Sander was coming towards her, standing in front of her, lifting his hands to slide the straps of her dress off her shoulders as he told her softly, ‘But you will look even more beautiful without it.’
The words were nothing, and yet at the same time they were everything. Ruby trembled from head to foot, hardly daring to breathe as Sander unzipped her dress so that it could fall to the floor and then cupped the side of her face and kissed her.
She was in Sander’s arms, and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him back. Kissing him back, holding him, feeling all her doubts and fears slipping away from her like sand sucked away by the sea as her love for him claimed her.
The sensation of Sander’s hands on her body, shaping it and caressing it, carried her on a surging tide of her own desire, like a tribute offered to an all powerful conqueror. His lightest touch made her body shudder softly in swiftly building paroxysms of pleasure. She had hungered to have him desire her like this, without the harsh bitterness of his anger. In the deepest hidden places of her heart Ruby recognised that, even if she had hidden that need from herself. She had hungered, ached, and denied that aching—yearned for him and forbidden that yearning. But now, here tonight in his arms, the lies she had told to protect herself were melting away, burned away by the heat of his hands on her body, leaping from nerve-ending to nerve-ending. Beneath Sander’s mouth Ruby moaned in heightened pleasure when his thumb-pad rubbed over her nipple, hot, sweet and aching need pulsing beneath his touch. Her body was clamouring for him to free it, to lay it bare to his eyes, his hands, his mouth, so that he could plunder its desire, feed it and feast on it, until she could endure the ache of her own need no longer and she clung to him whilst he took her to the heights and the final explosion that would give him all that she was and all that she had to give, make her helpless under the power of his possession and her own need for it, for him.
This was how it had been that first night in Manchester, with her senses overwhelmed by the intensity of what she was experiencing. So much so, in fact, that she had scarcely noticed the loss of her virginity. She’d been so desperate for his possession and for the pleasure it had brought her.
She was his, and Sander allowed himself to glory in that primeval knowledge. His body was on fire for her, aching beyond bearing with his need for her, but he wanted to draw out their pleasure—to savour it and store the unique bouquet of it in his memory for ever. He bent and picked her up, carrying her through into the bedroom, their gazes meeting and locking in the sensually charged warmth of the dimly lit room.
‘I’ve never forgotten you—do you know that? I’ve never been able to get your memory out of my head. The way you trembled against me when I touched you, the scent of your skin, the quick, unsteady way you breathed when I did this.’
Ruby fought to suppress her breathing now, as Sander caressed the side of her neck and then stroked his fingertips the length of her naked spine.
‘Yes, just like that.’
Helplessly Ruby whimpered against the lash of her own pleasure, protesting that Sander was tormenting her and she couldn’t bear any more, but Sander ignored her, tracing a line of kisses along her shoulderblade. When he had done that the first time she had arched her back in open delight, helpless against the onslaught of her own desire. Sander lifted her arm and began kissing the inside of her wrist and then the inside of her elbow. He had never known that it was possible for him to feel like this, Sander acknowledged. The sensual sweetness of Ruby’s response to him was crashing through all the defences he had raised against the way she was making him feel.
He kissed her mouth, probing its soft, welcoming warmth with his tongue, whilst Ruby trembled against him, her naked body arching up to his, the feel of her skin through his clothes a torment he could hardly bear.
Ruby was lost beneath the hot, intimate possession of Sander’s kiss—a kiss that was sending fiery darts of arousal and need rushing through her body to turn the existing dull ache low down within it into an open pulsing need. Her breasts yearned for his touch, her nipples throbbing and swollen like fruit so ripe their readiness could hardly be contained within their skin. She wanted to feel his hands on her body, stroking, caressing, satisfying her growing need. Wanted his lips kissing and sucking the ache from her breasts and transforming it to the liquid heat of pleasure. But instead he was pulling away from her, lifting his body from hers, abandoning her when she needed him so desperately. Frantically Ruby shook her head, her protest an inarticulate soft moan as she sat up in the bed.
As though he knew how she felt, and what she feared, Sander reached for her hand and carried it to his own body, laying it flat against the hard swell of his flesh under the fabric of his suit trousers, his gaze never leaving her face as it registered her passion stoked delight in his erection, and its sensual underlining of his own desire for her.
Very slowly her fingertips traced the length and thickness of his flesh, everything she was feeling visible to him in the soft parting of her mouth, the brief flick of her tongue-tip against her lips and the excitement darkening her absorbed gaze.
Impatiently Sander started to unfasten his shirt. Distracted by his movements, Ruby looked up at him and then moved closer, kneeling on the bed in front of him as she took over the task from him. She leaned forward to kiss the flesh each unfastened button exposed, and then gave in to the impulse driving her to know more than the warmth of his skin against her lips, stroking her tongue-tip along his breastbone, breathing in the pheromone-laden scent of his body as it shuddered beneath her caress. His chest was hard-muscled, his nipples flat and dark. Lost in the heady pleasure of being so close to him, Ruby reached out and touched the hard flesh with her fingertip, and then on an impulse that came out of nowhere she bent her head and kissed the same spot, exploring it with the tip of her tongue.
