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  Those intense, half-closed eyes surveyed her with intimate thoroughness, lingering on the rosy-apricot aureoles of her breasts until they hardened into tiny nubs, tiptilted, provocative. Wildfire zigzagged through her, uniting between the fork of her legs into a conflagration. She had never felt so exposed, so vulnerable, and she had never realised that she could enjoy such an experience.

  ‘Undress me,’ he said harshly.

  No doubt it would have been more suitable to a virgin if her fingers had trembled and been unable to undo the little buttons of his shirt, but they didn’t. Swiftly, competently, they moved down crisp white material that was warm from his body heat, then pushed the sleeves back over his shoulders, pulling them down until the shirt dropped on to the floor.

  Dry-mouthed, she stared at him. For the first time a hint of panic darkened her eyes. He was overwhelming, the male predator incarnate, with his wide bronze shoulders and chest where the hair curled in evocative patterns over smooth muscles, hinting at the disturbing, elemental power concealed there. Yet there was something intensely tantalising about him too. Aura touched the bold parabola of a muscle with her finger, then spread her hand to catch the heavy thud of his heart in her palm.

  His skin was like oiled silk, warm and slightly clinging to her sensitive fingertips, smooth and sleek and potent. Aura leaned forward and applied the tip of her tongue to the spot she had touched. Beneath her hand she felt his pulse speed up; his chest lifted as he dragged air into his lungs. An oblique smile tilted her lips. Like a small cat she licked along the line of a muscle, tasting the musky, salty tang of aroused male, of Flint.

  She half expected him to say something, to stop her, but he didn’t move, held still by an effort she barely recognised.

  ‘You taste—of heaven,’ she said.

  He laughed deep in his throat and said, ‘And what do you taste of, I wonder?’

  He lifted her, and stripped off the sleek silk briefs, then pushed his own clothes free. Aura’s eyes dilated. She swallowed and stopped an involuntary gasp by sheer force of will. He was so big, and so—

  She knew it was possible, but she didn’t see how it could happen.

  He must have realised the source of her sudden dismayed silence, for as he came down beside her he said quietly, ‘We’ll take it easy,’ and before she could answer he lowered his head and kissed the tender upper curve of her breast. His mouth lingered, as though the taste of her skin excited him as much as his did her.

  ‘Yes, you taste like the essence of woman,’ he said against her skin. ‘Sweeter than violets and more potent than brandy. You make me drunk.’

  Aura’s breath came hard and fast through lips already reddened by his kisses. More than anything she wanted to experience again the ecstasy of the moments in his apartment when he had touched her, and kissed her, and her whole being had risen to meet his.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  But he was in no hurry. He held back, reimposing a fierce control over his emotions and actions, his hands moving slowly and tormentingly across her skin.

  Outside a bird called from the lagoon, unknown, alien. Aura shivered as much with a sense of doom, of no going back, as with the wild pleasure that was coursing through her.

  ‘You have a mouth made to kiss, made to crush, made for me,’ he said softly, holding the weight of one breast in the palm of his hand. He looked at it with the awe and possessiveness of a man who holds infinite value in his grasp. ‘And skin like ivory satin.’

  Transfixed by the smouldering light in his eyes, she held her breath. He spoke a lover’s words, yet they were not delivered in a lover’s voice, and the look in his eyes was not tender.

  Unease widened her eyes; then she gasped as he kissed a hard, tight little nipple, and taking it into the warm cavity of his mouth suckled strongly.

  Sensation, swift and heated as fire, smooth and sweet as honey, shot through her. She closed her eyes, unable to cope with the feelings he aroused, unable to watch his mouth work its primal magic, unable to bear the contrast between the blunt angles of his dark face and the smooth pale curves of her body.

  Utterly ravished by need, she sighed his name.

  ‘Touch me,’ he said against the curve of her breast, taking her hand and holding it over his heart.

