Sultry Nights. Annie West

he reached for protection and smoothed it on with all the finesse of a novice. This scene was so reminiscent of a dream he hadn’t even acknowledged. He could feel Kate move beneath him. Her hair was spread in a golden halo around her head, and her eyes, like two huge pools of blue, looked up at him. Her legs parted a fraction more, and because it was the most necessary thing in the world he slid his erection, which felt engorged to the point of pain, into her silken heat, and died a small death of pleasure at the exquisite sensation.

      He felt her move her hips, drawing him deeper. Exerting extreme control, he slowly started to thrust in and out. His eyes were locked on hers. Twin flags of colour stained her cheeks, her lips were plump and red … her teeth bit them as she fought to keep her moans back. It was all Tiarnan could do not to explode there and then. Seeing her like this was a fulfilment of something he’d so long suppressed.

      Their skin was slick with sweat, their heartbeats no longer slow and heavy but frantic. The tempo increased. Tiarnan could feel Kate’s legs wrap around him, urging him even deeper, harder. The pinnacle came in a blaze of white light and pleasure so intense they both stopped breathing for a long moment, hung suspended in time. And then came the fall, tumbling down and down all the way, their bodies releasing and pulsing for an age as Kate accepted Tiarnan’s weight onto her, wrapped legs and arms around him even tighter, binding him to her.

      Tiarnan woke at some point and felt an empty space beside him. Immediately a low hum of panic gripped him that he did not like. He lifted his head. Dawn was touching the sky outside and Kate stood on the balcony, leaning on the railing looking out to sea, dressed in nothing but his white shirt. The outline of her body was silhouetted enticingly under the material. Relief surged through him—which he also did not like.

      Tiarnan got out of bed. As if linked to him by an invisible thread, Kate stood and turned around, pulled the shirt together over her chest haphazardly with one hand. Her hair was tumbled around her shoulders. Tiarnan prowled towards her. She was the only thing filling his mind, his vision in that moment. Seeing her dressed in nothing but his white shirt should have been a cliché. But it wasn’t. Plenty of women had dressed like this for him, as if in an effort to do the contrived sexy thing, and all it had incited within him was mild irritation. Right now, though, irritation was the last thing he was feeling. What he was feeling was a surge of primal possessiveness rushing through him.

      Kate stood straighter as he came closer, put her hands out behind her on the railing. The shirt fell open, revealing tantalising glimpses of the twin globes of her breasts and then, down further, the ever so soft swell of her belly and the apex of her thighs, where golden curls hid paradise. Tiarnan reached her and pulled her into him, his arms around her naked back under the shirt. Even though they’d barely slept all night, he was ready to take her again.

      He felt her lift one leg to hook it around his hip … knew instantly that she was ready again too. It was the most powerful aphrodisiac. They didn’t even make it back to the bed. Tiarnan slid into her there and then. And with the dawn breaking somewhere in the east, tingeing the sky with pink, he and Kate entered another realm of the senses.