Alistair led her past several doors and along the cramped passageway, lit only by a few lanterns. They turned a corner and were quite alone, even the noise from the Great Cabin fading into a murmur like the sea. In the shadows he seemed larger than ever and somehow mysterious.
‘I realised there would be one thing missing from a traditional Christmas, beside a flaming Yule log and snow.’ He held something in his hand, a spray of foliage that caught the light with a myriad of soft creamy orbs.
‘Oh, how lovely! Mistletoe—where on earth did you get it?’ Dita reached for it, but he held it just out of her reach.
‘Magic.’
She could believe that. The ship pitched and she stumbled towards him and was caught in his free arm. ‘Will you trust me with a kiss now?’
‘I thought you didn’t want me. You said you did not.’
‘I said that the way I kissed you then was simply a reaction to danger, to fighting. It was wrong to have done it like that, then. But I would have to be dead not to want to kiss you, Dita.’
‘Oh. I see. I thought—’ So he does want me, just as I want him. ‘Yes.’ Her heart soared and she did not hesitate now. Trust him? It was herself she could not trust, here in the semi-darkness, but she was not going to fight the way she felt. He was so close, and what she could not see clearly she could read with every other sense. He smelled of wine and smoke and she leaned a little closer to inhale clean, hot male and the scent that was his alone. His breathing was slow and calm, but she could detect just the slightest hitch in it as though he was controlling it consciously. And touch—solid, strong male in clothing she wanted to rip from his body.
Around her waist his hand held her steady and she fought the need to press against it, to feel those long fingers move on her skin. She wanted them on her, all over her. In her. Dita blushed in the shadows, hot with desire and shaken by her own imaginings and memories.
Alistair’s free hand moved and touched her hair and she felt him fasten the mistletoe sprig in amongst the heaped curls before he drew her to him with both hands.
‘Just a kiss,’ he murmured as he bent his head.
‘Yes,’ she agreed and reached up her own hands to touch his hair. It was soft and strong, thick and rebellious under her fingers and she recalled the unruly length of it when he had been younger, long enough for him to tie back with a cord when he was outside. When they had been in bed together she had untied the cord and run her fingers into the silk of it. ‘I like this short, it feels like fur.’ She stroked as she would a cat and he pushed against the caress, his eyes hooded and heavy.
Just a kiss, a Christmas kiss. The taste of him when he touched his mouth to hers had her closing her eyes and opening her lips. The darkness was arousing, gave an edge of danger now she could not see him, only feel and smell and taste. Alistair kissed her as deeply as he had in the rickshaw, but with no desperation, as leisurely as he had on the maidan, but with no mockery; she sighed into his mouth as their tongues met and tangled and stroked, sharing the wet heat and the intimacy and the trust.
Just a kiss, he had said. Dita wanted more, more of him. She pressed close, feeling the ache as her breasts crushed against the silk of his waistcoat, the heat as his erection pressed against her and she rocked into him, moaning now because a sigh was not enough for the need inside her. The man knew how to tantalise and prolong as his young self had not.
‘Dita.’ He lifted his head and she caught his ear between her teeth as he bent to kiss her neck, his hands sliding up to cup her breasts. Stephen had done that and she had recoiled and his hungry grasp had hurt her; now the pressure made her want to rub herself shamelessly against Alistair. It was an effort not to bite and she forced herself to concentrate on licking, nibbling, probing the intriguing whorls of his ear.
‘Perfect,’ Alistair murmured as his fingers found the edge of her bodice and began to stroke the aureole of her nipple. Her breast ached and swelled, heavy and tight in the silken bodice, and she moved under his hands, restless, needing to be free of corsets and camisole, needing his hands on her bare flesh.
He bent to kiss the swell of her breast above the silk, his teasing fingers fretting at the nipple until it was tight to the point of an exquisite pleasure that was almost pain. Dita gasped and Alistair lifted his head, his eyes glinting in the lantern light. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No. No … kiss me.’
It was almost too much, the heat of his mouth on hers, the demanding pressure, the tug at her breast that went deep, deep into her belly, down to where she felt the heat building and twisting into something that made her arch to rub against him—but that only made the ache worse. Her back was against the panelling now, Alistair’s weight pressing her, the thick length of his erection just where she needed him to be.
There was something behind her, digging into her back, and she shifted, felt it move and the wall vanished.
Alistair caught her as she stumbled back. ‘The door must have been unlocked,’ he said as she stared about her, confused. ‘It’s an empty cabin.’ There was just enough light to see. Alistair reached outside, lifted a lamp from the wall and came in, closing the door behind him. She heard the click of the key as he stood there, the light spilling out over the bare deck, the unmade bed with its coir mattress. ‘Alistair—’
‘Yes,’ he said, putting down the lantern and coming to pull her into his arms. ‘What do you want, Dita?’
‘I don’t know.’ She tugged at his waistcoat buttons. ‘You.’
‘I want you, too,’ he said as she undid the last of them and began to pull his shirt from his waistband. ‘I only meant to kiss you: I should have known it wouldn’t stop there. Trust me a little more, Dita? Trust me to pleasure you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, not quite understanding what he was asking, what it meant. ‘I need to touch you. Aah …’ Her hands slid around his waist against the hot skin and she stood there, resting against him, catching her breath and feeling him tense under her caress.
That evening so long ago, there had been no time to simply hold each other. He had reached for her, she had stumbled into his arms, thinking to give comfort for whatever was causing him such pain, finding her innocent intentions going up in a blaze of scarce-understood desire in the arms of a young man who had been, it seemed, as desperate as she had been and who had somehow found the control to be gentle despite their urgency.
Alistair moved and lifted her and then they were lying on the bunk and her skirts were around her thighs and her hand was cupped around his erection through his trousers and he groaned as he stroked up her legs. She trembled as he pressed them apart, opened her, slid his fingers into the slick folds that parted for him with no resistance. She had fought Stephen off before he touched her with such intimacy; now she had no shame and no fear, only the desperate need for this man.
That time before she had been passive and uncertain under his seeking hands and urgent mouth; now she wanted to touch him, all of him.
‘Touch me,’ he said against her mouth, echoing her thoughts, and she struggled to understand for a moment. She was touching him. Then she found the fall of his trousers and somehow undid them, slid her hand inside, found the hot, hard length of him and closed her fingers. ‘More. Dita …’
She squeezed and stroked and he shuddered and slipped one finger inside her as she clung to him. Then another, and his thumb found a place that felt hard and tight with tension and stroked and she cried out until he stopped her mouth with his, pressing into her circling hand, stroking and squeezing until she screamed silently, arching upwards as everything broke inside her and he surged in her grasp and shuddered above her and the world spun out of its orbit.
‘Dita, sweetheart. Are you all right?’
‘Hmm?’ She was on a bed, in a strange cabin, with Alistair, and he had made love to her—and she had made love to him and it had been everything she remembered yet different. ‘Yes. Yes, I am quite all right.’