Still tender from her first experience the night before, Lilah felt every inch of Bastien’s smooth hard length as he surged inside her. Her arms wrapped round his neck for support, her head falling back as he withdrew and surged deep again. Excitement engulfed her in a heady rush, her heart slamming inside her chest, her breath hitching and breaking in her throat.
So sensitive was she that as Bastien increased the tempo and hammered into her the pleasure swelled to an almost painful intensity. The rising heat within her finally soothed the hollow ache of tormenting hunger, and she gasped and moaned in delight. Her hips writhed against the cold tiles as she reached a climax too powerful to restrain and it swept her over the edge, sending intoxicating explosions of blissful sensation rippling through her quivering length as she sagged in Bastien’s powerful hold.
By the time she had floated down from that dizzy peak of satisfaction Bastien was trailing off her sodden nightdress and wrapping her in a towel.
‘You didn’t say sorry...this wasn’t supposed to happen between us...’ Lilah mumbled in limp reminder as she reclaimed her wits.
‘I jumped to conclusions. I was wrong. It appears that one of my staff was responsible for the leak to the press,’ Bastien shared with taut reluctance as he grabbed up another towel to fold it round her dripping hair.
‘Told you so,’ Lilah remarked ungraciously.
‘I lost my temper with you. I don’t do that,’ Bastien growled half under his breath in explanation. ‘When anger is in control, mistakes are made.’
‘So you’re saying sorry?’ Lilah whispered, weak as a kitten as he laid her down on the soft firmness of his bed and pulled a sheet over her cooling skin.
Bastien didn’t answer. He didn’t do apologies, but he was quite happy for her to assume that he had apologised. He was intent on her, still worked up in an unsettling way he didn’t understand. She made him feel alive, crazily alive, and for some reason he hadn’t had enough of her yet. One taste of her had only made him hunger for more.
He framed her face with long dark fingers, rejoicing in the silky softness of her skin and the rosy purity of her features. He savoured her swollen pink mouth with his own, revelling in the taste of her and the thundering race of his heartbeat as the hunger raged through him again like a tempest.
Bastien kissed with the same wild potency with which he made love, Lilah reflected dizzily, and the pulse of heat was awakening in her pelvis again as his tongue tangled with hers and flicked the ultra-sensitive roof of her mouth in a teasing assault that made her push up against him. Desire shimmied through her like an electrical storm, lighting up every place he touched, from the peaks of her straining nipples to the infinitely delicate damp flesh between her thighs.
‘I still want you, glikia mou,’ Bastien grated, and his stunning dark golden eyes were bright with lingering wonder at that anomaly as he ran his mouth down hungrily over the sweet mounds of her small breasts, licking and tasting and nipping to make her slim body writhe frantically.
As he reached the heart of her arousal and dallied to torment her with every carnal caress he had ever learned she gasped his name over and over again, and he very much liked the sound of his own name on her lips.
Lilah had not believed he could make her want him again so soon, when her body was still heavy with fulfilment, but somehow he’d pushed her to the raw, biting edge of feverish need again, and the first plunge of his powerful male heat inside her felt gloriously necessary.
Her spine arched, wild torrents of joyous sensation cascading through her quivering body as he pushed back her thighs and rose over her, pounding into her tight depths with driving hunger. She thrashed under him, every nerve-ending electrified by the pagan rhythm of his hard thrusts and the inexorable climb towards another climax. When it came, she hit a peak and shattered like glass, shocked by the white-hot intensity of excitement exploding inside her.
She fell back against the pillows, utterly drained of energy, while Bastien groaned long and low and shuddered with pleasure.
Bastien drank in the scent of Delilah’s shampoo as he struggled to get his breath back. Her silky hair had the sweet fresh perfume of a summer meadow. Her arms were still wrapped around him and he lifted his tousled dark head to drop a brief but appreciative kiss on her brow.
‘You’re an unbeatable cure for a nightmare, glikia mou,’ he husked with wicked amusement, rolling free of her to head for the bathroom.
The minute he arrived there he realised too late what was missing. He had not used a condom—not that last time or the time before it in the shower.
