Heather Graham (23 page)

The worst part of torture, as long philosophized, was the expectation of things to come. D’Alesio was apparently aware of that philosophy. He had her on pins and needles, knowing what she wanted, not knowing what she wanted, anxious, afraid, confused. … “Damnit!” she exploded to the crescent moon that spread its silvery shadow throughout the room. “If we could only have done with it. …” Then what? Would her worst fears be realized? Would she find it all too easy to need him, to long for his touch?

“Now that’s hardly what I call a romantic attitude!”

Alex spun around so quickly at the throaty chuckle that she almost lost her balance on the tiny balcony. She grasped desperately at the molded railings, but she wouldn’t have fallen, couldn’t have fallen, because he reached her with the same silent speed that had brought him into the room.

Breathlessly Alex stared into dark eyes, into the jet depths of mystery as seductively eternal as time. His arms were around her, his hands laced at her spine to hold her. Her own hands rested upon his shoulders, an instinctive gesture to hold fast to security. But was he security? Or loss and pain more devastating than any she had yet to know.

The moonlight cast a strange glow upon his rugged features and eyes. The jet eyes seemed to sparkle, and as he flashed her a smile with perfect white teeth, she wondered for a fanciful moment if she hadn’t indeed signed a pact with the devil. He pressed her more closely to him and a spasm of chills created a riot along her spine. She tried to breathe normally, but the harder she tried, the more evident it became that she was gasping for each short breath.

“Doctor,” he murmured, “has anyone ever told you that in the moonlight your eyes are like pure gold against velvet green? They are a picture of something far more intriguing than the greatest treasures of Egypt, brighter than the sun, deeper than the moon. …”

She had become so hypnotized by the husky silk of his voice and the pearl-white flash of his teeth against his bronze complexion that she was taken entirely off guard when his lips touched hers. They brushed so lightly against her that she couldn’t think to protest, only marvel that a mouth that could appear so firm could touch her with such tenderness. His lips were like gossamer, so enticing and persuasive that instinctively she responded and pressed closer to him. She could feel acutely the heat of his body as if every nerve in her own had found new sensitivity, as if something within her had become alive as it had never been before.

The soft provocation of his mouth had been a snare more deadly than that of a delicately woven spider’s web. She had stepped into the trap. Fascination had been too great to resist, and when she pressed her lips to his in return, silken enticement became ardent demand. His kiss became an inferno that ignited as it consumed. It swept her breath away; it left her trembling with weakness, burning with a strength only applicable to the need to feel more and more of him. The current, the tension, the heat were his. Only by this fusion could she find the strength to stand.

His tongue parted the barrier of her teeth, teased along the ridge of her mouth, played coaxingly with hers, dove deeply to explore and plunder and savor the farthest recesses of her mouth. And then withdrew. Only to circle her lips. To allow his mouth to shower kisses over her cheeks and find her mouth again. To nibble kisses against it, to breach the barrier of her lips and teeth once more with ravenous hunger. To drink and drink of this nectar, as if he would never have his fill.

Alex’s fingers dug into the fabric of his shirt, into the muscle beneath as she clung to him, fast losing all reason as she was swept into a storm of whirling fire. He held her steady with one hand still upon the small of her back, as if he knew she would fall without his support. But he brought his other hand trailing up her spine, sensitizing it anew, to thread his fingers into her hair. Perhaps he didn’t know that he didn’t need to hold her so, that she had been snared by the magic in his eyes. Perhaps it was merely her unleashed hunger.

But he held her, and held her, and held her in the moonlight, and that soft glow caressed them as did the soft breeze from the Persian Gulf. Time seemed either to stand still or to stretch into the dark eternity of the desert as he kissed her, alternately ravaging her mouth to its ultimate depths, then kissing her face with the softest of enticements, finding her eyes, her temples, her chin, her throat, so alabaster in the silver veil of the moon.

He could feel her trembling. He could feel the ardent pounding of her heart. Or was it his own, drumming double time? It didn’t matter. All he knew was that she was responding to him, clinging to him, allowing—no, not allowing but accepting, savoring—his advances. And while he wondered how he had ever allowed any woman to touch a chord of need so deep within him, he was also wondering if there had been a woman alive before who could drive a man so insane. Had any woman before touched the very air around her with such a sweetly seductive fragrance, had skin that could actually rival silk, had the power to curve so perfectly against a man’s body that she became both an inescapable lure and a sensual enigma.

