Rumours: The Billion-Dollar Brides. Lynne Graham

pleasure could grow exponentially to an almost unbearable level. And she had never felt her body rage out of her control before until those frantic feverish moments when Rashad thoroughly controlled her with his carnal mouth and skilful fingers. Almost immediately he transformed her keen curiosity into an overpowering demanding need. Her spine arched, her hips rose and jerked and her heart thumped as madly as though she were sprinting. And then stars detonated behind her eyelids and the whole world went into free fall along with her body.

      He slid over her and ran his mouth down the sensitive slope of her neck to her shoulder. A compulsive little shiver racked her languorous length. Her lashes lifted on his lean, darkly handsome features and she smiled, a little giddily, a little shyly, recalling how much noise she had made in climax and the way she had clawed at his hair and his shoulders. He brought out the bad girl hiding inside her and she rather thought she liked that, and the shimmering gold satisfaction in his eyes suggested that he did as well.

      He nudged against her tender cleft and she tensed, feeling him there, hard and ready. He pushed into her with greater ease than she had expected but then he had prepared her well. Her delicate inner walls stretched to accommodate him and then he shifted his hips and sank deeper, sending a sharp little pang of pain through her that made her grit her teeth.

      ‘Do you want me to stop?’ Rashad asked thickly.

      ‘No...’ she wailed in shocked protest as in answer to his movement an exquisite little shimmy of internal friction eddied through her pelvis.

      Rashad was fighting to stay in control, struggling to think about anything other than what he was doing. He shifted again, gathering her legs up over his arms, and drove into her hard and fast, rewarded by the gasp of pleasure she emitted. She was very vocal and he loved her lack of inhibition. He gripped her hips and pounded into the hot, wet grip of her glorious body with a growl of savage pleasure.

      Polly could only compare the experience to a wild and thrilling roller-coaster ride. A tightening band of tension formed low in her body and the crazy rush of intense sensation heightened as he quickened his pace, changing angle, hammering into her receptive body with delicious confident force. Excitement flooded her as another climax beckoned and she could feel her body surging up to reach it, gloriously out of her control. She hit that peak with a wondering cry and then dropped her head back against the pillows, drained but wonderfully relaxed. Rashad groaned and shuddered and buried his face in her tangled hair.

      ‘That was amazing,’ she told him cheerfully as soon as she had enough breath to speak, one hand smoothing possessively over his long, sweat-dampened back.

      Rashad’s dark head reared up, a startled look in his dark eyes as he searched her flushed and smiling face. And then he threw back his head and laughed. ‘Polly...only you would tell me that!’ he said appreciatively, dropping a kiss on her brow. ‘I thank you. It was even more amazing for me, aziz.’

      ‘Do you think it would have been like this for us last night?’ she asked, suffering a belated attack of regret.

      ‘No, we were both too tired and irritable and I had no idea I would be your first lover,’ Rashad replied, letting her off that hook with newly learned generosity as he freed her from his weight and rolled over.

      Her hand sought and found his below the sheet. Had she had the energy she would have turned cartwheels because she felt happy and too laid-back to guard her words. Succumbing to her curiosity, she said lightly, ‘Your first marriage was arranged, wasn’t it?’

      His fingers flexed and tensed beneath the light cover of hers. ‘Yes.’

      ‘Did you love her?’ Polly pressed helplessly, desperate to know even though she didn’t understand why she should have such a craving to know that information.

      ‘Yes,’ Rashad replied, stifling his unease at being forced to think back to his miserably unhappy first marriage. ‘How could I not? We were childhood playmates.’

      And somewhere within Polly a little hurt sensation sprang up like a claw that had the power to scratch her deep where it didn’t show. She didn’t understand it because it was surely good news that he had contrived to love Ferah, regardless of the reality that it had been an arranged marriage. But perhaps she had not been quite prepared to hear that he had known Ferah so well, a young woman who would have understood so much more about Rashad than Polly probably ever would. Her predecessor, she acknowledged unhappily, would be a tough act to follow.