by Lucy Ellis
Her bedroom door was directly opposite the stairs and open. The double bed didn’t look big enough but as he lowered her onto it he could see there was enough room for their purpose.
‘Let me do this,’ she said, before he could kiss her.
She was climbing up on her knees, tugging and pulling his T-shirt up over his head.
He was surprised by her willingness to take the initiative given her nervousness, but he wasn’t complaining as he finished the job for her and tossed the T-shirt over his shoulder.
‘I’m going to do this,’ she said and he could have told her he wasn’t going to argue.
She ran her fingers down his torso, exploring the definition of his muscles and tendons beneath the skin intricately converging to form that V below his taut abdomen, undoing a few of the buttons on his jeans.
Nik’s breathing was already coming in snags as he watched her explore him with her fingertips. Her touch was so light, the expression on her face transfixed.
‘Is this okay?’
She foraged under those loose buttons, meeting his eyes. ‘Yeah, that’s okay,’ he said, swallowing as she slowly slid her hand over the length of him.
Nik sucked in a breath and went still, eyes lambent, the breath hissing between his teeth as she explored him with her hand.
When she was sure he definitely hadn’t had enough she smiled and removed her hand and then slowly, enticingly began to move that same hand over the button fly of his jeans, opening it up.
‘Are you trying to kill me, dushka?’ he half joked, his voice hoarsened with the effort.
‘That would defeat our purpose, don’t you think?’ Somehow that combination of her shy smile and her knowing eyes as she tugged his jeans down over his lean hips, taking his boxers with them, had the same effect as her hand on his erection.
She came over him, measuring him with her eyes, and lowered her head, her hair sliding forward to curtain her face as she licked him from base to tip.
Nik hissed and gripped the coverlet, fisting it as he fought not to disgrace himself. He was on a hair trigger; just watching her was enough to set him off.
She’d been so shy.
He really hadn’t expected this…this sex goddess.
He tried to control the building reaction to her lapping, swirling pink tongue, the graze of her plump lips, and as she slid him into her mouth he knew he wasn’t going to make it if she went any further and he gently disengaged her and deftly rolled her back onto the bed.
She lay there, smiling up at him as if she’d accomplished something she was proud of, as she should be, her eyes glistening, her mouth wet, her breaths coming even shorter as he slid one finger into the vee of her soft cotton top, where it dipped into the valley between her breasts.
He went to strip her shirt off but she clamped her hands over his.
‘The light,’ she said, blinking anxiously at him as if he might say no.
He looked up at the overhead, a vintage frilled thing that was currently lighting things up to his satisfaction.
‘It’s in my eyes,’ she said, looking suddenly oddly flustered. ‘Can we have it off?’
Only an idiot would argue with her at this point. He bounded from the bed to turn the main light off. Sybella had reached across and switched on the lamp. The room was suddenly in shadows but Sybella was bathed in a diffused caramel glow.
She looked positively feline and possibly the most sensual creature he had ever laid eyes on.
‘Anything else you want doing?’ he asked, coming down beside her on the bed.
He ran his hands over her hips and behind to the curve of her generous bottom still clad in satin something and into her eyes crept a touch of tension. He snuffed it out by kissing her hungrily, devouring the soft, sweet mouth he’d been dreaming about for the last twenty-four hours.
He pushed her cotton top up over her breasts, lifting her arms and arching over her as he slid the cotton free. She was wearing a simple bra embroidered with pink forget-me-nots and with her flaxen hair tumbling over her shoulders she looked like every fantasy he’d ever had.
‘Bogu, you’re beautiful,’ he said, sliding one strap off her shoulder.
‘Am I?’
‘Gorgeous.’ He tried to imbue the assertion with some of the reverence he really did feel, but it wasn’t easy when all he wanted to do was fall on her like a sex-starved teenager who’d never been this close to a naked woman’s body in his life.
‘You’re a bona fide sex goddess,’ he asserted and she responded by wrapping her arms around his neck and coming up to meet him.
As their mouths fused he was no longer able to keep up this song of seduction and skill; he was just a man a little clumsy with lust.
He slid his mouth down her throat, licking over her cleavage, feeling her shiver against him in anticipation. He reached under her and released the catch of her bra and then slowly, with an intensity of purpose because frankly her breasts deserved worshipping, he peeled her pretty cups away.
He took his time to look his fill, feeling her eyes on him, her rapid, short breaths telling him she found this thrilling too. He took one taut pink nipple between his lips and licked. She gasped and bucked under him. He moved from one breast to the other, licking and sucking and moulding her, listening to her sighs and the little noises she made.
He untied the drawstring on her pants and hooked his thumbs under the sides of her satin knickers on the way down and peeled them both off, his hands actually shaking. She’d left herself as nature made her, the soft fair curls at the apex of her thighs as pretty as anything he’d ever seen.
He traced the seam of her sex with his index finger and she gave a little ‘oh’ as he lowered himself to kiss her there and inhale the heady scent of aroused woman. He licked her without warning and then again and she cried out and pulsed to her first orgasm, but he didn’t stop, he went on and on until he wrung the last glorious ripple from her.