  She explored him as he explored her, amazed afresh at the polished swell of muscles that flexed in response to her tentative hands. Each touch, each caress, each new step on the voyage of discovery added to the last, extended the next, until in the end his fingers slid carefully down and discovered her secret core, eager and hot, awaiting him.

  Aura’s lashes flew up. His heavy-lidded gaze was fixed on her face in a scrutiny that held all the old watchfulness. If she winced, or tensed, he would wonder why, and perhaps guess.

  And that would be the finish. He didn’t want a virgin in his bed, he wanted a woman with experience, a woman who could match his expertise. She couldn’t give him that, but she would give him something she could only surrender once.

  She turned her head into his chest, and delicately bit at the tight nubbin she found there. A deep breath expanded his chest, then his hand slipped a little further, sending shivers of delight through her. His thumb moved, found the centre of pleasure, and she shuddered.

  ‘Yes, you want me,’ he said softly. ‘How much do you want me, Aura?’

  She lifted weighted lashes and said on a sigh, ‘More than anything.’

  ‘More than anything?’ He laughed and turned away.

  For a horrified moment she assumed he was rejecting her as he had before. Even as she formulated the thought she realised what he was doing. There would be no unwanted child from this mating.

  Seconds later, one sure movement brought him over her completely, the powerful body, beautiful in its uncompromising masculinity poised, gathering strength, until he said harshly, ‘Now,’ and took her in a single powerful thrust that pressed smoothly home.

  Later she would think that the first moment of possession changed her fundamentally; at the time, she was so anxious in case he found some evidence of her virginity that she didn’t really appreciate what had happened. But after that moment of union he stopped, almost as though he waited for her to do something.

  As Aura’s wondering eyes, dilated and languorous, almost afraid, took in his clenched jaw and stark bone-structure, she realised two things: he was fighting for control, and in the silken sheath that surrounded him there was no betraying impediment. She was able to relax, and the responses her anxiety had blocked out roared back into her consciousness.

  A feeling of fullness, of completeness, was strengthened by a return of the overpowering excitement he had coaxed from her with his expert manipulation of her body. She stretched languidly, acutely conscious of his immediate, quickly leashed reaction. A desire to show him that he couldn’t control everything led her to move her hips experimentally.

  ‘No,’ he said harshly.

  ‘Why?’ Her voice was quiet in the quiet room, slow and deep and husky. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  He gave an odd groan. ‘I like it too much. No, damn you, don’t! If you want me to be any good for you, just lie still.’

  She tried, but as he moved, establishing a leisurely rhythm of advance and withdrawal as the scent of their lovemaking and the tactile delight of skin against skin, as his skill and strength fanned the flames of passion, a disturbance rioted through her, carrying her into an unknown region where all that mattered was reaching some unattainable objective.

  Racked by a feverish need to know, a consuming hunger, taken over by something greater than anything she had ever experienced before, Aura was heedless of everything but the mindless, sugar-sweet tide of delight that raced through her and the beloved weight pressing her loins into the bed, the slow penetration of her innermost secrets.

  Until that moment she had never thought of herself as passionate; she had believed her sultry face and slender body were at bewildering variance with her nature. But now, locked in the most
primal embrace of all, giving with all her heart and body, taking just as eagerly, she was forced to accept that these frenzied moments when the dark fire built higher and higher, when every sense was sharpened to an acuity almost painful, were what she had been born for.

  She looked up at the man above her and inside her, crying out with pleasure because she was not the only one in thrall to this consuming, primal heat.

  Flint’s skin was drawn tight over the fierce bone structure of his face, beads of sweat stood out across his brow; his mouth was hard, almost snarling as he muttered, ‘Aura, I can’t—dear God—’

  The slow, almost teasing movements of his body were suddenly transmuted into fierce thrusts. His head jerked back, and as she watched, her pleasure immeasurably heightened by his, tension snapped inside her, flinging her through waves of ecstasy into a rapturous present that had no beginning and no end, into a place where she was stripped to her barest essentials, where this violent and elemental sensation was all that mattered.

