As she had done to him he rimmed her navel with tiny kisses, and then the tip of his tongue, but then, before Petra could stop him, he tugged delicately on the diamond whilst his hand covered her sex, his thumb slowly probing an entrance between its tightly furled outer covering in a way that made her heart turn over inside her chest whilst the whole of her body turned molten and fluid with arousal.
‘Nowhere else,’ she heard herself whisper, but even as she said them she knew that the words were not needed, that Blaize had discovered for himself that her body possessed no other form of adornment!
Withdrawing slightly, he looked down at her whilst she quivered from head to foot—but not with apprehension or regret.
‘I want you,’ she told him huskily. ‘I want you now, Blaize.’
But as she reached for him he shook his head.
‘Wait!’ he told her, reaching out to open a small cupboard beside the bed.
‘I just hope that whoever planned this as a lovers’ retreat did some proper forward planning,’ Petra heard him mutter.
Bewildered, she waited, trying to peer past his shoulder, and then when she did see what he had been searching for her face coloured self-consciously.
Until now all ‘safe sex’ had meant to her was an expression that applied to other people!
But of course Blaize was more experienced, far more worldly than she was herself, and shakily she admitted that she was thankful that he was being so conscientious!
She even felt a tiny little thrill of excitement, knowing what he was doing, what it was leading up to! And when he was ready and he turned back to her, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her slowly and thoroughly before caressing her body, she shivered in passionate urgency.
She had thought that she knew what wanting him, aching for him felt like! But she had been wrong!
Enshrined in the street lore of her girlhood, the received wisdom of a hundred magazine articles and books, she had carried a certain protective wisdom that ‘first times were not good times’—but she had been wrong about that too!
She hadn’t known just how proactive her own role would be, how proactive she would want it to be as she reached and touched, stretched and invited, as she shuddered in the exquisite indescribable sensation of having him slowly enter her, slowly fill her…
But she knew now.
She hadn’t known either how easily she would find the words she could hear echoing the pace of his deepening thrusts, which told him all that she was feeling and wanting.
But she knew that now too.
Every breath he took as he filled and completed her—against her skin, in her ear, in the thud of his heartbeat against her own, deep inside her body, where it radiated out in golden waves—was the breath of life itself.
And then, just as she thought she had accustomed herself totally to the feel of him, he changed the pace, increasing its intensity, deepening it, letting her feel the strength of its power, letting her see that her body was ready for such intimacy.
And it was!
Mindlessly Petra clung to him, lifting herself against him so that he could go deeper, fuller, stronger, so that the intimacy they were sharing was so intense, so sweetly, savagely unbearable that it had to shatter, hurling them both through paroxysm after paroxysm of pleasure and into the beautiful golden peace that lay beyond it.
‘Mmm.’ Sleepily, Petra drew a small heart on the smooth skin of Blaize’s bare shoulder with her fingertip. He was asleep and she could see the dark fans his eyelashes made against the warmth of his tanned skin in the soft light of the lamp. She had been asleep herself until a couple of minutes ago, but it seemed that her body didn’t want to waste a moment of the time it could have with Blaize in sleep when she could be awake, watching him, touching him… loving him.
There—she had acknowledged her love! Admitted it! Accepted it?
She closed her eyes, testing the words inside her head. I love him. I love Blaize.
Yes, it was true. She could tell that from the way her whole being responded to the inner vibration of the words. She loved him! She loved Blaize.
She moved closer to him, bending her head to replace her fingertip with her lips, slowly retracing her heart with tiny whisper-light kisses.
His skin felt so warm, his body so excitingly different from her own and yet now so wonderfully, preciously familiar.
From now until the very end of her life she would remember tonight. Until the day she died she would be able to close her eyes and recreate his image inside her head. Her hands would never forget what it had felt like to touch him; her lips would never forget the taste of his, the heat of his mouth, the way he had kissed her.
Her eyes soft and dark with her own emotions, Petra traced the shape of his arm and then the length of his back, the curve of his buttock.
‘Two can play at this game.’
Petra gasped as Blaize’s hand suddenly slid over her, down to her waist and then up again to cup her breast, whilst his voice echoed in her ear.
‘You wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of a sleeping man, would you?’ he teased her.
‘I just wanted to see if you felt as good as I remembered,’ Petra told him honestly.
She felt him move, tensing a little, as though her words had somehow touched a raw nerve, or were something he didn’t really want to hear. But she decided that she must be wrong when he demanded, ‘And do I?’
As he spoke his thumb was deliberately teasing the unexpectedly taut and excited peak of her breast.
The shock of discovering how easily and quickly he could make her feel so hungry for him distracted her. Her hands were already curling, weaving rhythmically against his skin as her body started to pulse and ache.
Eagerly she kissed his throat and then his mouth, making a soft, taut sound of need deep in her throat as she pulled his head down towards her breast.
The sensation of his lips covering her nipple, caressing it, drawing it deeper into his mouth, made her dig her fingers into the hard muscles of his back. Already she was imagining the feel of him inside her, aching for it and for him, so much that she reached out and ran her fingertips down his body, touching him with a knowing intimacy that would have shocked her twenty-four hours ago.
Against her breast he made a sound she couldn’t decipher, smothered by the urgency of her compelling need as she arched against him and gloried in the swelling hardness of the male flesh beneath her touch.
Blaize had released her breast and rolled onto his back. She felt his hands on her waist. To lift her away? Swiftly she bent her head towards his body, her lips touching the hard shaft of flesh that compelled her, that she knew would complete her!
‘Petra… Petra…’
Her name was a raw, tormented sound of broken male control that filled her with sweetly savage pleasure.
His hands were still on her waist, but this time as he lifted her it was not away from him but towards him.
As he positioned her Petra shuddered, her eyes huge and dark with the realisation of how quickly and wantonly her body had adjusted to its newly dominant role.
Slickly they moved together, deeper, stronger, faster, whilst she stared into the mask of agonised pleasure that was Blaize’s face, his need openly revealed to her as he cried out and his body jerked in fierce spasms just as the pleasure exploded inside her.
She was trembling so much that she couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything other than lie against him whilst he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her.
‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ she heard him telling her in