Moonlight Man by Judy Griffith Gill

forced herself to obey, staring into the tawny depths of his.
    “I love you, Sharon.” He said it quietly but with deep conviction. She wanted to reply, to tell him the same, but her throat was filled with an aching tightness she couldn’t swallow, so she could only look at him and hope he understood.
    He moved over her, then took her slowly, inch by inch, letting her get used to the feel of him inside her. All the while he gazed at her face, his own a taut mask of control. When he was as deep inside her as he could go, he stayed very still for several beats, then withdrew until her clenching muscles and the alarm in her eyes drew him back. He thrust again, one rushing plunge after another as she cried out. Her legs wrapped around him, her nails raked his back, her body arched into a taut bow as she reached ever higher until she was there again. The sensation was upon her in such a rush she had no control over it, had to go with it, let it take her where it would. Dimly she was aware of the same thing happening to Marc, and she held him with a fierceness she had never known before, helping him over the edge.
    “How can so much woman be packaged in such a petite body?” he asked sometime later, and she had to smile at the way he pronounced “petite”—perfectly, not the way it was said in the English language. He gave it special charm, and she had a dim memory of his having murmured more French words as they’d made love.
    She didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could say. She could only lie there in his arms and savor the feelings seeping through her. She had made it. Twice, she had made it. She wasn’t what she had thought for so long. She wasn’t what Ellis had told her she was. It wasn’t the euphoria of elation she felt, she decided, examining her emotions, it was the quiet joy of personal vindication. She wasn’t “frigid.” She wasn’t “sexually dysfunctional” as the magazine articles had so tactfully put it. She was whole. She was normal. She was a woman!
    “What are those for?” Marc kissed the tears from her cheeks.
    “I don’t know. Happiness, maybe.”
    “I hope so, Sharon. Because you’ve made me very happy. Happier than I’ve been for a long time. “
    “That’s the way I feel.” Shyly, she looked at him through her black lashes. “I didn’t know I could … do that … anymore.”
    “Do what?”
    She felt a flush rising on her face. Dammit, she was thirty-seven years old. She was the mother of two children! She could certainly tell this man who had just become her lover her innermost thoughts, couldn’t she? “I didn’t know I could reach a climax.”
    “So you said earlier.” He smiled slowly, sexily, making her want him all over again. “I don’t know why you would think that,” he said. “You’re a very responsive, sensuous woman. Any man would know that, looking at the clothes you wear.” He fingered the satiny fabric of her robe. “Things like this, like the velvet and fur of your bridesmaid’s gown, the silk dress you wore Christmas Day, like the velour thing you had on when I came to ask you out for dinner. You like soft, you like smooth … and so do I.” His gaze held hers, mesmerically. His hands slid the robe down off her shoulders, over her arms. “Your skin is the smoothest … the softest, the most touchable skin in the world.” Lifting her unresisting body, he sat her up and slipped the robe right off her, sliding his hands up and down her back.
    Suddenly his hands stopped, one returning to a certain spot, his fingertips touching something. He felt her go rigid against him, and she struggled to get away, to pull her robe back up, but he carefully flipped her onto her stomach, and stared at the marks on her back.
    Her entire body heaved in an attempt to get away as she cried, “Don’t look at me! Stop it, Marc! Oh, God, please stop it!” But his gentle fingertip continued to trace the three small, round, puckered scars, all the more