evenly and slowly as she let herself sink down into and be absorbed into her gift for her work. So many things could be learned by this silent communication of touch and flesh, so many secrets withdrawn—he, for instance, was tensing himself against her even though he might be pretending with his steady, even breathing not to be doing so. At some stage in his life he had fallen heavily on his left hip, possibly from a horse. Polo again? There was no obvious damage but she could feel the muscle’s sensitive flutter as it whispered to her of its secret trauma. Automatically she responded to its need, stroking first reassurance and then, once it had accepted her touch, using a deeper, more searching kneading technique to send strength back into it, giving it power and confidence, telling it with her touch that it need not fear, that it could trust itself.
His hair, thick and dark—darker than her own, in fact—would, as she already knew, brush his collar when he was dressed. Now it felt sweetly soft against her fingertips as she swept up over his back and searched out the tensions in his neck muscles. She had been working for nearly fifteen minutes and her own muscles were beginning to ache slightly. Beneath the A-line shift all she was wearing was a pair of boy shorts, a practical decision, she had thought, but one she was regretting now as the movements required by the massage had brought her nipples into the kind of contact with the shift dress that was making them swell and ache. At least she assumed it was the fabric of her uniform.
She had never seen, never mind touched, a man with such a perfect body. She wanted to go on stroking and learning his flesh for ever. The feel of it intoxicated and delighted her whilst the scent of his massage-warmed skin was surely the scent of sensuality and sex itself, distilled to perfection. It possessed her ‘nose’ as physically and completely as though he had actually taken possession of her, causing a weakening of her own muscles and a corresponding ache deep within her belly, a sense of mingling heat and need that flowed up through her, affecting her like alcohol might do a drinker, melting bonds of her inhibitions and taking from her her ability to make rational decisions or to think rational thoughts. Her fingertips traced the long length of his spine, delicately tracing each vertebra. No wonder he stood so tall and proud. She had reached the edge of the towel wrapped low on his hips now. Since his request had been for a deep-textured neck and upper back massage there was no reason for her to be touching his body here. No reason other than her own need to indulge herself. All bodies had their strengths and their weaknesses, their good and their bad, but this body, his body, was so perfectly constructed that the pleasure of touching it was acting on her like a drug. Automatically her fingertips eased down the towel and sought the small indents either side of his spine just above the covered curve of his buttocks. She breathed in slowly and closed her eyes, stroking and circling, savouring the rush of pleasure surging through her as she caressed him.
‘What the hell…?’
The angry curse with which he rejected her unplanned intimacy made her step back, exhaling shakily as her face started to burn at her own lack of professionalism, and then stand completely still as though transfixed. When he had moved away from her he had started to turn over. As he had done so the towel had slipped from his body allowing her to see that, no matter what that angry curse might have been intended to convey, the real evidence of the effect of her touch on him was there for her to see in the thick, strong erection he had inadvertently revealed.
Natalia couldn’t take her gaze off it. He wasn’t the first client with a hard-on she had ever seen, of course; it was a natural and automatic male reaction to female touch, after all, she reminded herself. But this was the first time she had reacted like this to a client. Massage was a form of therapy and healing; she did not use it as an aid to turning herself on. By rights she should apologise, but what was there for her to say? That she had loved the feel of his flesh so much she had wanted to have more of it? Hardly. She bent down, intending to pick up his robe and hand it to him. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he was getting up off the massage table. Would he complain about her to Maya and Howard?
How embarrassing would that be, given the true nature of her business relationship with them? She held out the robe to him, determined not to look at him, but some power greater than her own was obviously at work because against all logic she was reaching out and running her fingertip down the dark line of hair that would take her in only one direction.
She felt him contract his stomach muscles. Against her touch or against his reaction to it?
‘Look,’ she heard him saying bitingly, ‘I don’t want…’ And then abruptly he stopped speaking and swung his legs to the floor, reaching for her as he did so.
The shock of feeling his hands on her flesh beneath her shift sliding up her bare thighs, and then further until his fingers were massaging the rounded curves of her buttocks beneath her underwear, jolted through her, making her shudder in violent mindless pleasure. She could smell as well as feel her own arousal, with its familiar sleek wetness and softly swollen flesh. She had thought she had gone beyond the hyper-sexuality of those late teenage years when learning about her body and its reactions, along with learning about her own desires, had been safely in a haven of deliberately chosen abstinence, where not experiencing sexual desire had been something she had accepted and preferred. But now she was having the security of that comfort wrenched from her, leaving her naked and exposed to what she was feeling. And as to what she was feeling…
Natalia was fighting hard to suppress her unwanted and unacceptable desire, but already she could feel the gathering tightness presaging an orgasm. As though a switch had been thrown inside that part of her mind that regulated how she thought and felt, suddenly she wasn’t sensible, respectable Natalia Carini, bride-to-be of Prince Kadir, but a far more pagan Natalia, who was all hedonistic, sensual woman. Instinctively she struggled to hold back her body’s response—not now out of rejection of her orgasm, but instead because, shockingly, this other Natalia actively wanted to prolong each millisecond of pleasure for as long as she could. Everything about Leon Perez dominated her senses, in a way that flooded past her defences. She had nothing within her experience to hold up to herself as a pattern card of what she could do to stop what she was feeling, because quite simply she had never, ever felt like this before. She longed, not just to touch him, but to taste him as well, to hear the sound of his breathing in the last seconds before he lost control, ragged and tortured in his need to possess her. She wanted to smell the hot, aroused male scent of him as it mingled with her own scent, creating a new fragrance that was unique to them, as potent and alive in its own way as though between them they had created a new life.
But most of all she wanted the experience of feeling him within her, her flesh sheathing his and holding it, her muscles stroking the most pleasurable of all pleasures into his, drawing the essence of life itself from him as sweetly and perfectly as she knew how to draw the essence of its perfume from a flower. It bemused her that she, who prided herself on her mature restraint, should not only feel this depth of passion, but actively relish giving in to it. Why? Because she was about to get married? Because she had not had sex in such a long, long time? Because of him, the man himself?
Of the three options the one she preferred was the second, but wilfully her brain refused to accept her offer of it. The warning of the closed door brought about by her marriage, then? It had to be that. It could not be him, this man. It must not be, she told herself determinedly, knowing she could not allow herself to accept what that might mean.
‘Who are you? What are you…?’ she could hear him demanding thickly as he slid the shift from her body. ‘Or need I ask? No, don’t tell me,’ he answered his own question. ‘Because we both know the answer. You are what your sex knows so well how to be, deceit, full of promises and tricks, all things to all men, for so long as it pleases you to be.’ There was a hard contempt in his voice matched with bitterness and anger, but Natalia was oblivious to its warning and had no sensual space left to hear it, anyway. She was totally lost in the dark surf like curl of pleasure she was riding. Her soft, husky purr of approval at their intimacy swelled into the soft notes of the music and became part of it. Never once had her thoughts ever even come close to conjuring