It was a very dangerous oversight that chilled Bastien and made him want to punch something hard in angry self-loathing. The shower beat down on him while some of the worst memories of his life engulfed him and he shuddered, knowing what he must do, knowing that this time around he would not dare to walk away and simply hope for the best.
Delilah needed to know that, whatever happened, her future and that of any child she had would be totally secure.
A towel knotted round his lean brown hips, he strode back into the bedroom and proceeded to disconcert Lilah with what she deemed to be inappropriate questions.
‘Why on earth are you asking me such things?’ she demanded tautly, her colour high from embarrassment.
‘We’ve had sex twice without a condom,’ Bastien told her grimly. ‘I’m regularly tested and I’m clean, so there is no risk of an infection. I’m merely trying to calculate the odds of conception.’
Lilah’s whole body turned cold at the threat of an unplanned pregnancy. She hadn’t noticed the lack of contraception—had been as lost in passion as he must have been. That acknowledgement stung, because she knew how important it was to take precautions and protect herself from such consequences.
Ashamed that she could have been so reckless and immature as to overlook such necessities, she answered his questions about her menstrual cycle and watched his frown steadily darken.
‘Obviously you could conceive. You’re young, fertile...naturally there’s a good chance.’ His beautiful mouth compressed hard. ‘We’ll get married as soon as I can get it organised.’
‘Married?’ Lilah parrotted in a strangled shriek, sitting up in bed with a sudden jerk, her eyes awash with disbelief as she stared back at him.
His unfathomable dark eyes glittered. ‘You need to know that whatever happens I’m there for you, and a wedding ring is the only security a man can offer a woman in that situation.’
‘People don’t rush off and get married simply because of a contraceptive oversight,’ Lilah whispered shakily. ‘That would be crazy.’
‘I know exactly what I’m doing. My first child was aborted when I was only twenty-one,’ Bastien explained, shattering her with that flat statement of fact. ‘I refuse to risk a repeat of that experience.’
Lilah was poleaxed. ‘But...but I—’
‘So we’ll get married. And if it transpires that we have no reason to stay married we’ll get an equally quick divorce,’ Bastien assured her smoothly, as though such a fast turnaround from marriage to divorce would be the most natural development in the world.
‘But we can’t just get married on the off-chance that I might be pregnant,’ she muttered incredulously.
‘If you have conceived we’ll be married and you’ll be less tempted to consider a termination,’ Bastien pointed out with assurance. ‘We don’t need to publicise our marriage in the short term, or drag anyone else into our predicament. We’ll have a private wedding.’
Stunned, Lilah flopped down flat again, exhaustion rolling over her like a hefty blanket. It was all too much to take in. The shocking revelations of his past and the sheer impossibility of their future.
‘We’ll argue about it in the morning,’ she countered in a daze. ‘You’re thinking worst-case scenario.’
‘No, I’ve already lived the worst-case scenario,’ Bastien contradicted with an edge of derision. ‘And that was losing the child I wanted because the woman concerned decided that she didn’t.’
Lilah winced, recognising the edge of bitterness in his dark deep drawl. She wondered who that woman had been, while marvelling at how much Bastien was revealing about himself. He had a deep, sensitive side to his nature that astonished her. For the first time she wondered what it had felt like for him—a man who wanted a child with a woman when the woman did not feel the same. Her heart ached for him. Clearly he had grieved that loss, but he had also interpreted the termination as a personal rejection and a humiliation, which struck her as even more sad.
Without comment she watched him stride lithely back to his own room, utterly unconcerned by his nudity. But why would he be concerned? an inner voice asked. When you were that perfectly built and physically beautiful you had to be aware of the fact.
She stretched out in the big bed, wondering why she wished he had stayed...wondering why what he had told her had left her feeling bereft and unsettled.
Had he loved the woman who had chosen not to have his child? Why did it bother her that Bastien might once have cared deeply for another woman? Evidently back then Bastien had not been quite as emotionally detached and untouchable as he was now. He had cared...he had been hurt. Why did that touch something deep down inside her and wound her? It couldn’t be jealousy... It couldn’t possibly be jealousy.