by Penny Jordan
He couldn't hold out much longer, Ricardo realized, as he felt his body throb in reaction to the pleasure of tasting her and arousing her. He drove the tip of his tongue into her moist opening and heard her moan of pleasure He stroked her clitoris with quick rhythmic strokes of his tongue and eased a finger slowly into her.
Immediately her muscles closed round it, holding it, and his body responded with a savage thrust of male urgency.
He could feel his heart thudding, sweat beading his forehead, but he made himself go slowly. One finger, and then two, waiting for her body to accommodate him and then respond as he caressed her.
She was moving urgently against him now, her body aroused and eager as she thrust against him and moaned.
Frantically Carly reached out and touched Ricardo's body, her fingers closing round him, moving over him. He felt so hot and slick, the foreskin moving easily and fluidly over the swollen head of his erection. Her body tightened, and excitement locked the air into her lungs in expectation.
Still caressing her, Ricardo pulled her beneath him, easing himself slowly into her, his muscles aching with the punishing pressure he was exerting over them as he refused to give in to their demand for him to thrust deeply and fully.
Her muscles closed round him, making him shudder with violent need. He thrust deeper, and then deeper still, whilst Carly dug her nails into his shoulder—not in pain, but in urgent female need to have more of him. Unable to stop herself, she gave voice to that need, the words tumbling huskily from her lips as she pleaded frantically, 'More... Ricardo. Deeper...' matching her pleas to the eager movement of her body against his.
'Like this? How much more? This much?'
She gasped into his thrust, driven by her own need to make him ill her and take her higher.
'Mmm. Yes. More...deeper...again.'
Her frantic litany of pleas and praise fell against Ricardo's senses like a song sung in sensual counterpart to their mingled breathing, underscored by the rise and fall of its urgency and satisfaction, whilst her body's response to him blew apart his intention of remaining in control.
His own need to go deeper, harder, to know and possess all of her, overwhelmed him. His increasingly powerful thrusts took them both higher, and his own satisfaction was matched by the eager rhythmic movement of Carly's hips, and the sounds of her rising pleasure. She clung to him, kissing his throat and his shoulder, then raking his arm with her nails in a sudden ecstasy of physical delight as he drove them both closer to the edge.
It was too much for his self-control. The muscles in his neck corded as he fought to delay his own climax, but it was too late. His body was already claiming its final mindless driving surge of release.
Carly called out a jumble of helpless words of feverish pleasure as Ricardo's fierce pulsing thrusts of completion carried her with him over the edge of pleasure, her body suddenly contorting in a burst of rhythmic climactic contractions of release.
It was over.
Very carefully, Ricardo rolled Carly over onto her side and held her against him.
Carly lay there, trying to steady her breathing, her body still trembling with reaction. Tears blurred her vision, although she had no idea why she should want to cry. The pleasure had been so very much more than she had imagined.
Ricardo was lying facing her, his arm resting heavily but oh, so sweetly over her, holding her close to him.
'Are you okay?'
'I think so,' she answered shakily. 'I'm still trying to come back down to earth. I hadn't realized it would be so...' She stopped.
'So what?' Ricardo probed.
'So...so intense. Not when you ...when we don't... when this isn't about loving one another,' she finally managed to say.
She felt Ricardo moving, but before she could say anything he was holding her tightly in his arms and kissing her. Slowly and gently and...oh, so very sweetly.
It was six o'clock and the park was quiet. Ricardo had left Carly sleeping, easing himself away from her body and taking care not to wake her.
He had woken a dozen times during the night, silently listening to her breathing, watching her, and whilst he was doing so he had relived the intimacy they had shared, trying to analyze his own reaction to it.
He had had sex before, after all, and he had had good sex before. But never, ever anything that had come any where near to making him feel the way he had felt with Carly.
Her use of the word 'intense' had mirrored his own feelings.
Why, though? Why should her body, her flesh, her need be so very different? Not because she had been a virgin? No, definitely not because of that!
The second time they had made love, in the early hours of the morning, had to him been an even more intense experience than the first time. And Carly had made it plain to him that she had no regrets. Her virginity had been something he'd had to take account of in possessing her, yes, but it had not been the cause of that difference.
So what was it about her that lingered so strongly that he had needed to keep waking up to check that she was still there?
What was it about her that made his whole body compress with possessiveness at the thought of losing her?
Was it the intensity of the intimacy they had shared? The fact that, for some unfathomable reason, something in her humbled and softened something in him? He didn't know. But he did know that, whatever it was, it had somehow caused an abrupt turnaround inside his head, and that instead of mentally working out how fast he could get away from her and get on with the really exciting things in his life—like another business acquisition—he was actually wondering how he could pro long their time together.
He looked at his watch. Soon she would be waking up. And he wanted to be there when she did.
'Carly?'
Reluctantly she opened her eyes. She had woken up an hour earlier, wondering where Ricardo had gone, and then, after showering and brushing her teeth, she had come back to bed and promptly fallen deeply asleep again.
