breasts felt full and heavy, her nipples stinging with impatience because he hadn’t reached them yet. And they wanted him to. They wanted him to close his mouth around them, lick and suck and make them his own.
‘Nic,’ she whispered again, in breathless need this time.
‘Shush,’ the hushed voice answered.
She sighed in lazy agreement—then came fully awake with a muscle-locking, bone-clenching jerk when he slid the tip of his tongue into the delicate crevice between her thighs.
‘Oh, God,’ she gasped. ‘Nicolas—No!’
‘Yes.’ He was suddenly looming over her, his face dark with passion, mouth full and moist from the havoc he had just been creating with his tongue.
And they were both naked! Her nightdress was gone—his clothes!—the crisp hair on his chest rasping against her breasts, one wonderfully muscular thigh heavy across her own.
‘You want me, Sara,’ he insisted. ‘Your body wants me. Your subconscious mind wants me! Don’t tell me no when I can feel you literally throbbing with need of me!’
‘You said comfort,’ she reminded him whimperingly.
‘This is comfort,’ he declared. ‘The most exquisite comfort there is.’
‘But—’
‘No,’ he gritted. ‘I need this too! We both do.’ Then he cut off any more protests with the hungry crush of his mouth.
She let out a single helpless sigh. He answered it by groaning something in his throat, then his tongue was playing with hers in the most sensuously evocative way, which brought her hands up to grasp tightly at his neck. His thigh moved against hers, rubbing a caress over the soft golden mound which protected her sex. His fingers trailed over her shoulders, her upper arms, then finally, exquisitely, her breasts.
‘Do you know how sweet to taste you are?’ he muttered, head coming up, hunter’s eyes glowing at her in the darkness. ‘How your skin secretes something onto my tongue that causes a chemical reaction inside me that drives me half-insane?’ He sighed, as if he despised himself for saying all of that. ‘I am addicted to you,’ he admitted thickly. ‘You are a fix I can get from no other source!’
‘You’ve tried?’ she asked painfully.
‘Of course I have tried!’ he admitted. ‘Do you think I like feeling this way about you?’
‘No,’ she sighed on a wave of dark sadness for this man with his monumental pride which must be taking a battering because he had discovered he could not lie with her without wanting her. Wanting the woman he believed had betrayed him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Sorry that fate had forced him to feel that way.
‘Don’t talk,’ he commanded bleakly. ‘I have to remember what you are when you talk. And I need this—need it!’ he repeated hoarsely.
Then he groaned again, caught her mouth in a mind-blowing desperate kiss that brought tears to her eyes and her hands down to stroke his chest in a lame gesture of comfort to relieve his agony.
It was at that moment that she realised how much she still loved him, loved this man who could believe such vile things about her yet could still desire her as desperately as this.
The rest took place in a charged kind of silence, he arousing her with a grim sense of determination that told her he wanted the full collapse of all her senses before he would feel satisfied in taking her.
When he did eventually come into her, he did it with a ruthless precision that brought a grunt from his throat and a gasp from hers. Then he stopped, elbows braced at each side of her, eyes closing on a tense sideways jerk of his head that was in itself a dead give-away of how close he had driven himself to the edge before allowing himself to do this.
He filled her. In that moment of complete stillness Sara lay there and felt him fill her, felt the wonder of it, the beauty, felt her own muscles close around him, draw him deeper, hold him, knead him.
‘Breathe,’ he gritted. ‘Damn you, Sara. Breathe!’
It was only as she sucked air into her lungs on a greedy gasp that she realised she had stopped breathing, her whole body locked in a spasm of sheer sensual ecstasy.
Her hands flew out, wildly uncoordinated as they searched for something solid to hold onto. They found his shoulders. He growled something in his throat, then his body was moving, thrusting—short, tense, blunt thrusts that held his face locked in a mask of total sexual compulsion and drove her over the edge to complete oblivion.
When she eventually dragged herself back from wherever she had gone off to, Nicolas was no longer in the bed. He was standing by it, pulling on his trousers with terse, angry movements, every cell in him sending out a message of bitter regret.
‘Hating yourself now, Nicolas?’ she taunted lazily.
He went still, then jerked his head round to look at her, the hunter’s gold eyes barely brushing over her before they were flicking away again. ‘Yes,’ he answered flatly.
He didn’t even have the decency to deny it, and that hurt. ‘You seduced me,’ she reminded him. ‘It was not the other way round.’
‘I know it.’ Snatching up his shirt, he tugged it on. ‘I am not blaming you for my own—’
He didn’t finish. His jaw flexing with tension, he pushed buttons into holes. Sara watched him, too spent to do much else as he dropped into a chair to pull on socks and shoes. That done, he stood up, glanced at her then away again, as if he couldn’t stand looking at her lying there like that, with her eyes languid and her body wearing the flush of a woman who had just been devoured.
‘Will you be—all right?’ he asked stiffly. ‘If I leave you?’
Desperate to get away now he had disgraced himself? she wondered.
‘Without you to comfort me, you mean?’ she mocked. ‘Yes, I’m sure I shall manage.’ Her sarcasm bit. ‘I’m used to being alone, after all,’ she added bleakly. ‘I’ve been alone since I was thirteen.’
‘Not always,’ he gritted. ‘Once, until you spoiled it, you had me.’
‘Really?’ She sliced a glance at him, his bitterness igniting her bitterness, and she scrambled off the bed to reach angrily for her robe. She didn’t even care that she was exposing her body to him. Nicolas hated himself for desiring her, so let him gaze at her naked body—and hate!
‘Alone, Nicolas,’ she repeated. ‘Even with you. You gave me no support, no rights. No say in how we ran our marriage. If I dared to object, you shut me up in the most effective way you knew how.’ She meant in bed, and he knew it; his grim mouth tightened. ‘If I persisted, you shot me down with hard words and derision. You thought it amusing that I liked to be amongst flowers rather than people, but never once allowed me the concession that maybe I had a right to like what I wanted to like no matter how empty-headed and frivolous it seemed to you.’
‘I never considered you empty-headed,’ he muttered.
‘You rarely considered me at all,’ she countered, searching angrily
