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‘I’m sorry, Nina.’ His apology whispered across her white knuckles, creeping into her guarded heart. ‘I’m sorry…I shouldn’t have teased you like that.’
‘I—it’s only a pencil,’ she stammered, bewildered as to why she should suddenly feel like wildly weeping. And over a stupid pencil! She shook her head. ‘It must have had a flaw. I have plenty of others.’
‘Here, let me.’ He unwrapped her stiff fingers and carefully picked the broken pieces of wood and graphite from the deep impressions in her skin, rubbing out the smudges from the graphite with his thumb. ‘There…’ he said soothingly.
He kissed the long, unbroken crease of her lifeline, and for an instant time was suspended with his black head bowed before her, his thick lashes dark crescents against his cheeks, his breath cupped in the palm of her hand.
Still holding her hand, he felt in the canvas pocket for another pencil and rewrapped her fingers around it. ‘And look…I’m putting my shirt back on so I don’t catch cold.’
He wrenched the brushed-cotton checked shirt from his belt loop and pulled it roughly on but left it unbuttoned, hanging loose off his shoulders so that she was still confronted by a wide expanse of naked chest as he knelt before her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
His chest was rising and falling as if he had been running, and there was tension twitching at the glossy skin. The hair that was thick at the centre of his chest flared out across his pectoral muscles, thinning to a satiny smoothness around the caramel-coloured nipples. They had been blunt and flat when he drew on his shirt, but as she continued to stare at them they began to subtly change their conformation.
He looked down at himself and then slowly back up to her flushed face with heavy-lidded intent. ‘You can touch them if you want.’
The fresh pencil fell out of her fingers as her hands curled helplessly on top of her sketchbook, and she fought the urge to do as he softly invited, the strange emotional turmoil of a few moments translating into something entirely different. Shouldn’t she be outraged by the offer?
‘Why would I want to?’
‘Curiosity.’
He picked up her quivering hands and drew them to his chest, brushing them in delicate circles over the hairy skin until her fingertips nudged his brown nipples, which stiffened visibly to her touch. He continued to tease them lightly back and forth until her trailing fingers began to move of their own volition, drawing on the taut flesh until they were both breathing fast and hard.
‘Am I allowed to be curious, too?’ he asked huskily, and her bones melted as his eyes moved down over the stretchy ribbed sweater to the sharp points that strained against the cream wool. Her breasts felt unbearably full and heavy in the lace cups of her bra and it was a relief when he reached out to touch them, slowly tracing the thrusting outline of her rigid nipples through the twin layers of fabric.
‘Just like me…’ he whispered approvingly, his fingers inscribing tight spirals around the throbbing peaks. ‘Soft, yet excitingly hard.’ He pinched gently, rolling his thumb and forefinger, and as she cried out, his open mouth came down over hers, moistly absorbing her honeyed moans, drinking in the taste of her sensual surrender.
His tongue played languidly with hers as he continued to lightly fondle her breasts, softly palming them while he concentrated on titillating the excited nipples, stoking her pleasure while not allowing it to reach a flashpoint beyond which it could flare out of his control. She leaned into him, trembling, her nails digging into his chest, and with a surge of bitter triumph he knew he could tumble her down onto the sand and mount her right there and then and she wouldn’t lift a finger to resist. With his blitzing attack he had proved that he could seduce her into doing anything with him, everything…except…
Except the one most important thing. There was one thing that could not be forced, or physically seduced, that had to come freely from the heart or be worthless. As Ryan fought to control his own recklessly surging desire, the rancorous brooding of a seventeenth-century poet-lover mocked his memory and sickened his triumph.
