‘But it’s also an exception because it embraces you and I want you more than I’ve wanted any woman in a very long time,’ Sergei imparted with charged urgency.
‘You’re only trying to justify yourself,’ Alissa reasoned in growing desperation.
‘Of course I am, dorogaya moya,’ he responded with immense assurance. ‘I’ve made my fortune from being a very adaptable man. We are together for the foreseeable future and will be living in the most intimate of connections—what is logical and reasonable should guide our behaviour.’
As his masculine gaze flamed over her Alissa snatched in a sharp breath, for his keen appraisal was making her feel as self-conscious as if she were already naked. And she saw no logic whatsoever in being wildly attracted to a guy so far removed from her in terms of wealth and status. Indeed, she saw only disaster. ‘It would just complicate things,’ she muttered in feverish rebuttal.
Sergei knew women. She couldn’t stop staring at him, Her pupils were dilated, her lips moistly parted, her breathing audible. He could sense how close he was to victory. ‘I don’t do complicated. Trust me I’ll keep it straightforward.’
Confident as ever, he lowered his handsome dark head, his luxuriant black hair gleaming in the light of the lamp she had lit to chase the wintry darkness of late afternoon. He pressed a teasing kiss to the corner of her tremulous lips. Instantly, revealingly, she turned her head straight into the kiss, lips parting in readiness for the exhilarating plunge of his tongue. Low in her throat she moaned when he gave her what she longed for in that first kiss and a knot of gathering sexual tension clenched tight in her pelvis, leaving her awesomely aware of her body.
How could she possibly trust him? He was notorious with women. If a supermodel or a famous actress couldn’t hold him for longer than five minutes, what hope had she? But his unashamed single-minded desire for her excited Alissa and ensured that she felt truly feminine and attractive for the first time in her life. Even so she was uneasily conscious of her inexperience and suspected that it might shock him, possibly even repulse him. He shifted against her, one hand cupping her hips to tilt her to him so that she could feel the urgent vigour of the erection tenting the fine fabric of his trousers. A quiver of pure hunger, as sharp as it was painful in its intensity, slivered through her.
Sergei unclipped the bra with one hand and drew it down her arms before succumbing to the temptation of looking at her beautifully formed breasts. He cupped the pert mounds in reverent fingers. ‘You are a work of art.’
His fingers brushed the lush pouting buds that crowned the full swells. He was already as hard as steel and he vented an earthy groan of appreciation and backed her down on the bed, his mouth swooping down to capture a quivering nipple to tease it with the slick of his tongue and the edge of his teeth.
That sweet torment of sensation arrowed straight down to the hot damp place between her thighs and raised her temperature to a tingling height. Her hips squirmed in a rhythm as old as time. She dragged him up to kiss her again, rejoicing in his passion but desperately hungry for more. Her untried body was soaking up every new sensation like a sponge and responding with increasing demands.
The level of her response astounded Sergei. He reeled back from her to haul at his shirt and she leant over him, tugging frantically at buttons with an eager lack of sophistication and dexterity that he found tremendously attractive.
The shirt finally conquered with the loss of only one button, Alissa studied his golden-toned torso and the pelt of curling black hair accentuating his pectoral muscles and felt weak with longing. She let her hands run unsteadily down over his stomach, felt his taut muscles contract in reaction and pressed her lips to a masculine nipple, headily drinking in the familiar smell of his skin.
‘Yizihkom,’ he breathed thickly.
‘In English?’ Alissa gasped.
Sergei tipped up her chin, dark golden eyes smouldering with sexual heat. ‘Use your tongue,’ he translated thickly, wondering at her tentative caresses and the way in which his advice caused immediate hot colour to rise in her cheeks.
