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Dear God! She could almost see, never mind feel, her breasts swelling and straining upwards in wanton and urgent demand for his touch—and not just the touch of his hands, she acknowledged as he bent his head and slowly started to use his mouth to follow the path of his tormenting finger.
She could feel herself starting to
tremble violently. The scent of his skin, his hair, of him, filled her nostrils like some kind of black-magic aphrodisiac.
‘Luke...’ She moaned his name, a soft, keening sound of female need, closing her eyes and arching her body, quiveringly, achingly, desperately trying to cling on to the self-control she could feel slipping away from her and carrying her along with all the momentum and danger of a mountain avalanche.
She could feel the warmth of his breath against her skin through her clothes and had to fight the sharp urge to slide her fingers into his hair and urge him closer to her body. He was kissing the space between the buttons fastening her top, his mouth pushing aside the fabric as he played on her tormented body and overstrung emotions, deliberately tantalising and tormenting her, she felt sure.
But she was gone way, way beyond the point where she could summon pride and common sense or even dignity to halt the landslide, the shocking swiftness of her descent into the dark realm of her almost violent demanding needs and when Luke’s hand reached out to cover her breast over her clothes she cried out harshly in longing to have him touch her more intimately, to have him satisfy the hunger, the urgency she felt for skin-on-skin contact.
She wanted him so much that she didn’t even realise what she was doing as she started to tug frantically at her top.
‘What is it...what do you want?’ she heard Luke demanding hoarsely as his hand covered her own and held it fast against her body, trapping it and her as he looked deep into her eyes. ‘Tell me, Bobbie,’ he insisted thickly. ‘Tell me...I want to hear you say it....’
Bobbie licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, shuddering as she felt the fierce lick of the inner flames burning through her. ‘I want you, Luke...I want you to...’
‘Yes...you want me to what?’ he asked her rawly. ‘You want me to tear every stitch of clothing from your body and leave it...you...naked to me...to my eyes... my hands...my mouth...?’
Bobbie moaned, trembling intensely, unable to stop herself from reacting, not just to what he was saying to her and the mental images he was conjuring up for her, but to what she could see in his eyes, as well, the message he was so clearly giving her that whilst he might verbally be playing the protagonist and pretending that he was aloof from the need that burned through her and fully in control of himself and her, the truth was that he had as little control over what was happening and his own fiercely male response to it as she had herself.
And perhaps that was why instead of fighting him, clawing her way back to reality and resisting everything he was offering her, everything she knew she so badly wanted, everything she knew he so badly wanted, she let him see in her eyes exactly what she was feeling, exactly what she was needing, exactly what the passionate, explosive, annihilating blend of physical desire and angry emotion was doing to her.
‘Yes. Yes. I want all of that...and more, much more...more....’ she admitted huskily, wildly, giving in to the dangerous thrill of not just going with the speeding avalanche but actively pushing it, increasing its velocity, its power. Somewhere, way, way below her, trauma and pain awaited her but at this moment all she cared about was the shocking, hitherto unknown, all-consuming excitement of being exposed to so much danger, of being a part of it, co-responsible for it, of knowing, despite what Luke was trying to imply, that all she had to do to make him join her in her self-created descent to destruction was to reach up, yes, as she was doing right now, and start unfastening the buttons of his shirt. Not all of them...not yet...just enough for her to be able to slide her hands inside his shirt so that she could caress the hard bones of his shoulders whilst her tongue tip explored the hollow of his throat and then moved upwards to caress his jaw.
She heard him groan, felt the reverberation of the low, tormented sound he couldn’t withhold all the way down to her toes and knew that now he would do it, now he would do exactly what he had threatened as she felt the hands he had used to imprison her tugging feverishly at her clothes, trembling against her skin as he unfastened and pulled down her top, exposing her breasts to the late-afternoon sunlight so that they were gilded with its warmth.
‘Oh God. Milk and honey,’ she thought she heard him mutter as he cupped them both and then rubbed the pads of his thumbs over and over her nipples until she lost control completely and could only hear herself crying out pleadingly to him that she wanted, needed, had to feel the heat, the touch of his mouth against them. ‘Like this?’ he demanded rawly.
But she couldn’t make any response. All she could do was to hold the back of his head in her hands and look down at his dark hair as he lay against her breast and the hot, urgent tug of his mouth on her nipple sent a jolt of sensation hot-wiring all the way from the centre of her breast to the heart of her womb. Instinctively her thighs parted, her body arching, a shocked cry leaving her lips as she realised what was going to happen.
