of Nasreen’s beautiful outfit, she knew, and he would hate her even more for being the cause of that destruction. He wasn’t listening to her, though, wasn’t paying her any attention at all, as she struggled in his hold. He refused to let her go, his knuckles pale against his skin with the pressure of his grip as he wrenched the delicate silk apart. The awful tearing sound of the fabric made Sophia cry out in protest, and as though that one small sound somehow penetrated the red mist of his fury Ash turned his back to her and ordered her, again, ‘Take it off. Now. All of it.’
From out of nowhere Sophia felt a surge of white-hot anger of her own rise up inside her to meet Ash’s fury. It burned along her veins swiftly, reaching the unstable powder keg of her jangling emotions.
‘You want me to take it off. Fine, then I will!’ she yelled furiously at Ash as she pulled and tugged at the clothes that she now loathed so much because of all they represented, as though they were shackles that bound and imprisoned her, flinging the garments down on the floor as she removed them. Her face was flushed, her temper was up and her dark brown eyes burned with her emotions. Within seconds the floor around her was strewn with discarded garments as she hurled them away from her, and Sophia herself was left standing virtually naked in nothing but her own tiny briefs, out of breath, her chest heaving, the full force of her fury leaving Ash momentarily lost for words. She was. She was … She was magnificent, he found himself admitting, magnificent. Her anger had somehow cleansed her completely of the taint of Nasreen which had so appalled him, just as her feisty removal of her own clothes had left her revealed to him as exactly what and who she was. Herself. Magnificent. And right now he wanted her so badly that the force of that wanting was ripping him apart inside.
‘Satisfied now, are you?’ Sophia challenged into the silence that had fallen between them, but Ash’s unmoving silence had definitely brought its heat down a few degrees.
‘Satisfied?’ Why was he having difficulty framing the word? Why was his body giving him a thousand messages about just what would bring him satisfaction right now, when it and he knew that he couldn’t give in to those illogical needs? And yet … His desire still roiled and thundered inside him, refusing to be subdued.
He took a step towards Sophia and then another, his actions shocking her because she had expected him to leave.
‘No, I am not satisfied,’ she heard him telling her. ‘And I shall not be satisfied until you have conceived our child.’
Then she was in his arms, and he was kissing her, angrily, savagely, humiliatingly, and yet she couldn’t find the willpower to resist him. Something within her own anger had ignited a force inside her that was overwhelming all her deep-rooted senses of self-preservation. There was a wildness in the air and in her body, a deep hot fiercely female urgent need that refused to listen to reason and insisted instead that it must and would be appeased. That need was carrying her with it, taking her as passionately as it was telling her that she wanted Ash to take her, as herself, as a woman whose desire was so powerful that it was impossible for him to resist or deny his need to match it. With such thoughts, such hungers, swirling around inside her it was impossible for Sophia to hold on to reality or sanity, especially not when Ash was kissing her with such scorching intensity. Or rather, he was kissing the woman he really wished were here with such scorching intensity, Sophia warned herself.
Under his dark mastery of her senses, and the spell it cast on them, she still couldn’t stop herself from responding to him, even though she knew that inside Ash’s head the woman on whom he was pouring out his passionate need was cast in Nasreen’s image and not her own. All that mattered was the white-hot heat his kiss and his touch were creating inside her. Her body knew him now and knew the power and delight of the pleasure he could give it. Her body had no conscience and no pride, all it knew was that the touch on it was a touch that sent coded messages of past and future pleasure surging along its most intimate pathways, condemning to oblivion anything that might have tried to stand in its way. It was pointless for her to try to tell herself that the fiercely possessive hunger of Ash’s touch belonged in reality to another woman. Foolishly her body wasn’t willing to listen, not when Ash’s obvious desire for it was laying out in front of her a positive banquet of intimate delight. From the curl of his hand in her hair as he pushed it back from her neck so that he could kiss its slender stem, to the strength of that hand on her as he smoothed his thumb over her skin, trapping the betraying rash of goose bumps that gave away her sensual vulnerability to him, every touch aroused a storm of sensual longing and delight.
He should stop, and right now. Every rational and responsible thought in his head told him that; Ash struggled to obey those voices but when he tried to pull away from her Sophia moved closer to him.
Ash was going to leave her but he mustn’t. He couldn’t. Not when the female hunger and need he had aroused was such an intense longing ache inside her. Sophia wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing small, eager, pleading kisses of her own against the dark sensuality of his throat, shivering with pleasure as she tasted the salty male tang of him on her lips, that taste feeding her appetite for more. His shirt was unfastened at the neck allowing her to slide her hand against the lower buttons and unfasten them, which in turn allowed her to kiss her way along the hard jutting angle of his shoulder.
No. No. A thousand times, no. He might be voicing that denial inside his head but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say those words out loud, Ash realised as his flesh burned raw with the hunger that Sophia’s kisses were igniting. How long had it been since a woman had affected him like this, made him hunger and ache like this?
A groan of torment—for past guilts and present longings—tortured his throat. Sophia’s kisses, the soft sweetly passionate kisses of a woman to whom the deepest dark mysteries of the raw heat of sexual intimacy were still unknown, filled him with a need to take her and show her how he longed to be touched, how intimately and possessively he wanted to be taken and owned by her feminine desire.
He had never known a need like this, never allowed himself to imagine it could exist. Now he wanted to lie naked beneath Sophia’s learning touch, to give himself up completely to her tender exploration, give himself over to her innocent possession. Then when she had had her fill, he wanted to turn things around and show her, teach her, give her the full power of his male desire until their mutual possession of each other took them beyond time and space.
It was too late. Things had gone too far. He couldn’t pull back now. He couldn’t give her up now. Ash felt Sophia’s hand tremble as she battled with his shirt buttons.
The feeling of Ash’s chest lifting as he drew in a deep breath and then trapped her hand against his body filled Sophia with despair. He didn’t want her touching him. He was going to stop her. But to her shock and disbelief when he lifted her hand from his shirt, instead of releasing it, he placed it flat against the hardness of his erection. For a handful of seconds Sophia allowed herself the erotic joy of knowing him so intimately, of feeling the life force of his maleness beneath her hand, of letting that hand curl against the breadth of his arousal. She felt slightly dizzy, giddy with the swift rush of the responsive desire that was pounding through her own lower body, setting up a rhythm she could feel pulsing into the very heart of her sex.
‘Ash …’
His name on her lips was a soft sound of agonised need, her breath rushing his skin. In the dimly lit bedroom her skin gleamed a soft gold, the almost pagan sight of her naked breasts full and taut, their nipples swollen and dark, wrenching away the remnants of Ash’s self-control. In between possessively intimate and erotic kisses he undressed himself, watching with raw male pride when Sophia shuddered softly at the sight of his own naked body, her eyes slipping helplessly to his sex, her small tremble of longing mingled with uncertainty answering a need in him as old as time itself.
‘Touch me,’ he commanded her softly. ‘Touch me and know me.’
There was something almost hypnotic about Ash’s voice, or was it her own desire that was hypnotising her, Sophia wondered helplessly as she went towards Ash. Letting him take her hand and draw her down onto the bed with him where he put her hand back on his body, he told her again, ‘Touch me.’
Just the sound of the words was enough