In shock, she meant to push him away. Her hand lifted and braced against a broad, muscular shoulder that was smooth as satin but infinitely more tactile and tempting. For an instant her mind warred with her body, telling her no…no, not right, not allowed…yet her fingers only flexed against that warm brown skin, touching, almost clenching into a move of denial but somehow not quite making it. And as quickly that moment of choice and awareness was lost. For Molly, time had stopped dead in its tracks and gone into reverse.
He slid a strong arm beneath her and lifted her up to him to let his tongue drive deep between her lips in passionate demand. A shaken gasp was torn from her as he made love to her mouth with wicked, wild expertise, ruthlessly ravishing the sensitive interior until she was hot and dizzy and clutching at him, her blood pounding terrifyingly fast in her veins.
‘No comparison, is there, cara?’ A husky, almost chilling laugh sent a responsive shiver down her spine but all she knew was that it was heaven to be in his arms again, shy fingers free to dart into the luxuriant black silk of his hair where it grew low and slightly too long at the nape of his neck.
‘Sholto…?’ she muttered unevenly, her mind struggling to get a grip.
His hand moved against the firm curve of her breast, which was shielded only by the fine cotton. Her eyes squeezed shut as her nipples peaked into hard, aching little buds, depriving her of breath and voice simultaneously. Repossessing her mouth with passionate hunger, he hooked long fingers deftly into the wide neckline of the T-shirt and tugged it down out of his path.
As his sure hands shaped her swelling breasts, a kind of exquisite agony consumed Molly. His thumbs flicked over the taut peaks, making her strain up to him and moan in shock at the power of that sensation. His mouth followed the slender, arching column of her throat, lingered to toy with racing pulse-points and traced a teasing path of hot, darting kisses over her quivering flesh before capturing an urgently sensitive pink crest with ruthless deliberation. She cried out, then fought just to breathe, heart hammering at an insane rate as her fingers bit fiercely into his shoulders.
His tongue swirled and teased with erotic expertise and then he nipped the taut, swollen tip with his teeth, hotly suckling while she writhed and whimpered, shock piling on sensual shock to overwhelm her. Liquid fire flared and burned unbearably between her trembling thighs. As he shifted his long, lithe body to mete out the same treatment to the other pouting peak, he parted her shivering legs with his knee and gently pinned her down.
‘Dio…you have the most exquisitely sexy body,’ Sholto intoned thickly, sinking appreciative hands beneath the generous curve of her hips and plundering her lips afresh.
When lean fingers skimmed through the damp tangle of chestnut curls guarding the apex of her thighs she went rigid and then gasped out loud and writhed as he found her secret place. Frantic heat flashed through her and then centred on the pulsing ache at the very heart of her. Wildly out of control from that moment on, she twisted helplessly in passion’s thr
all, tormented by sensation and choking, blinding waves of ever heightening excitement.
Sholto pressed her down and spread her beneath him when she was at a mindless, wordless peak of intolerable arousal. For a split second, he hesitated and her eyes opened, catching the raw satisfaction stamped in his darkly flushed features before he pushed back her thighs and entered her with a single driving thrust. Pain and pleasure linked as she cried out in bitter-sweet shock at that powerful invasion and he covered her mouth fiercely with his again in a stormy brand of possession.
It was wild; it was like nothing she had ever imagined. Overwhelming hunger and need clawed at her even in the wake of that stabbing pain. She wanted, needed, craved every urgently sexual move of his hot, hard, demanding body on hers. She was flying up into the sun, every fibre of her being ablaze with screaming desperation. He plunged into her faster and faster, forcing her higher and higher until the fierce heat and the even fiercer ache collided deep inside her and sent her sobbing and shuddering into an explosive release.
The world was still spinning when she opened her eyes again. A daze of unfamiliar languorous contentment kept her limp and still. Sholto’s arms were still tight around her, his big, powerful body damp and heavy on hers. He lifted his tousled dark head and stared down at her, not a muscle moving on his lean, dark face, brilliant eyes impenetrable.
‘Thanks,’ he drawled without any expression at all. ‘You were everything I ever hoped you would be.’
CHAPTER THREE
IN ONE lithe movement, Sholto released Molly from his weight and sprang out of bed. Utterly unselfconscious, he stretched, firelight gleaming over his damp golden skin and playing over the whipcord muscles flexing in his back. In the thunderous silence, he pulled on a pair of black briefs and reached for his jeans with complete cool.
Molly sat up with an uncoordinated jerk and stared. Uncertainly, she cleared her dry throat. ‘Sholto…?’
‘I’ll take the chair downstairs now,’ he told her as he yanked up the zip on his jeans with a fluid twist of his lean hips.
‘What…?’ It was a dulled whisper of incomprehension. Molly was in too much turmoil to be able to reason with any clarity.
Sholto slid his arms into a silk shirt, buttoned it with deft fingers and tugged on a black sweater. Then he strolled to the end of the bed and curved lean, strong hands round the omate footboard. He surveyed her rigid figure in the centre of the tangled bedding, his attention lingering on her wildly mussed hair, dazed eyes and swollen pink mouth. ‘Dio…I’ve waited a long time to see you like this,’ he confided softly.
This time Molly felt his cold menace. It was like the diamond-bright glitter of icy snow crystals freezing her shrinking flesh.
‘And you made it so damned easy for me, I should be ashamed of myself for taking advantage of a trusting virgin…but I’m not ashamed,’ Sholto asserted without a flicker of conscience as he watched her face slowly drain of colour. ‘I paid for that pleasure four years ago when I married you. Do you actually recall that wedding ceremony, Molly? Do you even remember the promises you made then? And do you also recall packing your bags that same night and running home to hide behind your parents?’
Molly was shaking, still so much in shock at what she had allowed to happen between them that she could barely credit that there could be even worse to come. ‘A-are you saying,’ she framed jerkily. ‘th-that you deliberately chose to make love to me?’
‘Lovemaking is what you would have had on our wedding night,’ Sholto responded with sardonic bite. ‘Tonight you had sex.’
Cringing from that demeaning description of their intimacy and in no state to guard her speech, Molly muttered shakily, ‘I thought you got carried away…like I did.’
An unexpected and very faint suggestion of colour briefly accentuated the slant of Sholto’s hard cheekbones but a cynical black brow flared. ‘Do you really think that’s likely?’
A deep dark flush scored her cheeks. She hunched her shoulders over her raised knees, her stomach churning. How could she have imagined for one moment that Sholto could have been responding to her non-existent sex appeal? And, of course, a male of his experience didn’t simply surrender to temptation and lose control like an impetuous, unthinking teenager. But the mere idea that Sholto had climbed with cold-blooded calculation into the bed for the express and sole purpose of depriving her of her virginity made Molly feel sick and incredibly degraded.
‘I don’t understand,’ she confessed unevenly, clasping her trembling hands round her knees, not wanting to understand but knowing that she needed to know why, why and on what possible grounds Sholto should have decided that she deserved such a retribution.
She watched his long, beautifully shaped fingers flex on the footboard, the knuckles briefly showing the white of bone through the brown skin. ‘I find it incredible that you shouldn’t understand,’ he admitted, his Italian accent roughening his vowel sounds. ‘Now where do I start? Perhaps the desire for revenge was born when I found myself being threatened by the police for trying to approach my runaway wife.’
‘The police?’ she echoed, her head shooting up again in astonishment.