Contract with Consequences

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WHEN his fingers first contacted her forehead, Scarlet stiffened inside. When they slid upwards into her hair, her teeth clenched down hard in her jaw. It was a struggle not to cry out. But she managed. Just.

Her mother used to stroke her head when she’d been sick as a child, her touch soft and soothing. John’s equally gentle touch might have had the same relaxing effect if she hadn’t been so agitated. No, not agitated-excited. Impossible to relax when your nipples were tight and tingling. Soon, it wasn’t her head she wanted him to stroke but other more intimate parts of her body. Her breasts. Her belly. Her quivering thighs. Her headache had receded, replaced by waves of dizzying desire which were as demanding and decadent as the bed she was lying in. Scarlet could not believe how much she wanted John to undress her. No longer did she care if he thought her breasts too small. She wanted his hands on them. And his mouth.

If she’d been bold, she might have told him of her cravings. But that was one thing she’d never been in the bedroom-bold.

At the same time, she was driven to say something, anything, which would indicate she wanted him to move on.

‘My headache’s gone,’ she murmured.

John’s hand stilled in her hair, but it didn’t move on.

Scarlet’s eyes opened so that she could work out what he was thinking.

No luck with that, however. She should have known she wouldn’t be able to read his thoughts. John had never been one to wear his heart on his sleeve, or his innermost thoughts on his face.

‘Maybe I should go back to my room?’ she said, battling to hide dismay from showing in her face.

John let out an exasperated-sounding sigh. ‘I thought I told you to stop over-thinking everything. You’re staying right where you are, Scarlet.’

‘I am?’

‘Yes. You want this as much as I do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have stayed in the first place. You’d have told me to get lost, then walked off back to your room. If there’s one thing I know very well about you, it’s your stubborn nature. You never do anything you don’t want to do. You want me to make love to you, Scarlet, so why don’t you just admit it?’

Scarlet glowered up at him, his outburst firing up the urge to tear his egotistical words down in flames with some verbal lightning bolts of her own. But what would be the point? He was right. So very irritatingly right!

But that didn’t mean she had to admit to too much. He would become insufferable if she confessed to what was really going on in her head, and in her body.

‘I suppose there’s no point in making you wait any longer,’ she said dismissively. ‘Not if you’re that desperate. It’s almost tomorrow, anyway. But don’t go imagining I’m panting for it.’

He smiled a very knowing smile. ‘We’ll see, Scarlet. We’ll see…’

Scarlet tried to think of something clever to retort but her brain had shut down the moment his hand withdrew from her hair and dropped down to the top button of her pyjamas. She held her breath whilst he flicked it open with one hand, grateful that his eyes were following his hand and not still looking into her frozen face. Slowly but deliberately he moved on to the next button, then the next, till all five were open, by which time she wasn’t panting for it. But she was in danger of dying from lack of air in her lungs.

Her sucking in breath sharply brought his eyes back up to her own.

A frown bunched his dark brow together. ‘You want me to stop?’

She shook her head.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t think I could have.’

His admission of the intensity of his own need soothed Scarlet’s worry over the almost uncontrollable nature of her own. It wasn’t like her to want a man this much. It was a surprise, but not an entirely unpleasant one. There was something right about enjoying the process of conceiving a baby, rather than what she’d been doing at the clinic. Not that she was likely to fall pregnant tonight. In her experience of charting her cycle each month, it was impossible. Sperm did not live for a week.

‘You’re thinking again,’ John warned her softly. ‘Have to stop that, Scarlet. Focus on what I’m doing to you and nothing else.’

He didn’t have to tell her twice, especially when he parted her top, exposing her breasts to his eyes.

‘So beautiful,’ he murmured, cupping her left breast with his free hand and lifting it slightly before bending his head to the nipple.

John didn’t suck it the way other men had sucked her nipples, like they were drinking their favourite beer through a straw which was too small. He didn’t suck it at all at first. He licked it, slowly, almost lasciviously, wetting it over and over till she moaned in frustration. Even then he didn’t suck it. He nibbled at it, then nipped it, then took it carefully between his teeth and tugged it, sending a dagger of dark pleasure stabbing through her entire breast. When he did it again, she twisted to one side, wrenching the burning nipple out of his mouth. She might have voiced some protest had he not pushed her roughly back against the pillow then silenced her with a kiss, which was nothing like the kiss he’d given her earlier. It was hard and hungry, obliterating all thought with a speed which Scarlet would later find astonishing. His mouth didn’t abandon hers till she was way beyond anything but lying there, dazed, whilst he undressed her totally and started doing all those things she’d imagined him doing under the covers.

