‘No?’
He was kissing her fingers again, but he was watching her mouth. She could feel the fierce heady excitement and anticipation start to throb through her as she held her breath, waiting, instinctively closing her eyes as she felt his hands cupping her face.
‘No, don’t close your eyes,’ he told her. ‘Don’t try to hide yourself, your feelings away from me, Christa. I want t
o share them, just as you want to share mine.’
How could it be that the simple act of keeping your eyes open, of looking deeply into the eyes of that other person while you kissed could give such an intense degree of intimacy? An intimacy deeper even than the hungry, open-mouthed kiss they were sharing; the questing search of Daniel’s tongue, the hard arousal of his body.
To look into his eyes and to allow him to look into hers when she was so emotionally vulnerable, so emotionally as well as physically aroused, was a far more intimate act than if she had stood naked before him; an act as intense and private in its way, as much an abandonment of self, requiring almost as much trust as the act of orgasm itself.
Abruptly her emotions overwhelmed her, her eyes closing, her whole body trembling as she leaned against him and whispered shakily, ‘No…I can’t…I…’
Immediately he seemed to understand, holding her, soothing his hand gently over her, rocking her almost as though he knew that it was comfort and reassurance she needed rather than raw sexuality.
If he could make her feel like this just by kissing her, what was it going to do to her when…? How would she feel…?
‘I’m afraid,’ she told him, her throat threatening to close up on the admission, her emotions pushing down her normal barriers of reticence and mistrust.
‘I know. I’m afraid too.’ He smiled ruefully at her as she lifted her head from his chest to look at him, but his smile disappeared as he asked her quietly, ‘What is it you fear the most, Christa? The fact that I might only want sex from you, or the fact that you know I want one hell of a lot more.’
Her expression gave her away.
‘I don’t want to love you,’ she told him wildly. ‘I don’t want to take that kind of risk…’ She shook her head helplessly and then cried out in panic, ‘I’m not ready for this…’
‘Do you think I am?’ Daniel asked her grimly. ‘Do you think anyone ever is?’
‘I can’t go to bed with you,’ she told him. ‘I’m not…I haven’t…I don’t…We have to think about safe sex,’ she finished miserably.
‘I’m not asking you to go to bed with me,’ Daniel told her. ‘We’ve three more weeks of this course to go, and until then…I want things to be right between us, Christa. I want us to be able to concentrate on ourselves, each other, without any barriers between us.
‘And as for safe sex…’
The look he gave her made Christa’s stomach churn like a washing-machine on full spin.
‘Safe sex is the last thing I want to have with you,’ he told her forcefully. ‘There’s nothing safe about the way I feel about you, about the way I want you, and as for sex…Sex isn’t what I want either. What I want from you…what I want to give you, to share with you, is just about as far removed from safe sex as it’s possible to get. I want to take you in my arms and make you cry out with joy and pleasure. I want to hold you and watch you as I make you part of me in the most intimate and complete way that a man and woman can discard their separateness and come together. I want to cherish you and protect you. The delicacy of your skin, your body, stops my breath and makes me almost afraid to touch you and yet, at the same time, I want to penetrate you so deeply that your flesh will hold the memory of me within it forever. I want to wake up in the morning and see the faint bruises of my lovemaking colouring your skin. And whatever those needs are, whatever they say about me, they are most definitely not safe sex…’
‘No, they aren’t,’ Christa agreed huskily.
No man had ever spoken to her like this before, aroused her so intensely, both emotionally and physically, simply by the sound of his voice, the message of his words.
She could actually feel the sharp, excited pulse of her own arousal deep within her body, and the need to place her hand over her stomach, her womb, where she ached physically from Daniel’s explicit description of the way he wanted her, was too strong a compulsion for her to resist.
‘And as for the rest of it,’ Daniel continued, his voice softer, more controlled, ‘I promise you there isn’t anything you need to worry about. For one thing—’ He paused and looked gravely at her. ‘The last time I slept with a woman, I’m ashamed to say that it was more out of compassion than desire. An old friend—we were students together—who came to me for…comfort when her husband left her.’
Daniel turned his head away from her as he told her gruffly, ‘She was feeling very vulnerable, all too aware of the fact that the girl her husband had left her for was many years her junior, afraid that she was no longer a sexually desirable woman. To have rejected her…’
Christa swallowed hard. She suspected from what Daniel was not telling her that he had not been the one who had instigated their intimacy. Tears momentarily blurred her eyes. What woman could resist loving such a man? Certainly not her.
‘She’s found someone else now and they’re very happy together,’ Daniel was telling her. But Christa only half heard him. She loved him. The knowledge thundered through her in a terrifying flood of emotion and need.
