Giving her no time to recover, Ryan spun around, detaching her clinging arms and legs and tumbling her on her back across the shadowed foot of the bed. Her limp arms outflung on the royal blue bedspread, Jane lifted her head to watch with glazed eyes as he stripped off the rest of his clothes and felt in the pocket of his trousers for a condom, which he donned with a boldness that would have made her blush if she hadn’t been so fascinated by the fierce urgency of his movements.
Every part of him was constructed to the same, massive scale, Jane realised with a frisson of awe, instinctively drawing her legs together. He grabbed at her slender ankles, pulling them apart as he braced his knees against the edge of the bed.
‘Don’t worry, nature has taken care of our proportions. You’re a big girl, Jane...you’ll be able to take every inch of me,’ he promised in a dark throaty purr as his
fingers tightened on her ankles and he lifted them, dragging her lush body towards him, his possessive gaze lowering to the dewy glistening on the layered petals of her femininity.
‘You’re so aroused that coming into you is going to be like gliding between hot satin sheets...sexy, smooth and deliciously slippery...’
He let her feet fall on either side of his thighs and knelt forward to brace himself above her supine body on bulging arms. Jane felt the tip of his jutting manhood brush against her stomach, and in her violently overstimulated state the fleeting caress, combined with the carnal frankness of his words, set off another series of small explosions inside her that obliterated the vague stirrings of caution and conscience. Her voluptuous body undulated shamelessly on the bed, a pale splash of rose-pink flesh against the sumptuous royal blue cover.
Her lips curved into pouting fullness as she looked dreamily up at the man who had caused her so much pain but was now promising her unlimited pleasure. And she believed him—just for this one night she could have it all... all her hurts healed, her fantasies realised and her lonely dreams fulfilled...
The sultry self-satisfaction in her seductive smile made Ryan stiffen, the fierce urgency of his expression hardening, a savage suspicion that he was being manipulated adding a dangerously predatory edge to his lust. He came down on top of her with all the finesse of an invading conqueror, carving a path deep inside her with a single surge of his powerful hips.
The physical discomfort was momentarily intense, swiftly superseded by the incredible sensation of herself stretching and then tightening around the aggressive invader, absorbing him impossibly deeper into her body in a series of fluttering internal contractions that made Jane sigh with contentment and Ryan utter a steamy curse. He buried his face in the hot curve of her throat, his hands contracting on her strong hips, forcing her buttocks deep into the mattress in an effort to keep her still, but she could no more control the instinctive rotation of her pelvis than she could the stars wheeling in the heavens.
An orgasm hit him almost immediately, a prolonged, wild, uninhibited eruption of pure energy that stunned Jane with its primitive violence. His muscles twisted and corded, locking and unlocking in pulsing spasms that sculpted his body into straining contortions as he bucked and shuddered, lashing himself into a frenzy in his mindless quest for climatic satisfaction. He reared up on both hands for one last, huge, hammering thrust, his head thrown back, his arched body utterly rigid, quivering like a tightly drawn bow until he let out a hoarse shout of scorching triumph and slumped down onto her heaving bosom.
Jane felt used and bruised and dazzled by his splendour. No other man had succeeded in making her feel so wildly desirable. She wasn’t the sort of woman who drove men crazy. She had only had one other lover in her life, and James had turned out to be a set-up of her father’s, more interested in grooming himself as a potential heir-in-law than satisfying her as a woman. For James, extended foreplay had been an irksome waste of time, and with his brisk efficiency he had ensured that Jane felt inadequate if she couldn’t keep up with him.
Ryan’s lax body eased off her, and Jane, suddenly self-conscious in her nudity, rolled away from him onto her side. His strong arm hooked around her waist, hauling her back against his sweaty chest as he mistook her movement for an attempt to leave.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded, sinking his teeth deep into the rounded curve of her shoulder, his hand cupping one soft-tipped breast. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet...’
He tightened his arm, turning her onto her back, anchoring her there with one hairy leg crooked across her abdomen. ‘The room is booked for the whole night, my sweet little swindler. You’ve only just begun to earn your money...’
CHAPTER SIX
JANE bent down to pick up a small pebble from the firm black sand. She brushed away the clumps of clinging grains and rubbed the flat, round stone between her finger and thumb in tactile appreciation of the smoothly polished surface. She curled her forefinger around the outside edge and looked out at the wide expanse of sea. There was a stiff wind and the turn of the tide had made the early-morning surf wild, the breakers thundering to shore in broken lines, salt spray hanging like white mist over the long, flat beach.
Jane waded into the foam at the edge of the water and paused, judging her moment, then splashed sideways in a series of little hops to skim the stone into the shallows over the top of a disintegrating wave. It skipped three times on the swirling water before smashing into the next curling breaker. Not bad considering that conditions were so poor and she was using her right arm!
She backed out of the water, brushing at the splashes on her white cotton shorts. Five was still her best score. When she got the proper use of her left hand back, in a few more weeks, she hoped to be able to double it.
The wind stung her wet legs and she tucked her taped hand into the pocket of her thin wind-cheater and turned back, deciding it was time for breakfast. Trudging into the soft sand above the high-tide mark, she glanced to her left where the huge, crouching hulk of Lion Rock which separated the broad iron-sands of North Piha from the main Piha beach was obscured in low cloud and spray. By mid-morning the cloud would probably burn off and it would be another brilliant west coast summer day.
Yesterday had been a scorcher, and the usual rash of weekend day-trippers had created havoc for the dedicated surf lifesavers who patrolled the crowded main beach, but early on a weekday morning, during school term, it was only the locals, and the serious surfers and body-boarders who braved the notorious Piha rips.
She lifted her eyes from the fine black sand sifting through her bare toes to the steep, bush-clad hills above the beach. They were the western fringe of the Waitakere Ranges, which protected the fiercely independent coastal community of Piha from the brash encroachments of the sprawling suburbs of Auckland, forty kilometres to the east. There was only one dead-end road winding through the ranges into Piha, and the locals liked it that way.
There were no commercial developments in the small, isolated settlement, no shops other than a single general store, a dairy and a takeaway bar on the beachfront, and no hotels, bars or restaurants—only private residences and holiday homes, most of them owned by the same families for generations, and a council-run camping ground offering basic facilities to those wanting to pitch tents and park caravans. The core population of permanent residents was small enough to be friendly, large enough to blend into, and eccentric enough to be tolerant of a range of alternative lifestyles.
It was the perfect bolt-hole.
Jane scrambled up the tussock-seeded dunes which crested the narrow tar-sealed road that ran along the back of the North Piha beach and came into sight of her own, private bolt-hole.
It wasn’t a very pretty sight. Like many of the old-fashioned holiday baches at Piha, it was a box-like rectangle of painted fibrolight panels, with extensions randomly tacked on over the years to cope with the ebb and flow of family numbers. This one was a particularly ugly faded yellow, with a red corrugated iron roof urgently in need of patching.
The paint on both roof and walls was cracked and peeling, sandblasted completely bare in places by decades of savage Piha winter westerlies. Several windows were cracked in their badly warped frames and the front door listed drunkenly on its hinges. The detached wooden garage was in even worse condition, rotten timbers proof of years of neglect, and the chain-link fence sagging around the perimeter completed the general picture of sad dilapidation.
But at least it was a roof over her head, albeit a rather leaky one, thought Jane ruefully as she pushed open the rusty gate. It was also rent-free and, most important of all, it was well out of Ryan Blair’s dangerous orbit!
Her enemy.
Her lover.
She didn’t know which one she feared more.