‘I would never have agreed to that particular term,’ Alex spelt out very quietly. ‘Indeed, were it not for your physical appeal, I would not have agreed to the marriage at all. Had I found you unattractive, had I not been able to imagine taking you to my bed, it would have been insanity to agree. Some day I want children of my own... Did you really believe that I would allow you to deprive me of that right as well?’
Sarah hadn’t thought of that. Breathing rapidly, she looked up at him, gripped by a sinking sense of inevitability. He had accused her of tunnel vision. Guilty as charged.
‘If this marriage lasts it will last on my terms, not on yours,’ Alex delivered, his broad brown shoulders blocking out the light as he lowered his dark head.
Galvanised back into motion, Sarah registered his intention and made a desperate attempt to snake free of him. But Alex seemingly was prepared for evasive action and one powerful hand meshed into her hair, holding her fast. Her eyes huge, her face taut and pale, she looked up at him like a trapped animal, her heartbeat hitting the Richter scale.
His thumb massaged the curve of her jawbone almost soothingly. ‘Relax.’
Was he joking?
‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,’ he murmured thickly.
‘Then let go of me!’
‘I was about to say that I wouldn’t hurt you...but that might not be true.’ Dark golden eyes scanned her hungrily. ‘I’ve never made love to a virgin before but I will be as gentle as I possibly can be.’
Hot-cheeked, she thought of denying her innocence, wondered furiously how her lack of experience could be that obvious. ‘You—’
Alex rested a silencing finger against her mouth, so close now she could feel his breath on her cheek, the raw power of his all-male body resting against her. ‘You set me on fire that night at Gina’s house and you didn’t even know it. The whole time we were in that room I was visualising how it would be if I stripped that robe from you, laid you flat and possessed you as no other man ever had...’
Sarah stared up at him in horror. ‘You pervert!’
‘I was very aroused,’ Alex admitted huskily. ‘As I was in the car after the wedding... Didn’t you feel that? Can’t you tell when a man wants to rip your clothes off? Don’t you feel the excitement in the air...the vibrations? I looked at you and thought, She’s mine now and she’s woman enough—no matter what she says—to go out and make herself even more beautiful just to please me.’
Sarah was transfixed by what he was telling her, had never imagined once in her entire adult life that any man would talk to her this way. Followed by that outrageously conceited assurance that she had transformed her appearance purely to make herself more appealing for his benefit when no such madness had ever entered her mind, she was literally forced into speech. ‘Pleasing you had nothing to do with it!’
A vibrantly amused smile slashed his sun-bronzed features. ‘If you say so,’ he said, with the air of an adult humouring a child over a triviality.
The astonishing charisma of that smile briefly blanked out her every rational thought. And it was while she was struggling to comprehend how a smile could make her feel all warm and dizzy that Alex kissed her, his mouth drifting down into a natural collision with hers, gentle, seeking, shorn of any threat.
But she was merely coming to terms with that astonishing gentleness when the entire tenor of his approach changed. He gave a ragged groan of impatience, she felt his hand tighten in her hair, and then his tongue delved between her softly parted lips and she shivered, lanced by a sudden startling sensation deep in the pit of her stomach. It was a clenched tight stab of shocking excitement. The pressure of his mouth increased and then circled, teased, his tongue searching out the moist interior she had instinctively opened to him.
This wasn’t happening, a shattered voice screamed inside her confused mind. Alex cannot make me enjoy this, want this...need this. But she discovered that Alex could. She discovered that he could kiss her into breathless, panting surrender and leave her wanting things she had never dreamt she could want.
‘You like that...I knew you would,’ Alex whispered against her reddened lips, when she trembled helplessly against him and closed her eyes, feeling her body arch up as if he had programmed her response.
And he went on making expert love to her mouth, extracting her from her flimsy nightdress without her even being aware of its removal. Her hands rose of their own volition and her fingers speared into his thick black hair, loving the texture, lingering to trace his well-shaped head and finally staying to hold her to him while she moved restively, involuntarily beneath him, wanting more contact, denied it. She was in another world
, a bewitching world of sensuality, aware of her body as she had never been aware of it before, aware of her capacity for pleasure and utterly seduced by the desperate need for that same pleasure to continue.
Her breasts felt tender and swollen and, when Alex splayed a hand to her spine and pulled her closer, her taut nipples came into glancing contact with his hair-roughened chest. ‘Ah...’ she gasped under his mouth in shock. His hands swept up her narrow ribcage and cupped her breasts and she froze, dredged from pleasure to dismay. ‘No!’ she cried as he released her lips.
Alex wasn’t listening. Her eyes flew wide on the taut, intent look of him as he slid lithely down the bed, his hands still shaping her flesh. His dark head bent and he closed his mouth hungrily on one pouting pink nipple. Excitement tore through her in an electrifying surge, reducing the cry of denial on her tongue to a mumbled, indistinct moan. Her entire body jerked with renewed shock, her legs trembling, an ache stirring between her thighs that made her teeth grit together in a kind of agonised pleasure.
She was stripped of every thought, every feeling. The surging hunger of her own body for sensation was terrifyingly greedy. He let his tongue flick the throbbing nub and then teased her unbearably aroused flesh with his teeth while his oh, so knowing fingers played with its neglected twin and drove her even crazier. The rush of heat to her pelvis made her hips move and she cried out, moaned, gasped, flung violently out of control by the intensity of her own excitement.
His dark head lifted. Glittering golden eyes, primal in their intensity, appraised her quivering body, lingered hotly on her bared breasts and the shameless thrust of their swollen peaks, and he groaned deep in his throat with satisfaction.
‘You have beautiful breasts,’ he muttered raggedly, running a possessive hand over the small pouting mounds, devouring them with his heated gaze. ‘And you’re incredibly sensitive there...and what that does to me—Cristos!’
Glazed green eyes focused on him with the greatest of difficulty and she stayed an instinctive move to cover herself from his sight, momentarily as fascinated by his response as by her own. He meant what he said. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. In a split-second, all the years of inadequacy and embarrassment about what she saw as her major deficiency were forgotten, banished, never to be recalled. Every remaining barrier fell away. She blossomed with a heady mix of pleasure and gratitude, rejoicing for the very first time in her own femininity.
She clashed with dark golden eyes and drowned in them. Alex lowered his head as if she had pulled him to her. He muttered something not quite steady in Greek. Gold and green meshed and she opened her arms without even thinking about it, suddenly wild to hold him close.
Somewhere in the interim, all restraint had fallen away. Alex took her mouth with shuddering force and engulfed her in his hunger, his need, his demands and she went under like a novice swimmer, but she was dragged down into that sexual oblivion without fear. Her last coherent thought was that if she had died without learning what he could make her feel, she would never have lived.
He trailed a forefinger along the length of one slender, extended thigh and she shivered violently in response, the raw torment of excitement instantly reclaiming her. Every nerve-ending in her body was singing wildly and then he found her, smoothly, gently explored with knowing fingers until she was ready to scream and sob, until she couldn’t stay still unless he held her down, until her entire body was one vast screeching ache for the fulfilment only he could give.