‘Or I’ll do this!’
It happened so quickly she had no time to warn him. He was parting her, then sliding sleekly inside with a thick, sensual growl of gratification as she closed tightly around his swollen hardness. To her dazed delight there was no pain…he had been too skilled, too intent in indulging his evident preference for extensive love-play.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she sighed with revealing eagerness, arching beneath him to rub her breasts against the dense, dark, silky hair of his chest.
He caught his breath, rising up on bulging arms, his hips pressing deeper, tighter as her body absorbed and adjusted itself to him in minute increments. ‘No lover, Anne? Or no lovers at all?’ he murmured raggedly.
Anne let her head fall back. Even at a critical moment like this the man was full of wretched curiosity!
‘Who cares now…?’ She moaned and clutched desperately at him as he suddenly withdrew, but it was only to slide forward again, sheathing himself even more deeply this time, his breathing harshening as the tension shivered across his hard belly and a sheen of sweat began to glisten on his thickly muscled shoulders and in his tangled chest-hair.
He braced his knees against the firm springs, his feet against the high-rolled arm of the couch, blessing the fact that it was a trifle too short for a man of his size as he used the resulting leverage to control carefully the instinctive aggression of his thrusts, drawing another wondrously flattering sigh from the new-born voluptuary beneath him.
‘Am I the first man to do this to you, Anne?’
He withdrew once more, and again she couldn’t stop herself from panicking, digging her short, practical nails into his tight buttocks until he eased forward, this time a little faster and more roughly, beginning to establish a rhythm that was both exhilarating and frustrating.
‘Am I, Anne?’
This time as he pulled back Hunter deliberately hesitated and, as he expected, his answer arrived in a wild rush as she wound herself around him.
‘Yes, yes! Although if I’d known it was going to be this good I wouldn’t have waited so long!’ She slid her fingers through the hair on his chest and stroked the fine pelt, following the silky line down his belly to push into the thickening where his body joined with hers—Anne and Hunter, Hunter and Anne—if only it could go on forever. ‘Oh, what does it matter? What does anything matter? Just shut up, Hunter, and keep doing whatever it is you’re doing and, whatever happens, this time don’t stop!’
There was a quiver of laughter in his voice as he responded explosively to her desperate order. ‘Don’t worry, little tyrant, there’s no danger of that. Hold on tight, now—I have a feeling this is going to be a turbulent ride!’
Anne lay on her back in a state of blissful exhaustion, staring at the afternoon sunlight painting patterns on the white ceiling of her bedroom.
‘So that’s what all the fuss is about!’ she said smugly to the sweat-soaked man lying beside her.
‘I take it you’re quite satisfied?’ Hunter smiled at her gloating expression, rising on one elbow to regard her sprawling figure.
‘Didn’t I give that vague impression?’ she said lightly, although secretly she was embarrassed. She knew she had amused him with her effervescent enthusiasm.
It was too much to expect that he wouldn’t guess. ‘You’re a very passionate woman; don’t apologise for it.’
‘Is that what I was doing?’ She suddenly realised that the sheets were twisted underneath her and she sat up, trying to tussle the top one free to cover her nakedness.
Hunter took the sheet out of her hand and threw it out of reach on the floor. Then he lay back and stretched, long and luxuriously, in an unnecessarily flagrant display of his rippling physique. Still, his ease with his nudity made her less self-conscious about her own.
She frowned at him. ‘I might have been cold,’ she said haughtily.
He smiled at her lazily. ‘You might have been. But you weren’t. Aren’t you going to ask how I know?’
His eyes drifted down to her breasts and she instinctively raised her hands to shield her soft nipples from his provocative glance, flushing as she felt them pucker lightly in loving memory.
He chuckled. She had never seen him so mellow and relaxed, totally at peace with the world and, she realised with a quickening of her pulse, with her. Yet even at his most passionate he had maintained an emotional distance that had precluded words of love in his love- making vocabulary…as if they were still, in his mind, reserved for someone else. For Deborah, she thought sinkingly. The serious wife his mother had disapproved of, but whom he had evidently loved enough to make him shy away from committing himself to anyone else.
‘Are you always like this after sex?’ she asked him jealously. If he didn’t use love-words, neither would she.
He raised his eyebrows, his expression cooling. ‘It depends on whether I enjoyed it or not.’
She tossed her head at the non-answer, and a swath of long hair flicked across his chest, catching against the curly thatch and pulling at it slightly as she whisked it away again, causing him to suck in his stomach with a small shudder.
‘Remind me to get you to do that to me properly some time,’ he murmured huskily.
‘What?’