‘And before that…before that, I had been celibate for a longer time than I like to admit…’
‘Like me,’ Christa heard herself saying chokily. ‘In fact, to be honest, there’s only been…Well, it was just really a college thing…more curiosity than any thing else and because, well, there’s a certain shame to a woman’s remaining a virgin after a certain age. And then I had a brief relationship with someone, but it ended when a friend of mine became…ill…’
Christa’s voice trailed off and she looked away from Daniel. She and Chris had only just been about to become lovers when Laura had arrived on her doorstep, wild-eyed and in panic, claiming that her husband hated her and had only married her for her money.
Chris had resented the time she had had to spend with Laura and had claimed that her friend meant more to her than he did, and their relationship had come to an abrupt end almost before it had begun—without any real regrets on either side, Christa suspected.
‘I’m not…I’m not very experienced,’ she told Daniel quietly. ‘Sex has never been an important motivating force in my life.’
She realised that Daniel was watching her and wondered what he was thinking, whether he was put off by the fact that she was not sexually experienced. She knew that some men would be…
‘I don’t suppose I should admit this,’ he was saying, ‘especially not in this day and age, but there’s something about a woman who quite obviously isn’t living the kind of lifestyle that means that she’s very sexually sophisticated, a woman who has to tell a man that she isn’t using a regular method of birth control, that is very sexually erotic…that makes a man feel very special…very male. Or at least that’s how it makes me feel.’
The look in his eyes was making her heart do enough somersaults to guarantee its entry into the Olympics, Christa acknowledged.
Daniel was smiling at her now, the deep seriousness leaving his eyes as he teased gently, ‘Somehow, I don’t think that even if you could bring yourself to carry the requisite packet of condoms around with you, you’d be the type to brag about your expertise in putting them on.’
‘I might not brag about it, but I certainly know how to do it,’ Christa told him, blushing a little as she responded to his gentle humour. ‘One of my friends’ teenage daughters has told me all about it. They had a demonstration at school—with a cucumber…’
‘A cucumber?’ Daniel burst out laughing. ‘And women wonder why men have such fragile sexual egos. Well, I think we can do better than that,’ he murmured, reaching out and taking her back in his arms. ‘Much, much better than that—in fact…’
‘You could give me some real hands-on experience?’ Christa suggested laughingly, teasing him back.
He was laughing too, but when his body suddenly hardened urgently against her the laughter died out of his eyes and out of hers.
‘Three weeks,’ he told her as he lowered his mouth towards hers. ‘God knows how I’m ever going to wait that long. Kis
s me, Christa,’ he demanded thickly against her mouth, not waiting for her response, but impatiently probing her lips with his tongue instead, his arms tightening round her. The movement of his body against hers as his control slipped and the delicate exploration of his tongue became an urgent, exciting thrusting, dragging the fabric of her top and bra against her swollen nipples, already oversensitised by her desire for Daniel. The extra friction made her cry cut and tense.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Daniel again said, releasing her mouth and looking down into her eyes.
Christa tried to fight the wave of hot colour that swamped her as, instead of waiting for her verbal response, he let his gaze sweep her body, intuitively coming to rest on the rounded swell of her breasts.
To her chagrin, as Christa followed his glance down her body, she could see quite plainly through her clothes the rigid and swollen outline of her nipples.
‘There’s no need to be embarrassed,’ Daniel told her gently, correctly interpreting the reason for her flushed face and the protective movement of her arm to conceal her body. ‘No, don’t,’ he added thickly, his hand coming up to move her arm away from her body so that he could look at her. ‘I like seeing you like this…I like knowing that you want me. Like it!’ He closed his eyes briefly and groaned. ‘Like it! That’s just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever made.’
He let go of her arm and reached out and touched her breast very gently, just stroking its outer curve with his fingertips, but it was enough to send such a shock of sensation jolting through her that Christa couldn’t quite suppress her small, sharp moan of pleasure.
‘Do you want me to stop?’ Daniel asked thickly, but even before Christa had shaken her head he was moving closer to her, his mouth leaving a burning trail of kisses against her skin, his fingers quickly working free the buttons on her shirt…Quickly, but not nearly quickly enough, Christa acknowledged, as she arched against him with a small sob of frantic release when she finally felt the warmth of his breath against her naked breasts.
In the past the thought of having her breasts stroked and suckled by a lover had never been one she had found particularly sexually exciting, and to witness a love-scene in a film where a couple were mimicking such an act with mutual evidence of considerable enjoyment was something she had found more embarrassing than exciting. But now, with Daniel’s mouth making its way down the slope of her breast while his fingers caressed its swollen peak, her need to feel his mouth against her flesh was so demandingly urgent that it literally made her feel faint with longing, her hand already lifting to press his head closer to her body, her back arching.