Staring up at his intense, almost savage expression, lost in his burning eyes, Erin felt her body stretching slowly, opening for him. His throbbing flesh was a primitive male demand, and her own feverish need compelled her to surrender to it. To him. A twinge of pain caught at her breath as his entry was barred, and she saw the sudden darkening of his eyes the instant he realized the truth.
“Erin…” His voice was a hoarse rasp and his body shuddered violently as he fought for control.
Surely he couldn’t stop now? Erin had a panicky notion that he could, convinced that his relentless will was equal to anything. And she wasn’t about to give him time to think about it. She wreathed her arms around his neck and pulled herself up enough to kiss him, her legs lifting to wrap around his hips. All she knew of passion was what he had taught her, but that was enough, more than enough, for her to brand him now with her own fiery demand. If this was all he was willing to give her, she’d damned well take every bit of it she could get.
She felt as well as heard a growl from him that was probably an oath, wordless and fierce, and his instant’s hesitation was no more than that. One of his hands slipped down between their bodies, touching her insistently, and she felt the burning pressure increase even as his caress guided her relentlessly to the edge of some peak that seemed just beyond her reach.
She couldn’t believe what he was making her feel. It was maddening, a hot, breathless tension so sharp-edged it was as if a living thing were trying to escape from the core of her. Then she felt a sudden sharp pain as something gave way, and for a shocked instant she was conscious of nothing except the incredible sensation of his flesh throbbing deep inside her.
He was kissing her almost wildly, and when the moment of shock passed she realized her body was still quivering on the edge of something. Her hands were compulsively stroking his back and shoulders, and she instinctively lifted her hips a little to take more of him when his body settled fully into the cradle of hers. The small movement yanked a groan from Keith, and he immediately began moving slowly inside her.
She realized he was being careful, even though the strain on his face and in the rigid muscles of his arms and back made it clear how difficult it was for him to rein himself. Erin wanted to tell him not to do so, not to hold back for her sake because there was no pain now, but then his hand was on her again and the spiraling tension edged into a new kind of pain. It was winding tighter and tighter around her, wringing a moan from her throat, making her writhe because it was too much and she couldn’t bear it anymore.
If she’d had the breath to say anything at all, she would have begged him to stop. But then, just when she knew that another second of the exquisite tension would kill her, something snapped violently and everything inside her seemed to melt until she was nothing but a hot, pulsing, liquid pool of pleasure. She heard primitive sounds and sobs escaping her throat, and she heard the hoarse cry of Keith’s pleasure as his powerful body shuddered in her arms.
Chapter 5
Erin wasn’t thinking very much about questions. She had never in her life felt so utterly limp and boneless, almost floating even beneath his considerable weight. He was heavy, but she wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable; in fact, she felt wonderful. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, her legs coiled with his, and she didn’t want either of them to move. His forearms were underneath her shoulders, his fingers moving in her hair, and once her own breath steadied she could feel the warmth of his against her neck. She wanted to go to sleep just like this.
Keith, however, was obviously thinking of questions. He lifted his head to gaze down at her, his vivid eyes still darkened to purple. He kissed her, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, but his voice was strangely flat when he spoke.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask,” Erin murmured.
A frown drew his flying brows together. “Dammit, Erin, it never occurred to me! You can’t tell me you haven’t had men chasing you since you hit puberty.”
She had to smile a little, curiously undisturbed by both his anger and the conversation. “As a matter of fact, I can tell you that. Men don’t chase me, Keith.”
“Maybe you have another name for it,” he said, obviously disbelieving her statement.
Erin shook her head slightly. “They don’t. Never have. Oh, sure, they ask me out. Talk to me. Dance with me. But most of them don’t make passes. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t want them to, and they sensed it. Or maybe…”
He was watching her intently, and when her voice trailed off, he prompted, “Maybe what?”
She hesitated, then said slowly, “I’ve always felt like an ornament. Something pretty a man likes to wear on his arm. I guess men don’t think about taking an ornament to bed.”
“Is that how you think I see you?” Keith demanded. “As an ornament?”
“No.” Her reply was instant and certain. “I’m not sure how you see me, but I know it isn’t that way.”
After a moment, and clearly choosing to ignore the implied question, Keith said roughly, “You should have told me, Erin. Do you think I would have let things go so far if I’d known you were a virgin?”
“No, I think you would have put me on the plane.” She met his gaze steadily. “But it was my choice, Keith. You made it mine when you offered your terms—and I accepted them.”
“How can you know what you’ve accepted if you’ve never been in a man’s bed before?”
She managed a little laugh. “Physically innocent is one thing, but I doubt it’s possible to be completely innocent. Not in today’s world, or at my age. I know what I’m doing. I understood your terms.”
“Then why did you accept them?” His voice was still flat, hard, but there was anger underneath the control.
Erin wasn’t surprised by it. Anger was, at least at this point in his life, so much a part of him that it helped fuel almost every other emotion. She thought he was angry at himself more than her, but in any case she wasn’t disturbed by it. In fact, she had an idea that the force of his emotions, often contained but seldom hidden, was one of the reasons she was in his bed now. His emotions had freed hers.
