‘To us,’ he told Beth, handing her one of them and raising his own in a toast.
It was red and full-bodied, and it hit Beth’s empty stomach in a warm rich wave that heated her blood, raising her temperature and lowering her resistance.
Having taken another gulp of it, she put down her glass and automatically ran her tongue-tip over her lips. In the firelight she saw Alex’s eyes darken fiercely. He held out his own glass to her and told her softly, ‘Drink.’
As she bent her head and took a sip he watched her, and then very deliberately and very slowly he turned the glass round, so that the place where she had drunk was facing him, and then equally deliberately he raised the glass to his own mouth, drinking from exactly the same spot she had drunk from. It was a simple enough gesture, and also a very explicit one. Beth could feel her heat, the response, the awareness, surge through her body in a jagged sensation as fierce and primitive as the lightning outside.
‘It’s you I’m thirsting for...hungry for...’ Alex told her rawly.
He put down his glass and reached for her, cupping her face as he had done earlier in the day and covering her mouth with his own, his thumb probing the softness of her lower lip, his tongue sliding into the access he had made for it and entwining softly with hers.
And the heat engulfing Beth had nothing whatsoever to do with the fire, nor the sweet film moistening her skin anything to do with the rain hammering down outside.
She did try to be strong, to cling to sanity and reason, reminding herself mentally that it was just desire, just sex, a physical appetite—that was all it was, all he was. But beneath her fingertips she could feel the heavy thudding of Alex’s heart, and Alex himself was urging her to free his body from the restrictive captivity of his clothes, guiding her to buttons and fastenings which, with his help, seemed to come free with almost miraculous speed.
In the firelight his body possessed a magnificence that seemed to echo the feudal ancestry of the castle. He might have been some powerful lord and she a helpless victim of his fiery passion for her, of their mutually fiery passion for one another, Beth amended dizzily as she recognised how eager she was for Alex to return the favour she had done him and help her to become free of her own clothes.
Unlike her, though, Alex seemed to need no extra assistance. Beth shivered on the spasm of sharp expectation that gripped her when Alex’s hands cupped her naked breasts, her nipples surging excitedly against his palms.
Hot, drenching shudders of excitement raced through her body. Alex was the furnace to which the raw molten material of her desire was drawn.
Slowly Alex removed her clothes, his gaze drinking in the sight of her naked, firelight-washed body. Beth felt as wanton and wild as though she were some long-ago earthy and elemental woman, sure and knowing in her awareness of her own sexuality and desirability.
The pride, the pleasure she felt in her own body as Alex sensuously absorbed the sight, the touch, the scent of her, watching her, stroking his hands over her skin as he shaped her, breathing in what he told her was the unforgettably precious sweet Beth-scent of her, totally banished any self-consciousness or doubt she might have felt.
Here, in the shadowed darkness of this fortress castle which had, over the centuries, seen all the worst and all the best of every human passion, it seemed to Beth everything she felt about herself and about Alex was reduced to its purest and most basic components.
She was a woman; he was a man. She wanted him, ached for him, needed him, and she could see the corresponding intensity of his need for her both in his body and in his eyes.
He might have been her lover returning to her from the heat of battle, their coming together a fierce celebration of the fact that he was still alive; she might have been the virgin bride of the lord of this domain, giving herself to him in a solemn rite of passage.
Before them, in this place, there must have been so many, many earlier lovers, and Beth could almost feel the echoes of their loving echoing the heavy thud of her own heart.
‘Have you any idea how much I’ve wanted to do this?’ Alex groaned as he took hold of her hand, placing it palm to palm against his own, lacing his fingers with hers and then lifting their clasped hands to his mouth whilst he kissed her ring finger.
Against her will Beth felt her own emotional reaction to what he was doing. This was the embodiment of her most private romantic dreams. This was how she had always imagined that a lover, her chosen lover, would cherish and desire her. A lover who would be both humble and held in thrall to the intensity of his desire for her and yet, too, the master of it, and of her.
‘I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,’ Alex was telling her huskily.
Love at first sight.
Beth’s heart gave a dizzying lurch. It must be the wine that was making her so dangerously tempted to believe him, that was making her want to believe him.
‘We hardly know one another,’ she protested in a whisper.
‘I know I want you,’ Alex returned. ‘I know I love you. I know that your body quivers with pleasure when I touch it so.’
His fingertips trailed liquid fire down her breastbone and over her belly before curling and tugging erotically, gently, on the soft tangle of curls below. As he released them Beth exhaled a long, shaky sigh that ended in a sharp gasp as his fingertip moved lower, finding the delicate cleft of the soft flesh that protected her intimacy. Like the petals
of a flower opening to the sure touch of a nectar-seeking bee her body started to respond to his touch.
‘And I certainly know what you’re doing to me.’ Alex’s voice groaned thickly in her ear. ‘Feel it, Beth,’ he begged her. ‘Feel me!’
A little hesitantly at first, but then with growing confidence, Beth spread her hands across his chest, closing her eyes in sensual pleasure as she absorbed the silken heat of his skin. Almost of their own volition her hands moved downwards, beyond the taut arch of Alex’s ribcage and over the male flatness of his belly, so masculinely different from hers with its soft curves and sweetly feminine flesh. Very gently, as though just to reassure herself that she hadn’t imagined it, Beth moved her hands upwards again, resting her fingertips on the solid rectangle of muscle that formed the male shape of Alex’s tough, firm stomach. He wasn’t overly muscular, a gym freak whose muscular development was too exaggerated to be truly desirable; he was just right, Beth acknowledged inwardly—perfect...
She hadn’t realised she had said the soft, satisfied words of praise out loud until she heard Alex growl and tell her, ‘You know traditionally what happens when you praise someone like that, don’t you...?’
‘Mmm...it makes their head swell,’ Beth murmured back absently, and then realised, from what Alex was doing with her hand as he took it and placed it very deliberately and very intimately on his own body, just exactly what he’d meant.