The Most Coveted Prize(17)

"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  … '