Knowing she needed all the help she could get, Alissa obliged, keen to please him as much as he had pleased her and driven on by the fire of craving at the heart of her. He tasted every bit as good as he looked and had he not pushed her back onto the mattress to torment the hard buds of her sensitised nipples, she would certainly have become more daring. Her downfall was complete when he employed a seeking hand below the lace panties and found the precise spot to tease, destroying what remained of her self control. With a helpless cry she arched up to him and he crushed her mouth below his, his tongue meshing with hers in an erotic dance.
‘Please…oh, please!’ Alissa moaned, burning with all-encompassing need and beyond thought.
With a roughened curse half under his breath, Sergei ripped off her panties and discovered the warm wet welcome awaiting him with a savage sound of overpoweringly male satisfaction. Springing upright, he dis
pensed with his own clothing while she looked up at him with dazed eyes of need.
He was so beautiful—a pagan vision of bronzed muscular power and energy. He was also very aroused and her first sight of a fully erect male was daunting.
‘We’ll never fit!’ she told him before she could think better of it.
Sergei laughed out loud, for it struck him as such a naïve and irrational comment from a woman who had stated in an interview that she considered herself very much a woman of the world and comfortable with men. ‘I am so hot for you, I am in pain,’ he confessed, coming down to her again.
He entered her hard and fast and she yelped and flinched with pain.
An incredulous look in his hot golden gaze, as he had felt the resistance of her flesh to his invasion, he growled, ‘You cannot be a virgin…’
‘Why? Is there a law against it?’ Alissa countered, her low voice raw with embarrassment and the lingering shards of discomfort still throbbing through her tender flesh.
‘Do you want me to stop?’ Sergei was frozen with frustration and a hunger that made him tremble because the lush, tight fit of her tiny body round him was extraordinarily pleasurable.
He was already trying and failing to replace the image of the woman he had thought she was with the woman she now appeared to be. He had picked a wife he’d believed would spring no surprises on him. Better the devil you know, he had decided, and who had more experience than he of shallow, unemotional and mercenary women? Instead he had found himself a virgin and suddenly he understood the blushes and the awkwardness and the confusing signals she gave him. He studied her from below the screen of his ink-black lashes and the rarity of the gift she had given him finally struck him. She was his wife and no one but him had ever got this intimate with her. It was a thought that had strong appeal for a male as discerning as he was. The disturbing surprise suddenly became a cause for celebration.
‘Don’t stop,’ she breathed, helpless in the grip of the erotic heat and intensity still roaring through her.
Expelling his breath in a hiss of relief, Sergei began to move again while exerting every atom of control that he could muster. He responded well to challenge and he was determined to exceed whatever expectations she had of the event. His fluid increase in tempo sent excitement flashing through Alissa faster than an express train and fuelled her need. She bucked under him and sobbed with startled pleasure when he employed slow subtle movements that tormented her with sensation. She couldn’t control anything that she was feeling and what she was feeling was incredibly powerful. The hunger stoked by his passion reached a frantic height when every part of her was pitched to an unbearable degree of longing and then in a breathless heartbeat she reached an ecstatic climax. As she writhed under him in frenzied abandonment, wave after wave of pleasure convulsing her slender body, Sergei enjoyed the longest and most stupendous release of his life. His superb body shuddering over her, he tasted the ecstasy.
A split second later, he was wondering with an amount of alarm that shook him whether that single act of stunning sex might get her pregnant. And he didn’t want her carrying a child too soon, did he? Momentarily, Sergei, who never, ever deviated from a goal once he was set on it, was plunged into genuine bewilderment by his own change of heart on the baby issue. But when she conceived, it would surely be a case of game over as far as the bedroom was concerned and he really did not want to put her out of commission in the first month. That said, however, his priorities were unchanged, he reassured himself confidently: he was simply taking a rain check on that objective. Why shouldn’t he want to enjoy his bride for a while? There wasn’t a man alive who would not want to make the most of a woman who gave him that much pleasure between the sheets, he reasoned, his tension ebbing again. Releasing her from his weight, he anchored her to him with an appreciative arm.