Helen Lacey – Chasing Summer: Date with Destiny / Marooned with the Maverick / A Summer Wedding at Willowmere (страница 18)

His fingers stilled abruptly. ‘What do you mean?’

She freed herself from his frozen grip, looking up at him with bleak green eyes. ‘I don’t know! Can’t you see I don’t really know anything any more? It’s all been too much for me today. First Ralph, then Charles, now you. I’m so mixed up!’ she cried, and covered her distressed face with her hands.

‘You want me to stop,’ he said in a dead, flat voice.

Her head snapped up and her eyes flew to him, wild, wild eyes. ‘No,’ she groaned. ‘That’s the most confusing part. I don’t.’

His eyes raked over her, from her turbulent gaze to her parted, quivering lips to the way her breasts were rising and falling beneath the dressing-gown.

‘I couldn’t anyway,’ he rasped. ‘Not even if I wanted to.’

In an electric silence his hands lifted to find the pins in her hair, throwing them away before returning to spread her tumbling mass of curls out across her shoulders. Then slowly—ever so slowly—he untied the sash of the dressing-gown and parted it, peeling it back across her shoulders and down her arms to drop on to the sheet.

Salome scooped in a breath and held it. Don’t think any more, she told herself. Don’t think. Close your eyes and just feel!

She expelled a shuddering sigh as she obeyed her own instructions, closing her eyes and waiting breathlessly for the moment when he would start touching her breasts. They were infinitely ready for him. Swollen and taut, her nipples still erect and sensitised from his earlier lovemaking in the lift.

‘Oh!’ she gasped when something hard and warm grazed over both tips at once. Her lashes fluttered open to reveal outstretched palms rubbing over them in slow, sensuous circles. His eyes were on hers, watching her with a heavy-lidded, smouldering gaze. Then he was caressing her whole breasts, cupping their soft weight in his hands, kneading them, lifting them, pushing them together, bending his mouth to one after the other.

Her head fell backwards in automatic abandon, the riotous bronze curls spilling from her neck. She pressed closed fists down into the mattress, thrusting her breasts upwards into those intoxicating hands, that tormenting mouth. Soft moans of arousal floated from her throat.

He lowered her to the bed and just looked at her. She looked back in a dazed rapture. ‘You are the most beautiful, the most sensual, the most responsive woman I have ever known,’ he murmured, and resumed stroking her body, making her gasp as he ran light fingers across her aching nipples once more. ‘I could drown in your eyes when they look like that. And your mouth...’ He groaned and bent to take her parted lips in a deep, hungry kiss, one hand scooping under her neck to hold her mouth firmly captive beneath his, the other sliding over her flat stomach, down between her thighs, where he began a shockingly intimate exploration of her body.

Salome was overwhelmed by the violently pleasurable sensations and feelings that besieged her with the liberties he was taking. They frightened her. This couldn’t be how lovemaking was supposed to feel, she thought frantically. Not this crazed, escalating need, this mad desire to submit to anything!

‘No more!’ she gasped when he finally abandoned her mouth. But any relief was short-lived as he began trailing hot, moist lips down her body, bypassing her breasts in a direct route towards that part of her body that was already on fire.

A tortured moan punched from her throat when she realised what he was about to do. And while the thought of it excited her unbearably, she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand it. But there was no stopping him, his hands masterful and dominating as they parted her thighs, his mouth insistently possessive as it moved over her in the ultimate intimacy.

She was right. She couldn’t stand it, the blisteringly electric sensations making her cry out. He totally ignored her whimpering moans, her hands fluttering in feeble protest in his hair, and continued his devastating attentions with an expertise that was both telling and breathtakingly hypnotic. Here was a man who not only knew all there was to know about women, but who wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer, a man who could destroy her even more thoroughly than Ralph had.