The moon slipped behind a cloud, and they were bathed in a darkness in which it was hard to tell that two people stood upon the balcony. But maybe they weren’t two; maybe they had become one.

The moon reappeared. It bathed them in new silvery light.

He finally broke away from her, yet held her still, his fingers firmly wound into the sun-and-moon hair at her nape as he compelled her eyes the same way he had compelled her lips.

“I’ve never even kissed you before …” he mused softly, watching as she struggled to lengthen her gasping breaths. Her lips glistened with the moisture of his kiss, and they were full and swollen and inviting all over again.

She swallowed, and her golden eyes closed to shut him out. Another shudder rent her body and he felt her stiffen. He was losing her, and he couldn’t understand why. He knew she wanted him, knew that the fires spread through her as they did through him—special fires, the type so rarely experienced that they deserved to be cherished, recognized, honored and carefully tended.

Anger suddenly gripped him as he became sure that she was thinking of her ex-husband. Ali had shown him the Cairo paper that had carried the UPI article.

Randall. The man who had cheated on her; the man who didn’t have the confidence to allow her brilliant mind free reign. The man who, if Zaid and Haman were right about certain speculations, had been very much upon Jim Crosby’s mind in those last few days before his disappearance.

Convulsively his fist clenched, tightening his grip upon her hair.

“Shall we move inside, Doctor?” he inquired with a biting cynicism he had never intended.

Her tongue, such a tiny, delicate thing to create such infinite pleasure, darted nervously over her lips. Her eyes became flashing beacons of indignant defiance.

“Shall we, D’Alesio?” she demanded coolly. “I can’t believe that a man such as yourself can really find the need to demand a—relationship with a woman simply because she made a deal in desperation.”

His breath seemed to catch hard in his chest with a slamming-of his heart. He stood still as he stared at her, his jet eyes never wavering. But for a moment he wondered, and he knew he could never force her, and he knew that she was right.

He was equally sure that it would never be force. As he paused he could feel the soft rasp of her breath, the pattering of her heart which raced unchecked, touching his as did the full, firm mounds of her breasts. Mounds that were peaked with hard, pouting little nubs he could feel against his flesh despite the silk of her gown and the cotton of his shirt.

He suddenly started laughing, chuckling deeply. “Start believing, Randall,” he told her with a full, wicked smile. And he released her—only to slip his arms back around her at the strategic points from which to sweep her into his arms.

She gasped, but her hands laced around his neck. He saw the gold flash of her eyes in the moonlight, and the defiance was gone. Her gaze was a little uncertain, a little wistful, a little lost. “We’re really going through with this?” she murmured as he strode surely with her to the silk-covered bed with its exotic canopies.

“Damn right, Ms. Randall,” he told her softly. His firm, silent stride brought them closer to the bed.

“I
T’S NOT MS. RANDALL,
” she reminded him quietly. “It’s
Dr.
Randall!”

“It’s both, I believe,” he replied, smiling as he laid her upon the silk covers and stretched his length beside hers. There was a small bronze loop attached to the oriental gown’s zipper high against the hollow of her throat. He pulled the loop slowly, pausing to press his lips first against that enticing indentation between her collarbones. Then he followed the line of flesh bared to him with the slow creep of the zipper, pressing his lips against the valley of her breasts, while not yet touching the mounds. Her fingers caught in his hair, clenching tightly but convulsively as tremor after tremor shot through her, not in any attempt to stop the slow caress of his mouth.

He traced her lower ribs lightly with his tongue and patterned another dizzying line along the concave line beneath her ribs to her waist. Below that he found her navel and gave it great attention, probing it with his tongue until she was certain he had actually reached inside her. Her fingers caught and uncaught in his hair, pulling, releasing, pulling again as she expelled a soft moan she had never meant to utter.

The zipper halted just inches below her navel. He traced the tip of his tongue to that point, teasing along the side of the material. He felt her like quicksilver beneath him; she trembled, flesh and limbs coming alive at his ardent touch.

Pulling himself upward, he stared into the liquid gold of her eyes. They were wide, slightly dilated. Her lips were parted, invitingly moist. He touched them again with his own and felt the sweet dart of her tongue against them. Her fingers now wound around his neck, deserted that pose and clutched his shoulders, roamed over his back.