Luke knew it, too. She could tell by the way he was looking at her as he reluctantly released her breast to look into her face whilst he still nuzzled its swollen temptation.
‘This shouldn’t be happening.’ Bobbie hadn’t realised she had spoken the words out loud until she felt Luke’s hands travelling lower down her body. ‘No,’ she protested, but they both knew her denial wasn’t of him or his touch but of her own response to it.
‘Take me now...take me now, Bobbie,’ she heard him whispering hoarsely to her. ‘You know you want to. You know you’re ready to.’
She didn’t make any verbal response. She couldn’t. Both of them were shaking as he removed the rest of their clothes, and when she saw him looking at her, Bobbie wanted desperately to be able to hold on to the moment, to lie proudly beneath his gaze, all female. She wanted to have the time to do her own share of gazing, to subject his naked body to as uninhibited and erotic a scrutiny as he did to hers, but she couldn’t. Quite simply, they didn’t have the time. She didn’t have the time and the feeling that engulfed her as she saw that he was ready for her turned the whole of her insides to liquid heat.
His first thrust made her clench her teeth to try to stop herself from grinding them together in frustration, it was so slow and careful.
She wanted to urge him to move faster, deeper, to ride the wave of her desire for him as it crested but then she forgot what it was she had been about to say...to demand... as he started to thrust once more, swiftly, deeply, once, twice and then again, and just as she was beginning to pick up his rhythm, returning to his earlier slower movement.
It was torment, torture, an unbearable white hell of sensation so acutely pleasurable that she wanted to scream with the exquisite ecstasy of it. But quite simply, there wasn’t time. Even as she opened her mouth the wave broke, sending them both crashing through the foam-speckled, churningly fierce, white-water rapids of their mutual desire.
She heard Luke cry out, the sound of a man in mortal agony or immortal ecstasy, and then, shockingly, shudderingly, it was over.
When Bobbie opened her eyes, the bedroom was in darkness. It took her several seconds to remember where she was and why. She had fallen so quickly and so deeply asleep after...after...afterwards, that her body was still curved with feminine vulnerability next to Luke’s. Not that she could have moved away from him even if she had wanted to, at least not without waking him up, because one very powerful male thigh—one very powerful, naked male thigh—was thrown across her body, anchoring her to the bed and to him.
Even though she hadn’t moved, something must have alerted Luke to the fact that she was awake because suddenly she felt the change in the tempo of his warm breath against the nape of her neck. His hand stroked slowly down her naked arm and then up again, coming to rest against her bare breast. Tiny quivers of sensation flooded her body, tiny pinpoint darts of pleasure emanating from the vulnerable place below her ear that he was caressing so slowly and deliciously with his mouth.
‘Turn round,’ she heard him instructing her softly. ‘I want to kiss you properly.’
This time the build-up was more leisur
ely, the caresses he bestowed on her body and she on his, with both their hands and their lips, more intimate and prolonged, but the final outcome was the same—an explosion of white-hot passion that engulfed the two of them, causing them to cry out and cling to one another as the full flood of their shared need ripped through them both.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE next time Bobbie opened her eyes, it was daylight and she was on her own. As the memories of the physical intimacy and oneness they had shared and the emotional intimacy and commitment they had not came back to her, she closed her eyes and wept silent tears of pain and grief. Pain for the hurt she knew lay ahead of her, and grief for the loss, the stillbirth, of the love she knew she could simply never allow to exist and that certainly did not exist for Luke.
The neatly embroidered, entwined initials on the pillowcase caught her eye. Carefully she traced them with the tip of her finger, the same gently stroking touch of exploration she had used on Luke’s body last night.
This bedlinen had been embroidered by a long ago Crighton bride. A Crighton bride! That was something, someone, she would never be. Hot tears burned the back of her eyelids. Where was Luke? She must not let him see her like this and suspect what she was feeling.
What she was feeling... What was she feeling? Did she really need to ask herself? Hadn’t her reaction to him, to last night, already told her, forced her to confront the truth she had been avoiding and trying to suppress virtually from the moment they met? She was in love with him; she loved him.
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, a small sound of anguish bubbling in her throat. No, not that, she couldn’t, she must not... Where was her pride? Her self-respect, her sense of self-worth and self-preservation?
