‘That was a pretty good run for an absolute beginner.’
He picked up his towel and mopped down his body with distracting thoroughness. ‘Actually you were right-it was a lot easier without you there pointing out every mistake and making me nervous.’ His face disappeared into the towel as he rubbed his hair.
‘Oh, really?’ she drawled, relaxing back on her elbows, dipping her head so that the straw brim of her hat concealed her study of the way the concave plane of his stomach flexed with his movements.
‘Yes, once you figure out how to stay upright the rest just seems to fall into place!’
Her suspicions were unappeased by his muffled words. ‘Luke James, is that the first time you’ve been windsurfing?’
His face emerged from the folds of the towel. ‘Surely you should have asked me that question before we started? How’s the foot?’
‘Fine,’ she said absently, trying to figure out whether his answer constituted a confession of exaggerated ineptitude.
‘Is it? May I see?’
Before she realised what he was doing he had dropped to his knees in front of her feet, his buttocks resting on his heels, his fingers gripping her ankle.
‘No!’
She tried to jerk away but his fingers tightened around the bone as he lifted her foot for inspection.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,’ he murmured, brushing the grains of sand gently off her sole with the thumb of his free hand.
‘I told you, it was nothing,’ she said breathlessly as he frowned, bending closer to the site, his damp hair fanning forward around the widow’s peak, his thumb moving in another probing caress. His nail scraped lightly across her skin and her toes curled involuntarily towards the ball of her foot, a husky sound of protest issuing from her throat. He paused, his lids flicking up in instant enquiry.
‘I’m ticklish.’ Unbelievably she could feel her face pinken at the husky lie. She, the mistress of the mask, whose whole professional training had been aimed at the weaving of believable lies. She never blushed...except when it was written in the stage directions!
‘I’ll be careful.’ His lids sank down again and Rosalind braced herself to have her silly deception exposed. ‘I don’t see—Ah, wait a moment, what’s this...?’ His short thumbnail dug into the soft, resilient pad of flesh. ‘It looks like...it could be a shell splinter, or some sort of spine...’
‘Could it?’ Rosalind hadn’t really looked closely at her foot, knowing there was nothing there to see. ‘Uh...it’s not hurting now—’
‘Did you feel a stinging or burning sensation when it happened?’
‘Neither,’ she said truthfully. But she could certainly feel something now! She wished he would stop rubbing his thumb back and forth like that; it was sending tingles of sensation shooting up the insides of her calves and thighs.
A heat that had nothing to do with the sun pooled in her stomach. Her fingers dug into the sand at her sides and her free leg shifted restlessly, drawing up slightly to hide the vulnerable triangle at the apex of her thighs. She could feel her nipples begin to firm and knew they would soon be evident through the thin, shiny fabric of her hot-pink bikini.
‘Whatever it is I don’t think we should leave it in there, do you?’ he said gravely. ‘In this climate infections can set in very quickly if you ignore a wound...’
‘Unfortunately I don’t happen to have a needle on me,’ joked Rosalind weakly, patting her bare sides. She regretted her mistake immediately as his eyes accepted the licence to rove. A quick glance down confirmed that he couldn’t fail to notice the explicit outline of her breasts, the smooth swells, gathered and lifted by the halter-neck of her bikini, projecting the stiff little crowns forward into stark prominence. And she couldn’t even blame it on the chill of the water!
His gaze took on a familiar blank, unfocused intensity as it rose to her face, his fingers tightening on her ankle as she instinctively tried again to twist it free.
‘We’ll just have to improvise, then...’ he murmured. And, still holding her gaze, he bent his head, shifting his grip to cup her heel, tilting her foot delicately aslant with his other hand as he placed it against his open mouth. Rosalind gasped as she felt his teeth sink deep into the tender pad of her sole and a hot, wet suction begin a rhythmic tugging at her flesh.
‘Luke!’ Her exclamation of shocked protest was undermined by the insidious weakness that flooded through her body. Her elbows collapsed and her shoulderblades hit the sand, her hat rolling off her bright head, leaving her dazzled by the sun. The second protest was even feebler than the first. ‘Luke...’
He sucked more strongly, his teeth grating against her skin, creating tiny needles of pain that were instantly soothed by the moist movements of his mouth. And she lay there and submitted, watching him watching her over the top of her toes. His gaze was intense with a dark concentration. She had never thought of her feet as erogenous zones before, but the delicious sensation of bone-melting pleasure she was experiencing made her reevaluate her thinking. No wonder people developed foot fetishes!
Suddenly she felt his tongue join the suckling, swirling and rasping against her wet skin. One of his hands slid lightly down the top of her foot and around behind her ankle, to drift up the back of her supple calf, his spreading fingers offering caressing support to the tautly extended muscle. The long, slow French kissing continued until Rosalind squirmed, a brief groan escaping her lips.
He lifted his mouth fractionally. ‘Am I hurting you? Do you want me to stop?’ His lips brushed against her sole as they formed the gruff words and she gave another little shivery moan. He was kneeling like a supplicant yet his eyes seemed to smoulder with the triumphant recognition of his own power. He knew exactly what he was doing to her...
Alarm bells started to ring in her distracted senses. The audacity of his action had been so out of character that it had caught her completely off guard, but she mustn’t allow him to think that he could control and manipulate her through her passions.
‘You’re not hurting me...but I still think you’d better stop,’ she asserted regretfully.
He lowered her foot onto his knee, holding her heel against the sun-warmed hardness of bone and muscle.