were being swamped by feeling.
His mouth closed over her breast, drawing it into a wild rhythmic threshing that was suddenly echoed by a more invasive stroking, a circling of her vagina, an internal caress, a teasing tantalising slide and glide that had her arching for more.
He moved his mouth to her other breast, sucking harder, tugging in a crescendo of possession given and taken as she writhed to the intense pleasure of his knowing touch, mindless to anything but the fantastic sensations arcing through her. She cried out an anguished protest when he withdrew from her, heaving himself down to the foot of the bed, but almost instantly he forged an even more intimate connection, kissing her as deeply there as he had her mouth, his lips covering other pleasure-swollen lips, his tongue seeking a sweeter cavern.
A fiercer pleasure screamed through her, driving her frantic as she felt the tension of it build towards the flood of climax. “No…no…I want you…you…” she sobbed, hands grabbing his hair, pulling hard.
He rose like a dark force of shimmering energy and surged into her, filling the need and rocketing her into the first convulsive wave of ecstatic satisfaction. Her legs whipped around him, holding him deep within, exulting in the sweet tidal flow he had set in motion.
But he didn’t drive it on as she expected. He maintained the full union with her, letting the awareness of it throb acutely through both of them as he propped his body over hers, his chest brushing the extended peaks of her breasts, his eyes blazing into hers with a furnace of feeling.
“Does this feel special to you, Miranda? More special than anything you’ve ever known?”
The question seized her mind, focused it, forced a deeply primitive retaliation. “Is it to you?”
“Would I ask if it wasn’t? I want to know if what I feel is echoed in you and I need the truth.”
In a sudden flash, she realised it was Bobby disturbing Nathan’s trust in her response to him, Bobby who had stirred too many bad feelings for either of them to dismiss easily. Yet he didn’t belong in this precious moment. He might have been the catalyst that had driven them to this acknowledgement of each other, but the truth was…Bobby Hewson was nothing and Nathan was everything.
Her eyes met the fire in his with all the open honesty he was now giving her, the answers she’d craved…and the rightness of it poured a blissful conviction into her voice as she answered him.
“It’s been the same for me…all you said…from when I first saw you.” She lifted her hands to his face, cupping it, pressing her need for possession of him as she added, “I don’t care if it makes sense or not. If I could have a man made for me, it would be you.”
“No ifs, Miranda. I’m here with you, in you now. Am I the man for you?”
“Yes.” The answer came unequivocally. “All that you are, Nathan.”
“Then show me.”
His arms burrowed under her and he rolled, turning onto his back and carrying her so she straddled him, still with the hard fullness of him inside her, waiting for her to go beyond passive acceptance, to be as positive in action as her words had been. He was giving her the freedom to express her desire, her need for him, and the surprise spurred by his challenge of mutuality swiftly zoomed into elation.
It wasn’t a matter of showing him anything. She wanted to touch him, to caress and excite and tantalise and arouse him to the same incredible pitch of pleasure that would rip all control apart and plunge them both into the same beautiful sea of ecstatic release.
She tasted, licked, kissed, stroked, wherever desire took her, all the time consciously keeping him inside her, voluptuously rolling around him, sliding forward and backwards, feeling every inch of him enveloped and squeezed, released and teased. It was a glorious, glorious feeling…Nathan, all hers.
She exulted when she heard him catch his breath, when she felt the flesh under his skin quiver, when a husky growl escaped from his throat. Her own pleasure continued to come in delicious waves with the move-ment she manipulated herself, but the best of it came when he could stand no more of being taken.
He erupted into action, heaving her back onto the pillows, gathering her to him, plunging himself hard and fast as though his survival depended upon it, a violent, primitive mating, his energy pouring into her in bursts of need—compelling need—no other woman made for him—not like her—none like her—and she was drawing this from him, climbing with him until they both reached a peak of fierce jubilation in their ultimate togetherness.
They hugged each other tightly, wanting the oneness to go on and on…the reality of it, the sense of it, the flow of feeling…and for a long, long time they shared the blissful harmony. Miranda was drifting into drowsiness when Nathan spoke, his voice humming softly in her ear.
“Is it too soon to hope you will be my mistress, Miranda?”
Her heart instantly contracted at his use of a word that had so many painful memories attached to it. She could barely bring herself to speak, but reason insisted he had to be thinking in more than sexual terms. Or was her own need for more than a sexual relationship colouring reason?
“What do you mean?” she asked flatly, trying to keep her emotions in check.
He wound a long tress of her hair around his hand, then let the silky strands of it slide through his fingers. “Is this ephemeral, or something we can keep?” His chest rose and fell as he expelled a long sigh. “I’m asking if there’s any chance you want to be the mistress of my heart, the mistress of my bed and home, the mistress of King’s Eden…for all the years ahead of us.”
Relief and joy erased the tension of wretched doubt.
“I’m not asking for a decision,” he went on. “I know it’s too soon. But I think you understand how it is, that this land is another kind of mistress and you’d have to tolerate its call on me. If you don’t see any possibility of sharing what I’d need you to share…”
“I’d share anything with you,” she cut in fervently. “Anything!” She felt him hold his breath and into her mind slipped the words Elizabeth King had spoken of her husband, Lachan, words that held the truth of her feeling for the man holding her in his arms. She hitched herself up, sliding her arms around his neck, speaking directly to the eyes questioning hers. “You are where I want to be. Whatever that entails, Nathan.”
His sigh whispered out through a smile that warmed her entire being. “So we have a beginning,” he said, a husky contentment in his voice.
“And no end in sight,” Miranda answered exultantly.
He laughed and rolled her onto her back, looming over her in a pose of wonderfully dominant maleness. “I gave you a choice,” he said teasingly.
“There was no choice,” she retorted. “Only you.”
“No one but you,” he answered softly.
And there was respect for the truths they had spoken this night in the love-making that followed. It was a good beginning, an open and honest communication of where they stood with each other, and Miranda ardently hoped that all the tomorrows would prove they were right in feeling what they did.
NATHAN waited in his office for the call he was expecting from Tommy. The weekend was over and he was content he’d made the most of it with Miranda, but he wanted to be sure there would be no comeback from the man who’d driven her into his life in the first place. He was certain now that Hewson was out of her heart, but he wanted her mind clear of him, as well—the past completely past.
It appalled him that he himself had briefly cast Miranda in the role Hewson had maliciously painted—a woman on the make, uncaring whom she hurt. Lies…yet that morning at Cathedral Gorge, he had let his own