‘Are 1-large and expressive. And sometimes almond-shaped.’
The golden blaze almost blinded her. ‘Like your eyes,’ he observed softly. ‘What else?’
Now his hand was drifting down over her torso and she could scarcely breathe.
‘Tell me, Lara,’ he urged. ‘I want to know.’
‘Their…their bodies are long and lean.’ She swallowed again. ‘The muscling well-defined, s-smoothly hugging the bone.’
‘That’s me,’ he whispered. ‘Isn’t it?’
By now his fingertip had edged down to the fork in her legs, drifting forward and back, forward and back, so that Lara closed her eyes and gasped.
‘Isn’t it, Lara?’
‘Well, yes. You know it is.’
‘Don’t you want to feel for yourself how it feels?’ he purred. ‘Feel the muscle which hugs the bone…?’
She didn’t need to be asked twice. Her hands flew to his chest, feeling the masculine heat of him through the damp shirt, and all the while his finger continued its erotic little dance, the material of the jodhpurs both restricting and heightening her pleasure.
‘Darian!’ she gasped.
‘Mmm?’
‘We can’t do this here!’
‘Do what?’ he questioned innocently, enjoying the way her thighs were now parting, revelling in the urgent little grind of her hips. ‘We’re not doing anything, are we? Not really. I’m just playing with you a little. Touching you there.’ He felt her squirm. ‘And there.’ He increased the pressure of his finger and her head fell back.
‘Someone might come!’ she protested, in a thick, slurred voice which didn’t sound like her own.
‘I think someone might,’ he agreed unsteadily. ‘But all the grooms have gone, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
Too late, she realised just where he was taking her. ‘Kiss me, Darian,’ she pleaded on a moan. ‘Please. Just kiss me.’
‘No.’
The single word should have terminated her pleasure with all the finality of a bucket of cold water being thrown over her, but it did no such thing. If anything, the cold, harsh word only increased her ascent into that tantalising, nebulous place which made such mockery of almost everything else which existed. Maybe she wasn’t so like the Akhal-Teke at all, she thought desperately, for there was no resentment on her part about the way he was treating her—and shouldn’t there have been? Shouldn’t there have been?
But then it happened, great wave upon wave of engulfing pleasure, and she opened her mouth, the pleasure so intense that she wanted to scream. And that was when he kissed her at last, swallowing up her cries with the fierce, hard pressure of his mouth, clamping his hand possessively over her jodhpurs while she still pulsed with sweet, dying spasms and her head fell uselessly to his shoulder.
‘Oh,’ she moaned. It was a helpless little cry, and it was edged with sorrow as well as fulfillment—for hadn’t the kiss been merely a silencing technique instead of a demonstration of affection?
‘Touch me,’ he urged. ‘Please.’
Her hand moved down and her eyes snapped open. ‘Oh!’ she breathed. He was hard, so very, very hard.
‘Yes—oh,’ he murmured wryly.
‘Wh-what do you want to do now?’
‘I want you,’ he shuddered. ‘That’s what I want. And I want you to undress me. Now.’
She felt the flush move from her neck to her cheeks, so that they burned like fire. It was a stark and unequivocal sexual command, dark with promise but devoid of all tenderness. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go back to our room?’
He was sliding her jodhpurs down now, with difficulty. ‘Practically?’ He groaned. ‘Lara, I don’t think I can. Take your boots off.’
With trembling hands she obeyed him, sliding the soft leather down over her calves and kicking them off into the dust.