Each intimacy between them only fed her desire for more, as though some powerful spell had been cast upon her ability to resist what was happening to her.
The hunger he had unleashed within her was enslaving her. He was enslaving her, Keira realised as she tried desperately to pull back from the chasm awaiting her and the darkness she knew it held. Only to fail when Jay touched her breast, cupping it within the hold of his hand so that her nipple rose tightly and eagerly to press against his flesh. Keira knew that it was her own response that had incited the explicitly erotic pluck of his fingertips against her nipple as he teased it into an even more blatantly hungry demand for more.
It was like being savaged by two opposing forces. No—it was like being fought over by them, Keira thought frantically. The one surging through her, taking her up to the heights of sexual excitement and need, and the other dragging her down to that place when the demons of her childhood lay in wait for her. Between them they could so easily tear her apart and destroy her. She must stop this. But she couldn’t.
Jay was kissing the side of her neck, sending wild, wanton shivers of irreversible arousal racking her. She could hear herself moaning as she collapsed into him, letting him take the weight of her body, letting him know without words of her need for him to possess it and her completely.
He was hard and ready against her softness. Automatically she reached down between them to touch him, driven now by nature, which guided her movements so that her fingertips fluttered helplessly against the thick hard ridge of his erection.
His smothered groan into her skin followed by the sharply sexual nip of his teeth would have been enough to melt any resistance she might have had, even without the sudden fierce sweep of his free hand down the length of her body, pressing her into him before closing on the soft curve of her buttock.
She was lost, Keira admitted to herself. There could be no going back from this.
In the moonlight she could see the darkness of Jay’s hand against her top. As though it was happening in slow motion she watched as his fingers curled into the fabric and pulled it away from her breast. Her heart was thumping slowly and heavily as she silently willed him not to stop, but instead to hurry, hurry…Because the need inside her could not be contained for much longer.
As though he had sensed that need Jay bent his head, taking her nipple into his mouth with fierce impatience and drawing on it, so that she could feel the sharp pangs of her own desire seizing her whole body, causing it to convulse with longing.
She was his. Jay could sense her body open to his, could already imagine what it would be like when she closed down on him as her orgasm possessed her and took him to his own pleasure. Just thinking about it made him ache so badly. Jay’s hand went to the fastening of his jeans. He wanted her so much, was so out of control with longing for her that he doubted he would have time to make it to the bed, never mind anything else.
Anything else? What the hell was happening to him? Jay never allowed himself to be out of control, and he certainly never had unprotected sex. But he had been about to do so.
Had been.
At first when Jay pushed her away Keira couldn’t understand or accept what was happening. She cried out in protest, her eyes wild with longing and incomprehension, until she was jerked back to reality by the stillness of Jay’s stance and the look she saw in his eyes before he turned on his heel and walked away from her.
Shame, her familiar and hated companion, slid its dark shadow next to her and smiled its mocking triumph at her.
Somehow Keira managed to stumble inside her room, where she showered in darkness, unable to bear the sight of her own body. Her mother and her great-aunt had been right about her after all.
After an hour of lying rigidly in her bed, unable to sleep, she got up and switched on her laptop. But for once her work did not bring its normal comfort, pushing everything and everyone else out of her thoughts. Instead images of Jay—his face, his eyes, his hands—came between her and the screen to torment her.
It was close to dawn when she eventually fell into an exhausted and troubled sleep.
It was just gone six in the morning. Jay was showered and dressed and drinking the tea his manservant had brought him. The morning sun was bathing everything in primrose-gold light, the clear blue of the sky on the horizon turning darker where it met the pink walls of the buildings.