Jennifer forgot the bells. Ever conscious of her robust figure, she was prepared to hit back at him until, incredulously, she realised that he was genuinely anxious. Mr ‘I bought a book’ had gaps in his learning!
‘Of course not.’ Her tremulous reply was torn between laughter and anger. ‘God doesn’t make those kind of design faults. Breasts are expressly designed to feed babies, whatever their respective sizes.’
He heard the hint of hurt in her tone and shrewdly guessed its source, the planes of his face tautening. ‘And to give pleasure,’ he added huskily, his thumbs pressing lightly over the stiffening tips. ‘I love your womanly proportions. I love the roundness of your bottom and the size of your breasts. And I especially like the way your nipples fill my mouth when I suck them. Last night you loved me doing that...’
His sexual frankness had its usual devastating effect. ‘L-last night was last night,’ she said shakily, remembering the caveat she had issued before their lovemaking.
He was remembering it, too, and his rebellious reaction. His thumbs continued to brush back and forth as he watched the lambent glow in her brown eyes grow. His thighs moved against her and she felt the brush of his heavy loins. ‘I’d like to watch you feeding our baby.’
She wished he would stop calling it our baby. ‘Well, you can’t, you won’t be here. You’ll be back in England when the baby’s born...’
‘I could visit you.’ His potent arousal was growing against her belly.
The suggestion crept like a thief into her soul, rifling her treasury of dreams.
‘C-come all this way just t-to watch me feed the baby?’ Jennifer stammered, watching him edge closer and closer, knowing that she was playing with fire, but unable to resist the lure of the heat.
‘That and...other things.’ He bent his head and showed her what those other things were, and in a slow, tender, lazy coupling, vastly different from the sizzling passion of the night before, Jennifer learned a new appreciation of her lover’s sensuous skills.
Later, lying weak and dewy in the aftermath of his magnificent possession, Jennifer suddenly noticed the angle of the sun in the sky.
She sat bolt upright, dragging the duvet with her.
‘What time is it?’
Rafe yawned, scrubbing his fingers through his streaky gold hair. ‘I don’t know; I took off my watch last night.’
Jennifer had left hers in the bathroom. She hitched up the duvet and lunged across his supine chest to squint short-sightedly at the small digital clock on the bedside table. She let out a little squawk when the blurry numbers swam into focus.
‘Oh, no, it’s after eleven o’clock!’ she discovered, sinking back onto her knees. ‘What about the breakfasts? What will everyone be thinking?’
‘Maybe they’ll think you stayed up late watching Ruapehu erupt and then slept in because you were tired,’ suggested Rafe, with a rakishly innocent air.
She hugged the duvet to her breasts, her brown eyes stormy at his teasing.
‘Or they could think that you spent all night making mad, passionate love with your husband and then lingered in bed for his morning wake-up call. Everyone knows that most men are inclined to be amorous in the mornings, especially ones who’ve just come back from a sex-starved excursion to the Amazonian jungle.’
Jennifer’s glare became a dignified scowl. She shook her hair behind her shoulders and looked down her sharp nose at him. The disdainful effect was rather ruined by the ruffled nipple peeping at him from the crook of her arm, but he was enjoying the view too much to point it out.
‘I know I often wake up with an erection,’ he confided cheerfully, for the pure, wicked pleasure of seeing her blush.
She did, her haughty pose completely disintegrating as he continued silkily, ‘Of course, having a voluptuous nude threshing about next to me in the throes of an erotic dream probably had something to do with this morning’s delectable awakening.’
Pink and flustered, Jennifer massed the duvet around her, preparatory for a dive towards the puddle of pink towelling on the floor, knowing that Rafe was probably going to hang onto his share of the bedclothes so that she would be forced to abandon her cover just short of her goal.
In the event she was wrong; Rafe let go of the duvet as she made her half-spring, half-tumble, and she was able to hurriedly struggle into her bathrobe under the modest shroud, only to emerge and find him lying bold, bare and beautiful on the rumpled white sheet in a disconcertingly similar manner to the love-supplicant in her dreams. Even the slightly out of focus softness around the edges of her vision were vaguely dream-like.
Averting her eyes, she threw the duvet over him and hurried to snatch up the scraps of green silk and lace from the floor.
‘I’m going to have a shower—’
‘Is that an invitation?’ He was rearranging the bedclothes over himself, obviously in no hurry to abandon his—her—sybarite bed.
‘No!’ She made an effort to calm down, nibbling her lip and d
iscovering it felt uncomfortably tender. ‘Last night—well, it happened, and I accept my share of responsibility for it, but it’s not going to happen a second time...’
‘Just a one-night stand,’ he agreed blandly, turning the top sheet down over his chest and folding his hands on it in an attitude of deceptive piety.