As her nerves stretched tighter, Maggie was grateful for the dark. She didn’t want him to see the doubts that would be clear on her face. As the need grew stronger, she knew she wouldn’t have been able to conceal that, either. Darkness was better, she told herself, because it was anonymous. When he touched her, her body went rigid with a dozen conflicting emotions.

Feeling it, Cliff ran his hands over the slope of her shoulders, down to her lower back. He found he didn’t want her to be too relaxed, to be too yielding. Not yet. He wanted to know she struggled against something deeper, something unnamed, even as he did.

“You don’t want to give in to this,” Cliff said quietly. “Or to me.”

“No.” Yet she felt the tremor, not fear but pleasure, course through her body when he slipped his hands under her thin wool sweater. “No, I don’t.”

“What choice is there?”

She could see his face through the gloom of darkness, close, very close, to hers. “Damn you,” she whispered. “There’s none at all.”

He slid his hands up her naked back, through the neck opening of her sweater, until his fingers found her hair. “No, not for either of us.”

His body was firm against hers. His voice, soft and low, was faintly edged with anger. She caught the scent of soap, sharp, unrepentantly male, that lingered on his skin. His face was mysterious, indistinct in the darkness. He might’ve been anyone. As Maggie felt the next fierce pull of desire, she almost wished he was.

“Make love with me,” she demanded. A decision made quickly, freely, would leave no room for regrets. “Take me now. It’s all either of us wants.”

Was it? The question had barely formed in his mind when his mouth was on hers. Then there were no questions, just flame and flash and power. Understanding, if there had been any before, dimmed. Reason vanished. Sensation, and only sensation, ruled. While perhaps both of them had expected it, they were caught in a maelstrom in which neither of them had any control. Racked by it, they fell together onto the bed and let the fire rage.

He could find no gentleness to give her, but it seemed she neither demanded nor expected any. He wanted her naked but not vulnerable, soft but not yielding. If he had spoken the needs aloud, she could have been no more what he’d asked for. As she arched against him, her lips clung in a wild, urgent kiss that was only a prelude to passion. He pulled at her clothes, forgetting finesse, then caught his breath when, in an equal frenzy, she began to strip him.

Clothes were tossed aside as if they were meaningless. Her scent rose up from her skin, from her hair, clouding whatever logic he might have tried to regain. The mattress swayed and dipped as they rolled over it, mindless now of the rain, of the dark, of time and place.