of warmth where they’d touched, moist from the nectar of her body.
You! her mind clamoured, begging, silently appealing to him. It’s all I’ve ever wanted—for so long!
Too unsure of him to actually say as much, she used the language of her body to show him by reaching down to entice him back across her.
‘Ah, is that all,’ he said softly and, even in the grip of passion, she realised, there was still room for sensual teasing in his voice.
As he reached across to open the drawer of the bedside cabinet, it hit her that he was continuing to call her Rayne. Rayne, not Lorri, because Lorri, the girl he had once ignored—silly, trusting, naïve Lorri—was gone, killed off by the crumbling of everything she had trusted and believed in. By the harsh reality of life as it really was.
King’s muttered oath as he pushed closed the drawer he had been groping in suddenly woke Rayne to what was wrong.
‘Don’t you have any?’ she asked breathlessly and a little coyly, despite how far their intimacy had come.
‘I thought I did.’ He let out a frustrated sigh and then, with a wry pull of his mouth, ‘It’s been a while,’ he admitted to her.
Later, Rayne would glean some comfort from that statement. Right now, though, all she felt was frustration, agonizing and raw.
‘I’m sorry, Rayne.’ She was lying there with her hair spread like dark fire across his pillow, her beautiful body flushed from the fever-pitch he had brought her to, and which was mirrored by the febrile glitter in her slumberous eyes. ‘I should have checked.’ He swore again, quite viciously this time. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said, noticing the anguish on her lovely face. ‘Or you’ll make me lose my mind and all my principles will be shot to the winds, and I’ve no intention of putting you at risk like that.’ He meant from an unwanted pregnancy. She could see the effort it was taking for him to honour those principles he’d spoken of. His face, as he drew away from her and sat up, was ravaged by his own frustration. Even in the dim light she could see the flush that darkened the skin across his cheekbones, and his darkened jaw appeared clenched against his thwarted sexual desire. But there was a bleakness to his superb profile that made him look vulnerable and weary.
Of course, she thought, reasoning through the depths of her wanting. He had been worrying about Mitch all day …
With her heart going out to him, she wondered how she could ever have doubted that he was anything other than trustworthy, and that that integrity he was showing her now would extend to every aspect of his life. And her intuition must have recognised that for her to have still found herself so attracted to him, even when she’d wanted to believe the worst about him.
She wanted to tell him she was sorry she’d misjudged him so completely, but she was still too aroused and racked with need for him to speak. She laid tentative fingers on his forearm. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured softly, with wild impulses leaping through her from the sensation of his skin beneath her fingers. ‘We don’t need one.’
‘You’re protected?’ The disbelief that chased away some of the shadows from his face was worth a month of birthdays, Rayne thought, smiling shyly, too aroused to tell him why. That weeks ago she’d been given the Pill to correct her erratic cycle, thrown out of kilter through worrying about her mum.
‘We’ll be perfectly safe—I promise,’ she breathed, her simmering desire beginning to bubble over again just from caressing the superbly contoured muscle of his upper arm. It felt firm and solid. As solid as the rest of his body as he came down to her again, causing her to gasp from the weight and power of him, and then from a breath-catching expectancy as he gently parted her legs.
But he didn’t enter her right away. Instead, with his hot, hard flesh merely nudging at her moist softness, he treated her to a torturous game of re-arousal that had her sobbing at the ecstasy of his tormenting lips and hands until she spread her legs fan-like and raised her hips uninhibitedly to his in a frenzied and unequivocal invitation to him to take her.
And that was more than he could take, she realised, gasping and overcome by sensation when one long, hard thrust had him sinking deeply into her eager warmth.
Pushed over the limit, she started to climax at once, bucking and sobbing until she was nothing but an abandoned mass of writhing sensations, propelled to greater and greater heights by King’s driving and increasingly deeper penetration.
Her zenith when it came was a starburst of colour and spell-binding pleasure in which she felt she was being catapulted to another planet. And then the moment came when King’s own climax burst and he was flowing into her, joining her with him and to him, sending the earth spinning off its axis as they floated together—one mind and one body—in some glorious parallel universe.
When she awoke, she was alone in the big bed and the blinds were drawn up to reveal the cloudless Mediterranean blue sky.
She was in a very masculine room, with plain soft furnishings and heavy designer furniture, in contrast to the pale and more delicate fitments of her own room.
Her stomach flipped now as she remembered what had transpired, the tender spots on the most intimate places of her body an exciting reminder of a long and rapturous night.
Now, though, remembering why she had come here and all that had transpired yesterday, she wondered just how wise she had been in letting it happen.
The Claybornes had as good as destroyed her family—or at least Mitch Clayborne had, even if Grant Hardwicke had brought it on himself in incurring Mitch’s wrath by planning to run off with his wife. But Rayne’s mother wasn’t aware of that, and Rayne vowed she would do her best to keep her from ever finding out. However, where King was concerned, her mother still believed, as Rayne had, that he was just as guilty as Mitch of stealing her father’s work. So whatever would her mother say if she knew how little it had taken for her daughter to wind up in bed with King? She’d be horrified and hurt beyond belief, Rayne thought, as she would if she knew about Grant’s affair. And how could she explain to her mother that King had played no part in hurting her father, when she didn’t think Cynthia Hardwicke would even survive knowing the whole truth?
All she could do, she reasoned, was not tell her mother anything—not even let her know that she had been here.
As for Mitch Clayborne …
Turning over in bed, she let out a low groan. She didn’t think she could stand the embarrassment of ever facing him again.
She was just about to step out of bed but, hearing the door opening and realising she was entirely naked, she slipped back in, pulling the single sheet up over her breasts.
Despite her concerns, her heart leaped to see King striding in wearing a white dressing gown and leather slippers. He had combed his hair, but his unshaven jaw was even darker this morning and his tanned chest and legs contrasted deeply with the robe.
‘You slept well,’ he commented, and his smile was so warm that all her worries were in danger of melting like the winter’s last snows. ‘Hélène’s cooking breakfast, but I thought you might like a glass of orange juice to revive you,’ he said.
Thanking him, Rayne took the crystal glass and drank from it gratefully. She couldn’t believe how thirsty she was—or how hungry. Obviously making love with him had stirred her appetites, she realised, in more ways than one.
‘King
