‘A woman has never made me feel this desperate,’ Bastian growled in a tone of bemused disbelief as he tugged off the last barrier between them.
Emmie recognised that he was shaken up too and the fierce wanting that drove her no longer seemed quite so shameful. She stared up at him, loving the hard, angular bone structure that gave his features such charismatic strength, the smouldering eyes beneath the lush curling lashes, marvelling that mere days earlier he had still been a stranger. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he made her feel. He touched her where she frantically needed to be touched, a fingertip whispering over the bundle of nerve endings below her mound, and she jerked as if he had burned her, her entire body coming alive with electric reaction.
He snaked down her body with strong supple power and spread her thighs, and her fingers knotted into his luxuriant black hair to stop him before the first breathtaking sensation of his sensual assault engulfed her feverish body. her teeth chattered together, shock winging through her at the ferocious intensity of her own response. He explored her with his mouth and his fingers and she twisted and arched and gasped over and over again, lost to sensation, lost to the violent need he had incited. Hungry heat spiralled in her pelvis and rose to an excruciating height and she was quivering and moaning and rising closer to the climax she sensed when he rose over her and plunged deep into her.
Pain and pleasure combined with explosive effect. Even as the involuntary ripples of orgasm clenched round his hard shaft and pulsed wildly through her she cried out in pain and he fell still, frowning down with perplexed eyes at her dismayed face.
‘Don’t stop!’ she told him urgently, too mortified by her own cry to be willing to draw such stark attention to what she had just sacrificed. That was not something she was prepared to discuss and she dimly hoped that continuation and a more natural conclusion would stifle comment. She had not known that first time sex would hurt, suspected that she should have warned him in advance but could not imagine what words she might have employed with which to share her deepest secret.
For that reason, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her cheeks burning, and tried to concentrate on the extraordinary feel of him inside her as he shifted position.
‘Are you all right?’ Bastian asked tautly.
‘Of course, I am,’ she parried, for that fleeting pain had speedily receded, leaving her with only the erotic sense of his alien fullness stretching her and sinking deeper into her receptive body.
‘If I was too rough, I’m sorry…you feel amazing,’ Bastian confided with ragged emphasis, easing back with care before sinking into her again. His movement provoked a melting wave of honeyed heat in her lower body, making her heart thump fast and hard again. The excitement gathered like the eye of a storm inside her chest, every sensation intensified by his fluid rhythm.
Suddenly she was caught up in the same endeavour, fully a partner, no longer an uncertain onlooker. Her heart pounding like mad, she bucked and lifted her hips beneath him, meeting his thrusts, urging him on as the writhing electric excitement and the frenzy of need overwhelmed the last remnants of her control. She could feel herself reaching another height and she plunged over the edge with a startled cry of pleasure, quivering in the waves of ecstasy while he drove into her one last time. He vented a harsh groan of satisfaction and shuddered over her and she felt him spill inside her.
He shifted and pressed his mouth in a brief salutation to her damp brow. ‘That was an unforgettable experience, moraki mou…’
Unforgettable for her as well, Emmie acknowledged in a daze. Even though their intimacy had begun on a note of pain he had twice brought her to a climax and she was blissfully relaxed and adrift on a fluffy cloud of well-being. She squashed the misgivings already trying to infiltrate her. She wasn’t going to turn all girly and silly in the aftermath, she assured herself with determination. He had surpassed her expectations but all they had shared was their bodies, nothing more. Nobody fancied themselves in love, nobody needed to get hurt, least of all her. She was in full control of her emotions.
Bastian rolled back from her and studied her with frowning golden eyes the colour of burning amber. ‘So, what’s going on here?’ he queried, black brows pleating. ‘I don’t want to misjudge you and assume that this was some bizarre set-up.’
TAKEN ABACK BY Bastian’s provocative statement, Emmie blinked away her drowsiness and lifted her head up off the pillow. ‘A…set-up? Bizarre?’ she repeated blankly in her confusion. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘By all means, tell me if I’m wrong,’ Bastian urged, wide sensual mouth tense. ‘But I believe you were a virgin.’
Emmie sat up, hugging the sheet defensively to her breasts. Suddenly, her face was literally burning with mortification, for she had been hoping that he either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t guessed what had been amiss with her. ‘Yes?’ she gritted in a so-what tone of discouragement.
‘Then why throw yourself away on me?’ Bastian asked flatly. ‘I’m not proud that you succeeded in enticing me into bed but I wasn’t expecting anything more from you than a typical shag.’
Emmie tensed in sheer shock and anger at his accusation. ‘Look, I did not entice you!’ she snapped back.
‘You’re so beautiful that you’ve naturally been enticing me from the moment we met at the airport,’ Bastian extended grudgingly and, recognising his pronounced discomfiture in the aftermath of his sexual satisfaction, he labelled himself a total hypocrite and sprang out of bed to distance himself from her. But he had done what he should not have done and now he had to deal with the fallout. She had proved to be a temptation he could not resist. But what he could not comprehend was that Emmie Marshall had also been a virgin. That did not make sense, nor did it match the characteristics of the adventurous and more experienced woman he had believed she had to be to work as an escort.
‘Believe me, it wasn’t intentional!’ Emmie fired back, thrusting back the bedding and snatching up the towelling robe folded over a nearby chair. She dug her arms into it and tied the sash tight, adjusting the lapels to cover every piece of skin that she could for the last thing she now wanted to be was naked in any way around Bastian Christou. A typical shag? Was that all her body had meant to him? Could he possibly be any more insulting?
‘I wasn’t expecting a hired escort to be a virgin. I don’t pay for sex either, I never have and never will, but I’ll naturally compensate you for your…er, generosity—’ Bastian selected the word with razor-edged care ‘—with diamonds and hope that they meet your expectations.’
Emmie had honestly believed that she could not feel any worse but now and without the smallest warning it was as if the bottom had fallen out of her world, leaving her hovering in sickening limbo. He truly did believe that she would want to be paid in some way for having slept with him! She was shattered and simultaneously cut to the quick by his view of her. Seemingly he saw her as barely one step removed from a hooker. A man didn’t normally offer a woman diamonds in reward after sex, at least not in her world. And this was the male she had chosen to sleep with? She could only despise her blind stupidity.
In the buzzing silence, Bastian noted her pallor and the tightness of her delicate bone structure. ‘Have I got this situation wrong? You did say quite plainly upfront that you weren’t cheap—’
‘But that didn’t mean that I put a price on my body like a whore!’ Emmie