and intimate kiss.
Helplessly she succumbed to it, feeling the desire he was arousing inside her run through her veins as sweetly as melting honey. He lifted her higher, kissing her throat, his lips moving lower to the valley between her breasts, before trailing with heart-hammering slowness and delicacy to first one eagerly waiting, quivering crest and then the other, and then back again, this time to lap tormentingly at her nipple with his damp tongue tip; the leisurely languorous journey repeated again and again until her whole body was crying out in agonised frustration.
Unable to stand the sensual torment any more, when his lips teased delicately at her nipple she buried her hands in the thick darkness of his hair and held his mouth against her body.
Surely he must feel the fierce rhythms pulsing through her flesh; surely he must know how much she wanted him?
Her hands tugged at his clothes, her voice whispering a soft torrent of aroused female longing that swamped Xavier’s defences.
His hands helped hers to quickly remove the layers of clothing that separated them.
When she finally saw the naked gleam of his flesh in the lamp-lit room, Mariella sucked in her breath on a small sob of shocked pleasure.
In wonder she studied him as tiny but openly visible quivers betrayed her body’s excited reaction to him. So compulsively absorbed in gazing at him, she was oblivious to the effect her sensual concentration was having on Xavier himself.
‘If you are deliberately trying to torment me and test my self-control by looking at me like that, then I warn you that both it and I have just about reached my limit,’ he told her thickly.
‘Now! Are you going to come to me and put into action all those dangerously seductive promises your eyes are giving me, or do I have to come to you and make you make good those promises, because, I warn you, if I do have to then I shall be demanding payment with full interest penalties,’ he added huskily.
For a moment Mariella couldn’t do anything. Xavier was watching her as she had been watching him. Excitement exploded inside her. She took a step towards him and then another, measuring his reaction as best she could, but it wasn’t easy given the extent of her own intense arousal.
She was only a breath away from him now, close enough to reach out her finger and draw the tip of it recklessly down his body, teasing the silky body hair.
‘You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this,’ she breathed truthfully.
‘No? Well, I certainly know how much I’ve wanted you to do it,’ Xavier responded throatily, ‘and how much I’ve wanted to…’
He gasped and shuddered as her fingertip stroked lower, and suddenly in the space of one single heartbeat she was lying on the bed, with Xavier arching over her.
‘Play with fire like that and you’ll make us both burn,’ he told her, his eyes darkening as he groaned. ‘Do you know what seeing that look in your eyes does to me? Do you know how much I’ve wanted to see just what colour they turn when I touch you like this?’
Mariella hadn’t realised just how ready she was for his intimate caress until she felt his hand stroke softly over her quivering belly, his fingers gently touching the swollen mound of her sex, his gaze pinioning hers as he parted the lips of her sex and began to caress her.
Mariella knew that she cried out, she knew too that her body arched to his touch actively seeking it, eagerly opening to it, but it was only a vague, distant knowledge, at the back of her awareness. Her self was concentrated on the mind-exploding battle to accept the intensity of her own feelings.
Frantically she reached for Xavier. Touching him, holding him, wrapping herself around him as she pressed passionate kisses against his skin, willing, aching for him to complete what he had begun.
And when he did enter her, moving into her, filling her moist sheathed muscles, filling her with such a soaring degree of pleasure that they and she clung to him, wanting to wring every infinitesimal sensation of pleasure from him, it was like nothing she had ever imagined feeling, a pleasure beyond any known pleasure, a sensation beyond any experienced sensation, a driven need that shocked her in its wanton compulsion as she urged him to drive deeper, harder, breaching every last barrier of her body until she knew instinctively that he could not and would not withdraw from her without giving her body the satisfaction it now craved.
They moved together, his thrusts carrying them both, delivering a pleasure so intense she could scarcely bear it, crying out against it at the same time as she abandoned herself to it.
She heard his guttural cry of warning and felt her body open up completely to him, the first tiny shudders of her orgasm sensitising her to the pulse of his, to the knowledge that she was receiving from him what she had so much wanted.
Was it that knowledge that made her orgasm so intense, so fierce that she felt almost as though she could not endure so much pleasure?
Long after it should have been over, the aftermath continued to send little shudders of sensation through her, shaking her whole body as she lay locked in Xavier’s arms.
She had done it, instinctively she knew it. Her child, of the desert and of a man who was equally compelling, equally dangerous, had been given life.
Reluctantly, Mariella opened her eyes. She could hear a shower running, and her whole body ached with an unfamiliar heaviness. ‘So you are awake!’
She stiffened as she saw Xavier coming towards her, his hair damp from his shower, a towel wrapped carelessly round his hips.
Leaning towards her, he bent his head to kiss her. He smelled of soap and clean, fresh skin and her body quivered helplessly in reaction to him.
‘Mmm…’
He kissed her again, more lingeringly, his hand stroking down over her bare arm.
The quivers became open shudders of erotic pleasure as he pulled the bedclothes back.
She had got what she wanted, and so surely she shouldn’t be feeling like this now that there wasn’t any need for her to want him!
The towel was sliding from his hips, quite plainly revealing the fact that he most definitely wanted her.
A sharp and unmistakable thrill of female excitement gripped her muscles.
It was just nature’s way of making doubly sure, Mariella told herself hazily as his hand cupped her breast, his thumb and forefinger teasing the already eagerly taut crest of her nipple. That was all, and, since nature wanted to be doubly sure, then obviously she must give in to her urgings. Urgings that were demanding that she experience the pleasure Xavier had given her the night before, and right now…
His hands were on her hips, holding her, lifting her. Already Mariella was anticipating the feel of him inside her, longing for it and for him. Needing him.
‘There will be things we shall need to discuss once we return to the city.’
‘Mmm…’ Mariella agreed, too satiated to lift her head off the pillow as Xavier turned to brush a kiss across her mouth.
She looked so tempting lying there in his bed, her face soft with satisfaction and her eyes heavy with their lovemaking, he acknowledged, ruefully aware of the
