Frantically she got up, her eyes flooding with tears, knocking over her chair in her desperate attempt to avoid crying in front of Alex and completely humiliating herself. But as she tried to run to the sanctuary of the bathroom the length of her bathrobe hampered her, and she had only taken a few steps before Alex caught up with her, bodily grabbed hold of her and swung her round to face him, his own face taut with emotion.
‘Oh, Beth. Beth, please don’t cry,’ she heard him groan as he wrapped her in his arms. ‘I’m so sorry...I didn’t mean to upset you. I never...’
‘I’m not upset,’ Beth denied. ‘I didn’t love him anyway,’ she told Alex truthfully, and then added less honestly, ‘Men aren’t worth loving...’
‘No?’ Alex asked her huskily.
‘No,’ Beth repeated firmly, but somehow or other her denial had lost a good deal of its potency. Was that perhaps because of the way Alex was cupping her face, his mouth gently caressing hers, his lips teasing the stubbornly tight line of hers, coaxing it to soften and part on a soft sigh that should have been a sharp rejection of what he was doing but somehow had become something softer and more accommodating?
As Alex continued to kiss her the most dizzying sweet sensation filled Beth.
She had the most overpowering urge to cling blissfully to Alex and melt into his arms like an old-fashioned Victorian maiden. Behind her closed eyelids she could have sworn there danced sunlit images of tulle and confetti scented with the lilies of a bridal bouquet, and the sound of a triumphant ‘Wedding March’ swelled and boomed and gold sunbeams formed a circle around her.
Dreamily Beth sighed, and then smiled beneath Alex’s kiss, her own lips parting in happy acquiescence to the explorative thrust of his tongue.
Alex was dressed casually, in jeans and a soft shirt. Beneath her fingertips Beth could feel the fabric of that shirt, soft and warm, but the body that lay beneath it felt deliciously firm...hard, masculine, an unfamiliar and even forbidden territory that her fingers were suddenly dangerously eager to explore.
Alex made a small sound of approving pleasure as Beth’s fingers rebelliously slipped between the buttons of his shirt. Her borrowed hotel robe, a ‘one size fits all’ garment of extremely generous proportions, was starting to slide off her shoulder, and the sensation of Alex’s fingertips just brushing her bare skin sent a violent frisson of breathtaking pleasure zigzagging all down her body.
; Beth wasn’t used to such an explosive physical reaction to a man’s touch. It made her catch her breath, her mouth rounding and her teeth accidentally closing on the fullness of Alex’s bottom lip and dragging gently against it.
Alex gave a thickly audible responsive groan that shivered through her own body right down to her toes, making her curl them into the carpet. The sensual heat they were both generating was combining to melt away all Beth’s inhibitions, her mouth opening eagerly to the demanding thrust of Alex’s tongue.
Her robe had started to open when she had trodden on the hem during her earlier attempt to escape from the humiliation of her own tears, but Beth was totally unaware of just how much of her body it had actually exposed until she felt the warmth of Alex’s hand against her breast, firmly cupping its soft weight against his palm as he slowly caressed its rounded shape with a slow, sensuous deliberation that made Beth tremble and then shudder, the rash of goosebumps raised on her skin betraying just how immediately and intensely sensitive she was to the erotic sensation of his caress.
Over Alex’s shoulder she could see their entwined images in her bedroom mirror. His hand, tanned and brown, lean and muscular, in direct contrast to the pale, sheer fabric-covered globe of her breast, soft, full, rounded, compliant to his touch. Male to female, man to woman, hard against soft.
Alex was still kissing her, plundering her mouth, his free hand burrowing beneath her robe to rest just below her waist on her naked back, his fingers stroking, kneading her sensitive flesh into such a frenzy of responsiveness that she was pressing herself frantically against him, mindlessly grinding her hips into his body, desperately searching for even closer contact with his aroused hardness.
The hand caressing her breast started to stroke it rhythmically, Alex’s fingertips teasing her nipple to a stiff point beneath her gauzy bra, playing with it, flicking it with a tormenting gentleness that made Beth tremble from head to foot with hungry need.
In the mirror now their bodies were so closely entwined, so sensuously entwined, that they might almost already have been lovers. Beth moaned longingly, reaching out to cover Alex’s hand with her own, wanting to urge him to remove the barrier of her bra. She was acting on instinct alone now, driven by a female urge programmed into her by nature itself, and, in obeying it, she had as little choice as a lemming following its preordained life path.
When Alex resisted her attempt to guide him to do what she wanted she growled her female frustration at having her need left unsatisfied beneath his kiss, making a low, keening sound that had no words but which Alex seemed immediately able to translate.
‘I can’t,’ he told her hoarsely, his hand burning hot against her swollen breast. ‘If I do, if I see you...touch you...’
His eyes flashed signals of stormy male desire, the sweetly savage bite of his teeth against the tenderness of her kiss-sensitive lips betraying how he would treat the tormenting and tormented sensitivity of her aroused nipples if she made him remove their frail protective covering. But Beth had gone beyond the safety of heeding any kind of warning.
Something—she neither knew nor cared what—had snapped the taut barrier she had wrapped around her feelings, her responses, her right to enjoy her female sexuality.
It was as though all the hurt she had experienced, all the anger, all the fear and distress, the humiliation and the pain had coalesced, exploded, burned itself out in a fierce transmuting heat that had turned her from her previously shy, inhibited, immature self into a powerfully strong and sexually motivated woman, a woman whose body demanded, expected and intended to have nothing less than total satisfaction of its deepest and most privately, primitively intimate sexual desires.
To her own shock, and her own fierce joy, she recognised that the Beth who had imagined the only way she could ever really enjoy sex would be in the arms of a gentle, considerate lover who would treat her as carefully as a delicately made piece of fragile glass had suddenly been replaced by a Beth who knew instinctively that what she wanted now was to enjoy sex in its rawest, purest, hottest form possible.
Like the silica at its most molten fluid form, she wanted to be taken into the creative care of an expert, an artist, a master of his craft—and of her. She wanted to watch, to be, as he poured the golden liquid form of her being into the crucible of heat that was their mutual desire. She wanted to feel the sharply passionate grate of his teeth against her tender flesh, to feel him being driven by his desire for her in the same way that Adam had been driven to eat the forbidden fruit handed to him by Eve. She wanted to be Alex’s forbidden fruit, she recognised dazedly.
‘Do it,’ she commanded him tautly, dragging his hand down so that his fingers caught in the edge of her bra, revealing the soft shimmer of her naked skin and the beginnings of the wantonly dark areola of her nipple.
Her robe was fully open now, and hanging off her arms. In the mirror Beth could see her own near-naked body.
‘Do it,’ she repeated hypnotically, her eyes wide and dark as she stared up into Alex’s.
‘You don’t know what...’ he began, but Beth shook her head.
‘Do it,’ she told him a third time, holding his gaze as she let her own hand drop away from his.