She felt his reaction jolt right through him, as though her touch had burned him, but the drift of her fingertips had been as light as the wings of a butterfly.
‘You want me, Ran,’ she whispered shakily, ‘and I want you...’
And then, without waiting for his response, she turned her back on him and walked very slowly and very deliberately to her bedroom door.
Once there she turned round and looked at him gravely.
He was still standing where she had left him, his face unfamiliarly pale, his eyes blazing with...
Quickly she looked away and then, before her courage could desert her, she tugged open the buttons of her borrowed shirt and shrugged it off.
Standing still and naked in full view of Ran whilst he watched her in silence was probably the hardest thing she had ever had to do, she acknowledged, but, somehow, doing it made her feel strong and brave and very, very womanly.
There was an odd glittering brilliance in Ran’s eyes, and her stomach muscles tensed as she saw the way his jaw tightened as he looked away from her.
‘Ran...’ she commanded softly.
‘Sylvie, for God’s sake...’
Ignoring the tough grimness in his voice, she turned her back and walked fully into her small bedroom. Seconds later he had followed her there, slamming the bedroom door shut as he bent to retrieve her discarded shirt.
‘Here. Put it back on,’ he ordered curtly.
Sylvie looked at him.
He was standing just over an arm’s length away from her and she could see that despite the hardness of his jaw his body was still aroused.
Uncertainly she licked her lips, tiny flames of excited nervousness flicking along her spine as she saw the way his glance followed her involuntary movement.
‘You put it on for me, Ran,’ she whispered provocatively, taking a step towards him, and then another, and then, before she could stop herself, she discovered that she was the one looking at his mouth, and then at just where...
She heard him groan, saw out of the corner of her eye Alex’s shirt as he hurled it away and then, blissfully, she was in his arms, her naked body pressed close against his fully dressed one as he covered her face, her throat, her mouth with hot, fevered kisses.
In his arms Sylvie shivered in mute delight. Every nerve-ending in her body was singing in joy and triumph.
‘Oh Ran... Ran...’ She whispered his name ecstatically as she wrapped her arms around him. ‘I want you so much... I love you so much...’ she told him, but she doubted he heard the words because they were silenced before she could properly form them as he continued to kiss her.
‘I want you to take your clothes off,’ she told him huskily when she finally could speak. ‘I want to see all of you, Ran... I want...’
There was a hooded and unbelievably exciting look about his eyes as he stepped back from her and started to comply with her shy demand, never removing his glance from hers as he thrust off his clothes, his shirt first, revealing the hard-muscled expanse of his chest with its male pattern of silky dark hair. Sylvie caught her breath as she watched him. She had seen his bare torso before, had seen him in fact wearing little more than a pair of swimming shorts, but somehow this...this was different Then his attitude towards his own semi-nudity had been laid-back and totally sexless; now...
Sylvie licked her lips a second time as she caught the burning look he was giving her.
His jeans followed his shirt and her stomach quivered, her heart leapt like a spawning salmon. Against the stark whiteness of his boxer shorts his skin gleamed, warmly tanned, and his body...his maleness...
Quickly she averted her eyes, suddenly conscious of her inexperience, her naiveté, her virginity, but her self-consciousness was quickly forgotten, swept away in a dizzying tide of longing and excitement. In another handful of seconds, less, she would be free to do what she had longed to do for what felt like for ever, free to look, to touch...to...
‘Ran...’
Helplessly she closed the distance between them, rubbing her face blissfully against the soft warmth of his chest, breathing in the male scent of him in bemused adoration before shyly pressing her closed lips to his skin.
He felt so good, smelled so good; tentatively she opened her eyes and then her mouth, licking exploratively at his skin. In her ear she could feel the rapid increase in Ran’s heartbeat. His arms tightened around her and then, suddenly, he was picking her up, carrying her over to the bed, laying her on it, touching her skin, stroking her body, kissing her in all the ways she had imagined and showing her at the same time just how far short of the wondrous reality her imagination had fallen.
In his hands her breasts swelled and ached, her nipples taut, begging to be touched, kissed, sucked.
Unable to stop herself, Sylvie started to moan softly as his mouth tugged gently on her breast, her body arching, twisting, filled, driven by such an intensity of need that she herself was lost in it.
‘Ran... Ran...’