She hadn’t a hope of winning.
He removed his hand from her breast and prised her knotted fingers from his hair. Then he moved her hand beneath his blanket, his body acting as a shield as he held her small hand over his thick, solid length. Her fingers ached to curl and stroke around him, but he did not allow it. Instead he just flattened her palm against him and held it there. His mouth still worked against hers, and she tried to grumble a protest as her hand fought not to stroke, not to feel, not to explore his arousal.
He won.
He smothered her moan with his mouth and sucked, as if swallowing her cry of pleasure, and then, most cruel of all, he loosened his grip on her hand and accepted the dig of her fingers into him. He lifted his head and watched her, a wicked smile on his face, as she struggled to breathe, watched her bite on her lip as he too fought not to come. And he wished the lights were on so he could watch her in colour, wished that they were in his vast bed so the second she’d finished they could resume.
And they would, he decided.
‘That,’ Niklas said as he crashed back not to earth but to ten thousand feet in the air, ‘was the appetiser.’
She’d been right the first time.
He had been talking about sex.
She put on a cardigan and excused herself just as the lights came on.
As she stood in the tiny cubicle and examined her face in the mirror she fastened her bra. Her skin was pink from his prolonged attention, her lips swollen, and her eyes glittered with danger. The face that looked back at her was not a woman she knew.
And she was so not the woman Niklas had first met.
Not once in her life had she rebelled; never had she even jumped out of her bedroom window and headed out to parties. At university she had studied and worked part-time, getting the grades her parents had expected before following them into the family business. She had always done the right thing, even when it came to her personal relationships.
Niklas had been right. She hadn’t wanted her boyfriend in the way she wanted Niklas, and had strung things out for as long as she could before realising she could not get engaged to someone she cared about but didn’t actually fancy. She had told her boyfriend that she wouldn’t have sex till she was sure they were serious, but the moment he’d started to talk about rings and a future Meg had known it was time to get out.
And that was the part that caused her disquiet.
She wasn’t the passionate woman Niklas had just met and kissed—she was a virgin, absolutely clueless with men. A few hours off the leash from her parents and she was lying on her back, with a stranger above her and the throb of illicit pulses below. She closed her eyes in shame, and then opened them again and saw the glitter and the shame burned a little less. There was no going back now to the woman she had been, and even if there were she would not change a minute of the time she had spent with Niklas.
She heard a tap against the door and froze for a second. Then she told herself she was being ridiculous. She brushed her teeth and sorted her hair and washed in the tiny sink, trying to brace herself to head back out there.
As she walked down the aisle she noticed her bed had been put away and the seats were up. She attempted polite conversation with Niklas as breakfast was served. He didn’t really return her conversation. It was as if what had passed between them simply hadn’t happened. He continued to read his paper, dunking his croissant in strong black coffee as if he hadn’t just rocked her world.
The dishes were cleared and still he kept reading. And as the plane started its descent Meg decided that she now hated landing too—because she didn’t want to arrive back at her old life.
Except you couldn’t fly for ever. Meg knew that. And a man like Niklas wasn’t going to stick around on landing. She knew what happened with men like him, wasn’t naïve enough to think it had been anything more than a nice diversion.
She accepted it was just about sex.
And yet it wasn’t just the sex that had her hooked on him.
He stretched out his legs, his suit trousers still somehow unrumpled, and she turned away and stared out of the window, trying not to think about what was beneath the cloth, trying not to think about what she had felt beneath her fingers, about the taste of his kisses and the passion she had encountered. Maybe life would have been easier had she not sat next to him—because now everything would be a mere comparison, for even with the little she knew still she was aware that there were not many men like Niklas.
Niklas just continued reading his newspaper, or appeared to be. His busy mind was already at work, cancelling his day. He knew that she would have plans once they landed. That she probably had a car waiting to take her to her hotel and her parents. But he’d think of something to get around that obstacle.
He had no intention of waiting.
Or maybe he would wait. Maybe he’d arrange to meet up with her tonight.
He thought of her controlling parents and turned a page in the paper. He relished the thought of screwing her right under their nose.
She, Niklas decided, was amazing.
There was no possibly about it now.
He thought of her face as she came beneath him and shifted just a little in his seat.
‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ They both looked up as the captain’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Due to an incident at LAX all planes are now being re-routed. We will be landing in Las Vegas in just over an hour.’
The captain apologised for the inconvenience and they heard the moans and grumbles from other passengers. They felt the shift as the plane started to climb, and had she been sitting next to anyone else Meg might have been complaining too, or panicking about the prolonged flight, or stressing about the car that was waiting for her, or worried about what was going on …
Instead she was smiling when he turned to her.
‘Viva Las Vegas,’ Niklas said, and picked up her remote, laid her chair flat again and got back to where he had left off.
‘IT WAS A false alarm.’
They were still sitting on the plane on the tarmac. The second they had landed in Vegas Niklas had pulled out his phone, turned it on and called someone. He was speaking in Portuguese. He had briefly halted his conversation to inform Meg that whatever had happened in Los Angeles had been a false alarm and then carried on talking into his phone.
‘Aguarde, por favour!’ he said, and then turned again to Meg. ‘I am speaking with my PA, Carla. I can ask her to reschedule your flight also. She will get it done quickly, I think.’
And make sure he’d sit next to her too, Niklas decided.
‘So?’ he asked. ‘When do you want to get there?’
Of course the normal response would be as soon as possible, but there was nothing normal about her response to him. Niklas was looking right at her, and there was undoubtedly an invitation in his eyes, but there was something he needed to know—somehow she had to tell him that what had happened between them wasn’t usual for her.
To put it mildly.
Except Niklas made her stomach fold into herself, and his eyes were waiting, and his mouth was so beautiful, and she did not want this to end with a kiss at an airport gate. She did not want to spend the rest of her life regretting what would surely be a far more exciting choice than the one she should be making.
He made it for her.
‘It