that case, what do you want to do? Or should I say, what is it you want me to do to you? If you tell me in minute explicit detail, Isabel, I’ll do it exactly as you describe. Anything you want, honey. Anything at all.’
Her mouth had gone dry. ‘Anything?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I…I don’t know what I want…’
He took the empty glass out of her hands, put it back on the table, then drew her down onto his lap. ‘Yes you do,’ he murmured as he moved aside the tiny triangles which barely covered her breasts and began playing with her nipples. ‘You know exactly what you want.’
‘I…’ She could hardly think with him doing what he was doing. Her nipples had tightened into twin peaks of heightened sensitivity, and he was rolling them with his fingertips in exquisite circles.
‘Tell me,’ he said, his breath hot in her ear. ‘Tell me…’
She shuddered and squirmed. ‘No,’ she croaked. ‘No, I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s…it’s too embarrassing.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what you want. You want me to give you a climax first. With my tongue. You want me to wait this time, till I’m climbing the walls like I was our first time together. Even then, you want to torment me some more with this sexy mouth of yours.’
His right hand lifted from her aching nipples to touch her lips, making them gasp apart. She automatically sucked in when he slipped a finger inside.
‘Yes, just like that,’ he said thickly, sliding his finger in and out of her mouth. ‘You’d like to do that to me, wouldn’t you, Isabel?’
She shuddered all over.
‘And then,’ he went on in a low seductive whisper, ‘you want me to do it to you like there’s no tomorrow. You want me to scatter your mind, to make you feel nothing but the wild heat of the moment, and the beautiful blissful oblivion that will follow afterwards.’
When his hot words finally stilled, so did that finger. A charged silence descended, with no sounds but the heaviness of his breathing and the waves on the beach.
Isabel wasn’t breathing at all!
Suddenly, his chair scraped back and he was up and carrying her, not over to the bure and the bed, as she was desperately hoping, but down the path which led to the beach. She was startled when he dumped her into the hammock on the way past then continued on himself to run across the sand and plunge into the ocean. Meanwhile, she had to clutch wildly at the sides of the swinging hammock to stop herself from falling out.
When he returned less than a minute later, all wet and smiling, she threw him the blackest look. ‘You did that deliberately, didn’t you?’ she growled, still clutching at the hammock. ‘Turned me on, then made me wait some more.’
‘Nope. It just happened that way. Perversely, I turned myself on even more than I was trying to do to you. I had no idea just talking about sex like that was so powerful. Had to go cool myself off before things became downright humiliating. But I’m back now, ready and able to put my words into action. So where shall we begin, lover? Right here in the hammock?’
‘Don’t be silly. The darned thing won’t stay still. And you don’t have a condom with you.’
‘I wasn’t going to have actual sex with you here, Isabel,’ he said drily. ‘If you recall, that doesn’t come till much later in the scenario I outlined, by which time I’m to carry you back to the bure.’
Her mouth gaped open. ‘You…you mean you’re going to do what you…d…d…described?’
‘Every single bit of it. And so are you.’
Her face flamed.
‘You’ll like it, I promise,’ he purred as he pulled her round crosswise and began peeling off her bikini bottom.
She did like it. Too much. Way too much.
But he was wrong about afterwards. He might have fallen into blissful oblivion on the bed afterwards, but she lay there wide awake, her thoughts going round and round.
She wasn’t going to be able to give him up after a mere fortnight. That was the truth of it. She was going to want him around for much longer than that.
Why? That was the question. Was it the way he could make her forget everything but the moment? Was it for the brilliant and blinding climaxes he could give her? Or was it something more insidious, something she’d vowed never to do, ever again?
Fall in love…
Rolling over onto her side, she looked at him lying there, sprawled naked on the lemon sheets, his arms flung wide, his silky brown hair. Leaning forward, she lifted one heavy lock from across his eyes and dropped it onto the pillow, then removed another which was covering his nostrils and mouth.
As if sensing that he could now breathe more easily, he sighed a deep, contented sigh, his mouth almost smiling in his sleep.
Isabel found herself smiling as well. Maybe she wanted to keep him around because she just liked him. And because he seemed to really like her in return.
Liking was good, she decided. She could live with that.
Finally, Isabel’s worries calmed, she curled up to Rafe and went to sleep.
‘NO RINGING for a dinner drop tonight, Isabel,’ Rafe told her. ‘We need to get up, get dressed and get away from here for a while. Do something else for a few hours. Have a change of scene.’
Isabel’s head lifted and she smiled at him. ‘Yes, Rafe darling, but surely you don’t want me to get up and get dressed right at this precise moment.’
He stared back down into her cool blue eyes and wished he had the strength to tell her, yes, stop. Stop tormenting me. Stop enslaving me. Stop making me addicted to your body. And to you.
It was Wednesday, and they were back in bed, not long awake from an afternoon nap after a rather rigorous morning. They’d gone for a dawn swim after minimal sleep the night before and hadn’t bothered with swimwear. There was no one to see them, after all. No one to see what they did in the water. Or on the wet sand. Or in the hammock again.
The hammock…
Rafe swallowed as he thought of what he’d done to her in the hammock last night, how he’d used the silk sarong she’d been wearing to bind her hands to the rope up above her head. He’d never done anything like that before. And neither had she, if he was any guess.
But what a sight she’d been stretched out there, naked, in the moonlight. Rafe had been incredibly turned on. And Isabel…Isabel had been beside herself. She’d come so many times he lost count. In the end, she’d begged him to stop.
But he hadn’t been able to stop, not for a long long
