‘You want me to stop?’ he asked her.
‘Only because I want you inside me, and I’m afraid that if you don’t stop it’s going to be too late.’
That was as close as she could get to telling him that she suspected she was about to orgasm, but it was obvious that he knew what she was trying to say. He covered the whole of her sex with his hand and then repositioned himself, bending his head to kiss her and then sliding his hands beneath her to lift her, so that her legs were on his shoulders. He moved slowly and deliberately into her, with carefully paced thrusts that took him deeper and deeper and had Keira crying out with fierce pleasure as she rose to meet him, picking up his rhythm until she was the one taking him deeper, holding him there so that her body could take its pleasure of him, tightening around him to caress and enjoy him before eagerly urging him further.
‘Faster,’ she told him. ‘Deeper—deeper, Jay.’ Her voice trembled, like her, on the edge of the precipice as Jay gathered himself and waited until Keira’s cries told him that she could wait no longer.
As the world swung on its axis and a million darts of pleasure exploded inside her like so many fireworks, Keira clung desperately to Jay.
Her face wet with tears of completion, she told him brokenly, ‘That was wonderful.’
‘That is just the start,’ Jay told her as he wiped away her tears with his thumb-pad. ‘There will be many, many wonderful times for us, and many wonders for us to explore together and share.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
JAY had been right. As the days had turned into weeks and the weeks into months—three of them, to be exact—there had been many wonderful times. There had been night after night during which she had thought she had climbed the heights, only to discover those heights had been mere foothills of pleasure.
Jay was an expertly sensual teacher, and Keira admitted she was a very eager pupil—his pleasure her own and hers his.
There had been nights when they had lain on the divans and Jay had shown her the beautifully illustrated plates in the ancient copy of the Kama Sutra he had told her he had bought as a young man in a bazaar. It had originally been the property of a maharaja whose library had been sold, he had explained to her, and was of immense cultural and financial value.
He had read the text to her, his voice sensually soft and erotic as he stroked the words as delicately as he stroked her skin. Uncertainly at first, but then with growing confidence, Keira had studied the illustrated plates whilst Jay encouraged her to choose a position she found erotically exciting so that they could experience it together. Jay had teased her that they should go through the alphabet, that every night they should pick a different letter and a different position. But some nights they would have run through half a dozen letters before dawn had streaked the sky, and others they would have enjoyed only one, taking their pleasure over and over again.
Against all her expectations—and Keira suspected Jay’s as well—his desire for her, far from burning itself out, had actually increased.
When he had to be away from her on business, his return often resulted in him breaking his rule of not having sex in his office, such was the intensity of his physical desire for her.
His physical desire for her, Keira reminded herself sadly. Because that was all he felt for her. Physical desire.
There had been pleasure beyond any pleasure she could ever have imagined between them, but for her—hand in hand with that pleasure, measuring it step by step and now finally outweighing it—there had also been terrible pain. It was a pain that came not just from knowing that Jay would never return her feelings, but increasingly from her own unexpected and dangerous feelings of mingled guilt and pain about her past. Guilt because she had withheld the truth about it from Jay, and pain because she could never be her true self with him—because she couldn’t ever know the kind of security that came from being accepted as she was.
The reality was that she was living not just one lie but several, and that could not go on. It was destroying her. She lived in fear of letting slip to Jay in the heat of their intimacy the fact that she loved him. She lived in fear of the ultimate ending of their relationship when he grew tired of her. And yet at the same time a part of her longed for the peace of mind that would come from knowing she would no longer need to lie by default.