When he lifted his head and looked up she had her eyes half closed, her hair spread around her, the sensuality of her on full uninhibited display, and satisfaction thundered through him. She gave him a dreamy smile.
‘What a little honeypot you are,’ he told her and placed a kiss on her lower belly, where she was softer and she had a silvery pale tributary of zigzagging lines and some pinkish ones that hadn’t faded yet, if they ever would.
Sybella watched him through her lashes. She didn’t mind those tiger stripes—her baby had given her those. He traced them with his tongue and kissed her belly again, coming up over her with intent.
‘Not a honey trap any more?’ Her voice was smoky with satisfaction.
His grin turned rueful. ‘I take it I’m not forgiven for that.’
Sybella reached for him, her hands smoothing over the warm breadth of his chest to curl over his shoulders where the muscles were bunched. She couldn’t get enough of his body. ‘Oh, I think you’re forgiven.’
‘Happy?’
She gave him a sly smile. ‘Not completely.’
‘I still have some work to do—what could the lady possibly want from me now?’
He settled between her thighs and Sybella had a blissful moment of being exactly where she wanted to be with exactly the right man.
He’d seen her body now in all its opulent glory and she was beginning to think just maybe the awkwardness with Simon hadn’t been entirely down to her, because at no point in any of this had she wanted to be covered by a sheet. Nik was obviously, unashamedly devouring her with his eyes.
She could feel him hard and impatient, stroking himself against her. Right there.
Sybella shifted her pelvis to bring him to her but he was pulling away.
No, no.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked incredulously.
‘I need to suit up.’
Sybella flopped back on the mattress, grateful one of them was using their brain.
Nik had pulled a couple of condoms out of his wallet.
She gave
him a lopsided smile. ‘You were confident.’
‘I had hopes.’
‘Hurry,’ she urged.
Nik discovered his hands were shaking slightly as he rolled one on and she moved to take over.
‘You really are going to kill me,’ he said between his teeth.
‘Well, like I said before, that would defeat our purpose.’ She said it with a little smile on her face that grew as she slid her hands over his hips, coming up on her knees and then looping her arms over his shoulders.
He spread his hands around her bottom, enjoying the give of her, the softness, the sheer female voluptuousness of her body against his harder frame.
He was against her and she made a soft little noise against his throat. Nik didn’t need the encouragement and drove home, the sheer size of him paralysing her senses for a moment and then his mouth was hot at her neck and he was sheathed inside her and Sybella sighed her deep-felt appreciation, turning her mouth to his as he kissed her, smothered her mouth with his, before lowering his head to suck on her breasts, leaving her gasping.
He positioned her with his big hands and thrust again and again and when he thought he couldn’t hold back she climaxed around him, the intensity of it tipping him over the edge. Conscious thought was a long time coming and when it returned to Nik they were lying in each other’s arms, her eyes soft and no longer as curious as they had been when he’d first looked into them in the snow last night. She had her answer.
‘Well,’ she panted, her breath soft against his shoulder, ‘that was…something.’
‘Da, something.’ Too fast, too urgent, just…sensational. He felt grateful, dazed and looking forward to taking that trip to heaven again.
Soon.
He stroked the hair off her face, feeling an unaccountable level of well-being he hadn’t felt in years. Her skin was dewy with faint perspiration, her cheeks pink; she was fairly glowing.
His gaze moved over the rounded shapes of her sumptuous breasts and flagrant hip curved under his hand. He squeezed her softly, enjoying the flesh under his hand.
‘You like looking at me,’ she said, her fingers tangling in his chest hair.
‘I’d be crazy if I didn’t.’ He touched his lips to the tip of her nose and then her eyelids and finally her temple. Nothing salacious, more in reverence for how tender she made him feel.
‘I like looking at you.’ She massaged her lower lip with her teeth, as if something else was on her mind. ‘I always had…trouble taking my clothes off in front of Simon. I felt, I thought, I don’t know, I wondered what he saw.’
He gave her a lascivious smile and she smiled back and then her eyes filled and overflowed with tears.
‘Sorry,’ she gasped, cupping her face with her hands, ‘so silly. Don’t mind me.’
She was so English. So polite in the oddest circumstances. She was a woman. She was emotional. She shouldn’t be ashamed of it. It made him feel tender. So he reached for her and kissed her tears and murmured to her in Russian, which seemed to quiet her. Presently her shoulders stopped quaking and she lay still against him.
‘You were very young when you got married,’ he said.
She nodded against his shoulder. ‘Only I didn’t think I was. I felt like I’d lived a lifetime before I met Simon.’ She raised her face to look at him. ‘He was my first love. We met in my first year at university. But after a year he—we—decided to take a break for the summer. He was going on a dig in Athens—amateur archaeology was his hobby, we kind of had that in common—but I couldn’t go with him. I needed to work, save some money, so it was a break in our relationship.’
Nik waited; he suspected he knew where this was going.
‘The next term he wanted to get back together but he told me he’d had a sort of a fling with another girl. It was okay,’ she hurried on, glancing at him as if daring him to condemn her precious Simon. ‘We were split when it happened.’
