She muttered a protest and clung, wriggling closer.
"Elspeth."
This time the voice was right in her ear, making her wince and frown.
It was a very nice voice, she decided, refusing to open her eyes, even if it did sound rather cross, and the sensation of it so close to her ear was sending the most delicious spirals of sensation over her skin;
so delicious in fact that she felt it only fair to show her appreciation, which she promptly did by burying her face in the lovely warm angle between Carter"s neck and shoulder, experimentally nibbling at his bare skin. It tasted even better than she had dreamed, so very, very good, in fact, that she couldn"t resist nibbling her way up to his ear, where she told him sleepily, "Mmm... Carter, this is really nice.
I wish you would hold me properly though and kiss me," she added reproachfully.
She felt the hiss of his indrawn breath and then the tension invade his body.
tom are drunk," he told her flatly.
"And what"s more you"re in my bed."
Now she did open her eyes, propping herself up on one elbow as she withdrew from him in affronted dignity. He was, she saw with some plea sure, undressed, and was obviously about to get into bed.
Her bed. She had been right about that. She recognised the shadowy shape of the room and the position of the window.
She told him as much, virtuously keeping her eyes on his face instead of letting her gaze wander, as it very much wished to do, over the exposed expanse of his chest. It was a pity, she decided regretfully, that the room"s shadows cloaked the rest of him, because she was sure that he had the kind of body that she would find it very pleasurable indeed to look at.
Oddly, it didn"t strike her as the least bit strange that she should be thinking of behaving in such a way, and as for Carter"s allegation that she was drunk. Impossible, she never drank. She dismissed a hazy recollection of her mother"s elderberry wine and a very large tumbler and instead concentrated on her victory.
"This is my room," she reaffirmed.
"Yes," Carter agreed grimly.
"But at the moment / happen to be sleeping in it. You are sleeping in your parents"."
Elspeth"s forehead furrowed.
"Not. I"m not--I"m sleeping here, or at least I was until you woke me up."
"Well, now that you"re awake, do you suppose you could get out of my bed and go and sleep in your own?" Carter rasped, patently unmollified.
Elspeth blinked owlishly at him. He really was getting rather cross, and as far as she could see there wasn"t any need.
"It"s all right.
Carter," she told him in a kind voice, patting the empty s.p.a.ce beside her.
"There"s plenty of room in here for both of us."
"What? Oh, for G.o.d"s sake don"t be so stupid. I can"t sleep with you.
I don"t want to. "
Elspeth froze. No, of course, he didn"t want to. Just like Peter hadn"t wanted to. She wasn"t desirable enough, attractive enough.
She said as much to him, sitting up in bed, her chin firming proudly, completely oblivious to the fact that a watery moon had broken through the clouds and was shedding a faint silver light into the room so that her body was illuminated in its trans S
lucent gleam, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pale and full and tipped with small, hard nipples.
"Elspeth," Carter groaned despairingly.
"No, please don"t make me go," she whispered.
"Please, Carter, let me stay. I don"t want to be on my own. Not tonight."
"If you stay I"ll make love to you," Carter warned her savagely.
"I want you to," Elspeth told him shakily.
"In fact I think I"ve wanted to ever since--ever since you kissed me down by the stream."
"This is madness--complete madness," she heard him saying thickly, but it didn"t stop him from leaning towards her, and slowly, so slowly that it was more of an adoration than a mere caress, he ran his hands up over her body, from the curve of her hips to the softness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pausing briefly there, while her breath locked in her throat and her heart pounded with sledgehammer beats and then his hands moved on, cupping the rounded ball of each shoulder. He leaned forward and kissed her, a questioning, delicate kiss that did little more than brush the softness of her lips, but she trembled so violently under it that both of them stilled.
"You really want this?" Carter demanded against her lips.
She couldn"t speak. Could only nod her head, her eyes huge and brilliant, her body achingly aware that, with his, it could learn pleasures so intense that they would never be forgotten.
He kissed her again, his mouth hard, the kiss brief, and then again and again, until their mouths fused in hot, eager need and this time when his hands touched her body it was with the sure, knowledgeable touch of a lover, stroking, enticing, exciting, making her gasp beneath his mouth and arch under his hands as they kneeled body to body in the moonlight.
Her own hands, more skilled, more knowing, more wanton than she had ever dreamed they could be, stroked him, told him how much they delighted in the pleasure of this intimacy with him.
When he buried his mouth in the soft curve of her throat, she arched eagerly against him, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed flat against his chest, her nipples sensitised by the quickening movements of his body.
When he laid her down on the bed, she gazed at him in wondering delight, aching to be able to find the words to tell him how he made her feel.
But it seemed that words were unnecessary and that her trembling flesh silently conveyed to him its pleasure in his touch by responding quiveringly to the exquisite sensations aroused first by his hands and then by his mouth.
When his tongue-tip traced the aureole of her breast she shuddered wildly and clung to him, gasping his name, her whole body tensing in spasms of white-hot pleasure when he responded to her need by opening his mouth over her tight, hard nipple and then by suckling on it with increasing urgency.
Elspeth had never dreamed herself capable of such wild abandonment, of such fevered, aching need, of such instinctive, overwhelming sensuality, as she opened her body to him, and wrapped herself around him, her mouth trembling, burning where it touched his skin, eager to absorb the taste and texture of him. Gone were the restraints of the past. This was where she wanted to be--where she needed to be.
She felt no self-consciousness, no guilt, no hesitation. only an overwhelming knowledge of the rightness of what she was doing.
It was as great a pleasure to touch Carter, to stroke and taste him, to feel his body shudder with reciprocal desire when she did so, as it was to have him touching her. It was like having a banquet of delights spread out in front of her, she thought dizzily, nuzzling his throat and then his shoulder, exploring the indentation of his spine and then the hard, flat plane of his b.u.t.tocks, her body thrilling with awareness of the aroused heat and weight of him against her.
"Elspeth, you don"t know what you"re doing to me," he told her thickly in between kisses.
"I know what you"re doing to me," she whispered shakily, watching his eyes go dark as his hand stroked her body and felt its betraying tremble. He was touching her so gently, so intimately, so pleasurably that there was nothing she could do other than give herself up to the voluptuous, velvet darkness of that pleasure, unable to stop him even when she felt the mind-destroying lap of his tongue against the most intimate part of her body and knew shockingly that there was nothing she wanted more than to return the intimacy of that caress, unless it was the fully aroused heat of him deep within her body, easing that tormenting ache that the soft stroke of his tongue was deliberately arousing.
She told him so, unaware of the jumbled litany of praise and pleas that left her lips, knowing only that his arousal, his desire were suddenly tumultuously urgent and that he, like her, seemed to know instinctively that her quivering body needed to feel him deep within its softness.
The sensation of him being there, the careful tenderness with which he controlled his body"s powerful surge, the way in which he held her, gentled her and held back his own pleasure while he shepherded hers, filled her with such emotion, such joy--such love, she recognised, her mind and flesh suddenly free of any kind of self-deceit--that she opened herself willingly and eagerly to him, and the pa.s.sage of his flesh within her own was so acutely pleasurable that she met each thrust with trembling eagerness, letting the forces inside her gather and coalesce until they couldn"t be contained any longer.