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 to send quivers of eager desire darting through her as she bent towards him. The feel of his hard hot flesh beneath her uncertain fingers was both alien and yet somehow in some way already known, as though in her dreams she had touched him like this a thousand plus times before. Each touch, each discovery, each sound of pleasure wrenched from Ash’s locked throat felt like a marker put in place on a territory that she had been destined to call her own.
Growing braver, she leaned over and brushed her lips against the taut plain of Ash’s flat muscular stomach, hot wilful pleasure possessing her when the slide of his hand into her hair and the raw gasp her touch drew from him told her that despite his stillness his body ached as much as her own.
A few more kisses, scattered daringly against the hair-roughened tautness of his thigh, a tentative caress of the hot tension of his erection, an awareness of the damp heat and the ache between her own thighs, and the coil of need within her had become a full-blown ravening demand.
Inside her head, images formed: the temptation to straddle Ash where he lay and let her body demand the upward thrust of his body into her own and the satisfaction it yearned for, a relentless unceasing hunger that grew with every breath she took.
How long before his self-control broke—how many seconds, how many heartbeats. How much could one man bear and not give in to such an intensity of need? Like a dam breaking, Ash felt his self-control give way. Reaching for Sophia he pulled her down against him, kissing her throat, her jaw, her mouth, taking the sobbed breath of pleasure she exhaled as he covered her breasts with his hands, kneading their soft warmth, letting his thumbs and fingertips mimic the intimate movement of his tongue within the soft damp heat of her mouth, When he made to lift her on top of him she moved eagerly, almost knowingly, to his guidance, one fierce tremor of her body and the flash of desire in her eyes her response to his removal of her briefs. Her sex was open and naked to his gaze and his touch and it was impossible for Ash to withstand the temptation to caress its