A Stormy Spanish Summer(46)

Vidal acknowledged how hard he had tried to fight the need for her that was sweeping over him right now, and how completely he had failed. He hadn’t planned for this to happen. In fact he had done everything he could to avoid it happening. But right now he was no more able to control his need for her than she was able to conceal her response to him.

Pointless. Pointless to fight, pointless to flee, and even more pointless to allow herself to love him—and that was exactly what she was doing, Fliss recognised, as Vidal looked deep into her eyes and then kissed her slowly and lingeringly. The sensation of his mouth moving on hers with such deliberate and controlled sensuality was stealing her resistance from her. All she wanted to do was respond to him, give to him, be held and touched and possessed by him. The force of that need made her whole body tremble in his arms like a reed in the wind, needing his support to protect her from her own vulnerability.

Vidal moved back and pulled off his shirt, then cupped her face and kissed the side of her neck, sending hot shivers of pleasure running over her skin so that her control ran from her like sand taken by a ceaseless and unstoppable tide.

‘Touch me,’ he whispered against her ear, and that rough, broken note of urgency suggested that his whole desire was for her touch and he was on the point of breaking his self-control. Surely more a figment of her own imagination than true reality? But Vidal was lifting her hand and placing it against the warm flesh of his chest, holding it there as he implored her, ‘Touch me, Fliss, as I’ve wanted you to touch me from the moment I saw you.’

Unable to stop herself, Fliss obeyed his whispered command. Wasn’t this, after all, what she had ached and longed for herself? Now, as she stroked and explored her way over Vidal’s torso, she could feel the surge of the blood beneath his skin rising up to meet the trembling excitement of her fingertips—just as she could feel the movement of his muscles as she grew bolder and explored further and lower, to the flat plane where his flesh disappeared beneath the edge of his chinos.

‘Yes.’ The heated urgency of the demand Vidal smothered against the rise of her breast came just when her hand reached the barrier of his trousers, and could only mean one thing. But still Fliss hesitated. To have come this far was dangerous. To go any further would be fatal, taking her to a state of being and emotion that once inhabited she knew she would never want to leave.

‘So you still want to torment me, do you?’ Vidal accused her. ‘Then maybe I should do a little tormenting of my own.’

Before she could stop him he had swung her up into his arms and was carrying her into his own bedroom, minimalist and masculine in design and decor, even if the large bed on which he was placing her seemed to Fliss to be the most sensually dangerous place she had ever known. Or was that because Vidal was now undressing her and himself, between kisses she was sure were designed to arouse her to the point where she ached for him so much that she was willing to do anything to have the pleasure he was giving her? Each kiss, each touch was taking her deeper and deeper into a place of such intense need that nothing else existed, and her now naked body was trembling with the force of her longing.

‘See how much you want me?’ Vidal asked her.

Fliss couldn’t deny it. She did want him. She wanted him, needed him, longed for him, loved him.

Her body shuddered in mute confirmation of that admission.

Vidal leaned forward and stroked her body from her hip to her breast with a fiercely demanding caress that ended with him bending his head to take her nipple between his lips, drawing the need up through her body until it was trembling and pulsing in response to him. His free hand was cupping her other breast, his knee urging her legs apart.

The desire that ripped into her was a volcano of molten heat. The satisfaction of feeling his naked erect flesh against her own sex, initially so pleasurable, quickly became another form of exquisite torture as she ached for even more intimacy, grinding her lower body against him whilst Vidal in turn lifted her against himself, opening her legs to wrap them around his body and hold him closer.

Fliss craved the sensation of him within her, the movement of his flesh inside and against her own. Just the thought of it made need surge through her in unbearable longing, but Vidal was pushing her away, removing himself from her, leaving her. Was this what he had meant about tormenting her?

Yearningly Fliss reached to him, but he shook his head.

‘Not yet,’ he told her softly. ‘I want to touch all of you, to taste all of you, to know all of you first.’

He was stringing kisses along the back of her knee and then the inside of her leg, whilst his fingers stroked apart the willing swollen heat of the lips covering her sex. The pulse already beating there increased in intensity, driving her towards the goal her body now craved. The caress of Vidal’s touch against the intimate wetness of her sex was both a pleasure and an incitement to want more, to want him. Fliss knew it as she curled her fingers round his wrist in a mute plea for what she really wanted.