This was the last thing he needed right now, Ash thought. In the intimacy of the cabin he could smell the scent of her skin, lush and warm, subtly demanding that his male senses respond to it as nature had designed them to do.
‘You’ve done this deliberately, haven’t you?’ he accused her. ‘Even though I told you that I couldn’t help you. I don’t like having my hand forced, Sophia.’
Sophia bristled. How dare he accuse her of that kind of subterfuge and deceit. ‘You’re wrong,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not trying to force your hand. I came to the airport thinking I’d be able to get a scheduled flight to London but all the normal flights were cancelled because of the number of guests arriving for the party on their own private jets. When the girl at the airport said that yours would be the first to leave I just—’
‘You just got on board? Have you any idea of the diplomatic reverberations your behaviour is going to cause? And not just with your father. How do you think your husband-to-be is going to react to the news that you’ve disappeared with another man within hours of your engagement to him being announced?’
‘He will never be my husband. Never. I wish this was any plane but yours, Ash, I really do, but I had no choice. I will not let my father sacrifice me for his dynastic ambitions. All I want is to get to London. I’ve got my passport. After your plane puts down in Mumbai you need never have anything to do with me again. In fact, I don’t want you to. I thought you were someone special, Ash, a true hero, and someone I could turn to, but you aren’t. Stupid of me when I already knew the danger of putting my faith in you and then being rejected as a result.’
He knew immediately what she was alluding to and her criticism stung.
‘You offered me your virginity and I refused it for your own sake as much as anything else. You were sixteen. To have taken your innocence from you would have been dishonourable.’
They shouldn’t be having this conversation. It took him too close to a dangerous place he didn’t want to be.
‘All I want from you is a lift to Mumbai,’ Sophia told him. ‘No one need know that I left the island with you.’
‘You’re damned right they don’t because the truth is that you did not leave with me. And why London?’
‘I’ve got friends there.’
She was avoiding looking at him, causing Ash to demand curtly, ‘Friends, or a man? A lover who—’
‘No!’ Sophia denied truthfully. Please don’t let Ash ask her if she was really sure those so-called friends would welcome her and help her, she prayed, because the honest answer was that she didn’t know.
Now that the shock of being woken up by Ash’s angry voice was abating, another and far more dangerous awareness was spreading quickly through her body and that was the realisation that under that robe he had tied so carelessly Ash was probably completely naked. Why should that either concern or disturb her? She didn’t want him any more.
And yet she couldn’t remove her gaze from where the robe gaped as he paced the cabin floor with angry strides. She could see the shadow where the dark line of hair that bisected his body started to broaden out after it had crossed the taut plain of his belly. Once and only once she had attempted to trace that line, but then she had only got as far as the waistband of the jeans he had been wearing. Now … She was suddenly finding it very difficult to swallow, Sophia realised, and even more difficult to drag her gaze away from Ash’s body.
‘By rights I ought to instruct my captain to turn this plane round and—’
‘No!’ So great was her panic that Sophia didn’t stop to think as she launched herself towards Ash, reaching out to grasp his arm, her eyes brilliant with fear and pleading as she looked up into his, totally oblivious to the fact that her anxious movement towards him had dragged down the bedding that had been protecting her nudity.
Her breasts were everything he had known they would be, Ash thought, her waist every bit as narrow and her hips every bit as lusciously curved. The tiny bikini pants she was wearing were somehow more a provocation highlighting her sex than a means of covering it. Deep down inside him a truth that refused to be ignored was surging through him. Whether he liked it or not, he wanted her.
In the soft light of the room her skin glowed, her tan contrasting with the white bedding, the lush sensual promise of her body emphasised by the almost monastic and starkness of the decor. Until now he hadn’t realised just how much the clinical decor reflected the emotional emptiness of his life. Now, though, the sight of Sophia’s near-naked body with its ripe readiness for sex had the effect on him of tightening an already-too-coiled spring of needs and desires that had tormented him all evening.
The plane dropped several feet, catching Sophia off guard as she struggled to pull up the sheet to cover her nakedness, her breath escaping from her lungs in a soft gasp as the movement of the plane threw her towards the edge of the bed.
Instinctively Ash reached out to stop her from falling. Instinctively, and disastrously, because it was her naked body he was now holding and his own was reacting to that fact. He had to let her go. He had to leave this cabin, but instead he was moving closer to her.
This couldn’t be happening. It must not be happening, Sophia told herself. But it was too late. It was happening, and somehow it seemed that her treacherous body wanted it to happen even though that should have been impossible.
He shouldn’t be doing this. He didn’t want to be doing this, Ash told himself, but he was, the lean darkness of his hand cupping one of her breasts whilst his lips feathered tiny tormenting kisses around the nipple of the other.
She wanted to deny him, to stop him, to tell him that this must not happen, but like a sealed jar of sweetly potent honey-infused wine exposed to the sun’s heat, the seal on her emotions and needs melted beneath his touch, leaving the sweet wine of her own desire to spill hotly through her veins.
Where did it come from, this instinct that was pure and intense? After all, she had no past experience of this kind of intimacy, no matter what others might think. But now, it had her reaching out to clasp Ash’s head between her hands to hold him to her breast whilst her body arched, her head thrown back in an agonised delirium of a desire she wanted to reject but couldn’t. A wild febrile urgency possessed her.
Her nipples, sensitised by his touch, and the shockingly fierce tug of his mouth, were sending almost violent spasms of erotic raw need to every part of her body, but most of all to the trembling aching heart of her sex. The pulse that sprung up there was growing more insistent, more urgent, more demanding, with every touch of Ash’s hands and mouth. It was as though, deep within her, the womanhood she had told herself she had guarded so assiduously for the man who would love her and take away the pain Ash’s rejection had caused her was pushing against the bonds of her virginity, swelling and softening, pulsing with its female need for the man arousing it so intensely.
Ash groaned. She was everything he had never allowed himself to imagine that she would be and more. Now, with the iron denial he had been trying all evening to forge around his desire for her to seal himself off from it, broken apart by the strength of that desire, he had no need to imagine what it would be like to give in to the lure of her, because he was already doing it.
She smelled of vanilla and almonds, her flesh dew-damp from her own arousal, the dark crowns of her nipples hard eager tellers of female need. He parted her thighs with his hand, caressing their sensitive inner flesh, his own body responding to her shudder of reaction and soft moan of impatient need. He was hard and ready, the head of his erection swollen and taut. Her briefs had bows at the sides which he unfastened with a tug. Her sex was bare to his gaze and touch, her Brazilian wax revealing its delicate shape. He was just reaching out to part its neatly folded outer lips when there was a knock on the cabin door and it started to open.
There was barely time for him to thrust the sheet over Sophia’s