But there was no room for regrets or future concerns at such a moment. Salome was beyond that, caught up in a journey of erotic pleasure from which there was no turning back. Tighter and tighter her body felt, faster and faster her breathing, hotter and hotter her blood. She was being swept up a previously unknown mountain, racing towards a peak from which there could be only one way down. And, even though the prospect of experiencing what she had never experienced before was intoxicatingly compulsive, suddenly Salome knew she didn’t want it this way, couldn’t bear it this way. She wanted Mike inside her, needed Mike inside her.

She moaned her frustration and frantically pushed him away, ‘No, no!’ she cried.

He staggered back off the end of the bed, getting to his feet and staring down at her with eyes both wild and incredulous. ‘You must be mad! There’s no stopping now. No changing your mind. Look at me!’ And, with a single savage yank, he stripped off his pyjama-trousers, striking her speechless with the stark evidence of his desire.

Salome had never looked quite so blatantly at an aroused man before, certainly not one as well-endowed as Mike. Colour burnt in her cheeks, her heart thudding beneath her breasts. ‘I haven’t changed my mind,’ she burst forth, then hesitated, finding it hard to find the words. ‘I was wanting you. You!’ she cried. ‘Not...anything less...’

His groan was tortured, his eyes squeezing tightly shut for a second. But then he was shaking his head and sinking back down on top of her, the anger punching from his lungs in a ragged sigh. ‘Then why didn’t you say so? Dear God, I thought—’

Again he groaned, then knelt upright to run shaking hands over her body, easing her thighs apart. Her eyes grew wide, her heart stopping as he scooped his hands under her buttocks and lifted her to meet him. She felt his flesh, hard against her softness, and then he was sinking into her, filling the aching void, taking her breath away. She moaned her pleasure as her body encompassed the entire length of him, her hands reaching up to drag him down to her waiting warmth.

This was how making love was meant to feel, she cried silently, two people as one, man and woman as nature had intended.

His mouth sought hers again as he began to move, slowly, rhythmically, deeply. Waves of pleasure—both emotional and physical—pervaded Salome’s body and senses, making her block out all thought of Mike being no more than a womaniser with no real caring for her. Right here, tonight, he was the man she wanted above all others; he was her man. He had just shown her how much he wanted her and, for now, it had to be enough.

Tomorrow she would probably despair over what she was doing now. More than probably. Yet somehow she was unable to summon any regret at this moment. All she knew was how marvellous it felt to be joined with Mike like this. Marvellous and exciting and overwhelming.

Finally he gasped away from her mouth and pressed hot lips to the smooth skin of her shoulder, the pulsating vein at the base of her throat, his hands running up and down the sides of her body. Her own hands were caressing the muscles in his back, but dug sharply inwards when he grabbed her hips, lifting them from the bed and thrusting even more deeply into her. Quite instinctively, her inner muscles squeezed tightly around his throbbing hardness, gripping and releasing him in a relentless rhythm. Any moment now...

There was a split second when she seemed to balance on a sharp edge, when her breathing stopped, and every muscle in her body strained to an aching stop. She heard him gasp for breath, felt his hands tightening around her. Then, with one final surge, he set them both free, and their mutual cries of release echoed in the night.

Salome was stunned, not only by the intensity of her physical feelings, but also by her emotional ones. She hugged Mike’s shuddering body to her till it stilled, unable to stop a crazed litany from tumbling through her mind.

I love him...I love him...I love him...

She grimaced in denial of it, knowing in her brain that it wasn’t true, and hating herself for the way her heart kept wanting to embrace the idea. This was lust, not love. Sexual satisfaction, not spiritual bonding. A one-night stand, not their wedding night.

But try as she might to dampen her joy with ruthless reasoning, she couldn’t. She felt wonderfully at peace, and very, very happy.

‘Oh, Mike,’ she sighed, raining kisses across his chest. ‘I want to stay like this forever.’

Sensual black eyes stared down at her, a languorous smile coming to his mouth. Salome wondered if her own lips looked as wonderfully ravaged as his. ‘Happy to oblige,’ he drawled. ‘When are you going to move in with me?’

She gasped her surprise. Of all things, she wasn’t expecting this. ‘You...you want me to live with you?’