He broke the kiss and traced the contours of her cheeks with his finger, marveling at the soft texture, at the exquisite line of bone structure. His finger trailed along her throat. Then he slipped his hands beneath the material that clung to her shoulders, drawing her up so that he could slip the sleeves from her arms. For a moment he paused, drinking in the sight of her in the moonlight, savoring the silver play upon shadow and angle, soft mound and hidden delight. Her breathing was almost silent, and yet he could hear it, the softest of rasping, quick, heightened, sensual, enticing. It caused her breasts to rise high and fall rapidly in that silver glow, and he thought he had never seen anything more like finest alabaster than the quality of her skin. Or felt anything softer.

He crushed her against him, impatient with his own shirt because it lay between them, but more determined to draw the robe from beneath her that still held the curve of her hips and the shapely length of her legs from his view, from his touch. Sweeping her hard to him, he slipped his hand along her back, loath to release that touch, needing to in order to splay his fingers low over her hips, lift her and tear away the silk garment completely. It flew unheeded to the floor.

He was consumed with both impatience and a fervent desire to draw the moments out into eternity. He was loath to release her, and yet to shed his own garments he had to. And she was still clad in the Moroccan slippers he had given her at Ali’s, and a pair of peach-froth bikini panties. The panties alone were enough to drive a man half mad.

He laid her gently back against the pillows and ripped off half the buttons in his haste to remove his shirt, jerking the tails from the confinement of his belt. But as his shirt flew to the floor, he noticed that she had edged off her own slippers with the toes of each foot. Her eyes were half slits in the moonlight; the lashes that he could have sworn were too long, too dark, to be real were creating crescents of the most ancient mystique against the ivory of her cheeks. She wouldn’t stare directly at him, neither would she quite smile, but the steady inhalation and exhalation of breath that brought her firm, rouge-crested breasts high and then low again signaled him clearly that she still wasn’t protesting. And her lips were still parted, moist, puffed and pouted in their sweet, clear shape.

As if spellbound anew, he lowered his mouth to her lips again but didn’t quite touch them. He circled them with just the tip of his tongue, then delved lightly, coaxingly into her mouth. The delicate pink tip of her tongue moved tentatively to touch his, taste it, savor it and draw back to her mouth, creating a staggering fusion. But as he kissed her this time, he wrenched his shoes from his feet and draped a leg over hers. And when the kiss broke he could no longer fight the allure of her breasts and he took them into his palms, holding them, allowing that slightly rough flesh to graze the nipples to hard, darkening peaks. He lowered his mouth over one while still grazing the other, and the moan she emitted was ardent and aching rather than soft. As if giving over to sensation, she arched high against him, and he felt a slow undulation begin within her hips, a seduction all the more erotic because it was simply the decree of nature. And as he caressed her breasts with hands and lips and tongue and teeth, that sweet writhing that swept away his mind became more ardent, more beckoning, more inviting.

He continued to massage her breasts with his mouth, teasing them lightly with unhurried flicks of his tongue, drawing upon the nipples more urgently, more demandingly, while following the curve of her body with his palm, appreciating, cherishing the slender line of her waist, the fanning flare of her hips, the indentation of her lower belly. He slipped his fingers beneath the elastic band of her peach panties and followed that line over and over. He barely noticed that her hands were kneading his shoulders, her fingers stroking, clawing, massaging, finding the heat of naked flesh as compelling as he was.

He followed the path of his fingers and hand with his lips then, reverently enjoying the angle of her hip, her belly. He no longer teased beneath the line of the peach elastic but tugged gently upon it, drawing it from her slowly, excruciatingly slowly, from hips to thighs, over her kneecaps, finally over her feet. And then he began the trek back, kissing her toes, sliding his tongue between them, along the arch of her foot, her calf, the tender shadowland of her upper thigh to the ultimate heart of sensual sensation within her. Moonlight secrets, the enigma of femininity. He had lost all control of his mind, but in that loss he loved her as he had never known love before, believing that he had never known a woman so uniquely feminine, so uniquely beautiful, from golden head to toe. He wanted her as he had never wanted a woman before, but with that wanting he became obsessed with being wanted every bit as voraciously in return. And in the whispers that came to him, the cries that were soft silken beseechings upon the silver of enchanted air, he was rewarded. She called his name, she begged him, she arched herself to him and tried only upon occasion to wrest herself from the ecstasy that was just a little bit of agony and would result in ultimate rapture.