But he could hear in her voice there had been no splitting as far as Sybella was concerned. She was loyal. He’d known her twenty-four hours but he’d seen her loyalty in action, keeping the crucial information about the letters from him to protect Deda.
‘Then, you see, she was in a few of my tutorial groups so I had to spend the rest of the year seeing her several times a month. I got a little funny about it. She never said anything, I don’t think we ever exchanged any more than the normal pleasantries, but she must have known.’
‘Do you want me to comment or just listen?’ Nik had a number of thoughts, all of them about her fool of a husband.
‘Listen, I think.’ She gave a soft, nervous laugh. ‘I’ve said all the critical things in my head and I said a few to Simon at the time. It’s just, we got back together—obviously—but I knew something wasn’t right. Even on my wedding day there was this niggle.’
‘He was still seeing her.’
‘Gosh, no, no! Simon wasn’t that kind of guy at all.’
Nyet, and in Sybella’s partial eyes probably never would be. Nik did his best not to take a dislike to her dead husband.
‘He was very ethical. I mean, he didn’t have to tell me.’
Nik wisely kept his own counsel. But the thought remained, I wouldn’t have told her, I would have protected her from the knowledge. Then the next startling thought arrived: I wouldn’t have gone to another woman.
Not when the girl was Sybella. She seemed to him a little traditional, the kind of woman who would expect fidelity. If the guy had loved her, he would have known that.
She eyed him, nervous once more. ‘I know this will sound silly but I got a bit funny about my body. I got it into my head Simon didn’t find me desirable.’ She frowned a little, as if puzzling over the girl she’d been.
Now Nik officially wanted to punch her dead husband.
‘You see, this other girl, she was very pretty and she was tiny, like a fairy tiny, and I’m not.’
Nik didn’t know what to do with that. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said.
She shoved him. ‘You’re not supposed to say that.’
He nudged up her chin to look at her, so incredibly lovely with her lightin-a-forest eyes and her pale pre-Raphaelite curls tumbling over her shoulders and those gorgeous breasts, and he knew in that moment what all men knew: they would never understand women.
‘Listen, Lady Godiva, my interest in fairies ended around about the age of four. I want a woman in my bed, and I want her soft and warm and capable of giving as good as she gets—in and out of bed. Your Simon was young, yes?’
‘Twenty-two when we got married.’ Sybella’s voice was soft and she was looking at him hopefully, as if he might say the very thing that was going to fix all this for her.
Nik wasn’t so sure. He knew from personal experience how deep resentments could shoot those roots when they attached young. Rejection by your parents had to leave deep fault lines, and Sybella had just admitted hers. To him. As if he was worth her trust. But to respond in kind was something he couldn’t do.
So he took hold of the surface problem and strangled the life out of it for her.
‘I’d pretty much sussed it by twenty-two,’ he said, meeting her eyes, ‘but it can take some men a lifetime. Whatever package it comes in, Sybella, it’s the woman inside who makes you notice her, who reduces you to an idiot and has you promising all kinds of things just to get her naked.’
Her mouth had fallen open slightly in the same way it had when he’d swooped her up into his arms earlier this evening and carried her up here.
Then her eyes began to kindle.
‘You didn’t promise me anything,’ she said in a low voice.
He grinned at her. ‘You should have asked, dushka.’
She was clearly trying not to smile.
‘You’re just saying that because you think it will get you laid again.’
‘Da, there is that.’
The wounded vulnerability in her eyes had been replaced by the light he’d seen earlier.
That light was
like a lighthouse beam guiding him right back to her and all that female lusciousness deep down she must know drove men mad.
‘So how about it?’
And her mouth, which had become an instrument of both torture and pleasure to his body, curved up in a smile, carving that dimple deeply.
Bogu, he wanted to kiss that sweet mouth.
But she tucked her hand behind his neck again and brought his mouth down to where she wanted it, on her breasts.
Yeah, he’d died.
This was heaven.
CHAPTER NINE
SOMETHING GAVE A CRACK and the bed lurched to one side and then another crack and the headboard came away from the iron frame.
Nik sprang out of bed and, saying something in Russian, went around and checked out the situation.
‘Should I get out?’ she asked, not wanting to move in case it all collapsed.
‘Hold still,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll fix this.’
She gave a soft shriek as he dislodged the mattress base from the rest of the frame and Sybella found herself staring up at a ceiling that was significantly farther away than it had been a moment ago.
Nik carried the iron base in its two pieces out into the hall and leaned it up against the wall. Sybella watched him, craning her neck.
‘You don’t have to go, do you?’ she called. ‘The bed still works.’
Sybella screwed shut her eyes. The bed still works? Why didn’t she say I still work and be done with it?
When Nik came back into the room he sized up the bed and then lowered the lean strength of his magnificent male body down beside her.
He shifted on the mess of twisted sheets and Sybella was suddenly very conscious of the lack of space in general, of how absurd this situation was in her small bedroom where she’d spent the last six years being nothing more than a harried working mum with no head space for what had happened here now.
