circles along her jawline. ‘But you, my lovely Salome, are the hardest of them all.’
He bent and covered her mouth with his, moving his lips back and forth across hers with slow, unhurried movements. She sucked in a startled breath as the most incredible wave of delight rippled through her. His head lifted a few inches, his eyes revealing a measure of surprise. ‘You’re amazing,’ he whispered. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was your first time...’
He kissed her again, this time teasing her mouth open and caressing the tip of her tongue with his. Desire seized Salome in its tenacious grip, making her moan deep in her throat.
Again Mike straightened to gaze frustratedly at the dazed expression on her face. ‘I can see why men go crazy for you,’ he muttered, his fingers drifting down her throat to trace the ‘V’ of the dressing-gown, making her shiver when he lingered on the valley between her breasts. ‘You are whatever they want of you at the time. In the lift, a wild wanton, here, a virgin on her wedding night, tentative and sweet, amazed yet delighted by your responses. How do you do it, Salome?’ he said, half admiringly, half derisively. ‘How many years of practice did it take to master the fine art of erotic fantasy?’
There was no time for an answer, even if her hurt mind could have thought of one. His mouth swooped to claim hers again, and this time it was hungry and demanding, his lips applying a bruising pressure, his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth, pushing aside her renewed dismay, leaving room for little but the crazed leap in her senses.
‘God!’ he muttered when at last he tore his mouth away, smouldering black eyes locking on to stunned green ones. Salome gave a soft whimper when his fingertips moved across her dark, swollen lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ he rasped. ‘I’m not usually so brutal.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said huskily. ‘I liked it.’
Liked it? What an outrageous understatement! She’d loved it, adored it, ached for it! She could think of nothing more exciting than having this man ravishing her.
Aroused eyes lifted to run up one of the strong male arms that imprisoned her, landing on his broad bare chest. The desire to touch the taut, finely honed muscles was overpowering, her right hand lifting to trail a tentative but sensuous path across his skin, her nails raking lightly over one of his male nipples.
The intensity of his shudder surprised her, as did the heat of the flesh beneath her fingers. With a rush of raw, mindless passion, she wrapped both her arms around his waist and pulled herself up till her face was pressed against his chest, opening moist lips on to his skin, sliding them across the hot, hard wall of muscle till it closed over where her nails had just been.
He shuddered again, then groaned as her tongue darted forward to tease the hard nub, encircling it slowly then nipping it with her teeth as he had done to her in the lift. Suddenly, strong hands grabbed her shoulders and pushed her away from him. ‘You must stop,’ he rasped. ‘Stop!’
She stared at him in confusion, her heart pounding madly. What had she done wrong?
‘I think you’d better revert to the shy virgin,’ he growled, letting her go to run agitated hands through his hair.
Salome cringed visibly, thinking she had just made a dreadful fool of herself.
‘God, woman, don’t look like that! Do you think I wasn’t enjoying it? Hell, I was enjoying it too much. The truth is, I haven’t had sex in bloody ages and, if you keep that up, this’ll be all over before it damned well starts!’
Salome stared at him, shocked at how much his confession of recent celibacy pleased her. But then came the cynical realisation that, for a virile man like him, a fortnight was probably ages. She glanced around at the huge bed with its cream satin sheets and myriad pillows, and she knew with absolute certainty that many women had been here before her, had lain eagerly beneath his gorgeous male body, had accepted his hungry kisses, had been thrilled by his overt sexuality.
Her jealousy was instant and savage, cutting a sharp path through her chest up into her brain. Her eyes snapped back up to him, and she wanted to tear his beautiful face apart, wanted to scream at him that he was never to make love to another woman ever again. That he was hers from this night forward. Hers and hers alone!
The intensity, the insanity of her feelings shook her. Surely this couldn’t be just normal sexual frustration she was suffering from? This was something far deeper, far more devastating.
‘What is it?’ Mike said sharply.
She expelled the breath she had been holding in a trembling gasp. ‘Nothing...nothing...’
‘Tell me,’ he urged, and drew her to him in a breathtakingly close embrace, his lips pressed feverishly to her forehead. ‘What is it that frightens you so about me? Why didn’t you want to let me finish making love to you earlier on? Why?‘
She shook her head frantically from side to side. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I can’t! It’s all too confusing.’
‘What’s confusing?’ he insisted, little knowing that the hot, stroking hands on her hair, her neck, her back, were the most confusing of all, because they kept bringing wave after wave of sensation that was slowly obliterating her capacity to reason. Surely she wouldn’t feel like this in any other man’s arms, would she? It didn’t seem possible. Yet...if it was only Michael Angellini who could do this to her, then what was it exactly she felt for him? Sexual infatuation? Obsession? Lust?
Salome refused to embrace the word ‘love’. Even if her feelings for Ralph had finally begun to die, her bruised, battered heart wasn’t ready, or capable, of loving another man yet, and certainly not a man who had nothing but contempt for her. Perhaps she was acting this way out of some sort of crazed revenge against the hurt perpetrated by her husband. Perhaps this was a rebound thing. She didn’t know any more.
‘Everything’s confusing,’ she groaned. ‘Me... this...you...’
His fingers stilled abruptly. ‘What do you mean?’
She freed herself from his frozen grip, looking up at him with bleak green eyes. ‘I don’t know! Can’t you see I don’t really know anything any more? It’s all been too much for me today. First Ralph, then Charles, now you. I’m so mixed up!’ she cried, and covered her distressed face with her hands.
‘You want me to stop,’ he said in a dead, flat voice.
Her head snapped up and her eyes flew to him, wild, wild eyes. ‘No,’ she groaned. ‘That’s the most confusing part. I don’t.’
His eyes raked over her, from her turbulent gaze to her parted, quivering lips to the way her breasts were rising and falling beneath the dressing-gown.
‘I couldn’t anyway,’ he rasped. ‘Not even if I wanted to.’
In an electric silence his hands lifted to find the pins in her hair, throwing them away before returning to spread her tumbling mass of curls out across her shoulders. Then slowly—ever so slowly—he untied the sash of the dressing-gown and parted it, peeling it back across her shoulders and down her arms to drop on to the sheet.
Salome scooped in a breath and held it. Don’t think any more, she told herself. Don’t think. Close your eyes and just feel!
She expelled a shuddering sigh as she obeyed her own instructions, closing her eyes and waiting breathlessly for the moment when he would start touching her breasts. They were infinitely ready for him. Swollen and taut, her nipples still erect and sensitised from his earlier lovemaking in the lift.
‘Oh!’ she gasped when something hard and warm grazed over both tips at once. Her lashes fluttered open to reveal outstretched palms rubbing over them in slow, sensuous circles. His eyes were on hers, watching her with a heavy-lidded, smouldering gaze. Then he was caressing her whole breasts, cupping their soft weight in his hands, kneading them, lifting them, pushing them together, bending his mouth to one after the other.
Her