  He groaned her name, and his body tightened and she was pierced by wonder and awe when the ripples of her own climax swept back up into waves to meet his and match it.

  She heard her voice, shook to the beat of her heart, and thought she might die of pleasure. And then he collapsed, the tension in the long muscles slackened, the proud body at last brought low by satiation.

  Aura lay in his arms, holding him in her turn like a precious burden. Very slowly, so slowly that there was never a moment when she first realised it, she discovered that it didn’t really matter that this man who lay breathing deeply in her arms, his heart thundering against hers, who had possessed her in a way transcending the physical...that this man was more dangerous to her than the tiger she saw in him could ever be. She could never trust his loyalty, nor that he would always be around for her. But she loved him.

  She had fought a valiant action against that love, clinging to her childhood need for stability, longing to be protected and cared for, longing for a father. It was strange how the wildness inside her had known better than she did what she needed. Something in Flint’s lawless character had chimed with hers.

  A small, replete smile touched a mouth softly swollen by his kisses. Aura was overwhelmed by an ecstasy that had little to do with the physical satisfaction enfolding her body in such lethargic pleasure. So this, she thought wonderingly, was what it felt like to love, to be helpless before its power.

  It was as far removed from the affection she had felt for Paul as an eagle was from a sparrow. It was magnificent, and yet it was mundane too; she wanted to live with Flint, to see him in the morning when he was unshaven and the sexy roughness of his voice was transformed by the night’s disuse to a rasp, to laugh with him over something small and insignificant, but important because it was part of their shared life. She wanted to argue with him and love him and look after him, and be looked after in her turn.

  It didn’t even seem to matter that he felt nothing like this for her.

  She turned her head, her heart melting at his closed eyes, the relaxed contours of his face. She had done this for him.

  The long lashes quivered, and slowly lifted to reveal golden eyes as cool and enigmatic as the transparent heart of a crystal.

  ‘I must weigh a ton,’ he said, and eased himself over on to his back.

  She wanted to cry out, but a strong arm swept her close and held her with her arm across his lean waist, her cheek on his chest.

  The lights glimmered against the perfumed darkness outside. Wrapped in a contentment so profound it seemed like Nirvana, Aura lay against the man she had learned too late she would give her life for, and let her mind drift.

  Before long she was asleep.

  She woke some time before dawn, but it wasn’t the lightening sky that woke her, or the songs of birds she had never heard before. It was the gentle touch of Flint’s hand on her breast, and the sound of his quickening breath in the quiet room.

  She said drowsily, ‘Flint?’

  ‘Who did you think it might be? No, don’t tell me.’ His voice was husky, and his caress became a statement of possession. Almost before she had time to react he bent his head and kissed her answer from her mouth. ‘You look so rare and precious and exquisite in my bed,’ he said against her lips.

  Fighting the instant leap in her blood, Aura levered her eyelids upwards. He was an outline in the dim room, the sloping line of his shoulders blocking out most of the faint light that filtered through the pavilion of mosquito net shutting them off from the world. Again she was awed by his size, and then heartened by memories, for last night they had fitted perfectly, her smallness taking him and enveloping him as if it had been meant.

  It was going to happen again; she could sense his determination with her skin, with the infinitesimal receptors that had once been of use in the days when humans had no language.

  ‘Aura?’ he murmured.

  She drew a shallow breath and said, ‘Yes.’

  It was answer enough.

  There was no repeat of the passionate, almost frenzied haste of the night before. This time he touched her confidently, and the slow progress of his hands over her skin sent imperative messages to the melting centre of her passion. It was different because she knew what he could do to her, she knew what was to come, and instead of dulling her expectation the knowledge increased it.

  This time, made bold by recollection, she was more forward, discovering with lazy, sleepy excitement that his skin pulled taut beneath her questing strokes, that when she bit gently at his shoulders he shivered.

  Natalie believed that men were far more interested in sex than women; she said it was one of the things women had to put up with in exchange for security and companionship. A child of her time, Aura had read magazines and books and knew with the logical part of her mind that this was not so, that making love should be equally pleasurable for both sexes.

