‘So you broke out into scarlet and suspenders… Stop trying to spoil my pleasure in the first clear invitation you have ever given me.’ Sholto smoothed the second stocking down a now trembling slender thigh. ‘You have the most beautiful skin…’
‘Have I?’ Her voice emerged high and breathless enough to startle her. Her heart was going thumpety-thumpety-thump in concert with her struggling lungs.
‘The most glorious hourglass shape.’
‘People think I should be a bit thinner,’ Molly mumbled.
‘Never!’ Sholto said with impressive conviction, skimming reverent hands up over the curvaceously feminine swell of her bottom and making her quiver like a leaf in a high wind.
‘Or have one of those breast-reduction ops…’ she whispered almost inaudibly.
‘Who the hell suggested that?’ Sholto demanded wrathfully.
‘Can’t remember,’ she framed breathlessly.
‘You have gorgeous breasts…’
She lost the ability to breathe altogether as long fingers hooked into the panties and slowly, gently eased them in a downward direction. She shot her hands down to cover herself in sudden embarrassment. But Sholto buried his mouth in her stomach, catching her defensive hands briefly with his to still the movement, resting there for a second or two while he felt the wild tremors running through her taut length. ‘And you have my baby cradled in there,’ he said with immense satisfaction.
Molly’s legs were shaking so badly, her hands reached down to clutch wildly at his hair and steady herself. With a rueful laugh he bowed his forehead briefly against the quivering, tensing muscles of her stomach and sighed with only faint regret, ‘Let’s go to bed, piccola mia.’
Sliding fluidly upright, he lifted her high in his arms and gave her one passionately hungry kiss before he laid her gently down on the wide divan bed. She felt as if he had stolen her soul with that one kiss. Her green eyes darkened pools of sheer longing and love, she watched him peel off his clothes with the inherent grace that accompanied his every movement. And she thought fiercely then, He’s mine; he’s more mine now than he’s ever been hers because I have his baby inside me.
‘By the end of three weeks…’ Sholto began lazily.
‘Three weeks?’ she echoed in surprise.
‘By the time we go home, I’ll have you wandering about this island as naked as a jaybird,’ Sholto forecast ambitiously.
‘I don’t think so,’ she warned. ‘Maybe just in a sarong or something,’ she added after careful thought.
He threw back his darkly handsome head and burst out laughing, lion-gold eyes vibrant with amusement. It felt so good to see him relax to that extent. He strolled across to the bed, gloriously unconcerned by his rampant state of arousal, and he could afford to be, Molly conceded, considering that she couldn’t drag her fascinated eyes from that incredibly beautiful and virile sun-bronzed body of his. Deep down inside she was already melting like honey heated to boiling point.
Sholto came down on the bed behind her and curved her back into contact with his warm, hair-roughened chest. ‘You must’ve been tortured wearing this corselette for so many hours,’ he murmured with a hint of guilt, but only a hint.
He dealt with the zip, spread the parted edges of the confection apart and let his hands slide up with hungry possessiveness to cup the fullness of her bared breasts. Molly shuddered in response, eyes half-shut as she watched his knowing brown fingers delicately circle the poutingly erect tips and play on their extreme sensitivity until her head fell back against his shoulder and she was moaning under the shocking intensity of that pleasure, watching abandoned for the greater excitement of simply feeling what he was doing to her shivering, ultra-responsive body.
He brought her round to him when she was just a mass of quivering nerve-endings and she grabbed at him with wild hands to hold him close and kiss him with all the breath left in her body. Wanting, aching, needing more strongly than ever before.
Sholto drew back with a ragged laugh of surprise from the assault. Then he slowly knotted his hand into her madly tumbled hair and looked down into her eyes. ‘That was no one-night stand at Freddy’s house,’ he said softly, dark golden eyes sweeping her suddenly anxious face. ‘It was unbelievably exciting and I lost control and behaved like a rat afterwards but that doesn’t make that night any less special.’
She nodded, throat thickening, vaguely grasping that he was trying to soften her memory of that encounter because that had been the night the baby had been conceived. She buried her face in the satin-smooth hollow of one broad shoulder, snatching in the hot, aroused scent of him as if she couldn’t live without it.
He ran a hand up the extended length of her inner thigh, making every tiny muscle twitch, and then he turned her face back up, holding her still while he kissed with his fingers splayed over her cheekbone. The hot excitement took over again as he explored her with gentle, tormenting fingers, discovering how wantonly moist and ready and unbearably aroused she already was.
He spread her beneath him with a sudden growl of very male hunger but he entered her so slowly, she almost died in the seconds that seemed to her frustrated body to last for ever. She tilted her hips, curved her thighs around him in an invitation as instinctive and old as time itself. He groaned and suddenly surged deep inside her with breathtaking force. She cried out at the height of that hot liquid pleasure and then was lost, utterly abandoned and lost to everything but his driving sexual domination.
‘You’re learning too fast how to push me over the edge,’ Sholto sighed languorously in the aftermath of their third bout of lovemaking, folded round her like a sunbathing big cat, content with satiation. ‘But you’ve had it with non-consummation now and you have no hope whatsoever of catching me on a charge of adultery. I wouldn’t have the energy.’
Molly flinched as if he had slapped her and before she could catch the words back she had opened her mouth and said painfully, ‘But you did the last time!’
Sholto thrust her away from him with positive violence and sat up.
Molly shut her eyes tightly, cursing her lack of concentration, her impulsive tongue and the ruin of a wedding night that had so far been like a dream come true.
‘You really do pick your moments,’ Sholto gritted with clear, cold anger as he sprang off the bed.
A giant lump ached in her throat. ‘Sholto—’ ‘Pandora took an overdose of pills that night,’ Sholto bit out with driven reluctance. ‘She phoned me to tell me what she was going to do and I thought she was crying wolf but I couldn’t afford to rely on that hope. I couldn’t ask anyone else to check up on her either. I had no bloody choice and I am not apologising for that night because she’d be dead if I hadn’t gone over there!’