‘Where is he?’ she heard Jake demanding furiously as he reached out to constrain her, to grab hold of her wrist, preventing her from fleeing, retreating back into David and Janey’s bedroom.
‘He…? What he?’ Lucianna queried in bewilderment as she tried to prise his fingers free of her wrist.
‘What he? The one you’ve dressed yourself up like that for of course,’ Jake told her bitingly. ‘And don’t tell me there is no “he”, Lucianna, because I won’t believe you.’ His eyes scanned her body, causing her face to burn a hot, embarrassed dark pink and then her whole body to become scorched with the same colo
ur. She suddenly realised that for some totally unfathomable reason her nipples beneath the delicate fabric of her new bra had hardened and were now quite clearly visible in all their pouting provocation, and Jake had seen them; that much was clear from the way he turned his head and looked so intently at her body.
Instinctively, she placed her free arm across her breasts, her eyes flashing daggers of embarrassed fury at him.
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ Jake told her scathingly. ‘You might as well be stark naked—you damn well nearly are.’
‘I am not,’ Lucianna denied. ‘I’m wearing the new underwear you told me to buy,’ she defended herself bravely.
‘I told you to buy?’ Jake checked himself and frowned. ‘Don’t try to tell me you bought this stuff you’re wearing—this…these—because of me,’ he told her bitingly.
‘Why not?’ Lucianna challenged him recklessly. ‘It’s the truth; you were the one—’
Abruptly she stopped speaking, her face going bright scarlet as she realised what she had been about to say, what she couldn’t possibly say, and that was that five minutes ago, standing in front of her brother and sister-in-law’s bedroom mirror, although it might have been John’s reaction to her transformation and her shy realisation of her own sexuality she had first of all been thinking about, to her chagrin, it had been Jake’s voice, Jake’s face, Jake’s reaction she had instinctively pictured.
Just for those few heart-stopping and instantly rejected heartbeats of time it had been Jake’s hands, Jake’s mouth, Jake’s touch she had emotionally imagined caressing her near-naked body. To her horror, even as she fought back the treacherous memory of those few fatal seconds, her body was already wilfully reacting to it, her nipples flouting her fervent plea to them not to betray her, whilst deep down inside her body…
‘So you dressed like this because of me?’ she heard Jake demanding grittily and disbelievingly, releasing her wrist abruptly as he added with a growl, ‘Lucianna…’
But as she turned in instinctive response to the harsh command in his voice suddenly his expression changed completely, his hand reaching out towards her again but not this time to restrain her in the old, familiar critical grip he had used on her since her childhood, but, far more dangerously, to gently cup the soft swell of her breast. His thumb caressed the naked flesh above the low-cut cup of her new bra, caressing it and, Lucianna recognised dizzily, edging the fabric even lower so that she could quite clearly see the flushed dusky pink flesh surrounding her nipple and, even more disturbing, feel the urgent pulse of her nipple itself, as though it were silently urging Jake to pull away the fabric altogether.
‘Because of me?’ she heard Jake repeating in a very different voice from the one he had used earlier, a voice which held an unfamiliar, faintly rusty but wholly male message of urgency and arousal. ‘Or for me?’
For him…? Lucianna opened her mouth to deny any such thing, heard Jake say her name in an excitingly harsh voice she had most certainly never heard him use before, and automatically and instinctively took the small provocative step, the fatal step forward that closed the minute distance between them, her body swaying provocatively, unsteadily, as she tried to balance on her new shoes, throwing her forward against him.
‘Oh, God,’ she heard Jake mutter under his breath, ‘I must be crazy doing this.’
Doing what? she tried to ask, but found she couldn’t say a single thing, for the very simple reason that Jake’s mouth was now covering hers and silencing every sound she tried to make, including her small shocked squeak of protest.
Later she would try to tell herself that it must have been the new shoes that caused her to feel so dizzy, just as it must have been the fact that she was only wearing her underwear that made her shiver and draw closer to the warmth of Jake’s fully clothed body—fully clothed maybe, but she was not so naive that she couldn’t recognise the surging hardness of his body as she pressed her own against him and then pressed herself against him again, carried away by the novel discovery that what she had read in her books had quite patently been correct and that men were responsive to a woman’s body language.