But there were no covers involved. There was nothing to hide her eyes from what was happening to her. She lay there, legs and arms spreadeagled, whilst his hands and lips became stunningly intimate with every inch of her body. And did she care? Not in the least. She moaned with pleasure then groaned with frustration each time he stopped, always when she was just on the verge of coming. It was a mad mixture of near ecstasy followed by sheer agony.

‘Oh please,’ she begged when his mouth abandoned her swollen clitoris one more tormenting, torturous time.

‘Patience, Scarlet,’ he said, at which point she swore at him, using a four-letter word which she rarely used. He only smiled and said, ‘Soon, sweetheart.’

Her head whirled as he rose from where he’d been lying between her legs and moved up the bed to lie down next to her, propping himself on one elbow.

‘Trust me,’ he added, giving her a breath-stealing kiss on her parted-and, yes, panting-lips, before sitting up and stripping off his black boxer shorts, exposing a stunningly formidable erection. Long and thick, it stood up ram-rod straight. Scarlet couldn’t stop staring at it, her mouth drying as she tried to imagine how it would feel inside her.

When he lay back down next to her, she couldn’t stop herself reaching out to touch him.

It was the kind of involuntary action John had hoped eventually to evoke in Scarlet, to make her forget about babies and think only of sex. It was what he’d planned when he’d asked her to come up to Darwin a week early. He’d thought he would need a good while to totally seduce Scarlet into such an erotically charged state of mind. It seemed, however, that he might achieve his goal a lot quicker than that. She was definitely not thinking of anything but sex right at this moment.

John knew he should probably stop her doing what she was doing, but he simply could not. Her fingertips felt like butterfly wings fluttering against his engorged flesh. Never before had his penis been touched like that. So sweetly yet so sensuously. It stirred him to an almost unbearable level of arousal. Being with Scarlet was testing his willpower to the limit. He’d already lasted a long time without release… enough was enough.

‘No more, Scarlet,’ he said, and reached out to still her hand with his. ‘I’m only human, you know,’ he added with a soft smile when her rather glazed eyes lifted to his.

Scarlet could not believe she’d been so bold as to touch him like that. Or that she’d loved it-loved the feel of him, so hard and yet so soft. It came to her as John lifted her hand away that she might not mind putting her lips where her hand had been-an astonishing thought, given she’d never been keen on that particular form of foreplay. Not that she hadn’t tried it once or twice. She had; men seemed crazy about it. But she’d hated the way it made her feel. She’d never imagined for one moment that she might actually enjoy it. Or be turned on by it. But she rather suspected she would be, if she did it to John. Just the thought of doing it turned her on. So did the thought of taking him into her body. A wave of naked desire brought a frustrated groan to her lips.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just do it to me,’ she said, her eyes as pleading as her voice.

He stared down into her flushed face as he positioned himself between her thighs.

‘Lift your knees,’ he commanded. ‘Place the soles of your feet flat on the mattress.’

Her stomach tightened as she did so, her heart pounding against her ribs.

His entry was slow and gentle, but it still brought a gasp to her lips.

He didn’t stop, pushing in further till she was filled to the hilt. But he wasn’t finished. Another gasp escaped her lips when he suddenly took her by the ankles and wrapped her legs up around his waist. This new position seemed to allow him to slide in even deeper, by which time Scarlet could not wait for him to move.

When he didn’t, she did.

Scarlet lifting her hips from the bed evoked something close to panic in John. Never before had a woman been able to make him lose control. Now, suddenly, he was overwhelmed by a powerful urge just to take her! Without finesse. Without further waiting or watching. His body began to move quite involuntarily, not slowly or gently, but vigorously, almost violently. Back and forth. Back and forth. She moved with him, squeezing him mercilessly, making his teeth clench down hard in his jaw as he tried to resist the sensations which were threatening to tip him over the edge with humiliating speed. In desperation he grabbed her hips, holding her still with a brutal grip whilst he tried to slow things down-his own body especially. But it would not be denied. There was no hope of lasting much longer, he realised with dismay. No hope at all!