??Pining?’ he repeated.
‘It’s obvious.’ She shrugged, then made the big mistake of glancing at the bed.
His dark gaze followed suit. One of those awful tense silences they were so good at developing began to sing in the room. Hot colour flooded her complexion; she spun back to the window, wishing the man wasn’t so good at reading her like an open book!
Did she have to be so obvious? she railed at herself. Did it always—always—have to be this man who made her feel like a lovesick fool?
Sex-sick, she then corrected. God, she hated herself sometimes. ‘Go, if you’re going,’ she snapped. Make it quick and don’t come back!
‘I have changed my mind.’
‘Not on my account.’ She tried to recover lost ground.
But she should have known by now that this man gave nothing back once he had gained it. She heard a rustle, felt a shot of alarm shoot down her backbone, spun, then just stood there staring in open dismay as the jacket to his suit hit the floor.
‘Come any closer and I’ll start screaming,’ she warned, backing herself into the window as he began walking towards her with fingers smoothly loosening his tie.
‘Scream,’ he invited. ‘Who will come? Your cynical friend from next door?’ Reaching over her shoulder, he tugged the cord that closed the heavy curtains. The room was suddenly shrouded in darkness. A dangerous glitter burned in his eyes. ‘Think of the embarrassment, Melanie, if Miss Elliot was foolish enough to come running in here only to find you begging in my arms.’
‘I will never beg!’ She gave an angry push at his body.
He laughed, low and deep and tauntingly. ‘One kiss and you will not be able to stop yourself,’ he derided. ‘Do you think I have not been aware that you have hardly slept a wink in that bed because you want me so badly?’
‘That’s a lie.’
He kissed her. It was no lie. She dived, she fell, she almost—almost begged him. Her breathing went haywire, her senses caught alight, and she whimpered into his urgent mouth. His arms imprisoned her, but they didn’t need to. She was clinging tightly.
‘I hate you for doing this.’
‘But, as you see, I am not pining for a lost love,’ he murmured, and to punctuate his meaning he caught hold of one of her hands and placed it down his front, then caught her protesting little gasp in his mouth.
Desire pulsed with every hammering heartbeat; it bounced off the walls and back at her in wave after wave of blistering passion, battering her every sense into submission. They kissed; they lost their clothes with an urgent lack of finesse. Somehow they managed to make it to the bed; his hand grabbed the duvet and stripped it back from the mattress before he tumbled her down on it. They kissed some more; they rolled; he stretched her out and ravished her breasts, then placed a line of hot wet kisses down her front; he buried his mouth between her thighs. She almost leapt into the air in shock, then went wild, utterly wanton. Bright hot lights were propelling themselves at her eyelids; she couldn’t keep still and his hands had to clamp her hips so he could sustain the torment until she lost herself completely, lost him, lost everything.
When she opened heavy eyelids she found black eyes glittering down at her, his face a smouldering cast of raw sensuality made all the more potent by triumph. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she whispered.
‘Why not?’ The hand he used to push the damp hair away from her face was trembling.
‘Because…’ she breathed. He hadn’t leapt with her, and she wanted him to leap with her. It was essential that he lose touch with himself as she had, or what had he proved here except that he was the expert and she was just somebody, nobody—anybody?
So she pushed him onto his back and came to lean over him, calling upon instincts she had never used before to take him where she had just been. He lay in the darkness and let her do whatever she wanted. She kissed his shoulders, his chest, sucked deeply on the hard points of his male nipples, stroked her hands down his body when he groaned hoarsely, took her mouth on a journey that stopped at nothing. His fingers coiled into her hair and his laboured breathing drove her on. When he shifted to grasp her beneath her arms then drag her upwards for a kiss that devoured she was ready for him to finish what she had started with the deep, urgent thrust of his pelvis.
They shuddered together into a drumming ecstasy; he seduced her mouth until the very last whisper of pleasure had faded, and eventually she lay heavily upon him, limp and useless. She couldn’t even draw enough energy to care that once again she had given him more of herself than she had ever wanted to.
She belonged here. It was that simple—and that sad.
‘We marry as soon as possible,’ he announced suddenly. Then, before she could raise so much as a gasp in protest, he switched their position and began the whole wild adventure all over again.
CHAPTER NINE
MELANIE sat in a chair beside Sophia and carefully rotated her aching shoulders. ‘Can’t I just wear that one?’ she said hopefully.
‘If you want to look like a fairy on a Christmas tree, of course you can wear that dress,’ Sophia replied.
‘Don’t be cruel.’
‘Do you want to knock his eyes out?’
‘No—yes.’ Melanie sighed and fiddled with a drink-starved wilting rosebud. ‘I wish he wasn’t so determined to make all of this fuss about a silly civil wedding.’