Lost in the heady awareness of the power of her sensuality, she was dimly aware of Jake groaning hoarsely as he cupped her face with both hands, but it was only when she felt the urgent thrust of his tongue within the vulnerable cavity of her own mouth that she recognised just what her innocent experimentation had done. By then…by then, inexplicably, all she really wanted to do, all she could actually think of doing, was to wrap her arms around Jake just as tightly as she could whilst her senses spun under the sensual assault of his kiss.
When he finally paused to lick the outline of her mouth with the tip of his tongue and command, ‘Kiss me back,’ it seemed to be the most natural, the most essential thing in the world to do just as he had asked, tentatively at first and then with more assurance as she discovered the heady delight of exploring the moist heat of his own mouth with the darting, uncertain tip of her tongue.
But it was when he captured it, held it prisoner and slowly, delicately sucked on it that she finally realised how out of her depth she was and in what dangerous waters—waters in which the only thing she had to cling to, in which her only safety and security lay in trusting herself completely to Jake and letting him take the responsibility for her.
She opened the heavy-lidded eyes she had closed, trembling in his arms as he traced her swollen mouth with his fingertip. He told her huskily, as she shuddered under the sensual caress, her mouth unbelievably sensitive to his touch, ‘If that’s how you react to being kissed, I can just imagine how you’re going to feel when it’s your breasts, your nipples—you—that I’m sucking and kissing…’
Lucianna couldn’t help it; she felt the shock of his words rip right through her body in a convulsive surge of sensual need and surrender, and without even realising what she was doing she heard herself moaning his name whilst her hands went to her breasts—whether to conceal them or tear away the fabric that covered them, to show him just what effect his words were having on her, she didn’t really know; but Jake, it seemed, did, and the cool rush of air that preceded the hard warmth of his hands holding her naked breasts as he pulled away her bra only seemed to increase the hot, spiralling ache pulsing through her whole body.
Jake was kissing the side of her neck whilst his hands caressed her breasts, his mouth, hot and hungry, scorching her naked skin, and yet instead of feeling shocked she actually seemed to be welcoming it, wanting it.
Lucianna heard herself moan again as her body ached against Jake’s hands, the rough pads of his thumbs moving against her nipples sending her into a frenzy of taut, aching need and unbelievably intense longing to feel his mouth against her body, caressing her in the way that he had so shockingly described to her.
‘Yes…what is it? What is it you want?’ she heard him demanding rawly in response to the impassioned plea she hadn’t realised she had uttered. And it seemed the most natural thing in the world to tell him, in the sobbing, agonised voice she could barely recognise as her own, ‘I want you to do what you said…to kiss me…suck me here,’ she told him, putting her own hand where his covered her breast.
Later Jake was to tell himself that if it hadn’t been for that, if it hadn’t been for the way both her voice and her body had trembled as she’d looked at him with all her newly aroused womanhood in her eyes, he might have been able to stop, to take control of himself and the situation; but he knew he was lying. What was happening had been inevitable, not just from the heart-stopping moment when he had seen her standing there, but from the very first moment he had realised how much he wanted her, how much he loved her.
That, though, was later. Right now, as he felt her hand tremble slightly over his and her body tremble even more, he ruthlessly ignored the stern voice of caution warning him that what was happening must stop, and instead bent to take Lucianna’s full weight as he swung her up into his arms. He then walked purposefully towards her bedroom, pausing in the doorway to lower his head and gently nuzzle the exposed peak of one breast with his mouth.
Lucianna felt as though she was going to die from the sheer intensity of the sensation that swamped her as Jake’s mouth opened gently over the aching tip of her breast. She had never dreamed there could be such a sensation, such a boiling, turbulent sense of aching need, such a compulsion to lock her fingers in Jake’s hair and keep his head, his mouth just exactly where it was.
Her reaction was too much for Jake; the gentle nuzzle became a deep, slow suckle and then an urgent, tugging demand that turned Lucianna’s body to a boneless, melting ache of complicity in his arms and made Jake himself shudder from head to foot, his body drenched in a musky, male-scented film of sexually aroused perspiration.