Ricardo was sitting on the side of the bed next to her, and what was more he was fully dressed.
She struggled to sit up, and then realized self-consciously that she was naked.
'We need to leave for France this afternoon,' Ricardo reminded her.
'Oh, yes, of course. I—'
She gave a shallow gasp as Ricardo leaned forward and covered her mouth with his own. Automatically she clung to his shoulders, and then wrapped her arms around his neck when she felt his tongue demanding possession of her mouth. Already her body felt sweetly heavy with longing for him, drawn to him like a moth to a lame.
He lifted his mouth from hers and she stretched sensuously, watching the heat burn in his gaze as it feasted on her, relishing the hot glitter. His hand cupped her shoulder and then stroked slowly over her, ignoring the urgent, desiring peaking of her nipples and coming to rest on her hip, his thumb moving lazily over the indent of her belly. Feathery, frustrating little touches that had her arching up to him in silent demand.
'Undress me!'
The command sounded thick and slightly unsteady, rather like her own fingers as they curled round the hem of his tee shirt and then trembled wildly the minute they came into contact with the hard-muscled heat of his skin.
Her task might have been easier if Ricardo hadn't tormented her, occupying himself by kissing her and caressing her whilst she was trying to complete it, Carly decided, but she finally tugged off his tee shirt, to be rewarded with the hot fierce suckle of his mouth on her breast.
Sensation pierced her, sweet and shocking and achingly erotic, and the stroke of his tongue and the deliberate, delicate rasp of his teeth made her moan and beg for more.
In the end he had to finish undressing himself, shed ding his clothes with unsteady urgency and then taking hold of Carly and lifting her to straddle his prone body.
He watched as her eyes widened, and kept on watching whilst he stroked his fingertip through her wetness.
She cried out immediately, her body tensi
ng. Ricardo reached up and laved first one and then the other nipple with his tongue, feral male arousal gripping him as the morning sun highlighted for him the swollen wet crests. He found the sensitive heat of her clitoris and rubbed his fingertip rhythmically over it.
Carly arched tightly against his touch, her eagerness for him darkening her eyes as she reached for him and positioned herself over him, slowly sinking down on him, taking him into her.
Ricardo kept still, hardly daring to breathe, hardly able to endure the pleasure of the sensation of her body opening to him, her muscles slowly claiming him.
Experimentally Carly moved her body, gasping in shocked delight as she felt her own pleasure. She moved again, eagerly and demandingly. Exhaling, Ricardo responded to her need, grasping her hips as she took control, letting her take as much of him as she wanted, and then groaning in raw heat as she demanded more.
She came quickly, almost violently, just before Ricardo, in a series of intense spasms that left her too weak to even move. It was left to Ricardo to lift her from him and then hold her sweat-slick trembling body against his own, his arms wrapped securely around her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'I should really stay at the chateau, so that I can be on hand in case anything goes wrong.'
They had arrived in France two hours ago, and now Carly was seated next to Ricardo in the large Mercedes hire car that had been waiting for him at the airport. He had just informed her that he wanted her to stay with him at the house he was renting instead of at the château where the party was to be held.
'If anything does go wrong you can be there within minutes,' he told her.
She knew that he was right, and she knew too that she wanted to be with him. How, in such a short space of time, could she have become so physically addicted to him that she could hardly bear not to be close to him?
'How are you feeling? Are you okay?'
Both his question and the almost tender note in his voice startled her.
'I'm—I'm fine. I can't believe I didn't realize before how...how compulsive sex can be.'
Ricardo started to frown. Her answer wasn't the one he had been expecting. Or the one he had wanted?
'It wasn't just sex for you, though, was it?' he challenged her.
Carly couldn't look at him. Prickles of warning were burning their way into her head, triggering her defenses. 'Why do you say that?'
'A woman doesn't get to your age still a virgin unless she's either too traumatized to want sex or she's waiting to feel as drawn to a partner emotionally as she is sexually.'
'No, that isn't true. The reason I haven't had sex before now is because I haven't wanted any emotional involvement, not because I have.'
Ricardo could hear the panic in her voice. No matter how old-fashioned it might be, every instinct he possessed told him that she had to have very deep emotional feelings for him to have responded the way she had. His male logic couldn't accept that, given her virginity, it could be any other way.
'Human beings are allowed to have emotions, you know,' he told her wryly. 'But my guess is that you are afraid of emotional vulnerability because of what you experienced as a child. Your adoptive parents rejected you, gave their love to their own daughter whilst with holding it from you.'
Carly was too intelligent to try and deny what he was saying.
'I may have been an emotionally needy child, but I have no intention of allowing myself to become an emotionally needy woman.'
'There's a huge difference between being emotion ally needy and loving someone.'
'Maybe. Or maybe, just as some people are genetically disposed to be more vulnerable to drug addiction, some people might be genetically disposed to emotional vulnerability. I prefer not to put my own resistance to the test.'
