Automatically she reached out to pull the duvet back up over him, instinctively soothing him with the kind of low-voiced, gentle comfort she had always given Sally as a child. The intensity of the fever worried her and she regretted not insisting on sending for a doctor earlier.
As she tried to tuck the duvet more securely around him her fingertips accidentally touched his skin. Its heat shocked her, fuelling her anxiety. She placed her hand against his forehead. His skin felt burning hot, his hair soaked with sweat.
He was talking in his sleep again, protesting about something or someone—she couldn’t tell.
‘It’s all right, Brad,’ she told him gently. ‘Everything is all right.’
‘Claire …’
Claire froze as the eyes she had thought closed in a deep, fever-fuelled sleep abruptly opened, their gaze focusing on and then fusing hypnotically with hers.
Claire found herself becoming slightly breathless and dizzy as she tried to wrench her eyes away from the hot, mesmerising glitter of Brad’s and discovered that she could not do so.
‘Claire,’ he said again, his voice lower, huskier, the sound of her name something between a growl and a groan. Then he said huskily, ‘You’re here … I thought you were just a dream … Come closer.’
‘No, Brad, you don’t …’ Claire started to protest, but with surprising strength Brad reached for her, one hand encircling her wrist, the other wrapping around her as he sat up and half lifted and half pulled her with firm insistence onto the bed next to him.
‘I thought you were just a dream,’ he whispered throatily as his hands framed her face. ‘But you’re not. You’re actually here, and real … very, very real.’
Claire knew that she should say something, do something, but somehow she couldn’t, didn’t, her body shocked into immobility as Brad breathed the last three words against her lips before gently brushing his own against hers in a kiss that was so tenderly sweet with gentle promise that Claire felt her whole body ache with yearning for him.
This was no brutal, selfish assault on her body, fuelled by a male sexual desire that was completely without emotion or any recognition of her as a person, a woman with needs and emotions of her own.
This was the kiss of a man who knew, who understood, who even in what Claire could only suppose was some fever-induced physical desire for her was still carefully tender and mindful of her vulnerability.
Claire could feel her body start to tremble as Brad cupped her face in his hands and continued to caress her lips with his, brushing gently over them again and again until they felt softly moist, pliantly eager for a more lingering and intense caress.
Without knowing that she had done so Claire moved closer to him, her lips parting on a small breath of shocked pleasure as she heard the low sound of hungry need that Brad made deep in his throat.
She could feel the sensual stroke of his fingertips against her skin as he massaged the delicate flesh behind her ear, his mouth leaving hers briefly as he looked down into her eyes, and then returning to it to kiss her with fierce passion—once and then a second time and then a third, until, unable to bear to be without the hungry contact of his mouth on hers, Claire reached up and wrapped her arms around him, holding him tightly, making small moaning sounds of pleasure deep in her own throat, her whole body on fire, trembling with the aching need she felt for him.
Like someone in a trance, Claire watched him as he released her and gently eased the robe back off her shoulders, her skin as hot and flushed as his as she saw the look in his eyes when his gaze caressed the slender nakedness of her upper body—her slim, narrow shoulders, the creamy smoothness of her skin, the round fullness of her breasts, her nipples flushed and flauntingly erect.
No man had ever seen her naked body before. He watched her with such obviously skin-tingling, erotic thoughts and in such a way, with such an expression in his eyes, that she instinctively responded to his subtle message and to the full-blooded male approval and appreciation of his lingering appraisal of her by arching her spine slightly, her eyelids dropping to conceal her own expression as she watched him back with parted lips and the sure, delicious knowledge that he found her desirable—and, more, that as a man he was just slightly enthralled, slightly and satisfyingly in awe of her womanhood.
It was a heady, aphrodisiac, potent mixture of new emotions for a woman whose only previous feelings towards her sexuality had been a corrosive blend of shame and self-judgement.
Nothing in the way Brad watched her made her feel ashamed. Nothing in the way he looked at her, nothing in the expression in his eyes, made her feel self-conscious or ill at ease, but her mind only absorbed these facts distantly, her senses, her emotions, her concentration focused instead on the way her body was responding to the subtle signs of sexual responsiveness to her in his.
Something about the way his chest rose and fell with increased urgency made her muscles tighten with delicious awareness.
Something about the hot, fiercely controlled smoulder in the way he looked at her mouth and then her breasts and tried not to flooded her body with feminine arousal and pride.
And, most especially, something about the way he moved the lower half of his body beneath the bedclothes, protectively and oh, so betrayingly trying discreetly to bundle the thickness of the duvet cover over the betraying, strong jut of flesh that it couldn’t quite disguise made her smile a soft smile of secret pleasure and power to herself.
She deliberately leaned forward to kiss delicately first one and then the other corner of his mouth before teasingly circling the whole outline of his lips with her tongue-tip, her weight supported on the splayed hand she had oh, so accidentally placed provocatively between his open thighs.
Claire had never behaved with such sensual aggression before—had never dreamed that she could, never mind that she would actually want to and, even more mind-stretching, take actual pleasure in doing so.
The reason why she had come into Brad’s bedroom was forgotten; the slow, hungry way he had kissed her had seen to that. It wasn’t just her mouth that he had sensitised and aroused with his shatteringly erotic kisses, it was her mind, her emotions, her senses and her whole body.
She felt as though she was wrapped in a soft, sensual cloud of physical and emotional pleasure—a sensation both so elusive and so intense that it couldn’t be examined or analysed, simply accepted and enjoyed.
The slow groan that built up in Brad’s throat as she teased his mouth made her shiver with delicious pleasure, her eyes narrowing to soft, cat-like slits that made his darken to a fiery furnace of strong male desire as she focused on them.
His hand lifted to her throat, slowly stroking it, his thumb on the pulse, flooding her body with heat as her breathing deepened and quickened in response to his reaction to her.
Claire could feel her breasts swelling and tightening, and somewhere on the edge of her awareness she was conscious of a small sense of outraged shock from her real self that this new, sensual and very wanton part of her should take such obvious self-confident feminine delight in his reaction.
Her body tautened and arched with provocative sensuality, silently calling to Brad to absorb visually the effect that he was having on her and to respond to it by reaching out to stroke and caress the warm, taut flesh so tantalisingly within his reach and yet at the same time denied to him as Claire copied his own, earlier caress, cupping his face in both her hands, gently holding him slightly away from her body as she started to kiss him.
There