She wondered if he’d think as she did. That her breasts were slightly too full for her tiny waist and the less curvy flare of her hips. But he was smiling when she opened her eyes, the smile of a man well gratified with the gift he was being given.
He reached out then, cupping the undersides of her breasts as tenderly as if each were a rare treasure, and Rayne gave a small moan, her lashes coming down over her eyes against the excruciating pleasure that ripped through her lower body as his thumbs lightly stroked the sensitised peaks.
‘Look at me.’
She didn’t want to! How could she stand here like this and let him see the naked longing in her eyes? Face him, knowing that her body was betraying the extent of her need of him? But his voice was as much her master as the sensations that were holding her in thrall and very slowly her lashes fluttered apart.
He looked flushed and tousled and as much a slave to his desire as she was, she realised, feeling the burn of his gaze like a brand on her body as it slid leisurely down over her rapidly rising breasts and ribcage, over the flat plane of her belly to the white triangle of lace at the apex of her creamy thighs.
‘Such loveliness should be rejoiced in. Worshipped,’ he emphasised heavily, his massaging hands leaving her breasts to follow the same path down over her midriff, her hips and her trembling thighs before coming to rest on the taut mounds of her bare buttocks, the beauty he had just spoken of with the heat of his desire bringing him finally to his knees.
Rayne gazed down on his thick dark hair as his hot mouth sought the heart of her femininity, concealed behind the last barrier of her string.
His moist heat burned into her, mingling with her hot wetness through the wisp of lace, and Rayne plunged her fingers into his hair to clutch him to her and with a groaning need thrust her throbbing centre hard against him.
He groaned his satisfaction as she squirmed above him.
‘I think we can dispense with this, don’t you?’ he murmured huskily.
His smile was excitingly sensual when he tilted his head to look up at her, although the strong masculine face was flushed with the desire that was making his eyelids heavy and lent his mouth the brooding look of a man in the grip of passion.
Rayne sucked in her breath as his fingers made short shrift of removing the little scrap of nonsense. His hands were dark and long and extremely masculine against the smooth, silky sheen of her legs.
Blindly she saw him toss her string down alongside her dress.
Both scraps of nonsense, she thought, if she’d imagined that either could protect her from her own weakness for him, or from his potent masculinity and his determined, exciting hands.
His clothes were unbelievably arousing on her nakedness as he pulled her to him and, where she had tugged his unbuttoned shirt out of his waistband, his chest hair rasped deliciously against her swollen breasts.
‘Oh, King …’ Involuntarily, she was wriggling against him, wanting even closer contact. She had never felt more wanton or more feminine.
‘Easy, darling,’ he said softly, and though she knew that the endearment might have been used with any woman he had been making love to, she was too driven by her need for him to be anything but happy to pretend that just for tonight she really meant something to him. ‘Don’t you think I feel it too?’
In fact he had never felt so hot or so hard in his entire life, King realised, with such an intense burning throb in his groin it was almost akin to pain.
He hadn’t intended this when he had come back from the clinic tonight, bearing the brunt of two men’s total disregard for each other. Or having to tell Rayne—while personally appalled at Mitch’s lack of ethics—that, legally, she had no claim against his father, and then to go on and shatter all her illusions about love and loyalty into the bargain. But it had been a hell of a day and he needed to lose himself in the pleasure of everything she was offering. And heaven help him if he was behaving like a sex-starved teenager! But this lovely woman couldn’t begin to know just how much pleasure it was going to give him to make love to her.
Claiming her mouth once more, he ground his hips against hers to show her just what she was doing to him and laughed softly into her mouth—a satisfied sound—when she gasped from the evidence of his arousal and pressed herself against his hardness in answering need.
Dragging his mouth from the drugging warmth of hers, it was only to rasp against the perfumed silk of her hair, ‘Come to bed with me.’
Her murmur of acquiescence was muffled by the depth of her wanting, but he understood.
Cupping her buttocks to lift her, he felt her warm eager legs wrap around him and, like that, somehow they made it up to his suite of rooms.
Monte Carlo was a blur of lights through the panorama of the open windows, its busy Corniche a blazing snake that led sinuously who-knew-where? Just like where making love with this man would be taking her tonight, Rayne thought distractedly, although she was in far too deep now to care.
From over his shoulder, on The Rock on the south side of the harbour, she glimpsed the palace, floodlit as a beacon against the dark velvet of the night.
Clarity against confusion. The thought rang through her brain. Like common sense against a wild, abandoned pleasure such as she had never known.
As King laid her down on the bed, she let the pleasure take her over—the excitement of him removing his clothes, the hard shadowed potency of his thrusting manhood and the heart-leaping anticipation as he came down to join her.
She reached for him at once and knew the heady thrill of touching him intimately for the first time.
‘Go easy,’ he advised raggedly and she could tell from his laboured breathing how close he was to losing control. ‘I don’t want to waste this. I want to savour every minute of these hours with you.’
That it sounded like the prelude to something final, she didn’t even want to think about. She couldn’t think anyway because, in moving away from her to remove her sandals, he was suddenly employing his tongue to trace a slow sensuous trail along each thigh.
Except that now he had found the secret parting between them and, lying there, breath held in shuddering anticipation, she almost screamed with pleasure when his teasing tongue flicked across her ripe swollen bud.
She had had just two lovers in her life, but she had never permitted such intimacy, and now she knew why no other relationship had ever been enough for her. Because there was only one man she wanted! Only one man she had ever wanted. And she knew that after tonight she would be spoiled for any other man who ever came after King.
As he drove her mindless with his mouth, her hands clutched the soft fabric of the coverlet beneath her to try and stem the tide of pleasure that was building in her. A small guttural murmur escaped her. She didn’t want to climax yet.
‘What is it? What is it you want, Rayne?’ he murmured with his lips softly brushing the soft flesh of her inner thigh. They left a slick trail of warmth where they’d touched, moist from the nectar of her body.
You! her mind clamoured, begging, silently appealing to him. It’s all I’ve ever wanted—for so long!
Too unsure of him to actually say as much, she used the language of her body to show him by reaching down to entice him back across her.
‘Ah, is that all,’ he said softly and, even in the grip of passion, she realised, there was still room for sensual teasing in his voice.
As he reached across to open the drawer of the bedside cabinet, it hit her that he was continuing to call her Rayne. Rayne, not Lorri, because Lorri, the girl he had once ignored—silly, trusting, naïve Lorri—was gone, killed off by the crumbling of everything