Exotic Affairs(95)

And, worse, he was awake. She knew he was because he was lying there on his back, letting his fingers stroke feather-light caresses along her resting arm. It wasn’t a sexual gesture; she knew that instinctively. More an absent stroking, as if he was lying there maybe staring into the darkness, lost deep in his own train of thought.

It was nice.

So nice in fact that she didn’t really want to end it. Though she didn’t know if she could simply go on lying here pretending to be asleep when she wasn’t, because already she could feel her pulse-rate picking up, feel the even tempo of her breathing alter.

It was a long time since she’d last felt the warm strength of a man lying beside her. Seven long lonely years, in fact.

And even then it had been this man. This same dark, sensually attractive man, with the same clean, slightly musky scent that was so intoxicatingly familiar.

It seemed ironic now, to find herself in this situation when it was Luiz who had spoiled her from wanting to go to bed with another man.

He released a small sigh. Caroline wished that she could do the same, only she knew it would give the game away. Then her defences would have to go back up, the tension would return, the need to keep on fighting him.

The sigh escaped anyway, so she tried to use it as an excuse to slide away, as if in her sleep. Luiz moved at the same time, his fingers tangling with her fingers at the same moment that he rolled onto his side and towards her. She wasn’t quick enough to close her eyes, and it was like looking into a mirror and seeing her own sombre mood reflected back at her. Only his eyes were dark—as dark as the night still surrounding them.

He wanted her, she could see the need written there. And the mirror was in knowing that she wanted him. Too late to pretend. Too late to run and hide. He knew just as she knew. It was that simple, that final.

With the use of their tangled fingers he drew her up against him, and even as she felt the aroused heat of his body pushing gently against her his mouth was hungrily capturing hers.

And—oh, but it felt good, like finding something she had been mourning the loss of for too, too long. And perhaps because she didn’t fight him, didn’t even try to protest, he savoured the kiss, almost as if he was feeling the same way about it as she.

Or maybe it had more to do with the lateness of the hour, their slumberous state, the relaxed warmth with which they had come together, or even that all-encompassing darkness itself.

Whatever, this kiss was like no other kiss they had ever shared. It was slow and it was deep and it was unbelievably tender. And it went on and on and on, until she felt as if she were floating, lost to a beauty so profound that she had to reach up with her free hand and cup his cheek—just to check that he wasn’t a mere figment of her dreamy imagination.

Her fingers found lean, taut flesh that rasped lightly with a five o’clock shadow. She touched his cheekbone, his nose, the corner of his mouth where it covered her own mouth, heard his low groan as if her exploration moved him.

Gently rolling her onto her back, he came with her, untangled his fingers from hers and began to touch her face in the self-same way. But the kiss began to alter, subtly at first, then with a deepening of sensuality that quickened the senses.

Linking her hands around his nape, she held him, and his touch begin to drift on a gentle exploration of her throat, her shoulders, and finally the satin-smooth slopes of her waiting breasts. As he brushed a caress across tightly budding peaks she gasped her response into his mouth. One of his hands began to dip low over her ribcage, and as she arched in response to his so-light caress he reached up, caught hold of one of her own hands and fed it onto his body.

It was a command for her to match his movements. She remembered it from the last time they’d come together like this. Luiz had been her tutor in the art of arousing a lover. What he made her feel, he wanted to feel; what he did to her to make her go wild with pleasure, he expected her to do to him.

But that had been seven years ago, and seven years of abstinence had made her unsure of herself. Her fingers fluttered uncertainly against his hair-roughened breastbone, found one small tight male nipple and began a tentative rolling of it between thumb and finger which had him groaning thickly. He wrenched his mouth from hers so he could string a line of heated kisses across her cheek and down her throat until he found and fixed on one of her own tightly drawn peaks.

She cried out. It was such a wildly exhilarating sensation. He muttered something she didn’t catch, ran his hand down her body, lifting eager nerve-ends to the surface of her skin as he did so, then caught hold of the hem of her nightdress and deftly slipped it up and over her head.

With the silk gone, his fingers began tracing the sensitive flesh along her inner thigh. Her mouth fixed on his shoulder; his returned to her breast. She could feel the heat of him, the burning, burgeoning power of him, pulsating against her hipbone.