For Pleasure...Or Marriage?

Slowly he came down beside her, fingers brushing the hair like an aureole around her beautiful face.

He heard her speak, wonder and disbelief in her voice.

‘Is this a dream? Is this really happening?’

A smile parted his lips, and he lowered his mouth slowly to hers.

‘No dream,’ he assured her.

He tasted once more the sweet nectar of her mouth, and then, with infinite patience, infinite pleasure, moved on to taste the sweetness of all her body—her milky rounded breasts, their ripe and straining peaks that he teased and flamed with lips and tongue and teeth, her silken flanks, the slender moulding of her hips, the slim length of her legs that he smoothed and caressed. And then his hands caressed her soft thighs apart, to seek and find the secret satin flesh between, that made the low gasps in her throat come again and again as his skilled, gliding fingers drew from her the honeydew of her aching pleasure until she was trembling and straining beneath him, her body arching to his as he readied her for his possession. The soft moans she gave, the glistening ripeness of her silky folds, the yielding contours of her body, all told him that now, now she was at the moment of his long-awaited fulfilment of his desire, and he lifted himself over her.

For one long, last, exquisite moment he denied himself, and then no more.

With slow, absolute possession he filled her.

And discovered, when it was far, far too late to do anything other than reap the exquisite fulfilment of everything he had wanted of this extraordinarily alluring girl, that he was the first to taste that ultimate sweetness.

‘Are…are you angry with me?’

Her voice was so tentative, so diffident, it made him tense a moment.

Her face shadowed. ‘I should have told you,’ she said quietly, her voice stricken.

Something in it, in the expression in her eyes, stabbed at

him. If, ten minutes ago, anyone should have asked him if he’d wanted to take a virgin to bed, he’d have given a short, unequivocal answer. No.

But now—

He looked down at her as she lay beneath him.

His breath caught. She was so beautiful—just so beautiful.

But it was more than beauty—he didn’t know what it was, but it was there. There in the wide, clouding eyes—something that reached to him. He did not know what, or how; he only knew, with sudden, absolute certainty that he did not care that she had been a virgin. It simply did not matter. All that mattered was that she was as different from the women he bedded as a glittering diamond from a hidden pearl. That was her allure. That she was like no woman he had ever possessed.

And when the moment of full possession had come, after the momentary shock of realising just how inexperienced she was, when his body had surged within hers and the last vestige of consciousness had been drowned in a tide of sensation that had swept over them both, as he’d known from the sudden clenching of her body around him, from the cry that had come from her throat, the taut arching of her neck, the blaze of shocked, incandescent awareness in her eyes—then he had experienced a pleasure so exceptional, so rare, so complete that it had consumed him, searing through him like a brand, sating him so that he knew he had never before felt anything as intense, as absolute as this, with any woman.

That strange, unknown emotion reached to him as she lay gazing up at him, her expression shadowed and anxious, welling through him again.

He drew himself down to her, entwining her body with his, holding her close to him, feeling the softness of her body, the sweetness of it in his arms. And he knew with that same certainty that he had made exactly the right decision when he had followed his impulse that day outside Nôtre Dame.

He kissed her softly, on her mouth and on her eyes.

‘You were perfect,’ he told her, his voice low and husky. ‘Quite, quite perfect.’

As he lifted his head away and gazed down smiling at her, he saw her face light up as if the sun had come out in her eyes—a radiance that filled her being.

It pleased him.

Pleased him very much.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SNOW WAS crisp beneath Vanessa’s ski boots, the air crystalline in her lungs. She stood at the foot of the piste, gazing anxiously up the steep mountain slope, already shadowing at the end of the Alpine winter’s afternoon. Almost beyond her vision she could see a dot moving, dark against the glittering snow, heading downwards in swift, powerful sweeps.

Anxiety bit at her, and she had to force herself to be calm. Markos was a superb skier, she knew that, and he could handle a run of this severity with ease. But her novice eyes saw only the plummeting drop, the deadly rocky outcrops, the hairpin turns.

Please let him be all right!