AS KING wrapped his arms around her, Rayne felt herself melting against him.
His jaw rasped against hers where he hadn’t shaved since that morning, but she rejoiced in its roughness and in his hard warmth that was driving every last trauma—of the day, of the past week and of the longer past—from her mind.
The only thing that mattered was him—here and now, the desire that had her clinging to him, as the only sure, secure thing in her crumbling universe.
She had wanted this—so much! Wanted it now a thousand times more than she had ever wanted it before. It was as if all the feelings she had had for him as a teenager hadn’t died but had been shut away inside her, brooding and intensifying so that now they overwhelmed her like a flood, gushing through her from her toes upwards and spreading along every nerve and sinew of her being.
He had called her a child then, but she was a woman now and she wanted to prove it to him, angling her body so that her needs were obvious—the craving for his hands against her naked flesh.
He read her like a book, following each silent sentence her body was conveying to him as long tanned fingers slipped the fine straps off her shoulders so that the chiffon bodice rippled like a waterfall down over the betraying fullness of her breasts.
King groaned deeply in his throat, his body hardening from her perfect femininity. He felt like ravaging her, driving them both wild in his need to blot out all the things that Mitch had revealed to him today. To lose himself inside the warm, slick wetness of her glorious body. But he forced himself to exercise all his powers of restraint, knowing that she wouldn’t thank him for that.
This woman needed to be handled with kid gloves, her beautiful body served and pleasured with the skill and tenderness it deserved.
She had deceived him, it was true. But only because she’d believed him to be party to a gross misdemeanour against her father—a father who hadn’t been wholly worthy of her trust and fierce loyalty. Nevertheless, the fact that she had deceived him made him glean a delicious thrill in inflicting some sensual punishment upon her in making her wait for all her body—and his own!—craved.
Dipping his head, he drew the hard peak of one pink begging nipple slowly into his mouth, taming the urge to pull her against him as his strong hands rested on the firm, gentle curves of her straining hips.
He was driving her crazy, Rayne thought headily, clutching at his shoulders, wanting to rip off his shirt, feel the hardness of his muscles and his hair-roughened chest against her breasts.
‘Easy,’ he advised softly, his breath fanning the wet swollen tip he had just released from its torturous pleasure. ‘What is it you want? Show me what you want.’
Maybe she should have been embarrassed, she thought distractedly, but hunger had stripped her of all inhibitions, so that now she had no qualms about doing as he’d asked.
Thrusting her neglected breast towards him, she uttered a deep, guttural sob when his mouth closed over it, sending sensations plummeting down through the centre of her body.
‘Is this it?’ he broke off to murmur against the pale fleshy mound after a few moments. ‘Is this what you want?’
No, I want you! All of you! Around me! On top of me! Inside me!
She heard her brain screaming out those phrases and couldn’t believe that any man could reduce her to thinking them. But this wasn’t any man, she assured herself hectically. This was King.
His hands on her hips were warm and firm, yet still holding her away from him when all she wanted was to feel him, feel the evidence of just how much he wanted her.
But he was controlling the pace, she realized, wanting more of what he was doing to her and yet crazy for this particular sensuous torture to end as he burned a slick, hot path between the valley of her breasts with a teasingly slow caress of his tongue.
‘I hate you, King Clayborne,’ she groaned.
She could say it now. Now, when the conflagration of need that was burning inside her raged so fiercely that there could be no turning back because what was there to lose? He knew how much she wanted him. Needed him.
‘No, you don’t,’ he murmured thickly against her ribcage.
He knew that too, she accepted helplessly, because she couldn’t fool him any more than she could fool herself. But to express what she was feeling in any other way would be no less than sheer folly, she realised, despairing at herself for wanting—needing—him so much.
With a deep groan from the depths of his throat he caught her to him then, and from that moment he was no longer in control.
Hungrily his mouth captured hers, their breath mingling, tongues blending in an urgent mimicry of the ultimate outcome of where all this was leading, as Rayne let her head fall back in wanton acquiescence to all that was about to happen.
They were equal now. Mouth to mouth. Pulsing body to pulsing body. Locked in the most fundamental act between a man and a woman.
Below them, beneath the darkening Mediterranean sky, Monte Carlo pulsed with a life of its own but they were oblivious to it, the sound of their impassioned breathing like an extension of the exotic chorus outside.
His teasing had backfired on him, Rayne realised with her heart singing. He was desperate to make love with her, a scenario she had only ever dared to dream about seven years ago. But now it was happening and the reality was sending shock waves of pleasure through her body way beyond any she could ever have imagined.
With a small sob of need and urgent trembling fingers, she tugged at the buttons of his shirt.
His chest was bronzed and beautifully contoured, as she had imagined it would be, the feathering of hair that ran down and disappeared inside his shirt igniting a fire in her as she ran her hands across it.
‘You’re beautiful.’ It seemed as natural to say it as it did to breathe, as very softly she pressed her kiss-swollen lips to his heaving chest. He smelled of pine and a masculine musk that acted like an aphrodisiac on her already heightened senses. His skin tasted slightly salty when she brought her tongue across the hard wall of muscle and bone.
‘Not nearly as beautiful as you.’
Did he really think that? Or was it just sex talking? How could she compare with the super-model type of woman his name was usually linked with? At that moment, though, she didn’t care—only that he was with her. Like this.
‘Take this off,’ he urged raggedly, already tugging her dress down over her hips. ‘I want to see you. All of you.’
Before she could murmur an objection, having thought about his type of woman and feeling extremely self-conscious about not living up to all he expected her to be, the whisper of fabric was nothing more than a pool of light around her ankles and she was standing there in nothing but her flimsy white sandals and a white lacy string that left very little hidden from the dark intensity of his gaze.
‘King,’ she breathed, hiding her sudden embarrassment against the warm hard wall of his shoulder. Gently, though,
