eyelashes diffuse the hunter-like gleam from the gold.
She could even feel the steady beat of his heart where he pressed against her arm. He leant down and kissed her, not passionately or anything, just light and gently, yet she still jerked her head back, feeling besieged by his heat and his strength and his close proximity.
‘Stop panicking,’ he chided softly. ‘I am not here to hurt you.’
‘But I don’t—’
‘And it is customary that you kiss the man you wake up with.’
He was expecting her to kiss him? No way, she thought, and gave him her response with a shake of her head.
‘You mean you expect me to do the kissing? Not very fair of you, cara, but—okay,’ he said, and his mouth found hers again, only this time he traced the outline of her lips with his tongue, then gently probed between until she gave in and parted them for him. She let him taste her with a sensual slowness, her breath trapped in her chest. By the time he pulled away again her heart was thumping heavily and her lips trembled in protest at the loss of his.
‘Not a bad way to start the new day,’ he murmured.
‘It—it’s still dark out there,’ Lizzy managed to whisper.
‘But past midnight,’ he said, drawing back a little to rest his head on the heel of his hand again. ‘You were asleep for hours. You missed our first dinner together as man and wife and left me alone to contemplate the folly in urging my temperate bride to knock back brandy like a fully-fledged alcoholic.’
Lizzy flushed. ‘Being unused to drinking brandy does not make me temperate.’
‘Intemperate, then?’
Meaning she’d behaved like a hot-headed fool? He was probably right, she accepted reluctantly.
‘Well, I’m hungry now,’ she said with what she congratulated herself as sounding near normal with her heart still thumping against her ribs. ‘S-so if you would just move your leg away I’ll get up and…’
Her voice faded into nothing at the slow shake of his head. ‘Relax,’ he encouraged. ‘I am not going to seal our wedding vows here in this very unromantic place, but I do want some more of what we have been sharing…a lot more,’ he husked as he lowered his head again, and this time there was nothing slow or gentle about it.
His mouth claimed her mouth with deep, sweet, sensual male hunger, and he pressed her back into the pillows with the weight of his body, driving the breath from her lungs. Heat poured into every skin cell, the taste and the scent of him and the ravishing passion making her lose her death grip on the duvet so her hands could clutch at him for dear life.
His husky assurance that he was not going to turn this into something she wasn’t ready for gave her the excuse she needed to just let go of restraint and she began kissing him back with an eager fervour, her body arching into the pressure of his. She barely noticed when he stripped the duvet away altogether; she just writhed with pleasure when she felt his hand stroke the length of her pale naked thigh.
Dragging his mouth from hers, he burned a dark golden look into her eyes. ‘You feel like silk,’ he breathed, the words deep and excitingly unsteady.
Then he made her groan when he reclaimed the kiss, his hand stroking upwards over the thin line of her panties to the flat of her stomach, the warmth of his skin against her over-sensitised skin making her quiver and cling as he blazed a trail of burning possession over her taut, slender ribcage to the rounded thrust of her breasts.
Panic arrived in a self-conscious rush from her exposed thighs to her throat as he gently cupped his fingers around the firm, rounded fullness of her breast barely covered by the green flimsy mesh of her bra. She tried to push his hand away, but he caught hold of her wrist with his other hand, making the flurrying sound of her breath shiver from her body as he gently lifted her hand out of the way so he could sear a path of warm, moist kisses down the arching column of her throat and over the hectic pant of her other breast.
She cried out and went wild beneath him as the sensual lap of his tongue located her nipple, sending a clamouring shock of heat piercing sensation screaming through her head.
With a softly uttered tense expletive he came back to her mouth, his hand sliding beneath her to draw her up against him. The next thing she knew the clasp of her bra had sprung free and he was lying her back against the pillows again and the scrappy bit of mesh was being trailed away.
‘You are exquisite,’ she heard him rasp through the hazy mists of her ravaged senses.
Then he was taking her mouth once again, crushing the pulsing hot softness of her lips and dipping deep and hungrily with his tongue at the same time that his hand closed around her breast again, naked now and so alive to his touch she cried out in half protest, half sense spinning pleasure, and grabbed blindly at his head, her fingers clawing into the glossy thickness of his hair.
He kneaded and shaped and kissed her breathless. She could feel the tremors attacking him, feel the fevered flush of his body and the tension in him, trapped his groan with her tongue when he pressed the distended tightness of her nipple against his palm.
She should have stopped it there, but she didn’t. She should have known that if you arched and writhed and quivered against a man you were going to tip him over the edge. But she liked what he was making her feel, too much, and was much too greedy for more.
And his hands were gliding everywhere now, caressing and learning what made her cry out and what made her writhe in shimmering pleasure. And his skin was like hot satin against her anxiously restless palms. She had never felt so totally out of control of her body and senses. She was panting and whimpering against his mouth and he was breathing fast and unevenly.
Reality should have arrived with the burgeoning thrust of his powerful erection pushing against her thigh at the same moment as he slid his hand between her legs and made that final intimate claim—but reality was nowhere. She was lost in a storm of heated pleasure. It sang along her veins and her flesh and it was all she could do to cling to him as his long fingers cupped and moved against her, his other hand buried in her hair, and the heat of his kiss was so deep and potently passionate she was almost beyond recovery when he lifted his mouth to mutter, ‘I knew you would do this to me,’ and eased her last scrap of mesh out of his way so he could glide the length of a finger inside.
Nothing prepared her for the power of this heated intrusion. There was just no way she could control her response. She arched and squirmed and found her mouth locking onto his as if it were the only way she was going to survive what was racing through her blood. He was whispering things she couldn’t hear, and filling her with sensations she hadn’t known she could feel.
Then he moved to strip the panties from her body and it was the rasping curse he uttered that brought her crashing back down to earth.
Panic erupted from her like a heaving monster, and she pushed him away from her with the agonised strength helped by the stinging shot of adrenalin singing through her blood. She caught a glimpse of his face, his shocked confusion, then she’d slithered out from beneath him to land in a mess of shaking limbs and whirling senses on her feet by the bed.
The pulsing silence that followed held the small cabin in a death grip except for the sound of her broken breathing. Her eyes felt so big and dark and glazed she was barely even able to see him through them.
‘Y-you said—’ she finally just about managed.
‘I know what I said,’ he coolly cut in.
Lizzy blinked, her eyes daring to focus on him still lying there with his long body so magnificently naked to his long brown feet. He had covered his eyes with an arm and the mouth beneath it was closed and tight. Unable to stop her eyes from raking over him, she stared at the potent evidence of his desire thrusting up from a thick cluster of virile dark hair.
Shocked by the blinding rush of heat that burned through her, she turned dizzily away with absolutely no idea what she was going to do next.