Elizabeth had to moisten her lips to allow her dry mouth to work.
'No.' How could he expect her to worry about the wafflings of a centuries-dead Roman poet when she could feel the rise and fall of his chest lightly tantalising her breasts?
Jack shifted, his hip wedging against her inner thigh as he took his weight on one arm, and lifted the other to run his finger over her damp mouth as he told her with a lazy sexual arrogance, 'Women can always be caught.'
Elizabeth was wildly aroused but she wasn’t entirely lost to her female pride. 'So can men,' she countered huskily.
'So we can. So I suppose it boils down to who is more eager to do the catching in each individual case. Who is being caught here, Beth? You, or me?'
She vaguely sensed some trap that she needed to be wary of. ‘I don’t know, maybe we both are,' she said vaguely, as she wondered how different his hard mouth would taste when flavoured by champagne.
'So you see us as equals, then? I like that. It means fewer recriminations later,' he murmured cryptically. The hand moved from her mouth to lightly encircle her throat, then it tunnelled under the nape of her neck to pull at the pins that held her sophisticated hairstyle in place.
'The smooth swept-back look doesn’t suit you,' he told her, as he fanned the dark, rippling waves across the white leather behind her head. 'You should let your hair flow loose and untamed... like your body. There wasn’t a man there tonight who didn’t look at you in that scrap of black silk and want you. But you only looked back at one. Me.'
His eyes were dark with a triumphant satisfaction that made Elizabeth quiver. 'And you didn’t put on that sinful dress and shrug off several hundred thousand francs just because you wanted to talk, did you, Beth? That's the kind of dress a woman wears when she's feeling reckless, not when she wants to impress with her honesty. So what is it you really want from me tonight...?'
He was much too lucid for her to answer that question just yet. Elizabeth shifted slightly within the cage of his body, her stockinged leg rubbing against his.
'Don’t you know? And I thought you were a perceptive man,' she taunted huskily. The fingers of one hand curved nervously into her palm as she reached out with the other to trace the hard curve of his jaw. Then, imitating his action of a few moments ago, she slid her fingers into his hair and raked it loose from the narrow black band.
His eyes narrowed to silver slits as his head moved down until he was just a kiss away. 'You want me untamed too, Eliza-Beth? You have decided to stop fighting yourself and seek the pleasure that you know I can give you?'
Such beautiful, breathtaking arrogance. Damn it, didn’t he ever stop asking questions and just accept...? Elizabeth's impatience burst the bounds of her control and her hand flattened against his scalp, tugging him that last, precious inch.
He didn’t taste any different, only better, the flavour of him melting over her tongue, the first sip only exacerbating the hunger that drove her to wind both arms around his neck and twist her mouth under his, needing the co-operation that was strangely lacking. Oh, God, was her desperate eagerness turning him off? She tensed as the old feeling of shame impinged on her consciousness.
As if her wavering doubt communicated itself to him Jack suddenly threw off his passiveness and took full command of the intimate embrace, his hand cupping her jaw as he plunged his tongue into her mouth, biting and sucking at the soft innermost recesses with a gentle savagery that utterly shattered her former notions of what a kiss could be. His hair, freed from her fingers, curtained their joined mouths, shrouding them in a private world of cleanly fragrant darkness.
'Oh!' When his mouth broke away from hers she was bereft, but only until she felt the warm, moist progression down the arch of her throat to the V of her collarbone. She sighed with pleasure as the brush of his mouth was accompanied by the silky stroke of his hair, like the stroke of a fur glove on her sensitive skin.
'You like that, chérie?’ He marched a little string of kisses over the twin swells of her breasts, just above the line of black fabric that hid their full splendour from his view. Elizabeth arched slightly, fighting the restriction of the tight skirt that trapped her extended legs outside his, yearning for more. He re-traced the kisses, this time taking small, stinging bites of the rosy flesh.
'Oh!'
‘Is that all you can say?' His voice was thick with teasing passion at her wordless cry. 'For such a well read woman you're a very inarticulate lover, chérie. Don’t you want to tell me what you're feeling, what I should do?'
‘I didn’t realise you needed instruction,' Elizabeth gasped shakily as he licked and sucked at the tiny red marks his teeth had grazed upon her skin. Inside the black silk her breasts felt unbearably hot and tight, the nipples chafing against their luxurious wrapping. Why, oh, why wouldn’t he touch her properly ... as he must know that she needed to be touched? She was afraid that if she tried to use words she wouldn’t be able to stop, that the helpless tide of her feelings would flood away with her. Soon she would make him say the words that she had planned to seduce from him, but for now she just wanted to steal something for herself... She couldn’t tell him, but she could show him...
Her eyes deepened from violet to indigo as
she fiercely attacked the pearl buttons of his shirt, operating purely on touch as his bent head masked her sight, his skilled mouth still rousing her aching frustration.
'Easy, darling,' he murmured, as she tried to pull the edges of his shirt apart before it was fully unbuttoned. 'Here, let me.' He knelt to shed his cuff-links and peel off the offending garment, grasping her by the waist and holding her still as she would have arched up painfully to press herself against his hair-roughened chest. 'You predicted I would lose my shirt tonight, didn’t you, chérie?' he stated with gravelly satisfaction as he looked down at her lush body. ‘I wouldn’t have objected to playing if I'd known you meant it so literally.'
'Please...' Dizziness swam in her head as she pleaded for deliverance. His grip on her waist was so tight that she thought she was going to faint, his fingers wrapping around her back to splay across her bare skin, his thumbs pressing into her belly, testing its firm resilience, causing a scalding heat to pool there.
'Please what?' he whispered, his hands moving obligingly from her waist to rest on her parted thighs, sliding slowly up under the taut black silk hem to stroke the borderline where stocking met tender satin skin.
'Oh!' She arched convulsively, forgetting the naive limits she had set for how far she would let him go, forgetting everything but the intense pleasure exploding through her senses, sending her nervous system into total overload.
'Please what?' His fingers pressed under the suspender straps, lightly tugging them in a way that pulled at muscles deep inside her abdomen. She felt hot and cold both at once and marvellously alive in a way she never had before.
'Oh, don’t-' she begged, as his marvellous hands moved away again and hovered, as if he was wondering what part of her to torture with pleasure next. She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling them thicken and bunch as she unconsciously guided him.
'Don’t what? Do this?' This time his finger hooked into the indiscreet slit in the centre of her bodice and created a wicked tension as he pulled, lifting her towards him. He bent and inhaled the fragrant heat that rose from between her breasts. Her eyes closed, her head fell back and his murmur was like tearing silk in her ears. 'Tell me... tell me everything you like, Eliza-Beth, every wish, every fantasy and I'll give it to you... all of it... anything, everything you want...'
'A-anything?' Elizabeth knew that there was a proper answer for that, something she was prepared to say, but then his finger exerted an ounce more pressure and she felt the ruffle on her bodice scrape one rigid nipple, exposing it to the cool night air. And his mouth... it was... soon he would... and it would be too late...