Married By Christmas. Оливия Гейтс

also back to exercising and had never been more, as she’d said earlier of him, painfully, distressingly beautiful.

      Placing the tray down on the bedside table, he luxuriated in watching her sleep off their latest lovemaking. Her lush body was tangled in sheets the color of her hair. Her thick lashes fanned her softly flushed cheeks, her lips swollen with his passion and her wild locks strewn over his pillow.

      Suddenly, a white-hot spasm stabbed his gut as images of her bathed in her own blood and Alex’s tore into his mind. Seeing her that way now, the image of health and contentment, had emotions raging through him. Every violent emotion, sublime and searing collided inside him, buckling his knees. He sank down on the mattress, a shaking hand reaching out to touch her, to assure himself all over again that this was the reality, that he had her with him, safe and whole and happy.

      Her eyes fluttered open, absolute welcome and joy filling them at once. He forced himself to breathe, struggling to banish the brutal images that assailed him regularly back into the deepest dungeon of his memory.

      Stretching and yawning delightedly, she sat up, looking like a goddess of voluptuousness, her breasts full and firm, her waist nipped, her thighs long and sleek, her hair gleaming gold around her strong shoulders. His body roared all over again. He tamped it down as viciously. It was enough he’d been all over her the moment he’d found her awake, not even giving her a chance to freshen up or eat. He really had to do something about his perpetual arousal, the need to possess her as many times as she could withstand every single day. He shouldn’t unleash seven years’ worth of deprivation on her. Even if she was breathlessly willing.

      But she was now getting on her hands and knees, slinking toward him like a mischievous cat, rubbing against him very much like one, before turning all human female, pressing her softness into his hardness, turning his arousal to distress.

      Pushing him on his back, she lay on top of him, pressing her every hot inch to his. “It’s you I want to feast on.”

      He gazed up at her, needing to tell her so much, yet still unable to, the unuttered confessions a constant burning coal in his throat. “I’ll be right here after you eat. I’ll always be there for you to take your fill of me.”

      Next moment, her response made him like everything had come crashing down.

      Wrapping one lock of the hair he’d grown longer as per her request, her smile inexorable seduction, she asked, “Always? Even when I go back home?”