Reaction ricocheted through Sander, engulfing and consuming him. He’d been unfastening his trousers whilst Ruby explored him, and now he wrenched off what was left of his clothes before taking Ruby in his arms to kiss her with the full force of his building need.
The sensation of Sander’s body against her, with no barriers between them, swept away what were left of Ruby’s inhibitions. Wrapping her arms around Sander’s neck, she clung to him, returning his kiss with equal passion, sighing her approval when his hands cupped her breasts.
This was what his heart had been yearning for, Sander admitted. This giving and receiving, this intimacy with no barriers, this woman above all women. Ruby was everything he wanted and more, Sander acknowledged, making his own slow voyage of rediscovery over Ruby’s silk-soft body.
Sander prided himself on being a skilled lover, but he had never been in this position before. He had never felt like this before. He wasn’t prepared for his own reaction to the way he felt. He wasn’t prepared for the way it powered his own desire to a level he had never known before, threatening his self-control, creating within him a desire to possess and pleasure every part of her, to bring her to orgasm over and over again, until he possessed her pleasure and her with it. He wanted to imprint himself on her desire so that no other man cou
ld ever unlock its sweetness. He wanted her, Sander acknowledged, and he fed the fast-surging appetite of his own arousal on the sound of her unsteady breathing, interspersed with sobs of pleasure, as he sucked on the hard peaks of her nipples and kneaded the soft flesh of her breasts.
Ruby arched up towards him, her hands clasped on the back of his neck to hold him against her. She had thought that Sander had already taken her to the utmost peak of sensual pleasure, but she had been wrong. Now, with the barriers between them down, she knew that what had gone before had been a mere shadow of what she was feeling now. Lightning-fast bolts of almost unbearable erotic arousal sheeted through her body with every tug of Sander’s mouth on her nipples, going to ground deep inside her, feeding the hot pulse already beating there, until merely arching up against him wasn’t enough to appease the savage dragging need possessing her. Instead she had to open her legs and press herself against him, her breath catching on a grateful moan of relief when Sander responded to her need with the firm pressure of his hand over her sex.
Against his hand Sander could feel the heavy pulsing beat of Ruby’s need. It drove the ache within his own flesh to a maddening desire to take her quickly and hotly, making him fight for the self-control that threatened to desert him when he parted the swollen outer lips of her sex to find the wetness within them.
It was almost more than Ruby could stand to have Sander touching her so intimately, and yet at the same time nowhere nearly intimately enough. His fingertip rimmed the opening to her sex. A fresh lightning bolt shot through her. She could feel her body opening to him in eagerness and hunger, heard a sound of agonised relief bubbling in her throat when Sander slid one and then two fingers slowly inside her.
He didn’t need Ruby’s fingers gripping his arm or her nails digging into his flesh to tell him what she was feeling. Sander could feel her need in his own flesh and hers as the movement of her body quickened and tightened. Even before she cried out to him he was aware of her release, and the quick, fierce pleasure of her orgasm filled his own body with fierce male satisfaction, swelling his sex to a hard urgency to play its part in more of that pleasure.
But not yet—not until he was sure that he had given her all the pleasure he could.
For Ruby, the sensation of Sander’s lips caressing their way down her supine body was initially one of relaxed easy sweetness—a tender caress after the white-hot heat that had gone before it. She had no intimation, no warning of the fresh urgency to come, until Sander’s lips drifted across her lower belly and the ache she had thought satisfied began to pulse and swell in a new surge of need that shocked her into an attempt to deny its existence.
But Sander wouldn’t let her. Her protests were ignored, and the growing pleasure of her wanton flesh was cherished with hot swirls of desire painted on her inner thighs by the stroke of his tongue—a tongue that searched out her desire even more intimately, until its movement against the hard swollen pulse of her clitoris had her abandoning her self-control once more and offering herself up to him.
This time her orgasm was short and sharp, leaving her trembling on the edge of something more. Agonised by the ache of that need, Ruby reached out to touch Sander’s body, but he stopped her, shaking his head as he told her thickly, ‘No. Don’t. Let me do this instead.’
She could feel the glide of his body against her own, his sex hard and slick, probing the eager moistness of hers, and her muscles quickened in eager longing, matching each slow, deliberate ever deeper thrust of his body within her own.
Aaahhh—how she remembered the first time he had shown her this pleasure and revealed its mystery. The way it had taken her beyond that small sharp pain which had caught at her breath and held her motionless beneath his thrust for a handful of seconds before her arousal had made its own demands on her, her muscles softening to enfold him, just as they were doing now, then firming to caress him, her body driven by its need to have him ever deeper within her.