A Price Worth Paying - By Trish Morey Page 0,51

and his rich accent stroked her like a slow velvet hand, and she felt the first unmistakable frisson of fear.

And the first unmistakable frisson of excitement.

No! That would be to let him win. She tugged desperately at her wrists. ‘Let me go.’

He tugged her back so she ended up even closer to the hard wall of his chest, his mouth turned up at the corners, his eyes never deviating from hers, and she knew what he intended and there was no way …

‘Let me go!’

He stepped closer. She stepped back. He took another step and this time her step was more of a stumble, until she found the old support she’d been clinging to before against her back. She’d welcomed it for its solidity then. Now she cursed it for preventing her escape, leaving her sandwiched between it and him.

He let her hands go then, to frame her face in his hands, his fingers deep in her hair, and she reached back, clinging to the support, keeping her hungry fingers away from him.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her heart beating too fast, too frantically, already knowing the answer.

So that when his mouth crashed down on hers it came as no surprise. His vehemence did. There was no remaining unaffected—his hot mouth and tongue seemed to want to plunder her very soul.

What had he done to her? she wondered as his tongue licked like a trail of flames across her throat. What had he reduced her to?

Feelings, the answer came back, as she gave herself up into his kiss and gave him back all he was offering her.

Feelings.

He had awoken her to feeling and she was a slave to it. Slave to him.

Her hands abandoned the support behind her. She was pulling at his clothes as fast as he was pulling at hers. The zip of her dress was undone, the tail of his shirt was tugged free. Her breasts exposed to his mouth, his chest was bared to her seeking fingers.

And his hands were at the hem of her dress, sliding the fabric up her legs, sliding down again once he’d hooked his fingers into her underwear and swept them away.

Air brushed the sensitive folds of her flesh. Cool air against hot torrid flesh.

‘Alesander,’ she cried, half plea, half protest as she battled to release him, a battle made harder because he was so hard.

‘I know,’ he muttered against her throat, her jaw, her mouth as he helped her. ‘I know.’

And then he lifted her and he was right there, at her entrance, and she thought her world could end and she wouldn’t care so long as he was inside her first.

She cried out when he pulled her down onto him. She cried out when he pulled back, knowing she’d been wrong. Because she didn’t ever want her world to end. Not when her world made it possible to feel like this.

He pounded into her, angry and insistent, and angrily, insistently she clenched her muscles and hung onto him, only to welcome him back, her need building with each desperate thrust.

‘Do you hate me now?’ he asked, thrusting again, his voice barely a grunt. ‘Do you still hate me?’

Her body was alive with sensation, her senses dancing wildly along a dangerous line that any moment they might teeter off into an abyss, and there was no way she could not answer honestly.

‘I hate you,’ she said, but not because of Felipe or the land or a vow of revenge that was made more than a century ago, but because of what you do to me. ‘I will always hate you.’

He answered with a thrust that threw her head crashing back against the beam. He followed it with another and then another, each one deeper than the first. Each one more desperate, more insistent. Each one building on that screaming tension building inexorably inside her.

He won’t make me come, she told herself, knowing the assault he was capable of, clamping down on that eventuality with all her muscles and all her might. Knowing what was in store if she just let him. I won’t let him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

And so she fought and resisted and battled against the torrent of sensations he subjected her to and tried to imagine herself back in her tiny flat in Melbourne, where this man and these feelings would be just a distant memory.

But it was too hard a task, too much to ask, with his mouth at her throat and on