At some stage he had unfastened the shirt he had been wearing and the white fabric was a pale blur against the darkness of his skin. There was evidence of his long day in the dark shadow bearding his jaw, and her muscles tensed a little in female response to such evidence of his maleness. Before she could stop herself she was reaching out to touch his jaw experimentally with her fingertips, and she felt her tenderness give way to sharply spiked desire.
As her fingers started to tremble she snatched them away, curling them into a fist and imprisoning them with her other hand. But, although she had managed to stop herself from touching him, she couldn’t stop herself from looking at him, her love-hungry gaze fastening greedily on his mouth, his throat, the exposed flesh of his torso.
Now it wasn’t just her fingers that were trembling, it was her whole body! She could feel the hot urgency of her own desire seeping into every nerve-ending—seeping, flowing, flooding through her until it swamped her completely.
Rashid! Tormentedly she mouthed his name, and then jumped back as he stirred in his sleep, his eyes starting to open.
By the time he had fully opened them she had retreated to her own side of the bed and was lying defensively still as she tried to feign sleep.
‘Petra?’ She heard the anxiety in his sleep-thickened voice as he leaned towards her. His hand touched her throat, checking her pulse, monitoring its frantic race.
‘Petra, wake up,’ he was commanding her.
‘Rashid, it’s all right—I do not have concussion,’ she told him briefly, guessing what he was thinking, turning her head to look at him and trying to shrug off his hand as she did so.
But suddenly he had gone completely still, his hand lying against her throat with heavy immobility. His gaze was fixed on her breasts, naked and exposed by her inadvertent negligence in failing to pull the covers up over her body.
She knew immediately and instinctively that he wanted her, and she knew just as instinctively that he would keep to the promise he had made her on the day of their wedding not to force himself on her.
All she needed to do was to reach for her covers and turn away from him. If that was what she wanted…
And if it wasn’t? Hardly daring to acknowledge what was going through her mind, Petra held his gaze. She could feel the longing and need curling through her, gaining force and power, filling her until her whole body felt like a highly tuned instrument of desire, openly aching for his touch. She could feel her breasts swell and lift, her nipples tighten and ache, her belly sink in slightly against the desire flooding her sex.
Lifting her hand, she curled her fingers around his forearm, slowly caressing it, her eyes wide open as she gazed up into his.
She could feel the open tremor of his body at her touch, see the way he was fighting to draw extra air into his lungs. What was he thinking? Feeling? A fierce surge of excitement and power filled her as she read the answer in the hot gleam of his eyes and the immediate response of his body!
‘Hold me, Rashid,’ she commanded him boldly, shuddering violently as he did so, tightening his arms around her so that they were body to body, so that she could feel the heavy, exciting thud of his heart.
‘Love me!’ she whispered passionately against his hot skin, knowing that he could not hear the betraying words, only feel the warmth of her breath.
She heard—and felt—the low growl of sound he made deep in his throat! Frustration? Longing?
Her body responded to it immediately, her lips parting eagerly for the savage sweet pleasure of his kiss.
Instantly she was plunged into a spiral of aching need, a swift descent into the thick velvet heat of her own most primitive longings. Her hand pressed to the back of Rashid’s head, she urged him to increase the pressure of his mouth against her own, until all rational thought was suspended beneath its bruisingly passionate heat.
Petra knew that she should have been horrified by and contemptuous of her own behaviour, that she should have totally resisted her own desire. But instead she could feel her heart turning over inside her chest and then slamming heavily into her ribs as shockingly elemental and savage emotions exploded into life inside her. She had wanted this so much, she recognised dizzily. She had wanted, needed him so much!
‘Petra,’ Rashid groaned against her mouth. ‘This isn’t…’
He moved, his hand accidentally brushing against her breast, and Petra froze. In the darkness she could feel his gaze searching the distance between them, penetrating the moon-silvered darkness and then fixing unerringly on the betraying peak of her nipple, where it pouted with deliberate invitation so dangerously close to his stilled hand.
‘Petra?’ This time when he said her name it held a different note, a male huskiness and timbre that her sensitive female ears interpreted as an open acknowledgement of his desire for her.
She could feel the power that his desire for her gave her. She was all Eve, a wanton temptress, holding her breath whilst she willed him to reach out to her, for her, already knowing the pleasure he would give her.
Very slowly his hand moved back towards her breast. Petra exhaled shakily, and then closed her eyes as he stroked her skin with the lightest of touches—so light that it was little more than a breath, and yet so sensual that her whole breast seemed to swell and yearn towards him.
‘Petra.’
This time her name was muffled beneath the slow, lingering kisses he was threading around the base of her throat like a necklace. A necklace that reached down between her breasts and was then strung from the upper curve of one breast to the other.
At some stage Petra had started to tremble. Tiny little inner secret tremors at first, but by the time Rashid was cupping one breast in his hand, laving the delighted pink-flushed crest of the other with his tongue, they had turned into galvanic shudders of uncontrollable mute delight. And then not so mute, when Petra was forced to bite down hard on her bottom lip to prevent herself from crying out aloud.
When Rashid saw what she was doing he lifted his mouth from her nipple to watch her, and then slid his finger into her mouth, freeing her bottom lip whilst he told her thickly, ‘Taste me instead, Petra!’
Her whole body reacted to his words, swept with a molten need that burned openly in her eyes.
‘Yes! Yes!’ he told her savagely, even though she had said nothing, spoken no question. But Petra knew that he had heard the silent hungry longing of her body, seen her need for him in her eyes.
‘Yes,’ he repeated more softly. ‘Whatever… However… Every which way you want, Petra. Every way, until you beg me to end our mutual torment.’
As he was speaking he was kissing her. Tiny slow kisses that were a torment in themselves as his hands shaped her body, effortlessly drawing from it everything that it ached so wantonly to give him and everything that she herself did not.
Her need, herself, her life. Her love…
She cried out in shocked denial under the touch of his tongue against her sex, and then cried out again in a low, guttural woman’s cry of acknowledgement of the pleasure he was showing her. But when he moaned in response, and placed her hand on his body, her reaction caused him to lift his head and demand rawly, ‘Did you think you are the only one to have pleasure in what I’m doing, in the feel of you, the heat of you, the taste of you? I’ve hungered for you like this Petra, for this intimacy with you… this possession of you.’
As he stopped speaking he turned his head and kissed the inside of her thigh. Petra trembled and then moaned as he kissed her again, more intimately. Her longing for his physical possession of her overwhelmed every other emotion she felt surging through her in an unstoppable, undammable torrent.
Petra didn’t know if she had actually reached for Rashid or if he had simply known how she felt, how she ached… how