‘Fairy dust from your fairy castle,’ he said huskily. ‘Here, let me be your towel…’ He replaced her hands on his shoulders and used the tips of his fingers to whisk delicately over and around the soft mounds, stroking his thumbs where the sand clung stubbornly to her milk-white flesh. He bent his head to blow gently at the recalcitrant grains, watching her breasts rise and tauten, the soft pink nipples puckering at the caress of the warm, moist zephyr. He pushed her to sit on the bed and picked up his shirt, kneeling in front to her to tenderly buff around the ruched peaks with the butter-soft linen, his eyes darkening as she flinched and gave a sudden gasp.
‘Oh, a button.’
He looked at the balled shirt in his hand, its pearlised buttons gleaming amongst the folds of fabric. ‘Did it catch against you?’
She nodded.
‘Like this…?’He deliberately turned the shirt and scraped a smooth, hard button against her sensitised nipple.
‘Oh…’ She shuddered, her eyes widening, her head tipping back, and he did it again, scraping the little disc back and forth across the swollen peak until it deepened from pink to mauve, then according the same delicious punishment to her other breast.
‘Oh…they…oh, don’t,’ she gasped unconvincingly as the blood thinned in her veins, rushing into her breasts and pooling between her thighs, easing her sorrowing heart of some of its coagulated heaviness. She closed her eyes and groaned, racked by a piercing yearning.
‘They’re almost clean now,’ she heard him murmur throatily. ‘I just need to…’ and suddenly the fabric was replaced by his warm breath again, and then his mouth, licking around her areolae, suckling gently but firmly at the twin peaks.
‘Would you have nursed our baby like this?’
Her eyes flew open with shock to meet his hot gaze, smouldering at her through his thick lashes, his lips still drawing tautly on her nipple, enfolding it inside his mouth in the hot curl of his tongue.
She plunged her hand into his hair and pulled his head away. ‘How can you ask that?’
He looked at her pointed breasts, cleansed of sand but glistening with the evidence of his possession. ‘I don’t want you to be afraid to talk about it. I don’t want you to think you have to pretend it never happened. You would have been a good mother, Kate, never doubt it.’
The reminder made her feel guilty all over again. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this…’
‘But it’s making you feel better, isn’t it?’
She quivered with confusion. ‘I’m not going t
o have sex with you,’ she said fiercely. Men always reduced everything to sex!
‘All right…we’ll just get into bed and cuddle together—you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ he suggested persuasively, reaching over to fold back a corner of the blue silk counterpane and show her the crisp white sheet. ‘You’d never let us do that before. You’d allow the requisite few minutes for a post-coital cuddle, but as soon as there was any danger of either of us drifting off to sleep you’d be up and moving about, suggesting things to do or getting dressed to leave.’
‘I thought that was what you wanted…’ she said, bewildered and intrigued by this seductively tender alien who had apparently taken over Drake’s body.
‘Well, you were wrong. I like having you close. I wanted to make love and be able to fall asleep to the feel of you in my arms.’ His eyes had fallen to her filmy white lace panties, and his finger began to toy with the elastic at the top of her leg.
She clamped her legs together to halt a molten gush. What if he found sand in her panties?
‘I’m not taking them off…’ she said weakly.
His finger hooked under the fabric. ‘I think you should,’ he advised. In contrast to hers his deep voice was compellingly certain. ‘They’re a bit tight, and you want to be comfy…’ And before she could blink, or accuse him of calling her fat, they were whisking through the air.
‘All right, but you have to keep your jeans on,’ she warned, her white bottom flashing as she scrabbled hastily under the covers and peeped out at him, using the sheet to cover the beginnings of a smile.
He looked disappointed but contented himself with merely unsnapping his top button to relieve the pressure behind his zip.
He climbed into the bed facing her, snuggling tantalisingly—but not crushingly—close, his hot chest just far enough away to rub her breasts with every indrawn breath, his big hands stroking her back, his heavy thigh lying over the top of hers, the centres of their bodies pressed together, the springy curls at the base of her belly catching against the rough denim bulging tightly in his crotch.
Their heads nestled on thistledown softness, their noses almost touching at the sloping intersection of their luxury pillows.
‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ he said, one hand moving down to cup the globes of her bottom, adjusting her more securely against his lower body, and she felt his voice in the hard tips of her breasts where they fenced with his flat nipples.
‘Y-yes…’ she said uncertainly, feeling the familiar throb of excitement pulse in her veins.
The longer she lay there, the worse it got. She didn’t want him to want her only for sex, she realised restlessly, but their thriving sex life was a healthy expression of their intense mutual attraction, and, as such, was an indivisible part of her love.
As her temperature rose she could feel his skin absorb and radiate more heat until it began to get uncomfortably hot under the covers. And yet still he made no move to acknowledge or ease the growing tension in their bodies. In spite of his earlier seductiveness, Drake was going to refrain from any sexualised affection because she had insisted she wanted it that way. He was showing that he respected her wishes above his carnal desires, when what she really wanted was not restraint, but reckless proof of life.