‘And you so understanding. Heck, why didn’t I tell you?’
He wanted to shake her. He wanted to tell her she’d been wrong ever thinking she could pull this off, that she should have admitted the truth when he’d first put his proposition to her, and maybe he would do both of those things, but first of all there was a raw pain in her liquid eyes that made him want to tear somebody else limb from limb first.
‘Who was he?’
‘It doesn’t matter. He was just some guy. It was just for a laugh.’
But her eyes told him differently.
He cupped her neck in one hand and drew her head to his shoulder. For a moment she stayed stiff but the strumming of his fingers on her skin soon soothed away her resistance. ‘But it was no good. At least, not for you.’
She gave what he suspected was meant to be a laugh, but came out more like a hiccup. ‘It was awful. It hurt and it was over in no time but I thought…’
He drew her closer into a hug. What kind of man was so uncaring of an innocent? ‘You thought what?’
She shrugged and tried to lift her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her voice was flat and lifeless but her body was warm and pliant against his, as if she’d forgotten to be afraid. His fingers stroked her neck, tracing the bones of her spine up into her hair and then down again.
Her scent surrounded him, the smell of her hair, the remnants of her fragrance and the warm scent of her earlier arousal. She had come apart in his arms. His and nobody else’s and the knowledge made him hard. She was almost a virgin and she needed to know it could be better. He kissed her hair and breathed deep.
‘He was a fool. He did not deserve the gift he’d been given.’
She raised her face and blinked up at him. ‘I thought you would be mad with me. Were mad with me. And you’d have every right. I’m sorry. I know I should never have agreed to do this.’
He listened to her words and nodded on a sigh. ‘You’re right. You clearly do not have the experience necessary for the job.’ And he felt her stiffen in his arms and try to pull away.
‘But perhaps that is something we could remedy together.’
It felt as if her heart had skipped a beat. Or maybe it had just stopped altogether. But no, she was still standing and there was her heartbeat, pounding louder than ever in her ears.
She looked up at him, afraid she’d misconstrued what he meant, afraid in case she hadn’t.
Afraid.
And he took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers.
‘I promise you your second time will be better.’
She was in his arms in the next moment, bundled still with the golden dress tangled around her and feeling strangely disjointed and other-worldly.
‘Andreas,’ she whispered as he placed her like a treasured prize in the centre of the bed. ‘What if I can’t? I mean—’ She felt the heat flood to her face. ‘You’re so…big.’
And he smiled as he unwrapped her from the coverlet, uncovering her bit by bit until she lay naked on the bed before him. ‘I will not hurt you,’ he said, and his dark eyes held a promise as intense as their desire so that even when he untied his own robe and revealed the full extent of his arousal she believed him.
Time became irrelevant in the minutes following. Colours blurred and merged with her feelings into a sensual overload. And nothing mattered but the sensations Andreas conjured up inside her as he worked his brand of slow magic upon her body.
No part of her escaped his attention. Nowhere was ignored by his clever fingers or his heated mouth or the hot flick of his tongue.
Until she was burning with a need that she’d never known.
Burning for completion.
‘Did he do this to you?’ Andreas asked as he parted her thighs and dipped his head lower. And she tossed her head from side to side, the sensations inside her robbing her of the power of speech.
‘Did he make you feel this way?’ He wanted to know as he pressed his hot mouth to her very core, almost tipping her over the edge.
‘Did he make you call his name?’ he demanded.
Her cry was torn from her, his name on her tongue as he sent her once again over the edge. ‘Did he?’ he demanded, raining hot kisses on her eyes and on her mouth. Hot kisses that tasted of him and of her.
‘No’ she breathed when finally she could talk once more, her head still spinning, her body humming. ‘No.’
‘Then he was not a man. He gave you nothing and so what he took from you was nothing.’
She shuddered under him, though whether from the intensity of his message or from the obsidian gaze meeting hers, she couldn’t tell. Nor could she think as she felt the nudge of him against her.
She gasped and felt a moment of panic but his eyes stayed her.
‘You are ready,’ he told her. ‘Trust me.’
Strangely she did. And this time there was no stab of pain, no discomfort. This time she felt her muscles slowly stretching as he eased his way inside, until he filled her completely, all the time his dark eyes not leaving hers.
He kissed her then, a slow, deep kiss that spoke of possession as he started to move inside her. She gasped into his mouth as he slowly withdrew. She gasped again when he returned, awakening nerve endings she’d never known she possessed, inviting their participation in this sensual dance.
Every part of her felt alive. Every part of her awake to his slow seduction, welcoming him as he increased the pace and the rhythm. And still his eyes didn’t leave her face.
She clung to him, inside and out, feeling it building again, that relentless ever-increasing tension as he took her higher and still higher with each deep thrust until there was nowhere left to climb, nowhere left to go.
And then her world exploded, shattering into tiny fragments as he pushed her over the edge. And this time she wasn’t alone. This time he came with her.
Clearly the man had been a fool. Andreas lay there listening to the sound of her deep even breathing as the moonlight spilled through the long window and over her creamy skin, giving it a pearl-like sheen. He’d always made a point of not bedding virgins. He didn’t want to build false hopes. He didn’t want attachments based on first times. He didn’t want attachments full stop.
So whoever had clumsily relieved Cleo of her virginity had handed him a gift. She was unbelievably responsive, her delight in an unfamiliar act refreshing and light years away from that of the women he normally associated with, who tended to go mechanically through the motions with a brisk, businesslike efficiency. Not that there was anything wrong with that; it was no different from the way he himself operated. But now that he had been handed this prize, it would be refreshing to spend a few weeks having sex with someone who wasn’t quite so practised, someone for whom the art of love-making would be more of a novelty.
Far
