He touched her in every place but the one place craving his touch. She discovered she had erogenous zones all over her. He let his sensual mouth nip at the extended line of her throat and she was convinced she would burst into flame. He licked her fingers and her very bones seemed to liquefy. He smoothed his palms with aching slowness along the outside of her slender thighs and she burned in absolute torment. And when he started shaping her squirming hips, she clawed him down to her in a tempestuous movement.
‘If you don’t…’ she moaned.
And then he did, and nothing from that point on could have wrenched her from the grip of such torturous excitement. Not thunder, not lightning, not even a full orchestra. Sounds escaped her that she didn’t recognise as her own, and she twisted and she writhed until at last he came over her.
And Luc was trembling too then, dampness sheening his golden skin, the hands that spread her beneath him taut and impatient, dark eyes burnished with raw desire. He entered her in a hungry surging thrust. She cried out loud, out of control, loving it, loving him with such fevered intensity that the pleasure seemed more than she could bear. And as he drove her deeper into that pleasure with long, hard strokes, she felt the great gathering ultimate surge taking her in its hold and just let go, gasping, shuddering, sobbing out his name at the height of ecstasy.
‘I think, mon ange…’ Luc groaned indolently into her hair. ‘I think I shall adapt to being really married with remarkable enthusiasm.’
She shifted indolently against him, enfolded by the most marvellous sense of peace and satiation. Lifting his head, Luc gazed down at her abstracted expression and he laughed softly. ‘You’re still out of it.’
Out of everything, she conceded happily as he traced the relaxed fullness of her reddened lips with a fingertip and gave her the sort of megawatt smile that made her heart sing. ‘Just keep on smiling at me…’
‘I believe I can definitely promise you that.’ His dark drawl husky with sensual amusement, Luc rolled over into a cooler patch of the tumbled bed, but he kept her welded to him with one powerfully possessive arm and covered her mouth very softly with his again.
It felt as if the whole world stood still while he kissed her. Glorious contentment enveloped Star. She closed her arms round him in helpless hunger, revelling in the damp, hard feel of his relaxed length and knowing that she already wanted him again.
Lifting his tousled head, Luc scanned her with stunning dark eyes ablaze with the same awareness. ‘It’s hard to believe that in the early hours of this morning. I was angry and drunk and climbing the walls with sexual frustration…and look at us now.’
Yes, look at us now, Star suddenly thought, tensing at the reminder of that upsetting confrontation during the night. It was as if Luc had pressed a panic button inside her head. Luc seemed to be suggesting that now everything was sorted, as it were. He thought, he had actually just assumed, that he had got what he wanted and that she had now agreed to stay married to him. And why shouldn’t he have made that assumption? Hadn’t she just fallen at abandoned speed back into bed with him again?
‘For the sake of our children,’ he had drawled piously, when he had stated the case for finally making their marriage a real and binding commitment. And didn’t she still love him? Wasn’t this probably the very most Luc was ever likely to offer her? What was she holding out for? Red roses and romance? Chance would be a fine thing! But how much could she even trust in what Luc was saying right now?
‘You know…’ she said uneasily, pulling away from him in a move that took an amount of will-power that embarrassed her. ‘Only last night you were talking like you hated me…’
Faint colour surfaced over his hard cheekbones and he frowned. ‘I still believed that the twins had been fathered by some other man! You never put yourself in my place, mon ange.’
No, now that he said it, she had to admit that she hadn’t ever tried. But then she had never managed to work out what went on inside Luc’s head. However, she suspected that when his emotions became involved Luc’s sense of proportion and his pure logic went out of the window, leaving him vulnerable. How else did she explain an overwhelmingly practical guy who, on the basis of a goodbye note, had had the moat and the lake dragged for her body?