A Ring to Secure His Heir

Her sultry mouth down curved. ‘I’m going to get fatter and heavier soon.’

‘There’ll simply be more of you to enjoy, moraki mou,’ Alexius husked, reaching down for the hem of her nightdress to pull it up and over her head.

‘Oh!’ Taken by surprise, Rosie crossed her arms over herself. ‘Did you plan this when you brought me here?’

Again, Alexius laughed but he picked his words with care. ‘Let’s say that I entertained the hope that we would get together again.’

Unimpressed, Rosie shook her head. ‘I know you—you planned it this way.’

In answer, Alexius shot her a brilliant smile of one-upmanship and crushed her mouth slowly beneath his. Something low in her pelvis clenched, making her hips shift up to him. He uncrossed her hands and directed his lips lower to caress the delicate swell of her breasts and torment the hotly engorged buds that were screamingly sensitive to his attention. As he employed his mouth and his tongue and even his teeth to tease the tender peaks, Rosie writhed, the simmering heat at the heart of her developing a more desperate edge of need. He absorbed her responses with keen interest, spreading her out on the bed to feast his eyes on, forestalling her every attempt to conceal her body from him.

‘I’ve waited a long time for this,’ he protested raggedly, running an admiring forefinger down between her breasts to the pale tangle of curls below, brushing her thighs apart while she held her breath, smoothing over the soft skin of her inner thigh to explore the warm wet invitation of her lush opening. ‘And you were definitely worth waiting for, moraki mou.’

Trembling, Rosie rested back, scarcely believing what she was allowing, finally acknowledging that she wanted to be with him so much that she didn’t care about the terms or the absence of promises. He circled the little pearl of nerve endings that controlled her response and reaction jackknifed through her in an unquenchable surge of charged pleasure. It went on and on and her hips wriggled, her taut nipples abraded by contact with his hair-roughened torso. He sank a finger deep into her and she gasped, her neck arching, slender muscles straining up to the climax she sensed gathering.

‘You don’t get to come unless I’m inside you,’ Alexius spelt out roughly, eyes bright with intensity, already positioning her for his entrance. ‘And I’m on a knife edge trying to wait.’

The edge of his desperation racked up her arousal even more. He was almost vibrating with eagerness against her, the muscles in his powerful arms bunched with effort, his jaw line hard as a rock.

‘Don’t wait,’ she told him between gritted teeth, her head rolling restively across the pillow, her body keyed to a frustrating high of expectation.

He filled her to the hilt in one swift motion that stole the breath from her lungs in a gasp. Excitement assailed her as she felt herself stretch to accommodate his size.

‘Am I hurting you?’ he husked, throwing his handsome head back, black hair wildly tousled by her fingers as he hitched her legs round his waist.

‘No, that was a wince of pure pleasure,’ she gasped as he sank even deeper into her.

‘You’re so tight,’ he grated with satisfaction, withdrawing almost completely from her body only to thrust back into her tender sheath again, sending goose bumps and tiny hairs prickling all over her skin along with deliriously satisfying sensation. He twisted his hips, changed his angle, and the momentum gathered like a great wave of heat surging through her as he began to thrust into her. The pace quickened. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only feel the rampant masculine force of his primal rhythm and the spasms of excitement sent glorious little tremors rippling through her that grew into a blaze of exhilaration that left her moaning and sobbing at the ecstasy of climax. Delight and more delight followed in the melting waves of sheer pleasure that engulfed her. Finally surrendering control, he shuddered above her, his breathing harsh, but the look of appreciation stamped on his face as he gazed down at her was sufficient to tilt her heart inside her.

At her first attempt to move away, Alexius held fast to her, their bodies hot and slippery with sweat and still joined. Finally, he flung himself back against the pillows and arranged her on top of him, arms still holding her close as he kissed her brow, pushed her hair off her face and studied her closely. ‘Already I’m thinking about the next time.’ He groaned the admission in despair. ‘That’s what you do to me and it was even more amazing than I remembered, moraki mou.’

‘Was it? I fell asleep that time.’

Alexius sat up and scrambled off the bed, still holding her. ‘Not tonight,’ he warned, striding into the bathroom to set her down in the shower and pummel the controls to deluge them both with warm reviving water. ‘Tonight I want you over and over and over again.’

‘Why?’ Rosie asked him baldly.

‘Because I’m fed up with wanting you and not having you,’ he growled.

Still quivering with sensual aftershocks, Rosie leant against him, sated and momentarily weak. ‘I’m here now.’

‘And not going anywhere away from me,’ Alexius specified with a shot of possessiveness in his veins that lit up warning signs in his shrewd brain, for he had not the slightest idea why, apart from the obvious, it seemed so crucial to keep her close. ‘Not for the foreseeable future.’

‘You’re so bossy sometimes.’ Rosie sighed, tingling as he soaped her with shower gel, big hands smoothing slowly and teasingly over her sensitised breasts and down over her still-flat stomach. Before long the exquisite sensitivity engendered by the first bout of their lovemaking awakened every nerve ending to fresh life. She felt his bold shaft hard and full of promise against her and made not the smallest objection when he tipped up her face and hungrily crushed her mouth under his again before he toppled her dripping wet back on the bed, ignoring her laughing protests to cover her body with his again. And if the first time had been wild and exciting the second was slow and deep and almost indescribably satisfying, her body still pulsing with satiation in the aftermath.

Alexius gazed down at her with veiled eyes that silvered with sudden annoyance. She had led him a dance and he didn’t like that. Although he had no idea what went on inside her head and had never wanted to know what went on inside a woman’s head, his ignorance continually inflamed him when he was with her. And right then, holding her close, his libido mercifully eased by the best sex he had ever had, her small face dreamy and dazed by the same compulsive release, anger suddenly rose uppermost and drove tension through his every muscle. On what grounds had she found him wanting? No woman had ever judged Alexius wanting in any field.

‘So I’m good enough to sleep with but not good enough to marry?’ he murmured in a lazily provocative but succinct undertone.

Rosie blinked, yanked back with a vengeance from the soothing relaxation of mind-blowing sex. ‘It’s not that simple,’ she mumbled, playing for time, needing her brain to waken from catatonic mode, for being with Alexius seemed to wipe out rational thinking processes.

‘It’s exactly that simple,’ Alexius grated in harsh disagreement.

Picking up on the derisive edge to his accented drawl, Rosie stiffened and, with difficulty because he was so much larger and heavier, pushed him away, no longer easy with the intimacy of lying naked with entwined limbs. She sat up, then grimaced. ‘You’ve already admitted that you don’t do serious and marriage is a very serious commitment.’

‘It would be different with you. You’re having my child,’ he pointed out and, without warning, he pressed a hand to her narrow shoulder to push her flat against the pillows again and he splayed a big hand across her stomach. ‘That’s my baby in there.’

Disconcerted by both the gesture and the anger that smouldered in his stunning silver gaze, Rosie wriggled right off the bed and snatched up her nightdress and shimmied into it with frantic hands. ‘That doesn’t mean you own me.’