manhood. Her knees suddenly had all the consistency of jelly and her hands flew up to grip his shoulders. 'A month is a very long time for me.'
And dinner was now a long way off, she sensed, her cheeks burning fierily. With a husky laugh of satisfaction, Alex raked shimmering golden eyes of desire over her and suddenly swept her off her feet and up into his arms. 'You still blush like a virgin,' he teased, starting towards the door.
She felt hot all over when he put her down again in the bedroom and slid down the zip on her dress. This is all right, she told herself urgently; this is normal, natural, healthy behaviour. We're married. It's OK to want him so much that you're ashamed of yourself. It is not OK to start imagining you're just a sex object again. Narrow-minded prudes are boring.
The dress pooled round her feet. She resisted an instinctive urge to cover herself. Alex's gaze locked with hers. His sensual mouth slashed into a knowing smile.
She broke breathlessly into speech. 'Alex, I-'
But, reaching for her, he bent his dark, well-shaped head and silenced her with the heat of his hungry mouth. And the ground shifted below her feet. He kissed her and there was nothing but him and the hot, swirling darkness behind her lowered eyelids. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him back with all the helpless urgency of her own need, her heartbeat a wild thunder in her ears, the blood in her veins pulsing at supersonic speed. She was dizzy when he lifted his head again, her passion-glazed eyes clinging to his.
He undid the catch on her lacy white bra and she stopped breathing altogether as he curved a hand round the pointed swell of one bared breast and brushed his thumb across its pouting pink nipple. A whimper of sound escaped low in her throat as an electric jolt of pleasure shot through her, the distended peaks of her breasts achingly sensitive to his awakening touch. He backed her down onto the bed, stood over her while he undressed. Smouldering golden eyes raked over her and be smiled with satisfaction.
'You always wanted me,' he said. I Her mind locked back into gear. 'No…'
But the accusation lingered and sent her memory flying back through countless uneasy encounters when she had dipped her eyes, turned her head and closed her mind even to an admission of what she was doing. She had blocked Alex out over and over again-so often that it had become a habit never, ever to relax around him, always to feel strained, threatened…
'You had iron self-discipline… and you were stubborn. You knew the attraction was there between us but you wouldn't admit it. It drove me crazy,' Alex told her, peeling off his shirt without once removing his intent gaze from her bemused face. 'I was afraid to make a move in case you walked out. You kept a wall between us, you never came close… you never touched me, not even accidentally.'
Involuntarily she recalled innumerable instances of her own pronounced caution in his radius. Remembering scared her. It was scary to accept that all along her body had been conscious of this powerful attraction but that her mind had resisted even acknowledging it until that day when he had walked into her office and she had told herself that she was not susceptible. That had been her first conscious admission of what Alex could make her feel. 'I didn't know,' she muttered
'You do now.' Alex folded himself lithely down on the bed beside her and tugged her into his arms, and the thinking stopped there as if he had pushed a button. Her nostrils flared with the scent of him and she trembled as his long, lean muscularity connected with her. She met his eyes and burned in the defenceless heat of anticipation, her breasts rising and falling with the quickening of her breathing, excitement stirring so fast again that it took her by storm.
He lowered his head and let the tip of his tongue graze a rose-pink bud, skimming a hand up over the tautness of her quivering ribcage, discovering the thunder of her racing heartbeat as her whole body leapt in response to that tiny caress.
'Alex…' she gasped.
'Feeling like this is special, bellamia,' he muttered raggedly. 'Dio… you are so beautiful.'
With unsteady fingers she caressed his cheekbone, wanting, wanting him so much that it was like a pain inside her as her thighs tightened on the ache in her loins. His eyes narrowed with smoky desire and then he curved his hands round her pale breasts, touching, inciting her pouting nipples before he dropped his mouth there and tugged at the tormented peaks with an erotic precision that engulfed her in a scorching surge of sensation. Her fingernails dug into the hard muscles of his back and then pushed through his hair as her body rose up to his of its own volition, tiny little gasps of sensual pleasure tearing free from deep in her throat.