The men of her father’s world were always…civilized. They moved in houses of government and diplomatic enclaves with their elegant manners and quiet voices and subtle words, and no matter what it was they were saying they always meant something else. Each of those men was habitually elusive and evasive and so calculating that the real man seemed a pale ghost overlaid with deception.
But not Keith. He was secretive, yes, but not subtle. What he said was forthright and blunt, and his emotions were so intense she could literally feel them. She thought she could trust her instincts where he was concerned, believed that no matter how contradictory he might seem, she would always know at least a part of what he was feeling. She believed Keith didn’t play games. The certainty of it was almost as reassuring as words of commitment would have been.
“Erin?”
She blinked, realized he was waiting for an answer to his question. She couldn’t tell him the truth. He didn’t want her love, and she wouldn’t offer what wasn’t wanted. Finally, she said steadily, “You didn’t see an ornament. I like being treated like a woman, Keith. That’s reason enough.”
He looked at her broodingly, one hand lifting to brush a strand of fiery hair away from her face, his fingers lingering to trace her cheekbone. “Is it?”
She smiled at him, determined to keep his terms firmly in mind no matter what it cost her. “I think so. It’s a wonderful feeling, being desired. I’ve never felt this way before. And I never knew—this—was so exciting. You’re a wonderful lover, Keith.” Then her smile wavered slightly. “Do you mind if I call you that? A lover?”
His facial muscles tightened. “No.”
“I couldn’t think of a better word,” she confessed. “I know it’s euphemistic, but—”
Keith bent his head and kissed her, a bit roughly. She had the vague impression that
he’d done it primarily to stop her from saying any more, but she didn’t think very much about his reasons. That kiss, hard and curiously possessive, felt like a brand, and sharp excitement quivered in her when she became aware of his renewing desire. Her own body had been faintly, languorously throbbing during their entire conversation, and now the pulsation grew stronger, faster.
He muttered something against her mouth and then lifted his head, looking down at her with what was almost a glare. “Dammit,” he said thickly, “I want to keep at you until neither of us can walk without help.”
Erin drew a shaky breath. “That—sounds fine to me,” she murmured.
“It isn’t fine,” he said in the same tone, kissing one corner of her mouth. “You’ll be sore. I shouldn’t—”
“I don’t care.” Her fingers probed the tensing muscles of his back and shoulders. “I don’t feel sore. All I feel is you.”
The bold invitation in her voice wasn’t something he could ignore, especially when her body clasped his with tight heat and she moved under him with an innate sensuality that stole his breath and what little control he could claim. Her innocence had shocked him at some deep level, jolting his emotions as well as his senses. Disquiet was still very much with him even though he couldn’t define it. But desire swept even that aside. He wanted her again, even more wildly than before, and the power of his desire sent his disturbing tangle of emotions flying.
She was astonishingly uninhibited, her passion so sweet and giving it drove his higher, her response so total that she went to his head like some fine, rare wine. Everything about her, from the texture of her skin and the misty depths of her eyes to the kitten-like sounds she made in passion, aroused him to heights he’d never known before. It was like a compulsion, loving her, a desperate, greedy, savage hunger that had to be satisfied no matter what it cost him.
During those intense moments, nothing else mattered. If he realized the primitive emotions could never have sprung only from lust, and that his profound need for her, Erin, was an instinctive hunger for joining as well as a sexual one, he didn’t think about it. He didn’t think about anything except the hot, sweet torment of their passion.
—
Erin woke to the realization that she was alone. She heard water running in the bathroom, and managed to pry her eyes open enough to see the clock on the nightstand. Two A.M. Well, she thought sleepily, he was accustomed to working nights. But she wasn’t. A long, tense day had culminated in a very active evening, and she was so blissfully weary she didn’t want to move.
She was in the middle of the bed, the covers drawn up over her limp, naked body. Partially awake now, she was conscious of that wonderful pulsing sensation deep inside her, and she wanted to purr with contentment.
After the emotional upheaval of the day, she couldn’t help but be a little amused at herself, because she should have been at least slightly worried—and she wasn’t. Maybe that would come, but it hadn’t yet. Any sensible woman, she decided drowsily, would be worried. But then, any sensible woman wouldn’t have become the mistress of an angry man by midnight of the day she’d first seen him.
Her first lover. A man who refused ties, promises, or even questions, who had offered a proposition rather than a proposal, and who had taught her to feel a passion so great that the memory of it now was still able to take her breath away. The man who was a few feet away in the bathroom, the man who had been shaken by her virginity and who was still, she thought, disturbed by it. The man who felt so much on so many complicated levels she might never get to the bottom of him even if he gave her the time to try. The man she loved.
She thought she should have been appalled, but drifted back to sleep without bothering to worry about it.
Her next sensation was of coolness as the covers were drawn away, and then strong arms gathering her up easily. She loved that, being carried by him, and murmured her pleasure. The next thing she knew, she was immersed in warm bathwater just the right temperature with bubbles up to her chin. She opened her eyes and stared at what little she could see of herself, vaguely aware that he had bundled her thick hair behind her head so that it formed a comfortable cushion on the rim of the tub.
