as he released a second button. ‘How’s that?’
Lola gave herself up to the feelings which were building a delicious slow blaze deep inside her. ‘Oh, Geraint,’ she gasped brokenly. ‘It’s so. . .’ Words failed her, and he smiled.
‘Isn’t it?’ he whispered, and Lola thought she detected a faint note of surprise in his voice.
She opened her blue eyes very wide, aware of the first faint flush of sexual excitement which tingled along her cheekbones, finding the way that he was watching her almost unbearably intimate.
She shut them again immediately. Quite apart from anything else, if she kept her eyes tightly closed, then her inexperience would be kept secret from him until the last possible moment—and by then it would be too late for him to stop. Lola had read enough books on sexual behaviour to have heard about the ‘point of no return’.
Because although she had claimed to know nothing about Geraint Howell-Williams she suspected that beneath his harshly handsome, swashbuckling exterior there lay an honourable man.
And honourable men did not bed virgins! Not unless their intentions were serious. And Lola was not going to fall into the trap of believing that.
‘Oh!’ she gasped suddenly as the third button flew open, and then the fourth, and the fifth. She felt the cool air washing over her heated, swollen breasts and longed for him to take her bra off.
‘Oh, what?’ he husked innocently.
She shook her head.
‘Tell me,’ he urged.
‘I like it,’ she told him honestly. ‘So much.’
‘Do you? And this?’ He watched her closely. ‘Do you like this, too?’ His finger lightly grazed over her bra, where the hardened nubs were now clearly visible through the silken cobweb of lace, and Lola started violently as his touch produced an unbearable ache deep in the most intimate fork in her body.
She felt the sweet, wet release of desire and her throat dried and constricted and she made tiny, mindless moans of pleasure.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, as calmly as if he were discussing the price of stocks and shares. ‘I can see that you do like it. I think you’re going to like everything I intend to do to you, Lola. Don’t you?’
‘Mmm,’ she agreed, though she had scarcely heard what he had said. She began to move restlessly as he peeled off her airline shirt and dropped it over the side of the bed and then his hand moved down to undo her skirt, sliding the zip down in one fluid movement.
He used his knee to ease it all the way down her legs until it had joined the blouse on the thick, oatmeal-coloured carpet and Lola was left reclining against the antique lace bedspread wearing nothing but that cream bra, her black stockings and suspenders and a pair of navy blue knickers. Oh, why hadn’t she put on matching underwear that morning? she asked herself despairingly.
He was still for a minute, and silent, too, and Lola lifted her eyelids fractionally, gazing covertly at him from beneath the lush shelter of her eyelashes, and was staggered and thrilled to see the look of rapt absorption on his face as he scrutinised her partially clothed body with all the thoroughness of a policeman searching for vital clues.
Her knees jerked up protectively to shield her belly, and he frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’
It sounded so stupid to say it. ‘My underwear doesn’t match,’ she whispered.
‘I’d noticed.’ He smiled. ‘And I’m glad.’
‘Glad?’
‘Mmm. I like the fact it doesn’t match. If you were wearing your most expensive scraps of French lingerie, it would seem as though you had planned this. And I don’t want you in underwear which another man has bought for you!’ he finished harshly.
‘Geraint!’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘No man—’
But he had leaned over and taken her in his arms and now he started kissing her with an unrestrained passion which drove every sensible thought from her head, and suddenly nothing in the world mattered other than Geraint kissing her.
And when he had kissed her mouth so thoroughly that Lola was certain her lips must be bruised he sought out other erotic destinations. He kissed her neck, her cheeks, her eyelids, and the tiny, vulnerable spot behind her ears, which had her trembling with an ecstatic reaction which made him halt and look down at her with a kind of hungry bemusement.
‘God, Lola, you’re so responsive,’ he observed, on a sultry note of pleasure. ‘So exquisitely responsive.’
Lola felt as though she had just landed in paradise, and the way he was making her feel right now drove all other considerations clean out of her mind. Like how abandoned she must look, with her black-stockinged legs sprawled across the bed, and wearing nothing but a few items of flimsy, mismatching lace underwear.
But Lola knew that she could not just take, take, take from Geraint without giving anything back. Lovemaking was supposed to be a two-way thing, and just because she had very little experience in what turned men on that did not mean to say that she was lacking in the imagination department. She had read the books and the magazine articles about sex which seemed to be everywhere these days. She knew what to do to Geraint to make him purr with pleasure.
She allowed her hands to roam unchecked beneath his luxurious silk sweater, her palms circling rhythmically over the tight whorls of hair on his chest. Her fingers crept their way teasingly over his torso, until at last she let her nails curl like a possessive kitten round each flat, hard nipple.
She felt his body jerk with pleasure. ‘Do you like that?’ she whispered shyly.
He forced his eyes open with an effort, a rueful smile deepening the little corner creases beside his mouth. ‘I love it, sweetheart—but quite honestly I’m so turned on by you already that I think if you threw me under a cold shower I would still want to make love to you all night! Which I fully intend to do, by the way.’
‘Oh,’ said Lola, thrilled and yet ridiculously embarrassed by his erotic statement.
‘Lola, you’re blushing again,’ he murmured.
‘Yes.’ It was just the shock of hearing him talk so openly about his desires and reactions like that. Her mother had brought her up with a tight-lipped repression which had forbade Lola ever to ask questions about sex. Consequently everything she had ever learned about making babies had been gleaned from a book. ‘I suppose you hate it?’
‘Hate blushing?’ he queried incredulously. ‘Sweetheart, you must be kidding! Don’t you know that it’s the greatest compliment you can pay to a man, to blush prettily in his arms? It makes him feel strong and powerful. . .’
‘I’m sure you don’t need me to help you feel those things, Geraint,’ Lola said mock-demurely, her eyes darkening without her realising it, so that he stared at her very intently and then gave a husky sigh of pleasure.
‘Don’t I?’ he murmured. ‘Then what do I need you for, Lola? This, perhaps?’ And he unhooked her front-fastening bra with an easy familiarity which made Lola wonder slightly nervously just how many similar items of underwear he had removed in his life.
But she wondered for no longer than it took for the frivolous scrap of lace to flutter unnoticed to the carpet, because Geraint gave her a long, smouldering look of sensual intent then dipped his head, his tongue tracing tiny circles over each aching mound.
‘It was the hardest thing in the world to watch you on that aircraft, bending down in that short, tight skirt,’ he murmured, his breath warm against her nipple. ‘I wanted to take it off so much that my hands were shaking.’
His words only served to heighten the sensations which he was producing with his hands, and Lola felt her body arch from the bed, as if she had received a sudden electric shock.
‘Oh, Geraint!’ she moaned helplessly as his tongue wetly continued