of the bed, where she had curled up in exhaustion like a small child. The white robe she was wearing was Xavier’s and it drowned her slender body. She had lit one of the lamps, which illuminated her face, showing her bone structure and the thick darkness of her silky eyelashes. In the enclosed heat, Xavier could smell the scent of her, and of his own instant reciprocal desire for her.
Xavier’s hand tightened convulsively on the cord that fastened the curtain to the bedroom’s entrance, whilst his heart tolled in slow, heavy beats. If he had any sense he would pick her up and carry her straight out to the Jeep and then drive back to the city with her without stopping!
He let the heavy curtain drop behind him, enclosing them both in the sensual semi-darkness.
Standing next to the bed, he looked down at Mariella.
Something, some instinct and awareness, disturbed Mariella’s sleep, making her frown and stir, her eyes opening.
‘Xavier!’
Relief… and longing flooded through her. Automatically she struggled to sit up, her arms and legs becoming tangled in the thick folds of Xavier’s robe as she did so.
‘What are you doing here?’ Xavier demanded harshly.
‘Waiting for you,’ Mariella told him. ‘Waiting to tell you how much I want you, and how much I hope you want me.’
She watched as his eyes turned from steel to mercury and recognised that she had caught him off guard.
‘You drove all the way out here to tell me that!’
His voice might be curt and unresponsive, but Mariella could see the way his jaw tightened as he turned his head away from her, as well as feel his betraying tension. Tiny body-language signs, that was all she knew, but instinctively she knew she had an advantage to pursue!
‘Not to tell you, Xavier,’ she corrected him boldly. ‘To show you… like this…’
Standing up, she went to him, letting the robe slide from her body as she did so. She had never envisaged that she would ever feel such a pride in her nakedness, her femaleness, such a sense of power and certainty, an awareness of how much a man’s still silence could betray how very, very tightly leashed he was keeping his desire.
She was standing in front of him and he hadn’t moved. For a moment she almost lost her courage but then she saw it, the way he clenched his hand and tried to conceal his involuntary reaction.
Quickly she raised herself up on her tiptoes and cupped his face with her hands. Never in a thousand lifetimes could she have behaved like this simply for her own gratification, for the indulgence of her own sexual or emotional feelings, but she was not doing it for them, for herself, she was doing it for the child she so desperately wanted to give life! Silently she looked up into his eyes, her own openly reflecting her desire. Very deliberately she let her gaze drop to his mouth. There was no need for her to manufacture the sharp little quiver of physical reaction that pierced her, tightening her belly.
She brushed her lips against his—slowly, savouring the delicate sensual contact between them, refusing to be put off by his lack of response, drawing from her inner self to focus totally on the pleasure it was giving her to explore the shape and texture of his mouth. Very quickly her senses took over, so that it was desire that led her to stroking his bottom lip with her tongue tip rather than calculation, the same desire that drove her to trace tiny kisses along the shape of his mouth and then draw her tongue lightly along that shape.
Xavier couldn’t endure what she was doing to him! Mentally he willed her to stop, but instead she opened her mouth over his and started to kiss him properly! Lost in what she was doing, what she was enjoying, Mariella took her time, putting her whole self into showing him just how hungry for him she was.
And then sickeningly, she could feel the rejecting hostility of his body, and for a heart-rocking second when he raised his hands she thought he was going to push her away. She suspected that he had thought so too, because suddenly in his eyes she saw both his shock and his raw, burning hunger.
He could never be a man who would be a passive lover, Mariella recognised on a deep shudder of pleasure as his hands imprisoned her and his mouth fought hers for control.
How little he realised that her surrender was really her victory, she rejoiced as his tongue thrust urgently between the lips she had parted for him.
‘I can’t believe that you’ve done this,’ she heard him saying thickly.
‘I had to,’ Mariella whispered back. After all, it was the truth. ‘I had to be with you, Xavier… like this… as a woman.’
He had released her to look at her, and now he lifted his hand to her face. Instantly Mariella caught hold of his wrist and turned her head to run her tongue tip over his fingertips.
She saw the way his skin stretched over his cheekbones, running hot with colour, his chest lifting and falling as savagely as though he had been deprived of oxygen. His forefinger rubbed over her bottom lip, and when she sucked on it his whole body jerked fiercely.
‘I want to see you, Xavier,’ she told him softly. ‘I want to touch you… taste you… I want. I want you to take me to bed and pleasure me, fill me.’
Taking his hand, she placed it against her naked breast.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please now, Xavier. Please…’
‘This is crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ she heard him mutter. ‘You are not your sister, you do not… I have not… I am not prepared…’ His voice had become thick and raw as he bent his head to kiss the exposed curve of her shoulder, her throat, his hands sliding down her back to pull her urgently against him.
‘There is nothing for you to worry about,’ she told him.
She felt light-headed with the intensity of her own longing—but she only felt like that because she wanted his child, she was quick to reassure herself. That, after all, was what was driving her, motivating her, even if that motivation was manifesting itself in an increasingly urgent need to touch him and be touched by him, to allow herself to luxuriate in the slow and delicious exploration of every bit of his skin, absorbing its heat, its feel, the essence of him through the sensitivity of her own pores. So that her child, their child could be impregnated through her with those memories of his father he would never otherwise be able to have?
Ruthlessly she stifled that thought. Her child would not need a father to be there. He or she only needed a father to provide that life.
What he was doing was reckless to the point of insanity, Xavier knew that, but he also knew that he couldn’t resist her, that he had ached for her, yearned for her too long to deny himself the soft, sweet, wanton feel of her in his arms… his bed…
But once he had held her, loved her, he also knew that he would never be able to let her go. Could she accept his way of life… adapt to it? Would she?
She was kissing him with increasing passion, stringing tiny, delicately tormenting little kisses around his throat, her tongue tip carefully exploring the shape of his Adam’s apple, her fingers kneading the flesh of his upper arm with unconscious sensuality. Xavier recognised his senses on overload from her deliberately erotic seduction.
Mariella gave a small startled gasp as Xavier suddenly lifted her bodily in
