so beautiful. Powerful and strong, with long, muscular legs and narrow hips, his buttocks a paler colour than the deeper olive glow of his skin.
Sophie licked her lips. She’d never seen a naked man before—not unless you counted the famous statues which brought visitors flocking to the Isolaverdian national museum during the winter months. And those naked men were made of marble, usually with a fig leaf covering their modesty. It occurred to her that Rafe would have needed an entire bunch of fig leaves to cover his most intimate part and that maybe she should have been daunted by the stiff, proud column of his erection. But she wasn’t. As he moved over her, she just felt...eager.
‘Well, just look at you,’ he said unsteadily, as his fingertip trailed a slow path from her neck to her belly button. ‘Aren’t you gorgeous?’
She gave a wriggle of pleasure. ‘Am I?’
‘You know damned well you are. A million men must have told you so.’
His remark brought reality creeping into the room but Sophie didn’t want reality. She wanted to feel, not to think. She wanted to feel a man’s fingers on her skin. To be intimate with a man who desired her, not because of her position or her status—but because they had a powerful chemistry which could not be denied.
So she coiled her arms around his neck and looked up at him, invitation vying with reprimand in her voice.
‘I don’t want to talk about other men right now,’ she said honestly.
His smile was hard as he cupped one breast with possessive arrogance, grinding his hips a little, so that she could feel the hard brush of his erection against her skin.
‘Me neither,’ he said.
He began to stroke her, the slow graze of his fingers exploring her. She gasped when his thumb first brushed against the tight bud above so much honeyed warmth, but within seconds she was hungrily anticipating more. Each practised stroke of his finger took her deeper—deep into a place of almost unimaginable pleasure and she heard him laugh as she gasped his name out loud. It felt as if her body was opening up to him, sensation flooding through her with relentless, rhythmical beats, and Sophie began to move restlessly, wanting more. And although he must have sensed her impatience, he took his time—eking out the pleasure, second by delicious second. He stroked her until she was writhing beneath him and, although she was eager to explore his body, she was shy about touching him there. Because what if she did the wrong thing? What if she destroyed the magic with some clumsy caress? Her lips sought his as she lifted her hips up, so that she could feel the weight of his erection pressing into her belly.
He made some little curse beneath his breath as he drew away and reached inside the drawer of the nightstand and Sophie stiffened as he tore open a little foil packet, scarcely able to believe that it was going to happen. After all the years of waiting, of saving her innocence for a man whose parents had bartered with her parents for her hand in marriage, she was about to lose her virginity in the anonymity of the Australian Outback, with the man who was paying her wages. A man who had promised her no tomorrows and scorned the idea of love. And yet she didn’t care. It was as if she’d been living in a dark cave which was about to be flooded by something brilliant and beautiful—and her life would never be the same again.
She watched as he began to stroke on the rubber and lifted his gaze, curving her a complicit smile as if silently acknowledging her enjoyment of the floorshow. Would he be shocked if he knew what she was really thinking—that she’d never seen either a condom or an erection before? Was he going to be disappointed once the truth was out and wouldn’t it be better to tell him now?
Instinct overrode her brief spike of conscience as she coiled her arms around his neck. Because this was an education, she reminded herself fiercely. A rite of passage. Something she needed to do to shake off the shackles of innocence and join the ranks of real women. Nothing more than that. This was what modern, normal people did. They met, they were attracted to one another—and they had sex. Why spoil it by revealing all her hang-ups and compromise her anonymity in the process?
He was moving over her and it felt slightly scary as he guided himself towards her—to where she was so hot and sticky. She tried not to tense up as he eased himself inside her, but he was so big she couldn’t help herself gasping out. For a moment he stilled, lifting his head to look at her—an expression of incomprehension etched onto his dark features.
His one-word question was incredulous. ‘You—?’
‘Yes,’ she gasped as her hips jerked forwards all of their own accord, so that he went in even deeper. ‘But don’t stop, Rafe. Please don’t stop.’
Rafe gave a strangled groan as he went deeper into her tight heat. How could he possibly have stopped when she was raining urgent kisses all over his shoulder and squeezing her pelvic muscles in a way which instantly made him want to come?
This really was just going to be once, he told himself grimly—so he had better make it something she would remember for the rest of her life. The best sex she would ever have. The only sex she would ever have—with him. Holding back his own hunger, he began to tease her clitoris with his finger as he thrust in and out of her, making her moan with pleasure—her cries getting louder with each penetration. He halted and lifted his head to look at her as a cold kind of anger rippled over his skin.
‘Keep quiet,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want you waking the men.’
But she didn’t—or couldn’t—keep quiet. Least of all when she began to come and he sensed that her gasps of disbelief were going to morph into cries of ecstasy. So he bent his head to kiss her, and the frantic touch of her lips seemed to intensify his own orgasm—and suddenly it was his cry being stifled by her kiss and the balance of power had shifted and he didn’t like that either.
He could feel her contracting around him as his body jerked like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and only when nature had finished with him and emptied him of all his seed did he have the strength to pull out. To roll away from her and close his mind to the rapturous look on her face as her eyelids fluttered to a close. To ignore the ruffled hair and dreamy expression of someone who had just experienced sex for the first time. Because although he wanted to lick her breasts and slide his hand between her thighs again and make her come all over his fingers, he didn’t intend touching her until she’d given him some kind of explanation.
A virgin! Dazedly, he shook his head. Whoever would have guessed it, when she’d agreed to have casual sex without any degree of hesitation? She’d been so up for it that they could have done it in the swimming pool. Or in the garden. If he’d laid her out on the kitchen table where she buttered bread each morning, he reckoned she still would have given him the green light. Why, she’d acted like someone completely at ease with her own sexuality—right up to the moment when he’d thrust inside her and she’d made that broken little cry. Why the hell hadn’t she told him she was innocent—and at least given him the option of whether or not he wanted to be the first?
And yet it had been amazing, hadn’t it? The most amazing sex he could remember?
Pushing away the rogue thought, he didn’t speak until he was certain his words would come out as measured and controlled. But even then his throat felt constricted and he could feel another rush of heat to his groin as he remembered easing into her slick tightness.
‘You’re certainly a woman of surprises,’ he said. ‘You don’t happen to have any more hidden up your sleeve?’
Sophie froze as she realised it was probably the most astute question he could have asked in the circumstances. What would he say if he realised what else she wasn’t telling him? She kept her eyes shut, not daring to open them, afraid of what they might reveal—when she wasn’t even sure herself. She felt...what?
She swallowed.
Complete? Yes. Satisfied? Very. She felt shy yet strangely confident, because she’d done it and it had worked. She’d had sex! She’d had an orgasm! Underneath all the glitz and the unusual upbringing, she was no different from any other woman—and that thought gave her hope for the future. It made her