'How did your adopted sister die?' His question caught her off guard. 'She...she was a drug addict. She died from an over dose of heroin. She started using drugs when we were at school. She was a year above me, and in a different crowd. I... It never appealed to me. I told you that my mother was one of three young women who died in a house fire. They were probably all drug addicts. I never... I couldn't... I know that, deep down inside, my adoptive parents blamed me for her addiction. My adoptive mother admitted as much. She said that she felt by bringing me into their lives they had brought in the evil of drug addiction.'
'Rubbish,' Ricardo announced briskly. 'It strikes me that they were looking for someone to blame and picked on you.'
'Maybe, but I still feel guilty. They loved her, not me, and now she's dead. All they've got left is me. I've tried to do what I can to help them, to repay them for everything they've given me.'
'Everything they've given you? Such as what?'
'A chance to live a normal life. My education. Without them I could have ended up making a living selling myself on the street, like my mother probably did.'
'No,' Ricardo told her firmly. 'No, you would never have done that. Somehow you would have found a way to set yourself free.'
Carly could feel emotional tears prickling her eyes. Emotional tears?
'I want you, Carly, and not just physically. You touch my emotions and delight my senses. When you aren't with me, I want you to be. You've become integral to my pleasure in life—to my happiness, if you like. I want to explore with you what's happening to us. I trust you enough to tell you that, and to tell you too that emotionally I am vulnerable to you. Is it really so hard for you to do the same?'
'I don't know what to say,' she admitted shakily.
'Then don't say anything,' Ricardo told her. 'Just al low yourself to feel instead. And when we're together you do feel, don't you, Carly?'
'I... I know that when we have sex it gives me a lot of pleasure.'
She answered him primly, but prim was the very opposite of what she felt. Just talking with him like this had made her body begin to pulse with sensual need. It seemed a lifetime since they had last had sex, though in fact it was less than twenty-four hours. Already she was longing for the opportunity to spend more time with him in intimate privacy. Her legs were weak, and she had to make a small denying movement in her seat to clamp down on the sensation pulsing inside her.
She could feel Ricardo looking at her. She turned her head and looked back at him. He knew! Somehow he knew what she was feeling. The car was an automatic, and he reached for her hand, placing it against his own body.
It wasn't the answer he wanted, but it would do—for now. If her sexual response to him was her area of vulnerability, then he would have to use that to try and break down her emotional barriers.
Ricardo was hard!
Carly tried to swallow, and for one wanton shocking moment she actually found herself wishing she were the kind of woman who felt comfortable abandoning her underwear, and that only the lightness of a thin summer skirt, instead of jeans and beneath them her thong, separated her from Ricardo's intimate touch.
'Don't,' she heard Ricardo growl thickly. 'Otherwise I'll have to stop. And the back of a car just doesn't have room for what I want to do with you right now... '
'What do you want to do?' Carly encouraged him huskily.
She felt his momentary hesitation mingling with her own shock that she could be so enticing.
'I want to spread you out in front of me, your body naked and eager...just like it was that first time. I want to start at your toes, touching every inch of you, tasting every inch of you. I want to bring you to orgasm with my hand and my mouth, and watch you take your plea sure from me... '
Carly let out a soft beseeching moan. 'Stop it,' she begged. 'I can't—'
'Wait?' he demanded softly. 'Do you think it's any different for me?'
Emotionless sex! Ricardo knew perfectly well that he was brooding too much and too betrayingly over Carly's attitude. She had no idea just what emotionless sex actually was, he told himself fiercely. She had al ready admitted to him that she was simply trying to protect herself from being hurt, as she had been hurt as a child. And because of
that she was refusing to admit that her emotions were as dangerously involved with him as his were with her. After all, she had given herself to him totally and completely as his, and he had claimed her in exactly that same way.
The figures he had been working on for making a bid for Prêt a Party were in front of him on the table of the small cafe' where they had stopped for drink. He glanced uncaringly at them whilst he waited for Carly to return from the lavatory. He no longer cared how profitable it was, or indeed whether or not he acquired it. In fact the only acquisition he was really interested in right now was the total and exclusive right to Carly herself—preferably by way of an unbreakable and permanent legally binding document.
Where was she? His muscles tensed, and then started to relax as he saw her hurrying towards him. Two men at another table were also looking at her, and immediately he wanted to get up, lay claim to her.
'We need to stop at a chemist,' he told her as he signaled for their bill. When she looked at him in concern, he explained succinctly, 'Condoms.'
'Oh!' Carly could feel her face going pink.
'Not that I think there's any risk to either of us from a health issue point of view, but I assume you aren't protected from pregnancy?'
'Yes. I mean, no. I mean, no—I'm not protected,' Carly confirmed guiltily. How could she have over looked something as basic and important as that?
The château owned by a famous rock star and his stunningly attractive American wife was in the Loire valley, home to some of France's famous wine-growing districts. Carly had seen photographs of the château in a magazine article about the star and his family, and she knew that his well-born wife had scoured Europe's antique dealers and employed the very best craftsmen in order to restore the building and turn it into a modern home. A mirrored ballroom similar to that at Versailles was the showpiece of the restoration work, along with the gardens.
