It would be Sharon, back before lock-out time, wanting to chew over the evening she’d spent with her boyfriend. Perhaps listening to the other girl’s racy chatter would take her mind off her own dreadful evening.
Pinning a smile on a mouth that was reluctant to do anything but droop, Rosie opened the door and the smile trembled and vanished.
Sebastian. Her eyes widened and her lips parted. She knew she shouldn’t be staring at him but she couldn’t stop. His soft dark hair was rumpled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it; it made him look rakish and tormentingly dangerous. His suit jacket had gone and the fine white fabric of his shirt clung to wide rangy shoulders and his muscular torso and tucked into the narrow waistband of those perfectly cut trousers.
And he was holding that wretched book!
Saying nothing.
The silence was electric. His eyes slid down to her quivering mouth then back up to hold her gaze with a shimmering silver intensity.
She heard him drag in a breath, saw his broad chest expand, and the brush dropped from her nerveless fingers. She couldn’t have retrieved it if her life had depended on it; she was glued to the spot. Her heartbeats had gone crazy, suffocating her.
‘You forgot your book,’ he intoned, his voice roughened. He stepped closer. Dio! Did she have any idea of what she was doing to him? That skimpy cotton robe did nothing to disguise the fact that she was naked beneath it. The sash was tightly cinched around her tiny waist, but there the modesty ended.
Her eager breasts were thrusting against the thin fabric, the opening revealing the fine dew of perspiration that beaded the enticing valley between. He imagined himself lapping the moisture away and tried to blank out the wicked mind picture, and didn’t come near to succeeding.
This woman could arouse and tempt him as no other woman had done before, just by being there. She had no need of the calculated feminine wiles that he had become cynically immune to.
She just had to be there.
He should have left the book where he’d found it. He should have had more sense than to come to her room.
Time to get the hell out of it.
His heart racing, he gritted his teeth and wordlessly handed the book to her.
She stepped forward, reached for it, and he heard the whisper of fabric against her skin as their fingers touched. A shock wave of electric sensation coursed clear through him and the book fell to the floor.
A tiny moment of intensely sizzling silence, then they both bent for it at the same time. Both pulling in lung-searing breaths to shatter that spiked silence. Both reaching.
Her hair tumbled over her face, pale blonde tendrils curving round her slender throat, the edges of her robe parting.
Mesmerised, his body hardening out of control, he gazed at the revealed curve of smooth thigh and reached out, long fingers clamping round her narrow wrist.
Pulling her upright, he hauled her against his fevered body, drinking in the clean soapy scent of her, the heat of her flesh through the flimsy robe. And dipped his head to kiss her.
Rosie felt as if she were burning alive. Her legs had no substance. She melted against him, the evidence of his arousal blowing her mind. Her helpless response was way beyond her ability to control, and as his tongue slid between her eagerly parted lips she no longer cared. If this was all she would ever know of total bliss, she would take it with both greedy hands and leave regrets for the cold light of dawn.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rosie woke from a troubled sleep long before dawn. Gingerly, holding her breath until her lungs ached, she edged herself away from the tantalisingly sexy warmth of Sebastian’s naked, lean and muscular length.
Her body ached in all sorts of previously unconsidered areas and every inch of her skin still burned fierily from his ravaging kisses, but that was as nothing beside the hurt in her heart.
Torrid images of his tormentingly erotic exploration of her far-too-eager body, his lips and hands sending her wild, her response shatteringly immediate and shamelessly wanton until, driven almost out of her mind with desperate excitement, she’d pleaded with near sobbing impatience, ‘Love me—please love me!’ now filled her tortured mind with gut-wrenching shame.
His body had curved over her, slick and hot, his voice ragged as he’d groaned, ‘I want you—how I want you!’ and angled himself into her with driven need. His sudden pause as she’d given a small but sharp cry of pain had made her move frantically against him, inviting him deeper, urging him on with moans of pleasure because he mustn’t stop, not for anything. It was too late and the ecstasy she hadn’t known was possible was so tantalisingly close.
Too late for him, too. His hands sliding beneath her buttocks, his breathing ragged, he’d plunged deeper, erotically and exquisitely gentle, and Rosie had been swept away by transcending pleasure, oblivious to everything but the beautiful perfection of his loving, until her bod
y had exploded with cataclysmic peaks of ecstasy that matched his shattering climax.
He had held her, she remembered, her throat tightening as she tried to find the courage to wake him and remind him that he should go back to his own room before anyone else woke.
Nothing had been said in that dizzying aftermath. He had simply held her, stroking her hair in the heavily charged darkness until she had drifted into sleep. An uneasy, restless sleep.
What on earth must he think of her? It was too awful to contemplate. She hardly knew him and yet she had welcomed him into her bed, behaved like a real slut!