Mediterranean Tycoons. Michelle Reid

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СКАЧАТЬ efficiency stripped it all the way up to her throat.

      The loss of his mouth and the slick, lithe way he removed the scrap of silk over her head set her shivering and gasping, then the kiss was deep and hungry again, the massaging hand gliding now, over her newly exposed flesh. He stroked her thighs, the gentle contours of her hip and the indentation of her waist. When she whispered something into his mouth, he rose up and looked down her length to watch as his fingers moved on over the flat of her stomach to skim across the top of one pale rounded breast.

      Lizzy closed her eyes when she felt the possessive claim that hand made and was ready this time for the burning wave of pleasure that drenched her as he stroked, then cupped, then grazed the aching tip with the pad of his thumb. Her nipples sprang out in a blatant leap and she squirmed in embarrassment.

      He wasn’t embarrassed. He just used his long fingers to shape the quivering globe in preparation to take that tight dark rosebud into his mouth. A piercing hot sting struck from the centre of her nipple and shot all the way down to her thighs, bending her body like a wand. Once again he lifted his dark head and looked at her, then strung a gentle line of slow, tender kisses along the line of her jaw. Lizzy closed her eyes and endured until at last he stopped teasing and gave her what she wanted—the warm, seductive pressure of his mouth on her own.

      She kissed him as if she would die if she didn’t. She floated on a sexual high. When he tried to calm her, she ran her fingernails into his hair and scored them down his back.

      ‘Il virago inglese’ he accused on a rough shaken shudder.

      Lizzy didn’t care. She wanted his touch, she wanted to toss herself back to where they’d been on that other bed, before she’d chickened out and called a stop. And she wanted to feel every sensual sensation she knew was still waiting for her to experience.

      So the tense curse that left his chest meant nothing to her until he used the superior strength in his arms to bring her tumbling halfway back down to earth.

      ‘I said slowly,’ he husked at her. ‘I will not ravish you, Elizabeth.’

      But she didn’t know the difference between fast and slow. Her own wild senses were ruling her actions; the sweet, tight pulse of desire was controlling the pace. The fingers she sent spearing into his neck so she could bring his mouth back to hers were fierce and urgent. ‘I want to be ravished,’ she whispered to him.

      His kiss-heated lips twisted into a grim smile. ‘You don’t understand the concept and I will not give you an excuse to accuse me of ravishing you once it is done and your conscience decides to torment you.’

      Her eyes widened in protest. ‘I w-wouldn’t do that—’

      ‘You would,’ he insisted. ‘You want me but you don’t want to want me, you have simply allowed yourself to forget that. In fact,’ he added, sending a sardonic gleam to her liquid green eyes, ‘I predict you will take great pleasure in accusing me of anything that might come to mind.’

      ‘How can you be so cold and detached that your mind can even think of these things right now?’ she threw at him helplessly.

      ‘I am not cold and detached.’ But his dark face clenched. ‘I am just trying to play this as fairly as I can for you!’

      ‘Me?’ Lizzy choked out a laugh, feeling the whole wretched, glorious wash of pleasure swirl into bitterness. ‘You haven’t been fair to me since you met me.’ Clenching her fists, she used them to try and push him away. ‘You’re a lousy lover, Luc,’ she added in thick frustration when she couldn’t budge him by even half an inch. ‘The kind that sounds like he wants me to sign another contract before he condescends to move this marriage on!’

      Once again her tongue had outpaced her common sense. Lizzy knew it the moment the cutting accusation was out. Her breathing disappeared, her eyelashes flickering as she took in the look that had frozen his face. Teeth burying themselves into her full bottom lip, she waited, heart pounding, her foolish stubbornness refusing to let her take the words back before it was too late.

      And she knew she should have done—his complete stillness told her that she should. Yet he didn’t move, didn’t speak, he didn’t make any really visible sign that she’d managed to cut into him at all. It was just there in the pulsating silence, in the way she was suddenly feeling the difference in their age and experience, and in the tiny quivers stinging her muscles in places they should not be doing at a tense moment like this.

      ‘S-say something,’ she breathed when she could stand it no longer.

      He moved then, like a man who had just come to a grim decision. One of his arms snaked outwards and suddenly a light switched on, bathing them both in a soft golden glow that did nothing to lessen Lizzy’s tension one bit. She actually felt her eyes turn black. Yet he still just continued to look down at her, into her huge wary eyes and the silken tumble of chestnut curls rippling the pillow around her delicately featured very pale face.

      And her heart wasn’t beating fast now, it was thumping slow and thick. His face, his beautiful, beautiful face was still so expressionless it just didn’t go with what he did next.

      What he did was to spear his long fingers into her hair, then curve them around the back of her neck. As she gasped he tilted her head back so it arched her slender white throat, then lowered his dark head and buried his mouth in her taut, smooth flesh.

      Nothing in her meagre experience with men helped to warn her as to what was coming. It was seduction at its most deep and determined level. It was the man of experience making no concessions for her foolishly defiant innocence. He made love to her with a grim and silent precision; he dragged each and every sensually erotic sensation to the stinging surface of her pale, smooth, receptive skin. He moved his mouth in hot, sensual glides until he reached her parted, trembling mouth, then he kissed her long and deep and without mercy until she was dizzy with it, throbbing and drunk. And he used his hands and his mouth and his tongue in ways and in places she hadn’t known could be so deliciously good.

      The quiet command of his voice worked her like a puppet. She was trapped, enslaved by the string-pulling power of his knowledge and her own desire to feel whatever he decided to bestow on her too-responsive flesh. He caressed each curve and hollow and soft warm crevice of her body; he drew her taut with exquisite sensation with his hands and his mouth and his teeth. He kneaded the rounded, swollen fullness of her breasts and sent her teeth into his satin, taut shoulder when he teased and sucked their eager tips.

      She even felt him tremble once or twice when her restless, untutored fingers scraped across his flesh. And when the downward glide of his trailing fingers finally took control of the pulsing ache between her legs she flailed in a morass of hot feeling, lost to reality because her own heady consciousness had locked onto the will of her body and the way he slowly, relentlessly brought her climbing and crawling and panting and needing to a whimpering, pleading peak.

      No single part of her did not know what it was like to be caressed by him—no nerve-end, no muscle, no velvet dark place of intimacy, until she pulsed and throbbed and breathed out his name in a helpless, breathless, sensual chant.

      She hadn’t opened her eyes in ages, not since she’d lowered her eyelids in surrender and let him do this to her. But as she felt his weight easing down on top of her and her thighs being urged apart her eyelids lifted, her eyes making deep, deep contact with the heavy gold darkness in his.

      Everything about him was heavy gold darkness, the breadth of his shoulders blocking out most of the lamplight, the long, hard-muscled torso pressing down on her with his hips. She felt СКАЧАТЬ