‘Nikolai—’
‘Come here,’ he said urgently, his lips returning to her breasts, teasing them, sucking them—grazing them with the provocative scrape of his teeth. He concentrated on only her breasts until she was writhing impatiently beneath his lips. He’d been planning to take his mouth all the way down…over her belly, and beyond. But now he could see that might not be the smartest thing to do because her lips were circling towards his in a silent invitation he couldn’t resist.
Reaching deep into the pocket of his trousers, he pulled out a small foil packet and Zara felt a moment of apprehension as she heard the rasp of a zip. She wished it could have been different—that there could have been some deep emotion which flowed between the two of them, which would have made it less about sex and more about making love. But she wasn’t going to start acting coy now. Her words had been true. She did want him—more than she could remember wanting anything.
Swallowing down her reservations, she stared into his ice-blue eyes. Maybe what she was about to do with Nikolai was wrong—but right now it didn’t feel like it. It felt anything but wrong. It felt like the best thing on offer in a life which had been spectacularly short on treats.
Undaunted by the size of his arousal, she watched as he rolled on the condom—and by now her fingers were gripping at his shoulders as she tried to pull him back down to her, eager to have him kiss her again. She could hear him laugh as her nails scratched against the soft silk of his shirt.
‘Easy, tiger,’ he purred, ripping the shirt from his body in a single movement, tiny buttons bouncing all over the kitchen floor as he gave a low laugh of pleasure. ‘You are a very impatient woman.’
Zara didn’t care how impatient she was, because now his magnificent torso was bare. Golden and gleaming, all bare and spare—she gave a little gulp as her fingers splayed over the frantic hammering of his heart. Oh, but he was magnificent. ‘Nikolai,’ she breathed.
The way she was
touching him was driving him wild and yet all she was doing was to stroke at him with trembling fingers. ‘Carry on doing that and I’m not going to be able to wait much longer,’ he grated, unprepared for another of those sweet kisses at the curve of his jaw or a scrabbling little graze of his nipple with one of her fingernails.
‘Then don’t,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Just do it to me.’
Nikolai expelled a ragged breath. He couldn’t have waited a minute longer. She had already made him wait longer than any other woman. Parting her legs, he entered her with one long thrust and heard her little yelp of startled surprise as he began to move inside her.
For a moment, he stopped—his breath hot and tight in his chest as he gasped out the unthinkable. ‘You’re not a virgin?’
She guessed it would be crazy to tell him that right now she felt like one—as if she’d never known what sex felt like until now. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the fact that he filled her so completely so that it felt as if their bodies had been made for each other. ‘No.’
‘Then I am too big for you?’ he questioned unsteadily—because she felt so…so tight—as if she’d never done it with anyone before.
‘Actually you’re p-perfect,’ she answered tremblingly. ‘Just perfect.’
Nikolai lost it—or, rather, in those next few minutes, he lost himself. Acting on instinct and impulse alone, he watched her with rapt fascination as he moved inside her. At the rise and fall of her breath and the rosy flowering of her breasts as she teetered closer and closer to the brink of orgasm. Cupping the silken globes of her buttocks, he drove deep inside her until she cried out his name and he wished he’d had the time to remove her skirt, so that she could have wrapped those delicious legs around his back.
As it was, he was completely turned on by her dishevelled state of abandonment as her head tipped back and she moaned something. He saw and felt the arching quiver of her release and then it was his turn. His turn to tumble down into that place of such remote sweetness—only, for once, he fell further than ever before. It was…incredible. Especially when she wrapped her arms around him so tightly and pressed her cheek against his, as if she couldn’t bear to let him go.
He let out a long, ragged sigh as his heart-rate gradually began to thump back to normal, but he felt as light-headed as a man at the end of a marathon. The adrenaline rush of all-night gambling followed by the erotic charge of ravishing his maid on the kitchen table made him come down like a stone being dropped off the edge of a cliff.
His lips buried contentedly in the warm hollow between Zara’s damp breasts, Nikolai fell asleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘NIKOLAI. Nikolai!‘
The breathless whisper pierced through the layers of sensuality which covered him and Nikolai resisted the call to drag him to the surface.
‘Nikolai…will you please wake up?’
Nikolai swallowed to try to alleviate some of the dryness in his throat. It was Zara’s voice he could hear. Zara, his maid. Zara, the woman he’d just made love to in the most erotic of circumstances. Slowly, his head turned and his eyelashes parted to see one delicious breast in glorious close-up, pressed right up against his face. ‘Why?’ he mumbled, unable to resist the desire to brush his lips against its warm weight. ‘I might not want to wake up.’
‘Because …’ She wished he wouldn’t do that. Or rather, she wished he would. But not now—and certainly not here. Not when she was feeling so vulnerable in every which way. ‘Because we’re both lying nearly naked on the table in the kitchen!’
‘You weren’t objecting to that a little while back, angel moy,’ he murmured, the tip of his tongue tracing a light circle around one tight, puckered nipple.
Zara tried to ignore the corresponding shaft of desire which shot through her body and to wriggle away—but it wasn’t easy when six foot three of powerful and muscular man was lying on top of you and when you didn’t particularly want to go anywhere. This was both the best and worst of places to be, she thought helplessly. Wrapped in Nikolai’s arms, with their warm flesh mingling in the aftermath of the most amazing sex and feeling as if she had just caught a glimpse of what heaven might be like.
It was just great sex, she told herself. Stop reading happy-ever-after into it.
Over his shoulder, she glanced around the room, her eyes alighting on rows of gleaming metal cooking instruments while her ears were alerted for any sounds. Yes, he’d said that he had given the chef the day off—but what about the other staff needed to maintain this massive property of his? The housekeeper—or the gardeners she’d seen toiling away in the flowerbeds? Had he remembered to dismiss them, too? What if one of them came wandering in, looking for a cold drink—or if Sergei and Crystal decided that they were bored with Monte Carlo and wanted a little bit more of the Komarov hospitality? A shudder ran through her as she imagined what they would find.
No. Much as she was tempted to let him have a sleep she suspected he badly needed, she was not going to risk being discovered in his arms, with her skirt hitched up around her waist and her panties lying on the floor.