Naughty Temptations

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Sometime in the night, a lover’s hands reach for her. She moaned in pleasure at his possessive touch, not quite waking as strong, warm fingers caressed her cheek and trailed down her neck to cup her breast. She turned her head on the pillow, seeking his lips in the semi-darkness of the moonlit room, and was rewarded by the feel of his firm mouth covering hers.

She shifted her thighs slightly apart, yearning for his full possession already. No dream had ever made her feel this needy. As if reading her mind, before her next heartbeat, a large, aggressive leg insinuated itself between both of hers. His nude thigh pressed sensually against her mons. She gasped when he clasped her shoulders in his large hands; a small jolt of pure, s****l urge tingled down from his point of physical contact and shot into her belly where it mushroomed.

“Grayson…” She murmured, opening her eyes to see if her guess was correct.

A shadowy figure reared up in bed, looming over her. A shaft of moonlight illuminated Grayson Hunter’s face for a moment. His eyes burned down on her, their light gray ignited to silver by passion. And he apparently slept in the nude. She glanced past his shoulders and spied her dream catcher, still filtering the moonlight at the window. This was just a delicious dream, she reminded herself.

She was suddenly too hot, as if the granny gown and robe she wore to bed was stifling her.

“Take it off,” she pleaded, plucking at the neckline of her nightgown.

“Lady ghost,” a deep Southern drawl growled in her ear, “I don’t know how you know me, or why what luck I have left has you come to haunt my bed, but I confess we are of the same mind on that point.”

With a smooth movement, he stripped the garments off her shoulders and swept them down the length of her body, leaving her naked and trembling in his arms.

“I have a mind to see if you are a flesh and blood woman or merely a construct of my imagination.” He ground his mouth on hers. She inhaled sharply. He had a salty, earthy smell, clean and rich.

“You’re real,” he murmured in surprise when he lifted his head. “Yet you appeared before my eyes seconds ago. I’d ask how, but I’m not one to question my good fortune. Not these days,” he added with a touch of grimness.

Suddenly, she couldn’t resist the urge to touch him. Explore him. Flattening her upturned palm against his muscled pectorals, she found his skin was warm and delightful under her fingers. Touching him only made the wet need beginning to gather in her p***y stronger and harder to resist. This dream was becoming far too real. It was difficult to think, even to breathe, with him invading all her senses. She tried to pull away.

His palm instantly came up to trap her hand that was braced against his broad chest, rubbing her smaller fingers against his warm skin. He slowly moved her fingertips over his crisp, light sprinkling of chest hair.

“This doesn’t feel like a dream,” she murmured more to the dream catcher in the window than to him. “What’s happening?”

“I have a million such questions. For now I can’t recall one of them,” he rasped, his left hand stroking the curve of her waist under the quilt. He stared down at her, his expectant gray eyes darkening with mounting, undisguised hunger as a shaft of moonlight spilled down across her exposed, round breasts.

“But I swear you’ll answer them all. Afterward.” He dipped his head to plant a searing kiss on her n****e that pebbled hard under his tongue.

She couldn’t prevent a whimper from escaping her dry throat as even more heat pooled at the apex of her legs. She tried to control the waves of desire that already had her c******s swollen and slick, ready for orgasm, but it was no use. Her body craved his.

He feels so real. This is just a dream. Isn’t it?

Hazy panic leaked through the waves of desire now coursing through her. Her heart began to pound. He seemed to feel the shift in her as she shrank from his touch. His eyes glittered down at her. She detected male outrage, possession and, oddly, something akin to hurt in them. Then his hands turned from insistent lover to soothing comforter on her naked body, with long strokes along her arms and back as he held her. He breathed hoarsely as though to control his own need.

“Be easy, beauty,” he drawled softly into her hair. “I won’t force you into giving me anything you do not truly wish to give. And I’d not frighten you away for all the gold in the Union and Confederate treasuries combined.” His lips brushed the cleft between her breasts with barely restrained passion.

Valerie relaxed under his calming words. He brushed his mouth against her parted lips. His feathery kiss sent jolt down to twitch the small bit of flesh nestled in her damp bush. Her inner thighs were growing slick and slippery with excitement. She could scent her arousal that hung thick in the air between them. He inhaled deeply and made a pleased sound in the back of his throat.

“No matter who or what you are, I want you, lady. I shall truly enjoy satisfying all of your needs,” he murmured, his lips still teasingly light against hers.

Her thoughts ran riot in no particular order.

Why not? I need this. I want this. Why not just give in to my desires? Beauty? Me?

She reached for him with a moan, willing and wet. She could see his face far more clearly than before. The room had grown lighter without her noticing. Dawn was creeping in through the window.

From somewhere outside in the yard, a rooster crowed. And just like that, darkness overcame her and she slipped once more into a deep sleep. She knew no more for some time.

*****

In her mind, Valerie swam down to the bottom of a deep pool and kicked off from the bottom. When she resurfaced she was back in the darkened bedroom. Her dream catcher was still swaying gently in the moonlit window.

A large body stirred on the bed. “You’re back, then,” Grayson Hunter stated matter-of-factly next to her, but with a distinct undercurrent of sleepy relief lacing his deep voice. “About time, woman. It’s been five days since you last visited my bed. I’ve been starving for you.”

His nude torso rolled upon her, crushing her into the mattress, trapping her sensually under his weight.

“You’ll not leave me again without giving me your name,” he drawled. “And a way to call you to me.”

He pinned her hands above her head, his large biceps barely needing to flex to hold her in place. “Now. What is your name, witch?”

