Was he asleep? He certainly wasn’t moving. Quietly she crept a little closer, automatically balancing one knee on the bed as she did so in order to get a closer look at him.
Tentatively she whispered his name. If he didn’t respond and was asleep then she could return to her own bed with a clear conscience and save her apology until the morning, knowing that she had at least tried to deliver it!
He hadn’t uttered a sound. Exhaling softly in relief, Petra started to back away—and then froze as with shocking speed he reached out and gripped her wrist, demanding tauntingly, ‘Sleepwalking Petra?’
His fingers burned against her skin, and as though he had guessed his thumb probed the uncoordinated thud of her pulse as though he was monitoring her reaction to him.
‘Your blood is racing through your body like a gazelle fleeing from the hunter.’
‘You… you startled me. I thought you were asleep!’
She winced a little as he released her, gritting a soft expletive under his breath. Moving with the swift stealth of a panther, throwing back the bedclothes, he reached out to relight the oil lamp on the table beside the bed, taunting her softly, ‘If you thought I was asleep then what exactly are you doing here?’
Far from being asleep, he sounded dangerously alert, Petra recognised.
As she gave a small nervous shudder his expression changed abruptly. Frowningly he questioned her, ‘What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well? The desert air can sometimes…’
‘I’m fine,’ Petra assured him quickly. ‘It isn’t…’ Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she struggled to drag her distracted… besotted gaze away from his naked torso. Like her, he obviously did not favour pyjamas. But unlike her, she suspected, from the brief glimpse she had just had of one lean muscular hip and the telltale dark shadowing of hair running down over his taut flat stomach, Blaize did not even adopt the modesty of wearing briefs to sleep in!
‘Fine?’ he repeated. ‘Then what…?’
He looked fully awake now. And fully alert too, Petra recognised with a sinking, almost queasy sensation gripping her stomach. Thinking about delivering a short but noble speech of apology in the privacy of her own bed was one thing: actually doing it whilst she was poised semi-crouched on the edge of Blaize’s bed, with her mind more on the fact that he was undoubtedly naked beneath the silky throw than on what she was supposed to be doing, was very much another! And if she wasn’t careful… if she wasn’t very, very careful indeed… she might just be in grave danger of totally ignoring what she had come here to do…
The scratches on Blaize’s upper arm caught her attention. They had stopped bleeding but they still looked raw, and even slightly inflamed.
As she dragged her gaze away it met Blaize’s, and was held there trapped… hypnotised…
‘For your information, they were not caused by Shara… the dancer,’ he told her quietly. ‘The falconer had a new young bird he was training and it became over-excited. I offered to help him.’ He gave a small shrug. ‘As I told him, once she matures she will make an enviably loyal bird. She resented being handled by someone who was not her master and she let me know it.’
‘A falcon scratched you?’ Petra breathed, her face flooding with guilty colour. Now she owed him not one but two apologies.
Helplessly she looked back to his arm, and then, unable to stop herself, she leaned forward and gently caressed the broken skin with her lips, tenderly kissing the line of each scratch.
As she kissed the last one she felt Blaize’s body quiver. Sombrely she turned her head and looked into his eyes.
‘I came to apologise,’ she told him quietly. ‘I should not have… have done what I did.’
There was a small tense pause through which she could feel her own emotions pulsing, as though they possessed a life force of their own, whilst she waited for him to speak, and once again she found that she was having to wet her dry lips.
His thickly groaned, ‘Don’t do that, Petra!’ followed by an even thicker, ‘Why… why did you have to come in here?’ drove the colour from her face, redefining the delicacy of her bone structure and highlighting her fragility. She started to move away, her eyes widening as Blaize followed her, grasping hold of her wrists and holding them against his bare chest as he looked deep into her eyes, before his gaze dropped, heavy-lidded with sensuality, to her mouth.
In the thick, taut silence that enveloped them while Blaize lit the lamp next to the bed Petra made the interesting scientific discovery that it was possible to find that one could not breathe even with open airways, parted lips, and an ample supply of oxygen!
‘You know that you shouldn’t really be here, don’t you, my little virgin?’
His little virgin? Petra’s heart jumped like a hooked fish throwing itself against her ribcage.
‘I…’
I can go, Petra had been about to say. But speech had suddenly become impossible because Blaize was kissing her… kissing her with a mind-drugging, slow, sweet simplicity that was nothing more than the merest touch of his lips against hers, over and over again, and then again, until all she wanted to do was live off their touch, to feel it for ever.
Somehow she was now kneeling upright on the bed, and so too was Blaize, so that they were body to body. His naked body next to her very scantily clad one!
Petra could feel the heavy, fierce thud of his heart beneath her hands as he held them against his chest.
He was kissing the tip of her nose, her closed eyelids, with tiny butterfly kisses that brushed the taut planes of her cheekbones whilst the hands pinning her own set them free, lifted to cup her face, to push the hair back from it so that his lips and then his tongue could investigate the delicate and oh, so sensually sensitive whorls of her ears.
Petra heard herself whimpering, an unfamiliar distant sound that was a needy plea for even more of the pleasure he was inflicting on her. Blindly she turned her head, seeking the warmth of his mouth.
His hands shaped her throat, holding it, his thumb measuring the frantic leaping pulse at its base. Her small curled fists still lay against his chest, the rasp of his body hair against her skin disturbingly sexual.
His hands were on her shoulders, beneath her wrap, stroking her skin, sliding the fabric away.
In the soft light of the lamp he had lit Petra could see their reflection in a mirror. Her skin looked milky pale against the warm tan of his, her breasts surely swollen, its taut peak surely a deeper, hotter colour as it pressed against him, flushed and pulsing with the desire that ached right through her.
If he were to touch her there now, cup her breast, roll his fingertip around her nipple… Her whole body stiffened in response to her own thoughts and it was as though somehow he had read her mind and felt her desires. His hand cupped her breast and his mouth returned to hers, his lips brushing over it with tantalising and then tormenting delicacy, making her lips part with hungry longing and her body press into his.
Wantonly she ran her tongue-tip over his lips, until he captured it and drew it between his teeth, caressing it with his own before his tongue slid deeper and deeper into the moist sweetness of her mouth.
As
