‘Do you want it to?’
‘No!’ Charley told him vehemently.
‘The pleasure we shall give each other and share will be unique to us, exclusive to us, as it is with any lovers. But, like any man, I dare say my ego will enjoy knowing that I cannot be compared to a previous lover and found wanting.’
Charley was so relieved that she burst out truthfully, ‘I can’t imagine any woman ever thinking that about you.’
Raphael exhaled slowly, recognising that deep down inside himself he had already suspected he would be her first lover. His heart slammed into the wall of his chest. He wanted to take hold of her right now, slide the clothes from her body and give in to his desire to take them both to a place where all that mattered was their shared need for one another.
The realisation rolled over him that he wanted her as he had never wanted any other woman—as he had never imagined wanting any woman—but all he said to her was, ‘I shall do my best to be worthy of your faith in me.’ He was unable to stop himself from adding under his breath, ‘I just hope that my self-control is up to the challenge.’
His self-control? Charley trembled under the eager anticipatory tightening of her body. She felt, she thought dizzily, as though sensually, sexually, her desire for him had bloomed into a peak of lush, ripe readiness. Almost magically she was free of all restraints and inhibitions, just as though she had been reborn into the full flowering of her own sexuality. Because of Raphael. And not just because she wanted him, but because he had shown her that she could be free of the damaging beliefs of her past, that she could be whatever she chose to be.
Her body was singing with excitement and joy, aching deliciously and oh, so tormentingly with a thousand aches that instinctively she knew would meld into one piercingly intense surge of need beneath Raphael’s touch.
She looked up at him and smiled.
‘It isn’t your self-control that I want,’ she told him simply.
Raphael felt the breath shudder through his lungs, the savage thrust of his desire crashing through his barriers.
‘You shouldn’t say such things to me,’ he warned her as he closed the distance between them.
‘Why not?’ Charley whispered the words against his lips. She was trembling so violently that she had to hold on to him for support.
‘Because it’s dangerous, because you are dangerous—dangerously enticing, dangerously sensual, dangerously tempting me to forget all the reasons why I should not be doing this,’ Raphael whispered back.
His hands were moving over her, angling her within his hold so that he could shape and knead the soft fullness of her breast as he kissed her. Pleasure rushed through her—pleasure, excitement, and a need that had her finding his tongue with her own and caressing it, twining with it. Wild shudders of firework explosive delight showered her when Raphael stopped her, to turn her explorative caress into the shockingly deep thrust of his tongue within the softness of her mouth, his tongue and his hand against her breast working to a rhythmic beat that produced an aching echo of its urgenc
y deep inside her. Helplessly Charley pressed closer to him, her hands moving feverishly over his chest and then his shoulders, frustrated by the barrier of his shirt.
As though he knew how she felt, he moved his lips to her ear, demanding, ‘What is it you want?’
‘I want to touch you, all of you, without your clothes,’ Charley answered him immediately, her voice unsteady with the intensity of her longing.
‘Then take them off for me.’
Undress him? A shock wave of raw need stormed through her, and then her fingers were tugging at his tie, trembling over his shirt buttons, only her longing to feel his bare skin against her own preventing her from being distracted by the way he was caressing her tight nipple whilst he held her shoulder with his free hand and slowly kissed his way along the side of her neck. At last she had his shirt unfastened, tugged out of the waistband of his suit trousers, and she was free to bury her face against the warm, muscular expanse of his chest with its soft covering of dark hair, breathing in the scent of him, pressing frantically hungry kisses on his bared skin, so completely lost in the pleasure of what she was at long last free to do that she was oblivious to the fact that Raphael had stopped kissing her and touching her, and was simply holding her whilst he struggled to control his breathing.
This was so much more than he had been prepared for—so much more than he had understood he could ever feel or want. Charley’s open and uninhibited pleasure in what she was doing was undermining his self-control like the tide stealing away sand. Raphael cupped the sides of her head, arching his throat back in mute offering to the searing, scalding pleasure of her lips caressing his skin. An uncontrollable shudder of male pleasure seized him in its grip.
‘Enough,’ he told Charley rawly. ‘Now it’s my turn to undress you.’
Where she had been all fingers and thumbs, all out-of-control excitement and delight, Raphael was skilled. His touch was sure and knowing as he dealt with the layers of her clothes until she was standing in her underwear—the delicate silk and lace lingerie that had been delivered with her new clothes.
In one of the mirrors set on either side of the bed above the bedside tables Charley could see the pale shimmer of her almost naked body, glowing and pearlescent in the subdued lighting of the room, the slenderness and delicacy of her bone structure made more fragile by the solid muscularity of Raphael’s torso beside it.
‘We look so different,’ she told him, her voice husky, softened by desire.
‘But together we will make a perfect whole,’ Raphael answered her.
As she watched their reflections she saw Raphael’s hand lift to her breast, to push down the silk fabric and expose the dark flesh of her nipple, hard and tight with arousal. The sight of it, knowing what its arousal meant, sent an urgent frisson of longing down her spine. As though Raphael had felt it and knew its meaning, he traced a line of fiery erotic kisses along her shoulderblade, whilst his fingertips plucked and teased the eager longing of her nipple, causing starburst after starburst of pleasure to spread through her. But that pleasure was nothing compared to the dark agony of desire that flooded her when Raphael took her nipple into his mouth, tonguing it; stroking it; making her arch her body up to him in helpless supplication, whilst her veins ran with liquid heat and her whole body pulsed to the rhythm of her longing.
His mouth still on her breast, Raphael slid his hands into the cut-away legs of her knickers, moulding and kneading the rounded cheeks of her bottom, making her press as close to him as she could as the ache between her legs intensified. She wanted him to touch her there. She wanted to press herself against him, to rub herself against him. She wanted—Charley gasped in shocked delight when Raphael lifted his head, his hand sliding between her legs, his fingers stroking the soft swell of flesh that covered her sex, pulling down the pretty confection of silk and lace so that in the mirror she could see the movement of his hand against her body, could see too that he was watching her just as she was watching him.
Slowly, so slowly that she had to hold her breath so as not to beg him to hurry, he parted the lips of her sex, causing a shudder of aroused delight to shake her body. Then she was arching with erotic shock when he stroked gently up and down the soft wet valley, and then pressed his fingers against the wellspring of her desire, rubbing it slowly, and then more swiftly, whilst she gasped and writhed and clung to him, her eyes wide with all that she was feeling. Her orgasm came so quickly and so intensely that it shook her from head to foot, and she needed the support of his arms to hold her as he kissed her and took the words of pleasure from her lips.
CHAPTER ELEVEN