broad back felt like warm velvet beneath her clinging fingers, and she could feel the play of powerful muscle beneath the smooth skin. He smelt good too, of cedar and a familiar underlying musk that had her nostrils dilating, greedy for as much of his warm scent as they could hold.
‘You shouldn’t have got that cold.’ His tone was lightly abrasive. ‘You should have come in and told me.’
‘You were asleep,’ she argued by means of a feeble excuse. Already she was feeling better. His body was like a furnace and the bed was becoming nicely warm at last.
‘No, I wasn’t.’
Wasn’t he? Against the warm satin of his shoulder, her brow puckered. Why not? What had kept him awake? ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
She felt the deep wall of his chest expand slightly. ‘Evidently not,’ he scolded, releasing a curiously ragged breath.
A small satisfied sigh escaped Taylor. She had stopped shivering at last. In fact, she was virtually glowing now.
‘Warmer?’ His voice was a lilting caress against her hair.
She murmured an affirmation, and suddenly realised that it wasn’t just his proximity that was warming her blood. Inside her something stirred, something born out of hunger and denial that her body recognised, and to which it was responding, seemingly with a will of its own.
From somewhere in the depths of her consciousness a little voice was struggling to be heard, but her ears were deaf to its futile warning.
She caught the shuddering breath that Jared drew and at the same time became aware of her own shallow breathing, knew that he had to have noticed it too.
Way down in the centre of her abdomen she felt the deep throb of desire, felt its molten message pierce her loins, her aching flesh, the tightening aureoles of her small breasts.
Pulled by something beyond her own volition, she moved restlessly against him, her legs unconsciously massaging the coarse length of his, her body thrilling to the full exciting knowledge of his arousal.
‘Taylor…’ It sounded like a growl, or a hopeless plea, she wasn’t sure which. She only knew that whatever she was feeling, he was feeling it too.
She could almost touch the leashed power of his aggressive virility, the tight-wire tension that packed every nerve and sinew of his body.
For a fraction of a second, her self-preservation shrieked at her to draw back, but it was already too late.
As he groaned, then pushed her on to her back, her senses were already leaping to meet their own destruction and when his mouth came down over hers she arched towards him with a stifled cry, lost in a conflagration of her own need.
Oh, dear heaven! How had she lived without this!
The stubble of his jaw was abrasive on her skin, rough and unbearably arousing, while their mouths blended, breathless and devouring, demanding a deeper knowledge of the other that each knew could only be reached in the most elemental way.
Shudders racked her body as his hard hands slid under the soft fabric of her tunic, seeking, claiming, kneading the slender curves of her eager hips. His massaging fingers moved to splay across the small span of her waist, and Taylor caught her breath as they slid along her ribcage to trace, with tantalising skill, the outer edges of her breasts.
He was and always had been a consummate lover, knowing exactly when to make her wait and when to grant her pleasure. But now she sucked in a breath, moving convulsively against him. How could he deny her when she wanted him so much!
‘Oh God…’ he breathed as though she strained his self-control, and slid his hands over her breasts now as reverently as if he were fondling priceless treasures.
‘Jared…’ It was a small sobbed sound, torn from her as he slid down and pushed back her tunic so that his mouth could close over one breast, his fingers caressing and moulding and teasing the other into throbbing tumescence before his mouth claimed that one too, drawing it into its erotically suckling warmth, sending an agony of exquisite pleasure down through her lower body.
Her fingers were luxuriating in the thickness of his hair, both hands eagerly caressing him, reacquainting themselves with the curve of his head, the coarser hair that formed his sideburns, the hard, exciting structure of his cheek and jaw.
Little murmurs of pleasure escaped her as his lips and hands rediscovered her, spasms bringing her straining against him—this man of whom she could never have enough—inviting, accepting him as sole licensee of her body.
She could feel the fullness of his arousal pressing against her beneath the soft shorts and she wanted to be rid of the barrier, wanted him inside of her, guiding her, controlling her, taking her with him to some other place, some other part of the universe that no one else could share.
She grappled with his waistband, slid her hand beneath it and felt the tightening flesh of a firm buttock. But then he reached down and helped her, pulling the garment free, then tugged her tunic over her head so that they were lying naked together.
The air in the room was like ice on her sensitised body, but that didn’t matter any more. Heat seared her as he came back down to her, causing her to gasp from the electrifying sensation of his warm nakedness.
This was where she belonged! This was where she had always belonged, she told herself feverishly, with no thought for tomorrow. In this man’s arms. In his bed. Giving as much as he demanded of her. And taking too. Taking in turn.
With his lower body pressed against hers, tantalising her with the promise of unbearable pleasure, he lay propped up on his elbows, hesitating, as though gripped by a moment’s doubt, like an undeserving soul unsure whether to take or turn away from the unexpected gift of heaven.
In the darkness, desperately Taylor’s eyes sought his.
Was he harbouring second thoughts? He couldn’t be. She was his and there was nothing she could do about it except take him into her, she reasoned blindly, thrusting her pelvis towards his.
As if that one action had snapped his self-control, he was pushing hard into her, the sudden and rapturous reality of his filling her drawing guttural sobs from her throat.
She was moving with him, joining him in a rhythm that was theirs and had only ever been theirs alone. She felt him sink deeper into her and she moved to accommodate him, winding her legs around him and gripping him hard, locking him to her in a dizzying, primeval rhapsody of the senses.
He groaned, robbed of his powers to do anything but lose himself to the generously offered gift of her femininity. But she had already begun to climax from the powerful thrusts of his body, and she felt the moist warmth of his flowing into her, first as an aphrodisiac, increasing her pleasure, then as a soothing balm after the fierce and throbbing contractions of her own body.
The next thing she knew it was morning. Sunlight was streaming in through a chink in the curtains and Jared’s side of the bed was empty.
The cold struck home as she slipped an arm out of the bed, and she quickly retracted it, reminded all too shockingly that she was naked.
Shame stung her more than the icy temperature in the room. Why had she let him? Let herself? she wondered despairingly. Why,
