conscious that she was not quite sober. How much wine had she drunk? And she had not eaten much at dinner, she recalled vaguely. Drinking on an empty tummy after that huge brandy Nessa had pressed on her—how foolish could a woman be? But the burn of that scorching kiss was still on her swollen mouth, firing an unbearable ache between her legs and destroying her self-discipline.
A lean brown hand closing round hers, he pulled her into the bedroom she had vacated earlier. His hands cradled her face, glittering dark eyes heavily lidded with desire. ‘Once we get back to London this didn’t happen. It will be our secret,’ he told her arrogantly.
‘It’s not going to happen,’ she faltered, taken aback by that ruthless assurance that warned her there would be no future beyond the next dawn. ‘I’m not cheap—’
His fingertips grazed her delicate jawbone. ‘You want me.’
Madly, insanely, crazily, she acknowledged, still fighting to think straight.
One night, Bastian was bargaining with himself, one rare night of self-indulgence that smashed his usual boundaries. She wasn’t cheap? He had got that unsavoury message, wished he hadn’t and wanted the strength of mind to evict her from his bedroom but he could no longer fight his devouring hunger for her. He pulled off his jacket with impatient hands and ripped loose his collar before he reached for her and crushed her succulent mouth below his again. Gathering her up to him, he brought her down on the bed, stretching down a hand to flip off her high heels.
His hard, demanding mouth and the plunging stab of his tongue were like a drug Emmie craved, a need as powerful and natural as taking a next breath. In a minute she promised herself that she would stop him, call a halt, assert logic, but with every demanding kiss he demolished her mental misgivings. She was flat on the bed, rejoicing in his weight, which seemed to answer some of the longing clawing at her, when he lifted her up and ran down the zip of her dress.
‘Bastian…we—’ mustn’t, she intended to say but he enveloped her in the folds of her dress as he trailed it off over her head.
‘We must,’ he contradicted, second-guessing her words while burying his carnal mouth against the pulse beating raggedly at her collarbone, licking the salt from her skin with a wicked tongue, tracing a trail down to the shallow valley between her small high breasts, fingers already dealing with her bra, everything moving so fast she couldn’t keep track of it or call a pause.
‘I want to be sensible,’ she argued frantically, spooked by the out-of-control feeling she was experiencing.
‘Sensible?’ he exclaimed with incredulity, straddling her prone length to rip off his shirt with positive violence, buttons flying in all directions. ‘There’s nothing sensible about feeling like this. Some actions are driven by instinct, koukla mou.’
Either instinct or appreciation kept her still, her dazed blue gaze welded to the smooth muscular planes of his magnificent brown torso. Heat hummed at the heart of her and the ache stirred again stronger than ever. her bra was gone and she hadn’t even noticed it going, was suddenly much more aware of the burn of his eyes over her bare breasts, the devastating touch of expert fingers rubbing against the unbearably swollen tips. Her spine bowed, her body reaching upward in a helpless arch as long fingers grazed down her leg and came to a sudden stop to retrace their path over the roughened stretch of skin he had detected.
‘What’s this?’ he breathed, glancing down.
Emmie froze, more naked and vulnerable in that moment than she would have been had she wakened to find herself walking nude down a street, and she turned paper pale. ‘I had surgery…years ago…there was something wrong with my leg,’ she explained jerkily. ‘You see, I’ve got some ugly scars. I’m not perfect—’
‘I don’t want or need perfect,’ Bastian declared hungrily, running a caressing but unconcerned hand over the marks he had discovered.
‘But I do want you,’ he breathed thickly, eyes hot gold below sooty lashes. ‘I’m as hard as a rock.’
Her pallor receded, her face burning with sudden colour as he sprang off the bed and shed his tailored trousers, the male bulge of arousal prominent in his fitted boxers. Shyness and uncertainty and apprehension engulfed her. She didn’t know what to do or how to behave and yet still he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. That lithe tawny body called to hers on a visceral level. Desire, she was discovering, incited much more overwhelming responses than she could ever have guessed. She had never dreamt she could want to touch a man so badly.
Bastian used his mouth to tease her rosy nipples, suckling and lingering to torment while he kneaded the full mounds of her breasts. Little involuntary sounds escaped her throat and when he ran a hand up her inner thigh she literally stopped breathing, the ache stirring again and overriding every other impulse. He raked a finger down over the tight, damp fabric of her knickers and she shuddered, intolerably conscious of the swollen damp flesh pulsing between her splayed thighs. Every reflex and hormonal reaction in her entire body seemed to be centred there.
‘A woman has never made me feel this desperate,’ Bastian growled in a tone of bemused disbelief as he tugged off the last barrier between them.
Emmie recognised that he was shaken up too and the fierce wanting that drove her no longer seemed quite so shameful. She stared up at him, loving the hard, angular bone structure that gave his features such charismatic strength, the smouldering eyes beneath the lush curling lashes, marvelling that mere days earlier he had still been a stranger. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he made her feel. He touched her where she frantically needed to be touched, a fingertip whispering over the bundle of nerve endings below her mound, and she jerked as if he had burned her, her entire body coming alive with electric reaction.
He snaked down her body with strong supple power and spread her thighs, and her fingers knotted into his luxuriant black hair to stop him before the first breathtaking sensation of his sensual assault engulfed her feverish body. her teeth chattered together, shock winging through her at the ferocious intensity of her own response. He explored her with his mouth and his fingers and she twisted and arched and gasped over and over again, lost to sensation, lost to the violent need he had incited. Hungry heat spiralled in her pelvis and rose to an excruciating height and she was quivering and moaning and rising closer to the climax she sensed when he rose over her and plunged deep into her.
Pain and pleasure combined with explosive effect. Even as the involuntary ripples of orgasm clenched round his hard shaft and pulsed wildly through her she cried out in pain and he fell still, frowning down with perplexed eyes at her dismayed face.
‘Don’t stop!’ she told him urgently, too mortified by her own cry to be willing to draw such stark attention to what she had just sacrificed. That was not something she was prepared to discuss and she dimly hoped that continuation and a more natural conclusion would stifle comment. She had not known that first time sex would hurt, suspected that she should have warned him in advance but could not imagine what words she might have employed with which to share her deepest secret.
For that reason, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her cheeks burning, and tried to concentrate on the extraordinary feel of him inside her as he shifted position.
‘Are you all right?’ Bastian asked tautly.
‘Of course, I am,’ she parried, for that fleeting pain had speedily receded, leaving her with only the erotic sense of his alien fullness stretching her and sinking deeper into her receptive body.
‘If I was too rough, I’m
