She could not take her eyes off him. His lean bronzed torso bore a triangular pelt of black curls across his pectorals. He was powerfully muscled but as sleek in movement as an athlete. His stomach was washboard-flat and dissected by a silky furrow of dark hair. She watched him unsnap his jeans, skim them down to reveal boxers and long, hair-roughened thighs and the shame of her own excitement almost overwhelmed her.
‘You make me crazy for you…’ Christien groaned, his rasping, sexy accent sending an evocative qui
ver down her spine.
He pulled her back to him. He made a praiseworthy effort to be cool, seductive and slow the pace with some seductive kissing, but her tongue twinned with his and he shuddered against her and ground his aching shaft into her pelvis with a raw growl low in his throat. Suddenly she was flat on the bed and he was devouring her with a wild, ravaging kiss. Her hunger went rocketing up the temperature scale and she rose up under him and sobbed his name below his marauding mouth, back arching in an agony of longing as he worshipped her breasts with his lips and his teeth.
‘Please-’
‘If I don’t wait, I’ll blow it,’ Christien grated in raw warning.
‘No…you won’t.’ She would have told him anything.
‘Oui…just like the first time, like a stupid, overeager kid, I’ll hurt you!’ Fabulous bone structure rigid, Christien glowered down at her as he struggled to maintain a grip on his fast-shredding control.
‘That wasn’t your fault.’ Tabby pressed her lips to his strong jawline in a soothing gesture as natural to her with Christien as living. ‘It was my first time and I should’ve told you but I was too embarrassed.’
Christien blinked. Her first time? When they met she had been a…virgin? One hundred per cent innocent, pure and untouched? And he hadn’t noticed? He was stunned by the belated awareness that somewhere deep down where he had had no desire to probe he had always had that suspicion, but had never taken it out and faced it before. Why not? Was it possible that he had been reluctant to accept that amount of responsibility?
‘Christien…?’
Golden eyes haunted by rare guilt, he steeled himself to back off, but her small hands were sliding into his hair, shaping his skull, and he looked down into luminous green eyes and fell victim to their enchantment instead. The drugging collision of their mouths ignited the hunger to a frantic fever again and her desperation only increased when he probed the hot, satin sensitivity between her thighs. She was in sensual torment, arching up to him, begging for more with every fibre of her being.
‘I need to be inside you…’ Dark blood delineating his hard cheekbones, Christien dragged her under him.
He plunged his swollen member into her damp, heated core and thrust deep. Sensual shock momentarily held her still. She could feel him stretching her and it had been so long that her own excitement was almost unbearable. His pagan possession thrilled her to the depths of her wanton soul. Her blood roared through her veins and her heart thundered as he drove her into his stormy rhythm. She was flying higher than she had ever flown and then she was crying out his name and her body was jerking, convulsing, breaking apart in a sweet, sweet rush of ecstasy. It felt so good, so wonderful it almost hurt and a surge of tears stung her eyes. His magnificent body shuddered over hers and she clutched him tight in the aftermath. It was as if she had been in suspended animation for almost four years and had suffered a sudden revival. She was in shock.
Christien emerged from the wildest, hottest orgasm of his life and struggled just to breathe again. He rolled over, carrying her with him, and stared down at her in a daze, pushing her tumbled honey-coloured hair back off her flushed, oval face with a lean brown hand that he noticed was trembling. That shook him even more.
Tabby drank in the musky, sexy scent of his damp skin and revelled in the familiarity even as a little voice shrieked inside her that she had just committed an act of insanity.
Christien pressed his lips to her smooth brow and rearranged her slight body over him. ‘Once is never enough with you-’
‘Don’t be greedy,’ she teased, snuggling into him like a homing pigeon, determined not to think about what she was doing.
‘I should have guessed that you were a virgin when we met,’ Christien breathed, for he was only just beginning to disentangle that startling reality from the miasma of misinformation with which he had deliberately fenced his memories of her in the intervening years.
‘You didn’t want to know…you thought it might commit you in some way,’ Tabby whispered abstractedly. ‘I told myself you hadn’t noticed but I was really just trying to explain what I wasn’t old enough to understand.’
It had been almost four years since Christien had been treated to that amount of blunt honesty and his even white teeth momentarily gritted together. As a rule women wrapped up the unpalatable truth around him and never ever voiced it. ‘It wasn’t like that…’
Of course, it had been, Tabby reflected painfully. She had been besotted, out of her depth and trying to be something she was not and he had taken what all young, virile males were programmed to take: sexual conquest of a willing woman. Everything that had happened between them had been inevitable according to their sex, right down to her having fallen head over heels in love and him having got bored with her.
‘It was…and you got bored-’
His long, lean length had turned very tense. ‘I didn’t get bored…you went off with the lout on the Harley.’
‘I didn’t-’
Christien lifted her off him and dumped her down onto the mattress by his side. ‘For once in your life, tell the truth-’
Infuriated, Tabby sat up. ‘I am telling the truth!’
‘Where is the bathroom?’ Christien demanded.
‘Downstairs.’ Tabby compressed her lips, green eyes fiery. ‘I went out for a ride with Pete, and Pippa and Hilary were with his friends on their bikes. It was just a night out and nothing happened-’
‘Ciel! Don’t give me that! I saw you snogging him in the village…little slut!’ Christien suddenly shot at her with a passionate fury that took even him aback and was a far cry from the cool he preferred to show the world.