But even then, Luke stifled the raw cry that was crowding his throat.
Resting some of his weight on his elbows, he dropped his head to her shoulder. His heartbeat eventually slowed, his breathing returning to normal. Gently he eased her onto her side and laid down facing her. She was lying still, her eyes closed. “Katrin?” he whispered. “Are you okay?”
She burrowed her face into his chest, as though not yet ready to look at him. “I’m fine,” she mumbled, her breath warm on his chest. “What about you?”
“Great,” he said.
She suddenly reared her head. “Really? Because you were holding back the whole time. You never really let go, even at the end.”
He should have remembered how acute she was. “I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said; and knew it for only a partial reply.
“You didn’t want to lose control.”
“I hate postmortems,” he said curtly.
“You hate it when I get too close to the truth. Too close to you.”
For a man who only minutes ago had been convulsed by sexual passion, Luke felt extraordinarily angry. “So who did you prefer, Katrin? Me or Donald?”
“You. Of course. Donald was as self-centered in bed as out.”
“I rest my case—I was trying to look after you, and I obviously succeeded.”
“Why do I think I’ve been very cleverly sidetracked—and by a real pro?”
“You’re putting the worst possible interpretation on everything I say and do!”
She pushed herself up on one arm. “So tell me about your parents, Luke. Your brothers and sisters and relatives. Where you grew up. Why you react so strongly to the mere mention of anything like a relationship.”
“We made a deal. And that kind of talk’s not in it.”
“So we did,” Katrin said. “In fact, I instigated it…silly me.” With a brilliant smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, she added, “Since we’ve only got one night, we shouldn’t waste any time…talk’s certainly not getting us anywhere.”
He was still angry. “For obvious reasons, I have to go to the bathroom.”
“I hope you brought enough protection for the whole night,” she said provocatively.
Luke stalked out of the room. But before he left the bathroom, he gazed at himself in the mirror. She hadn’t liked him holding back; that was obvious. She saw it as a challenge. Well, she was out of luck. If she didn’t like him as he was, too bad.
When he walked back in the room, she was lying just as he’d left her. He climbed into bed and lay down beside her. Her cheekbones were shadowed, as shadowed as her collarbone; darkness lay between her breasts. The dip of her waist, the rise of her hip, the smooth length of her thighs: all known to him now. And still desired, he realized with an unnerving jolt. Desired more strongly than before; the past three-quarters of an hour might never have happened.
She wasn’t out of his system.
She’d become part of him instead. Invaded him in a way a woman never had before. Wouldn’t that be closer to the truth?
The laugh was on him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AS LUKE lay there, his mind racing, Katrin reached up, took his face between her palms and began kissing him with a slow sensuality that made his pulses quicken. Her fingertips light as feathers, she brushed his cheekbones, his deep-set eyes and the dark lines of his brows; as though she were blind and seeking an image of him in her mind. Then her lips wandered down the taut cords of his throat. And all the while, her body was pressed to his, moving against him with leisurely seductiveness.
He tried to hold back. Tried to take control. But as she teased his chest hair with one hand, her other hand slid lower. He was more than ready for her; and felt her touch surge through his body, flooding him with a primitive and all-consuming hunger. Her hair slipping like water over his ribs and navel, she moved lower, finding the jut of his hipbones, his navel, the arrow of hair that led her mouth to the hardness that was need and the ache for consummation.
Luke shuddered with pleasure. She said softly, “You’re so silky, so warm,” her tongue laving where her fingers had moved. He moaned deep in his throat, trapped by sensation. With the inexorability of fire, pleasure and hunger mounted, feeding on each other, hotter and hotter.
Just when he was sure he couldn’t bear it any longer, Katrin slid away from him. She rolled on her back, thighs shamelessly spread, and took his hands in hers. “Make love to me, Luke. As if this were the very first time for both of us…I want to know everything you can teach me.”
His heart pounding like a mallet in his chest, Luke said with an honesty as naked as his body, “I’ve never wanted a woman as I want you.”
She brought his hands to her breasts. “Touch me here…and here.”
He plummeted to find her mouth, kissing her with an imperative hunger; then he licked the rise of her breasts, the hardness of her nipples, the long arc of each collarbone. Her hands were roaming his body, loosing in him waves of eroticism that he couldn’t suppress and was helpless to resist.
As though the tides had engulfed him, Luke abandoned technique and control and restraint. Instead his own body and Katrin’s ardent responses became his only guides in a territory new to him, that he’d never entered before. In a tumult of longing he caught her in his arms, kissing her, his fingers buried in her hair. She met him more than halfway, her generosity inflaming all his senses. Her taste, the delicate scent of her skin, the silken ripples of her hair, how would he ever get enough of them?
Drowning in passion, Luke sought to imprint himself on every inch of her body. Making it his; because she belonged to him. Impetuously he lifted her to straddle him, watching all the changing expressions on her face, so open and unguarded. So alive. So utterly beautiful.
With a seductiveness that nearly drove him out of his mind, Katrin rode him slowly, her knees clasping his hips. When he touched her gently between her thighs, finding that place where she was most sensitive, she threw her head back, her breasts lifted, crying out his name over and over again. He could feel her inner pulsing as though it were his own, a release that triggered his. He rose to meet her, their gazes locked in an intimacy beyond anything he’d ever known. With a deep cry of satiation, he met her climax, and heard that cry echo in his ears.
With a long moan Katrin collapsed on top of him, her hair falling over his face like a shield that would shelter him from the world of normality. Her heart was racing against his chest; she felt boneless, so close to him that Luke wasn’t sure where he ended and she began. He wound his arms around her and held on as though all his boundaries had dissolved. As though his very life depended on her.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
She slipped her knees farther down the bed, resting her cheek on his shoulder. Her arms were loosely curved to fit his body, her thighs enclosing his. Gradually he became aware that her breathing had slowed and deepened into sleep.
He lay still, eyes wide-open, one hand absently stroking her hair; in the turmoil of emotion that had him in its grip, a sense of rightness was predominant.
She belonged to him.
The words repeated themselves in his head. Katrin belongs to me. What was he thinking of? They were a lie, of course. Katrin didn’t belong to him. She didn’t want to. So how could he account for this deep current of possessive-ness, the need to imprint himself on her so that she’d never go elsewhere?
Atavism, he told himself forcibly. The caveman asserting himself