‘Who am I?’
She blinked at him, startled, the nimbus of light around his head making it difficult for her to see his expression. ‘What?’
‘My name—who am I?’ he demanded, allowing her the illusion of being able to keep him at arm’s length as he hovered over her. ‘You don’t call me sir any more and you can’t quite bring yourself to say Mr Savage either. But you refuse to call me Benedict. I don’t like being a nobody. So why don’t you try Ben? You called me that once before, remember? Short, sweet and intimate. Try it. Say Ben, Vanessa.’
‘For goodness’ sake—’
‘Say it.’ He took off his glasses and threw them away in a gesture of reckless intent that made her heart pound.
‘All right, damn it—Ben!’ she retorted wildly. ‘There, I’ve said it. Ben, Ben, Ben—’
Her provocative chant was suddenly smothered. There was no tentativeness, none of the explorative gentleness that had characterised his last kiss. This time he was all aggressive, dominating male. The kiss was hot and hard, swallowing her anger and feeding it back to her piece by defiant piece. In the first few savage moments of contact he didn’t even allow her the luxury of a response—biting, licking and sucking at her mouth as if he were a starving man driven to extract every scrap of nourishment from the sensual feast before it could be snatched away from him.
But even as her mouth parted helplessly under the greedy onslaught Vanessa knew that she wasn’t going to deny him anything. Only Benedict could make her feel like this, so furious, so frustrated, so wildly aroused that she no longer cared about the rules and petty restrictions that she had carefully worked out to build and govern her peaceful life.
‘Say it again,’ his husky voice growled into her moist depths. His tongue caressed hers, stroking his name along her trembling taste-buds, teasing it out of her in an aching sigh of pleasure.
‘Ben...’
He gave a low grunt of triumph and the kiss changed, hardening even further as he came heavily down on her, his lithe body crushing her into the cushioning grasses with a powerful surging movement that dislodged her feverish grip on his sweater. Her hands slid up over his shoulders and curved down over his straining back as he settled his full length intimately against her, pushing insistently at her knees until he had nudged them far enough apart to insinuate himself between them.
‘God, I love the way you say my name...’ He cupped her head in one hand, pulling at her scarf with the other until her hair fluffed out across the blanket, and then he nuzzled at it before returning to her mouth, this time paying thorough attention to her every response.
As his tongue licked at her senses his free hand smoothed down the side of her soft cardigan and over her denim flank to hook behind her knee, bending it up to rest alongside his hip, increasing the intimacy of the undulating pressure between her thighs in a way that made her moan.
‘Am I hurting you?’ he whispered harshly, lifting his mouth from hers to study her dazed expression.
‘Yes...’ Her eyes were closed, her face stiff with an agony of bliss that he couldn’t fail to misread.
‘Then let me help you, heal you...’ He shifted his torso sideways and her eyes fluttered open as she felt a pearlised button between her breasts suddenly give way.
‘Why is it you always wear clothes with so many damned tiny buttons?’ he growled, so intent on his task that he didn’t notice her watching him through wondering eyes. His face was flushed, the tip of his tongue tracing his swollen lower lip as he concentrated.
She looked down at what he was doing, shocked to discover that he wasn’t bothering to undo the buttons in a proper sequence but was merely exposing her breasts as quickly as he could. Somehow it seemed more indecent that way. Instinctively she put a hand to the top button only to have it impatiently brushed away.
‘No. I want to do it. I want to see.’ He looked up then and his eyes were hot and dark and at least as indecent as her thoughts. He deliberately held her gaze as he undid another button and then paused, splaying his hands possessively over the twin swells of soft angora and contracting them just enough to make her gasp.
‘Someone might come,’ she whispered threadily, arching helplessly as his hands contracted again.
‘No one can see us here. We’re safely tucked up in our little nest,’ he murmured, not taking his eyes off her vulnerable face as he undid the rest of the buttons by touch and slowly began to draw the loose edges of her cardigan aside, stroking the downy wool across her sensitive skin. ‘You want me to look at you, don’t you, Nessa, to stop this ache we both have...?’
She stopped breathing, wondering whether he would be disappointed when he finally saw the plain white bra she was wearing, serviceable rather than seductive.
He looked down and stilled, a tiny smile sizzling at the corner of his mouth at the sight of the smooth, seamless cups and the intriguing shadowy outline of her areolae traced against the silky fine fabric. ‘Where does it fasten?’
It was her willingness he was requesting, not operating instructions, Vanessa realised and she responded breathlessly. ‘H-here.’ She pulled her arms from his neck to touch herself nervously between her breasts, her voice nearly as thick as his.
‘No.’ He stopped her tentative movement, catching first one wrist and then the other and pressing them down against the rug on either side of her head. She lay quiescent as his fingers trailed slowly away to deftly unclip the tiny catch and delicately ease her breasts free from their aching confinement. His eyes blazed like blue fire.
‘Oh, yes...oh, darling, just look at you...’ He leaned forward and his forefinger drifted across her bare nipple in a whisper-light caress. She flinched and he touched her again, and again, until she was arching into the maddeningly light caresses, needing more than this exquisite teasing.
‘So soft and smooth...’ he murmured, absorbed in his erotic entrancement. ‘And such beautiful, velvety pink rosebuds...look how they darken and furl so sweet and tight when they’re plucked...’ His thumb and forefinger moved skilfully, sending sharp splinters of abandoned pleasure streaking to the core of her being. He let her experience the thrill over and over again before he finally gathered her into his cupped palms, admiring the frame his masculine fingers created around her overflowing ripeness, lifting her, praising her with his eyes and words and finally, to her unbearable delight, his mouth.
Her fists opened and closed helplessly beside her mindlessly tossing head as he suckled his way up the warm, creamy slopes, seeking the peaks that he had meticulously teased to rigid excitement, nuzzling them hotly, licking and sucking at each swollen bud in turn, at first with extreme delicacy and then with a ravishingly raw hunger, working on her with his teeth and tongue until her whole body pulsed with the same powerfully driving rhythm that rode him between her raised legs, stroking her with his growing hardness until she was aware of nothing else but a terrifying pressure building up inside her.
A wave of primitive fear increased the pressure as her body jolted with the impact of another bunching male thrust. He was ready for her but she wasn’t ready at all—she would never be! She couldn’t see him but she could feel how big he was—much bigger than Julian had been and that meant that when he lost control the pain would also be worse and the pleasure that he had given her would be nothing in comparison. She was mad, insane to think she had wanted this...
She wasn’t aware of the frightened little sounds and hectic movements she was making until he reluctantly abandoned her glistening flesh to soothe her frantic cries with his mouth.