His shirt was unfastened now, and he was still kissing her. A hard, demanding kiss without any softening warmth or tender emotion. How long would it be before his anger cooled and he pushed her away again? She must not let that happen. Somehow she must keep feeding his anger until it became physical arousal and desire. And perhaps the best way to do that was to confirm his judgement of her.
Very carefully and deliberately she broke Vidal’s kiss, and then equally deliberately she let the robe slide from her body. She stepped towards him and placed her lips against his, lifting her hands to his shoulders.
She heard Vidal groan, felt his hands clamping down on her waist, his mouth closing against hers.
A shiver of self-revulsion gripped her. What was she doing? She had gambled and lost in a mad moment of self-destruction, and now.
He couldn’t let this happen. Vidal knew that. He would be damned for ever if he gave in to Felicity’s allure. And tormented for ever if he did not. His body yearned and ached for her. For seven years he had had to live with the need she aroused in him. He looked down at her body and felt his own shudder violently as he fought against taking what she was offering. Of its own volition and against his will his hands lifted from her waist to her breasts, full and taut, the nipples already hard with sensual promise. They pressed against his palms.
‘Oh!’ Fliss gasped, caught off-guard by the shock of pleasure the sensation of Vidal’s touch against her breasts had brought. She hadn’t been expecting it and it widened her eyes and made her mouth soften. Desire? Her body trembled. Was it wrong to want him, or was it part of what must happen?
Vidal could see and feel Fliss’s arousal. She wanted him! That knowledge severed the last strand of his self-control, plunging him into the millrace of his own longing for her.
He tried to dam the racing flood of his need. His heart was slamming into his chest wall. He knew what he should do, but it was impossible for him to stem the fierce tide of desire that possessed him. At some atavistic deep level his instinct said that Felicity was his—should always have been his, would be his.
Her lips clung to his, parting eagerly to the thrust of his tongue as he took and tasted the wild sweetness of her mouth.
Beneath the possessive pressure of Vidal’s kiss, Fliss tensed on a soft moan of delight. There was no point in her trying to control the desire leaping to life inside her, racing from nerve-ending to nerve-ending. Why attempt the impossible? Why resist what was surely preordained by fate?
The seeking, all-conquering exploration of his tongue took her own into its fierce possession, sending a star-burst of liquid arousal spilling through her whole body. And when Vidal withdrew his tongue from hers, to stroke the tip of it tormentingly against the now swollen fullness of her lips, Fliss clung to him, cast adrift in a wild inner sea of sensual intensity.
The reason they were here together like this no longer mattered. It had evaporated like morning mist beneath the heat of the sun, burned away by the power of their shared desire.
Now it was Fliss who captured Vidal’s tongue, taking it deep within the warm wet intimacy of her mouth to caress it with her own. She was in Vidal’s arms, and they were kissing as though the connection between them had sprung to life like an invisible force that bound them together.
She welcomed the possession of Vidal’s hands against her naked breasts, straining towards him as though to offer him their arousal, her whole body shuddering wildly when he rolled her nipples between his thumb and forefinger in a caress of erotic delight that had her digging her nails into the hard muscles of his arms.
Vidal didn’t need her to tell him what he was doing to her, or what she wanted. He seemed to understand her need instinctively, arousing it, matching it, feeding and sustaining it with his touch and the growing passion of his kisses.
She had no will apart from the will to submit to the pleasure Vidal was giving her, Fliss thought dizzily, lost in the erotic heat that enveloped her, enclosing her in its embrace, possessing her senses, her thoughts and her will-power just as Vidal was possessing her body. She wanted what was happening more than she had ever wanted anything in the whole of her life. It was what she had been born for, what she longed for. It was her fate and her destiny—a completion that had the power to make her whole.
Vidal’s hands moulded and caressed her breasts as he kissed her again, the rhythm of his fingers caressing the eager hardness of her nipples and matching the equally rhythmic thrust of his tongue against her own, creating a swiftly growing crescendo of hungry longing that pulsed and ran through her body in a silent song of female arousal. As though her desire had been hot-wired to respond only to Vidal’s touch, her body moved to the rhythm he was imposing on it, the lamplight giving her naked flesh a softly golden sheen highlighted by the arousal-induced flush that bathed her chest and throat.