"I don't want you to give me up.' Alena trembled valiantly against the storming assault of her own longing as he pushed against the barriers of her inexperience, melting them with his heat. "Come with me, Kiryl,' she begged as she reached for the handle to her bedroom door. "Come with me and show me … teach me … All I want is you. All I will ever want is you.'
The bedroom door was open, standing as wide as the door to her heart and her sensuality, and yet instead of stepping forward to seize the prize he wanted Kiryl found that he was standing still, held to the spot by an alien emotion that gripped him as tightly as though a boa constrictor had coiled itself around his mind.
Why was he hesitating? This was a vitally important step along the road to the fulfilment of his plan-more important, perhaps, than any of the other steps he had taken. Bold, invincible steps that had taken him easily through the ruins of other men's attempts to stop his successful financial progress. If he had crushed them beneath his will-power then why was he hesitating now, when all he had to do was simply take what was being offered to him? Surely he wasn't afraid of doing that? Afraid that the very act of taking what Alena was offering might also take from him something he had no desire to give? Afraid that somehow the taking of her heart would demand a price that would ultimately prove too heavy for him? Afraid to step over the entrance to her room because of what doing so might reveal to him about himself?
Never.
Bending down, he swung Alena up into his arms and claimed her mouth in a kiss that committed him to his chosen course of action, sealing behind him all the doors he had thrust open to get to the place where he now was.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THEY were in her bedroom, the lights turned down low by the unseen, highly efficient staff who must have come in whilst they were having dinner to prepare her room for the evening. In the soft light the green darkness of Kiryl's eyes as he fixed his gaze on hers set Alena's heart beating suffocatingly fast. Having placed her on the bed, Kiryl was now sitting beside her, looking down at her. He reached out and covered the wild beat of her heart where it was lifting the soft silk of her dress.
"So much excitement,' he whispered against her throat. "I hope I will not disappoint you.'
"I am the one who is more likely to disappoint you,' was Alena's unsteady response.
"That is not possible. It is for me to light the way for you, so that your desire is mine, your pleasure mine and your satisfaction mine,' Kiryl responded.
He was kissing her again-slow, delicate kisses that he trailed from her collarbone to the corner of her mouth and then back again, gently at first, and then with an urgent rhythmic tempo that accelerated the beat of her heart and had her digging her fingers into his shoulders in an increasing urgency of need.
The hot satin touch of male hands on her body, swiftly removing her clothes, replacing them with boldly sensual kisses, made Alena feel as though a river of molten desire was sweeping away whatever hesitancy and inhibitions she might have had along with her garments.
Soon it wasn't enough just to have Kiryl touching her, and she was the one reaching for him with trembling, eager fingers, tugging at buttons and cloth, belt and zip, until the lamplight burned golden against the magnificence of his torso, soft with dark body hair. No shadows were deep or dark enough to conceal the naked aroused thrust of his maleness-a maleness that evoked a female desire within her as primitive as his.
Lost in a world filled with awed delight and an aching need to know the reality of his possession, Alena reached out towards him, her hot gaze embracing the thick full ness of his erection, her fingertips trembling slightly as she touched it in a hesitant exploration that grew bolder with the hot flood of delight that flowed from where she was touching him right through her body to her own eager sex.
The unsteady breath she exhaled brushed the soft hairs on Kiryl's skin, releasing him from the dangerous spell her touch had put him under with its combination of open female longing and inexperience. Kiryl frowned. Something was happening to him. Thoughts and feelings were growing inside him that he didn't want-like the knowledge that this was the first time she had touched a man in this way, and that the responsibility for how she would view the pleasure of sex-or the lack of pleasure-potentially for the rest of her life lay with him.
Whilst he hesitated Alena explored him intimately, her breasts swelling with female ecstasy in his maleness, her nipples tight and thrusting, the ache deep down within her sex growing and pulsing into a clamour of female need. Overwhelmed by the intensity of her own desire, she leaned forward and touched her lips to the engorged head of his sex.
Like winter ice on the Neva, cracking under the force of the sun's warmth, Kiryl felt the shock waves of her intimate touch crashing through him. Feelings, needs he was totally unable to control burst into turbulent boiling life inside him. Alena was in his arms, her naked body shimmering satin against the bed, her hair spread all around her in a tumble of rich gold, her nipples burned to the deep, dark heat of eagerness. Her thighs were splayed apart and the soft delicate line of blonde hair on her sex was dancing in the light as her hips rose and fell in a writhing agony of need. The same need that was thudding through his own body, like a pile driver sending its insistent message, making its unstoppable demand for that the soft, wet velvet intimacy that would take it and hold whilst he drove them both to the heights and kept them there.
A raw sound escaped from Kiryl's throat just before he bent his head to take her nipple between his lips, to rake it with his teeth in an agony of male desire that had what was left of her self-control splintering into a hundred thousand shards of aching longing. It ricocheted through Alena's own body. It was a sound of denial and demand, of agonised longing and the desire to resist that longing, of a need that could not be controlled or contained, and it echoed everything that she felt herself. It was the cry of his heart and her own heart, was crying back to it.
Kiryl told himself that he must remember this was her first time-that he must make her pleasure so great that what she so obviously felt for him now was intensified. He must and he would-but still an inner voice warned him that, despite the importance of that, it was surely not really necessary for him to slide his hand the silky-smooth length of her inner thigh and feel the responsive quiver not only of her flesh there but of her whole body, for him to follow that caress with the exploration of his mouth. But he was doing it, and he didn't want to stop-couldn't stop-even though Alena had tightened her fingers into his skin and was begging him to stop. Because she could not endure the intensity of the pleasure he was giving her.
It shocked him that those throaty, sobbed words, driven with female arousal and never heard by him before, could have such a savagely erotic effect on him. No other woman he had ever known had revealed a helpless inability to withstand the desire he aroused in her so openly or so honestly, and certainly no other woman had said to him as Alena was saying now, "But I want to please you. I want to hold you and touch you and … '
Kiryl's hand cupped the softly swol en flesh of Alena's sex as he kissed the top of her thigh. His fingers stroked apart the deep pink flushed lips that guarded what lay beyond them.
"This pleases me,' he told her truthfully, his own voice thickened by what he told himself was his satisfaction in her desire for him. "Your response to me, your desire for me, the sweet hot wetness of you here, where you welcome my touch and make those little sounds of need you are making now, please me, Alena. This … '
His thumb stroked slowly along the moist, sensitive vall ey and caressed the pulsing centre of her female sexuality, his touch making her cry out, torn between her need to press herself closer to his caress and her fear of doing so because of the intensity of that need.
"This pleases me. It pleases me and it makes me want to do this … '
Alena cried out again when she felt his mouth against the place where his thumb rested.
"And this … ' His fingers slid slowly and carefully into her.
It was the wildness of Alena's response, her lack of control and her desire that was affecting him and snapping the cords of his own control, Kiryl told himself. Nothing else.
Lost in the waves of pleasure that were pounding through her, each one deeper and more intense than the one before, Alena could only cling helplessly to Kiryl and plead with him, "I want you, Kiryl, I want you now. Please now … '