Her breath catching in her throat, Allie gave a soft, panting gasp of assent. What he was suggesting, offering, was too alluring, too tempting for her to refuse, her eyes already glistening with emotion at the thought of the sensual riches he was promising her.
‘Let me take this off, then,’ he told her, carefully sliding the straps of her nightdress free of her shoulders. Even that light touch of his fingertips against her naked skin was enough to bring her out in a mass of sensually aroused goosebumps, and Allie knew before her nightdress slid free of her naked body, to reveal them in all their darkly pink, feminine glory, that her nipples were as eagerly aroused as two rosebuds, just waiting for the hot, silky warmth of the morning sun to coax them into full flower.
Only what her nipples yearned for was not the touch of the summer sun, but the stroke of Luke’s fingers; the moist heat of his mouth. The intimacy of her own thoughts was enough to make her shudder visibly.
He had never seen a woman betray her arousal, her need, so innocently nor so proudly, Luke acknowledged, and he had certainly never felt so awed, so humbled, so blessed in knowing he was the reason for that arousal.
She might not love him but Allie wanted him, and somehow he knew instinctively that this level of desire was as unfamiliar to her as loving her so intensely was unfamiliar to him.
Very carefully he reached out and cupped her naked breasts, looking first into her eyes and then down to the silken globes he was cherishing with his hands and his gaze, before telling her thickly, ‘You are so beautiful… so perfect…’
‘No…’ she began to deny, but before she could finish he was kissing her, gently at first, and then with increasing passion as he slid his hands around her back, bringing her naked breasts into direct contact with the warm, silky abrasion of his chest. Allie thought the sensation of his body pressed so close to hers, his heart pumping so strongly that it could have been beating for both of them, was going to make her faint.
‘No one else has ever done this with you before, have they?’ Luke asked her insistently, his emotions overruling his natural caution as the instinctive knowledge that she was giving herself to him with an intimacy she had never shared with anyone else hit him like a jolt of adrenaline released into his bloodstream.
As he spoke Luke’s hand was returning to cover her naked breast with an open possessiveness that made Allie’s heart turn over inside her chest. Just for a moment, with that look in his eyes, she could almost convince herself that he loved her.
‘If just my caressing your breast makes you feel like this,’ he breathed hotly as he felt the mute shudders of delight run through her body, betraying everything that she was feeling to him,
‘just think how it’s going to feel when we do something more intimate.’
Something more intimate! Allie’s eyes started to widen with a mixture of excitement and alarm. She was already quivering so intensely with the extent of the arousal and longing coursing through her that she didn’t think she could actually bear to endure any more pleasure. But he was already bending his head, whispering such things against her mouth and into her ears that her whole body burned to hear them-and burned even hotter to know them.
“Come here and lie next to me, skin against skin, heartbeat against heartbeat, and tell me again that you don’t want me. That this…” he paused as his fingertip delicately touched the place where the frantic betraying pulse thudded at the base of her throat ‘… doesn’t mean what we both know it does…’
Very deliberately he slipped the straps of her nightdress down off her shoulders so that it fell free of her immobile body, revealing the full curves of her breasts. Even more delicately he touched her nipples-so tautly erect and sensitive to him that Allie shuddered visibly in reaction as he did so.
‘Oh, God, you don’t know what it does to me to see you reacting to me like that,’ she heard Luke telling her thickly.
‘You want me to touch you, Allie… to hold you… taste you…’ His voice was so thickly muffled that she could barely hear what he was saying-or was it because her own heart was beating so loudly and so fast that she wasn’t sure whether or not he had said that final, fatal ‘You want me to love you’ or not?
And anyway, what did it matter what he had said, or what he had guessed? What did anything matter now other than the aching need that filled her? A woman’s need, driven by a woman’s love; her body was so ready for him, so longing for him, so empty for him.
Proudly, Allie arched her back as his hands held and shaped her breasts, her eyes heavy-lidded with passion as she watched his head bend towards her body.
A tiny shocked gasp of pleasure quivered past her lips as he began to explore one taut nipple delicately with his mouth. The most exquisitely arousing sensation shot through her, quicksilver, mercurial rivulets of pleasure that had her writhing in sensual torment against him.
Just for one brief second reality slipped through the rainbow-coloured delight she was experiencing.
‘No!’ she protested muzzily as he pushed the bedclothes aside and slid her nightdress completely free of her body at the same time as he removed his own robe. The reality of him was so much more than she had imagined, so powerfully, awesomely male.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘We shouldn’t… we mustn’t… Without love…’
‘You mustn’t be ashamed of wanting me,’ he whispered back. ‘Desire isn’t wrong, Allie, it’s a normal, natural human need.’
Perhaps for him it was, Allie recognised, but for her…
‘Love matters,’ she protested fiercely. ‘I should… I need-‘
‘You need this; you need me…’ Luke interrupted her softly.
The touch of his hands against her skin was enticing her into a world she couldn’t bear to resist, luring her there with a hundred-no, a thousand sensual promises she knew he could fulfil. Just the sweep of his hand against her naked flesh as he caressed the length of her spine, just the warmth of his breath against her mouth as he lifted her to his own body and started to kiss her were enough to vanquish all the arguments her inner voice of caution could muster.
And instead of repudiating him she heard herself saying helplessly as he touched her, ‘Oh, yes… yes…’
And then she closed her eyes and let him lead her into such an unfamiliar country that to name it merely ‘pleasure’ was like calling the sun ‘warm’.
‘Hasn’t anyone ever done this for you before?’ Luke asked her tenderly at one moment when she was so unable to conceal from him what she was feeling that her eyes actually started to fill with tears, so unbearably intense was her pleasure.
‘Wait until I love you there with my mouth,’ he whispered slowly to her, watching as the expressions chased one another across her face, wondering if she had any idea how close she brought him to the edge of completion just by the way she was reacting to his words and his touch.