wasn’t transparent and Mrs Featherfield had seen and admired it, but the lace-trimmed V neckline revealed more cleavage than she would normally put on public view, especially to Beau Prescott who already saw her as having no morals at all. It didn’t stop him looking at her with lust, though, and Maggie felt a quite vixenish satisfaction in stirring him on a primitive level when he couldn’t possibly approve of himself being attracted to her.
Rebellion simmered through the heat he aroused. She’d be damned if she’d make any move to cover up. She was in her own bedroom. She enjoyed wearing this nightgown. It was one little pleasure he couldn’t take away from her. Besides, a belated attempt at modesty wouldn’t impress him. He thought badly of her anyway. So let him stare. Let him burn as much as she was burning.
Her breathing quickened with the reckless, dangerous excitement of challenging him on the most basic level of all. She felt her breasts rising, falling, straining against the flimsy silk, her nipples hardening, flaunting themselves through the provocative arrangement of lace. And she didn’t care. She revelled in the feverish glitter in his green eyes, exulted when splashes of red speared across his cheekbones betraying his rush of blood, his discomfiture with what was happening to him, his response to the stimulus of her femininity.
Her mind boiled over the memory of her first sight of him this morning, the sizzle of sexual awareness, the pleasure, the tingling anticipation of thinking they were made for each other, the sense of at last having found a man she wanted, with whom it would be right to mate. Frustration seethed through her as her eyes raked down his body. This man should have been hers. Her bones ached with the sense of loss.
“Maggie...”
The low, gutteral uttering of her name snapped her gaze up to his again, violent emotion coursing through her at the violation of possibilities he’d ripped away before they could grow. Damn him! she thought in bitter fury. Damn him for not recognising what should have been!
It was true...Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But he wasn’t scorning her now. Not now. Whatever barriers he’d imposed between them were gone and the wild child had been let loose. Except there was no child in those blazing eyes. It was rampant manhood on the move and he was coming at her, tearing off his shirt, blinding her with a broad expanse of bronzed masculinity.
His clothes were dragged off and hurled away with lightning speed. No hesitation. No inhibitions. Maggie did nothing, said nothing to stop him. She was totally mesmerised by the splendour of the nakedness emerging. He was stunningly beautiful and compellingly, enthrallingly, majestically male. Her whole body was seized by an intense lust for the touch of him, the taste of him, the complete and utter experience of him.
She’d barely had time to want when the want was answered, a strong, binding arm scooping her against him, the thin film of silk between them heightening the physical sensations of their bodies meeting, impressing, exulting in the intimate contact, his hand burrowing under her hair to curl around the nape of her neck, and his mouth crashing onto hers, hot and hungry, intent on plunder.
He kissed her deeply, a strong, sweeping possession determined on tasting all of her. Electric tingles shot straight through the roof of her mouth and exploded any inhibitions she might have had. A fever of passionate need took hold, inciting a wild response to his aggression. They ravished each other in a tumult of kisses, laying an erotic siege that pushed for more to give under the urgent escalation of the desire to take everything—everything they could—here and now.
His fingers hooked into her hair, tilting her head back to expose her long throat to a burning trail of kisses, and she arched into him, loving the sensation of hard unyielding thighs against hers, the thick roll of his manhood pressing into her stomach, the heave of his chest compressing her breasts.
He dragged the shoulder straps of her nightgown down with his teeth, then lifted her off her feet, one arm under her thighs, the other under her back, lifting her high, shoulder high, draping her over his arms like a taut bow, her naked breasts pointing up for his mouth to take, the swell of her flesh taut and tingling, drowning in fierce waves of pleasure from the hot suction of his kisses as he carried her across the room.
Then the bed was beneath her and the silk was stripped from her body, leaving her open and utterly vulnerable to the eyes glittering down in rapturous thrall. “The same colour...the same colour...” he murmured, his voice furred with sensual satisfaction, and he thrust his fingers through the red-gold silkiness at the apex of her thighs, parting it, sliding down to caress the soft, intimate folds it hid...hidden no more as he buried his face there, tasting her sex, driving fierce spasms of sensation through her, making her jerk and twist and tremble with the intensity of his pleasuring.
She felt herself poised on a perilous edge, her muscles melting, contracting in need for him to be inside her, filling the aching emptiness, easing the screaming desire for full possession. She was dying for him...dying for the proving of the promise, the final plunge that would make order of chaos. She clawed at his head, silently begging, urging him to come to her.
He lifted himself over her, kissed her, his mouth invading hers with fast, darting thrusts that drove her wild, taunting her with what he withheld. She bucked in fierce incitement and he rolled, carrying her, lifting her to straddle him, challenging her to take what she wanted, how she wanted. He was there for her, primed and positioned, and his hands slid to her buttocks, squeezing them, urging her into aggressive action.
She took him, lowering herself slowly, feeling herself stretching to encompass him, feeling her muscles convulse around him in response to the exquisite sensation of him moving into her, deeper and deeper, like a delicious fullness pushing through a long swelling stem to a place that seemed to blossom with soft inner petals opening to ecstasy.
She closed her eyes, focusing on that fantastic inner world, and she lifted herself, revelling in the reverse slide, wanting to feel it all over again, exulting in the control he’d given her. His hands stroked up her back and lifted her hair forward, over her shoulders. As she undulated over him, he curtained her breasts with the long silky tresses, caressing them through the soft, tantalising texture in the same rhythmic movement she used on him, evoking a wild eroticism that drove her into pumping faster, until suddenly she was shaking, unable to direct anything.
He whirled her onto her back and took command, poised over her with all his dominant power and the stroking inside her was different now, like a steam train charging towards some zenith she couldn’t even imagine, the rails sparking with showers of electricity—speed, power, action—and a scream of achievement building, building, rushing through her, pushing her to an incredible peak and bursting into an explosion of intense melting sweetness that fused their bodies together and left them collapsed on each other, saturated in heat, all energy pooled and drained.
Maggie had no idea how long they stayed like that, limp and damp and dazed in the aftermath of passion. Eventually Beau dragged himself aside and lay on his back, apart from her. She didn’t mind the separation. Her brain was in some strange limbo where thoughts could not be defined, let alone caught and held. Somehow what had happened was too much to grasp, too difficult to sort out. It hadn’t really been she who had shared in all those wild actions. Some kind of madness had possessed her.
As though this recognition and acknowledgment cleared the haze a little, various ideas darted through. The madness was his fault. He had incited it. After all, she had never done anything like this before. Though it shook her that she’d let it happen, in a way, she had actually wanted it to happen. However, wanting him was no excuse when she knew perfectly well his wanting would stop right here in this bedroom.
He didn’t like her.
And she didn’t like him, either.
So what on earth were they going to do now?
The silence and stillness stretched on, humming with an awareness which was no longer sexual but gathering just as much electric tension. However exhausted they were, sleep was definitely not in the air. Maggie suspected Beau Prescott was nursing the very same thoughts that were plaguing her.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman,” he said at last, making it a quiet statement of fact, all