He surfaced halfway down the pool to find her still fiddling with her hair. He didn’t need any reminders of how glorious that hair had felt beneath his hands when he’d laced his fingers through its silky thickness. It pleased him to see that, in spite of her best efforts to achieve a severe look, soft tendrils were still escaping. He dipped his head beneath the water so she couldn’t see him smile, and when he surfaced he was in time to watch her perform a perfect swallow dive. She swam to reach him, and it was a relief to see her face was almost free from tension by the time she reached him.
‘Oh, that feels good!’ she exclaimed.
He was tempted to catch her close, but he wanted to be sure she’d loosened up and was ready for that first.
‘Race?’ she challenged, to his surprise.
‘Why not?’ he agreed. ‘Want a head start?’
She huffed with mock contempt and took off without him.
Catching up easily, he swam alongside her until the last couple of yards when he pulled ahead.
‘You are so unfair,’ she complained. ‘You always do that.’
‘And you always fall for it.’
She lifted herself clear of the water in a cloud of silver bubbles, and then, scooping water, she splashed it in his face.
‘Like that, is it?’ he threatened.
She laughed. Dipping her arm into the pool again, she thrashed it across the water, dousing him completely. He couldn’t let a challenge like that go unopposed, and launching himself across the pool he brought her down beneath the surface with him.
She escaped like a seal, wriggling free from his arms with no difficulty at all—but not before he had felt a tantalising brush of her breasts against his arm and her heat all over him.
‘You’ll pay for that,’ she threatened as they faced each other.
‘I’d like to see you try!’
Diving down beneath the surface, she grabbed hold of his legs and tried to bring him under. He resisted her easily, and diving down with her he brought her to the surface, struggling furiously in his arms. If there was a more erotic experience than having a hot, wet Karina fighting him off, he had yet to experience it. When he finally subdued her, she was laughing. ‘You have to let me go,’ she protested.
‘Why, when this is much more fun?’
‘For you.’
‘For both of us.’
She saw the change in his expression and grew still. Winding his fist through her hair, he drew her head back slowly and then, taking his time so he could savour every moment of it, he brought his lips down on hers.
Hot and cold, wet and warm, the dark secrets of her body were yielding themselves up to him. He plundered her mouth with his tongue, mimicking the sex act he craved—the act that had gone on all night the first time. He could never forget how wild she’d been, how responsive, how abandoned. He could still remember her screams of pleasure and the way she had called out his name at the moment of release.
Karina had been insatiable and so had he. Bringing a premature end to that glorious encounter had been torture for both of them. They had discovered a capacity for pleasure he guessed neither of them had previously suspected. She was sucking his tongue now as she had sucked him that night...and now she was biting his bottom lip, just as she had teased and tormented him. She’d rubbed her warm breasts against him in open invitation as she’d wrapped her limbs around his, making him her captive, as he had gladly been that night—until he’d turned her beneath him to show her the meaning of deep, thrusting, rhythmical pleasure. She had responded by pressing her legs as far apart as far as she could, in order to isolate that most sensitive place for his attention. She’d cried and groaned and panted out her need, and as he pressed his erection into her now, he could feel the soft swollen warmth of her core yielding against him, just as it had that night. Her lips were wet, her mouth was hot, and he was as sure as he had ever been that Karina in her confining swimsuit was ready for him to take, to pleasure, to satisfy—
‘No!’
She reeled away from him in the water as he began to ease her swimsuit down and quickly backpedalled in the water as if her life depended on putting distance between them.
‘You stay in,’ she insisted, reaching for a towel before she had even climbed out of the pool.
He sprang out to join her, shocked by her sudden change of mood—perplexed as she backed away, as if he were a threat in some way.
‘What now?’ she asked him warily, still backing away.
He shrugged in an attempt to ease the rigid tension between them.