Bridal Bargains

It had been a reckless thing to say—foolish, when it was so obvious that he was angry. His dark eyes flashed contemptuously. ‘Then start paying your damned dues,’ he muttered, and his mouth crushed hers.

It was an insult, an invasion. It promised nothing but punishment for believing she could answer him like that. Yet what actually happened to her then was perhaps more of a punishment than the fierceness of his kiss.

Because she pushed and punched out at him—and then went up like an exploding volcano, her mouth drawing greedily on his like someone with a raging thirst. It was awful—she could feel herself shattering into a million fiery particles but couldn’t do a single thing to stop it from happening.

‘My God,’ he gasped, dragging his mouth free so he could stare down at her. He was shocked. She didn’t blame him—she was feeling utterly shattered by it herself!

‘You are now contaminated!’ she snarled at him in sheer seething reaction.

He just laughed, but it was a rather shocked sound with nothing amused about it. Then he caught her mouth again, sending her spinning back to where she’d gone off to with no apparent effort. It was different now. There was no anger feeding the flames, just a white-hot passion that sang through her blood and sizzled across her skin.

His hands were all over her, his long fingers knotting in her hair, trailing the arching length of her throat, urgently searching for and finding the thrusting tightness of her breast. Then, frustratingly, his hands moving on downwards, finding the knot holding her robe together and impatiently freeing it.

Cool fresh air touched her burning skin and she cried out when it actually hurt. His mouth had left hers and she hadn’t even noticed, his body sliding sideways so he could completely unwrap her.

Her eyes were closed, her body trembling with an overload of sensation. He knelt there beside her and watched it all happen while he rid himself of his own robe, his dark face taut and muscles bunched, his own sensual urgency no less controlled than hers was.

When he came back to her, her arms wrapped round him, her fingers clawing into his hair. Their mouths fused hungrily again, and she felt the stinging pleasure of his hair-roughened chest grazing the sensitised tips of her breasts. She felt the power of his arousal pressing against her thighs and instinctively opened them so she could accept him into the cradle of her slender hips.

He groaned something, she didn’t know what. She didn’t even care. But her eyes snapped open in protest when he denied her his mouth again.

He was glaring hotly down at her. ‘Wild,’ he muttered. ‘I knew you would be wild. No one with this glorious colour of hair and the amount of self-control you exhibit could be anything but wild once you let go.’

‘I haven’t let go!’ she denied, wishing it was the truth! ‘I hate you!’ she added helplessly

‘I hate you too.’ He laughed. ‘Interesting, isn’t it? How two people who can hate each other this much can also feel this naked kind of passion.’

‘The passion is all yours,’ she said, tight-lipped, then gasped when he suddenly lifted himself away from

her to kneel between her parted thighs.

Eyes like black lasers skimmed over her body from firm proud, thrusting breasts to the cluster of tight golden curls protecting her sex.

‘Oh …’ she choked in appalled embarrassment. No man had ever looked on her quite like this!

But what was a worse humiliation was the way her senses were responding to the way he was looking at her—throbbing and pulsing with an excitement that threatened to completely engulf her.

‘I can see you are dying for me to touch you.’

‘Please,’ she groaned in pained mortification. ‘Don’t do this to me!’

‘You will be wishing me inside you before this hour is through,’ he promised darkly.

Then he touched her, sliding a long and silkenly practised finger along the hot moist crevice he had exposed with such a bold disregard to her modesty, and claimed possession by delving deep inside.

It shook her, shook her right through to the very centre of everything she had ever imagined to do with this kind of intimacy. At sixteen she had been too young and too inexperienced to know that she was supposed to have been enjoying this as much as the man who had eventually taken her virginity.

But this—this wild hot surge of stinging pleasure which was taking her over was completely new territory to her. And the fact that it was caused by a man she so utterly despised was enough to send her reeling into shock—the kind of shock that held her helpless as he arched his body over her, capturing her mouth with a hunger that devoured while his fingers began to work a magic on her flesh she had never experienced in her life before.

Oh, help me, she thought on a wave of helpless despair. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her, couldn’t believe she could lose control like this!

He knew it too, and played with her, like a cat with a mesmerised mouse. An arm slid beneath her shoulders, his body shifting sideways so he was no longer completely covering her, then the real torture began, with slow, light, lazy caresses that told him everything he needed to know about the woman he was exploring.

He touched her face, her nose, her lips, and ran those same fingers down her neck and between the throbbing up-thrust of her breasts. He followed the flat line of her ribcage to her tightly muscled stomach, traced the line of her hips, then delved once again into the very core of her, but only fleetingly—too fleetingly—before he was exploring her silken thighs, watching with a dark intensity, which really frightened her, each quiver and jolt of her flesh as he learned what gave her pleasure and what did not.

‘Why do you always hide your hair?’ he murmured huskily into the dark chasm of sensation that her whirling mind had become. ‘I find it very exciting that the same colour nestles here between your thighs. I adore it that your skin is so pale against my own skin, that your breasts are so very sensitive to my slightest touch even though you fight me. And even the fact that you fight me excites me. It makes me wonder what I will feel when you decide to torment me in return …’

‘No.’ Out of her head with sensation as she was, she heard the silky invitation in his voice and breathlessly refused the offer. ‘I won’t touch you. You don’t need me to.’ The obvious fact that his manhood lay in such daunting erection against her thigh confirmed that fact.