from the rain.