  But it had taken Flint’s passionate overwhelming of her defences last night to convince her emotionally. Now that she knew it was true, she prepared to abandon herself to her senses, to explore and enjoy his body as he so clearly did hers. Investigating him with a cold candour, she ranged over his sleek hide with a murmurous delight in all the things that were different.

  She sensed that he wasn’t accustomed to being touched quite so familiarly, and her fingers stilled.

  But he said, ‘No, don’t stop.’

  ‘You are so beautiful,’ she said, turning her face into his flat stomach.

  It expanded as he laughed. ‘That’s the first time anyone’s used that term for me.’

  She tasted the skin there, nibbling along a rib until he pushed her mouth away and pulled her up to kiss it.

  ‘Now you,’ he said quietly against her lips, ‘you’re beautiful, but you know that, don’t you. Other men have told you often enough. Have they told you that when you smile your eyes gleam, and you have a maddening way of lowering your lashes?’

  ‘No,’ she said, as his mouth roved the smooth length of her throat.

  ‘Nobody? What a hopeless set. You were made for love, Aura. Your breasts fit into a man’s hands as though they had been made for him, and whenever I look at those amazing legs I imagine them wrapped around me, holding me tightly, and my whole body clenches. But the reality is so much more spectacular than all my imaginings.’

  For the first time since she was fourteen she didn’t shrink with a cold nausea at the thought of being part of a man’s fantasies. The sound of Flint’s gravelly voice sent her pulses careering, banished forever the taint that one man’s perversion had imprinted on her memory.

  ‘Your palms have an innocent, unprotected look,’ he murmured, ‘just like the insides of your elbows. As for that tormenting place where your neck meets your shoulders, and the little hollow in your throat, and...’

  He kissed each place he mentioned, stroked across heated skin with slow fingers, tantalising her with the contrast between his rough voice and his gentle touch, his blazing sexuality
and the intense restraint that fettered it.

  Desire burned with metallic lustre in his eyes, captured his mouth and forced it into a straight line. Although he continued to drug her with dark words of passion his lips hardly moved, yet his hands shook.

  And when she kissed him, when she touched him in her turn, she could see the involuntary secret imprint of her fingers, her mouth, on his skin, in the building heat that scorched through them both.

  When at last he groaned, ‘I want you—Aura, I want you now,’ she was eagerly compliant—no, there was nothing of compliance in the way she moved, inciting him, tormenting in her turn, moving over him so that he lay beneath her like a sacrificial victim, bronzed skin gleaming with a faint dew of sweat that would mingle with hers.

  ‘Now?’ she said, and before he had time to answer, she slid over him, taking him into her.

  It didn’t hurt, but for a second she froze, her eyes dilated, her body thrumming like a guitar-string with sensations so acute she thought she might faint.

  ‘Aura—’

  She couldn’t stay still. The fire in her blood hurtled her along a path of unhindered eroticism; she lowered her face to kiss his hard mouth, burgundy hair falling like a warm curtain of silk around his face, and with a skill that was new and untried gave herself up to an innocent, sweet carnality.

  When it was over she thought dazedly that she had never expected it to be like that. People tried to describe it, but there were no words, no ways...

  She yawned, and he laughed. ‘Got to sleep,’ he said deeply.

  Aura didn’t think she could ever sleep again, but she did, while outside the dawn sky lightened into the warmth of a tropical winter, and the man beneath her lay with his arms around her slender form and his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

  The dream started innocuously. She was laughing up at Paul, her ring winking on her finger, while they were dancing to a Strauss waltz. ‘The Blue Danube’.

  ‘It isn’t blue, of course,’ Paul told her, smiling. ‘The Danube is really a muddy brown,’ and then he tripped, and she realised that there was a hole in the floor, a hole that got bigger, with Paul teetering on the edge of it, a hole that ate through the floorboards and became a black pit where things gibbered and waited.