She gasped under his weight. “Valerie Amy Heart. And I’m not a witch. I’m as surprised as you about all this. In fact, it’s you who called me here.” She squirmed under him, trying to shift his weight off her. “And thanks a lot for that, by the way, big guy,” she grumbled.

“And how, exactly, did I do that, Valerie Amy Heart?” he asked, levering himself off her slightly. He stared down into her wide eyes. Then, as though unable to help himself, he tilted his head to kiss the side of her neck.

Valerie expelled an involuntary breath, his erection pressing deliciously between her legs. She struggled to formulate speech but her desire-drugged body wasn’t helping her articulation much. “You… you sent me a… a Valentine.”

“A what?” He caressed her hip, shaping it with hard fingers.

“A love letter. On February the fourteenth.”

“I know what a Valentine is, woman. I’ve sent no letter to you. I’d damn sure recall if I had sent a love letter to a strange woman with cornflower blue eyes and hair the color of moonbeams who appears and disappears from a man’s bed without so much as a by your leave,” he growled. His fingers traveled lazily up her navel, breasts, and throat to caress her hair that was still braided in a coronet around her head.

“Not yet, but you will. You hid it on February the fourteenth in the year eighteen hundred and sixty-five – I mean you will hide it for me to find in my own time… in the… future,” she finished lamely.

“That’s tomorrow,” he interjected. His fingers were now busy loosening her hair. Seemingly fascinated, he wound a thick, long strand around his knuckles and let the moonlight play on the golden stuff.

She grimaced, aware of how ridiculous this must sound to him, but she lifted her chin. “I’m not lying, Grayson.”

“The future?” His look was skeptical. She couldn’t blame him for that. “How far in the future?”

She took a deep breath. “One hundred and fifty years.”

His silent disbelief was deafening.

“I know it sounds nuts. I’m still wrapping my head around it myself. I think time is out of joint. My past is your future. Even if you haven’t done it yet, in my time you already have.”

“Then tell me. What happens next?”

“The South loses the war, for one thing.”

“That’s already been apparent to most of the nation for some time now. Even Jefferson Davis knows it. He’s already begun to break up the Confederate treasury in Richmond and scatter the gold in shipments bound in all directions to keep it out of Yankee hands. What’s next?”

“Uh, well, eventually Lee surrenders to Grant.“

“I meant, tell me what happens next between us, Valerie Heart.” He thrust his hips against her pelvis.

“Oh! Uh, I… I don’t know. I haven’t lived this bit yet.”

“Let’s make it up as we go along, then,” he half growled, half laughed. The velvet tip of his hardened c**k brushed high on her thigh.

“Just where am I destined to hide this letter for you to find in the … future?” He dipped his head to lick and suck her exposed n****e.

She writhed under his tongue. “Inside the living room wall of this house. Across from the fireplace.”

“Living room?”

“I think in your day, you call it the parlor.”

“Why would I do that?”

“How should I know, you’re the one who hid it,” she exploded. “But you did. And I’ll find it. Actually, I already found it. And, just as you will ask me to do, I found a way to come back to you. Because, well, obviously, here I am,” she finished weakly, very aware of how badly she had mixed past, present, and future tenses in her garbled little speech.

“Exactly what are you doing tearing up my house in the future?”

“It’s my house now. Or it will be then, I mean.”

He tilted his head above her, shifting his lower body to fit more snugly against her pelvis. “You have traveled through time. Just because I asked you to.” His brows drew together.

“So far as I can tell…pretty much.” She shrugged under him, breathless and her mind hardly on his question with his full erection now teasing her wet entrance. “If this isn’t a dream, then it’s the only explanation I can offer.”

“I’ll take your word for it, since I have more urgent matters on my mind at the moment.” He carefully bit her puckered n****e until it was an erect bud. When she automatically opened her lips in protest, he swiftly lifted his head and invaded her mouth with his tongue. She mindlessly kissed him back. He groaned and deepened the kiss even more.

“You smell of ripe peaches and wild honey,” he murmured in wonder against her lips. Then he crushed her even more fully against the hard contours of his body. “I want you, Valerie Amy Heart. However you came to me, I mean to keep you. Right now, I don’t give a damn about the past or the future. I’m weary. Outside the world is burning. Only the present matters.”

His words were part warning, part demand, and part plea. They stared at one another in the semi-light.

She touched his face. “You sent a picture of yourself with your letter. I knew when I saw it that somehow this would happen.”

She reached between them and curled her fingers around his rigid erection, stroking him as she opened her legs, allowing him full access to her body in silent, willing invitation. He closed his eyes and inhaled sharply at her touch. He needed no further urging and reached for her hungrily.

“And I knew the moment you appeared in my bed I’d have you for my own. You belong to me, Valerie Heart. It feels like I’ve always known you, yet from what you say you aren’t even born yet. You’ve bewitched me entirely.”

His gaze held hers as, with a single thrust, his member slid smoothly into her snug, wet channel. He filled her completely. She clung to him, wrapping her legs around his waist, as her inner walls clenched tight around his c**k.

A rooster’s crow sounded outside. Suddenly, what sounded like cannon-fire close by shook the room. Valerie’s eyes flew to the window where the purple dawn was rising just in time to see the dream catcher sway wildly from the repercussion. It fell off the peg and tumbled to the wood floor. In horror, she felt herself begin to melt away once more.

“No!” Grayson ordered. “Don’t leave! Not again. Not now!”

She reached for him. He tried to hold her tight, still inside her. For a moment time stood still, but she couldn’t stop herself from slipping once more into the ether of time, to the blank, liquid netherworld between his world and hers.

“Grayson! I’m sorry,” she cried out as he faded away. “I can’t stop it. Grayson!”

Then he was gone. Or she was. All was blackness again.