Game Of Love. PENNY JORDAN

      When he took hold of her, his hands sliding beneath the heavy fabric of her borrowed Barbour, she shuddered deeply, and, as though he found the sensitive reaction of her flesh intensely satisfying, he murmured against her ear, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this all evening.’

      Distantly Natasha was aware of his sliding the heavy jacket off her shoulders, and binding her to him with arms hard with muscles she could feel even through the fabric of their clothes. His head angled towards her, blotting out the moon. Panic attacked her as she suddenly recognised her own foolishness in not escaping earlier. Her mouth had gone dry; her lips felt stiff and cold. She badly wanted to touch them with her tongue, a nervous reaction, and one which she was well aware he would read as intensely provocative. She could see the clear white of his eyes and the light reflective gleam of his iris. She could even see the hard angle of his jaw and the firm curve of his mouth. Soon that mouth would be touching hers…Soon…Was she mad? she wondered in a frantic surge of reality. Had he cast some sort of spell over her, to render her so quiescent and submissive?

      His mouth only a breath away from her own, he told her softly, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this all evening, wondering how you would feel and taste.’

      ‘Well, I haven’t,’she countered jerkily, trying to pull back from him and escape, but it was too late.

      As she turned her head to avoid his kiss, he caught hold of it, sliding his palm along her jaw, imprisoning her so that she couldn’t move her head without hurting herself, his voice edged with mockery and cynicism as he told her, ‘You’re a liar.’

      And then he was kissing her—not roughly or cruelly as she had always naïvely imagined men did kiss women for whom all they felt was an emotionless physical ache, but with such great subtlety, such instinctive awareness of her own needs and responses that it was as though the whole world had caved in around her, leaving her floating helplessly in a dimension she had never even imagined existed.

      The pressure of his mouth moving against her own was at once so caressive, so knowing, so persuasive, that she simply didn’t have any defences against it. Despairingly she recognised that, while her mind might not have wanted this intimacy, her body certainly had, and, humiliatingly, he must have been aware of that wanting even though she herself had not.

      Helplessly unable to stop herself giving him the response he demanded, she heard him make a small sound deep in his throat, and felt her own flesh thrill in recognition of what it meant. His hand was no longer cupping her face; instead it was caressing her throat, pushing aside the shoulder of her dress so that his fingers could caress the smooth, pale flesh he had revealed.