This resort hotel supplied numerous amenities for its guests, including bubble bath for the deep, oval tubs that were the essence of comfort. Erin was comfortable—and slightly bemused.
There were several lights in the bathroom; he had turned on only one so that the illumination was soft rather than sharp. She looked up at Keith as he knelt by the tub, searching for words in the haze of contentment and finally settling for, “Why am I here?”
His mouth curved in a slight smile, though his eyes remained darkened and intent. “You may not feel it now, but you will in the morning. Any new—activity—uses muscles you didn’t know you had.”
Erin stretched out her legs and winced slightly as the muscles of her thighs twinged. “You could be right,” she admitted, recalling her childhood days on horseback, when a ride after months out of the saddle had left her stiff and sore.
That thought led to another along the same lines, as she remembered a favorite theory of one of her teachers. He had maintained that the attraction of adolescent girls for horses had a sexual base. Many of the muscles used in riding were the same ones exercised by sexual activity, and the symbolism of gripping a powerful animal between the legs, he said, was rather obvious. It was a “safe” outlet for sensations and emotions with which an immature mind hadn’t learned to cope.
After hearing that, Erin had stayed away from her horse for weeks, feeling ridiculously guilty about her affection for him. Him! She would have had to own a gelding! She wondered, now, how many of her classmates had been as unnecessarily upset as she’d been. That teacher had either been thoughtless or perversely cruel to have put those ideas into the minds of young girls, so many of whom had owned horses.
“Is the water too hot?” Keith asked.
She could feel the heat in her face. “No, it’s just right.”
“Then you’re blushing. Why?”
Erin eyed him, and decided to keep her memories to herself. “I haven’t been put into a bath since I was seven. And never when I was sound asleep.” He had told her he couldn’t promise he’d be kind, but this was kind, she thought.
His smile remained, and he seemed to hesitate before he said dryly, “If I’d lain there any longer and watched you sleep, you would have had even more reason for aching muscles in the morning.”
Accustomed to graceful compliments and flowery words, Erin found his bluntness curiously refreshing. And she wasn’t at all embarrassed by it.
“You watched me sleep?” she ventured, far more disturbed by that.
Keith nodded, but didn’t elaborate. Instead, he reached out and down, finding her lower thigh beneath the bubbles and beginning to gently massage it. Erin had experienced the expert touch of a masseur in some of the finest spas in Europe, but nothing compared to the melting, boneless sensation that swept over her as Keith’s fingers slowly kneaded her muscles. She actually wanted to whimper out loud with the pleasure of it.
Her eyelids grew heavy as weariness vanished, and between her lashes she stared at his arm, starkly bronze against the white bubbles. The heat of the water was seeping into all her other muscles, and both his hands were on her thighs now, massaging slowly and deeply. She was turning to jelly. Quivering jelly, because the touch of his hands was as sensual as it was relaxing.
Her veiled gaze moved up over his forearms, lingered on the pulsing movements of his biceps, then his shoulders, and finally his face. He was looking down at the bubbles that hid the body he was touching, his expression taut and eyes narrowed. She loved that look. It was fierce and hard, primitive in a way that touched some cord deep inside her.
Maybe that was it indeed, she thought dimly. The reason. He was unlike any other man she’d ever known, and the vitality in him, the intensity was so strong and honest, it touched a part of her no one else had even come close
to. When he was like this, his hands on her, it was as if her whole body understood an immutable truth that her mind was accepting only now. She was his. She was connected to him, belonged to him, on some instinctive, ancient level where language was only emotion.
Erin made a soft, almost inaudible sound, and his hands stilled as he looked at her face. Then, without a word, he reached for the bar of soap lying on a ledge near the faucet. She hadn’t been aware of the passage of time, but realized now that the bubbles had begun dissolving and that the water had cooled to lukewarm. She didn’t want to move. Her skin tingled warmly from the heat of the bath and his touch, and though she thought she should probably protest his obvious intention to bathe her because it didn’t seem quite right that he should do it, she couldn’t summon the energy.
Keith flipped the lever that would slowly drain the water from the tub, then worked up a lather in his hands and set the soap aside. Beginning with her slender feet, he slowly worked his way up her legs, caressing and massaging more than anything else. He had meant this interlude to be relaxing, but should have known, he acknowledged silently, that he couldn’t have his hands on her without going crazy.
A tall woman, she was so perfectly proportioned that her body was almost delicate. And she was revealed to him slowly as the water around her drained away, her golden flesh glistening in the soft light. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and his hands were reveling in the slippery exploration. He stroked the slick lather from her feet to her chin, moving so slowly that he was torturing himself. He saw her breathing quicken, watched her nipples tighten as his hands swirled the soapy foam around them, felt her stomach quiver and contract beneath his touch.
His heart was pounding so heavily that his chest ached, and when she made a soft little sound as his fingers slid between her legs, his own desire ran like fire through his body. He felt as if he was being taken apart, cell by cell, and wouldn’t be whole again until he lost himself in her, surrounded himself with the warmth of her. He retained just enough control to reach for the hand-held shower attachment and turn it on, waiting seconds for the water to reach the right temperature. Then he began rinsing the soap off her rosy body.