His fingers stroked the smooth skin of her inner thigh, mounting higher by torturous degrees that made her clutch at him in involuntary protest, drag him up again, find his mouth again for herself and exult in the hungry thrust of his tongue. He skimmed a finger over the satin mound of her bikini pants so that she twisted and moaned under his mouth in a sweet agony of desperate need. And then the frustrating barrier was gone and he was expertly exploring the honeyed dampness beneath, sending her swerving violently out of control, every muscle screaming with tension as her heartbeat hammered.
Now…'Alex groaned when she was on the brink of an intolerable excitement.
Her gaze collided blindly with his and then he pulled her up to receive him and drove into her hard and fast and her head fell back and she cried out with the hot, torturous pleasure of that penetration, her body yielding to the forceful possession of his. He moved again with sinuous eroticism and the pleasure increased to such unbearable limits that she lost herself entirely. With every tormenting stroke he took her higher and her nails raked down his smooth back as her spine arched and the sunburst heat in her loins suddenly expanded, every muscle clenching in response as she went flying over the edge into a release that convulsed her in violent waves.
In the aftermath she clung to him, recalling the won-drously intimate feel of him shuddering with that same satisfaction in the circle of her arms. A glorious sense of well-being enclosed her. She was at peace, perfectly at peace, until she became aware of the intense happiness which was fostering that quiet contentment. It was that unquestionable feeling of joy which shook Sara the most.
Alex rolled over, carrying her with him, and her arms instinctively tightened round his hot, damp, sleekly muscled length because… because she didn't want to let him go. Concealed by the wild tumble of her hair as she rested her cheek against his shoulder, her eyes flew wide at that alarming awareness. She also recognised within herself a surge of raw feminine possessiveness and that made her shiver in shock.
'Cold?'Alex tugged the sheet up carefully over her shifted again beneath her, like a cat stretching in sunlight. She knew that he was smiling. 'Much better without the brandy,' he murmured huskily.
Sara tensed. 'I wasn't drunk.'
'But you weren't quite sober either,' Alex interposed with rueful emphasis. 'I promised you that you could trust me that night. I wasn't lying when I said that, bellamia. But I overestimated the limits of my self-control. I didn't really care why you wanted me. It was enough that you did.'
One crazy night, Sara thought, and it had changed her life. 'Why all the flowers?' she whispered curiously.
'Guilt,' he said succinctly.
'Guilt?' She pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked up at him with a frown.
His expressive mouth twisted. 'I wasn't expecting it to be your first time, cara. For a woman that is a significant event and you weren't a teenager any more, you were twenty-three, which suggested that abstention had been a deliberate policy. I didn't think you were likely to feel as reckless in the morning as you had the night before.'
'You were right.' Her creamy skin turned pink and if she hadn't still been too shy to discuss their intimacy of that night she might have told him that he had made it a very significant event. Even in her angry turmoil of regret, she had known that Alex had made their love-making feel special. But then why not?she reflected ruefully. Alex was a very experienced lover. At a tender nineteen, an age when she had still been at the stage of fumbling kisses on doorsteps, Alex had been living in no doubt very exciting sin with an older woman. Who had seduced whom? she wondered, and then suppressed the thought, scolding herself for such tasteless, inappropriate curiosity.
Alex absorbed the distant look in her green eyes. His dark scrutiny glittering, he lifted her away from him and tumbled her carelessly down onto a cool patch in the spacious bed as he slid out of it. 'I'm hungry, cara. There's still plenty of time to make dinner.'
His abrupt withdrawal sharply disconcerted Sara. She watched him stroll into the bathroom, stared in consternation at the scratches marring the smooth, bronzed perfection of his back and dropped her head again, the warmth of that curious joy inside her ebbing fast. She began to wonder fearfully if the only time she would feel secure and important to Alex was when he was in bed with her, satisfying his desire.
